The FOSE trade show rolled into Washington, DC this past week. Among its rows of 10x10’ booths and crowds of government administrative personnel shoving free pens into their CDWG-branded bags, was an excellent group of key note speakers.
Speakers may be the most valuable aspect of the super-sized industry conferences because of the insight they share about their company’s positioning, messaging, thought leadership and to-market strategy. It is often more than what you find in press releases with their sterilized quotes. It’s also interesting to hear the companies a speaker acknowledges as competitors and who gets dismissed as an afterthought.
My schedule prevented me from catching Paul Otellini of INTEL or Kevin Rollins of Dell, but I was there 30 minutes early to hear what Bill McDermott of SAP America had to say about the enterprise applications market in government.
I can sum up Bill’s presentation in a single sentence: it’s good to be the king.
While the Oracle/Peoplesoft/JD Edwards/Retek combination company poses a legitimate number two in the market, they’ll be sending much of the next few years figuring out how to integrate their products while maintaining their existing customer set. Yes…greater market share is primed for SAP’s taking. Bill knows it. SAP’s competitors know it. And the FOSE audience last Thursday knew it.
What did Bill do? He got on the offensive in his presentation…big time. Here are a few of Bill’s suggestions to the senior government executives in the audience:
“It’s too risky and too hard to have too many vendors providing complex technology. It is critical for customers to focus on working only with the market leaders.”
“The best of breed strategy has failed and will never succeed again. Supply chain companies like i2 and Manugistics, and pure play CRM vendors are irrelevant.”
“Open systems are critical, but the focus of interoperability has to be on the market leaders, like SAP and Microsoft.”
“The next 9 to 12 months will determine the future of the enterprise applications business.”
“SAP has 10,000 developers working every day to improve SAP products. That’s a tremendous investment in R&D and the traits of a market leader.”
Bill is a bit arrogant. And I don’t believe its curtains just yet for best of breed because true innovation is rarely delivered by a company as large as SAP. When you are a market leader though you are suppose to act like one. That means creating fear and doubt in the minds of customers about any company not on the top of the hill.
