Parallax : Calculating Technology's Future: Newmerix Crosses the Chasm

When I first started Newmerix in 2002, I had a few initial premises for why the business could be very large and a would end up being a "must have" and not just a "nice to have":

#1 - Packaged applications were not going away anytime soon and, in fact, would become the central
platform for IT because of their back office nature (as opposed to web sites or Exchange infrastructure).
#2 - While customers who bought PeopleSoft, Oracle EBS, SAP, etc.. thought they were moving away from custom development, they were in fact just exchanging traditional custom development for a new kind of customization development on those platforms.
#3 - Packaged applications, while different, had all evolved to have the same basic architecture; one based on metadata and the classic MVC design model. As a class they were more similar than they were different.
#4 - Managing a packaged application was a change-centric activity while traditional development was a build centric activity.

There are clear examples of these items coming true (#1 - NetWeaver/Fusion/Dynamics, #2 - the patch nightmare of owning a packaged application, #3 - PeopleTools/ABAP Workbench/Oracle Forms and OAF, #4 - SOX compliance , patch and customization management, and ITIL). That said, the subtlety (especially built into #2 above) was that Newmerix could build a business (and product) in stages, where each successive expansion became cheaper and easier to build than the prior stage, while the overall value of what we were building would grow non-linearly to the customer.

Today we announced our complete suite of products for the SAP and Oracle EBS platforms. Not only am I proud of the amazing engineering, sales and field work that has gone into getting us here, when I look at the milestone timeline of the business, it confirms much of this subtle original premise. To business school aficionados this will strike you as a textbook case study in “Crossing the Chasm”. Here's the quick timeline to illustrate our growing expansion momentum:

2002

Business started

2003

PeopleSoft testing product (Automate!Test for PeopleSoft) developed and first version GA

2004

Centralized change request management product (Automate!Control) developed and GA

2005

PeopleSoft change management product (Automate!Change for PeopleSoft) developed and first version GA

2006

Acquired Object Manager which became Automate!Change for SAP
Extended Automate!Control to integrate with Automate!Change for SAP
Extended Automate!Control to integrate with Automate!Test for PeopleSoft
Added Business Process Documentation to Automate!Test for PeopleSoft

2007

Extended Automate!Control to integrate with both Automate!Change for SAP and Automate!Change for PeopleSoft for customers who owned both and wanted to centrally manage them
Launched Automate!Test for SAP including Business Process Documentation
Developed and launched Automate!Change for Oracle
Developed and launched Automate!Test for Oracle including Business Process Documentation

2008

(coming soon) Extending Automate!Control to integrate with SAP, PeopleSoft and EBS in one central location for cross-ISV change and lifecycle management
(coming soon) Extending Automate!Control to integrate with all the Automate!Test products for one central location to manage all business process testing
(and much more…)

Note that while the size of our engineer team has only grown a little bit over this time, we’ve been able to launch complete new products and ISVs built on the foundation of our other products in a fraction of the time our first versions took to build. The side effect of this (taking Automate!Change for EBS as the example) is that the first versions of our new products are really the third generation of our existing products and thus are extremely feature rich.

From the customers perspective, the more we deliver in our roadmap, the more they have been able to integrate all activities across the packaged application change lifecycle into one location (Automate!Control). In addition, many (I’d say 50%) of the customers we serve own more than one packaged application due to history, acquisitions, etc.. Being able to come to one vendor and buy the same product set for all your ISV management needs is incredibly valuable. We’ve already closed a number of multi-ISV customers and we’re seeing our pipeline fill up with people who have SAP and Oracle, PeopleSoft and EBS, and even all three.

We are now the only company in the world to support the complete lifecycle of change in PeopleSoft, Oracle EBS, and SAP, let alone integrate them all together in case you have more than one. That's a pretty amazing statement given this was nothing but a PowerPoint less than 5 years ago.

It’s exciting times around the office. Congratulations to the whole team at Newmerix who have worked very hard for a long time to get us here!

Click here for the complete Newmerix Automate!SAP and Automate!Oracle press release.

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