Software's Big Four: Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft
Enterprise software is coming down to four big choices: Cisco Systems or IBM or Oracle or Microsoft.
Hewlett-Packard? HP is doing very well in hardware, but it lacks the overarching software strategy that fuels these other four.
Even as the industry consolidates into these big ecosystem vendors, it's becoming ripe for a new kind of hegemonic, all-out war.
It's a fun time to be in the industry. For one thing, it's fascinating to watch (and, in some cases, assist) each of the Big Four to use open source as a strategic club with which to pummel their neighbors. Open source, thy name is capitalism.
But open source is just one part of it. The bigger part is conflicting product-level competition. Microsoft dominates the desktop and uses it as a "home base" from which to compete in other markets. Cisco spreads the power of the network into a wide variety of complementary businesses. Oracle uses the database as the center of the enterprise-computing universe, but surrounds it with a host of exceptional software.
And IBM? Well, IBM enriches its massive software business with integrated hardware and services that no one has yet been able to match.
Each, of course, is starting to infiltrate the others' safety zone with new initiatives. IBM, as announced on Monday, is pairing up with Brocade to go after Cisco's core networking market. Cisco, for its part, is stepping on just about everybody's toes with collaboration initiatives that veer toward Microsoft's SharePoint, even while it adds a server line to compete with IBM.
Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun Microsystems to help give it a leg up on IBM and Microsoft through Java, Sun's hardware lines, and MySQL. Microsoft, for its part, is expanding into everyone else's markets with the ubiquitous SharePoint.
This is only the beginning. The question is, "The beginning of what?" In some ways, this dramatic industry consolidation reduces customer choice. But in other ways, it enhances it.
Given the centrality of software to this enterprise cage match, it also begs the question, "When will SAP join the fray?" Last week, I spent time at the Open Forum Europe conference, where I repeatedly heard the question raised, "When will Europe produce a dominant software company?"
SAP's strength in enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software could serve as a nice complement to one of the Big Four's product lines--or as a beachhead for the assembly and deployment of an additional, independent software ecosystem.
Red Hat could do the same, fostering an open-source ecosystem to rival that of the Big Four, mostly proprietary software vendors. While the company has shown little ambition beyond infrastructure software, there are hints of a growing interest to sell (and build?) solutions. Red Hat's recent channel expansion through Synnex suggests that it may be toe-dipping its way toward a larger vision of being the hub of the open-source "wheel."
Given this waxing and waning of competition in enterprise software, I suppose that the real question is, "On which ecosystem are you betting your business?" Enterprise IT is a study in heterogeneity, but for how long?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay is chief operating officer at Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Prior to Canonical, Matt was general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, an open-source applications company. Matt brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
however, this one really has me scratching my head. I have spent most of the last 20 years in enterprise software, mainly in the network management space. Anyone who has been around networking knows that Cisco is not a software company. They have had how many people in charge of network management in the last 5 years (I believe the number is 3). CiscoWorks, arguably their primary software platform, is ridiculed in the industry...the joke for those in the industry is that Cisco works does not work. beyond network management, they really have very few credible offerings in the It managment domain. No real server or application management products. No mainframe products. Nothing that really generates revenue other than a few partner products (they sell SMARTS and Opnet and a few others)
If we move outside of IT management software, what does Cisco have. Yes they have webex, which is a decent product, but other than that....very little.
I will not argue about the other of your big 4 choices, but anyone who knows enterprise software understands that Cisco is not a software company. Cisco has been and will continue to be a hardware company trying to learn the software business since hardware is such a commmodity.
- by Aaron Kempf April 28, 2009 8:41 AM PDT
- Adobe and Cisco as just wannabes. How about SAP?
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(6 Comments)You sit there and say that Microsoft has been ENTERING the enterprise space.. but you're wrong. Microosft OWNS the enteprise space through products like Excel and Access (specifically Access Data Projects)
And Microsoft has been active in the enterprise for the past 15 years.