Halo30k

NetSuite: Not as Well Positioned as Larger Players

Dennis,

My .03

First a quick issue with your comment on BPEL

check out

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

SAP was not involved at all they had a SAP custom workflow (another issue another day)

SAP was a mainframe ERP company focused on Germany and German centric Euro mid sized firms with less then 2000 customers in late 80's . Its hard to compare them back in 1980-92 with market leadership of MSA (Management Science America), M & D (McCormack & Dodge), Walker, D & B, etc..I agree they made the "jump" to Client server ERP that was their push to sell in the US on on the back of the "BPR" Management consulting hype of the early 1990's remember Tom Peters/ Hammer etc.. I count them as a full ERP for Fortune 1000 / invented Global 5000. I look at SAP as the salesforce.com of its era. JDE has taken a 20 year path to being client server and until PeopleSoft and then Oracle has bought them it might of taken another 10 years to get the client server done. The real issue is the way the World product is designed around the old DB2/400 kernel. It has taken the development team 10 years to fully port it to SQL Server and now Oracle in the last few years. The tech stack is poor buy late 90's standards much less late 2000's. They also have never broken out of the AS/400 mindset of sales. Firms that use 400's/ iSeries now there are over 750k 400's / iSeries servers out in the world. JDE has about 4000 -customers (10k+ servers) of the 750k installed base. To say they made the jump is a not quite correct. Most (75+%) of the Enterprise (client server version of JDE) are to old world customers. And PeopleSoft is the final one I see their attempt at being a real internet ERP is going to be the most interesting but in the end is Oracle going to allow its #2 (in terms of how Oracle Mgmt feels) ERP (Oracle EBS is their baby) beat its #1? I cannot see how these firms can take the leap (SAP has 60k customers with 500k+ modules and Oracle has 45k customers with 250k+ modules) to internet ERP on demand. I see four major reasons. The capital costs alone $10'sb + ( billions in infrastructure for data centers, the billions in redevelopment, billions in services & support, billions in marketing/sales/partne... VAR/SI -ecosystems) over 10 years + etc.. the second reason is the lack of management model/ talent/ governance, the third reason is the sales/licensing how do you convert and monetize the customer base the last reason is the simple one will customers wait ( which is my thesis for why the prior wave failures occur for leaders) customer don't want to wait 3-5-10 yrs for you to convert to something they can buy now and work for 3-5+ years to fix.

I also see a economic cycle connection (these massive transformations are linked to post slowdown automation in large companies that cut/fire/trim staff and have to rescale as their operations grow out slowdowns) look at 1982-90 wave 1 ERP, 1993-2001 wave 2 ERP, I would say also that wave 3 has been going on from 2005 in the form of trying the major vendors but by 09 most are too costly and slow (to create value) .

Why will Salesforce/Netsuite/ Workday/ SugarCRM/ the other 10 etc.. do well in the next 5-10 yrs because they are the only game in town, the mega vendors are so slow and expensive and force you to retool and (then buy more of their software which forces you upgarde to their managment stack and then add the BI which only works if the SOA is in too) etc.. If all I want is a quick order entry module for a new distro center in a region or a quick HR module or CRM etc.. then SaaS is going to make sense. Even if it cost $5k a user if all I have to buy.