Redefining Enterprise Software with Open Source

Everyone knows that Enterprise Software is bloated with un-necessary fat. And the fat shows clearly in the way sales happens. In the latest book by Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz, he shares a story where in order to please a customer, they went and acquired a company, whose product was liked by the purchasing manager, so that they could bundle its software with theirs and win the contract. So clearly politics wins and the product is something that is incidental. I assume a whole bunch of million dollar deals happen like this. I have personally heard a story from from a smart sales person who sold a software worth Rs 1cr to a very large Indian corporate house and that software barely was ever used. I knew he was not bluffing because the purchaser, a high ranking corporate manager was standing next to him. Relationships sell, not products.

Contrast this with Consumer Software Products. Apple sells a beautiful piece of hardware (a computer + phone) and a complex operating system with amazing design for just $600 and makes 39% margin on it. I am sure the software that goes in the iPhone is worth thousand times more and is infinitely more complex than the piece of crap sold by Ben Horowitz or the smart sales guy. The difference is only in the volume. Given enough volume, great software need not be bloated or expensive. This gap between consumer and enterprise software is what ERPNext plans to bridge.

With ERPNext, we are going one step further. Not only are we pricing the product way below the market but also giving it away for free. To remove the fat, we did away with our entire sales team and started to make it easier for our customers to download and use our product for free. What this has done is that it has given us traction and a community. This community is our marketing engine that has consistently taken the ERPNext brand forward and we take pride when ERPNext is proposed as one of the “mature” open source ERP on third party forums. Whats more, this strategy has attracted sponsors who have volunteered to pay us money to accelerate the development.

Being an Open Source product, opens up opportunities that are usually not accessible to proprietary products. Software vendors and partners are already bundling ERPNext along with their offerings and plugins are being built. As the publisher, our focus is on continuously improving the quality of the product and helping the community with deployments and functional help. We so much diverse feedback, it is only natural that the product keeps improving.

To take this platform to the next level, we are hosting a conference in Mumbai on September 25th where we plan to bring together users, developers and partners to brainstorm ideas and identify opportunities growth. We would also like to invite the larger Indian software ecosystem to participate in this community driven and open source project.

To register for the conference, please go to the ERPNext Conf. site.

8 Perspectives on Software Vendors to Watch in 2013

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 AuditorePeter 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 Resslerprincipal, 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.

Read the complete article at Sandhill.com