{"id":800,"date":"2006-11-29T19:35:58","date_gmt":"2006-11-30T02:35:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp\/?p=800"},"modified":"2006-11-29T19:35:58","modified_gmt":"2006-11-30T02:35:58","slug":"steve-mills-less-is-more-keeping-our-attention-ibm-as-an-erp-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/steve-mills-less-is-more-keeping-our-attention-ibm-as-an-erp-company\/","title":{"rendered":"Steve Mills: Less is More, Keeping Our Attention, IBM as &#8220;an ERP company&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Wow. That was great. Steve Mills, IBM Software Group General Manager,&nbsp;just wrapped up his hello pitch in under 20 minutes. This is news, because he has been known to give 2 hour,&nbsp;140 slide presentations at this event.&nbsp;Not an optimal way to maintain attention&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>What did he say?&nbsp;SWG is doing great, with nice growth and improved profitability (not bad during an acquisition streak).<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;People ask me why don&#8217;t we sell applications?&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The answer as ever is that IBM can make more from surrounding services, than the&nbsp;app itself.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>We sell an extraordinary amount of software into Oracle, Retek, Peoplesoft accounts. databases, systems management and collaboration. Oracle&#8217;s biggest customers are our biggest customers. SAP use more WebSphere for end to end heterogeneous integration than anything else.<\/p>\n<p><strong>We&#8217;re a huge multibillion dollar ERP company<\/strong>. We just don&#8217;t sell ERP applications, but services, systems and software around it. The &#8220;at time of sale&#8221; ecosystem associated with ERP is 5x the revenue. The &#8220;surrounding pool of money&#8221; is what IBM targets.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Mills made the extremely apposite point that there is far&nbsp;too much shelfware in this industry. IBM needs to make sure that its customers actually implement the software it sells. Well, yeah &#8211; with that many services people, you think&#8230; But seriously, shelfware is a huge problem in the industry. Does IT Matter? Not if the IT isn&#8217;t implemented&#8230;. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/archives\/002500.html\">Cheap Technology Officers<\/a> generally don&#8217;t buy stuff they don&#8217;t use.<\/p>\n<p>Many software companies have recorded revenues on software that is never installed&#8230; not so smart in the post-SOX era. Software doesn&#8217;t install itself. That is a fundamental IBM strength. While competitors like to slam IBM as a body shop, customers like service wrappers to get software installed. IBM has a model for this, and its working. You don&#8217;t record 40% growth in WebSphere, and 30% growth at Tivoli, as in recent quarters without doing something right. We&#8217;ll learn more over the next couple of days.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Technorati Tags:<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/IBM\" rel=\"tag\">IBM<\/a> &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/WebSphere\" rel=\"tag\">WebSphere<\/a> &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/Retek\" rel=\"tag\">Retek<\/a> &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/PeopleSoft\" rel=\"tag\">Peoplesoft<\/a> &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/ibmanalystconf06\" rel=\"tag\">ibmanalystconf06<\/a> &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/SWG\" rel=\"tag\">SWG<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;disclaimer: IBM is a client, and paid T&amp;E for our trip to Stamford, CT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wow. That was great. Steve Mills, IBM Software Group General Manager,&nbsp;just wrapped up his hello pitch in under 20 minutes. This is news, because he has been known to give 2 hour,&nbsp;140 slide presentations at this event.&nbsp;Not an optimal way to maintain attention&#8230; What did he say?&nbsp;SWG is doing great, with nice growth and improved<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wfjh-cU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}