A definitive agreement was reached between HP and EDS today where HP will purchase the global outsourcing company for $13.9 billion ($25 a share).
EDS is a global technology services company centering on information outsourcing. It serves both the private and public sectors, with core areas including manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, communications, energy, transportation, and consumer and retail industries.
HP is one of the world’s largest technology companies with revenues totaling $107.7 billion for the four fiscal quarters ending Jan. 31, 2008. Read the rest of this entry »
We submitted this question to our analyst team to get their collective opinion. Read on to find out what they had to say.
Besides the ongoing (seemingly never-ending) presidential campaign and celebrity scandals/gossip, food safety is very much in the news. Indeed, incidents of outbreaks, contamination, product recalls and whatnot flood TV channels as breaking news every now and then. Consumers, governments and the various members of the food supply chain are rightly concerned about food safety, and there has been increasing pressure for food and consumer product goods (CPG) supply chain traceability, in a pervasive manner.
Consumers and governments (both becoming ever-more educated and informed on one side, but still confused on the other side) are concerned about the safety of the food supply and protecting the public. While demanding more product choice and delivery speed, consumers have been voicing fears over food safety in the wake of recent salmonella outbreaks (remember the contaminated spinach or major chocolate recall cases?), cases of pet deaths due to poisonous imported pet food, lead-tainted imported children’s toys, anti-freeze tainted imported toothpaste, and so on…
The ever-longer and global food supply chain (often called “from farm to fork”) includes crop farmers/growers (utilizing fertilizers and pesticides), feed processors, livestock farmers (that might feed and treat animals accordingly [or not]), manufacturers (primary and value-add food processors), packaging and labeling sites, distributors, retailers, and food service companies (restaurants and cafeterias).
These supply chain member companies have to be concerned about the consumer safety issues, plus the potential negative and even fatal impact on their brands and businesses. For instance, high-and-mighty retailers customarily want ever higher service levels from suppliers (without any negative publicity), while the overall industry itself wants to protect “brand” value and reduce recall costs. Read the rest of this entry »
Disconcerting? That’s hardly what one feels when losing a laptop, and when it’s stolen … ?
Lackadaisical, however, seems to be the approach most enterprises take when it comes to safeguarding laptops. The theft of a laptop is devastating to a company, because data is so precious. It’s not just a matter of losing trade secrets, which is also a major concern, but a person’s name is one of the most important assets she has (remember Tina Turner?). Read the rest of this entry »
From one of our readers comes this question:
I am a student of IT Management; I have an ERP course and I am supposed to write an article to review new aspects of ERP systems. I’ve decided to explore the reasons for using data mining techniques in ERP systems—and to look at different modules to which these techniques have been applied. Read the rest of this entry »
Part II of this blog series analyzed the relatively recently launched Deltek EPM suite, which came as a result of three focused acquisitions. It also analyzed the suite’s resulting potential cross- and up-sell opportunities and its prospective additional revenue for Deltek in a standalone manner. However, Deltek has not been sitting still when it comes to continually enhancing its core products either.
Deltek Vision 5 Series
For example, the new Resource Planning module of Deltek Vision 5 [evaluate this product] was devised to allow project managers to assign staff to projects and immediately see the impact on labor utilization. The managers can then modify resource assignments to meet project needs, whereby color coding provides focus on resources.
The new module also offers real-time insight into employee billing rates and actual labor charges. It provides visibility to align resources for upcoming projects in order to increase overall resource utilization. The available tools give project managers a view of employee utilization by project or across all projects by day, week, month or year. In addition, the enhanced Resource Search feature allows for projection of future staffing allocation. Read the rest of this entry »
In IP Telephony 101, I looked at the pros and cons of IP telephony, and a few of the considerations you should explore before making the switch to VoIP.
