Infor recently announced the release of Infor Automotive Exchange v11.0 and Infor Supplier Exchange v11.3, two products that deliver embedded industry-required collaboration throughout the automotive supplier value chain. Infor Automotive Exchange (previous version 10.3 and previous product name AutoConnect) provides automotive suppliers with connectivity with their OEM and up-tier customers, whereas Infor Supplier Exchange (previous version 11.2 and previous product name SupplyWEB) provides connectivity with their downstream supply chain.

Both solutions are generally available now, and are integrated with Infor ION, Infor’s purpose-built integration solution built on industry standards, and a part of the Infor 10x technology platform. The idea is to create an automotive industry solution suite, which provides the connectivity, capabilities, and user experience required for the automotive industry.

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 Jive introduces new iPad, iPhone and Android apps to support the demands of mobile users to generate content and access communication and collaboration tools.

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A major announcement at the PTC Live Global 2013 conference was that PTC Creo design and analysis applications will soon be available and supported in a Virtual Desktop environment. In design and manufacturing environments today, corporations need to have the ability to get global teams up and running quickly in new locations, and they need all teams to be able to easily access the latest software installation by updating from a single server. Virtualization of PTC Creo design and analysis applications can help IT managers accomplish this. Read the rest of this entry »

Market conditions are driving requirements for visibility and control across global operations and supply chains, as witnessed by a number of recent E2open wins. In today’s increasingly digital world, supply chain leaders are delivering competitive advantage to their customers by sharing critical information across their vast supplier networks more quickly and efficiently through the cloud. During the recently held IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit, IBM announced a four-year contract with CEVA Logistics to accelerate business delivery results for its customers through a new cloud-based information exchange for its supply network.

CEVA Logistics, a non-asset-based supply chain management (SCM) company, designs and implements solutions for large and medium-sized national and multinational companies in the automotive, consumer, retail, healthcare, pharmaceutical, industrial, and technology sectors. Their customers’ profitability and customer service reputation rely on how fast they can orchestrate their supply chain to take parts and products produced in multiple regions and assemble and ship them around the world. Read the rest of this entry »

It would be an understatement to say that Red Hat is an interesting enterprise software company. Since its founding in 1994 and initial public offering (IPO) in 1999, the vendor has focused on businesses and divisions thereof that embrace open-source computing tools. In 2001, Red Hat introduced Enterprise Linux, a “frozen” mature version of Linux whose support and maintenance the vendor could guarantee (for a fee) until the next mature version would be officially released (say, a few years later). This approach shields users from the potential disruptions of continual enhancements that the open-source community keeps bringing to the Linux kernel. Read the rest of this entry »

Both individuals and businesses are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by passwords, because passwords are still the dominant form of user authentication. To manage their burgeoning password portfolios (especially those passwords that must change every once in a while due to corporate practices) users have developed poor practices by storing passwords in spreadsheets, text documents, and other volatile and vulnerable sources. To make things worse, they share them without protection, and they reuse mnemonic passwords that are easy to remember and thus are usually weak.

Soon after announcing Zoho Pulse, a social networking software, Zoho announced Zoho Vault, a secure (as its name suggests) online password manager for teams and businesses. Zoho Vault establishes a central repository that offers data privacy for companies that want to store, organize, manage, and safely share their passwords, online credentials, financial records, and other sensitive information. In addition, the Zoho Vault iPhone app lets users access passwords anywhere, any time, even when there is no Internet connection (via a secure offline access mechanism for passwords and sensitive information).

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The market for collaborative social networking software is getting ever hotly contested. Not long after Moxie Software announced its free Collaboration Spaces offering, Zoho, a provider of online productivity, collaboration, and business applications for businesses of all sizes, also decided to challenge the establishment of Jive Software, Microsoft Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, IBM Connections, and other prominent social software providers.

Zoho recently announced the launch of Zoho Pulse, its social network with which companies can establish their own private social networks to encourage communication and collaboration among the entire organization as well as select departments and users. Employees can stay on top of what’s going on within the organization through Zoho Pulse iPhone and Android mobile applications. You can see an online video tour of the product here.

