It seems like just a few minutes ago, I was talking about the recipe for success, right?
The most successful companies in the Application Integration and Middleware (AIM) space have done what large software consulting firms have done. They go towards the money. Consulting costs money. Middleware requires consulting. The Fortune 500 requires middleware. They have money. It’s a win-win, right?
What this strategy has led to is an industry that fights over the top 5000 companies world wide and ignores the bottom 9,995,000 companies that can’t afford to have their own IT department, let alone hire a team of integration ninjas to come in and build a custom middleware solution to connect their WooCommerce, QuickBooks and Salesforce accounts.
The really expensive bit in the current middleware market is that huge up-front fee. Because middleware deployment is commonly modeled after software consulting and application deployment, middleware consultants use a traditional software development approach. This generally leads to custom deployments and customizations. This approach is not lean.
In the book, Blue Ocean Strategy,