Enterprise Software Archives - Page 3 of 12

Cloudy Fusion

Posted on September 28, 2008 ·

Image by wicho via Flickr

The Enterprise Irregulars took over CloudAve… well, sort of, forcing us to release an article early. Eran Kampf had a post lined up for Monday morning about Larry Ellison’s Cloud Envy, when all of a sudden fellow Irregular Anshu Sharma had a humor attack and came out with a hilarious post. All he did was replace Cloud Computing with Fusion in Larry’s famous rant, and voila!:

"The interesting thing about Fusion is that we’ve redefined Fusion to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t Fusion with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"

"We’ll make Fusion announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of Fusion other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view."

Wow. This variant of Ellison’s speech makes a lot of sense, referring to his own elusive Fusion applications. Even Vinnie Agrees.

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, Humor, SaaS · Tagged: buzzwords, cloud computing, Enterprise Software, fusion, Humor, hype, larry ellison, oracle

CloudAve Launched – and Thank You, Harry

Posted on September 15, 2008 ·

(OK, I sinned. Mea Culpa. I’ve just cross-posted an entire article, which is not the best behavior. But it’s not every day that I launch a new group blog – so consider this my shameless self-plug, and please subscribe to the feed.)

We must be a crazy bunch on a suicide mission. Why else would we launch a new blog focused on Cloud Computing and Business, when it’s just a fad that will collapse in two years?

Harry Debes, CEO of Lawson Software is a respected Enterprise Software industry veteran, but I’m afraid for all his achievements he’ll go down in history as the man who grabbed headlines with a fatally wrong call. Of course not all wrong calls hurt one’s reputation: IBM’s Thomas Watson is still an industry legend despite the famous quote incorrectly attributed to him:

” I think there is a world market for maybe five computers“

The small difference is that what Thomas Watson could not fathom in 1943 ended up putting IBM on an amazing growth trajectory, while Harry Debes’s view may just turn out to be fatal for Lawson – or to quote my Enterprise Irregular friend, Vinnie Mirchandani:

“That’s what American and Delta said about SW. And GM and Ford said about Japanese cars. And Sears and Wards said about WalMart.”

Another quote by Vinnie, closer to our industry:

“Dun & Bradstreet, which GEAC acquired for a song, was one of the most spectacular slides in the software market. In less than 5 years it went from dominant position to a distress sale as it missed the client/server wave in early 90s.”

I’ve seen that one close, fortunately for me from SAP’s side – the winner in that round. We’re witnessing another tidal wave now, the shift to Cloud Computing. It won’t happen overnight, but those who completely ignore it will vanish. Some of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars elaborate more:

Vinnie Mirchandani points out that SaaS is what more and more customers want, and those who stop listening to customers inevitably hit the wall sooner or later. Need proof? How about this 100% SaaS customer, showcased at the recent Office 2.0 conference?
Jim Berkowitz of CRM Mastery fame agrees, adding that calling people, potential customers “stupid” never leads to any good.
Bob Warfield makes the case that even if we ignore what customers want and only consider profitabilty, Debes is wrong, Salesforce.com is almost as profitable as Lawson, but grows much faster, while Conquer, another SaaS success story is actually more profitable than Lawson is.
Jason Corsello adds that Lawson actually launched a SaaS offering last year, but experienced lackluster customer response largely to pricing and deployment issues … so now that they couldn’t pull it off, the declare the entire market doomed.
Josh Greenbaum concludes: “SaaS isn’t collapsing, it’s only just getting started“.

I can live with that… it’s only starting… so we’re not a suicidal bunch, after all. But thank you, Harry Debes, for sparking a great discussion.

If you read just the few articles I’ve quoted above, you get a fairly good picture of the many benefits the Software as a Service model offers. Let me add a few of my personal favorites:

Extended reach – small businesses can now have business functionality previously only available and affordable for large enterprises.
Commoditization of the software market – commoditization hurts most companies, except the few who drive it, but guess what – it’s great for customers.
End of Bloatware – for the first time SaaS vendors can run stats and observe what features are actually used by customers, so they can cut out the fat and enhance the in-demand features.
New Business Models, like benchmarking – based on anonym aggregate data provide your customers with performance metrics. Even newer business models we have not even imagined yet.
Dramatically changed Sales and Marketing model: pull vs. push. Instead of the traditional sales model it’s all about transparency, information, letting informed customers find you. The Product sells itself and your Customers are your Marketing team.

