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The Death of Licensed Enterprise Software?
tfsm writes "Andy Singleton wrote a short, interesting article about the looming death of traditionally licensed, proprietary, enterprise software over at The IT Manager's Journal. In it, he talks about the declining revenues of software giants such as Siebel. There are several causes, but one, he suggests, is erosion from Open Source offerings."
This is probably very true. I mean, recently I was looking into partition/harddrive/virtual drive encryption programs. There are a number of identical looking commercial apps available. However, TrueCrypt(sourceforge) offers the same or better features really. Honestly, if you have to choose between the free solution, which is a mature stable choice, and one that will cost your company hundreds of dollars per license.... well, it's not much of a choice, is it?
TFA is thin on alternatives to selling licenses, but at my company, we've gone to more of a "rental" type model of licensing, a monthly payment which bundles in support and upgrades. This is a win-win for everybody, as the customers are able to pay for it out of their discretionary budget, where a big-ticket license requires approval from the board, god and everybody.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
If you're talking about boxed software then support is limited to a "knowledge base" database and rudimentary and usually dire scripted phone support.
Out of the box commercial software pretty much like this. However, if you're talking enterprise solutions from Oracle, SAP, IBM, EMC, NetAPP, and even Sun (unfortunately, whose support quality has declined recently IMO) then it's a different game. Pay for a contract and you will get highly knowlegable engineers to solve whatever problem that crops up within the confines of the contract. I've been very impressed by IBM in the past. DEC used to have pheonominal support. So, while your copy of TurboTax may not get you the support you feel you deserve, it's not the same with big iron hardware and enterprise software. At least, not in my experience. --M
Both Open Source and inexpensive web services will erode this market.
On the Open Source side: systems like SugarCRM are free to implement and very high quality. On the inexpensive web services side: systems like Basecamp provide a great service at a price point that looks almost free.
Anyway, SugarCRM and 37signals (Basecamp) are two companies that I am watching as examples of a new business model that works.
Honestly, Siebel is losing lots of business to salesforce.com, not open-source alternatives.
For example, when one clicks on a drop menu, there is a noticeable delay (up to 2 seconds) before the dropmenu is populated. The only reason for this that I can think of is that the app runs a DB query each and every time a dropmenu is clicked, even though the contents change very rarely. This is quite possibly the worst possible way to fill a drop menu, ever.
To add insult to injury, the thing is a "web app", but it makes such excessive use of ActiveX and other Windows-specific tools, it eliminates one of the primary advantages of web applications: Cross-platform compatibility.
To their credit, a rep from Siebel did say that this particular product was once a locally-run binary program, but Siebel was losing sales to competitors simply because their tool was not a web application. That is the only reason! Apparently, it didn't include a sufficient number of buzzwords, so they rewrote it to do just that.
How much do you want to bet they'll switch its data storage medium from a proper relational database (even if it is MS SQL) to a purely XML-based system? I am sure that will be plenty fast.
The irony is that this system was used to replace two systems that actually worked well--a OpenVMS-based control system and a Tandem-based logging system. Whomever implemented the old systems clearly valued uptime (neither OpenVMS nor Tandem/HP-Nonstop systems crash; at least, I have never seen it happen, and I've worked on such systems that have uptimes of decades), though admittedly both are rather proprietary and dated.
I've only used 2 or 3 Siebel products, so my experience with them is somewhat limited. Perhaps some of their stuff is non-crap.
Just goes to show--never let PHB's dominate your design decisions, at least if quality is a concern.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Having been witness to a million dollar fiasco with Siebel I think Siebel's licensing revenue is down because they make a shitty product.
In a nutshell, they came in and promised the world and ended up delivering something like the nastiest part of New Jersey.
Ironically, our inside developers created a Cold Fusion app and were able to solve all the problems Siebel wasn't.
So, I don't think licensed enterprise software is dead. Only poor quality half assed licensed enterprise software. Granted, I've had my bitches about Cold Fusion but at least the system as concieved actually works...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Well, all of those open source enterprise software are distributed under some kind of open source license (GPL, LGPL, MPL, BSD, etc) so technically speaking, they're still licensed software.
Take-off every
sql-ledger?
Nope. It doesn't do payroll.
I don't respond to AC's.
You have it backwards..
Seibel ruins any company it trouches. In fact they are given credit to the takedown of Gateway Computer and AT&T Wireless.
Both companies were forced to sell their stock within 1 year of switching to siebel. Both credit their loss in revenue to a lack of response time in customer support due to problems with their new database.
With Gateway, it was with their delay time in sending out warranty parts (on the order of weedk&months, not hours after the siebel switch). With AT&T it was a problem with activating new customers (on the order of hours, not minutes that the customer would have to stay in a store while CSR waits on the database to type in customer info).
I'm sure there are other problems with companies who rolled out with siebel. But these are 2 big red flags for them.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
Open Source is of course, NOT a solution. Any corporation that isn't run by some weird eccentrics is going to avoid paying a code cowboy team to customize apps of all kinds, in all places in the business, and then pay their legal people overtime to make sure they are in compliance with three or six different open source-ish licensing models.
Don't redistribute your changes, and you are not in violation of any licenses. GPL/BSD/MPL are _all_ about distribution of the source, not about its use.
You just happen to be wrong about the requirements of the licenses.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
The point of the article is that OSS alternatives like SugarCRM now exist and are likely to erode the non-OSS sales eventually.
It didn't say "right now."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!