Recently, I met over the Web with TARGIT’s Ruben Knudsen and Ulrik Pedersen, along with some TEC cohorts to verify TARGIT’S BI product.  TARGIT had  completed a TEC-designed RFI containing a list of BI capabilities that every BI vendor could support  “out of the box.” The RFI is a common list of BI capabilities that we send to all BI vendors, and from the long list of TARGIT responses, we chose 172 entries for them to demonstrate. Without missing a beat, TARGIT demonstrated all the 172 selected entries from a total of 1900 criteria we chose using a “live meeting” and telephone sessions. TARGIT passed with 100 percent verification – no omissions. Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time around 1995, the well-known American agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), decided that there was no computer operating system that was adequately secure for their needs.  In analyzing the risks, they found that while UNIX was the most secure, they needed additional protection. They looked at the industry of anti-virus protection, at problems with Trojan software, at the problem of keeping up with virus authors, and at the requirement for government level security to prevent a corrupted module from secretly penetrating their operating or business system environment. Their conclusion was that “anti-virus blacklisting” is ineffective and isn’t worth a pinch of dung.

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Part 3 of this blog series analyzed the ever-evolving user interface (UI) and visualization technologies, and related approaches of Microsoft and other independent software vendors (ISVs). Lawson Smart Office and IFS’ Project Aurora (including the first Project’s delivery, IFS Enterprise Explorer [IEE]) were described.

Shedding Some “Northern Star” Light on IEE

For IEE IFS uses Microsoft ClickOnce, which is a technology designed to perform web-based deployment of rich applications. Basically the authorized user clicks on a link and the application loads straight from the web server without needing to be installed and distributed via CDs (like traditional client/server applications). It works similar to the counterpart Java Web Start or Adobe Flash technologies. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I touched on the idea of building a vendor portfolio to help manage risks associated with software outsourcing practices in the article Should North Americans Send More Software Development Work to China? I’d like to use this blog post to give some complementary readings for those who read the article and felt the vendor portfolio idea interesting.

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Part 1 of this blog series covered the spectrum of Meridian Systems’ Proliance solution for Tier One, multi-billion-dollar global companies. It also analyzed Meridian’s early bet on leveraging Microsoft Office Business Applications (OBAs), and harnessing the Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology collaboration that is revolutionizing the capital infrastructure industry.

Meridian, which promotes its business as the Plan-Build-Operate (PBO) technology solutions leader for Project-Based Organizations (another PBO acronym, and thus the “PBO squared” mantra), offers an end-to-end solution for building owners, construction and engineering firms, and public agencies in three flavors. These offerings respectively cater to high-end (Tier One), mid-market, and small market organizations that manage capital building programs and facility assets. Read the rest of this entry »

Disclaimer: The idea behind this post is strictly based on an assumption that has no scientific proof—and an approach that is very simplified. Thus, the results and conclusions should not be used for any serious purpose.

Recently, as a member of the TEC Green Team, I went through over 20 enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors to examine elements within their offerings that help companies tackle environmental issues. During the research process, I got the impression that there seems to be a relationship between vendor size and the greenness of their offerings. Read the rest of this entry »

We certainly learn new things every day, and sometimes out of pure serendipity. Namely, when I was recently asked by one of my industry contacts (working for a PR agency) whether I would like to have a briefing with and about his client, whose name included the word “batch” as a part, I agreed, thinking it was a process enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor or maybe a manufacturing execution system (MES) vendor.

To my chagrin, as soon as the Web conference meeting and demo started, I realized that I was in the quite unfamiliar territory of enterprise job scheduling and workload automation, especially when it comes to highly diverse and distributed information technology (IT) environments. Many of these jobs are still run in a batch mode without human interaction and intervention (at least preferably).

Some batch job examples would be: database/data warehouse updates, payroll runs, file copying and archiving, systems rebooting, disks de-fragmenting, reports printing, processing insurance claims, billing statements, and/or enrollments, file transfer protocols (FTP), and so on. Thus came the ActiveBatch product name, I guess. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you having trouble finding concrete information about how enterprise software actually works? I know I am.

