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The Cost of Doing Business Differently
6/25/2003
The $36 billion enterprise software market is considered by many to be "ripe for consolidation." If Oracle consumes PeopleSoft, it will still be smaller than SAP, and other consolidations are likely to follow. As these companies get larger, they are likely to care less and less about what will look to bigger companies like a smaller and smaller niche market.
What is likely to happen is that the larger companies will produce better products, but with fewer choices for higher education institutions, and more expensive customization, if offering customization is even seen as a worthwhile business practice. Over time, that will increase an already growing trend for higher education institutions to more closely align their core business practices with those of other industries. That will be, after all, the way to get the most efficiency out of the enterprise systems available. What will happen to the more esoteric modules or packages, such as student services systems, is less certain. Others with a focus in the higher education niche, such as SCT, may refocus on higher education—or Microsoft's growing interest in the enterprise software arena may sweep up its higher education. None of this d'es any harm to the open source movement.
We empathize with our IT colleagues who face both painful certainty and resource-consuming uncertainty. In an already uncertain time, the path to integrated software solutions has become less clear. In a financially difficult time, they face, perhaps not a certainty but a strong likelihood of increased costs. For them, and possibly for the rest of us, what Norris et al., in Transforming eKnowledge, describe on page 97 as movement at a "judicious pace" from ERP systems to "open system architectures and protocols" may increase somewhat.
Although the thoughts expressed herein are mine alone, my thanks go to David Hollowell of the University of Delaware, and Laura Saunders of Highline Community College, for recent insightful discussions.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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