I'm hearing more wishful thinking than reasoning.
CLFY, SCOP and VNTV all have help desk products. For the most part there is little functional difference between internal and external product support. Help Desks may need some additional functionality (e.g. Asset tracking and management), but the actual problem resolution, tracking, and account management functions are essentially similar.
I can see where RMDY may want to merge with one of the three to get market share in the external product support market (rather than build its own) but I don't really see the three falling over themselves to merge with Remedy to get into the internal help desk segment. As a practical matter, it is easier to get a customer who already has the external support product to buy the help-desk product, than the other way around. This is because the external support group is usually independent of the IS group, and will often get a tracking application before the help-desk. (Steven Farber, feel free to jump in here with your sales experience). In any event, there is sufficient difference between Remedy's approach and that of the others that there would be little product synergy if there was to be a merger.
The three are all positioning themselves as "enterprise-wide client-server customer information-asset management systems" (my coinage, thank you very much). This is why they all have (or are acquiring) functionality like sales force automation, and logistics.
"Pure-play" players in other client-server functionality are probably going to look to acquire some customer information-asset management functionality themselves, so as to offer a complete solution. Aurum does this, Siebel will probably get into this, and this is why I agree with you that Peoplesoft may get involved. After all they just purchased a supply chain management company (now there's synergy with HRIS functionality *(#)&*(%@*(!&*?).
I agree there is a potential for a scenario similar to that in the database server market, with three main players and a handful of wanna-bes. However I'm not sure there will be as clear a #1 as Oracle. |
