Sporting a brand new stock symbol (NYSE: DATA), Tableau Software, the Seattle-based analytics and visualization software provider announced the pricing of its initial public offering of its 8.2 million Class A shares. At a public price of $31 per share, 5 million shares are being offered by Tableau Software and 3.2 million shares are being offered by other selling stockholders. Acting as lead joint book-running managers for the offering are Goldman, Sachs & Co and Morgan Stanley & CO, with other important financial organizations also involved. Read the rest of this entry »

Internet company Yahoo! has entered into an agreement to acquire the Tumblr social blogging service. According to the official press release:

Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators. 

Or, in other words, Tumblr can go on being Tumblr, if it’s not distracted by Yahoo! adds. Read the rest of this entry »

Senior supply chain analyst Bob Eastman was at the Epicor Customer Conference, Insights 2013, in Nashville last week.

Epicor invited Bob to share his insight into current technology trends in the supply chain space. Check out that conversation on YouTube.

In this almost 9-minute video, Bob talks about the acceleration of the business cycle and some of the enabling trends (such as cloud and mobility) that address the challenges the speed of business presents to the supply chain.

Bob also discusses the pursuit of supply chain excellence—how strategy and technology must go hand in hand—and identifies three key requirements for success today: visibility, sales and operations planning, and metrics.

SAP is undergoing a makeover with some structural changes to certain segments of its extensive software portfolio. Just before its annual SAPPHIRE conference, SAP re-baptized its Visual Intelligence product as SAP Lumira, its new data analytics offering. Read the rest of this entry »

The recent Epicor Insights 2013 conference highlighted how the 2012 Solarsoft acquisition strengthens Epicor’s presence in the lumber and building materials, wholesale distribution, print and packaging, and automotive sectors. In addition, Solarsoft gives Epicor new presence in process manufacturing (i.e., food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, mills, metals, and chemicals), whereas Epicor has traditionally focused on discrete manufacturing.

One byproduct of Solarsoft’s acquisition was Epicor Mattec, a standalone manufacturing execution system (MES), for which there reportedly is growing customer demand among manufacturing organizations worldwide. The product is also creating new opportunities for Epicor as an integrated solution with its next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, Epicor ERP (a.k.a., Epicor 9).

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Autodesk recently signed a definitive agreement to acquire Tinkercad, an easy-to-use browser-based 3D design tool. The addition of Tinkercad to Autodesk is aimed at helping broaden the consumer-oriented Autodesk 123D family of apps and supports Autodesk’s vision to help anybody (students, makers, and designers) imagine, design, and create anything. The acquisition will also revive the Tinkercad service and community, despite a previously announced shutdown by its founders and creators. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the major themes at the recently held SuiteWorld 2013 conference was that NetSuite has been aggressively building a cloud partner ecosystem, the Autodesk alliance being one resounding example. During the conference, automated mobile workforce management (WFM) and optimization solutions provider ClickSoftware Technologies announced that it has partnered with NetSuite to build the ClickSoftware SuiteApp using NetSuite’s SuiteCloud Computing Platform.

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The “little” SAP Business One solution is an unsung hero of sorts at SAP. Indeed, more than 38,000 customers worldwide in nearly 30 languages and over 630 partners are often ignored as less newsworthy by market observers. The business management solution for small businesses (with 10–20 users, on average) can be deployed on premises or in the cloud, and is accessible via mobile devices.

During the SAPPHIRENOW 2013 conference, SAP announced the general availability of the 9.0 version of the SAP Business One running on Microsoft SQL Server (which is the product’s original database). With more than 50 new features, the latest version offers enhanced capabilities for warehouse management, infrastructure, and inventory management, as well as improved systems performance.

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If you are a small or medium business and you haven’t heard of Zoho yet, you should check it out—the company might have an app for you, perhaps even for free. The name alludes to small office, home office, i.e., SOHO, although some products are suited to larger companies.

The Web-based mini apps of the Zoho Office Suite are a great example of the trend of the atomization of user experience. This is in tune with the Long Tail Theory, according to which companies will compete on ever-smaller and more specific product footprints and capabilities to satisfy ever-smaller niches, and all in a plug-and-play manner. Forrester has also noted a “business technology (BT)” trend, describing pervasive use by casual users in lines of business (LoBs) of technology that is increasingly managed outside the direct control of IT departments.

