Brand Platform or just platform reality

Posted on July 19, 2006
Filed Under Enterprise Software |

In response to my post last week about the emergence of the brand platform, Jeff Weinberger argues that I have the right analysis but the wrong conclusion. Okay, I subscribe to Bob Sutton’s “strong opinions, weakly held” (via Ross) so I’m not above asking myself whether or not I should reconsider, however, in reading Jeff’s post I am not unsure that we are actually arguing the same point… that NetWeaver, Fusions, .Net, and Websphere are plumbing and that just doesn’t matter to enterprise buyers as much as we think it does.

So to clarify my earlier point, I don’t believe that technology platforms are really a competitive differentiator, what I do believe is that increasingly companies who are able to bring together a variety of applications, regardless of what they are developed in, under a common go-to-market brand and support umbrella will be the ones that prosper. In other words, Oracle’s decision to abandon rewriting their acquired applications in Fusion, and continue development as separate and distinct technology stacks, might not be as damaging as we would prefer.

Nuggets » Brand Platform or just platform reality: The real value – and the buyers know this – and the real opportunity in technology and software is in those thing that add value and opportunity to the business. Add revenue – not reduce cost. The market has shifted – the opportunity is beyond the platform. Sorry, Jeff, brilliant analyis (as always), but really the wrong conclusion.

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