A winter of discontent.
Shane:
Excellent point much obliged for the thought. You brought up the point that hiring qualified employees have become easier for i2 due to the turmoil felt by others,that is definitely a benefit for i2.
Another important benefit I think for ITWO on account of the trouble within and among its competition is that companies like MANU and BAAN will have their hands full in fixing the management and accounting problems thus taking away their attention from taking on SCM and i2.
As for SAP it seems their hands are full as well,perhaps thus slowing down their effort to compete with i2 in the SCM segment in the immediate future.
Perception- Also note that due to all the bad news from MANU and BAAN potential customers may shy away from buying products from them as most likely the customers would rather buy the product from a company like i2 who has proven products,excellent management, rock solid performance and an impressive customer list.As for SAP you know they don't have any products yet to compete with i2. I believe i2 has taken center stage in SCM/eBPO segment.
Now here is an informative article I ran across about the trouble ERP guys are facing.
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Application vendors cool off
By Stannie Holt
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 3:56 PM PT, Jan 22, 1999
This has been a winter of discontent for supply-chain automation vendor Manugistics and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software company Baan. Their suffering could point to broader troubles in the enterprise software market.
Both Baan and Manugistics announced this week that they would restructure with the hope of stopping the mounting losses of the past few quarters, and there would also be extensive layoffs. Manugistics has ousted CEO William Gibson and other senior executives, and plans to focus on demand planning and electronic commerce, and Baan has severed its last ties with its founders.
Observers are quick to point out each company's unique problems: for Manugistics, poor management and a narrow supply-chain market; For Baan, too many acquisitions, shoddy bookkeeping, and tangled relationships with sister companies. But they also point out that the entire field of enterprise business software has felt some pain, partly due to the year-2000 and enterprises setting aside all their IT resources to plug every last hole.
Even the biggest ERP vendors, such as SAP and PeopleSoft, have seen their stock prices tumble after reaching a peak last summer. Projected 1999 earnings and market growth for many companies have been revised from 30 percent to 50 percent or more, down to a more realistic 15 percent to 25 percent.
"With the Y2K freeze, things are looking shaky," said Janet Gould, an analyst and West Coast director of Plant-Wide Research, in North Billerica, Mass.
Another analyst agreed that the year-2000 problem is hurting software vendors, but said that this year's fury to remediate systems will give way to more spending on packaged applications, as users try to realize the business benefits of implementing new systems.
"ERP sales are going down," said David Dobrin, senior director at Benchmarking Partners, in Cambridge, Mass. "[But] 1999 is an anomalous year. ... What happens now won't mean much in the long run."
Bruce Richardson, vice president of research strategy at AMR Research, in Boston, said he believes the ERP market is cyclical, and that it is going through a predictable downturn after a high in the mid-1990s, when new technologies, such as client/server, graphical user interfaces, and multifunction suites, replaced the old mainframe model.
"ERP is no longer sexy," Richardson said.
And this widespread slowdown in sales weighed especially heavily on companies that were already in trouble, Richardson added.
Although Baan and Manugistics fundamentally have good products, their tangled finances and plummeting stock prices could scare off potential buyers who wonder whether the vendor will be around years from now, both Gould and Dobrin agreed.
However, Baan is still struggling to digest all the companies it acquired in the past year-and-one-half for expertise in human resources, the supply chain, and sales-force automation. In the long term, Baan could be forced into survival mode like SSA, or even be bought out by a competitor, Dobrin said.
At least Baan is now taking steps to untangle its "weird" and widely criticized finances, Richardson said, by cutting ties with Vanenburg Ventures, owned by founders Paul and Jan Baan, replacing them on its board of directors, and taking full ownership of former channel partner Baan Midmarket Solutions.
(Stannie Holt is an InfoWorld reporter.)
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