britton manasco and software

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Success-based SaaS

The failure to understand the operational challenges associated with Software as a Service SaaS helps to explain why the first wave of SaaS vendors crashed and burned a few years ago. Back then, such vendors called themselves application service providers ASP. So what's different this time? I'm persuaded that...

Tags: OpSource, software, software-as-a-service

Blog posts 2005-09-21

High maintenance in the software industry

One source of potential pressure on enterprise software companies is their ability to hang onto maintenance contracts. Oracle, for instance, derives 45% of its revenues from maintenance agreements. In fact, a recent piece in Forbes suggested that this is one area that might be attacked by competitors. It pointed to...

Tags: Enterprise software, Oracle Corp., software

Blog posts 2005-09-16

SOA's deep impact on software

SOA is the top trend in the software industry, according to attendees at SandHill.com's Enterprise 2005 conference earlier this month. Asked what technology will have the most impact on the software industry in the next 12 months, 30% picked Service-Oriented Architectures SOAs, 27% picked open source and 27% picked mobile...

Tags: SOA

Blog posts 2005-08-23

Software industry disruption

Over at Loosely Coupled, Phil Wainewright has picked up on our recent piece on outcome-driven software pricing. He notes that, "Vendors get understandably excited about the technology they have on offer, and eventually a whole ecosystem of sales and marketing teams, industry analysts, journalists and technology-focused buyers ends up getting...

Tags: software, software pricing, pricing

Blog posts 2005-08-05

Next big thing?

What will be the next big thing? Not Service Oriented Architectures, Open Source, or Software as Service, argues Mike Nevins, former managing partner of McKinsey & Company's Global High Tech Practice at SandHill.com. He contends "all three will miss the mark for one simple reason. They don't address the real...

Tags: Zyme, software, Mike Nevins

Blog posts 2005-07-19

War of the worlds

As if the software world was not facing enough threats, the hardware world now threatens to undermine software business models left and right. New chip architectures and other hardware trends now raise the prospect of software industry upheaval. "The real losers," according to a recent piece in The Economist, could...

Tags: software

Blog posts 2005-07-15

Virtualization and SOA

"The word architecture is generally quite misleading for describing what most companies have today," write John Hagel and John Seely Brown in their new book The Only Sustainable Edge. "Architecture calls forth images of the neat schematics of an architect who is carefully thinking through in advance all the needs...

Tags: commoditization

Blog posts 2005-07-05

Hosted software not strategic

ZDNet's DataPoint highlights a new report from Nucleus Research suggesting that SalesForce.com is not living up to its billing as a revolutionary new tool. While the research revealed that most of Salesforce.com’s customers realized positive ROI, most did so by simply replacing a paper-based or individual contact management solution. ...

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc.

Blog posts 2005-05-26

Wall Street wakes up to Web services

Surprise, surprise. It seems that Wall Street analysts have found a new reason to be optimistic about the software industry -- one that they had begun to write off as "mature." Goldman Sachs analysts have upgraded the software sector to "attractive" from "neutral," noting that the "next big thing" in...

Tags: Web services, software, Web service, Web

Blog posts 2005-05-23

Bad relationship...

The backlash against the software industry continues. But the feeling seems to have drifted from anger to disappointment to bewilderment. At SandHill Group's Software 2005 conference last week, representatives of the corporate IT world expressed their view that software companies are totally failing to address the challenges and priorities of...

Tags: software

Blog posts 2005-05-02

Software sector under attack

Joshua Greenbaum, a principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, argues that the traditional software business model is heavily threatened by the spectre of SOA and composite applications. "The whole notion of a software license -- and with it maintenance and service -- will be under attack as soon as service-oriented...

Tags: software

Blog posts 2005-04-12

Thinkin different

Can SOA change the culture of software? Let's hope so. As Kristin Zhivago notes of software buyers, demand is in decline. "They have already been badly burned by 'revolutionary' systems like CRM and ERP. Some of them almost killed their own companies trying to put these systems into place (and...

Tags: software

Blog posts 2005-03-31

Out of the box

What does SOA mean for the future of the software industry? Who wins and who loses? Good questions. But the answers are not predetermined. The future will unfold in relation to the actions that software vendors take.John Hagel, author of thegroundbreakingOut of the Box, offers a few guidelines to help...

Tags: SOA

Blog posts 2005-02-22

Software as service

In a new opinion piece, Ray Lane,former president of Oracle and now a venture capitalist, offers a compelling vision of software as service.He defines thisconcept in terms of "tying supplier revenue to a business outcome: the supplier sees the client's end result, measures its success, and receives revenue based on...

Tags: Lane

Blog posts 2005-02-02

Software war

One of the key flashpoints in the growth of/war over SOA will be in the enterprise software world. Key players to watch: Oracle; SAP; and Microsoft. Now, we have SAP Chief Executive Officer Henning Kagermann promising to drive the "industrialization of the software industry" as it puts all its applications...

Tags: SAP NetWeaver, SAP AG

Blog posts 2005-02-01

Paradigms lost

Well, the week may have started with the announcement that Oracle would acquire PeopleSoft. However, Tim O'Reilly, founder and president of O'Reilly & Associates, has provocatively stated that "eBay will someday buy Oracle." O'Reilly's facetious point is that the interconnected, globalWeb is enabling a new power shift that tends to...

Tags: software, O'Reilly, eBay Inc., O'Reilly & Associates

Blog posts 2004-12-15

The underdeveloped world of software

Software may be growing increasingly ubiquitous. But that just means the problems associated with poor design are growing as well. The Economist cites the Standish Group's estimates that "30% of all software projects are cancelled, nearly half come in over budget, 60% are considered failures by the organisations that initiated...

Tags: software

Blog posts 2004-11-26

Revolution in Increments

Revolutionary acts need not always end with blood in the streets. That's onelesson fromthe new economy of Webservices. Whereas the "tech boom"explodedin our faces,the advocates of Web services take a much more pragmatic and incrementalist approach. Just look at what is happening to the pricing of software. At the recent...

Tags: software

Blog posts 2004-11-02

Additional Resources

Analyst thinks Google should buy Rearden Commerce

In his latest "Alert Highlight," it might as well be called a blog, AMR’s Bruce Richardson muses over the "Google Economy," a subject not suffering from any lack of coverage these days. His final of five points stood out and deserves some attention:No. 5: Google should buy Rearden CommerceWhy...

Tags: AMR&rsquo, s Bruce Richardson, Google Inc.

Blog posts 2005-10-28

The great ESB squabble of 2005

Both my blogmates Dan Farber and Britton Manasco have provided pointers to excellent information on what enterprise service buses ESBs are all about. However, there is some confusion -- if not outright sniping -- over who invented ESBs to begin with. Datamonitor ComputerWire's Jason Stamper picked up on...

Tags: Sonic Software, Enterprise Service Bus

Blog posts 2005-08-08