We’ll be writing about these and more. I’m a “business application guy”, so I mostly talk about SaaS – but our name is Cloud Avenue, not SaaS Avenue, for good reason: fellow blogger Krish will talk about it soon. By the way, Krish and I got to know each other through our blogs – just like my fellow Editor, Ben Kepes, and just about all other contributors. We also have our CloudLab – for product / service reviews. Yes, we will report on products, but do not strive to be a mini-TechCrunch: we have no intention to report about everything new. We’re not a news-blog. We’d rather sit back, analyze a market, find key players, then produce a series of reviews / comparative analysis. Quality before quantity or urgency.

We’re believers in Cloud Computing, but not over-zealous cheerleaders. Just as I’m finishing this post, another SaaS debate erupted, which prompted Anshu Sharma to note: “there must be a Sky is Falling Support Group“. The really notable part of the Cloud-Filled Debate @Forbes is Nick Carr’s responses: not because of the Big Switch author’s unquestionable “cloud-bias”, but because of how realistic he is:

Forbes.com: Is cloud computing over-hyped?
Nicholas Carr: At the moment, yes, and that’s typical for technological advances.

What’s your imagined time line of the adoption of cloud computing? Will it take years? Decades?
If you’re talking about big companies, I would say it will be a slow, steady process lasting maybe 15 to 20 years.

On what Gartner Research analysts call “the cycle of hype and gloom,” where do you think cloud computing is currently positioned?
It’s definitely near the peak of its hype. The doom period, when the media and IT managers realize the challenges ahead, is likely coming soon. But regardless of hype or gloom, the technology will only keep progressing.

Overhyped, slow process, doom is coming… has Nick Carr switched sides? No, he is just being realistic – and that’s what we need to do here @CloudAve, too. We will talk about integration problems, security issues, privacy concerns, even legal ramifications – many of these I don’t claim to know much about, which is why it’s great to have a diverse team of authors with complementary areas of expertise. And our door is never closed: we welcome guest posts, and who knows, you may feel inclined to join us as as a regular writer…

Finally, we could not afford to bring you CloudAve without sponsorship. My regular readers know I’ve been an advisor to Zoho for years now – I’ve found them to be a showcase for a lot of my ideals. Zoho stepped up as exclusive sponsor of CloudAve. This does not make us a Zoho PR outlet, in fact they can expect less coverage here than they got on my personal blog. We enjoy complete editorial independence.

What we do not have, and will not have is any form of advertising. None of those flashy banners, boxes, making the site close to unreadable. Just pure content. And since we are not dependent on page views, we can afford to offer our content under a Creative Commons licence. Yes, it’s all yours, take it – just don’t forget attribution.

So here we are – welcome to CloudAve. We hope you will follow us. And once again, thank you, Harry, for all the attention to Cloud Computing.

P.S. The CloudAve platform is not exactly in nice order yet. It’s work-in-progress.

So for now, all I can do is apologize for the shabby appearance, like I did at a previous move – that one turned out quite well, didn’t it?

And talk about move – I am not abandoning this blog either, so I hope you continue to follow me both here and on CloudAve.

Filed Under: Blogging, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, SaaS, Social Networking · Tagged: benchmarking, business model, cloud computing, CloudAve, commoditization, Enterprise Software, Gartner, hype cycle, office 2.0, pull-model, SaaS, software sales

SaaS and the Shifting Software Business Model

Posted on May 28, 2008 ·

Barely two years ago we debated whether little-known Zoho was worth paying attention to. The majority view was that their Office applications were weak contenders that would never challenge the Microsoft suite’s position. I think I was in the minority stating that I really did not need more than 10-20% of Word or Excel’s functionality, but online-anywhere access and collaboration made the switch worthwhile.