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E2open, a provider of cloud-based solutions for collaborative execution across global trading networks, recently announced the addition of E2 Rapid Resolutions to extend E2open’s flagship E2open Business Network with cross-network prescriptive analytics for decision support. More than 35,000 trading partners, with over 108,000 unique registered users, currently participate in the E2open Business Network, which allows participants to access and share data and execute business processes in a secure and real-time manner. The network also provides collaboration tools and analytics so that E2open customers can make more informed and efficient decisions.

E2 Rapid Resolutions leverages E2open’s cloud-based network and process layers, as well as common integration and data models for continuous monitoring, earlier detection, and faster resolution of supply chain disruptions. With faster, more intelligent responses, companies can reduce lead times and costs. In combination with E2 Process Management, which identifies current and projected exceptions across the network using predictive analytics, E2 Rapid Resolutions performs single-sweep operations to measure the scope and impact of such disruptions.

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E2open, a provider of strategic cloud-based solutions for collaborative execution across global trading networks, seems to be on a roll of late. After its recent big wins at Yanfeng Visteon and HP, the company has announced that Konecranes, a provider of lifting solutions as well as services for lifting equipment and machine tools, has selected E2open as its collaborative execution platform, and that the program has gone live with Konecranes’ supply base.

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Similar to the Ariba LIVE conference last year, one of the main themes at the Ariba LIVE 2013 conference was again that Ariba, now an SAP company, is making it easier than ever for companies to connect to the Ariba Network and collaborate. Accordingly, Ariba and Dell Boomi announced that they are teaming up to deliver pre-packaged integration as a service offering for selling organizations.

Designed to simplify and speed up integration to the Ariba Network, the Ariba Integration Connector, powered by Dell Boomi Integration Packs, aims to enable companies to collaborate more efficiently. The first available connector, which integrates with Intuit QuickBooks, was officially unveiled at Ariba LIVE 2013. Additional connectors to enable sellers who own Microsoft Dynamics GP and Sage 50 (a.k.a., Sage Peachtree) to integrate with the Ariba Network are planned to be released later this year.

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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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According to an ABC News/Time magazine/Washington Post poll, in very large US urban and metro areas, the average commuter spends US$16 and 52 minutes going 32 miles round trip to work each day. Long solo commutes can cost employees and their organizations in lost productivity, wasted resources, and additional expenses. In addition, many of these miserable commuters spend the rest of their workday without much interaction with their coworkers.

To that end, SAP recently introduced TwoGo by SAP, a mobile and cloud carpooling annual subscription solution that allows companies to engage their employees in ride-sharing to work. Read the rest of this entry »

Retailers are vital to the global economy, responsible for 18 percent of the US GDP while supporting more than 41 million jobs in the US alone. It’s no secret that Microsoft Dynamics AX has marked retail as one of its focus industries, and early in 2013 Microsoft announced the latest release of Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail that offers new capabilities to help retailers deliver a complete shopping experience through search-based e-commerce, new point of sale (POS) capabilities, and an omni-channel commerce engine.

But many important functional pieces will still have to be delivered by partners. Most recently, EdgeAX, a unit of Visionet Systems, Inc., announced the general availability of its apparel product lifecycle management (PLM) solution that is embedded in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and harnesses the underlying technology.

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Conventional wisdom would imply that a software company that changes its owners and CEO in the same year might be in some kind of trouble or facing stormy waters. But, Deltek vigorously claims that nothing is farther from the truth. Quite the contrary, in fact—via its 2012 acquisition by Thoma Bravo, Deltek believes it has found a dedicated and committed financial backer. In addition, there was nothing sinister in Deltek’s CEO change in late 2012. After a transformational seven-plus years with Deltek, former CEO Kevin Parker left the company under his own volition. Seven-and-a-half years is a nice run at an enterprise software company, and Parker felt that it was the right time for him to step back a bit after accomplishing a lot of the goals he set out to accomplish back in 2005 (plus, he might have begun to miss the US West Coast where he hails from).

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Sage North America yesterday announced the results of its mobile device survey, which recently polled 490 small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in the United States. The Sage SMB Survey on Mobile Devices showed that employees accessed work-related information when they were not in the office most commonly using laptops (80 percent) and smartphones (81 percent), followed by tablets (57 percent).

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