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by Joshua Greenbaum, Contributing Editor   | Abstract: | Is the broad push by enterprise software vendors into the mid-market space a beacon of hope for smaller manufacturers or merely a revenue play? |
If you're like many MA readers, you fit into what enterprise software vendors like to call the mid-market. And, in case you hadn't noticed, every vendor on the planet is after your budget. While it's nice that everyone is paying attention to your needs, the variety of offerings, incentives, programs, and systems will quickly become confusing, to say the least. And it's going to be hard to sort out the offerings that make the most sense for you from the ones that make the most sense for the vendors. Part of the problem is that very few vendors present a truly clean set of messages and products for the mid-market. SAP has All-in-One and Business One being sold by its channel partners, not to mention MySAP sales reps trying to push the flagship product down into the mid-market space. Oracle's recently announced plans include its four core product offerings — E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel — as well as a bewildering array of possible deployment models. Microsoft has its three core products positioned for the mid-market as well — GP, NAV, and AX — while Infor tops them all with a truly mind-boggling product portfolio that numbers in the dozens, among them the remnants of MAPICS, Baan, Infinium, SSA, and many others. Add to that the more pure-play offerings of IFS, Ramco, and QAD, and it's enough to drive a customer mad. Which, in a way, is how you should feel about this frenzy. Because there is a cynical component to this mid-market froth that is all about reviving those fabulous growth rates and revenue surges that many vendors and their investors got addicted to in the run-up to saturating the global enterprise software market. With the big game all hunted out, everyone is thinking that their revenue dreams can be fulfilled by creating a volume market out of the literally millions of companies worldwide that fit into the mid-market space. It's a laudable goal, but at times it looks like the vendors are losing sight of the real reason why they should be in the mid-market in the first place: it's the functionality, stupid. It's bad form, at a minimum, to make Wall Street a primary focus of this new mid-market push. What has always been true about mid-market companies is truer today than ever before: These companies are mid-market in size only, not in complexity or requirements. Or savvy. I've been talking to more and more mid-market companies that are moving faster and deeper into top-tier issues such as SOA and business process modeling than many of the bigger companies that are supposed to be the obvious targets of these new technology waves. Meanwhile, too much of the focus for the mid-market is on low-cost, easy-to-implement solutions, as if anyone would rather buy a high-cost, hard-to-implement chunk of software. What the mid-market needs is some frank talk about partnering for success. Which will be hard, considering that most mid-market solutions are being taken to market by small resellers over whom the vendors have little direct control or oversight. In the end, the latest mid-market campaign by the enterprise software market must focus on the needs of the customers, instead of the needs of the vendors. A little less emphasis on cover-your-revenue-behinds, a little more on making IT safe for the mid-market customer, if you don't mind. |