麦肯锡高科技行业战略系列-软件行业的展望.docVIP

In software抯 coming shakeout, big companies will get bigger, while smaller ones will need to play smart or close shop. Ken Berryman and Jim Seaberg The McKinsey Quarterly, 2004 Number 1 Far too many small and midsize enterprise software companies spend too much on sales and on research and development to survive the coming shakeout. Many rely on cash reserves, while others milk maintenance contracts and upgrades on software they have already sold. These smaller vendors might have reached their sell-by date, for the enterprise software industry will consolidate as customers buy products from fewer vendors. One company we know recently raised its preferred supplier抯 share of its software budget to 70 percent, from 10. This sort of decision梑y no means unusual among software customers these days梚s good news for larger vendors, which find synergies in selling bundled applications, such as enterprise-resource-planning or supply-chain-management software. But it is bad news for small companies. The big will get bigger in enterprise software, though not primarily through acquisitions, because the difficulty of integrating the products of two merging companies can make the price too high. Such companies can抰 simply paste a new brand name on an acquired line and expect it to work seamlessly with their existing products. Software must generally be rewritten, often extensively, to work with a buyer抯 platform梐 requirement that replicates much of the acquired product抯 RD cost. Companies that hope to create cost synergies through acquisitions by removing redundant selling, general, and administrative expenses can encounter technical-integration costs so high that a deal makes no sense. Further complicating plans to consolidate are the difficulties some software companies have experienced trying to sell their products into a newly purchased customer base. Companies that buy other companies to obtain access to their customers rather than their technology have historically underperf