I’m not talking about feature lists—you can find those easily enough—and I’m not talking about promises to streamline processes, increase efficiency, or deliver value—which I don’t read. What I’m talking about is this:

Let’s say my company is considering upgrading one of its enterprise software packages, and, as an end user, I’m going to be spending most of every day using said package. What’s my day going to look like?
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I was positively staggered to read the article “Should North Americans Send More Software Development Work to China?” Perhaps my opinions are underlined with a bias of the South Indian (you’ll find Bangalore in those parts) variety, a fierce one at that too (which is why I have long abstained from writing the article “Why Indian outsourcing is the next best thing to sliced bread”). Nevertheless, I maintain that the article does not present an objective view of the state of outsourcing to China & India. Do read on, because as fiercely competitive as we Indians are, we are just as capable of self-inquiry and mindfulness.

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If one quickly skims through Sun Microsystem’s newspeak-style press release, its devastating cut to 6,000 jobs, globally, only sounds like a doubleplusungood minor reshuffle. Newsoutlets and investors, however, weren’t fooled, and the announcement caused the troubled company’s shares to plummet to $4.06. At its height, during the dot-com boom, Sun’s shares were worth $250.

For eight years, Sun has been in deep financial troubles, and it hasn’t escaped the global credit crisis—a significant number of its customers are banks. This latest shakeup in has some analysts speculating that Sun will become a “dirt cheap“  acquisition target for larger rivals, such as HP, IBM, or Dell.

While this move is expected to save Sun between $700 million and $800 million annually, it won’t be enough to preserve the company. Sun may still undergo further restructuring, including splitting its software division into three different business units to push its open source business.

Part 2 of this blog series analyzed Microsoft platform parts that are slated for shared use within the Microsoft Dynamics family of products. Particular attention was given to Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint, and parts of Microsoft .NET Framework.

What About Visualization and User Interface (UI) Technologies?

However, what has somewhat intrigued me is Microsoft’s not-so-vocal touting and promoting of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), although it is an intrinsic part of the .NET Framework. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, the tool has not yet been used within the Dynamics set in earnest, although Lawson Software  and Verticent would be the two independent software vendors (ISV) that I am aware of deploying it. Read the rest of this entry »

Recent uncertainty in the global economy is not only having a negative impact on international economies, but an equally deleterious effect on global supply chains. As with the international economies they serve, global supply chains are interwoven and inextricably linked to one another. For instance, if one link is severed in the supply chain it can cause a ripple effect which could collapse the entire chain. I’ll look at some of the concerns for potential supply chain collapse, and some strategies to limit your exposure to such a risk. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s mid-November and time to tell you about some of the new product ratings and certifications that we’re covering in our research. TEC analysts recently completed certifying products from BatchMaster and Targit. Read the rest of this entry »

My office is in the downtown core of Montreal and last week I attended a briefing session by two aerospace companies, Pratt and Whitney (PW) and Bombardier, at a hotel up the street. The subject was about a new initiative by PW and Bombardier to improve supplier performance. Read the rest of this entry »

For residents and tourists of Paris (France), using RER or Paris Metro is certainly a way to save on commuting costs (and parking frustrations) compared to owning and renting cars. This blog post is not about transportation, but rather about an inventory management method with a similar name.

Namely, this blog post is about RIR or Rapid Inventory Rightsizing, which is an innovative new program to help embattled companies relatively quickly free up cash and reduce the impact of the current global credit crunch on their supply chains. This pretty straightforward concept and message of improving a free cash flow (FCF) came recently from ToolsGroup, a global provider of demand-driven inventory optimization (IO) solutions. Regular readers of this blog site might remember my recent series on shortening long tails of supply chains, where ToolsGroup was also the protagonist. Read the rest of this entry »