On January 11, 2011, Jaspersoft launched a new version of its business intelligence (BI) suite named Jaspersoft 4, and just a couple of weeks later, on January 25, the open source BI provider launched a new set of software tools that provides support for a wider variety of data sources in the “Big Data” space. This is a clear sign that BI applications will come to address a wider number of data sources and expand the reach as well as the size of the information that BI systems can handle. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this series introduced SuccessFactors, a public provider of software as a service (SaaS) talent management solutions. The article first analyzed the vendor’s evolution from its traditional People Performance realm to the seemingly more opportune Business Execution (BizX) province.

Then the article talked about SuccessFactors’ diverse product editions (tailored to satisfy companies of all sizes) and detailed the two core modules of the SuccessFactors BizX suite of applications: Performance Management and Goal Management. These two modules serve as the foundation for the BizX application suite, since visibility into employee performance and organizational goals form the necessary basis for other talent management activities.

Part 2 then analyzed additional BizX modules (i.e., recruiting, learning & development, compensation, and succession planning), some nice-to-have capabilities, and the most recent developments, such as the 2010 tuck-in acquisitions of Inform, CubeTree, and YouCalc. 

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2008, I wrote a four-part series that explained in great detail Microsoft’s platform technology pieces, commonly used in Microsoft Dynamics and many other enterprise applications. Primarily, these “plumbing” tools were Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint, and Office within enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, while Visio and SharePoint have also been embedded in a plethora of business process management (BPM) solutions.

Mid-2010 marked the business launch of Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, and Visio 2010. For the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who use some combination of Microsoft Dynamics ERP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft SharePoint Server to run their businesses, that announcement signaled new opportunities to increase productivity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series talked about my attendance of Dreamforce 2010, salesforce.com’s annual user conference, which has over the past several years become a highly anticipated and entertaining end-of-the-year fixture for enterprise applications market observers. My post concluded that while Dreamforce 2009 was mostly about continued growth of the cloud computing trailblazer and unveiling of Salesforce Chatter, the company’s nascent social platform and collaboration cloud (as duly covered by my blog series), the overall Dreamforce 2010 theme was cloud proliferation (and salesforce.com’s further diversification).

In his blog post, Louis Columbus states that at the center of Dreamforce 2010 was the transformation of salesforce.com into an enterprise cloud platform provider, starting with endorsing open application programming interfaces (APIs) including REST (Representational State Transfer), which its developer community had reportedly been requesting for over a year. Moreover, after realizing the proprietary nature of its Force.com cloud platform (and its Apex code), salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and his co-founder Parker Harris have recently decided to decouple Force.com into a more open application layer, for platform as a service (PaaS) purposes and a database layer for providing infrastructure as a service (IaaS). 

Read the rest of this entry »

On January 11, 2011, Jaspersoft launched a new version of its BI suite named Jaspersoft 4. The open source software provider will be promoting its new business intelligence (BI) suite designed to provide users with self-service BI features via its Web Application user interface (UI). Built on open Web standards, Jaspersoft 4 is a complete Web application, and it’s ready to be deployed on premise as well as under Software-as- a-Service (SaaS) environments. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series introduced ClickSoftware Technologies (NASDAQ: CKSW). Until recently, the software company focused solely on workforce and service optimization solutions for large field service companies. Gradually, via both internal development and a few appetizing acquisitions in 2009, the vendor has added a few important growth engines, such as mobile computing solutions, shift planning (rostering) solutions, and solutions for the Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs). 

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) introduced its Accreditation Program to provide software buyers with insight into the quality of implementation and support services delivered by value-added resellers (VARs), channel partners, implementers, vendors, and consultants. With the end user in mind, we established an in-depth questionnaire that captures the customer’s level of satisfaction for services rendered (service delivery and support, maintenance, project evaluation) and the customer’s overall recommendation. Through a series of customer reference checks, we examine these areas for service providers that participate in TEC’s Accreditation Program. We then write a concise report highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the provider’s services for a particular software type, industry, or business area. Read the rest of this entry »

I was playing with an interesting site recently called Compete.com. Compete.com tracks the US traffic audience of various Web sites. Thanks to you, our visitors, I was pleased to see that TEC has surpassed a number of firms (Gartner and Forrester) over the last several months. To see for yourself, click this compete.com link for the 2010 stats.

click the image for a larger version

As much as I appreciate this graph, it represents the US region specifically. I’d be curious to see where the rest of the world goes for its information about enterprise software issues.

