Winners and losers in today's enterprise software market

Computerworld has a short article today outlining the earnings reports in various categories of enterprise software vendors. This gives a quick snapshot of how the landscape is changing as the market for technology spending is showing some improvement. Of interest are the following observations:

1. Top tier suite vendors SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards are holding up remarkably well in this market, even though there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding Oracle's hostile bid for PeopleSoft, and PeopleSoft's friendly bid for J.D. Edwards.
   


2. Best-of-breed CRM vendors, characterized by Siebel, continue to suffer as the pendulum seems to be swinging away from a best-of-breed CRM approach toward CRM as part of an integrated suite offered by the major ERP vendors. Siebel's strategy of offering tools to facilitate integration with other enterprise systems does not yet seem to be overcoming the attraction of pre-built integration of the full suite vendors.
   


3. Standalone enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors, such as Tibco, WebMethods, SeeBeyond, and Vitria continue to suffer. While CIOs consistently rate integration as a top priority, the EAI vendor landscape has changed radically. One the one hand, large vendors such as IBM and BEA have cornered a large part of the EAI market. On the other hand, Web services standards holds out promise of easier "roll your own" integration between software components in the future. Therefore, customers that have not already committed to an EAI vendor may be holding out hope that an EAI software decision--which can be huge--can be avoided. Most analysts agree that there will continue to be a market for EAI software, although only Tibco and WebMethods are likely to remain as standalone EAI vendors.