Today Robert Scoble reports he is seeing online applications wherever he turns:

Today I’d say the skill set is shifting once again. This time to something like Zoho Writer or Google’s Docs. Because if you visit Fast Company’s offices in New York, for instance, they want to work with you on your copy in live time. Fast Fast Fast is the word of the day. It’s in our title, after all. Now some people still use Word, but last time I was there one of the editors told me he was moving everything over to Google’s Docs because it let him work with his authors much more effectively.

These are no longer yesterday’s wannabe applications. Zoho Sheet recently added Macro and Pivot Table support , going way beyond the average user’s needs (and certainly exceeding my spreadsheet skills, which are stuck somewhere at the Lotus 1-2-3 level). Zoho Writer today added an equation editor and LaTex support. Heck, I don’t even know latex from silicone, what is it doing in my editor?
As I found out it’s important for Zoho’s academic and student users, once again, going way beyond an average user’s needs. (the other update today is mass import from Google Docs: nice, special delivery for Dennis, but I still would like to see a list of all my online docs, be it Zoho or Google, open them, edit them, and save to whichever format (and storage) I want to.)

Online applications have arrived, they’ve become feature-rich, powerful, and are the way software will be consumed in the future. They also change the business landscape.

Software margins choked by the cloud? – asks Matt Assay at CNet, pointing out a shift in Microsoft’s tone about cloud computing, recognizing that in the future they will host apps for a majority of their customers, and that their margins will seriously decline:

There’s not a chance in Hades that Microsoft will be able to charge more for its cloud-based offerings–not when its competitors are using the cloud to pummel its desktop and server-based offerings. This is something that Microsoft (and everyone else) is simply going to have to get used to. The go-go days of outrageous software margins are over. Done.

Matt cites Nick Carr who in turn recently discussed

…the different economics of providing software as a Web service and the aggressive pricing strategies of cloud pioneers like Google, Zoho, and Amazon.

This is fellow Enterprise Irregular Larry Dignan’s key take-away from the Bill & Steve show, too:

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer acknowledged the fact that a lot of computing is happening in the browser and not in applications. He also said that the future of software will have “a much more balanced computational model” and that Microsoft will have to compromise.

Of course it isn’t just Office. The obvious business application is CRM, where Salesforce.com pioneered the concept and delivered the first On-demand product. But now a funny thing is happening: the pioneer is increasingly being replaced by more inexpensive competitors, including my Client, Zoho. Yes, SaaS disrupts the traditional software market, but there’s another equally important trend happening: the commoditization of software.

Commoditization is beneficial to customers, but a death-spiral to (most) vendors. Except for the few that drive commoditization. Zoho makes no secret of doing exactly that.

Filed Under: Collaboration, ERP / CRM, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: business model, cloud computing, commoditization, crm, excel, microsoft, On-Demand, SaaS, salesforce.com, Software, Web Applications, word, zoho, zoho crm, zoho sheet, zoho writer

Re-blogging: The Difference Between Press and Bloggers

Posted on May 20, 2008 ·

I don’t normally do this, but I figured if re-tweeting on Twitter is accepted, then re-blogging should be OK, too.

Some of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars are at SAP’s European Conference, SAPPHIRE 08 in Berlin, and James Governor juxtaposed two photos taken there:

James leaves it to the reader to work out which group the bloggers are.

Filed Under: Blogging, Enterprise Software · Tagged: Blogging, media, press, sap, sapphire08

Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition @ SMB Price

Posted on April 16, 2008 ·

This morning Zoho announced the Enterprise Edition of their CRM product. The key updates are:

Introduction of Role-based Security Administration

Profiles for managing CRM module-level permissions
Roles for modeling organizational hierarchy and setting up data sharing rules
Groups for sharing the data among various departments
Field-level security for controlling the access rights (View or Edit) of fields in CRM modules

Enhancements in product Customization & Data Administration

Multi-language Support (11 Languages)

SSL Support for Professional & Enterprise Version

Integration with Zoho Sheet

Improved Business Functionality

Automatically update Stock information once the Purchase Order is approved
Find and Merge the duplicate records in Vendors module
Convert Quote to Sales Order or Invoice in a single click
Convert Sales Order to Invoice in a single click
Add account information automatically while creating quotes/orders/invoices from the potentials

Wiki-based Context-sensitive Help

The key in “going enterprise” is no doubt the new security/permissioning scheme. That said, Zoho CRM has already been functionally rich even before today’s upgrade. I’ve repeatedly stated that supporting business processes like Sales Order Management, Procurement, Inventory Management, Invoicing Zoho really has a mini-ERP system, under the disguise of the CRM label.. In fact let’s just stop here for a minute.