Here’s a bit of trivia for you. If you’re visiting our site from the US, you’re part of the 36% of our audience that is based in North America. The rest of our Web audience comes from Asia - 24%, Europe - 13%, Latin America - 10%, Africa - 8%, Middle East - 6%, and Oceania/Australia - 2%.

We have a lot of new work planned for publishing in 2011, so I hope it proves as useful to everyone as the material from the past year has.

I have recently taken the helm as TEC’s research analyst for all manner of strategic supply chain management (SCM) solutions designed to take businesses to a higher level, that being their aspiration and achieved with varying degrees of success. However, I’m not here to make a case of my humble credentials in this first posting of mine.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s annual user conference, has over the past several years become a highly anticipated and entertaining end-of-the-year fixture for the enterprise applications market observers (surprisingly, Dreamforce 2011 will take place in late August, and let’s see how that new timing will feel). Namely, in these prolonged times of bad economic news and businesses recoiling across the board, one could always enjoy the unusually high attendance and upbeat and “never a dull moment” atmosphere of the multi-day event, courtesy of salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff and his executive team.

While Dreamforce 2009 was mostly about the continued growth of the vendor and the unveiling of Salesforce Chatter, the company’s nascent social platform and collaboration cloud (as duly covered by my blog series), the overall Dreamforce 2010 theme was the cloud proliferation (and salesforce.com’s further diversification). Needless to say, this was in addition to the theme of continued growth. 

Read the rest of this entry »

My recent series of tutorial articles entitled “Navigating Between Service Management Scylla & Charybdis” and “The Magic Behind Planning and Executing (Optimal) Service Supply Chains” have drawn solid interest and valuable feedback. Along similar lines was the series on general workforce management (WFM) systems (i.e., not necessarily only in field service) entitled “Integrated Workforce Management (WFM) Platforms: Fact or Fiction?”

The software vendor whose work and solutions largely inspired the first two series is ClickSoftware Technologies (NASDAQ: CKSW). With its recent acquisitions (to be explained shortly), ClickSoftware has also become somewhat related to the latter series on general WFM considerations. 

Read the rest of this entry »

There has been an influx of human capital vendor acquisitions taking place recently, with Epicor acquiring Spectrum HR, Lawson acquiring Enwisen, and Workstream’s plans to acquire an unnamed human capital provider, all in late 2010. Now, barely into our first week of the New Year, 2011 sees its first learning management acquisition with global talent and learning management vendor SumTotal Systems officially announcing yesterday its acquisition of privately-held learning vendor GeoLearning.

Read the rest of this entry »

In part one of my interview with Martin Schneider, Senior Director of Communications at SugarCRM, we discussed the history of SugarCRM and the open source customer relationship management (CRM) space. Part 2 describes SugarCRM’s approach to development, their partner ecosystem, and how social media has changed CRM. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that there are more and more acquisitions in the area of human capital management (HCM) these days. At the end of 2010, we saw enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors Epicor acquire Spectrum HR and Lawson Software acquire Enwisen. Now it’s Workstream’s turn.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the major takeaway messages from salesforce.com’s recent Dreamforce 2010 conference was the company’s diversification within the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) space. Namely, during their keynote presentations, the company’s executives admitted publicly to the Force.com platform’s proprietary nature (i.e., the non-mainstream Apex language), which made them decide recently to decouple the application development layer from the database layer in the cloud (the latter called database.com).

The application layer has been further broken down into several cloud-based application building flavors. To that end, there are the following application development environments that cater to different user constituencies and developer language preferences: 

Read the rest of this entry »