There are five stages that usually make up the lifecycle of a product: introduction, growth, maturity, decline, and termination.

During introduction, companies typically focus on the success of the product. Maturity is the stage when their focus is to take advantage of momentum and sell as much as possible. Only during maturity or decline do they start worrying about product end-of-life—which may be too late, as the transition from maturity to decline can happen very quickly (not to mention that there is no clear delimitation between stages, which means that a product can move from maturity to decline in its lifecycle without the manufacturer even noticing). Preparing for a product’s end of life should definitely start earlier, but the question is when and how they should approach it.

In order to understand that, let’s take a look at some basic concepts of product end-of-life, as well as the most important challenges that companies face when managing it. Read the rest of this entry »

After a hiatus of several years, the stars and planets were again aligned for me to be able to attend the AribaLIVE conference in early April 2012. And boy, what a difference several years can make! The last time I attended, in the mid-2000s, Ariba was behind its worst times of the early 2000s and the dotcom ”boom and crash.” For those that are not sure what I am talking about, in the early 2000s, Ariba had quite over-invested in its resource-heavy and inflexible client-server supplier exchanges and was bleeding cash.

The turnaround started when the company decided to focus on spend management software and know-how (sourcing, contract management, spend analysis, invoice automation, etc.), rather than on merely providing the “plumbing” for procurement transactions between trading partners. While the financial performance and posture of Ariba were noticeably improved by the mid-2000s, the company was still criticized by some market observers as being too conservative and focusing on traditional solutions.

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Sugar CRM announced the latest version of its customer relationship management (CRM) solution at Sugarcon 2012, its annual conference. After the event, I had a very interesting conversation with Jan Sysmans, senior director of product marketing, and Chris Bucholtz, editor-in-chief of CRM Outsiders, and would like to share the most interesting findings here with you.
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SOFTWARE SELECTIONS AND GO-LIVES

Los Angeles County selects SAS to provide analytics services and applications
Industry tags: BI/business analytics
“Los Angeles County will use SAS predictive analytics and data mining solutions as well as SAS BI solutions to fight organized fraud within the Department of Public and Social Services. Uncovering more than 200 probable fraud cases = BI and business analytics at their best.”—Jorge García, TEC BI Analyst

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Whether it is an enterprise resource planning (ERP), a customer relationship management (CRM), or any other system, acquisition and deployment of enterprise class software is usually a significant move for a company of any size and industry. It leads to disruption of the company’s business activities, so much so that hardly any employee is left unaffected during such a major project. Read the rest of this entry »

TIBCO, a Palo Alto, California—based provider of a diverse number of business and information technology (IT) software applications, has announced the availability of TIBCO Spotfire 4.5, its business intelligence and analytics platform. This new version contains enhancements in different functional areas. Read the rest of this entry »

The first of week of May marked a flurry of news by up-and-coming cloud enterprise applications vendors. During salesforce.com’s Cloudforce event in Chicago, Kenandy, Inc. announced release 2.0 of Kenandy Social ERP, the first cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system built entirely on Force.com, salesforce.com’s social enterprise cloud computing platform. The new release adds financials and order management to Kenandy’s manufacturing management core, specifically for product companies. Read the rest of this entry »

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is
like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
—Bill Gates

Business metrics—the quantifiable measurements by which a company’s performance is gauged—are part of the broad area of business intelligence (BI) or business analytics (BA). Read the rest of this entry »

On April 25, Pentaho delivered Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5, and I had a chance to get a sense of its new features via a demo prepared by Pentaho. Two main topics were at the forefront of this new offering from the Orlando-based company: visualization and performance.

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Nuxeo sees its content management product as the base for organizations to create their own content-centric business applications. The company offers some interesting tools to aid in this process, which I’ll get to in a moment. Nuxeo also offers its own distinct modules for document management, case management, digital asset management, and with the recent version 5.5, for social collaboration. Read the rest of this entry »

During my several years of attending events organized by the cloud computing evangelist salesforce.com, such as Dreamforce and Cloudforce, Xactly Corporation has always had a prominent stand at the expo floor (another fixture at these events has been BigMachines, and not surprisingly the two vendors are close partners). In a nutshell, Xactly’s on-demand software lets sales professionals know, well, exactly what they are getting out of their sales wins.

The company’s flagship software, Xactly Incent, helps sales representatives and other sales professionals determine compensation for sales transactions. Additionally, sales executives can use the company’s analytics software to analyze post-sales information such as what, where, and to whom their product lines have been sold and how profitably.

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We’ve barely had time to assimilate IBM’s acquisition of Vivisimo and now IBM has announced its intention to acquire Tealeaf Technology, a provider of customer experience management and customer behavior analysis applications. Read the rest of this entry »

Hannon Hill has grown its content management application over the years so that today’s solution targets midsized organizations with a depth of functionality at an accommodating price point. Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server is frequently adopted within higher-education institutions (roughly 80 percent of its clients) but Hannon Hill has also maintained a focus on the public sector, health care, technology, and publishing industries. Read the rest of this entry »

SOFTWARE SELECTIONS & DEPLOYMENTS

European manufacturer of construction chemicals selects IFS Applications
Industry tags: Process manufacturing, mining
“Polish corporation Atlas Group, which operates 18 business entities and 5 mines in Poland and internationally, has selected IFS Applications as its corporate-level ERP system. The first areas slated for implementation will be financials, distribution, manufacturing, maintenance, controlling elements, consolidation, trade management-commerce portals, WMS, and document and quality management. Atlas Group is a typical “sweet spot” IFS client, as the product provides good functional support, particularly in process manufacturing and mining.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• TEC profile for IFS Applications
• Compare process ERP software now!
• Compare mining software now!
• Press release

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IBM has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Vivisimo, a provider of federated data discovery and navigation solutions. This acquisition will enable IBM to reinforce its offering in the enterprise search and data discovery spaces. Read the rest of this entry »