PracticalSOA

Courtesy Vinnie Mirchandani’s blog, a most informative post on ZDnet on the evolution of the packaged software industry:

“….selling software as a continuously updated service, on a pay-as-you-go subscription, seems like an anomaly. But the accepted status quo is in fact merely a quirk of history, brought about by government action.“

(Emphasis mine)

I wasn’t aware of this fact at all. If you work in the packaged software business or in the implementation business, you should read the full post. You should also check out Vinnie’s post on this topic.

In our business, we too are experiencing something similar. It may not yet be as noticeable as in the case of some SaaS providers, but it is undoubtedly felt by all of us.

We develop solutions on top of SAP’s Netweaver platform but we do not implement any of the back-end products from SAP (such as ECC or CRM or SRM). So in that sense, we are not a packaged software provider nor are we - strictly speaking - in the implementation business. But customers expect our solutions to deliver features and functionality, just as they would from a software product vendor.

Interesting times, to be in the enterprise software business right now.

It’s refreshing to read someone in the media asking businesses to stop worrying so much about Twitter and Facebook and focus instead on SAP and ERP apps. (Link to Thomas Wailgum’s column in cio.com)

It is obvious that people working in enterprise software are suffering from a serious case of “buzz envy”. Newspapers, blogs and magazines talk endlessly about the social networking revolution and how it will completely transform the world as we know it. Enterprise software, that relic from the mid-1990s, is not worthy of any attention at all.

If that’s not a case of utter lack of self-confidence, I don’t know what is. We are talking about software that keeps businesses running, right? The same software that helps Apple design, manufacture and ship its computer to some Twitter user who then posts a terse-but-witty 140-character message that lets everyone know he plans to sleep through the rest of his weekend?

I have no doubt that there are some interesting ideas in the social networking/Web 2.0 world that could make enterprise apps more useful. (Link to ZDnet).

But why not make enterprise software business simpler and more fun to use? Is it no longer a worthy goal to drive user productivity through better designed ERP and CRM apps?