Dennis Byron (Research 2.0)

NetSuite: Not as Well Positioned as Larger Players

Halo30K

Thanks for the comment. At Research 2.0, we agree with your analysis that the SOA-ERP market will follow the past lifecycle of legacy-ERP followed by CS-ERP followed by Internet-ERP. (SaaS is just how you buy it to us but we agree with your wave theory.) The report that this blog post references goes into more detail.

But your analysis that the old dogs can't learn new tricks (and therefore the next era will be dominated by a lot of new names) isn't historically accurate. In the past, typically only one new name has broken through per era. SAP did not just emerge from the fields of Waldorf in 1992; it had been into mainframe ERP for 10-15 years before that. Edwards certainly made the transition from legacy (System/38 in its case) as well. Most of the original Microsoft stuff was monolithic too, but on a PC. Peoplesoft was the breakthrough application vendor of the client/server era. Siebel was the breakthrough application vendor of the Internet era.

We also agree with your comments about BPEL (invented by SAP) and open source software. One of our concerns about NetSuite, detailed in the report, is that it is not doing enough in these new technology areas.

Thanks again.