SAP CEO Declares Big Deals Dead

from the end-of-an-era dept

Well, it appears that after many years of irrational IT expenditures, companies are finally starting to wise up. SAP's CEO has admitted that the age of the "big deal" is dead. They're no longer signing multi-year, many million dollar deals to supply a huge, cumbersome information system. It appears that, in this mad rush to (gasp!) justify your expenditures, most CIOs and other such types realized that these huge projects cost a lot for very little benefit. Now, they're much more interested in smaller deals, with clearly understood goals and metrics. Only 27% of sales SAP did last quarter were over $3.45 million, compared to 42% of their deals a year ago. 44% are under $1 million. In the US, 77% are under half a million dollars. This isn't a bad thing (unless you were an enterprise software company getting rich by selling useless software that no one needed). It, hopefully, means that companies are now being smart about their IT investments, and can get real productivity gains out of them.

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