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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."
Open source is taking a dent, but the biggest threat to enterprise level and vertical markets is the products themselves.
Typically they are low quality with bad quirks. So the company finally get's sick of it and has the replacement software written in house to replace them instead.
Now the company OWNS the app they rely on and pay's less in "annual licensing fees" for the maintaince of the software and codebase by having on-staff programmers that are NOT dedicated programmer positions.
I.E. the IT/Programmer is very common today. you change printer toner, install a new PC and add a feature to that Billing application, or squash a bug in the shipping application.
Corperations are now demanding IT and IS people that are capable of all aspects and are expected to perform all aspects. That "programmer" is expected to be at the office at 3AM to deal with a crashed database server.
It's silly to pay $60-100K for a programmer that you have to try to keep busy when you can hire someone that has good programming skills, good IT skills and actually understands Electronics at the board level for the $50-$90K. and usually get an employee that will happily work his butt off because of the diversity of the job.
This is my observation from work here. All new hires in the IT department MUST have some programming skills in C, Java, python and PHP. We intentionally do not hire anyone that has been a "programmer" or "developer" except those that have experience in OSS as a developer. But they also must show a proficiency at IT skills and prefer that they have some EE background.
this has lead to over 15 enterprise apps being replaced with in-house versions that work better and are far FAR cheaper in the long run even when ignoring the fact that it is an asset now because the company owns it instead of a liability when you "lease" or "rent"(buy) software.
The great part is that versioning systems like Subversion integrate so well with linux,OSX and windows that it takes less than 2 hours to teach a new recruit how to use our system and get them up to speed in checking in and out code.
Enterprise apps are starting to become in-house customized projects, and THAT is the biggest threat to that "business model"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
My skepticism grows with each time I see this topic posted somewhere. The deathknell of the proprietary has been hailed as a Roman general marching onward to victory, but let us remember this: despite the rosy forecast, proprietary enterprise software packages remain.
While OSS has inherent advantages, the non-savvy end-users of business systems prefer lack of change to robustness of operation. If they didn't, OSS would be more prominent on the enterprise level. We tried to implement various builds of *nix and X window system on workstations at my place of work, and there was REVOLT IN THE AISLES.
The business world is not yet ready for the intellectual (not to mention monetary) cost of full transition to OSS. As much as I love it, the end-user isn't ready. It should remain the goal of all OSS developers to give these people more and more reason to change their minds.
Let us keep in mind: there are other reasons for the drop in revenues for these proprietary software vendors as well.
The Crimson Dragon
There's no free ride anymore, it's time to innovate or die.
Depends on which side of the coin you are on. If you are on the consumer side, choose F/OSS and it can be a free ride. Unfortunately, shrink wrap software companies probably are going to have a hard time paying salaries of programmers so if you program, you'd better start liking jobs where all you do is tweek F/OSS for "customization" for your site.
So let's see you hire some high IQ people and start thinking up new ideas and industrial progress will be off and running again after a short stall!
And if you're a shrink wrap house, you'll pay these high IQ salaries with... what exactly? If you *do* come up with something great, you'll have 100 SourceForge copycats within a month and they will erode your market.
F/OSS is the great poison pill of software. If anyone comes out with something that is good (and it isn't you), then just put some effort into a F/OSS "alternative" and poison the whole market... basically make it where if *I* can't make any money in that market, then no one will.
Simply, the enterprise software vendors themselves. At this point, they'd all have to be wheelchair bound given how much they shoot themselves in the foot.
Over the years their prices have risen out of sync with target client business revenue, activity, and need not to mention the changing economic scene.
Their software often seems written explicitly to confound the most experienced users and administrators and effectively prevent any ease in enterprise-wide roll-out, installation, upgrading, and administration.
Their licensing models bear no relationship whatsoever to the realities of the usage of the target businesses, and frequently are outright hostile to newer technology usage such as multiprocessor workstations and thin clients.
For instance, I have yet to have a single installation of any Computer Associates offering go smoothly, or anything that might be mistaken for semi-smoothly. A demo copy of Unicenter once hosed a workstation I tried it on. Given the models, methods, and practices currently standard in the world of Windows programming, and the prodigious resources of CA, that takes Herculean effort to do.
Remedy ARS anyone? I'm sure this can't be the only software with an interface that would make a sadomasochistic OS/2 2.1 adherent's blood curdle.
Siebel? I worked for a company that tried their code. We lost 500% productivity almost overnight. Everyone rebelled by continuing to use Remedy ARS. You have to write some horrendously bad stuff to make people prefer RARS to your offering.
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. As it is, there are major corporations shovelling massive greenbacks into Redmond to get Windows source access to get custom builds for their desktops. Or were when 95 was the standard. Now they might just put up with the comparatively less quirky WinXP Pro and pay a few junior desktop nerds a whole lot less.
Many companies today, trying to cut costs everywhere, are removing a lot of very useful software that their people got very comfortable with and were very proficient with, further eroding productivity. How sad is it that the vendor of the gui has overpriced it to the point that their client would rather do without and simply make use of the command prompt interface of the routers and switches instead?
All in all, things are not in the same way they used to be seven years ago. That does not mean however that Open Source is going to be the magic solution. OS still costs money. Programmers and support personnel and trainers do not work for free. I think neglect of taking that into account is the single biggest blindspot of the OSS boosters and if they don't stop acting as though the fruits of others' labors should be free on a silver platter and come with no cost, they will blow a golden opportunity to expand the usage of software in big business and simply hand it back to Microsoft, Siebel, etc.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Another employer, another year - I built a "Work in Progress" system using Oracle Power Objects. - Oracle scraps OPO because of major Y2K defects - project dies.
Now I use PHP and Postgresql - No chance of this happening to me again.
I have used other proprietry software since - and guess what - the so called "support" consists of some fool in Bangalore pretending he has an English name, and being unable to understand the problem I am reporting, consuming more of my time than it would take to fix the software myself. (Ten hours of my time, two weeks to NOT fix a misaligned columns in a report listing is what you get from paid support!)
Use proprietry software - get shafted! Yeah, that will make us buy it!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII