Today’s human resources (HR) managers are faced with more employee compensation challenges than ever before—and the reason is relatively clear: employees are no longer happy with simply getting a decent day’s wage for a decent day’s work. They want more! As the competition for skilled talent increases, companies must find better and more interesting ways to retain their employees. And as the old saying goes “money talks.” An offer of money is often the most persuasive argument in getting someone to do what you want. It’ll also give them a reason to stay with your company.

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Software vendor Apprenda started by helping organizations solve an important issue: moving on-premise applications to the cloud and converting them into software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. With its product SaaSGrid, Apprenda can help organizations do this with less technical effort, by applying a middleware technology that enables them to avoid significant complications.

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Even though enterprise resource planning (ERP) for services is a growing market, its most important players still take a generalist approach when it comes to dealing with specific industries, and media and advertising is one of them. Vendors like Oracle and SAP, who decided to adapt their manufacturing offering to services, or vendors like Netsuite and Deltek, who concentrated on service companies from the start, choose to mix their existing solutions—ERP, customer relationship management (CRM), and document management software, add-ons, etc.—to create solutions for specific industries in the services market. Read the rest of this entry »

Needham, Massachusetts (US)-based Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC, NASDAQ: PMTC) is an over USD 1 billion large software company that develops, markets, and supports product development software solutions and related services. The company’s solutions help its client companies design products, manage product information, and improve their product development processes. PTC’s software solutions and services have helped its customers increase innovation, improve product quality, decrease time to market (TTM), and reduce product development costs.

PTC offers solutions in the product development market, which encompasses the product lifecycle management (PLM) market (i.e., product data management [PDM] and related collaborative solutions) and the so-called CAx (computer-aided technologies) market, which includes computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), and computer-aided engineering (CAE) solutions. The company’s software solutions provide its customers with an integral product development system (PDS) that enables these enterprises to create digital product content, collaborate with others in the product development process, control product content, automate product development processes, configure products and product content, and communicate product information to people and systems across the extended enterprise and design chain. 

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Over the past several years I’ve repeatedly heard of a supply chain management (SCM) software and professional services company called ClearOrbit that was recently renamed TAKE Supply Chain. I admit to initially being in a quandary how to figure out the company’s exact value proposition and differentiation, given that its corporate Web site and press release (PR) messages as well as webinar topics seemed to be all over the SCM map: from labeling, printing, and package visibility, via reverse logistics, warehousing, radio frequency (RF) and RF Identification (RFID) mobility, to procure-to-pay (P2P), and supplier relationship management (SRM).

After a while, I finally had my “a-ha!” moment of epiphany and realized the company’s mission: “To improve the speed, visibility and control of extended manufacturing and distribution value chains.” There are indeed many business problems encountered in managing globally extended supply networks.

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As I’m writing this post, more software vendors are launching their mobile business intelligence (BI) solutions. So I’ve decided to hurry up and start talking about the vendors that are shaping the mobile BI space.

In this installment of BI Hits the Road (see Part 1 and Part 2) I will describe some of the features of two specific mobile BI solutions offered by a couple of vendors: Roambi from MeLLmo and Visual KPI from Transpara. Read the rest of this entry »

In the deluge of news revolving mainly around the Big Five product lifecycle management (PLM) vendors, i.e., Siemens PLM, Dassault Systemes, Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), Oracle Agile PLM, and SAP PLM, hardly any noise comes from smaller PLM providers in the lower end of the market. To be certain, many smaller PLM players, who had been catering to the mid-market, such as former MatrixOne or Agile Software, have lately been gobbled up by their larger counterparts.

Thus, in addition to Arena Solutions and its pure on-demand PLM offering as well as Aras’ open source PLM offering, the only other viable choice for smaller enterprises remains Omnify Software. Privately held Omnify Software is headquartered in Tewksbury, Massachusetts (US), with another US office in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

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From the 1950s to the 1980s, when companies wanted to hire, they simply posted handmade signs on their storefronts, restaurants, or office buildings and waited for people to flock in with their resumes. An interview was often as simple as asking whether interviewees could do a specific task. If the answer was “yes,” they were hired—and sometimes started working right on the spot. And that was just the hiring. Managing the employee was a whole other story.

Today, talent acquisition and management is very different.

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Many people consider social media as a set of tools for communicating with others and/or entertaining themselves and collaboration as a characteristic of business processes and workflows that allows employees to work together to be more efficient.

In reality though, both social media and collaboration can help employees communicate and share information, and thus work more efficiently. In addition, the success of any social media and collaboration initiative heavily depends on the tools used and the way they are integrated with the activities of the company. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series analyzed Manhattan Associates’ innovative Supply Chain Process Platform (SCPP)-based analytic applications, including Supply Chain Intelligence (SCI) and Total Cost to Serve (TCS). I discussed other Manhattan SCOPE suite modules as well as the company’s recent evolution from being a mere supply chain execution (SCE) provider.

In Part 2, I zoomed in on the Distributed Order Management (DOM) module, which is a critical “cerebral” SCOPE/SCPP application. I explained the DOM inner workings via a few scenarios of how the system could take customer orders and decides which location is best suited to fulfill them based on inventory on hand, inventory in transit, and complex delivery requirements and preferences.

Manhattan Associates’ platform pieces also enable the vendor to identify new ways to combine solutions to uniquely address industry-specific business problems. At the 2011 National Retail Federation (NRF) Annual Conference, the vendor revealed the next generation of Zero Disappointment Retail (ZDR), a concrete deployment of its SCOPE, SCPP, and multi-channel order management concepts in the retail sector.

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Meridian Knowledge Solutions has participated in Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) programs since 2007; however, it wasn’t until 2009 that I had the opportunity to meet the folks at Meridian to see what Meridian Global LMS was all about. As part of the TEC Certification process, Meridian demonstrated its learning management system (LMS) product to me during a three-hour session, following a detailed script that I had prepared.

This year, Meridian opted to renew its TEC Certification once again, so this past month I sat with Bill Perry (head of marketing) and Tom Klopfer (program manager in charge of upgrades) to review the changes the company has made to Meridian Global LMS over the last two years.
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Part 1 of this series analyzed the transformative events during the last few years at Sage Group, Plc (LSE: SGE) and its Sage North America subsidiary. These changes have led to the company’s analyst day held in Boston in February 2011, where Sage took a giant leap towards clarifying its position in the market.

The analyst day started with Sage Group’s CEO Guy Berruyer’s and outgoing Sage North America’s CEO Sue Swenson’s reports on their respective company’s current state of affairs. As the summary of both leaders’ presentations, Sage remains passionate about its customers and has been expanding connected (cloud-based software) services and online solutions to provide choices. Read the rest of this entry »

Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) is conducting a research study on the changing needs of higher education institutions. To better understand the enterprise software needs of these institutions, as well as to determine whether their current systems are equipped to handle their changing requirements, we have developed a short survey.

If you work in higher education, you are encouraged to participate—the survey takes only 2-3 minutes to complete. Please share the link to this survey. All responses will be treated anonymously.

To thank you for your time, TEC is offering one-week free access to its software evaluation models and vendor data to participants who complete the survey, as well as access to a report of the results of this study. Take the survey now.

My TEC colleague Aleksey Osintsev and I recently made our way to the last stop of the SAP Run Better Tour in Montreal to get a taste of what SAP was cooking up in terms of improvements and strategies for 2011. I was hoping for some developments regarding mobile technology and support. Did I get my fill? Let’s just say I was still feeling a bit peckish when I left. Here’s the lowdown on SAP’s mobile strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick post to highlight the best presentations of the two collocated Gartner events in Los Angeles last week:

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