Once again Gartner has demonstrated why it is viewed as a lagging indicator of meaningful market trends. Check out a new article in CIO Magazine entitled, “Gartner: Four Disruptions That Will Transform the Software Industry.”

In this article, Gartner analyst Yvonne Genovese identifies the following “disruptive” software industry trends that will take shape by 2010-2015,

Rise in New Technologies and Convergence of Existing Technologies
Change in Software User and Support Demographics
Revolutionary Changes in Software and How it is Consumed
Software Market Moves to Megavendors Supporting Large Ecosystems

To call any of these trends potentially disruptive in 2010 or 2015 is to ignore the significant impact each of them is already having on the software industry today.

Web mash-ups became the play things of the Facebook crowd over a year ago and are already being used by a wide array of companies of all sizes today.

That same … Read More »

It is always gratifying to have the major research firms affirm my perspectives and THINKstrategies’ predictions.

Recently, Gartner predicted that the global outsourcing market will grow 8.1 percent in 2008, and that this growth would not be in the form of traditional IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) agreements, but fueled instead by growing the acceptance of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and other utility computing services offerings by companies of all sizes.

Let’s have some fun and do a side-by-side comparison:

According to Gartner, “publicly reported IT outsourcing (ITO) and business process outsourcing (BPO) contract values decreased overall by 50 percent in 2007.”In January 2002, I wrote in a NetworkWorld commentary that the traditional outsourcing model was dying. Even at that time, the size and duration of these deals was shrinking because their rate of success was abysmal.

As I’ve been stating for many years, companies … Read More »

I had the privilege this week of participating in an interesting webinar sponsored by Makana Solutions regarding the sales implications of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and other subscription services.

Tom Wilson, of the Wilson Group; Makana’s founder, chairman, and CEO Liz Cobb; and I discussed how the sales skills and processes differ in the on-demand services world from the traditional packaged product environment. Specifically, on-demand services come at a lower price-point which necessitates higher volume sales to be successful. This requires a transaction oriented sales process and telesales skills, rather than the long salescycles and highly personalized approach of traditional legacy software sales. Therefore, restructuring the sales process and retraining or restaffing the sales team is critical to transitioning to the SaaS and subscription service model.

Similarly, the support function also changes in the on-demand world. Rather than rely on technical support to react … Read More »