Comments on: Enterprise Software Sales as Corporate Pathology: The World’s Greatest Dog and Pony Show

By: untangling the future… » Blog Archive » Open Source Rules, but Is Perpetual Licensing a “Pathology”?

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:20:20 +0000

[...] I admit it. I was totally drawn in by the provocative title of James Governor’s post. It was that “pathology” word that got me. According to Meriam-Webster: [...]

By: Service-Oriented Architecture mobile edition

Service-Oriented Architecture mobile edition — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:12:24 +0000

[...] computing James Governor calls it enterprise software sales a “pathology.” ZDNet colleague Michael Krigsman calls it “ugly enterprise software sales tactics.” Either way, [...]

By: rwang0

rwang0 — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:42:58 +0000

Catching up w/ today’s tweets/posts. Check out the software dog and pony show from star analyst James @monkchips http://tinyurl.com/c92eeq

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

By: Berkay Mollamustafao

Berkay Mollamustafao — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:31:09 +0000

No doubt vendors use aggressive sales tactics. They have been forever and will do more now. Why is that? Well may be because it works?

If the customers rewarded vendors who don’t subscribe to this type of behavior, would there not be more of them? I don’t think it is accurate to see the customers as victims who don’t have control over what happens. They can do many things such as embracing some of your advices above, but in recent years focus has been in “consolidating vendors” which gives more and more power to limited number of large vendors.
You reap what you sow ..

By: mkrigsman

mkrigsman — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:35:04 +0000

@marilynpratt Here’s @redmonk’s ode to software sales and corporate pathology http://bit.ly/gGBWa

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

By: Rob Gray

Rob Gray — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:47:41 +0000

when it comes to the cloud, the business guys are going straight there without talking to IT / CIO or the devs and sysadmins – they don’t need to coz they can just buy the stuff that does the job, and is delivered in weeks not months… IT teams of today will be dead in the water if don’t realise this and shift their focus to how they can help to manage cloud apps (rather than pretending they don’t exist)

By: John Clingan

John Clingan — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:43:33 +0000

I forgot to add this relevant blog post I wrote about a year ago: http://blogs.sun.com/jclingan/entry/has_open_source_killed_the

By: John Clingan

John Clingan — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:41:15 +0000

Good post. Note that customers also have their Dog & Pony show at times. Bringing in a a second vendor for a PoC to simply get the incumbent to drop their price. They’ve already made a decision, but simply want a better price. Ethical questions should be aimed strictly at vendors, IMHO.

That being said, I’ve seen a shift from competitive bake-offs given open-source pricing disparity, and open source quality and enterprise readiness. In most cases, open source software does what customers need it to do. Our time is now spent less on traditional bake-offs and more on migrating a couple applications that are representative of customer applications so they can estimate overall costs of a transition.

Sometimes, if not a majority of cases, the migrations are ignored entirely and commercial open source is used for new projects, with no up-front effort at all because customers have already been using GlassFish in some applications (or at least developing with it).

By: arungupta

arungupta — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:26:55 +0000

@monkchips recommend GlassFish (instead of Weblogic) and MySQL: http://tinyurl.com/c92eeq

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

By: simoncoles

simoncoles — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:25:38 +0000

@monkchips on Enterprise Purchasing: “If its takes 18 months to decide what platform to adopt you’re doing it wrong” - http://bit.ly/IFv4O

This comment was originally posted on Twitter