Accounting and Business

Accounting departments have long suffered from being considered as serving a lower-priority function and playing a subsidiary role to other departments in any business—i.e., a “non-value creating” activity. Many business owners and top managers consider accounting as government mandated and a pretty much useless function. They also view accountants as boring bean counters whose only role is to prepare a few insipid reports a year, and who are known for their constant irritating interventions to “more valuable” departments with unclear (for most personnel) requirements and standards that others have to maintain for reasons unknown. And I wouldn’t be surprised if all top managers secretly dreamt of ridding themselves of those annoying accounting people and finally doing whatever they want, without looking back at the “weird” needs of the bookkeeping department. Or at least outsource them as much as possible to minimize their involvement, cut expenses to nearly nothing, and forget about them—all the more so, as information technology (IT) allows for performing such outsourcing nowadays.

However, accounting and financial activities, and the people who carry them out, definitely deserve to be better regarded by others. Read the rest of this entry »

I am pleased to announce that Technology Evaluation Centers’ (TEC’s) online software evaluation and selection system, TEC Advisor, has exited the beta phase and its latest release is now available. Read the rest of this entry »

The recent acquisition of Gist by BlackBerry developer Research In Motion (RIM) prompted this TEC water cooler information session between TEC’s Managing Editor Dave Clark and CRM analyst Gabriel Gheorghiu:

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The high cost of business disruption that accompanies changes to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is a source of frustration for many businesses and organizations. If you decide to upgrade your business software and move to the cloud, will the cloud meet your expectations?

Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) is conducting a research study to understand your key challenges and pain points with respect to your current ERP system, as well as your expectations of cloud-based ERP solutions. Please take a few minutes to answer this brief survey and help us measure the expectations you have of your ERP solutions, whether traditional or in the cloud.

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 survey. Take the survey now.

Part 1 of this blog series analyzed the runaway success and genesis of Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). The article outlined the main reasons for the product’s widespread use and analyzed its evolution. So, what is it that SharePoint’s treasure trove of tools (a la “grandma’s attic”) can (and can’t) do for companies?

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Globalization has lost its novelty. For most goods-driven enterprises it has become a matter of fact, just to stay in the game. However, the level of complexity that doing business globally entails can be daunting for professionals in charge of overseeing the supply chain—especially when the business needs to be nimble to keep ahead. Nimble can be painfully complex, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. That’s where global trade management (GTM) comes in. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series introduced TAKE Supply Chain, a supply chain management (SCM) division of TAKE Solutions, Ltd. The parent TAKE Solutions is a global technology solutions and service provider, which focuses on two principal business areas – life sciences and SCM (the company is listed on the Indian Stock Exchange).

My first post described TAKE Supply Chain’s genesis since its inception in 1994 as BPA Solutions, through its ClearOrbit phase from 2001 to 2007, and finally from TAKE Solutions’ ownership on. Throughout all these changes, the company’s mission has remained intact: “To improve the speed, visibility and control of extended manufacturing and distribution value chains.”

Part 1 also analyzed TAKE Supply Chain’s current product lines, starting with Demand-Driven Supply Network (DDSN) solutions. The first DDSN offering was OneSCM, which is an online supplier relationship management (SRM) platform that features multi-tier, multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS) architecture and is designed for mid- to large-sized manufacturers and distributors.

Part 2 continued with the analysis of TAKE Supply Chain main product lines, in particular the Xtended Process Control (X.PC) SRM suite within the DDSN product line and the Enterprise Returns Management (ERM) suite within Demand-Driven Distribution & Fulfillment solutions (TAKE’s second major SCM product line). The final part of this blog series will now address TAKE Supply Chain’s remaining product line: Mobile & Auto-ID Solutions, and will discuss the company’s competitive landscape.

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Earlier this week MeLLmo, creator of the mobile business intelligence solution Roambi, announced a new product to be launched in June and included in its Mobile software stack: RoambBI Flow. Read the rest of this entry »

Notwithstanding Microsoft’s recent purchase of Skype, some pundits have started to question its relevance in the long term (in view of the ongoing consumer mobile devices and/or social media success of Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, salesforce.com, etc.).

