In late November 2012, IFS announced that a major North American offshore oil & gas drilling company had signed a contract to implement IFS Applications as its enterprise asset management (EAM) software system. The unnamed offshore drilling company will implement the IFS Applications for Offshore Service edition to support maintenance operations. The deployed solution will include projects, maintenance, and IFS Instant Replication, a special solution for rapid replication of data between offshore rigs or vessels and onshore facilities. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently attended the Microsoft Dynamics Fall Analyst Event (FAE) 2012 in Washington state, which started with a tour of a local Microsoft Store (see Part 1 of this blog series, Microsoft Analyst Event Part One: What’s New for Fall 2012). At the company’s Redmond, WA Microsoft headquarters, Kirill Tatarinov, President of the Microsoft Business Solutions Division (MBS), gave us the 2012 year-end review. One major point that he made was that he and the entire MBS department have been promoted into a full-fledged Microsoft division (no longer folded together with SharePoint and Office), and that the division has been recruiting new executives and rank-and-file employees. I take this as a sign of the company’s serious investment in Microsoft Dynamics.

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Human capital management (HCM) solutions are relatively recent in the software for business market. Lately, several HCM solutions have been consolidated through acquisitions and mergers. For example, in recent months:

• SAP acquired Successfactors, which previously incorporated Inform, CubeTree, YouCalc, Jambok, Nuvosoft, Plateau, and Jobs2Web.
• Oracle acquired Taleo. Taleo had already assimilated Recruitforce.com, WWC, Vurv, JobFlash, Learn.com, WetFeet, White Amber, Cytiva, and Jobpartners.
• Bedford Funding acquired Peoplefluent, which had previously acquired Peopleclick, itiliti, Hire.com, Optimum HR, Criterion Incorporated, PRI Associates, Authoria, Claybrooke & Associates, Advanced Information Management, Inc., and Aquire.

Prior to the consolidation wave occurring during the last few years, most HCM vendors were more or less niche vendors. In fact, the novelty of HCM solutions still permits the emergence of new niche vendors, a phenomenon that does not occur in more mature markets like ERP, where the appearance of brand-new niche vendors is rare. Read the rest of this entry »

Like it or not, gamification is here to stay and help bolster user engagement. Employee engagement has become the holy grail in private companies and government agencies, as numerous studies show that engaged employees are far more productive, and stay longer than their non-engaged peers. Companies are increasingly using gamification to reward and recognize both their trading partners and their employees.

When gamification capabilities are added to social software, the idea is for companies to access data and analytics that should provide much needed insight into employee behavior, and then reward employees in a way that increases their commitment to what they are doing while also keeping them aligned with company goals. To that end, Socialtext, a renowned provider of enterprise social software, announced its partnership with Badgeville, the leading gamification and behavior management platform, to infuse gamification capabilities into its variety of applications, widgets, and mobile tools.

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Oracle presented new features for its customer experience service platform, RightNow CX Cloud Service. The release allows organizations to engage customers via multiple channels thanks to the newly introduced integration between Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service and Oracle Engagement Engine Cloud Service. Read the rest of this entry »

Today Blackboard announced two new mobile applications: an app for users of Blackboard MyConnect (a mass notification service) and mobile student debit accounts.

The former allows users to receive and personalize their messaging options from their mobile devices. This app is targeted at individuals who are or desire to be subscribed to Blackboard MyConnect groups—topic-based subscription lists provided by their institutions. Read the rest of this entry »

In November 2012, Revionics, Inc., a cloud-based provider of merchandise optimization solutions, acquired SkuLoop, a provider of social commerce-driven promotions for retailers and consumer brands, from GIIV, Inc. Revionics’ solutions use predictive analytics and demand-based science to help retailers obtain the best results across all touchpoints in the multi-channel shopping realm—online, in-store, social, and mobile—by  aiding with decisions in product, price, promotion, placement, and space allocation. Read the rest of this entry »

Zendesk has revealed new updates for its Salesforce-based product. Zendesk’s goal is to achieve seamless integration between its own customer support application and Salesforce for enhanced customer experience. Read the rest of this entry »

TEC is pleased to announce that DEACOM Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution by Deacom, Inc. is now TEC Certified, and available as part of the online evaluation of ERP solutions in the Process Manufacturing (ERP) Evaluation Center. Read the rest of this entry »

On December 4, 2012, Pegasystems (a.k.a. Pega), a prominent business process management (BPM) and customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions provider, announced its new Pega Process Extender offering. The product aims to enable organizations to leverage their SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications with new work automation and user experience capabilities. Pega has significant experience complementing SAP ERP applications, and large enterprises can now take advantage of all of Pega’s BPM, dynamic case management, and next-best-action predictive analytics solutions to unlock and leverage their data, logic, and processes in SAP.

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The traditional Microsoft Dynamics Fall Analyst Event (FAE) 2012 started with a tour of the flagship Microsoft Store in an opulent mall in Bellevue, WA, where Windows 8 and Surface were all the rage. Read the rest of this entry »

In an analyst webinar, Workday announced Update 18 of its Workday solution, which proposes enhancements for financial management, workforce engagement, performance management, and flexibility. In 2012, Workday had three significant updates demonstrating sustained efforts to advance its product at a fast pace. Furthermore, the update contains more than 100 new items, 60 of which address client feedback that was collected through the Workday’s Brainstorm online customer community. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, Apriso announced general availability of FlexNet 9.6, its next generation manufacturing software platform that offers much more than traditional manufacturing execution systems (MES) in terms of digital manufacturing. Namely, FlexNet 9.6 more readily supports conversion to paperless manufacturing environments, whereby enhanced role-based electronic work instructions (eWI) can more easily be updated by business users, without the need for IT staff to be involved. Read the rest of this entry »

Deacom, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution developer, announced yesterday that its client Synalloy has decided to expand its Deacom ERP system to another division. Being a holding company, Synalloy operates five separate business units mainly related to the production of steel, alloys metal, plastic pipes manufacturing, and some specific chemical solutions. One of the business divisions has been a client of Deacom for years, and I would guess that the division has a great deal of experience both with the software and with the vendor. Read the rest of this entry »

Centrify has introduced a new Windows Azure cloud-based offering for identity management—Centrify DirectControl for SaaS. The product goes beyond identity management solutions and provides comprehensive unified identity services across an organization’s mobile, cloud, and data center infrastructures. The product leverages existing Microsoft Active Directory investments and allows a company to extend the management across a broad range of systems, mobile devices, and applications. Read the rest of this entry »