With the holidays well over, it’s probably time to blog some again.

I was reading this article about Red Hat at The Register, which linked and quoted from this Forbes article about Salesforce.com, and I’d like to highlight this part:

The theory of enterprise software is that it is cheaper to buy an off-the-shelf solution and configure it to your needs instead of building exactly what you need from scratch. Some companies are great at using off-the-shelf products and others waste a lot of money. But for most companies, the trade-off works. It is cheaper to buy and configure than to build.

What is less widely known is that the range of processes covered by standard software is modest. In his book, Business Process Management: The SAP Roadmap, SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe says, based on research, that standard software covers about 20 percent of the processes in any given business.

I had the sense that moving to PeopleSoft or an equivalent would still leave a need for a lot of local, custom development, but having it meet 20% of the need is much smaller than what I would have guessed.