Top 10 things to use the money for, once you stop paying maintenance.

10. Reducing the backlog at internal support. This doesn’t take much money, of course, since you’re already saving the hours your people had been on hold waiting for the software company to answer.

9. First-Aid. You know all those open, raw spots in your current installation, the ones you hoped would be fixed by the latest version, if you could ever get it installed? Take charge and fix them, ’cause now your former supplier ain’t gonna do it. You’d be surprised what rudimentary first-aid tools can do: a few user exits, a virtual machine for low-profile Java apps that the exits talk to, a little user training, a few reports. You’ll get people back to the front in no time.

8. Raises. You know life just got easier. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use some of the money to reward your staff for all the effort they put out over the years dealing deal with your former supplier.

7. Shutting down the patch testing environment. Of course, once you do that, you have even more money, so…

6. Buy something you couldn’t afford. Go on, live a little. Here are some suggestions…

5. Invest in mobile. Every one of your executives wants cool stuff on their iPhone (or an iPhone if they don’t have it). Make yourself a star. Give it to them. They’ll go to their graves believing that IT support improved on the day you stopped paying maintenance.

4. Invest in the cloud. Face it. With the end of enterprise support, you don’t have an excuse not to do development that you can’t afford to do. So start by reducing the cost of development. With EC2 or or Rackspace, you can suddenly start doing it right, that is light and cheap.

3. Don’t invest in social networking. But do take the shackles off. Spend a little, tiny bit of money encouraging people to figure out what they ought to be doing with these new tools (if anything). And maybe use some of the tools to help everybody keep track of the efforts.

2. Return some of the money to the CFO. He or she has been walking around the halls looking for some spare change. Now you can reach in your pocket, pull something out, and feel good for the rest of the afternoon.

1. Hold a check-burning party. Write out 10 of those big checks made out to whoever it is, go out to the parking lot, and reduce them to their constituent elements. Hint: bring some beer.

Got your own suggestions about what to do with the money? Add some comments here.


A new generation of apps is coming, a generation that will make today’s middle-aged apps look as dated and primitive as the old Dun & Bradstreet software.

I remember the last time this happened; it was 1990. The big deals in enterprise applications were ASK and the aforementioned D&B and SSA. I worked at one of the next-gen apps, QAD; nobody at our company back then had even heard of SAP or PeopleSoft.

At that time, how could a company sensibly prepare for the fact that they would soon replace their systems? It was pretty simple. Don’t buy the old-fashioned guys, because the useful life is too limited. (Basically, it’s the same reason you might not want to buy a new car in the last year of the model.)

But what else can you do? Well, as I said in the previous post, buy appropriate technologies: keep any new technology small and simple and don’t worry too much about your platform (which is dying, anyway).

Here’s another thing to do. Fix your data. When you look at any modern app, one thing strikes you immediately. They just won’t work on bad data. It isn’t just garbage-in, garbage-out. It’s really more like the catalytic converters, which would turn into sludge the second exhaust from lead-based gasoline hit their poor little crystals.

But can’t you wait until you get a next-gen app, when all your data will be nice and new and clean, just like the app? Well, no. Because one of the things you’re going to want to do (and can do, because next-gen apps worry about conversion) is use your old data in the new app. And if your old data is, well, what most people’s old data looks like, you will muck up that old app.

In a way, what will happen to data when modern apps come in is what happened to the pioneer’s farmhouses after they got modern plumbing. Before, real cleanliness was something only rich people could achieve and then only at fabulous expense. After, real cleanliness was simply expected of anybody who called themselves middle-class.

So, if you believe my analogy, how do you clean up your data if you don’t have running water? Well, a whole lot of it is attitude. If you want it clean, even if you’re poor, you can do a lot about making it clean and keeping it clean. [Please comment if you have a good suggestion.] And if you don’t really care–it’s not that you’re against cleanliness, mind you, it’s just that it’s a lot of work, and you’ve got other things to worry about, and besides, it’s pretty dark over in that corner, so who would notice–well, you’re in for a surprise when attitudes and technologies change.






Think small.









The Oracle Quarter

June 23, 2009

I was following some Oracle deals, as their quarter closed last month, and what struck me most about some of these deals is that Oracle competitors are trying to out-Oracle Oracle–and failing.