We’ll turn now to the nitty-gritty of VoIP systems: the architecture, the equipment, the network structure, the software, and what you can expect to pay. Read the rest of this entry »
In this final installment of the Project Management Communication series, we look at a vital project management tool. This system has provided visibility to senior management, as well as justification for projects based on the expected value of each product in its planning stage, and in projects both in progress and completed. Read the rest of this entry »
Consona claims to be one of the market’s rare CRM offerings that is both operational and collaborative, with many years of a broad range of consulting, technical, and business process services that have created the related methodology and blueprint.
Consona CRM Portfolio
The vendor believes that it offers the best value for price in the market due to the extensive product’s flexibility and adaptability, ease of customization, configuration, integration and upgrades, and due to the depth of the product’s extensibility.
These capabilities come from the combination of Onyx Adaptive CRM (i.e., BPM, BI, SFA, customer service, customer data management and customer data integration [CDI]), KNOVA (i.e., self-service and knowledge management [KM]) and the partnership with Million Handshakes (part of Portrait Software) for marketing automation. Read the rest of this entry »
How many of you have walked into a store with the expectation that the product you purchase will probably not work? How many industries do you think can get away with product defects and incompatible components?
For almost three decades, the software industry has convinced consumers that “Bugs” (product defects) and “System Integration” (incompatible components) is a cost of doing business. Granted… enterprise software can comprise of millions of lines of code performing very complex operations. Moreover, today’s complex global economy made possible by the internet has complicated things further with businesses required to support the multiple languages, government regulations, and consumer demands of its customer base. Read the rest of this entry »
While most discussions about the Software as a Service (SaaS) market revolve around the likes of Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Google, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, OpSource, etc., the name Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) rarely comes to mind, unjustifiably.
While Progress itself is to blame in part for a less aggressive marketing effort (and for the-best-kept-secret-in-the-market status), it is still puzzling that the Bedford, Massachusetts (US)-based provider of application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration, and management of business applications is not more regularly mentioned within the press and analyst circles.
A company that was founded in 1981 and with about US$500 million in revenues in 2007, with over 110,000 customer sites and over 2,000 employees in 90 offices worldwide certainly deserves due attention. This is especially the case given the company’s long espoused goal to maximize the benefits of information technology (IT) while minimizing its complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO). Read the rest of this entry »
I’m often asked about the “Vendor Shootout” event that appears on the TEC website and marketing calendar.
While the term ‘shootout’ may conjure up images of a Wild West scenario - vigilante cowboys taking shots at each other from the shattered windows and tumbleweed strewn, empty streets of a deserted Midwest town - a group of likeminded ERP Value Added Resellers (VARs) in the mid to south East USA are redefining it. Read the rest of this entry »
We all know what security means when we think of our home. Did we lock the door when we left for the day? Is the stove turned off? Computer security for the small to medium business (SMB) must address similar concerns. Can a hacker gain access to its servers? How can a business protect its data?
Read the rest of this entry »
Frequently when project teams convene to discuss post-project reviews, project team members feel that if communication had been better, the project would have gone smoother. The reason communication in project management is crucial is because it can impact a project’s success, and it is very important that project managers use the right types of communication during a project. Read the rest of this entry »
Much has been said and written lately, on TEC’s web site as well as on many other peer sites, about the on-demand deployment model, especially about multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS). The opinions there have ranged from an absolute infatuation with the “technology of the 22nd century” or so (thereby rendering the traditional on-premise model completely passe) to much more reserved and cautious stances.
My idea here is to start with a series of blog posts discussing the various quandaries about these subtle (or not) technology choices and nuances, and to also give many protagonists in the market a chance to voice their opinions too.
Today’s topic is sort of “Which model will win at the end of the day, if any?” In my opinion, co-existence of the two deployment models will continue for quite some time to come, since each has its advantages for certain situations. Anyone who thinks one model will dominate for every possible use of software is just not an enterprise software connoisseur, is not a serious person, or is just an aggressive salesperson. Read the rest of this entry »
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