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October - 2007 - issue > Editor's Desk
Software!
Harvi Sachar
Monday, October 1, 2007
Three years back Nicholas Carr’s famous book “Does IT matter?”, published by Harvard press, set about a worldwide debate about the diminishing role of computers and software in enterprise. Recently in an interview, Vivek Ranadive, CEO and founder of Tibco Software (TIBX), gave an “F” grade to the pace of innovation in software space.

When we got to wonder what is happening to enterprise software, last week both Oracle and SAP stocks hit the 5 year high on NASDAQ. If world’s Top 2 enterprise software companies are seeing new height, IT should matter somewhat to their customers. Like we all know how much it mattered to Dell and Walmart; until this day they have their home grown systems in place and attribute their success for this systems. In India too, when CEO and Managing Director of ICICI, Shri K.V. Kamath, was asked to named one thing that ICICI did to succeed, he proudly pointed out to all the systems developed by ICICI to run its own operations. So “is software ageing?”, still a continuous and ongoing debate, it is not dead for sure.

“The End of Software” which Marc Benioff of salesforce.com predicted a few years back, was nothing but the end of traditional ways of dealing with software sales. It was the innovative model of “software as a service” coupled with open source movement. Both these trends have significantly reduced the cost of new systems and the time taken for business to get value from systems investments. However, what they have done best is to lower barriers to entry and adoption—all thanks to their ability to empower individual developers and architects.

Just a few years back, any enterprise development project required a big budget for servers, databases, application servers, compilers, source code repositories and system management tools—all these easily running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today, all this is available free. And with cheap Intel servers there is almost no budget required to build system or do initial limited deployment for analyzing the value created. This is resulting in thousands of software systems being built and deployed in enterprises to make them run their businesses better and increase the overall productivity in the economy.

Innovation in business model today (like the technology yesterday) is changing the world. This brings us to cover story for this month, Metabyte. This is first professional services firm that we have ever visited that has an “innovation hall of fame” to recognize
employees for their innovation in technology.

We hope you like the issue and share your feedback with us.

Harvi Sachar
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
harvi@siliconindia.com

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