From G. Moore.
Lifted from the NPI board.
"Gang,
I think we have been scraping along the bottom long enough for us all to
take out our gorilla game strategies and dust them off. Here is a
thesis I propose we discuss with respect to enterprise software
applications. Recovery will come very slowly but also steadily. In
this recovery period inertia is a benefit, not a liability. The
canonical gorillas have a huge inertia advantage. This should allow
them not only to continue to monetize past innovations but to coopt
other companies's innovations as well. There are hundreds of
single-product companies around that can be either assimilated or
duplicated, so there should be no lack of "new stuff" to sell. The
critical competitive advantage will be sales channel access to the
enterprise customer, and the critical battlefield will be enterprise
systems of record -- how many such systems will there be, and who will
dominate each one? ERP is the canonical enterprise system of record,
specifically the financial systems of record, and SAP dominates. CRM is
the second, the customer system of record, and Seibel dominates. Supply
Chain Management looked to be the third system of record, but has
struggled of late -- not clear if it makes it or not-- will there be a
separate supplier system of record? It also appears possible there could
be a product system of record (at present the product life-cycle is
governed by lots of departmental apps sprinkled through engineering,
manufacturing, sourcing, outsourcing, and post-sale servicing), and
possibly an employee system of record (if you could do for employees
what CRM does for customers, and if companies cared enought to do it).
The questions I would like to get input on are these:
1. How much are the inertia and co-opting advantages already priced
into the canonical gorilla stocks? Is there an opportunity for
significant upside?
2. Does supply chain recover as a third enterprise system of record,
and if so, what happens to ITWO and MANU?
3. Is there a gorilla game to play in riding product life-cycle
management from the bowling alley to the tornado?
Geoff"
Kat |
