Infor | Sr. Inside Sales Manager | Building teams that are customer-centric and industry-invested | Read, Ask Questions, Learn | Embrace Change & Embrace Others
Started reading "The Innovator's Dilemma" and now everything sits in "sustaining" vs "disruptive" buckets ... so given my industry (enterprise software) I am weighing out where technologies like LLM, applied ML, RPA, and even cloud fit within this spectrum. 10 years ago there was an argument that cloud would be the disruptive motion to the established ERP providers Oracle and SAP. They had the world's largest manufacturers and businesses on their system across multiple industries. Would their customers want/need the cloud? Today the answer is mostly, yes, the customers want it. But Gartner, IDC, Nexus Research, etc. maintain Oracle + SAP and now Infor + Microsoft in the leaders quadrants for cloud ERP. In fact the vendors on these lists have remained about the same the last 5 years. Cloud as a thing doesn't seem to be as disruptive as much as it is sustaining. Now every major cloud ERP has jumped on GenAI / LLM plugins and RPA. Again this is technology that makes existing systems better by building upon existing vendor strengths: industry process knowledge, enterprise search, data management, and UX. This is focused on bringing consumer grade experiences to the enterprise while continuing to maximize up-market value segments. Disruption typically comes from below--what is the disruptive technology in 2024-2025 that doesn't serve Enterprise customers' needs today, but given maturity, feature parity does invade the cloud ERP space in 3-5 years? Is it a niche application of AI? Is it a fully "composable" system like Gartner talked about in 2020? Is it the Rabbit R1? (jk ...)