You asked for it, you got it. Based on your feedback, Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) has released its 2012 buyer’s guide calendar, which outlines the planned themes for our popular buyer’s guide series. With more interest and downloads than ever before, the TEC buyer’s guide team is excited to work on next year’s lineup.

In 2012, we will once again be publishing four issues spanning diverse topics in enterprise software. As with past buyer’s guides, these issues will include a wealth of analyst insight, a state of the market analysis, solution overviews, vendor case studies, and a comprehensive technology directory.

Look for our final buyer’s guide of the year, “New Innovations in CRM,” which is slated for publication in November 2011. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek at TEC’s quarterly buyer’s guide roster for 2012: Read the rest of this entry »

In 2005, after his PeopleSoft venture ended (successfully in financial terms, at least), I was sure that Dave Duffield would not sit still for long. And in fact, I’ve been listening to a slew of otherwise hard-to-please analysts and bloggers raving about Workday for a few years now – this company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri.

Dave Duffield is Workday’s co-CEO, co-founder, and chief customer advocate. As mentioned earlier, he was co-founder, CEO, and chairman at PeopleSoft, and Workday is the fifth company that he has founded (see his full bio here). Aneel Bhusri is Workday’s co-CEO and co-founder (he was vice chairman at PeopleSoft). Aneel was named #15 on the 2011 Forbes Midas list (see his full bio here as well as other Workday leadership bios here).

Indeed, David Dobrin, Naomi Bloom, Ray Wang, Vinnie Mirchandani, Dennis Howlett, Dana Gardner, Nick Carr, Mike Krigsman, Jason Busch, Phil Wainewright, and Brian Sommer are only a few of the renowned market observers that have been talking, blogging, tweeting, and whatnot about Workday as possibly the best invention since sliced bread. Naturally, the skeptic in me has wondered what all this fuss and adulation was about. For some flavor, here are the blog posts on Workday by Dennis Howlett of ZDNet, Nick Carr of the Rough Type blog, and Vinnie Mirchandani of Deal Architect, and these seasoned and discerning fellas are not easily impressed.

I finally had a deeper look at Workday at the recent Dreamforce 2011 conference by salesforce.com (where Workday had a noted presence at the expo floor), and the vendor’s conceptual design and approach is beyond reproach. In many ways, Workday can be viewed as the next generation of good-old PeopleSoft enterprise applications. Like its predecessor, the company started with a set of best-of-breed applications around human capital management (HCM).

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It appears that many organizations are rapidly adopting mobile business intelligence (BI), and the technology promises to become a natural component of every BI application in the near future. And this has only been made possible by the hard work of number of software companies over the past several years in establishing the foundation, changing mindsets, and applying new mobile-based techniques to the BI space. One such company is Transpara, a provider of a product called Visual KPI, a software application that enables organizations to monitor and manage dashboards, alerts, and analytics using mobile devices. In this interview of the Thinking Radically series, we speak with Michael Saucier, chief executive officer (CEO) of Transpara and Robert Hylton, vice president (VP) of Transpara. Take a minute to read both Mr. Saucier’s and Mr. Hylton’s thoughts on their product Visual KPI in particular and on the mobile BI space in general.

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My recent article Has SAP Become a PLM Factor to be Reckoned With? concluded that while SAP PLM can be a system of record in most departments within enterprises, it has yet to win the hearts and minds of engineering departments for lack of its own computer-aided design (CAD) system. But the article concluded with SAP’s stated vision of providing 3D visualization and communication capabilities for all asset- and product-related processes for the entire enterprise. The SAP PLM team’s strong belief is that 3D viewing is not just for engineering departments, but also for the entire enterprise. This vision also includes user-centric workplaces for engineering and research and development (R&D) teams.

To that end, in early September 2011, SAP acquired Right Hemisphere, a leading provider of visual enterprise solutions based in San Ramon, California (US) and Auckland (New Zealand). Founded in 1997, Right Hemisphere is a provider of visual product communication and collaboration solutions enabling manufacturers to optimize their global product development, launch, and support processes. Organizations have invested in operational processes and IT systems to improve product lifecycle efficiencies, yet delivery of precise and up-to-date product information to the extended enterprise in a timely, efficient, and usable form remains difficult today.

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Everything can change without notice in your relationships with prospects and customers, and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions should be flexible enough to help with this ongoing challenge. Monolithic enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages or suites can take years to implement and cannot easily adapt to change; but CRM solutions can provide functionality that makes change management easy and reduces its disruptive effects to the minimum.

