Part 1 of this blog series talked about my recent reunion with Cameleon Software (formerly Access Commerce) a provider of on-demand and on-premises configure, price, and quote (CPQ)/quote-to-order (Q2O) solutions. Prior to analyzing the recent events at Cameleon, Part 1 first established the need and market drivers for such software solutions.

I then analyzed how Cameleon helps product managers and marketers during the design phase of new product and service offerings, with the focus on being amenable to business (vs. power IT) users in these departments. Part 2 continues with the analyses of how Cameleon helps the sales process (often via multiple channels) and a discussion of recent developments at Cameleon. 

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According to a recent news item in Computerworld, Attachmate will acquire Novell in a $2.2 billion deal. Novell also agreed to sell some intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings, a consortium led by Microsoft. Read the rest of this entry »

According to TechCrunch: Expedia Acquires FlightTrack App Developer Mobiata. Expedia will have the ability to travel more directly to its customers with the acquisition of mobile travel application developer Mobiata.

Mobiata develops a number of mobile applications to enable customers to compare fares, check flight status, and track flights, including real-time flight tracking directly on iPhone. The press release notes that the acquisition represents the “most significant investment to date in addressing the mobile travel market” for Expedia, which will enable it to have an extended reach to existing and potential new customers.

It’s an intelligent move from Expedia to expand its services and functionality features, as long as it doesn’t repeat The Case of the Fake Transatlantic Flight.

I welcome your thoughts—leave a comment below, and I’ll respond as soon as I can.

A recent post from Doug Henschen in InformationWeek detailed the newsworthy alliance of data warehousing vendor Teradata and online storage specialist RainStor, which highlights the importance that big data markets are acquiring. Big data is turning into “giant data,” and organizations that manage very large amounts of information are demanding that software vendors enable the management of increasing volumes of data. For this reason, Teradata and RainStor are joining forces to bring new offerings in 2011, enabling both companies to offer online storage at competitive prices.

Henschen quotes Chris Twogood, senior director of product and services marketing at Teradata, as saying “we’re trying to position this as being as cost-effective as tape without compression; but the problem with tape storage is that it’s off line.”

This is a significant move for Teradata in terms of repositioning its role within the big data market by improving its compression and data storing structure and allowing Teradata to take advantage of RainStor’s capabilities for the protection of software-as-a-service (SaaS)–based data.

I welcome your thoughts—please leave a comment below, and I’ll respond as soon as I can.

After Google’s recent acquisition of Metaweb comes Google Refine 2.0 (formerly Freebase Gridworks 1.0), a tool that enables organizations to work in the refinement of large data sets. The new product is open-source based and comes with a large number of transformation expressions and commands. It can transform data from one format to another, as well as including data from external sources (other databases and Web services, etc.).

Data quality is still a major concern when dealing with any type of data set. This offering may serve two very useful purposes: for data quality novices, the access to learning the fundamentals of this complex discipline, and for experienced users, a tool that is accessible in terms of cost.

The code is available for download here. To learn more about Google’s new Refine 2.0 tool, click here, or watch the video.

Especially in today’s globally competitive and recessionary environment it is imperative that companies further eliminate waste, become leaner, and become more agile to respond to customer’s demand. The ability to sense demand and become a demand-driven (responsive) business is more than just the catch-phrase du jour: it has become a recipe for survival. Everyone is on a quest to deliver on time and as quickly as necessary, with minimum inventory (and working capital), and highest necessary utilization. 

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Just when we thought that business intelligence (BI) systems were headed straight for the cloud, new BI applications are already being developed for another change in the way traditional BI tools used to work.

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The war in the “big data” space is getting even more interesting than it already was. Today Pentaho is announcing the availability of its Pentaho Enterprise Data Services Suite. The open source business intelligence (BI) company will be addressing the challenge of providing services to manage big data for analysis. Along with the general availability of Pentaho Data Integration 4.1 and Pentaho BI Suite 3.7, the software vendor will offer a product for data analysis, metadata, and cloud data services.

You can read the press release here.

Richard Daley, co-founder and CEO of Pentaho, has this to say:

This suite will change every preconceived notion you’ve ever had about complex data preparation. The capabilities of the Pentaho Enterprise Data Services Suite make Pentaho a more cost-effective alternative for the vast majority of cloud and data integration deployments. Organizations continue to flock to Pentaho because we can deploy enterprise-class data integration solutions much more quickly and for significantly less cost than old-school proprietary alternatives.

