Enterprise Un-Credibility

I am reading news from CES this week including that from a “personal cloud” company, Lyve Minds, a Seagate Technology startup. It made me ponder how believable the offering would be if an enterprise software company had announced it.

3 years after much fanfare and publicity from the Jeopardy! outing, the Wall Street Journal estimates Watson has generated less than $ 100 million for IBM. IBM of course keeps talking futures like it estimates Watson to generate $10bn in annual revenue within 10 years.

I have pointed out a few times, HANA has penetrated less than 1% of SAP’s own customer base in the 4+ years it has become priority 1 for the vendor. To that SAP fans will always protest – but it has been GA for much less time (as if that stopped enthusiastic customers from ever adopting new technology) or the 250,000 customer number is wrong (then tell SAP to change its customer count on its web page)

Oracle has taken much grief for its claim it was “Halfway to Fusion” – way back in 2006. Microsoft sat around with several billions worth of shiny Azure data centers mostly empty till recently when Office365 started to take off. 

A metric I really like is “what percent of a company’s revenues come from products introduced in last 5 years”. Apple has become the standout benchmark for that with over 60% from iOS products but even older industrial companies like Emerson Electric and GE pay close attention to the stat. Most enterprise software companies do very poorly on that metric.

SaaS vendors like Workday have taken pains to manage the bite size expectations of increments they deliver in every release, but for the most part, enterprise vendors have a significant credibility gap when they announce new products.