Future of visualization

During the course of the year, the question is often raised about the future of Nakisa and SF. I am not an expert in the field of forecasting the  development of companies in the market, but I’ll give some facts on the current state, to explain what’s going on at the moment.

Nakisa is growing and devloping; in the summer, there was an interesting meeting in Moscow with Andre Willems, in which he highlighted the current state of business and plans for the future. On the basis of his words, the fourth version should be just incredible and cool! He has told, that in the CIS there will soon be office-support which is very important for Russian companies. We can say that this is a good marketing move, because in Russia there is no SF office-support. When I was presenting at a meeting this summer with David Ludlow and other representatives of SF, to my question on the office team, they replied that it had not yet been planned.

We felt the growth of competition between SF and Nakisa. SF – undoubtedly giant, has already taken its place in the market, but this does not mean that it has exactly displaced all of its competitors. If Nakisa will soon release a 4th version (as far as I know it has to happen in the autumn), when the corresponding set of parameters SOVN/STVN will be able to seriously compete with SF applications. If the release is delayed for half a year, then Nakisa may lose its position in the eyes of the companies’ advisers and clients. Why? Because now the SF application looks really beautiful and more comfortable than the corresponding application from Nakisa, SF also covers more functionality, so companies’ advisers will demonstrate SF on tenders and  presales, what would their decision seemed more competitive.

You ask, “Who are you and why do you give such sharp and rough assumptions?” In addition to  project activities, I quite often have to participate in presales and tenders, as the consultant on the visualization. So I have to analyze and understand the needs of potential customers and, accordingly, to decide what product to demonstrate to the customer.

I will not pretend that the choice is in the hands of the client. I will say that in my experience, in most cases anyway, the choice of product is in the hands of the company-adviser, but not the company itself. With any decision you can submit a good or bad thing, respectively, to sell or not, but that’s another story.

At the moment SF may be of interest only to the customers of small and medium-sized companies (in  CIS), while Nakisa remains the favorite of big companies. Of course, all that matters is the type of applications – on-demand and on-premise. Practically none of the big companies in Russia will give up their personal data to remote data-centers; it’s their security. For large banks, oil companies, etc., at the moment it is impossible to imagine the transition of their data in the cloud. It will take time to change the minds of clients, top-managers, CIO, etc.

For small and medium-sized companies such an SaaS has been a long-awaited guest. This will help not only to save costs for  the company as well as the structure of its business processes and data; software such as SAP ERP are not very commonly used in such companies.

Now is the time for cloud solutions; Before they were just mobile technology, perhaps, only SF does not create both versions of their applications – on-demand and on-premise, otherwise, cloud-based solutions would not be so popular. Of course it stands for marketing, the economy and so on, so I don’t see the whole picture, but I am sure, If SF had both types of  options- on-premise and on-demand, the Nakisa’s there would be a chance, it’s only my opinion.

If we get back to technology, the mobile solutions help sell visualization applications already inside the companies-clients, demonstrate solutions to managers and so on, but the main advantage of applications is visualization but not functionality.

Probably, within several years, when there will be a data-center in Russia, similar to the European, this will speed up the development of SF in the CIS market.

And what is the situation you have in the market, as it is now divided clients SF and Nakisa?

Best regards,

Alex Chebotarev