The "fog" of enterprise software

So many data points cannot be wrong, can they? Larry Ellison talks about SAP's customers moving away during the Oracle earnings call. IFS runs a billboard ad suggesting the same. I get whispers from several other competitors suggesting SAP is in trouble. I see countless retweets of an article which says the new SAP leadership faces big challenges in 2020. I hear many analysts talk about the activist investor, Elliott. So many of the executives I had in my book SAP Nation 3.0 released just a few months ago are no longer there.

Except that when I talk to SAP customers I hear concerns - but very different ones. Those around integration across SAP products. Those around SI and other costs when they consider migrating to S/4HANA. How they have a tough time developing an ROI for S/4. How few are considering the public cloud route to S/4. But I don't hear of them migrating to a different vendor. Five years ago, in volume 1 of SAP Nation, I showcased customers who were ring fencing SAP with other solutions, moving to two -tier ERP, to third party maintenance. When I wrote volume 3 that trend had slowed down and if anything, SAP had reversed some of those defections.

What to believe?

I watch Dreamforce and have to wonder if I am watching a stream of the Democratic National Convention. So many caucuses talking about ethnic, ethical and equality issues. Protests in and around Moscone. I read CEO Marc Benioff's new book, Trailblazer and I see he invokes Steve Jobs and the launch of Apple's App Store. He forgets to mention his AppExchange was born before and still does not have even 10%  of the App Store revenue. I am glad I also got to see sessions which go into Salesforce's efforts in various verticals. To me, they should have been Day 1, center stage.

What to believe where the company's priorities are?

I listen to Microsoft pitches on their retail vertical and parse Satya Nadella's keynote at NRF, the annual retail show. Lots of good capabilities, particularly in the CRM and infrastructure area but I notice there is very little on supply chain and logistics. The hottest topics in retail these days, many driven by Amazon, are around last mile coverage, robotic warehouses and reverse logistics.

What to believe about the company's vertical strategy?

In the last few months I have written blog posts detailing most of these points. But those are individual notes in an orchestra. In 2007, I wrote a post which talked about the "thousand points of influence". Now, there are x times more - many often rumor and conjecture based. It forces you to keep going back to your True North. To me, my "fog lights" are conversations with customers and distilling their technology strategies and investment trajectories. Then use that as a guide to measure vendors on their functionality, their architecture, their economics and their ecosystems. Because customers make really long term decisions when it comes to their enterprise software.    

Interestingly, in the auto world, fog lights are gradually disappearing as a standard feature. In a world of LIDAR and automatic braking, that trend will continue. In the enterprise software world we need to develop similar capabilities to navigate our fog. Till we do, drive carefully, and pray that others on the road also behave responsibly.