Chip Hazard on Jeff Bussgang’s Blog has a great riposte to the assertion that the Enterprise software business is dying. In particular, his first point about driving IT efficiency is very relevant to our business area.

We spend most of our time developing custom solutions for clients who have made large up-front investments in enterprise applications and now want to maximise the return on that investment. In some case, this may simply be a case of extracting out data in a summary form from these systems so that they can make informed planning decisions. In other cases, we are building BI applications which aggregate data from multiple systems to allow clients to get a deep understanding of their cost base and how they can better utilise existing assets.

The key word is “Custom”. No two engagements are the same, no two customers use the same tools in the same way. As long as the enterprise software vendors keep providing the enabling technologies, we’ll be able to provide the glue.

Chip’s other comments about Verticals and Open Source also resonate very strongly with the direction we are currently taking.

[tags]bi, custom, integration, businessintelligence[/tags]