Let me give you an example. One of the most common, best-known plays in the ERP salesperson’s playbook–the equivalent of post-right in football–is called elevating the deal.

When you elevate the deal, you try to take it out of the hands of the “team” that has been assembled to evaluate your product and put it in the hands of busy executives, preferably several levels up, who are in a position to override the team. When you’re put in front of these executives, you pitch business benefits, instead of functional capabilities, and fill their soft little heads with visions of flexibility and agility, competitive differentiators, and money dropping like rain to the bottom line. At this level, of course, you just assume that your software actually has the functionality that will allow you to gain those benefits, which is of course what that low-level team was taking all this time trying to assess.

Both Oracle and SAP are past masters of this particular play; when they run it, it’s Tom Brady to Randy Moss, man.

So this quarter, I heard about two situations where one ERP vendor tried to elevate the deal, at the express instructions of the coach, er, head of sales. In either case, was it Oracle? No, it was the other guy. And did it work? Not a bit. The only thing the competitor succeeded in doing was ticking off the selection team.

It’s a pretty small sample size, of course. But it made me wonder. I know that the applications themselves showing their age. Is it possible that the tactics that go along with those apps are beginning to fray, too? I have been saying for some time, now, that they’ve outlived their usefulness to the customer (if there ever was any). See my blog post, “Lawson’s New Office,” for instance. But now, I’m wondering, have the old sales tactics stopped working for the vendors, too?

I’d be curious to get comments on this; as I said, my sample size is too small. But assuming I’m right, there’s one other question to ask. Why has Oracle figured this out and other companies haven’t?

If so,

Designed for Stability

June 22, 2009

I was just talking recently to a specialty chemical company whose specialty product is used primary by an industry that is now under water. They have a lot of middle-aged systems, and they’re looking for something, anything that they can do in the systems area that can help them out.

We’re talking about a company that needs to contract by, say, 50% until their market comes back.

So what can they do? Well, nothing. But the reason they can do nothing is well worth paying attention to and pondering.

You see, the systems they have–I won’t tell you which one is preponderant, but it’s one of the $AP family, that is, SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, etc.–are all designed for stability. They work well only when things change very little. Change a manufacturing line, get a new big customer, add a new product or two, and these systems can deal; it only takes a few man years of work.

But change the business in some fundamental way and everything breaks. Move a line from one factory to another, and it might actually be easier to move the physical line than it would be to move the data in the old ERP system into the new one.

Chrysler faced this a while back, when Cerberus bought it; now, both GM and Chrysler are having to deal with it. I ran into the problem at an electronics company that was deciding to outsource and at a company that was trying to shift a lot of its business onto the web. Their systems wouldn’t let them change.

Well, it’s a good thing if the company that’s setting up the system is stable, has a product that doesn’t change too much, has reliable customers and a business model that will work for the next twenty years.

Know any companies like that?

It’s a bad thing, though, if your company wants to or needs to change fast. Then your systems will get in the way.

Do people ever think about this simple fact when they’re buying the systems in the first place? I’ve never seen any company that did. Do they think about it when they’re buying a company? I’ve only seen a few. When they’re figuring out whether to consolidate systems, that is, do they consider the tradeoff between the money they’ll save by consolidating systems and the money they’ll lose if they have to disentangle the newly consolidated entities? I’ve never run into anybody who did.

It makes sense, of course. Everybody thinks that things will stay more or less the same. Companies, their employees, the people who sell them systems, the people who design the systems. So that’s what they plan for, build for, and buy for.

The only problem is that much of the time, it isn’t true.

Not only the systems, my dear, but the entire mode of doing business with the vendor.

They come to the conversation talking to me about consolidation; they want to use fewer systems, servers, support personnel, etc.

I don’t think this is going to work; in fact, I think they’re going in exactly the wrong direction.

Chiseling On-Demand

June 15, 2009


What about when it’s a “No-software salesperson?”
















Cloud Confusing

June 5, 2009





So I signed up, or tried to. You see, while Xactly may be on the AppExchange, they don’t use as a platform, they have their own product which is hosted by OpSource, another long-time Salesforce partner and AppExchange stalwart that has a particular appeal to AppExchange partners because they help people through the process of joining the AppExchange.



Where is that wine?


Is it noon, yet?




