At the start of 2015, executives from VMware, RKON Technologies, Lastline, Synety, Lua and Magic Software Enterprises set out what they expected enterprise software buyers to face that year. The first four of the eight trends in that list covered hybrid cloud, subscription pricing, mobile CRM and in-memory ERP.
Hybrid cloud and subscription pricing
Chris Wolf, then CTO of the Americas at VMware, said multi-cloud strategies had spiked in 2014 and would continue. He expected CIOs to invest in hybrid architectures to keep applications and services flexible.
Marc Malizia, CTO of managed cloud provider RKON Technologies, predicted that more organisations would move to some form of cloud. Most, he said, would mix a cloud provider’s services with their own in-house platform.
Engin Kirda, cofounder and chief architect of security firm Lastline, forecast a further shift to subscription pricing. He expected per-user or per-year pricing to replace large lump-sum licences and costly hardware preloads. He said this would reach beyond end-user applications to data centre management and breach detection.
Mobile CRM
Mark Seemann, CEO of cloud software and communications firm Synety, argued that Salesforce had set the stage in 2014 by investing in its mobile app and getting integration partners to use it. In 2015, he said, the larger CRM vendors would keep narrowing the gap between their mobile apps and their main web products.
Michael DeFranco, founder and CEO of secure-messaging company Lua, said employees were spending less time in the office. Tools such as CRM and BPM therefore had to be designed around mobile workers, he argued, so that they stayed connected and could collaborate with colleagues.
In-memory ERP
Glenn Johnson, senior vice president for the Americas at Magic Software Enterprises, predicted that in-memory computing would become the main point of ERP differentiation, especially for large enterprises. He named SAP HANA and Oracle In-Memory Applications. He said ERP brands without in-memory offerings would fade as Big Data attention continued.
What followed
The market did move toward subscriptions in ERP. SAP’s S/4HANA Cloud is now sold on a subscription basis, and its public edition is priced per named user. SAP offers S/4HANA across public cloud, private cloud, on-premise and hybrid models.
Both SAP and Oracle have re-platformed their product lines to the cloud. Oracle’s Fusion Cloud ERP is delivered mainly as software as a service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with a private cloud option. Buyers still running SAP ECC face the end of its extended maintenance in 2027.