Competitor or Collaborator?

The world is fast changing as ever and so is the business world. The dynamics and definition of competition is being redefined and reshaped. Traditional competitors are no more an absolute competitors and they may be a competitor for one segment of offering but collaborator for another. Take for example two business powerhouses; SAP and Microsoft: In the past Microsoft has been a competitor of SAP and has even tried to buy out SAP but today they are collaborating in a space that has produced a new solution called Duet.

The value called “Efficiency with Simplicity” was created when the personal computing giant Microsoft collaborated with Enterprise software giant SAP. SAP traditionally has been very complex and data driven – an absolute need for a business application to function efficiently and effectively. But the world is moving fast in a direction where the user of applications are at the center of defining what will be called as new “value”. What it means is that the value of functionality and business effectiveness is already given and now the new value of “user experience” has to be created. Microsoft and SAP realized this need of the market and also realized that none of them individually could deliver this value quickly with great quality. Consequently, they collaborated to create an application that allows the users to perform their routine business application such as entering time, requesting leave, approving leave, running business report query etc right from their own convenient outlook application. To know more about the power of this technology logon to http://www.duet.com/

Duet is not the first application that was inspired by the value “Efficiency with Simplicity”; in fact there are a host of such applications. Another such application that takes out the complexity of SAP data out of succession planning and helps the user to do their what-if analysis, board room presentation and much more is known as Nakisa. Nakisa is a leader in visualization of workforce management application and is fast growing in popularity among organizations that uses SAP application. Think about your ability to produce graphical representation of organization chart, or an ability to develop visual matrix of all your high performers for a single position with information of how long each one of them would need to be ready for that position. Is it not interesting? There is much more to that and Nakisa offers a range of visualization solution in the Talent Management space. Not surprising that SAP realized their value addition and hence made them their official certified partner. To know more about Nakisa solutions logon to http://www.nakisa.com/

These are just some examples of collaboration it the SAP space but the key take away is that companies are going beyond the traditional boundaries of competition and are really getting engaged to create value for the clients that were not possible by any single company. So we are seeing some true client centric business dynamics and I think this is real healthy for businesses and consumers in general.

What do you think? Leave your valuable comments.

Links: http://www.sap.com/ http://www.microsoft.com/ http://www.duet.com/ http://www.nakisa.com/