#62 - Vinnie Mirchandani - On how the ERP space is transforming fast, but slow

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the ERP space, and my guest is Vinnie Mirchandani

Vinnie is the founder of Deal Architect - a Technology strategy and negotiation firm listed as a leading "boutique" by the Black Book of Outsourcing. Vinnie also founded IQ4hire, a project marketplace and Jetstream Group, a sourcing advisory firm.

Earlier in his career, he had various technology consulting roles at PwC (now IBM) in the US, Europe, and Asia, and worked as an industry analyst at Gartner.

He wrote various books about the evolution and future of enterprise software, amongst which are Silicon Collar, The New Polymath and The New Technology Elite. His latest book is SAP Nation 3.0 (See Amazon), and this triggered me to invite Vinnie again to my podcast.

We explore the changes in the ERP landscape over the last 5 years, in particular amongst the big 3 – SAP, Oracle, and Workday. We explore why, after 20 years of ERP in the cloud, today there’s still not enough traction.

Here are some of his quotes:

“In the last five years, two things have changed. One is that SAP has been a product launch machine. I mean, they have launched more products than any other I would say technology vendor.

The other thing I saw pleasantly with SAP was how much more open they were this time.

One of the disappointing things about cloud has been, you know, it's 20 years old now. NetSuite was born in 98, Salesforce was born in 99. But if you do a breakdown by global world region, by industry, by business process, only about 20% is filled.

So, the vendor community hasn’t delivered enough. And on the other hand, the buyer community has been very slow to adopt it.

I raised an alarm. I go, this is scary, guys. After 20 years, both the buyers and the vendors are just not moving. Something's not right.”

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why it’s key for ERP vendors to not just modernize the technology. Modernize the business processes. 2. That a big opportunity is left virtually untouched and that is: leveraging the biggest benefit of the cloud: Data, and utilizing that to introduce real value shifts 3. Why it’s key to wake up and realize it’s urgent after 20 years to start moving ‘Bystanders’, i.e., ERP legacy customers. 4. Why systems integrators should start to apply machine learning and automation to their own business. Stop just selling bodies, and leverage the learnings and data from millions of CRM and ERP projects to make these projects faster, cheaper and a lot less risky