In Death of an IT Salesman, GigaOM's Barb Darrow gives a highly accurate and utterly satisfying account of the trend in enterprise software sales away from the traditional, big company, big sales force model and the move toward newer, more equitable approaches.
Darrow writes ...more enterprise customers - not just startups anymore - have glommed onto the try-before-you-buy model that lets them download software, use it as they see fit, and when the time comes to deploy across company or to get support, all they have to do is pick up the phone.
Big IT vendors have taken note. And so too should legacy PLM providers. What's driving the shift? Customers are "very tired of getting the short end of the stick in their sales experience."
PLM end users are no different. They're tired of paying upfront for tons of licenses they'll never use because the software will ultimately not do everything it was scoped to do. And why is that? Usually because the functionality never really existed or the customer got tired of continually throwing consulting dollars at it and had to settle for basic check in, check out file management. I don't blame them one bit.
Buyers are also getting wise to vendor lock-in schemes and they're realizing the value in being able to download software from a wide array of vendors for different applications. They want options. Who doesn't?
Of course, the status quo won't change overnight, but it is changing. As Darrow reports, The top IT guy "will keep buying Oracle from a rep in a suit but many of the people who work for that guy are already running applications like Hadoop or Couchbase on a server under their desk or in a VM in the public cloud. Those people will likely replace that IT guy in 5 or 7 years. Then they'll be buying software, compute and storage just like you buy electricity - on a monthly usage-based rate. They won't need to own the power plant."
5-7 years. That's about the lifecycle of a PLM implementation. Legacy PLM providers, the clock is ticking.
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