Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Question for the Class:

Does the recent consolidation of performance management vendors make the remaining independent vendors MORE valuable or LESS attractive to customers?

Let’s take the “MORE” argument first.

Low hanging fruit:
· less competitive clutter and comparison companies to be evaluated against for an acquisition
· easier to play the “we’re the last of the independents” card than before
· take advantage of vendor integration issues and make hay in the market before bigger vendors get their stories straight

Medium hanging fruit:
· Clearer differentiation between their story and the larger faceless nameless conglomerate
· Faceless nameless conglomerate has lots of okay products to sell, they have one really good one
· conglomerates move slower, slower to respond

Not quite ripe fruit:
· “We’re seeing a lot of people trying to join us since the acquisition was announced.”
· Threat of product discontinuance or lack of ongoing support for products makes the independent vendor more reliable and dependable.
· Now the current product line-up of the conglomerate de-emphasizes so this isn’t a core business for them like the independent vendor.

What am I missing here?

1 comment:

Prashanth Rai said...

On this point - · Threat of product discontinuance or lack of ongoing support for products makes the independent vendor more reliable and dependable.

Well this most relevant in the case of Hyperion, Wanted to get your thoughts on what oracle is going to do with the Hyperion Product suite.

On the case for / against the independent players, the first thought that occurs is given the growing pervasiveness of BI&BPM solutions across all aspects of the enterprise. Do the independent players have the depth and width to compete with Oracle/SAP?

What do you think?

Prashanth