Teradata recently announced a new version of its Aster Discovery Platform, which contains important enhancements to the existing functionality set, aiming to deal with the analysis of big data.

The Teradata Aster Discovery Platform addresses the issues associated with an organization’s big data analytics requirements and aims to reduce the difficulties associated with deploying and managing big data analytics initiatives (from data collection to visualization and consumption). Read the rest of this entry »

Process industries often find the sophisticated software products from Aspen Technology (a.k.a., AspenTech) quite functional and useful in catering to their complex supply chain planning (SCP), manufacturing execution, and engineering process optimization needs. The vendor has about 1,500 companies in the energy, chemical, construction, and pharmaceutical industries as its customers (its name, curiously, stands for “Advanced System for Process Engineering”). In fact, had BP used the Aspen HYSYS petroleum process simulation software, it is likely that it wouldn’t have attempted the costly and ineffective “top kill” attempt to stop the Gulf of Mexico oil leak of 2010.

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In part 1 of this series, we took a look at IBS, some of the challenges the company was facing, and its software oferings for the business community. To discuss the aforementioned issues (see part 1) and IBS’ ongoing turnaround, we recently spoke to Doug Braun, the chief executive officer (CEO) of IBS. As CEO, Mr. Braun is responsible for translating business needs into products that solve customer supply chain problems.

TEC: How would you describe IBS’s current state of affairs? Read the rest of this entry »

Snippets of recent supply chain news…

Quintiq, dually headquartered in the Netherlands and Philadelphia, announced this week that Republic Steel has selected Quintiq for campaign planning, order promising, finite capacity planning, inventory optimization, detailed scheduling, and sequencing optimization. Read the rest of this entry »

Hydro One Networks, a planning, construction, operations, and maintenance provider for transmission and distribution networks in Ontario recently selected the Space-Time Insight Situational Intelligence suite to provide a consistent and comprehensive view of asset risks and priorities to help operators and field service crews to collaborate and improve lifecycle decisions over all maintenance planning of their grid. Read the rest of this entry »

Canali, word-famous Italian men’s clothing brand, has selected Microsoft Dynamics AX for its US operations. Business in North America must be going quite well, as the company has decided to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software application that would serve the entire region.

All Canali’s factories are in Italy (and the fact that it has not moved its manufacturing operations to lower-wage countries is worth some respect). Since Canali does not conduct any manufacturing in the US, the software selection case was limited to coordination of distribution channels and retail and wholesale operations. Read the rest of this entry »

While opportunities for new or replacement product lifecycle management (PLM) systems at large enterprises are rare, neither is the small to medium business (SMB) market fully exploited. To that end, PTC recently announced the release of PTC Windchill PDM Essentials, the company’s product data management (PDM) software.

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On February 26, KeyedIn™ Solutions formally launched its new KeyedIn Manufacturing cloud solution at the Houstex manufacturing conference in Houston, Texas. KeyedIn Manufacturing is the latest entrant into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) for small to medium businesses (SMBs) space. TEC wanted to get more background on the product and had the opportunity to speak with Karen Adame, chief product officer at KeyedIn Solutions. We’ll share some highlights from that discussion here. Read the rest of this entry »

Vitria, a software provider of operational intelligence solutions recently released version 4 of its Operational Intelligence suite, which includes several enhancements of its existing capabilities but, more importantly, offers new capabilities for real-time analytics for big data, enabling the analysis of continuous flows of large amounts of data. Read the rest of this entry »

Several years ago enterprise applications market observers might have talked about Sweden’s “Three I” enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors: Intentia, IFS, and IBS. While hardly anyone has ever questioned those publicly traded vendors’ industry savvy and product functionality, all three of them have struggled with stagnant growth and red ink for the major part of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The first one is no longer an independent company and is now part of Infor, after first merging with Lawson Software in 2005. IFS seems to be doing very well of late as still an independent publicly traded company, after undergoing its own thorough soul searching and regrouping a few years back. After refocusing on only asset-intensive and project-centric industries as well as via a few non-taxing acquisitions in the field service management (FSM) space, IFS has lately had an array of impressive customer wins. Read the rest of this entry »

While it may not be surprising that IFS has lately had a streak of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and enterprise asset management (EAM) wins in its traditional asset-intensive industries, it is interesting to note that some recent wins and expanded project footprints are in the realm of field service management (FSM). IFS has tackled this attractive software category via the recent acquisitions of Metrix and 360 Scheduling (see the related article for more details).

In late 2012, IFS won an Asian telecom company. In January 2013, IFS announced that the seventh largest Pepsi-Cola franchise company in the US is expanding its footprint with the IFS Metrix Service Management Mobile solution. Read the rest of this entry »

SAP announced on Friday evening its intention to (finally) acquire SmartOps, a move much anticipated for some time. The most enduring mystery about this is not that it happened, or why, but why SAP waited so long to make the move.

SmartOps had established a leading position in the inventory optimization space, and had obviously formed a very close relationship with SAP, who realized long ago that SmartOps fulfilled a very real supplementary inventory optimization capability to the SAP suite.

After wrestling early on with the pros and cons of linking its fortunes to a single vendor, SmartOps, has betrayed no second thoughts since announcing its appointment as an SAP reseller in mid-2009. Read the rest of this entry »

To ERP, or not to ERP, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous ERP vendors,
Or to take arms against a cloud of component solutions…

Whether your organization is looking to take the leap into an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for the first time or seeking to add to the current ERP system’s functionality, the words of the Bard of Avon (updated for the present day) might be considered before making your decision. No longer does an organization have to be bound to a one-size-fits-all ERP solution. One can pick and choose from the best of the best from ERP component vendors to fit their needs.

ERP as a Suite of Components
When you look at an ERP system, it can be viewed as a set of functional component modules that, when put together, provide the entire suite of enterprise functionality needed by your organization. Read the rest of this entry »

CRM analyst Raluca Druta interviews TEC’s marketing specialist.

Recently, the task of selecting customer relationship management (CRM) software tools appears to reside in the front yard of the chief marketing officer (CMO). Is this a natural evolution of the CMO’s job responsibilities?

It makes sense. The CMO is responsible for making the most of the data that passes through the CRM system. But to do that, the marketing department relies on all kinds of tools that aren’t necessarily part of the CRM system itself. The CMO is the best person to advocate for a system that plays nicely with other marketing software. Read the rest of this entry »

After making it available for preview some months ago, Microsoft is now officially launching Outlook.com, Microsoft’s new free e-mail service. According to Microsoft, in its preview stage Outlook.com grew from 0 to 60 million users in six months. With this addition, Microsoft wants to offer e-mail users a fresh user experience—one that’s more intuitive and capable of be used transparently with all major mobile and personal computing devices.

What will happen to Hotmail users? According to Microsoft, every Hotmail user will be progressively upgraded to Outlook.com, transferring their address, password, and contacts.

Additionally to this, Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger users will need to migrate to Skype, as the messenger service will be phased out.

Will Outlook.com be able to compete with offerings such as Gmail?  Have a comment or feedback on outlook.com? Please drop us a line.