Last week IBM launched PureSystems. For those of you not keeping up with the latest from Big Blue, it is a solution for deploying private, public, or hybrid clouds and their bundled applications. Call it Cloud In A Box, if you will. The question is, how will they get enough people on the platform to compete?

Good question! Well, when in doubt, turn to history. Remember, rinse, and repeat. Do you remember a little thing called iTunes? How about some Angry Birds? Apple essentially created a market for their hardware via their software. And how did Apple do it? They made it easy to buy…

Now let’s get back to Big Blue (IBM for the purists). What if, let’s say… what if, and only if, it was easy to buy enterprise applications? What if the licensing model was not only clear, but explicit. What if you could get it to the point of having a “Buy Now” button on a webpage, and you buy your enterprise application? ERP, CRM, HRM, etc?

What if someone made it easy to buy? Would you be interested? The cloud revolution is forcing vendors to re-think their ways of doing business… and what better way of revamping the sales model than by looking at a method that was hugely successful, and, well, just doing the same thing? Why not? Buyers would like it (proven already by Apple). Maybe the software will… sell itself! Well that might be a stretch, but it would definitely be more accessible than enterprise applications are now.

Some of you may be thinking “but Jason, wouldn’t that mean the end of the software selection process? Won’t you be out of a job?” I’m not so worried. At Success ERP we have always maintained that over 50% of the focus should be on the team chosen to implement the application, since many applications can actually do the same things these days. That part of the equation – the team – won’t change for many years. There will still be choices regarding which vendor team will bring you success faster and for what price. As far as I am concerned, this lets us focus on the part that we have been saying is more important all the long – who do I choose to teach me how to use my new system? That is where the true value is to be found!