One of the major themes at the recently held SuiteWorld 2013 conference was that NetSuite has been aggressively building a cloud partner ecosystem, the Autodesk alliance being one resounding example. During the conference, automated mobile workforce management (WFM) and optimization solutions provider ClickSoftware Technologies announced that it has partnered with NetSuite to build the ClickSoftware SuiteApp using NetSuite’s SuiteCloud Computing Platform.

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If you are a small or medium business and you haven’t heard of Zoho yet, you should check it out—the company might have an app for you, perhaps even for free. The name alludes to small office, home office, i.e., SOHO, although some products are suited to larger companies.

The Web-based mini apps of the Zoho Office Suite are a great example of the trend of the atomization of user experience. This is in tune with the Long Tail Theory, according to which companies will compete on ever-smaller and more specific product footprints and capabilities to satisfy ever-smaller niches, and all in a plug-and-play manner. Forrester has also noted a “business technology (BT)” trend, describing pervasive use by casual users in lines of business (LoBs) of technology that is increasingly managed outside the direct control of IT departments.

Certainly Zoho is fulfilling a demand for easy-to-use cloud and mobile apps for productivity, collaboration, and communication that aren’t bogged down by the need to customize and manage this functionality within an enterprise-wide system. Read the rest of this entry »

The Epicor Retail division of global business software solution provider Epicor Software Corporation provides solutions for retailers seeking to streamline processes, integrate channels, and leverage intelligence  in a variety of industries including apparel, footwear, discount, general merchandise, automotive aftermarket, lumber and building materials, nursery, and pharmacy. Epicor is the retail technology partner of choice for thousands of retailers—from Aeropostale, Aftermarket Auto Parts Alliance, and Build-A-Bear Workshop, to General Nutrition Centers, True Value Company, and Under Armour ( more details here).

New Epicor Retail Strategy
Early in 2013, Epicor unveiled a multi-year strategic plan to grow its market share and expand its global footprint in the retail technology space. While Epicor is recognized as the No.1 provider of point of sale (POS) software among the top 250 largest specialty soft goods and hard goods retailers by IHL Group, the multi-year strategic plan was designed to enable Epicor to maintain and grow its leadership position. Initially, Epicor has been focused on the following four strategic priorities: global expansion, cross-channel execution, and continuing investments in both POS and enterprise cloud technology.

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HP Enterprise Services has introduced new services designed for organizations interested in multichannel customer experience contact centers. The HP Customer Engagement as a Service (CEaaS) resulted from the integration between HP’s cloud technology and Avaya’s contact center technology.

The contact center tools comprising the solution allow users to handle social media marketing, mobile integration, and customer analytics in a single cloud-based contact center platform. Read the rest of this entry »

As NASA’s space shuttle program comes to an end and several baby boomers retire,  it can be unsettling to realize that the knowledge that sent the first man to the moon might be lost forever. But this scenario is occurring quietly all over corporate America. As boomers—one third of America’s workforce—are entering their golden years, millions of dollars’ worth of irreplaceable knowledge will be stepping aside every year.

Corporations not only can stave off this knowledge exodus, but also can hasten a knowledge influx and guarantee that knowledge will never again be static or localized to a few individuals. Moxie Software has recently launched Social Knowledgebase, which combines social collaboration technology with knowledge management, aiming to make it easy to tap into and capture knowledge sourced from individuals, groups, and even trading partners and customers.

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Coincidentally or not, my industry analyst career started at about the same time that salesforce.com was founded, back in 1999. And boy, has the vocal cloud software company had an amazing transition over the years—once dismissed as a fad-like niche sales force automation (SFA) vendor with glorified contact management capabilities, salesforce.com is now a $3 billion (USD) enterprise software powerhouse. Whether one likes salesforce.com CEO and founder Marc Benioff’s bluster or not, the vendor is now indisputably a member of the elite enterprise applications club, joining the likes of SAP, Oracle, Infor, Microsoft Dynamics, Dassault Systemes, Autodesk, and Sage Group. What more poignant example of the “old school” vs. “new school” contrast could be pointed out than the fact that Obama’s 2012 campaign used salesforce.com to monitor voters’ inquiries in real-time in the cloud while Romney’s 2012 campaign used an on-premises Oracle solution (that famously erroneously predicted a landslide victory for the Republicans).
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Intelligent scheduling optimizes your resources. Intelligent scheduling software uses predictive analytics to establish both predictable and “unpredictable” events so as to yield a realistic schedule that can be continuously optimized.

