Pronto Software, provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) software, announced signing a new contract with Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation (HFE). HFE is the largest family-owned theme park in the United States. The Pronto solutions will be rolled out across HFE’s portfolio of entertainment, tourism, and hospitality properties, replacing legacy retail and inventory systems. Read the rest of this entry »

PROACTIS now helps more than 120 public sector organizations managing £15 billion of public sector spend in the UK and over 100,000 suppliers to streamline their source-to-contract and purchase-to-pay processes to achieve better value and control. The most recent win was at the Flintshire Council,  and now 20 out of 22 local authorities in Wales use PROACTIS.  Read the rest of this entry »

Today Oracle unveiled some of the details of its new contract with Finish Line, Inc.—one of the leading US-based retailers of sports footware, apparel, and accessories. This retail chain will acquire a whole range of Oracle Retail software solutions, including Oracle Retail Merchandising, Planning, and Stores. Read the rest of this entry »

What was alluded to at the Inforum 2012 conference back in April 2012 (and talked about for the last several months in the media) finally took place on October 18, 2012, when Infor announced the grand opening of its new headquarters in New York City. This move not only announced the vendor’s new “digs,” but also introduced Infor’s new brand. The related press release briefly touched on Hook & Loop—Infor’s new in-house design agency. In addition, Infor revealed the launch of a new ION Experience Center at the operations center in Alpharetta, Georgia, its former HQ. Read the rest of this entry »

Rosslyn Analytics recently launched RAPid Spend Analysis – Professional, the cloud-based tool for decision-makers and knowledge workers at organizations running SAP to automatically extract, classify, and share business intelligence (BI) on-demand. SAP customers can use Rosslyn’s RAPid cloud enterprise data enrichment to perform advanced data analysis using pre-built dashboards and reports. Read the rest of this entry »

While day 1 of the IFS World Conference 2012 in Gothenburg, Sweden was mostly about mobility, day 2 expanded into some other interesting themes and topics. IFS has long positioned itself as a single-instance global enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution alternative to SAP and Oracle. The realm of corporate social responsibility (CSR) presents notable challenges for organizations due to the intricacy of global and local laws and regulations and the difficulty in navigating them. In his keynote presentation (which he mostly repeated in his subsequent presentation to the press/analysts), IFS CTO Dan Matthews pointedly stated that CSR is difficult to manage at a global level. Read the rest of this entry »

Teradata, a provider of data warehouse and analytics solutions, has released a new appliance designed specifically to manage big-data projects by integrating Apache Hadoop and Teradata Aster into a single appliance. Read the rest of this entry »

During the TechEd event in Las Vegas, SAP launched Business Planning and Consolidation 10.0 for the SAP EPM Unwired Platform, enabling users to gain access to a more extensive set of functionalities beyond the common exploration and analysis of information. This new offering is part of a series of mobile innovations planned by SAP last year for business intelligence, enterprise performance management, risk and compliance, and analytics applications, which are being progressively rolled out.

Available on iTunes, users can download the application and be able to plan, budget, and forecast from their mobile devices, a core improvement to provide users with the ability to perform an increasing number of tasks besides data exploration and visualization, and expanding the reach of mobile devices as complete work tools.

Those folks who might have been led to believe that Microsoft Dynamics has lately been focusing solely on one or two particular products (with a global enterprise appeal) at the expense of the others (that are more local and niche) will have been disabused of their notions in early October 2012. Specifically, Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 in 15 markets. With deep investments in significant new capabilities and improvements across the product, this launch was hailed as the most significant release yet of Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Read the rest of this entry »

During SAP’s TechEd event in Las Vegas, SAP announced that in an agreement with Amazon, SAP HANA can be used on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and will be available immediately via the AWS Marketplace as an offering called SAP HANA One. Read the rest of this entry »

What Siemens alluded to us at its two-day Siemens PLM analyst summit in early September 2012 is now official—the vendor has announced that its flagship product lifecycle management (PLM) software Teamcenter is available on the cloud, adding another platform option for Teamcenter customers. Teamcenter on the cloud delivered through an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model extends Siemens PLM Software’s “platform of choice” strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

During SAP’s TechEd event, SAP unveiled its plans for delivering SAP HANA in the cloud—SAP HANA Cloud, an in-memory cloud platform offering. SAP’s cloud platform will include some important offerings: Read the rest of this entry »

At the IFS World Conference 2012 in Gothenburg, Sweden, it was interesting to notice that Microsoft was the diamond sponsor of the conference, while IBM and Oracle were platinum sponsors.

Currently, IFS Applications runs solely on Oracle database, while the presentation (client) side and prepackaged business intelligence (BI) are Microsoft-centric (the IFS Web client also supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome browsers). Where IFS offers more openness and choice is in the middleware/app server layer by supporting IBM WebSphere, Oracle Weblogic, and Red Hat’s JBoss products based on the Java Enterprise Edition standards. Microsoft Windows, Unix, and Linux are supported OS platforms. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft has acquired the marketing automation software company MarketingPilot. According to the press release, the new acquisition will be integrated into the Microsoft Dynamics CRM suite. MarketingPilot specialized in software that addresses marketing management demands ranging from insight into customer needs to automation of multi-channel marketing campaigns. MarketingPilot appears to provide strong analytics capabilities that can reveal the return on marketing investment for each campaign. This appears to be the key motivation for the acquisition. As more and more customer relationship management (CRM) products are aspiring to become social and benefit from these new channels of communication, Microsoft is hoping to assess the effectiveness of each campaign as well as its medium of delivery.

After having announced the launch of a number of cloud mobile apps, and in keeping with the mobility theme, IFS announced the new IFS Touch Apps Partner Program at the IFS World Conference 2012 in Gothenburg, Sweden. The program, which is aimed at delivering new smartphone apps to IFS customers, will officially launch on November 15, 2012, and five partners have already signed on. Read the rest of this entry »