Today’s announcement aside, I still consider Zoho’s primary focus to be the small business (SMB) market. As for CRM, it really comes down to the classic breadth vs. depth of functionality question. Zoho CRM’s breadth, along with the other productivity applications allows many SMB’s to use it as their single, only business application. The market leader in SaaS CRM, Salesforce.com clearly supports fewer business processes, offering more depth in each – probably a better fit for larger enterprises which likely run several applications anyway. This matrix provides an overview of Zoho CRM vs. Salesforce CRM Group and Professional Editions. (click on pic for detail)

Having done a functional comparison, a quick look at pricing demonstrates why Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu called Salesforce.com still very expensive:

No wonder Larry Dignan at ZDNet declares “Zoho aims to poach Salesforce.com customers.” But Larry (and Marc), you ain’t seen nothing yet… just wait till Zoho comes out with a Salesforce.com importer .

Clearly, Salesforce.com does keep a close eye on Zoho, otherwise why would they spend money on the Google Adword “Zoho CRM“?

But again, reality check: Salesforce.com does own the Enterprise space. For now.

Finally, a word about integration. After all, Zoho is known for their almost endless range of products, they should work together… Currently Zoho Sheet, the spreadsheet application is fully integrated with CRM – most data can be edited either inside CRM or in the spreadsheet format that many business users are more familiar with.

Zoho plans to integrate Writer, their word processor, Mail (still in private beta) as well as some of the business applications, namely recently released Invoice and People. When all that’s done, Zoho will have a more complete offering than two industry giants, Salesforce.com and Google together. I can’t wait…

(Disclaimer: I am an Advisor to Zoho. Take anything I say with a grain of salt. In fact with a pound of salt. Don’t believe a single word of mine about Zoho products: go ahead and check them out yourself).

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: crm, Enterprise Software, erp, On-Demand, SaaS, salesforce.com, small business software, smb, sme, zoho

3 Half-Truths about SaaS

Posted on April 11, 2008 ·

I am a big fan of Software as a Service, but it frustrates the hell out of me to see industry pundits over-hype it without really understanding it. Here are 3 killer (in the bad sense) half-truths about SaaS:

1 – SaaS is simpler, easier to implement than On-premise software (see update at the bottom)

2 – SaaS is for the SMB market

3 – SaaS is bought, not sold, it’s the end of Enterprise Sales

Let’s examine them in detail:

1 – SaaS is simpler, easier to implement than On-premise software.

The only part that’s absolutely true is the technical installation, which the customer no longer has to worry about with SaaS. But we all know that this is a fraction of a typical implementation. Implementations are all about business process and training, hence the difficulty / duration / cost of an implementation depends on the complexity of business and the size of the organization – these two tend to correlate with each other.

It just so happens that all SaaS solutions so far have started (and many stay) at the SMB level, so they are simpler not by virtue of being SaaS but by their target market’s needs.

2 – SaaS is for the SMB market

Yes, traditionally all SaaS started with Small Businesses, but that does not mean it may not move upstream. Salesforce.com and several HCM applications have proven technical scalability, but they offer partial / departmental functionality.
I am a strong believer that in 4-5 years most software developed will be SaaS, and that in 10 years it will be the predominant method of “consuming” software by large enterprises – but I can’t prove it. There’s no empirical evidence, since there has not been any Integrated Enterprise SaaS available so far. The closest to it is NetSuite today (but it’s still SMB focused), and SAP’s Business ByDesign tomorrow. In fact despite SAP’s official positioning, driven by market focus and current limitations (functional and infrastructure), I believe that SAP will use BBD to learn the SaaS game – i.e. BBD will be a test bed for a future Enterprise SaaS offering. But we’re not there yet.
(longer discussion here)

3 – SaaS is bought, not sold, it’s the end of Enterprise Sales

Hey, I’ve said this myself, so it must be true (?). Well, it depends on the position of the sun, the constellation of the stars, and several other factors, but mostly the first two we’ve just covered.

