Being a human resources (HR) and customer relationship management (CRM) analyst is definitely a privilege. I get to follow the trends from these two different business areas, which (incidentally) have many things in common: employees are a company’s internal customers, recruiting is campaign management for the workforce, privacy data about customers and employees is equally sensitive, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

2010 has certainly been an interesting (if not a crossroads) year for Infor. Namely, after a number of new high-profile hires at the beginning of the year, which signalled Infor’s intention to be taken seriously, the vendor then entered an eerily quieter period of several months. Except for the ongoing vocal marketing campaign entitled “Down with Big ERP” with witty cartoonish billboards and banners adorning major airports, magazines, web sites, and so on (and which has been acknowledged as successful to me even by Infor’s competitors, albeit privately and begrudgingly).

During this period, many market observers were aware of a quiet exodus of executives who were once considered crucial within Infor (at least we all remember their keynotes from past Inforum conferences). As Frank Scavo pointed out in his recent blog post, Infor has lost several key executives recently. These individuals were the key architects of Infor’s all-encompassing Open SOA strategy that was once touted as the only way to satisfy all diverse Infor customers.

So, what was all this change of guard about? Is Infor now backing out of its previous (too ambitious and perhaps non-feasible) product roadmap to start a brand new one? Perhaps these were just some modifications to the strategy, or something else under pressure from impatient investors awaiting their payday?

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Part 1 of this blog series talked about the historical background of the JRocket Marketing Grape Escape(TM) event. Grape Escape has become a June fixture over past several years, right after the high traveling season to major vendors’ events subsides and before everyone takes their summer vacations. It is a signature event that showcases the intimate analyst relationships (AR) and event expertise that JRocket Marketing’s president and founder Judith Rothrock delivers to her software vendors’ client base by giving them exposure to a selected group of industry analysts.

Part 1 also analyzed the news announcements by Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce.com, followed by the testimony from its customer Wi-Fi Alliance. Part 2 analyzed the Grape Escape 2010 news announcements from Meridian Systems CEO John Bodrozic and SYSPRO US CEO Brian Stein, followed by these vendors’ customers (Walt Disney and Lee Spring, respectively).

Part 3 will analyze major news coming from UNIT4’s Agresso product line.

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Part 1 of this blog series analyzed the major modules of integrated workforce management (WFM) suites that organizations can deploy to better schedule and assign work in their production and distribution facilities, and in retail stores. Concrete examples of commercially available products included those from Kronos and RedPrairie Corporation, given those two vendors’ notable recent moves in the WFM field.

While Part 1 detailed the data collection, time and attendance (T&A), labor activities, and absence management modules of WFM (and their respective importance), Part 2 will focus on the forecasting and scheduling, reporting and analytics, and talent management parts of WFM.

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Next month a TDWI World Conference will be taking place in San Diego, California. What’s so special about this conference anyway? The answer is simple:  the general topic is going to be “Creating an Agile BI Environment”. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series talked about the historical background of the JRocket Marketing Grape Escape event. Grape Escape has become a June fixture over past several years, right after the high traveling season to major vendors’ events subsides and before everyone takes their summer vacations. It is a signature event that showcases the intimate analyst relationships (AR) and event expertise that JRocket Marketing’s president and founder Judith Rothrock delivers to her enterprise software vendors’ client base by giving them exposure to a selected group of industry analysts.

Part 1 also analyzed the news announcements by Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce.com, followed by the testimony from its customer Wi-Fi Alliance. 

Read the rest of this entry »

The Business of Agriculture Commodity Trading

Recently, I had the opportunity to take a detailed look at the agriculture commodity trading and risk management industry after being involved in a project. In this article I will share some considerations on agricultural products trading specialties and software that supports it.

While I have experience dealing with the securities market—which is sometimes classified as the commodities trading market—my impression of agricultural commodities trading is different from any other commodity trading business. I believe that it deserves to be classified as a stand-alone cluster within the trading and risk management business. There are some particular qualities that make it distinctive from similar business models that trade other commodities, and it can be very different from other encountered types of businesses such as: manufacturing, retail, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series talked about Consona Corporation’s recent acquisition of leading open source and cloud computing enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider Compiere. After reading a slew of speculative blog posts (including the one from TEC’s free and open source [FOSS] buff and advocate Josh Chalifour), I had an incisive briefing with Consona’s CEO Jeff Tognoni, to give the company a fair chance to explain its strategy and the rationale behind the acquisition.

