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."

Comments

TrueCrypt

[urikkiru]

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?

"Support"

[maynard]

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

Interesting example

[Sivar]

"In it, he talks about the declining revenues of software giants such as Siebel."

Well, that and Siebel's software is usually crap. For example, Siebel makes the customer management software that DirecTV uses. I've used it, and a friend of mine informs me that it crashes at least once a week, is painfully slow, and its user interface is almost as bad as that of CUPS.

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.