Ten years later, who’s left standing?

I just got back from one of my last training rides before I set off next week on my third annual, week long, bicycle crossing of North Carolina.  This year, the roughly 500 miles of scenic country road cycling begins in the Blue Ridge Mountain town of Blowing Rock and ends one week later at the beachfront town of Surf City.  But that’s not the subject of today’s blog.

The t-shirt that I threw on after today’s ride is.

I’ve been mindlessly putting on this t-shirt for, and after, my workouts for the last 10 years. But for some reason, today I actually noticed the logos on the shirt.

Here is what dawned on me…where are these companies ten years after they paid good money to reside in my t-shirt drawer?

Let’s start with mySAP.com.  It died an uneulogized death.  To the best of my knowledge, the centerpiece of the mySAP strategy, the so called “mySAP marketplace” no longer exists.  In fact, this is all that is left of the 1999 mySAP website  announcing the concept (thanks to the WayBackMachine).

Siemens is certainly still around, but according to this Information Week article, they seem to be on the verge of a divorce from SAP.  Seems as if Siemens doesn’t like the concept of 17% maintenance fees that don’t deliver value and would prefer to go to a more innovative SaaS vendor for their HR functionality. (You can’t blame them can you?)

webMethods couldn’t make a business out of integrating systems and found themselves the victim of…hmmm…an integration…into Software AG’s business in 2007.

TopTier was an early SAP acquisition back in 2001.  They were an integral part of the mySAP.com technology stack and an important contributor to the ensuing SAP Portal strategy.  The most interesting aspect of that acquisition was that it came with the now famous Shai Aggasi.  Years later, Shai became an heir apparent to the top job at SAP, but instead, chose to create a Better Place in 2007.  His mission now is to free us from the tyranny of Middle East Oil producers by creating a worldwide infrastructure for electric cars.

I partnered with appnet back in 1999 to develop Symbol Technologies’ SAP integrated B2B website.  They were a class outfit that clearly understood web design!  Someone has their url today, but I can’t believe it’s the same appnet that received $100M in financing in 1998 and was later purchased by Commerce one, and who was eventually purchased by Perfect Commerce in 2006. There is no mention of SAP anywhere on their website.  Like a punch drunk heavyweight boxer who steps in the ring way past his time, it’s really sad to see what’s happened to appnet. They’re home page asks the reader “what is a blog” and “who owns a domain name” and they’re hawking web developers at $60/hr on their website.   :-(

As of July of this year, IDS Scheer is in the process of being acquired by Software AG.

Lastly, we all know what happened to HAHT Software. They were purchased by GXS around the year 2000 and then subsequently abandoned the SAP B2B eCommerce market.  Thank goodness! Otherwise b2b2dot0 wouldn’t exist!

What do we make of all this?

• T-shirts have become archeological artifacts alongside cave paintings and bits of pottery?
• If you over-promise and under-deliver be happy that you at least sponsored a conference once?
• Exercise and blogging are good for you and they help you justifiy to your wife why it’s not a good idea to toss out those old t-shirts from your dresser!

Sam

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