I took some interesting (but blurry) photos yesterday in the exhibition hall at Oracle Open World (OOW). Deloitte had festooned its booth with these huge charts that detailed how a firm would examine value drivers across different aspects of its organization and via different Oracle applications.
Deloitte’s Intellectual Property
I backed up a ways to get this photo (and sadly, it’s too fuzzy too read due to the curvature of the wall) but it shows hundreds of drivers of shareholder value. This is exactly the discussion vendors and integrators need to have with prospective software buyers. Buyers though need to challenge the value/TCO/ROI calculations to ensure that decisions are still relevant given newer choices for pure-play SaaS products. If your project team really wants to understand how to build a better business case, see if you can find an old article I wrote for the late Optimize magazine called “A new kind of business case”; however, I wrote that long before great SaaS solutions existed.
Accenture had a different approach. They posted a number of critical statistics on top of their booth.
Accenture Oracle Stats
If you’re an Oracle customer looking for an integrator with large numbers of trained people, then the ACN guys have you in their sites. The claims of 49,500+ trained implementers and over 4,900 projects is certainly enviable.
Value drivers are definitely different and evolving and vendors, integrators and customers will need to adapt their mindsets and spreadsheets. What will change? Here are some factors:
– not all solutions will need hardware – Pure, true, multi-tenant SaaS applications require no hardware for the customer. Do your economic models account for this critical difference?
