Death of Legacy High Tech Boom?
Dell Buys Perot, Oracle Buys Sun, HP Buys EDS…what’s going on? What happened to stick to your core competency?
OK ,when you are growing at 30-50% it is easy to say stick to core competency. Hardware companies should be hardware companies, and software companies should be software companies, system integrators should be system integrators. Well now at 5-10% growth it is mature market growth, time to go after someone else’s market.
Is this another sign that “traditional high tech” is growing up?
In the boom days of the nineties there were 3 seperate pillars driving enterprise applications: hardware (HP, Sun, IBM, Dell), software (Oracle, SAP, Peoplesoft, Baan, etc.) and integrators. IBM led the way showing how an in house consulting shop can drive revenue through boom and somewhat succesfully – busts. Others above have followed.
Where does this leave SAP? Do they need a hardware partner? SI? Does IBM need more enterprise applications? What’s next mixing in the network providers?
Has hardware become a commodity and unavoidable to obtain high-margin sticky services and recurring revenue? Where does this leave channel partners? Will Dell and others allow the channel to resell these services or leave only low-margin hardware to the channel?