Jason Corsello asks the question about SAP after attending the company’s Industry Analyst Conference in Las Vegas. Apparently, not much time was spent on it – Jason says 15 minutes out of two days. Then, DubDubs wonders about Oracle – saying that the HR track at OracleWorld was left until the last day – resulting in a lot of irrtated HR people.
Jason also makes mention of SAP’s platform, NetWeaver, that I think supports the ideas in yesterday’s post on purposeless platforms:
Although SAP is outpacing their arch-nemesis Oracle in the applications space, and their ESA (Enterprise Services Architecture) vision is a solid strategy for existing customers that have already sank millions in SAP, I was quite surprised in their lack of focus on what many customers are demanding today — applications that can be easily turned on and off with highly configurable options and rapid payback (I actually saw one slide that stated a payback in 3.4 years). Instead, they are singularly focused on offering a business process platform (NetWeaver) bundled with hundreds of Prue-defined "services" combined with zaps (a fancy name for packaging customized application functionality).
It supports Greg Gianforte’s point that the big guys are focused on delivering purposeless, behemoth platforms instead of applications that address business needs, are easy to deploy, easy to configure, and quick to return value.
If a rising tide raises all boats, a turning tide is bound to sink some.