It is a frightening situation. However, something that everyone often loses sight of is that times like these are probably the best times to launch a reliability or improvement initiative.
There is a lot of pain out there, and there are many (MANY) companies who are really in need of a product or service that will enable them to reduce costs, increase uptime, and/or increase productivity.
This brings me again to my favorite topic. Online maintenance technology. Since the start of the year eMaint has posted three great wins for them in the USA. And each of them is from a different sector!
ResortQuest is the largest marketer and management company of vacation condominiums and home rentals in the U.S and they chose eMain for their property management requirements.
All West Container , a custom manufacturer of boxes, packaging products & POP displays
And lastly they talk about Cargill's in Tampa . This last one is a bit ambiguous. Cargill has three different operations in Tampa, in three different industry sectors. So I am not sure if they got one or all three!
Not a bad start to a year when the economy is in its worst state of affairs since the great depression. (Depending on who you listen to about that) Why is this so? Are they super duper salesmen? Do their clients have oodles of spare cash laying around?
I have no clue about any of that, but what I can say is that it doesn't surprise me!
I like eMaint. They have a good product and they were into Software as a Service (SaaS) before the rest of the world even knew it was an acronym. I really like gutsy pioneering types.
But regardless of that, the thing that is pushing all of this towards a tipping point is the economic crisis itself. Companies still have problems, they always will and as long as it is not their core business they will always be needing some for of additional help.
But, they have to be pretty wise about what they spend their money on and where.
In the December quarter Oracle managed a 5% increase in revenue , but missed analysts expectations, posting revenue of $5.6 billion against expectations of $5.84 billion. While Societe General has issued warnings on SAP stock , expecting them to issue a warning in January in response to hardening financial times.
SaaS leader Salesforce.com, however, reported a whopping 43% revenue increase compared to last year. A record quarterly revenue for them.
This is not going to stop. In fact, we may see the beginnings of a tipping point this year. Where companies are forced to look again at their spending in light of limits on credit and collapsing demand and prices. In short, this could be the opportunity that eMaint and others in the online maintenance technology field have been waiting for to really shine as a superior deployment and implementation approach to enterprise systems.
If you are a vendor in the maintenance and reliability technology fields and you are not online then... I think you should be. if you are a company who is looking at an upgrade or a new solution and you are not looking at the online products then you definitely should be!
Having said that - it is definitely not for everyone. Systems need to be transactional, they need to be required by people separated by geographical boundaries, and they need to be cheap. Volume wins over price, and the key to the market is service. Service, service, service.
Watch this space, a fascinating evolution is hotting up here.
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