The End of Software: Finding Security, Flexibility, and Profit in the on Demand Future - Softcover

Chou, Timothy Chen Kuang

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0672326981 ISBN 13: 9780672326981

Publisher: Sams, 2004

Synopsis

Do you know what is the real cost of your software? Before you reach for a calculator, be forewarned that it's a trick question. Even technology industry analysts and seasoned IT executives have difficulty putting a hard figure on the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of today's enterprise application solutions. What makes the equation so tricky is the sheer number of variables that must be factored in, many of which cannot be lined up in a neat column and reconciled, such as issues of security, availability, performance, problem resolution and change management. The End of Software: Transforming Your Business for the On Demand Future, by Dr. Timothy Chou, is a groundbreaking book for business managers and executives that challenges conventional approaches to business software and proposes new alternatives to managing and maintaining the systems that companies depend on.

Read What Industry Experts Have to Say:

• "Whether you rely on computer software to run your business, create software solutions, or invest in software companies, you are facing the shift from software as a product to software as a service. In The End of Software, Dr. Timothy Chou makes the case for Software on Demand and shows you who's already out there creating and using this new model." Fred Magner, Chief Information Officer, Unocal Corporation
• "As a pioneer of the On Demand delivery model, Dr. Chou challenges certain conventions long held by the software industry. The End of Software provokes industry participants to re-think how big software should be packaged, sold and delivered in the future." Stephen Wong, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Embarcadero Technologies
• "Dr. Timothy Chou's book The End of Software presents a logical argument for the shift from selling and buying software, or the promise of the value that software represents, to selling and buying the actual value that software can bring to a user. This is very persuasive, especially when you consider the legacy of software vendors, who are notorious for over-promising and under-delivering. As Dr. Chou so clearly understands (and why shouldn't he-he's lived it), this new delivery method simply makes sense. But the world is often slow to change; as keen observers of the technology industry, we'll be watching closely." John S. DiFucci, Senior Software Analyst, Managing Director, Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc.

About this title

About the Author:

Dr. Timothy Chou serves as president of Oracle On Demand, the fastest-growing business inside Oracle. Oracle On Demand provides applications on demand for more than 250,000 corporate users globally. Users access ERP, CRM, HR, purchasing, supply chain, manufacturing and business intelligence applications from more than 25 countries around the world on both public and private networks. Under Dr. Chou's leadership, Oracle On Demand was recently recognized, along with IBM and EDS, by a multiclient Meta Group study as one of the top three companies customers are currently looking to today for application management and outsourcing services.

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Introduction

Introduction

Twenty-five years ago, the high-tech business was small, computers were largely relegated to accounting, and the money major corporations spent on information technology barely made a dent in their overall budgets. Today that has all changed. High-tech businesses are some of the largest in the world. The Dow Jones Industrial Average includes four technology companies whose total market capitalization exceeds $600 billion. Computers have moved out of the role of accounting to managing supply chains, tracking manufacturing processes, and managing orders globally. There are even multibillion dollar companies founded and dependent only on information technology, such as Yahoo! and eBay.

With the increased role of computing has come increased spending to the point that global corporations' IT spending is no longer a rounding error. Today, we can estimate that the total spent on IT exceeds $1 trillion dollars per year. More amazingly, 75% of that is used for managing existing systems, most of which is dominated by the cost to manage the complex software that has been built over the past 25 years. Where does this cost come from? The increased usage of computing also brings increased exposure. Corporate costs for managing the security of computing is increasing each year. Today, most companies run 24/7; with no weekends or days off, managing the availability of these systems is a greater and greater challenge. And increasing dependence on computing also means an increasing need to change the environments. Some have estimated the cost to upgrade an enterprise application at $1,000 per user.

The disadvantage of this large expenditure on the operation of existing systems is that, with more than 75% of the budget being spent here, only 25% of the budget can be spent on new innovations. Unfortunately, the cost to manage past sins increases each year, so in time the amount of money spent on anything new will vanish—an alarming prognosis for any high-tech company.

Software as a service—or, as we will refer to it, software on demand—is the next step in the software industry. This isn't because it's a cool idea, but because it fundamentally alters the economics of software. If the cost of software (to a software company) can be reduced by a factor of 10, the shift in the software industry is as fundamental as the advent of the Intel microprocessor was to the hardware industry.

This book is full of examples and challenges to this transformation. Traditional software companies, including Oracle, are making the change, and new software companies such as WebEx are leading the way for next-generation startups. Read on if you think this will change your business. If you're the CIO or CEO of a large, medium-size, or small company and a consumer of software, you need to understand how this shift can change the economics of your IT budget and allow you to free up capital and resource to invest in the future, not the past.

If you're the CEO of a software company, you need to understand how the software on demand model changes your business starting in support, reaching into how you develop software, and culminating in changes to your fundamental business models based on a new economy. Finally, if you're an investor in high technology, I'm sure you wish you had bought Intel back in 1978. Key companies, both new and old, are participating in the move to software on demand. It's important that, as investors, you understand who gets it and who's pretending. The debate is not whether this shift in the software business will happen, only the rate.

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About this edition

• Publisher: Sams
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0672326981
• ISBN 13: 9780672326981
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 170