<<Last week we asked Annrai O'Toole, CEO of Cape Clear Software Inc.,
a loaded question: We saw a lot of large companies gobble up smaller
vendors in 2006, is it getting harder for companies like Cape Clear to
compete with the leviathans in the marketplace?
"Leviathans are slow and not able to react well, either to market
changes or the demanding needs of the majority of customers," O'Toole
answered. "It is a tough competitive world, but the smaller companies
are using their size as an offensive weapon. We are really close to
the cutting edge of the SOA world. It is our exclusive focus. We have
seen the mistakes customers make and are better able to help them reap
the real business benefits of SOA."
This week, we've asked other smaller vendors in the SOA space the same
question. Here are the answers we received:
'SOA 1.0 has failed'
Dado Vrsalovic, President, Cordys North America Inc.
Cordys believes that the promise of SOA 1.0 has failed - SOA is still
not widely adopted in Global 2000 companies, standards are not
universally agreed upon and the promise of interoperability remains
largely unfulfilled. The resulting market shift actually gives Cordys
a distinct advantage over both the 'leviathans' and other players in
the industry - built from the ground up as a single fully-integrated
business process oriented platform, Cordys can deliver greater
scalability and reliability with less implementation than competitor
platforms, which means Cordys can practically demonstrate ROI in a
much shorter timeframe.
Is it really harder to compete?
Ed Horst, Vice President, Marketing, AmberPoint Inc.
It is hard for us to feel like it's getting harder to compete, having
just closed a quarter where we had our highest revenues ever, a record
number of new customers, announced strategic new partnerships with SAP
and Tibco, and had a win ratio of over 90%. Leviathans, while big, are
not typically known for being nimble, responsive to a wide range of
customer requests or good at digesting their recent meals.
Sometimes the Leviathans help
Dimitri Sirota, VP of Marketing and Alliances, Layer 7 Technologies Inc.
Yes and No. Certainly some stack vendors like IBM have been aggressive
and arguably successful about marketing their broad SOA capabilities.
Having said that, IBM's efforts have made other infrastructure vendors
more aware of SOA opportunities creating new partnering opportunities
for vendors like Layer 7.
The answer is no
Alan Himler, CEO, LogicLibrary Inc.
Actually no, we have found that enterprises are usually looking to
either "buy into a platform" or choose a best of breed solution to
solve their SOA governance needs. Most organizations have opted for
the "best of breed" approach, which is good for LogicLibrary. SOA has
greatly helped leveling the competitive landscape given that one of
its core strengths is interoperability. Based on customer demand,
LogicLibrary has been aggressive in providing value added
integrations. These existing integrations range from interfaces with
platform vendors such as IBM's Rational and WebSphere tools and
Microsoft's application development suite to "best of breed" players
such as SOA Software and Metallect, to name a few.
The small and agile shall lead them
Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President, SOA Software Inc.
New and emerging markets are always led by small, agile companies with
very strong technology solutions that are better than anything offered
by large companies with a broad and unfocused product portfolio. There
are certainly a number of larger vendors engaging in the SOA
Infrastructure market, most of whom are platform vendors with an
overarching goal of promoting the use of their platform. SOA Software
focuses on delivering platform-independent SOA Infrastructure
solutions with registry, repository, policy management, service
management and security integrated into a closed-loop solution. The
large vendors offer piecemeal solutions, often using components
licensed from third parties, focused on their own platform rather than
on providing a heterogeneous solution to a heterogeneous problem. SOA
Software is focused and agile with our own market-leading technology.
We have the name, the brand and the right products as evidenced by
more than 150 companies from the Fortune 500 deploying our products.
Large vendors do not pose a serious threat
Atul Saini, President and CEO, Fiorano Software, Inc.
This is an interesting question and something that we've been asked
many times in the past.
The short answer is that the larger vendors do not pose a serious
threat to Fiorano. A bit of history and background is in order.
In June 2002, Fiorano got a $3.5M deal from POSCO, the world's 3rd
largest steel manufacturer, displacing IBM from the account after 12
years. In December 2005, Fiorano got a multi-million dollar deal from
the world's second-largest bank, headquartered in London (with
significant operations in Hong Kong), being chosen in a direct
competition against IBM, BEA, Oracle, TIBCO, Microsoft and many
smaller vendors. In August 2005, Fiorano was selected by the world's
most valuable company ("the House that Jack Built" ....), again over
IBM, BEA and some smaller vendors. In addition, Fiorano is used by
VODAFONE in France and Italy, British Telecom in the U.K. and a large
number of customers in Asia/Pacific. We have a growing operation in
Japan as well, and have customers in Finland, South Africa,
Mozambique, Spain, Germany and many other countries in Europe,
together with Taiwan and Hong Kong in the east.
So far from being a problem to compete with, the larger companies are
having a tough time because:
* they cannot respond fast enough to customer needs: their support
is not the best
* they need larger deal sizes to survive; for instance, TIBCO has
an average deal size of $400K+ and IBM is larger than that for the
most part. Fiorano does very well with smaller deals in the $150-250K
range
* they have less innovative technology than that of Fiorano
Fiorano has worked out the real secret of large companies: they are
easy to compete against since the only real weapon they have is
company size. In all other departments (product innovation, quality of
support, quality of response times, smartness of engineering talent,
etc.), they are behind the curve. So Fiorano has no problem competing
against larger companies.
The real secret of competition is copying the business strategy of the
competitor. Fiorano has built up - and continues to build up - a good
set of global distributors. With each new distributor added to the
list, our company becomes that much stronger.>>
You can read this at:
<http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1239763,00.html?track=NL-110&ad=576835&asrc=EM_NLN_922356&uid=5532089>
Gervas