SaaS for very small business: that’s the clear-cut lab case for the click-to buy pull model to work. In fact in this respect (sales model) I believe the business size is the no.1 determinator. Some solutions will have to be configured and may even require pre-sales business process consulting. This inflexion point will clearly be higher for functionally simpler solutions, like CRM and lower for integrated business management systems, like NetSuite or SAP’s Business ByDesign.

Once you reach that inflexion point, you’re in a more interactive, lengthier sales process, and that’s typically face to face. At least that’s what we’re conditioned to: but it does not have to be that way. That will be the subject of another post – to come soon.

Update: Ben Kepes challenged #1 on his blog, and to some extent I have to agree. My post here is continuation of a discussion we started at the virtual SAP Marketing Community Meeting, and my mind-set was still business process software, e.g. CRM, ERP..etc, but I forgot to specify that. Instead of replicating the argument, why don’t you read my response to his response at Ben’s place.

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: business bydesign, netsuite, On-Demand, pull-model, SaaS, sap, sap bbd, small business software, smb, sme, software sales

SAP Marketing Community Virtual Meeting

Posted on April 7, 2008 ·

I’ve said before, software giant SAP is a company that “gets” social media. Heck, their Global Marketing group even has a VP focused on Social Media. He’s now running a rather unique experience on a grand scale: a virtual Marketing Community Meeting, with some 2000 SAP marketers worldwide, using a Unisfair virtual conference center.

The prelude to the meeting already started with blogging activity, using Jive’s Clearspace community platform. I’m truly honored to have been invited as part of a select group of external bloggers to participate, along with:

Now there’s only one thing missing: a link to the actual event site. I can’t link ( for now?), since it’s an internal, behind-the-firewall event. I hope Steve and team will eventually be able to review the material created here, and eventually release some (most?) of it to the general public. Not only because it represents intellectual value to share, but because it would be consistent with SAP striving to be an open, conversational company.

Update (6/4): This post is now #5 for the Google search SAP marketing. That’s insane. (but I don’t mind)

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, Social Networking · Tagged: Blogging, Clearspace, Enterprise Software, enterprise software marketing, erp, marketing, sap, Unisfair, virtual marketing, virtual meeting

Zoho People: Will it Disrupt or Fail?

Posted on March 10, 2008 ·

Zoho, best known for their Web-based Productivity (Office+) Suite today released Zoho People, a feature-rich On-Demand HRMS – Human Resources Management System. For the product introduction please read my previous post, while here I focus on business analysis, specifically on what this move means to software sales in general.

Today’s product announcement signifies a departure from what Zoho has been known for so far, in a number of ways. Their primary reputation is being the best Web-based Office / Productivity Suite provider – People is clearly a process-driven, transactional system with “enterprisey” features: organization levels, work-flow, permissions…etc.

It’s not an entirely new field for Zoho though, as their CRM solution has been gaining traction for years now – both in terms of new customers as well as converts from the market leader. (See chart with full list of Productivity and Business Apps). As a matter of fact, I’ve often stated calling it CRM is an understatement: with Sales Order Management, Procurement, Inventory Management, Invoicing it’s really more of a mini-ERP. Add to it Accounting and HCM and Zoho can come up with an unparalleled Small Business Suite, which includes the productivity suite (what we now consider the Office Suite) and all process-driven, transactional systems: something like NetSuite + Microsoft, targeted at SMB’s, perfectly rhyming with Zoho’s stated objective of becoming the outsourced IT for small businesses.

