July 10, 2011

When professional services and software mix

I blogged a little last year about the rewards and challenges of combining professional services and software in a mature company’s business model. My main example was Oracle. But other examples from Oracle’s history might have been equally instructive. For example:

Oracle started out doing what amounted to custom development for government (military/intelligence) clients.
Even when Oracle said it had productized its software, the stuff didn’t work very well without services to get it running.
Oracle and Ingres both got a huge fraction of their early revenue* from deals to port their software to various brands of hardware. That’s a lot like professional services.
Oracle’s huge Tools Group grew out of professional services, if I have the story straight. Indeed, its first product was written by later long-time group chief Sohaib Abbasi when he was a consultant.

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