White Papers Is It Time to Replace Your E/CTRM? | Page 4

A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
Is It Time to Replace Your E/CTRM?
of functionality and/or technology for whatever reason.
In fact, it is hard to point to a successful M&A strategy in
this space at any point in its history if that M&A activity
includes the acquisition of competing platforms. The
user experience of these events has often been poor
particularly in terms of the subsequent support for, and
innovation around, these E/CTRM platforms.
Meanwhile, buyers are spoiled for choice in the E/
CTRM arena these days with many start-ups and new
entrants who have developed cloud-native solutions
or existing vendors that have begun to invest in
broadening and modernizing their solutions. This
choice also includes the buy and build route where a
move to services or ecosystems of services facilitates a
mix and match approach.
After more than 20-years of choosing, implementing
and supporting E/CTRM software, there is also a
good deal more experience around across the entire
market than there was. This experience allows users
to make much better and more informed decisions
about procurement, selection and support of E/
CTRM solutions. There is less ‘fear’ around making
procurement decisions.
VOLATILE AND SHIFTING BUSINESS
PROCESSES
The sector is experiencing much change and from every possible source. These include
regulators, stakeholders, technologies, business models, geopolitical events and much more.
Users increasingly recognize the need for much more nimble and agile solutions to help them
adapt to change and find business efficiencies across business processes and supply chains.
There is an increasing awareness and recognition that the older legacy solutions simply cannot
work well in this environment.
Users struggle to keep the software up to date as the
vendor continuously releases new versions and often
end up falling very far behind. Sometimes, so far behind,
that the software is no longer covered by the support
and maintenance agreement. Sometimes, the demands
to test each new release become too onerous and
expensive as well. At the same time, there is a constant
need to get costs down. By migrating to usage or
subscription pricing models costs can be reduced and
migrating to the cloud also offers at least different ways
of accounting for costs. Older, legacy solutions, where
the cost of support and maintenance is significantly
higher, are increasingly at risk of replacement.
Overall then, we see a more mature market in which
legacy software simply often needs to be replaced.
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