However, there are still many Microsoft products that are quite relevant. One of them is undoubtedly Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Until the recent runaway success of the Kinect for Xbox 360 “gesturing entertainment platform” (which Microsoft hopes to deploy well beyond the juvenile games playing use, say, in harmful industrial environments), SharePoint was the product that reportedly grew the fastest to the US$ 1 billion mark in revenues (and it had been the fastest growing Microsoft technology for three straight years before the advent of Kinect). Read the rest of this entry »

If you still think business intelligence (BI) hasn’t yet hit the big time in IT industry terms, think again. On May 9, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, founders of YouTube (and now directing their new company AVOS), announced the acquisition of Tap11, a real-time BI platform. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series introduced Needham, Massachusetts, United States (US)-based Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC, NASDAQ: PMTC), which is an over US$ 1 billion large software company that develops, markets, and supports product development software solutions and related services. The article analyzed the company’s genesis from its inception in 1985 through the mid 2000s.

In addition to delivering Pro/ENGINEER (a.k.a., Pro/E, recently renamed Creo Elements/Pro) the first parametric, associative feature-based, solid (3D) modeling computer-aided-design (CAD) software in 1988, PTC has since acquired 18 companies to add both technology and industry expertise to its offerings. The article paid special attention to the following noteworthy acquisitions:

• Computervision in 1998 for its competing CADDS product, but which also, as a byproduct of the acquisition, provided PTC with Windchill Technologies and its first-to-market Internet-based product lifecycle management (PLM) solution. Today, the PTC Windchill PLM suite [evaluate this product] is one of the company’s two main product lines and growth engines (as it will be analyzed shortly)
• The Division Group in 1999, for the visualization ProductView product, which was recently renamed Creo Elements/View in connection with the launch of PTC Creo, which will be described in more detail in subsequent articles
• Arbortext in 2005, for its technical product data authoring and dynamic publishing solution, followed by the acquisition of ITEDO, a 2D and 3D technical illustration and animation software company, in 2006. The added capabilities for dynamic authoring, publishing, and service information have enabled service organizations to create and manage the content needed by field service professionals
• Aptivis Technology Corporation in 2005, which formed the basis of Windchill FlexPLM [evaluate this solution], a specialized version of Windchill that has enabled PTC to address the enterprise PLM needs of retailers as well as footwear and apparel/fashion (so-called “softline”) manufacturers and retailers
• CoCreate in 2007, for its direct modeling 3D CAD capabilities, primarily to add its existing customers and history-free, dynamic modeling capabilities to PTC’s CAx (computer-aided technologies) arsenal. The product was recently renamed Creo Elements/Direct (see Part 1 for more detail on the differences between parametric/history-based and explicit/direct modeling approaches) Read the rest of this entry »

In what seems to be a smart move by Deloitte, this Monday the consultancy company announced the acquisition of the promising software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence (BI) company Oco, Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday Oracle announced its new releases of Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications and Oracle Real-Time Decisions.

With these new releases of Oracle’s BI solutions, all BI applications support iPhone and iPad mobile access without additional effort or configuration. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series introduced TAKE Supply Chain, a supply chain management (SCM) division of TAKE Solutions, Ltd. The TAKE Solutions parent company is a global technology solutions and service provider, with significant focus across two principal business areas – life sciences and SCM, with an almost even breakdown of revenues between these divisions (the company is listed on the Indian Stock Exchange).

My blog post first described TAKE Supply Chain’s genesis since its inception in 1994 as BPA Solutions, through its ClearOrbit phase from 2001 to 2007, and from the TAKE Solutions ownership on. Throughout all these changes, the company’s mission has remained intact: “To improve the speed, visibility and control of extended manufacturing and distribution value chains.”

Then, the article analyzed TAKE Supply Chain’s current product lines, starting with Demand-Driven Supply Network (DDSN) solutions. The first DDSN offering was OneSCM, which is an online supplier relationship management (SRM) platform that features multi-tier, multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS) architecture and is designed for mid- to large-sized manufacturers and distributors.

Part 2 of this blog series will continue with analysis of TAKE Supply Chain’s main product lines, in particular looking at the rest of the DDSN products and at its Demand-Driven Distribution & Fulfillment solutions (the second major product line).

Read the rest of this entry »

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 its analyst day 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 the outgoing Sage North America’s CEO Sue Swenson’s reports on their respective companies’ current state of affairs.

Part 2 talked about the subsequent presentation by Himanshu Palsule, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy and Marketing of Sage North America’s Business Solutions, on Sage North America’s strategic “Extend, Connect, Grow” framework and related Web strategy. In this presentation, Sage espoused somewhat differing cloud computing approaches for the small business and core mid-market segments.

But how do Sage customers and partners fit within the “Extend, Connect, Grow” strategic pillars?

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