Bilateral Symmetry

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R&D investments stagnating and engineering software sales slow down.
From a software customer perspective, three factors are shrinking investments in engineering software:

  1. Open source software. Customers start to consider open source software as an option.
  2. Mergers or acquisitions.  Newly-consolidating client companies maximize interoperability and reduce software redundancy, i.e. they get rid of the ones they don’t need anymore.
  3. Wide Area Network vs. Local Area Network. Global companies want to deploy software on global scale. They need to reallocate software licenses into main servers, to gain economies of scale and optimize expenses for software.

From a software vendor perspective, three factors are driving sales down:

  1. Open source software. Software editors consider open source (only) as a threat.
  2. Mergers or acquisitions. Newly-consolidating software companies maximize interoperability and reduce software redundancy… It takes time, money and makes their clients endlessly ‘waiting for the next release’.
  3. Wide Area Network vs. Local Area Network. For obvious reasons, global software vendors (still) like to sell software on local basis, avoiding clients to gain economies of scale and optimize expenses for software.

Symmetric perspectives on software sales drop-off.

Posted on mag 18, 2009 by Giorgio Buccilli  

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2 Comments on "Bilateral Symmetry"

  1. Luca Fasolo on mer, 27th mag 2009 19:52 

    About point 1):
    Why do software houses keep on selling “piece of papers” (i.e. licenses) instead of know how?
    If the software is not a simple text editor, to be successfully used it requires a lot of skills, that have to be countinuously mantained and improved.
    In my opinion this could be the future: an open source model, where the software is developed internally by companies, together with the community, and the main business of the companies is to sell knowledge and project management skills. The software should be a companion.

  2. Thomas on mar, 22nd dic 2009 11:31 

    I agree with engineering software going open source, however some of the more advanced engineering methodologies, in particular for simulation, still need to validated using test data. This is probably only delaying the process and certainly requires suppliers to shift their business model towards service supported software.