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by David R. Brousell, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | The software industry's current consolidation phase masks an emerging trend that will mean good news for application builders and buyers. |
There are some in the software industry who would have you believe that the market for so-called best-of-breed applications is on its deathbed or, even worse, ready to be buried. Evangelists of this belief exhort that Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft last year and of Siebel Systems recently amount to the most obvious proof that companies that develop software for specific functions cannot remain independent in the mature and consolidating market that enterprise software has become. Alas, it is the end of days, these pessimistic prognosticators proclaim. Enterprise software has become a game of software suites versus software suites and will soon become a contest of Web-based architectural platforms versus Web-based architectural platforms. The days when single application software companies could survive and thrive, as a PeopleSoft or Siebel had, has given way to a market where buyers demand fewer suppliers and more homogeneous computing environments. The demands may be true, but reports of the death of best-of-breed software, as the famous American writer Mark Twain used to say, are greatly exaggerated. [Click to continue] |