Step away from the decision–let’s look at the meta-selection. The SageCircle blog features some recent posts on selecting analyst services. So here we are, TEC, guiding all sorts of people in their selection processes for software, recommending best practices, developing custom research, etc., and the interesting thing (if I read the SageCircle blog correctly) is that our recommended software selection best practices can be applied for clients seeking analyst services, of the sort we offer, hence a meta-selection.

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We’re seeking a couple research analysts to join our team in Montreal (our headquarters).

Essentially we’d like additional research analysts for enterprise software subjects such as BI, asset management, ERP, etc. Candidates must be able to apply critical thinking skills to all aspects of their research.

If the following job description interests you, please contact us.

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The Hague Declaration, recently published by The Digital Standards organization, proposes that all governments adhere to free and open standards for IT activities. Something that strikes me about Digistan’s declaration is its basis in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and not a technical document. The three things The Hague Declaration calls on all governments to do, are as follows. Read the rest of this entry »

Consulting firm, 180 Systems, posted a little note regarding an article we recently published on some parts of the evaluation and selection process that we promote. I’d recommend checking out the 180 site for additional information. In fact they have a brief list of steps that tend to be very similar to commonly recognized selection best-practices, and are in many ways, close to what we at TEC recommend (more on that later as we’re preparing to publish our internal guide). 180 Systems has a few perspectives to contribute on the subject and that’s why I’m surprised they didn’t say something more critically astute in their post, which I cited above. Read the rest of this entry »

The ZDNet article on PLM/BPM vendor, Aras, covers reasons this former proprietary vendor decided to open source its Innovator products. Two points that stuck out for me, concern what open sourcing enabled Aras to do. Read the rest of this entry »

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) issued a press release on its newly published Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3. This license affects the modification and distribution of software oriented toward Web-based services.

The popular adoption of Web-based applications as an alternate to in-house software implementations has meant that free and open source software developed for web-based usage can be picked up by companies outside of the ones that originally developed the software, modify it, and foist it upon the world as a new business without necessarily contributing the modifications back to the project. That is a bone of contention for many. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an update on new TEC vendor ratings and certifications. If you’re currently evaluating or researching ERP, business process management (BPM), or product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, here’s what we have new for you. Reports are available as well as in-depth rating evaluations in the evaluation centers. Here are the new items.

TEC published up-to-date information for version 4 of Omnify’s Empower PLM. Some areas in which the product’s functionality focuses help to integrate product design changes with the production process, product data vaulting and management, and configuration management.

Polymita’s BPM Suite joined our business process management knowledge base. The product focuses in part on modeling, workflow, and security functionality.

If you’re researching ERP solutions for discrete, process, or mixed-mode industries, I’d like to announce that TEC analysts recently certified the Logo Business Solutions’ Unity system.

Finally, to continue on the different variants of ERP systems, a new name recently entered the enterprise software space, Solarsoft. Its products however, have a history represented in the merger of vendors CMS and XKO Software. We’re offering six different reports on these products.

I’ve seen a lot of press about the open source telephony system, Asterisk. Although I haven’t worked in the telephony world for some time, I remember what it was like administering those systems years ago in a midsize company that handled large event ticket sales.

We ran some systems on OS/2 and for larger ACD call center requirements, Unix. These were not inexpensive systems. If I go to AsteriskNOW.org, now I can download a specialized Linux distribution that installs as an easy-to-set-up PBX system. Since TEC’s current newsletter issue is focusing on telephony issues, I figured I’d post a bit about the open source side.

The Asterisk project originates with a company called Digium, which looks like the center of a whirlwind of related activity. IP telephony vendors claim that one of the benefits they offer is a reduction in costs that would normally be incurred from toll services, and this message is frequently targeted toward small and medium businesses. So if you combine that with some of the other common open source advantages, you get an interesting product to consider. Read the rest of this entry »

I just saw this announcement about Compiere’s 11 new demos. The company is offering a sneak peek of its next generation Web-architecture. While watching the first demo, I notice it really stresses ease-of-use in the interface.

