The software roadmap; valuable to your business or not?

Globalisation has contributed to a reduction of worldwide leading software vendors due to acquisitions, mergers and discontinuity. And this will continue. A proof point of all that is the fact the short-term ‘JBOPS’ does not exist anymore. ‘JBOPS’ stands for: J.D. Edwards, Baan, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP; the global leading five ERP companies of the late nineties.

J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft have been acquired by Oracle while BAAN has been acquired by Infor.

In 2000 Microsoft bought itself into the IT Business Solution market space by acquiring Great Plains and later on (2002) Navision just after Navision acquired Damgaard. SAP acquired TopManage Financial Systems (SAP Business One) and more recently Business Objects and Sybase while SAGE has been in aggressive acquisition mode. Epicor did no major acquisitions compared to the ones mentioned before.

Discontinuity and continuity are stronger than ever before.

Because of the impact of change on the organization, placing an order for a new IT Business Solution is not something that a business wants to do and then need to do again every two years. The average refresh cycle is between five and ten years and companies that achieve this path can have the latest technology if they choose a vendor that consistently invests in Research and Development and provides the benefit of a manageable upgrade path. In this case the users do not have to go through the disruption of evaluating, learning and implementing another new system at the same time they are busy performing their jobs, because for an upgrade the basic architecture and operational method is the same.

With this in mind, the following aspects are important to your business when purchasing an IT Business Solution from a software vendor or solution provider:

1. Continuity
2. Support life cycle
3. Innovation

Working for over ten years in this industry, I am amazed how businesses actually do spend minor attention to the future software roadmap and perform a risk analysis for relatively a large investment.

Here is a simple approach of doing due diligence on these aspects.

Ask the solution provider (vendor or implementation partner) for the software roadmap of 2-4 years ago. Read it and then analyse how much of this has been actually applied in the IT Business Solution that they have demonstrated to you.

After that exercise ask for the current software roadmap that covers the next 2-4 years at least. I predict that you will read this document in an educated manner and perhaps with mixed interest. It gives you a much better idea of what software companies are actually doing with the maintenance that you pay. How much of that has actually been put back into the future releases of the IT Business Solution? Something that your business potentially can benefit from again.

It should provide you with a certain level of comfort that this IT Business Solution provides you with innovative technologies to let your staff be even more productive and your business be able to further cut cost and be more profitable.

To have an analogy with buying a car here; you could perhaps compare it with checking the oil level of a car engine and this time also getting insights on what the oil level has been in the past. You get even in a position to check under the hood and be able to see what new engine technologies have been applied. You now know upfront if the car you are looking to buy is actually already leaking oil and/or is going to leak oil soon or if it is a car that will keep running smoothly, and will be upgraded with a turbo, or perhaps a hybrid module if you pay your maintenance.