These are the good old days

It’s hard to argue with Buck Showalter when he says in this MLB promo "These are the good old days" “These are the best 750 players in the world that the world has to offer” and “The game’s being played better than it ever has in the history of it.”

The quality of players from around the world, the analytics, shifts and other on-field strategies, technologies at the stadium and at home certainly have raised the quality of the game.

You know you can say the same of enterprise software today. As I wrote SAP Nation, I was taken aback at the choices customers have today – they are replacing or “ring fencing’ with cloud solutions, they are moving to third party maintenance, they are tiering solutions for subsidiaries, they are insourcing outsourced application support, they are leveraging massive cloud data centers at Amazon and Microsoft, they are deploying their own data capture technologies and UX, they are visualizing data in amazing new ways, they are leveraging data as a service and all kinds of machine learning,  

The quality of the professional in the industry is also improving. There are more data scientists. There are design agency quality UX professionals. The marketers are more digital. The salespeople are being schooled in “Challenger" techniques. There are people constantly thinking about shared services, data center thermodynamics and network latencies.  There are process experts who can talk to business executives. There is more sophisticated value engineering analysis.

I find it funny when folks at larger vendors tell me the book was too nice to Workday or Plex or  Rimini or Cognizant or Appirio. Hey, I would not give them much ink if customers were not talking to me about them.

It’s a new season.  Small city teams like Buck’s in Baltimore can generate plenty of excitement. Long suffering Mets and Cubs fans are alive.

Yes, it is also the good old days for enterprise software. Enjoy the bounty  of the smaller teams and the innovative shifts and pitcher rotations. Time to move away from your Dad's software industry.