I always go back to that wonderful Jiffy Lube example. For years, you had to change your car's oil every 7,000 miles. Jiffy Lube comes along and says, "Let's double the number of appointments by just telling everybody it's 3,000 miles. Let's create a false expiration date for your car's oil." And they convinced everyone that it's 3,000 miles. It has nothing to do with the true engine life of the engine oil. That's great marketing!

In the software world, [the vendors] always have to move your company forward to the new release, so they sell upgrades and consulting. And the only two areas they make money in are consulting and maintenance. But you're seeing companies saying now: "You're not going to dictate to me that I'm going to have to give up my software every three to four years because you say I have to when it's still a performing asset for the company. We'll trade our car fleet when we feel it's the right time. And we'll trade our software when we feel it's the right time."

This is reflected in the companies like Oracle and SAP, as they keep extending out their support periods on the software products. When I ran support policy for PeopleSoft, it was 18 months back in the late 1990s for a major release. So every 18 months you needed to move forward because the software was immature.

Now, Oracle will take you out five to seven years. So while Oracle is now giving you these longer periods of support, they're charging you a fortune for those years, when, in fact, you use less support. So you get less support over time for more money, whereas in our world, we cut that cost because you're on a more mature platform.

What's happening here is that customers are really taking control of their system, and they're not allowing the vendors to dictate the terms anymore. And that's a huge revelation.