White Papers Is It Time to Replace Your E/CTRM? | Page 3

A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
Is It Time to Replace Your E/CTRM?
TECHNOLOGY
Many legacy E/CTRMs were developed on old client/server technologies now being withdrawn
by their supplier, like Power Builder, for example. Support for these technologies is no longer
available and the skills to support them in the market have more or less dried up and become
very expensive, meaning it is now often imperative to migrate to newer technologies. This means
it is now essential to undertake a re-implementation of a new E/CTRM.
As cloud and Software as a Service have begun
to emerge as the chosen adoption models, many
businesses now want their critical systems delivered
that way and seek cloud-native solutions or at least
solutions that can be deployed in the cloud. Even those
that prefer on-premises delivery seek more modern
technologies for greater flexibility and business agility
like web-enabled and graphical user interfaces, for
example.
applications that are highly complex and convoluted sets
of code. They are difficult to maintain both for the vendor
and the user and do not provide the needed agility nor
ease of use. Most newer vendors over the last decade
or more have adopted more open architectures or even
developed ecosystems of application or modules to
allow better ease of support and increased business
agility. Given the changes taking place in commodities
and the frequency at which they are taking place,
architecture has also become important.
Many legacy platforms are essentially monolithic
M&A AND THE VENDOR LANDSCAPE
There has been M&A activity for many years in the E/CTRM software category but in recent
years, that activity has seen several of the larger and most prominent solutions in the space
fall under a single owner. Not unexpectedly, there is some discomfort in parts of the industry
at this and a suspicion that there is increased risk around proper support, marketing and sales
of the acquired software products primarily due to an earlier acquisition which saw high staff
turnover and a model of charging premium fees. Others simply do not like the idea of a potential
monopoly and for some of the earlier acquired platforms, replacements are seemingly already
underway.
However, other large vendors have run into trouble as
well with ageing platforms that have been acquired at
some point in the past and they have demonstrated a
lack of ability to properly migrate them forward in terms
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