Customer-centric or not, every company generates information about its customers that may be used by any department of the company—e.g., invoicing for accounting, customer feedback for product development, sales performance for incentives and compensation management, etc. Traditionally, CRM solutions did not offer functionality that would allow companies to use CRM data in any department other than sales and marketing. Also, functionality that was not specific to CRM but still related to it, such as business process management (BPM) and project management, was very little supported by CRM systems. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series talked about my attendance of the 11^th Vendor Shootout^TM for ERP event, which took place in Boston in mid-August 2011. I was able to experience this co-opetitive gathering of eight solution providers and several dozen end users seeking new solutions first-hand as a neutral (and yet very active) observer (for the inner workings of the event, see my article Demystifying “Vendor Shootout for ERP” events).

My blog post then mentioned the following four enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions (based on my partial attendance of their scripted demos): Infor ERP SyteLine, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Epicor 9, and Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. Part 2 of this blog series will conclude with the remaining four products that I had the chance to see at great length.

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In 1997, TARGIT acquired Morton Systems, a company founded by Dr. Morten Middelfart and devoted to providing business intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions. Dr. Middelfart was then appointed chief technology offer (CTO) of TARGIT, and since then, he has become the technology and educational leader for TARGIT BI. [Evaluate TARGIT BI using TEC Advisor.] Read the rest of this entry »

I’m pleased to announce that the Bizagi’s BPM Suite 9.1 has recently joined the ranks of TEC Certified systems providing business process management (BPM) functionality. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series talked about the major (blockbuster of a sort) announcements at PTC’s PlanetPTC Live 2011 annual user conference, which was held in mid-June 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada, US. These announcements were as follows:

1. General availability (GA) of nine PTC Creo 1.0 design applications.
2. Showcasing the Windchill 10.0 product lifecycle management (PLM) suite.
3. The acquisition of MKS Inc. and its flagship Integrity platform for embedded software lifecycle management.

But there were a number of other announcements that were seemingly not that earth-shattering. Still, these announcements indicate the ongoing PLM/computer-aided design (CAD) market trends and will likely have significant implications on other product development software market players’ moves.

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Is there a tension between the people authorizing IT spending in your company and those determining the needs? The roles of each C-level position, combined with current approaches to IT, may tell the story of how “strategic” your IT systems really are. More importantly, this tension underscores the involvement IT must have in understanding and participating in determining needs. Read the rest of this entry »

Learning management systems (LMSs) and Web content management (WCM) systems for corporate or educational environments have a new but not untested contender. Trunity (a combination of the words truth, trust, and community) provides a platform used to collaborate on delivering a significant body of research used by educational institutions. It may be worth a further look and that’s what we at TEC, intend to do shortly. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I love about my job is the opportunity I have to speak with great people. In this installment of Thinking Radically, I speak with Gary Cokins, an internationally-renowned speaker and expert on performance improvement systems. Please take a minute to read this interesting and informative interview with one of the gurus in the business performance and analytics spaces.

Gary Cokins is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author in the areas of advanced cost management and performance improvement systems. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this series introduced Saba Software, a public provider of the Saba People Cloud, which constitutes a new class of business-critical software that combines enterprise learning management, talent management, and social and real-time collaboration technologies. My post first described the vendor’s slew of industry rewards and accolades at the recent 2011 Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and related events.

Then, the post discussed the need for the “People Cloud” that transforms people-driven enterprises and analyzed a number of social software use case scenarios. The blog post ended with a description of Saba’s current state of affairs. Part 2 analyzed the individual modules of the Saba People Cloud Applications.

This final part will analyze the underlying product architecture that enables the rich functionality of the Saba People Cloud Applications described in Part 2.

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Most of us use a mobile device for work, and even though we all care about how to maintain and keep these devices safe and running well, there are questions that we probably did not consider seriously or decided to deal with later. Though this inactivity may not have serious consequences for each individual, the sum of many small issues can turn into a big problem at the company level.

In order to avoid that, you should start looking at three types of issues that will arise when looking for answers to the following questions: Read the rest of this entry »

TEC’s research model of oil and gas ERP systems is now live. This means you can research and compare ERP solutions for the oil and gas industry at TEC’s Oil and Gas Evaluation Center. Solutions include ERP systems from Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, and many other vendors coming soon. We’ll keep you posted on some second-tier vendors offering exciting products that emulate first-tier solutions, but geared and priced for upstream explorers and developers. Read the rest of this entry »