This begs the question: why is SAP work so grossly overpaid (at least over here in Germany)? Doesn't look particularly exciting or challenging to me. Most of the implementations I've seen are of the 'meh' type: buggy, boring, bloated. I'm a bit biased though since a colleague of mine ran away screaming from a highly-paid SAP job. 'Never again', he said.
The focus of the last couple of years - especially YC type startups - has been on social - which is pretty much saturated now (I laughed/cried at some of the content on that dreamitventures site that was posted yesterday).
We're in a recession now that means big opportunity for replacing established business software apps - because existing apps have grown bloated and carry huge costs - which gives a massive attack surface - a startup can do take an existing app and do the key features better, cheaper and simpler - and instantly bite in to some revenue.
New startups need to be taking on salesforce.com not trying to be the next Facebook or Twitter.
2010 will be all about revenue not unique visitors.
I dont know, I have worked in some very big clients and I just dont see them trading their ERP's for some startup product, they just have too much riding on it, without counting the HUGE piles of money they've already invested in the SAP solutions. Its like the mob, once you're in you're in and the cost of getting out would be really steep.
On the other hand, and this probably was what you were actually going for, startups could provide an alternative to those very expensive solutions and could very well tap into a huge pile of money thats sitting there waiting to be picked. One corporate client can generate more revenue than 100 freeloading "social users".
(Disclaimer: I should be more knowledgeable about this, having interned at SAP once.)
Perhaps you can do to SAP what Scala, Clojure et al are doing to Java: Present a more enjoyable front-end to the programmer, but target the underlying system.
I think you've answered your question :) None wants to do it, so the companies have to pay a lot of money.
Now, you might ask, none wants to be the garbage man, and their salay is crap. But it's a low barrier job to entry, and its employer doesn't have a lot of money, plus there's no specialization or the applicants don't can't receive better job offers elsewhere.
On a related note, COBOL programmers are well paid these days, but none wants to program in COBOL anymore. Kinda the same situation.
One of the guys that trimmed my maple tree this fall used to be a garbage man, and he said the hours were terrible and the pay wasn't very good.
This surprised me because I also thought garbage men made pretty good money. We do have competing trash services here, perhaps that makes a difference.
Big market, big projects, small amount of qualified people, people who don't yet realize how dumb is it to run your business on something you need to pay a single vendor to maintain (ie, most people).
To be fair, their main concern isn't the "single vendor" (SAP) but the wide deployment of available (if pricey) consultants to maintain it. They're paying extra but they're buying peace of mind. Not saying it's the right move, but still important to understand (without necessarily agreeing) what makes a market such as this (or any other) tick.
