While I know a lot of entrepreneurs and folks in small companies read this blog, I also know that there are plenty of folks in big companies that do also. I ask those of you in a big company two questions:
- Does your organizations use packaged applications like Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, or SAP?
- Is managing the implementation, upgrades, and customization of these applications a nightmare, especially in a world of company and vendor consolidation?
In case you are wondering, these are rhetorical questions. In 2002, Niel Robertson sat down with me and my partner Seth Levine and went through his vision of how the packaged application market was going to evolve. He had a few key premises, including:
- Packaged applications were not going away anytime soon and, in fact, would become the central platform for IT because of their back office nature (as opposed to web sites or Exchange infrastructure).
- While customers who bought PeopleSoft, Oracle EBS, SAP, etc.. thought they were moving away from custom development, they were in fact just exchanging traditional custom development for a new kind of customization development on those platforms.
- Packaged applications, while different, had all evolved to have the same basic architecture; one based on metadata and the classic MVC design model. As a class they were more similar than they were different.
- Managing a packaged application was a change-centric activity while traditional development was a build centric activity.
This was a set of PowerPoint slides and a bunch of ideas in Niel’s delightful brain that fit nicely in a theme we loving refer to as “IT Management.” Five years later, his vision is embedded in a rapidly growing company called Newmerix that we are proud to be investors in.
Newmerix recently launched their Newmerix Automate! for Oracle E-Business Suite and Automate!Test for SAP completing the development of the third generation of their products (for those keeping score at home, remember the Microsoft 3.0 cliche – if you don’t know it, hang around and I’ll tell you about it some day.)
Congrats Niel and the entire team at Newmerix. It’s really cool to see a vision like this come together in real products for real customers.