Mediaboss Marketing

Alan Pelz-Sharpe is a Research Director at 451 Research. He has over 20 years of experience in the information management industry, working with a wide variety of end-user organizations and suppliers around the world.

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It has always amused me that we work in an industry that has built up such a bad reputation for overselling that we actually coined the phrase "Shelfware".

To be fair and accurate about it, buyers are just as guilty as sellers here, and they often bulk-buy licences for software and services with little consideration, seldom stopping for a moment to count the real cost or purpose until it's too late.

Over the years buyers have invested heavily in future enterprise rollouts of big business applications, often to find a year or two on that only a very small number (in some cases zero) of the huge volume of licences they paid for ever actually get used. True, the recession brought some long overdue belt buckling, and this chilly economic climate has made a few enterprises look a little more closely at where their budget is going, but overall spending remains profligate.

Indeed the viral growth of seemingly low-cost cloud services is currently driving another surge in reckless spending, and it really is time to put the brakes on and get some control back. I mean, let's be serious: when an enterprise tells me that they have 20,000 SharePoint installations or that they think (they never actually know) that large parts of their organisation have Dropbox I have no reason to doubt them. What I do have reason to doubt though is whether many of those instances are actually in use - and of those that are in use, how many of them serve a useful purpose?

End users can so easily provision their own software instances today that many get a bit carried away. It usually starts with good intentions - a new project for example but once the initial enthusiasm is gone, so too is the use of the new service.

Of course IT carries on paying for it one way or another, they always do, and usually for a very long time indeed. Its a problem most IT departments are acutely aware of, and feel they can do little to resolve, but I believe that will start to change.

(Note: It's worth remembering that when an industry analyst like me says things are just about to change and indicates that they will do so in a year or two it's probably going to take many more years than that in reality.)

But change is on the horizon no matter how distant, and I believe that the coming change will offer the channel some very interesting growth opportunities.

The rest is here:
The software industry: So efficient, we invented shelfware