Has the Enterprise Software Market Matured?
BusinessWeek includes pieces from S&P sometimes, today they had a item about mergers in the software industry. What I found more interesting, though, was their forward-looking predictions. According to Standard & Poor's, there are too many players trying to sell into the enterprise software market:
In our opinion, there was, and still is, too much capacity in the industry, particularly in enterprise software. This overcapacity has created a great deal of pressure, in our view, for enterprise software providers to discount their products, particularly at the end of any given quarter.
As a result, customers are turning to suites:
Additional reasons for further consolidation, in our view, are that the software industry is growing in the low- to mid-single digits, as opposed to the double-digit growth of the 1990s, and customers are starting to limit the number of outside vendors they deal with. In this environment, we believe the larger suite providers are better positioned to gain market share.
That's an interesting observation. When such things happen it's because the market has become saturated and buyers are treating such products as commodities. While it may be the case that ERP tools are commodities, the recent experiences I've had in my New Product Development course lead me to believe there are still things to be done in the PDM space.
My recent experiences with PeopleSoft tools make me wonder how those guys are still in business. IBM and Intel use their tools for job searching, and they stink! If that's the general public face of PeopleSoft they are not long for the world.
Josh Poulson
Posted Monday, May 9 2005 10:08 AM
![[Feed]](http://pun.org/oslo/feed_blue_32.png){kind=small}