Intelligent scheduling is perhaps the most critical functionality that has been missing from the feature set for field service activities and processes in other systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise asset management (EAM), or customer relationship management (CRM). Field service management solutions have begun to emerge that include scheduling—the bottom line is that intelligent scheduling helps to ensure that paying clients are happy with the service that they receive. Read the rest of this entry »

The days of companies making serious investments in general purpose social networks and collaboration tools seem to be numbered. The true value of collaboration tools comes only via enabling particular best practices and helping solve certain issues and situations. To that end, Moxie Software, a provider of customer-centric enterprise social software, recently announced the availability of its Collaboration Spaces for free. Enterprises of all sizes can benefit from Moxie Software’s functional collaboration application (with activity streams, groups, ideation, projects, discussions, wikis, blogs, user profiles, mobility, branding, etc.), which connects employees, customers, and trusted partners to engage in business, share knowledge, and collaboration.

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For a long time, PROS Inc. was a prominent pricing management software provider for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) industries. Lately, however, the vendor has been leveraging its decades-long experience in handling large volumes of data to provide big data applications for sales effectiveness (pricing being only a part thereof). In other words, PROS now delivers prescriptive analytics and data science to help customers identify sales opportunities, develop offers, and set prices.

PROS has announced that it has signed an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with SAP to embed the SAP HANA platform with its big data apps. SAP HANA is a real-time in-memory database platform that streamlines analytics, planning, predictive, and sentiment assessments to allow business to operate in real time.

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Salesforce has announced Salesforce Social.com, a product designed for social advertising and meant to enhance Salesforce Marketing Cloud. To date, Salesforce Marketing Cloud includes social listening (Salesforce Radian6), publishing (Salesforce Buddy Media), and social advertising (Social.com). Read the rest of this entry »

At the Inforum 2013 user conference, Infor announced it has entered into a non-binding letter of intent to acquire longstanding partner TDCI Inc. Financial terms of the proposed transaction were not being disclosed and the parties expect to complete the transaction within thirty days (subject to some due diligence conditions).

Based in Columbus, Ohio, TDCI is a provider of configurator and guided selling solutions for manufacturers and distributors of customizable products and services. Read the rest of this entry »

In part 1 of this blog post series, we took a look at a major player in the field service management (FSM) market ServiceMax. In what follows is a recent question-and-answer interview with Stacey Epstein‚ vice president (VP) of marketing at ServiceMax. Read the rest of this entry »

TEC’s recent article on IFS’ recent success in the field service management (FSM) market by no means implies that other FSM players are not prospering. Indeed, one of those players is ServiceMax, which is garnering quite a bit of attention in the field service market, and more than doubles its revenues, receivables, pipeline production, and bookings each year. It also provides one of the most vibrant applications on the salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace. AppExchange currently features more than 1,700 solutions with 1.6 million installs and $700 (USD) in total revenue for salesforce.com’s ecosystem. Read the rest of this entry »

The digital intelligence solutions vendor Webtrends has introduced the Action Center platform supported by Webtrends Streams, a streaming architecture pushing real-time visitor and event-level data into marketing systems. In other words, the platform facilitates the integration of in-session and historical customer-level data into systems that marketers use including e-mail, display ad networks, SMS messaging, customer relationship management (CRM), etc. Read the rest of this entry »

ShopIgniter has announced an updated version of its Igniter platform. The solution supports brand advertising to social and mobile consumers, and consequently allows marketers to create, manage, and measure rich social media advertising campaigns.

By using typical social media functions such as search, engage, share, and comment, Igniter attempts to generate business opportunities or leads for its clients. Read the rest of this entry »