Except… well, Zoho People is not a small business system. All you have to do is look at some of the organizational setup, or processes, like holiday, training, leave requests, company policies to realize that this system is ideally suitable for organizations with a few hundred employees and more. (The “M” in SMB, whereas most of Zoho’s focus has been on the “S” until now). So it’s a departure from Zoho’s traditional target market, and by its very nature it’s not a system individuals or small groups would just start to use in an ad-hoc manner. It’s a system to be introduced by HR for the entire company.

Bringing an enterprise system to the market typically requires a different approach, a coordinated marketing and sales effort, supplemented by consulting and support – i.e. all the extra weight that makes enterprise software “big and fat”. Yet Zoho just throws it out in the open, like they did with Writer, Sheet or any one of the dozen or so productivity tools. They have no clue how to market enterprise software! – one might say… and do they, really?

Simply announcing enterprise software without marketing and sales is certainly a risky proposition. Any startup that does with their main product is doomed to fail. Yet Zoho can afford an experiment. The new HCM system is just one product in their portfolio, in fact the entire Zoho portfolio is just a big experiment of the parent company, privately held and profitable Adventnet. CEO Sridhar Vembu repeatedly stated his mission is to commoditize software, delivering it to large masses at previously unseen prices.

There’s all this talk about how SaaS changes the economics of Software – pull vs push process, try-and-buy vs. the expensive enterprise sales process; but it mostly refers to the SMB space. The try-and-buy, self-serve model is almost unheard of amongst larger organizations and more complex software. It traditionally needs more cajoling and hand-holding. But why not break away from tradition? Why should all innovation stay on the product side? Zoho goes the extra mile to make the new system more “consumable”: screenshot tours, demo videos abound. Of course disruptive pricing does not hurt, either.

If Zoho People fails to gain traction, so be it: the company will likely focus on their main avenue of becoming the IT provider for SMB’s, integrate features from People into Zoho Business and CRM, and figure out how to crack the HCM market later. If, however it starts gaining traction, it’s a good signal to the entire SaaS industry: an indication that transparency, online information and help works, the try-and-buy model may just be feasible even with larger organizations, which, for the first time will buy Software as a Service instead of being sold to by pushy enterprise sales teams.

(Disclaimer: I am an Advisor for Zoho.)

Filed Under: Business, Enterprise Software, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: Enterprise Software, hcm, hris, hrms, On-Demand, pull-model, SaaS, software sales, try-and-buy, zoho, zoho crm, zoho people

Zoho Enters Human Resources Market with Zoho People.

Posted on March 10, 2008 ·

(I broke up my originally long post into two pieces: this one about the product announcement, and the next one with the business analysis)

Zoho, best known for their Web-based Productivity (Office+) Suite today released Zoho People, a feature-rich On-Demand HRMS – Human Resources Management System.

Several modules support the work of managers, HR professionals:

Organization for defining corporate and departmental structure
Recruitment for managing recruitment processes and maintaining resume databases
Checklist for defining business processes and workflows in the organization
Forms for defining custom business forms using the integrated Zoho Creator
Dashboard to overview it all

All the setup, be it form changes, new forms or field, org chart changes ..etc happens via a friendly drag-and-drop interface.

While all the above is for Management, HR, perhaps Training, Travel professionals, most “regular” employees in a company would only access the Self Service Module, which is split to an Employee and a Manager Self-Service section. Requests can be sent to the HR department on job openings, employees can submit information like Expense Reports, Vacation, Training Requests to the relevant departments/managers as pre-defined in the workflow…etc.

For a detailed feature overview, watch this demo video.

Zoho People from Raju Vegesna on Vimeo.

The application is currently in Beta, and for the Beta period it will be free, independent of the number of users. After the Beta pricing will likely involve a dual scheme, with ad-hoc users (regular employee accessing Self Service) paying less than full users (typically HR professionals.) While no numbers have been announced, Zoho claims the blended price level will be disruptive – something to the scale of Zoho CRM, which is about 10% of the cost of it’s main competitor.

Talk about CRM, it’s worth mentioning that while Zoho’s fame comes from the Office Suite (or the extended suite of Productivity Apps), this is not their first foray into business applications. Zoho People joins Zoho CRM, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Projects and Zoho DB. Below is an overview of the entire Zoho Portfolio:

Please read my next post for a business analysis on what Zoho’s entry to the HCM space means.

