Is your vendor a cloud believer or deceiver – and does it matter anyway?

Cloud Believer or Deceiver – Does it matter?

After more than 20 years in the wonderful and wild world of IT I have seen and heard just about everything when it comes to self serving statements from vendors changing their product positioning to adapt to the latest trend in IT.

When I worked at a vendor that didn’t have a multi-user accounting software package, the mantra was …multi-user accounting? its a risk/who needs it etc etc…of course as soon as they released their multi-user software it was a case of criticizing all the other single user accounting packages because they weren’t multi user.

Then it was accounting software on Windows and they didn’t have a Windows version so we were all being told accounting with a mouse doesn’t make sense people want to use keyboards and of course as soon as they released a Windows version, then anyone that wasn’t running on Windows was behind the times….

And now we are on to the next hype cycle where everything is cloud…if you aren’t in the cloud then you aren’t a player for the long term….even the major top tier vendors are talking about leading with Cloud solutions but still having an each way bet and keeping their on premise solutions in play.

But at the end of the day whether a solution is deployed in the cloud or on premise the fundamentals still apply and this is one of my core beliefs….you need to look at the underlying requirements that a solution has to meet.

I am yet to meet someone who said we will change our business requirements to match this software because it runs in the cloud and having a cloud solution is more important than running our business the way we need to….people will often compromise but there are certain fundamentals that the solution has to deliver otherwise it just wont make the cut.

But I am going to make a contentious statement here and address what I believe is the core challenge today and that is this – the underlying architecture of the solution is important and has a long term impact but if you cant meet a customers basic requirements to run their business then you need to qualify out. But there’s more to this picture than meets the eye because the delivery of a solution encompasses the product, the technology, the delivery and the economics or pricing or what I like to call the 4xP Platform for ERP Success.

And this 4xP model is a great way to evaluate your potential contenders and it can help you differentiate between ERP vendors.

In my opinion it comes down to four core “P” areas – Product model, Partner model, Pricing model and Provisioning model – and each one of these components is important in constructing a balanced solution where each component is equally important and must be part of the vendors approach in order to ensure a successful and long term future for both customer and vendor and of course for partners as well.

I am hearing more and more executives in ERP companies talking about the need to remove partners from the equation and they see cloud as a way to dis-intermediate partners from the customer life cycle or talking about the imperative to get partners to behave in a way that suits that vendors business model.

And as someone that has worked in the partner ecosystem for more than 20 years on both sides of the street – as a vendor and as a partner, it is my absolute conviction that that approach is destined to fail.

Others are focused on the provisioning model and are focused on pushing a particular model…on-premise, cloud or hybrid.

Others spend a lot of time positioning their pricing models – talking about subscription pricing, perpetual, SaaS or even free/freemium.

Product is a given of course as I said….if you can’t deliver what your target market needs then you shouldn’t even be playing.

Every component in the 4P structure I believe in is equally important and a failure in any one will cause the other three to fail as it is the tension between each of those influences that gives a balanced solution.

Over the next few weeks I will talk more about each of these 4 “P”‘s in detail and how I believe they impact on the selection of an ERP solution and the success of the deployment.