This will add more fuel to the fire in the already hot data warehouse and big data space. Please stay tuned for more information regarding BI and BPM.

I welcome your thoughts—please leave a comment below, and I’ll respond as soon as I can.

In this fast-moving world, use of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing has grown rapidly owing to its straightforward subscription-based pricing model and relatively quick deployment. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the niche quote-to-order (Q2O) or configure, price & quote (CPQ) market segment. Indeed, BigMachines, FPX (formerly Firepond), Webcom, and Experlogix continue to report notable on-demand software subscription and accounts growth even during these economically depressed days. 

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The best way to capture customer experience is without a doubt the ability to interpret real customer sentiment, which is reason enough for Medallia to include text analytics capabilities to its already well-known Customer Experience Management Suite (CEM).

Points of note: this offering integrates fully with Medallia’s CEM solution. The vendor touts its ease of use, as well as the ability for users to acquire fast results and distribute these results across the organization.

In this regard, Borge Hal, CEO and co-founder of Medallia says that “for years, many companies have struggled to effectively understand text-based customer feedback. Companies that lack text analytics solutions devote significant resources to manually summarizing the feedback—they’re engaged in the proverbial search for the needle in the haystack.”

Business intelligence and analytics tools are following an interesting path—either by going vertical, or by being embedded as complementary tools for other business suites. Analytic tools can be now more at the center of the action. You can read the actual press release here.

I welcome your thoughts—leave a comment below, and I’ll respond as soon as I can.

Employees: The backbone of every organization.
Motivation: Often the driving factor behind an employee’s performance.
Compensation: The motivation.

What I’m trying to say (if you couldn’t read between the lines) is that rewarding your people can ultimately lead to an increase in your bottom line. This can be achieved through the creation of a strong performance compensation plan. Read the rest of this entry »

On November 8, 2010, IBM announced its Global Business Services initiative to help companies address their social networking initiatives and issues, and use social network technologies and strategies. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started with the assertion that cloud computing is reaching mainstream adoption in the enterprise applications space. Indeed, virtually all renowned independent software vendors (ISVs) already offer or plan to offer some or all of their products as a service (on-demand software).

My blog post then expanded onto some cloud computing definitions and nuances, to establish that enterprise resource planning (ERP) ISVs have a few different ways to take the cloud plunge. Possibly the most viable approach is to partner with an established platform as a service (PaaS) provider.

Finally, my post concluded with the recent symbiotic relationship (and mutual endorsements) between Microsoft and Infor. During its annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2010, Microsoft (as expected) continued to emphasize that it was embracing the cloud at the core of its current and future product strategy. For its part, Infor announced the launch of Infor24, its blueprint for delivering cloud versions of its enterprise applications.  Infor is also working closely with Microsoft to enable its key applications on the Windows Azure Platform. 

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As Dassault Systèmes Customer Conference (DSCC) 2010 moved to day 2, use of the word “innovation” continued its popularity at various sessions. However, I’d like to refrain from using this hot keyword and move to “sustainability,” one of the outcomes of innovation, and discuss it from a role perspective.

This thought was triggered by today’s ENOVIA Brand Overview session by Michel Tellier, Chief Executive Officer, ENOVIA, Dassault Systèmes. During this session, ENOVIA V6 offerings were presented from a roles perspective by discussing what the solution was capable of for each of the following four roles: program manager, engineering manager, mid-market manager, and supply chain sourcing manager. Of course, there are more roles for PLM solutions, but these selected roles together provide a quick but quite representative look of what ENOVIA is about. Compared with ENOVIA V6’s lengthy and hierarchical functionality list at this link, this roles approach is a more effective way of communication. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dassault Systèmes Customer Conference (DSCC) 2010 kicked off on November 9th, 2010 in Orlando, Florida. It is the second time that Dassault Systèmes has hosted the customer conference collectively for most of the company’s brands at a single event, with a geographic focus on the Americas (the European Customer Forum [ECF] 2010 is the European equivalence taking place in two weeks).

When I had a little time to reflect after the busy first day came to an end, the key word that popped into my mind was “innovation,” the most frequently used keyword today, and which appeared in multiple sessions in conjunction with different adjectives. Read the rest of this entry »