The have really gone after Guy Smith hammer and tongs on his post at Sandhill, my quick thoughts on the topic:

well I think instead of taking each point in the piece and critically analyzing it, what is important is to probably get from the post is that the notion of enterprise software in its original avatar of multiyear & multimillion $ projects is doomed. CIO's neither have the budgets nor the bandwidth to go ahead with these kinds of projects.

Enterprise want it all and want it now!!!

On another front significant portion of a CIO's budget is stuck in maintenance related costs, which is hurting them as they are not able to embark on any new / innovative projects. So they want to find ways to reduce this. To this end CIO's are willing to explore alternative options either to reduce these maintenance costs or to embark on innovative projects.....trends that are being looked at or evaluated are ....SaaS ...Off shoring...& Open Source.

Also in the future Enterprise software business growth is expected to be more from the SMB segment who are usually constrained by limited resources and IT capabilities. Given that back ground they are more inclined to evaluate SAAS & open source solutions. As i have suggested in this post here.

More on this topic later.

Prashanth Rai