SandHill’s questions on predictions as to how the software vendor landscape will change in 2013 found agreement among industry observers about the changes facing legacy software powerhouses. The questions also sparked tirades about Microsoft. Dive into their perspectives on the difficult challenges and necessary “rebooting” ahead.
Q: Which three to five software vendors will face the most dramatic change to their business in 2013?
Peter Auditore, principal researcher at Asterias Research: SAP, Oracle and Microsoft will face the greatest challenge to their business models as the disruptive SaaS and cloud vendors begin eating their installed base with new and innovative licensing models that completely change the enterprise software space.
SAP in particular is in an extremely weak position as it has been unable to bring one single SaaS or cloud product to market. Business By Design, Streamworks, Sales On Demand and Sourcing on Demand along with the massive push on sustainability have missed the mark and completely failed.
IBM and Oracle will gain tremendous competitive advantage with hardware software offerings at price performance levels other vendors can’t meet.
Paul Ressler, principal, The Cirrostratus Group:
- Cisco, who we often don’t think of as a software vendor, will make significant product changes to address the software-controlled network business.
- VMware will make some sort of major acquisition that will put them into the network infrastructure business, giving them the opportunity to dominate the software-controlled network space.
- HP will try to develop a more focused enterprise software strategy. This will result in continued upheaval in their business including niche acquisitions and significant layoffs. Unfortunately it will not be clear by the end of 2013 whether this strategy will be successful.
- BYOD (bring your own device) and increased use of mobile enterprise applications will put tremendous pressure on managing mobile security. Symantec will be well positioned to provide mobile security solutions and will provide many new offerings in this space and go through lots of growth. Other major software providers will make acquisitions in the security space to compete.