South African Internet and mobile status

An interesting blog from the New Media Marketing conference gives a status update on where SA stands in relation to its Internet and mobile adoption.

For fixed line we are still behind the times (thanks to Telkom) but seem to doing OK on the mobile side.

What is Microsoft’s commitment to Dynamics?

Josh Greenbaum commented on how the Microsoft Dynamics division was doing – Microsoft Dynamics Revenues: Is More Really Less?

There has been a lot of management change in the Dynamics organisation, and we have seen that recently in SA with partner account managers leaving.

My director friend at SYSPRO said four years ago that Microsoft would not understand the ERP business, and would eventually leave it. From what Josh says, if Dynamics’ growth doesn’t improve that prediction might come true.

Shortest ever ERP deal closed

I have just been involved in the shortest ever ERP deal closure in my +10 years of working in the enterprise software industry.

An engineering company came to us for help in managing construction inventory between South Africa and a big project in the DRC.

They came to see us last Tuesday, we sent them the project proposal last Friday, and today – 6 days later – they have told us they have accepted our proposal!

It’s a smallish SYSPRO licence, so the ratio of implementation cost to software cost is +3 to 1. The company had looked at SAP (and JDE, I think) but were put off by the initial costs and the change management those solutions would have required.

I am speculating a bit here, but I think the reasons for the speedy decision were:

- their project is big, and so are the budgets
- there is a time-critical factor
- they are a medium-size company so not a lot of IT skills and experience
- we were able show them from our experience how we could make their operations work with the minimum of fuss
- we did a damn good sales job!

How to live

An amazing video from the Oprah show – Dr. Randy Pausch summarising the lecture he gave at Carnegie-Mellon University, his last lecture as he is dying of cancer.

The URL is   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tIyt8oSLVs 

Thanks to Tyler Reed for blogging it.