hi matt,

nice QUOTE from Mahatma Gandhi(as he's known to Indians).

Not only opensource leaders but all leaders of new /different ideas should know about this quote.

BR,
~A

Five years ago or so, the large commercial ERP and CRM vendors were the only choices you had for large multi-hundred user deployments. SAP, Siebel (now Oracle), PeopleSoft (now Oracle), and Oracle were the only players in town. We saw license costs in the thousands of dollars per seat (discounted!), and integration costs at multiples of 3-5 times license cost. An open secret of the CRM/ERP industry (especially among the integrators who actually implemented these projects) was that the very-expensive industry-vertical functionality was often not a good fit at all for large implementations, but was routinely purchased anyway.

These multi-million dollar projects led to some great successes and some spectacular failures, and the high cost of these projects opened the door to commoditization, with thousands of vendors entering the ring hoping to capture the SMB market. Microsoft's CRM offering and NetSuite were emblematic of this second-wave commoditization.

One side-effect of this, and the maturing and consolidation of the big players, was that the core feature set needed by a credible open-source entrant into this market is now well-understood. Open source or commercial open source projects like Compiere ERP+CRM, XRMS CRM, and SugarCRM offer the vast majority of the standard features of the big vendors, and allow integration for industry-specific verticals. I think that the first casualties of this new market will be the SMB commercial vendors, who can't compete on either price or quality with the open source vendors.

I remember reading some years back about a Siebel contract with a large Fortune 500 company. It was supposed to be a ten million dollar contract.

It ended up costing ONE HUNDRED MILLION dollars before the implementation was frozen - because they didn't have any money in the budget for training the end users!

When I read that, several thoughts immediately crossed my mind:

1) How could can Siebel be when they have a ten-fold cost overrun?
2) How smart could their client be to allow a ten-fold cost overrun?
3) If Siebel is this incompetent, I can take their business.
4) Who set up a contract without budgeting for training?
5) Pay me ten million dollars and I'll solve ALL your IT problems by Tuesday before lunch.

It also reminded me of the time one of the large insurance companies sued the COBOL Standard Committee because they had just spent ten years converting their millions of lines of COBOL code from the previous standard to the last standard and didn't want to convert again to the NEW standard.

This was a company that had such a huge IT department that they had a TWO-HUNDRED-FIFTY-MAN COMPUTER SCIENCE department WITHIN their IT department.

I thought that if I had such a department, I would have Hal 9000 on their systems by Tuesday before lunch. Why is it they couldn't even convert their COBOL code from one version of COBOL to another?

There is no limit to the incompetence in IT. That is why Linux and OSS is having such a hard time penetrating the corporate marketplace. Period. There are NO technical reasons for this (aside from a certain lack of enterprise class applications, which are slowly being developed in OSS). It's entirely a management issue.

You want to solve your IT problems? Call me.

The only requirement is that you actually listen to what I tell you.

Hi Matt,

I can definitively tell you that Documentum has passed the "laugh at you" with us Nuxeo and they are now in the "fight you" phase on the ECM market.