It is almost always an exaggeration to state that ‘nothing will ever be the same again’ (though from a philosophical perspective, nothing ever is), but the global downturn has certainly changed the way we do business, and the technology industry has not been exempt. ‘The market for high end enterprise software has been depleted during the past year, but this has been an opportunity from an engineering perspective,’ Stuart Lynn, the head of R&D for the Sage mid-market division, tells FSN writer Lesley Meall, and it may turn into an opportunity for some Sage customers too.
‘We’ve been able to go back and revisit our product road maps,’ says Lynn, updating the underlying architecture and thinking about the long-term development of product lines, in light of new technologies and deployment methods (such as the cloud), and in response the changing priorities of Sage’s mid-market customers. During the recession, easier customisation, increased efficiency, and reduced cost of ownership have all been asked for by Sage customers, and delivered; but what sort of specifics have these rather ‘generalised’ demands translated into?
Well, the upgrade cycle has been simplified. ‘It is much easier for users to take advantage of new software releases,’ reports Lynn. Structural developments such as a web-based installer now make software deployment easier, and new releases can be installed without the loss of third party modifications, as long as business partners have developed their add-ons using ‘the right’ application programming interface (API), which will be good news for many in the Sage ecosystem. ‘This stops customers and business partners being left behind,’ adds Lynn.
Other software developers are also reacting to similar demands from customers, but Unit4 has gone a step further than some, along the road towards easier system upgrades, by enabling customers to cherry pick at least some of the new functionality they exploit. ‘In the past, if they wanted to use the latest financial management module they had to upgrade all the other modules too,’ says Ton Dobbe, vice president, product marketing, ‘now they can take a piecemeal approach.’ Prior to release (5.6) of Agresso Business World (ABW) a customer with an ERP installation had to use the same release across all modules – whether it wanted them or not.
Driven by uncertainty
The uncertainties created by the recession have contributed to a rise in demand for more flexibility from many of the corporate and public sector bodies that use Unit4 systems, so over the next two years, it will deliver a series of upgrades designed to help (what Dobbe describes as) ‘businesses living in change’ to better manage this. ‘ABW has always been about post implementation agility; it’s conceptual,’ asserts Dobbe, but the changes will enhance this ‘agility’ by, for example, making it easier for customers to manage data, process and delivery methodology change, at the business user level. ‘As it’s about independence and about going somewhere new, we’ve called it Route 66,’ says Dobbe.
Taking some of the pain from unavoidable changes, by making systems easier to manage, has also been behind some recent developments at Thomson Reuters. ‘There has never been so much new and complex tax legislation in countries across the world,’ says Jerry Rihll, managing director of Digita, which is part of the tax & accounting business of Thomson Reuters, and this legislation creates a huge compliance burden for corporate tax departments, from technical and administrative points of view. So Thomson Reuters bought a business (Abacus) that developed compliance software for corporate tax departments, and used it as the basis for a solution (OneSource) that makes all of the associated processes easier to manage.
‘When we acquired the Abacus tax business from Deloitte in 2009 it was because we are creating the sort of software that organisations will need in the future,’ states Rihll. ‘Because businesses want to plan their tax compliance from a corporate perspective, finance professionals need to look at international tax compliance through a multi-faceted lens,’ he says, and OneSource facilitates this by simplifying and streamlining the associated processes, and providing a centralised and contextualised view of global tax data, with the support of the OneSource web portal, performance dashboard, and a workflow manager (which is particularly appealing to international organisations).
Compelled by compliance
Of course, tax compliance is not the only area of business that is characterised by the need to react rapidly and repeatedly to an ever-increasing range of changes. So although some areas of the enterprise software market have been stagnant over the past year or so, suppliers in the data security space have seen a growing demand for systems that can simplify and streamline the process of managing data security and the legislative compliance burden, and the products and services they use to protect their data against the latest threats. ‘If you are using 17 security products from different vendors, the admin can be painful,’ observes Sean Glynn, vice president of marketing for the data encryption specialist Credant.
Credant’s Mobile Guardian Enterprise Edition can help, by providing a single, centrally managed portfolio, and in recognition of the growing demand for ‘a simpler approach to compliance’, during 2010, the computer giant Dell started offering this as a factory install. This means that businesses can buy data encryption in the same way as they would any other system add-on, and pay for it as a one-off cost (without placing a volume order or needing to retro-install the software themselves). ‘This makes it much easier for businesses of all sizes to protect their data,’ says Glynn, so that they can focus their valuable resources on what they do best.
So although the recession has been difficult for technology companies and the businesses they serve, some of the trends it seems to have kick-started don’t seem to be such a bad thing. Businesses appear to be demanding software and systems that help them to meet their immediate needs for compliance, enhance their ability to deal with change efficiently and effectively, and give them more direct control over the associated costs of ownership, and software developers seem to be doing what they can to meet these demands. Maybe saying that ‘nothing will ever be the same again’ isn’t an exaggeration after all.