Whether others agree that it’s easy to use or not, I don’t know but, but it is interesting that Compiere publicly asked for feedback in its public forum on the subject. A few days ago I posted about some debates taking place on the user-friendliness of enterprise software. I suggested that getting the software development process to incorporate greater open communications like in open source projects, could help improve the user-friendliness. Well this is a real live example of just that.

People often ask us “what’s the difference between process and discrete ERP?” We model both systems in such a way that they share many common components, nevertheless process manufacturing industries have unique requirements that differ from discrete manufacturing industries. Here’s a rough overview of the difference.

A quick definition from APICS (The Association for Operations Management) describes discrete manufacturing as “The production of distinct items such as automobiles, appliances, or computers.” Whereas process manufacturing covers “Production that adds value by mixing, separating, forming, and/or performing chemical reactions. It may be done in either batch or continuous mode.” Now let’s look at a few examples. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re looking for web content management systems (WCM), I have some stats that might help you key into the features you’d expect to come standard.

Here is how vendors offering web content management systems support the functionality in our model of WCM systems. These stats are based on the averages of 11441 product functionality ratings of the vendors published within our WCM knowledge base. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you still read tech/business industry e-mail newsletters? In the early days of the Web, I remember going to a conference talking about the importance of developing an e-mail newsletter to communicate with customers. Now, many people simply mark the newsletters they receive as spam. A lot of e-mail services automatically mark legitimate newsletters as spam too. Are e-mail newsletters no longer useful as communication or news formats?

To publish a successful e-mail newsletter, I think you’ve got to provide something that people feel is worth subscribing to. Once you’ve accomplished that, you have to get it to them, which isn’t as simple as firing off a message from your e-mail program. Among many technical considerations, it has to get through a gauntlet of spam filtering systems that could incorrectly flag you, the sender, as a spammer.

Today, we launched a new format for the TEC Newsletter. It’s our attempt to see if we can make our newsletter more valuable to those reading it. I’d like to mention a few of the changes we made and find out whether people think we’re on the right track. Read the rest of this entry »

Newly published TEC ratings are available for a number of software vendors. Individual reports are available for purchase, or you can review the ratings in-depth using the evaluation centers. Here’s a quick rundown of the updates.

Take note if you’re in the process of evaluating any of the following systems.

• enterprise resource planning (ERP) for process manufacturing industries
• customer relationship management (CRM)
• enterprise financial software

Our public data on the BatchMaster ERP system is now up-to-date as of version 8.10, which targets medium enterprises in pharmaceutical, chemical, paint, food and beverage industries.

Version 2.0 of Vertical Marketing’s crmEZ.net covers a range of features, in particular account and contact management and opportunity management.

Following up on the financial system updates from last week, we have two more updates, this time from Infor. Our financial system knowledge base now holds the latest data on both Infor Masterpiece (previously SSA Global) and FMS SunSystems eXFM products (previously Systems Union).

I just read Khoi Vinh’s quacking cow dolphin post (by way of Nicholas Carr’s blog) about how unfriendly he thinks enterprise software is (both posts are generating insightful commentary). Vinh makes a point about enterprise applications not receiving the same sort of wide-spread critiques that popular commodity applications do. He attributes this to the idea that the software is used by a less-varied base of people, which aren’t very likely to be merciless with their feedback. He says

“Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users.”

I suppose that could often be the case, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I can think of at least two ways that situation doesn’t have to come to pass. Read the rest of this entry »

I received an e-mail notice today about Cofundos, a “community innovation & funding” site, which launched last week. Cofundos looks like one possible solution to an often murky area in the open source software space: how to continue fueling development.

Suppose you find some open source software useful but it doesn’t have commercial backing devoting regular developers (for example, Red Hat or Compiere) to its well-being, and suppose you don’t want to employ developers internally to improve, fix, or modify it, then no matter its utility, a lot of people or companies might be wary about relying on it in any larger-scale sense–who can they go to if they have a problem? Read the rest of this entry »