Three very different data points over the last month contribute to this post
a) I was impressed to see at the Dreamforce conference last week how much custom development is going on on the force.com platform. The numbers we heard from Marc Benioff were big – 188 million lines of force.com code, 12 times as much as last year. Since June more than 15,000 companies have a signed up for our the Force.com free edition etc.
But the numbers are just numbers till you see what end-user organizations are custom-building – not just vendors like Coda to build their own accounting applications. You have to stop and ask - has the pendulum swung? Are people building more rather than buying packaged functionality?
b) Then I saw fellow Enterprise Advocate Ray Wang present at a SAP user event in Manchester, England and point out 5 areas SAP has invested in recent years.
- Netweaver
- Duet
- BusinessbyDesign
- Solution manager
- Enterprise support
But there has been little customer uptake. Alan Bowling, chairperson of the UK and Ireland user group is quoted: “SAP still develops stuff that only five people will ever use and then tries to drop it on us. ” No wonder SAP has had a tough job migrating customer bases. Why should they with new features they don’t really care about, and the chaos of a typical upgrade. 3-4 months of rehearsals, and the hold-your-breath long weekend execution of the upgrade. In contrast, Marc Benioff also harped on salesforce’s ability to perform“5 minute upgrades” using mirrored data centers.
c) Finally, a conversation with Zach Nelson of NetSuite brought home much more clearly how much more SaaS vendors understand their customer base. When you can see on-line which features your customer base is using extensively, and which new features get adopted in an upgrade release, that is one of the best feedback loops you can have. In on-premise world that feedback takes much longer, and the results typically based on surveys are never accurate.
Alan was further quoted as saying “We can now get in early and tell (SAP) that some things are either irrelevant or might be better if approached from a different angle. We’re gaining access to advanced roadmaps that would have been kept from us”. That is goodness, but it has taken years and will continue to take years to incorporate into future releases. How do you compete against Zach’s much better visibility in to his customer preferences?
More custom development. More tuned features in future releases. 5 minute upgrades.
The packaged software world is going through seismic changes.
No related posts.
