One major cross-sale opportunity in the recent merger of Epicor and Activant into a new Epicor was unveiled on November 20, 2012, when Epicor announced the availability of the Epicor ICE business architecture for the Epicor Prophet 21 wholesale distribution enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution.

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Woe is HP. The company recently made headlines with news that its Autonomy division, which sells a number of products for enterprise content management (ECM), search and discovery, customer experience management, and more, misrepresented its financial situation to get itself acquired by HP. Indeed, HP says its pain from this misreprentation comes to about $5 billion (USD). Read the rest of this entry »

My blog series in 2009 entitled “A Tale of a Few Good SCM Players” talked at great length about RedPrairie Corporation, JDA Software, and Manhattan Associates, including their corporate history and acquisitions. The general feeling at the time was that hardly any of these three great supply chain management (SCM) software companies would remain independent in the long term.

It took a few years for two of these companies to decide to merge, but on November 1, 2012, RedPrairie and JDA announced their merger agreement, under the terms of which the entities affiliated with RedPrairie will effect a cash tender offer to acquire all outstanding shares of JDA common stock for $45 per share. Read the rest of this entry »

Being an enterprise resource planning (ERP) analyst, I spend lots of time watching demos provided by different ERP vendors during certification programs or other events of this nature. At those hours-long live software demonstrations we are able to see how various software systems are designed and how they execute their main intended objective—making an entire business more efficient. With respect to ERP systems, usability and positive end user experience are extremely important for achieving this goal. Read the rest of this entry »

Sage North America announced the 2013 version of Sage Millennium, its solution for nonprofit organizations. The release introduces mobile access for all users, on-demand reports for prospect managers and directors, workflow for prospect data entry, photographs for display and reporting, and new display customization features including paging of data. According to the press release, the new features of Sage Millennium 2013 are aimed at addressing demands for prospect management and user experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Since righting its ship in 2004 or so, Descartes Systems Group (DSG) has made nearly 20 tuck-in acquisitions to address the needs of multi-modal logistics, global trade, and routing and mobile tracking in the cloud. Painstaking as it is, this is really the only way to master global logistics expertise and deliver solutions that help its customers make and receive shipments.

Logistics is the backbone of commerce. Read the rest of this entry »

SAP and VMWare will now offer another deployment architecture for SAP HANA. During the SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Madrid, SAP announced the upcoming availability of SAP HANA on VMWare vSphere 5.1 for testing and development.

SAP’s customers will have the ability to provide instances of SAP HANA in virtual machines faster, use advanced datacenter capabilities of VMware vSphere such as Dynamic Resource Scheduling and vSphere vMotion, and more easily configure their testing and development environments over the cloud.

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During SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Madrid, the recent support pack for HANA was released (SPS5), providing additional capabilities to HANA’s functionality set. Along with enhancements for mission-critical applications, SAP has worked on HANA’s architecture to collapse the different layers of the platform—data and application, so that both reside within an in-memory-based architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the major announcement sets at the recently held joint SAPPHIRE NOW and SAP TechEd event in Madrid, Spain, November 13-16, 2012, was about SAP’s plans to infuse SAP innovations into the world’s most powerful business network, Ariba Network. Through the recent combination of SAP and Ariba, close to 1 million companies are now connected to the Ariba Network—more than any other trading network. The introduction of SAP innovations in social, mobile, and cloud and the in-memory technology of the SAP HANA platform should logically drive global business-to-business (B2B) collaboration and achieve even higher levels of efficiency in sales, procurement, invoice, and payment processes as well as insights through the business network.

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During the SAPPHIRE Now and SAP TechEd conference in Madrid, it was announced that MolecularHealth, a provider of clinico-molecular informatics, has signed a partnership with SAP to improve oncologists’ efforts in enhancing the quality of treatment for cancer patients. By improving the decision-making process, oncologists will be able to provide better personalized treatments. Read the rest of this entry »

This past Halloween was by no means scary for Xactly Corporation, a cloud sales compensation and sales performance management (SPM) provider.  In fact, the day ended up being quite a treat—not only did the company close out an exceptionally strong quarter on October 31, 2012, but it also signed its 500th customer. Read the rest of this entry »

Columbia University in the City of New York, in partnership with the City, announced the launch of the new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. The new institute within the school of engineering has been created to address the challenges of big data. The institute will initially focus on five key sectors: smart cities, new media, health analytics, financial analytics, and cybersecuirty. Read the rest of this entry »

Within an organization, knowledge bases (KBs) of known product issues and their resolutions are typically created and managed by customer support teams. Their obvious use is to maintain different types of methods for addressing various client issues. KBs thus become an important tool in an organization’s armamentarium used for supporting its customers. But clients are unable to access these resources directly—rather they need to go through a customer support employee. Given their central function in addressing clients’ problems, how can KBs of known product issues become a tool in the hands of customers?

Here are some thoughts to consider… Read the rest of this entry »

Dassault Systèmes, a global provider of 3D design software, 3D digital mock-up (DMU), and product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions, announced during its recent annual North American forum (the former Dassault Systèmes Customer Conference has been renamed the 3DEXPERIENCE Forum) the launch of a new industry solution experience for aerospace and defense (A&D) companies called “Winning Program.” A&D companies will be able to configure the right concept for their customers and know from the earliest stages that they can deliver it on budget and on time. Read the rest of this entry »

Cabela’s, the world’s largest direct marketer of hunting, fishing, camping, and related outdoor merchandise, has chosen PTC Windchill FlexPLM software, PTC’s product lifecycle management (PLM) solution for retail. The company will be using PTC’s PLM solutions to manage the entire life cycle of its apparel products from conception, through design, technical design, sourcing, and manufacturing, to commercialization. Read the rest of this entry »