December 9th, 2007
Enterprise apps not sexy?
Robert Scoble wonders why enterprise applications aren’t sexy but in the process makes the fundamental mistake of assuming you can compare consumer to business in the blog model:
Instead, let’s look at the business of journalism or even of blogging. We’re paid to deliver page views. Advertisers call it “CPM” (cost per thousand viewers). Now, what’s going to get more of you interested? Consumer software that you actually have a role in adopting or purchasing or enterprise software where some CIO somewhere else in your organization decides on? I know that when I talk about enterprise software the numbers of viewers just don’t show up. So, tech bloggers quickly learn that if they talk about enterprise software they aren’t going to get many advertising impressions.
It’s not about page views, it’s about relative influence. That’s why some of us have a seat at Henning Kagermann’s table. He’s CEO at SAP, a $15 billion per year business with 40,000 plus enterprise customers, nearly a million people in its developer network and 200,000 people in its business process network. It’s why some of us also get a seat at Charles Phillips table. He’s president of Oracle and has spent some $25 billion acquiring enterprise application vendors the last few years. These are people who shape yours and my lives. That’s pretty darned cool.
Enterprise applications may not be sexy, it may, as Mike Krigsman points out be hidden but as Vinnie Mirchandani says:
You know what turns me on? To see UPS give each one of its drivers a DIAD - and they did it years before the recent wave of personal gadgets - with GPS, wifi, scanning and other technologies. And with a battery that lasts all day. Can our iPhones do that? See the massive technology behind their ops that make it so easy for their millions of customers. This time of the year, you realize they are Santa’s elves with the billions of deliveries they do daily.
Robert - you want sexy? We can do that. Check out Majority Desk built by two super smart guys from Colgate Palmolive working out of SAP’s Palo Alto labs and demonstrated around the world to thousands of other uber geeks. These are people who get things done, pay the bills, make the deliveries, run the airlines, design cars, drill for oil, deliver healthcare, grow food…the list is endless.
I like that I get to hang out with some of these folks pretty much every day and learn how they’re trying to make our lives better. The apps these folk build may not be sexy in the sense Robert expresses, but I’ll bet he’d hate it if they didn’t exist.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 12/10/07
