
This week I had an interesting round-table discussion where a few young ICT entrepreneurs, SAP and Exact were attending. The meeting was a preparation for ICT Congres 2009 on October 1st in Delft, where speakers from both SAP and Exact will attend. Even in this preparation, a heated discussion already took place on open versus closed source software…if you want to witness this yourself then don’t miss the ICT congres. A discussion that intrigued me was about the difference between ICT companies that sell and implement software and who live on customizations, so maximizing the number of hours/services they sell is their main business goal. This is in contrast with companies that just want to sell standard software products and quickly get as many happy customers as possible. An example was given about an SAP partner in Europe who really mastered a few best practices for the industries he wanted to be in and does his utmost not to make any customizations to the solutions he provides his customers. That means often answering ‘no’ to questions for customization and convincing the customer on the power of the best practice, asking questions like “In what sense is your company really unique” or “what would you not be able to do if we would implement this best practice’. This partner went so far as to give his project managers and delivery organization targets where people got a higher payout depending how much their projects were completed ahead of time/budget. The sooner the project was completed, the faster a new project could be initiated and (potentially) a new reference customer added to their client base! Needless to say that this partner is a fast growing one and the customer feedback on their implementations is very positive.
Adding large customizations on top of standard (ERP) software, can easily put a burden on future maintainability, updates to newer operating systems, database platforms or other technology shifts. Not just the customer buying the customization but for the company producing and maintaining the customized software it’s often a tricky situation and not a very scalable model. Exact Software to my opinion could not have grown to its current customer base if all of these customers would have customized versions of our software. So asking the questions mentioned above and saying ‘no’ to requests for customizations, could very well be in the interest of the seller as well as buyer.
In the discussion we had on this topic, opinions on the above were highly different so feel free to comment with your own view on this.










