Those of us who have been in the business for a while feel it’s in the doldrums: there’s not much innovation, and every year, the apps get older.
Where will innovation come from? Well, the thing about innovation is that it has to change something that we think is fundamental and immutable: it has to be on a CD-ROM, it has to be typed from a phone keypad, etc. So you can’t look for innovation in the same old stuff.
That said, here are four areas that I think are wide open, wide open, wide, wide, wide open. An enterprise application (or an enterprise application company) can get an edge if they can do one of the following things:
Reduce the cost of sales by a factor of 10.
Reduce the risk of ownership by a factor of 2.
Increase the effectiveness of the application by a factor of 5. What’s a measure of effectiveness; well, let’s say it’s the number of users who use it seamlessly and easily.
Increase the speed of the application (usually by using a special-purpose database) by a factor of 50.
At least two of these aren’t impossible, because we’ve seen them happen.
Salesforce reduced the cost of sales for SMB customers by selling an enterprise-level application that you could test for free and buy with a credit card.
Workday and Qlikview both transformed applications in their area using special-purpose databases, and Hasso wants SAP to do the same.
And at least one large company, SAP, is trying for innovation in the third. Fumbling and clumsy as their effort to improve maintenance has been, the idea is to reduce the risk of owning SAP by making maintenance practices considerably more effective.
As for reduced risk of ownership or increased effectiveness (actually, maybe you’ve seen Qlikview do this), we’re still waiting.
Ideas on who’s done this or how it can be done?