(Disclaimer: I am an Advisor for Zoho.)

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: employee self-service, Enterprise Software, hcm, hris, hrms, On-Demand, SaaS, zoho, zoho crm, zoho people

Enterprise Software: from ERP to BRP

Posted on March 5, 2008 ·

I had already spent half a decade implementing SAP solutions in the 90’s when I finally got enlightened, learning the “proper term” for what I was doing: ERP, as in Enterprise Resource Planning. The term was coined by then Gartner Analyst, now Enterprise Irregular Erik Keller. Now another fellow Enterprise Irregular, Sig Rinde introduces a new interpretation of ERP: Easily Repeatable Process. Of course he contrasts that with his new acronym, BRP (not to be confused with BPR, another 90’s favorite), which means Barely Repeatable Process. BRP is what Thingamy, Sig’s lightweight, extremely adoptable system attempts to address. But it’s a very-very tough sell…

ERP traditionally addresses the core, standard, and as such repeatable business processes. Whatever it can’t handle are the exceptions: processes to be handled by knowledge workers outside the realm of ERP, by traditional means: phone calls, spreadsheets, creative thinking and a lot of emailing back and forth. Exceptions may be a fraction of business volume, but they are what corporate employees spend most of their time resolving. If that’s the case, knowledge workers who come up with innovative solutions may consider it a good practice to document them just in case the “exception” ever occurs again… and if it does a few times, well then it’s no longer an exception, but a (Barely) Repeatable Process.

Wikis in the Enterprise are a simple yet effective solution to manage such BRPs: they facilitate collaboration of all knowledge workers involved, allow some structure (structure is helpful when not pre-imposed but flexibly created) to organize data and finally, as a by-product they serve as documentation of the solution for future re-use.

Neither process-driven heavyweight systems like ERP, nor innovative, lightweight collaboration tools like wikis are the one and only mantra for most businesses (see my previous rant on “you can’t run your supply chain on a wiki“), they have their own place and should complement each other. Standard business processes and exceptions are not black-and-white opposites either: it’s a continuum, and halfway is BRP. If ERP (in the traditional meaning) tries to address to many of theses BRPs, it gets overly complex (it already is!), hard to configure and use.

This is the dilemma Sig’s system, Thingamy addresses. It’s neither free-form collaboration, nor ERP: it’s a business system framework, that allows you to model and define business processes: a tool to create your own custom-made ERP, if you like.

And therein lies the rub. Most business users don’t want to create software. They want to use it. This was the problem that caused the demise of Teqlo: the unfunded, unproven belief, that users actually want to interactively create their tools. No, they want to deal with the urgent business problems (the BRP), using whatever tools are readily available.

Thingamy’s dilemma is finding the customer: it certainly won’t be the business user. A modeling tool, simple it may be has a learning curve, dealing with it is a distraction to say the least. Thingamy’s likely “owner” would be corporate IT which would have to create processes on demand. But we all know what happens if you need to call IT to create a “program” for you. Thingamy could possibly be a handy tool for consultants, system integrator firms – but they all have their own army of programmers, toolsets..etc, which makes it an awfully hard sell, IMHO.

Thingamy is no doubt an elegant solution, I just don’t see the mass market need for it, because it does not solve a mass market problem. Or I should say, it does, but there’s a mismatch between whose problems it solves and who can use it. Sig himself defines collaboration as a workaround for the Barely Repeatable Processes in the Enterprise: my bet is that this “workaround” is here to stay for a long time.

Update (3/18): CIO Magazine interviews Ross Mayfield, Founder and Chairman of Socialtext, an enterprise wiki company:

Most employees don’t spend their time executing business process. That’s a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process.

… the greatest source of sustainable innovation is how you’re handling these exceptions to business process.

… So I’ve always looked at it as we’re doing the other half of enterprise software: making this unstructured information transparent.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, Startups · Tagged: brp, business processes, Collaboration, crm, enterprise sofware, erp, exceptions, oracle, sap, socialtext, structure, thingamy, wiki