SAP high-flyer gives view from the top
Published: 01 Oct 2003 14:25 BST
Are you guys having the last laugh?
I don't think it's the last laugh. I think in a lot of cases, it's sad to see what happened to those companies. It's also sad to see what's happened to some of the customers that have bet on them and have these systems still running and are trying to figure out how to put all the pieces together. They got recommendations from some trusted advisors to go and do a pluralism of application approach. And that model is extremely expensive. It shifts a lot of money to the advisors, but it's extremely expensive for them.
Who were those advisors?
The people that came in and said, "all you need to do is put in CRM (customer relationship management), and you don't need to think about where you get your CRM from."
Who said that?
In general, there was a wave in which people said best-of-breed software is going to win. We have that situation right now, and it's not going to go away. They just need to question if that's still the best way, and who gave them that advice. To a certain degree, we are taking the responsibility on ourselves. But we're the only vendor saying, "we recognise your situation, and we're trying to help you right now." We're not having a laugh; we're having a lot of hard work.
We've been hearing about Web services for a while. What's happening with it?
What's new is we're starting to see the emergence of very few players that have all these integration facets in one platform. It's almost like the car industry. We go from the thousands of players to very, very few -- five or six -- that can actually put in one platform, fully pre-integrated. And that is a very big change, because when you get to a complete solution, you move from early adopters to people who like to dabble and build to the Main Street -- the people who have to have it. And we look at five to 10 times growth in any market when that happens.
What does that mean for IT managers?
That means that instead of seeing ERP, CRM, SCM (supply chain management), PLM (product lifecycle management), HR (human resources) and you name it -- all these buzzwords in the application space, shipping as separate entities -- you will see a collection of services -- in the vicinity of tens of thousands of services.
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