In Part 1, Tognoni first dispelled any idea that Consona’s intentions were to to copy the much larger and also acquisitive vendor Infor, as suggested by the related ERP Graveyard blog post. Thereafter, he explained that his interest in Compiere’s cloud platform coincided with (and was validated by) the recent launch of Consona’s CRM Cloud leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) for the server infrastructure and platform.

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According to Paul Greenberg, an expert in customer relationship management (CRM) and social CRM (SCRM), the term “social customer” was coined by Chris Carfi “some six or seven years ago.”

But before being social customers, we are social media users—we use Facebook, Twitter, create blogs and comments on Web sites, and sometimes we can even integrate some of these tools and make them work together. Unfortunately, this is not an easy thing to do and if you use three or more social media tools, you will have a hard time integrating all of them (or most of them). Why? When a social media company launches a new product, they want to keep their followers, users, etc. and they would rather not share them with others (for instance, Twitter has an application that lets you find followers on Facebook, which was recently blocked by Facebook). Read the rest of this entry »

Every June over past several years, after the high season for traveling to major vendor events subsides, and before everyone takes their summer vacations, a group of selected enterprise applications analysts have become accustomed to attending the JRocket Marketing Grape Escape(TM) event. “Grape Escape” is a signature event that showcases the intimate analyst relationships (AR) and event expertise that JRocket Marketing’s president and founder Judith Rothrock delivers to her enterprise software vendors’ client base. Read the rest of this entry »

Both the “old” Deltek (pre-2005) and “new” Deltek (from 2005 on) have not been strangers to acquisitions, but these were largely well thought-out and appetizing (“nip in”) purchases of smaller companies that had either an attractive piece of technology or install base (or both). However, in early June 2010, immediately after its Insight 2010 user conference, Deltek announced its intent to acquire Maconomy A/S, a Denmark-based provider of solutions to the professional services market. On July 6, Deltek announced the completion of its tender offer to acquire the European enterprise resourceplanning (ERP) provider.

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In her recent blog post 12 Things Retailers Did Last Year To Improve Supply Chain… IDC’s analyst Leslie Hand said that many retailers, as one of the top three priorities of the last year, implemented new “pay and bonus for performance” structures based on current labor standards/time management or simply applied new labor standards to their distribution centers (DCs) and warehouse work. Some also implemented comprehensive workforce management (WFM) products to better schedule and assign work in their distribution facilities and stores.

Sought-after partners most often included Kronos and RedPrairie Corporation, which is not surprising to me given these two vendors’ recent impressive moves in the WFM field. 

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Product lifecycle management (PLM) systems are too complicated, too expensive, and take too long to implement. That’s what I said last month in a blog post. However, more and more companies find that adopting PLM is an unavoidable route to take regardless how many obstacles ahead. Can companies find ways to adopt PLM more easily and faster? After listening to Lectra’s introduction to its Easy Start PLM implementation approach, I think I’ve found some answers. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you have a small network with a couple of printers and a fax machine, or a sophisticated shop floor using robots, cranes, etc., you have to make sure your assets are functioning properly. One of the main challenges is finding the right spare part to repair your equipment.

There are two facts that are certain in the enterprise asset management (EAM) world: 1. your equipment will break sooner or later; and 2. it will eventually become obsolete. It is common knowledge that when your equipment becomes obsolete, you need to replace it and when they break, they need to be repaired. Furthermore, one would expect companies to always have spare parts available for repairs, but it is not always the case. Let’s take a look at why this may happen. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I attended the Grape Escape analyst event in Boston. This was the 10th annual meeting organized by Judith Rothrock’s marketing company to present her clients and announce some news. I had the opportunity to listen and informally talk to software vendors, their clients, and industry analysts in addition to three one-on-one briefings with top managers from UNIT4, SYSPRO, and Meridian Systems. Read the rest of this entry »