Certainly Zoho is fulfilling a demand for easy-to-use cloud and mobile apps for productivity, collaboration, and communication that aren’t bogged down by the need to customize and manage this functionality within an enterprise-wide system. Read the rest of this entry »

NetSuite is on a roll with whopping growth and expansion (16,000 customers, 2,000 employees, and 700 partners) and is even now talking about profitability, positive cash flow, and a hefty cash position (contrary to the popular belief that cloud software vendors are not profitable in general). The company’s third SuiteWorld annual conference brought about 5,000 attendees, which is significantly higher than the 3,000 and 1,200 attendees respectively for the previous two years’ events. While retail and multi-channel e-commerce was the main theme at SuiteWorld 2012, SuiteWorld 2013’s main theme was that manufacturing is ready for cloud computing too.

NetSuite for Manufacturing
This week’s release of NetSuite Manufacturing Edition brings to the marketplace a solution for manufacturing and product-centric companies that includes a portfolio of capabilities such as production routings and scheduling, financials for manufacturing with standard cost and work in progress (WIP) accounting, inventory management with available-to-promise (ATP), and supply chain integration. While previously NetSuite mainly targeted outsourced offshore manufacturing, NetSuite Manufacturing Edition now caters to manufacturers that make their own products. The offering is still a fairly generic discrete manufacturing solution, but it is likely that NetSuite will make it more vertical, in part based on tuck-in acquisitions and partner offerings.

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At SAPPHIRE, the SAP company, SuccessFactors, announced a series of new upgrades as part of its human capital management (HCM) offering. Aiming at businesses that want to go beyond basic human resources (HR) functionality, SuccessFactors also enhanced its talent management tools. Read the rest of this entry »

SYSPRO recently announced that Freedom Smokeless, a manufacturer of e-cigarettes, has selected SYSPRO ERP software to facilitate growth. According to the California-based company, SYSPRO ERP will be a cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation in the company’s new factory, where the software will manage manufacturing and facilitate bar code scanning, inventory controls, and product traceability.

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Deacom, Inc., a provider of DEACOM, a broad enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for process manufacturers, announced recently that Cloverdale Foods Company, a food manufacturer of high-quality processed meats, has licensed the DEACOM ERP system to streamline its manufacturing operations. Cloverdale has an aggressive plan for growth in mind and recognized that it would need a new ERP system in order to handle increased demand. Read the rest of this entry »

The Epicor Retail division of global business software solution provider Epicor Software Corporation provides solutions for retailers seeking to streamline processes, integrate channels, and leverage intelligence  in a variety of industries including apparel, footwear, discount, general merchandise, automotive aftermarket, lumber and building materials, nursery, and pharmacy. Epicor is the retail technology partner of choice for thousands of retailers—from Aeropostale, Aftermarket Auto Parts Alliance, and Build-A-Bear Workshop, to General Nutrition Centers, True Value Company, and Under Armour ( more details here).

New Epicor Retail Strategy
Early in 2013, Epicor unveiled a multi-year strategic plan to grow its market share and expand its global footprint in the retail technology space. While Epicor is recognized as the No.1 provider of point of sale (POS) software among the top 250 largest specialty soft goods and hard goods retailers by IHL Group, the multi-year strategic plan was designed to enable Epicor to maintain and grow its leadership position. Initially, Epicor has been focused on the following four strategic priorities: global expansion, cross-channel execution, and continuing investments in both POS and enterprise cloud technology.

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Kronos Incorporated and SuccessFactors, an SAP company, have partnered to combine SuccessFactors’ cloud and talent management technologies with Kronos’ workforce management capabilities.

Together Kronos and SuccessFactors will be able to support labor rules and pay policies stemming from Kronos Workforce Central, which focuses on time and labor tracking, advanced scheduling, analytics, and complex absence management. Also, talent management will be ensured by SuccessFactors’ extended capabilities for compensation, learning, onboarding, and performance and goals. Read the rest of this entry »