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 »

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 »

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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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 »

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 »

E2open is a leading provider of cloud-based solutions for collaborative execution across global trading networks—more than 33,000 trading partners in 69 countries currently participate in the E2open Business Network. On November 15, 2012, E2open announced the availability of the newest version of E2 Cloud Connectivity, the foundation layer of the E2open Business Network. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether pandering to their voting blocks, politicians in this election cycle often say that most innovation takes place in small businesses. Indeed, how many times have we heard a statement to the effect of “The entrepreneurial spirit is a critical part of the global workforce and gross domestic product”? Yet small to medium business (SMB)-driven innovation often gets overlooked, as large companies have much more marketing muscle and public interest. The same holds in the enterprise software space, where Google, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, salesforce.com, Facebook, NetSuite, etc., first come to mind as the major technology innovators.

Not many think of Intuit Inc., a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for small and midsized businesses, as a tireless innovator. Perhaps many folks think that good accounting (well beyond a pocket calculator and spreadsheets) is not that innovation intensive? Yet, over the last several years, Intuit has met the challenges of innovating in an increasingly social, mobile, and global world, as the Gen Y workforce is coming into the accounting world with similar expectations of consumer-like simplicity for business software users. Brand new Intuit customers don’t usually think of going to, say, Staples or Best Buy, and buying a CD of accounting software and uploading it onto their PC. They live their lives on their mobile phone, tablet, and the Internet. That is where business software customers of the future will be. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the major announcements at the recently held Workday Rising 2012 conference was that Workday will develop its own talent acquisition suite from scratch and deliver it  in early 2014. This is a major departure from the vendor’s signature policy not to announce any vaporware. But, during the Workday Technology Summit (which preceded the conference), Workday executives said they needed to make the announcement out of consideration for their existing customers as to what to do about their recruiting software plans. To be fair, Workday has always delivered its solutions as promised on time. Read the rest of this entry »

Out of more than 12,000 companies and subsidiaries that depend on NetSuite to run their critical business processes in the cloud, about 2,800 customers use NetSuite for running their e-commerce Web sites. More than 10 years ago the vendor introduced an e-commerce offering, which has recently evolved into a commerce-as-a-service (CaaS) offering. For the post-iPad and Facebook world it has been redesigned to deliver the type of device-agnostic commerce expected of ever-more demanding consumers. Read the rest of this entry »

Arena Solutions provides cloud-based bill of materials (BOM) and change management software for small and midsize hi-tech manufacturers. Its suite of cloud applications, including BOMControl, PartsList, and PDXViewer, enable engineering, manufacturing, and their extended supply chains to speed prototyping, reduce scrap, and streamline supply chains. Engineers looking to streamline BOM creation and management will find important new functions in the fall 2012 release of Arena Solutions’ cloud-based BOMControl system. Read the rest of this entry »

At the recently held Workday Rising 2012 conference, Workday unveiled big data analytics for its users in human resources (HR) and financial departments. Workday plans to deliver big data capabilities (with no hardware required) to map and process external data sources and streams. Read the rest of this entry »

Siemens’s Industry Automation division, which includes Siemens PLM Software, continues with its strategy of offering manufacturing organizations virtually anything they might need—from product ideation and design to actual manufacturing execution and plant automation (including even the actual hardware products from sister divisions at Siemens). Still, the giant knows that hardly any large manufacturing company will procure everything from a single vendor, and thus it is more than happy to provide customers (and even competitors) with its best-of-breed (BoB) software components. Either way, Siemens is happy to help customers make smarter product development decisions, at various lifecycle stages, leading to better products. Read the rest of this entry »

Kronos, the global leader in delivering workforce management (WFM) solutions in the cloud, is preparing for its KronosWorks 2012 conference early next week, and continues to fire on all cylinders. Tens of thousands of organizations in more than 100 countries—including more than half of the Fortune 1000—use Kronos to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity. During the recently held 15th annual HR Technology Conference & Exposition in Chicago, Kronos announced a series of enhancements to its fast-selling cloud WFM suite for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), dubbed Kronos Workforce Ready. Read the rest of this entry »

In a slew of announcements at the recently held Workday Rising 2012 user conference, one major theme has been that Workday, the cloud software company that initially started with providing human resource management system (HRMS) and which later added payroll software, now has 40 financial management customers as well (10 percent of its customer base). Most recently, the roster of Workday Financial Management customers has been joined by the University of Rochester, TripAdvisor, and J.B. Hunt.

Workday 18 Financial Management

The recently released Workday 18 had major Workday Financial Management application enhancements to bring more global capabilities to large multinational organizations, together with advanced industry-specific functionality (see the related PR). Some advancements to Workday Financial Management included the following: Read the rest of this entry »