This week BMC announced it had secured the purchase of ITM Software, a business management provider. BMC is a publically traded data center automation company that competes directly with CA Inc, HP, and IBM. It’s clients include DELL, Home Depot, and Toyota. Over the past two years, BMC has been busy snapping up different IT companies, such as Proactive Net (June 2007), RealOps (July 2007), and Emprisa Networks (October 2007). It’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Bengal Acquisition Corporation acquired 96.7% interest in BladeLogic. Read the rest of this entry »
Consona claims to be one of the market’s rare CRM offerings that is both operational and collaborative, with many years of a broad range of consulting, technical, and business process services that have created the related methodology and blueprint.
Consona CRM Portfolio
The vendor believes that it offers the best value for price in the market due to the extensive product’s flexibility and adaptability, ease of customization, configuration, integration and upgrades, and due to the depth of the product’s extensibility.
These capabilities come from the combination of Onyx Adaptive CRM (i.e., BPM, BI, SFA, customer service, customer data management and customer data integration [CDI]), KNOVA (i.e., self-service and knowledge management [KM]) and the partnership with Million Handshakes (part of Portrait Software) for marketing automation. Read the rest of this entry »
While most discussions about the Software as a Service (SaaS) market revolve around the likes of Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Google, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, OpSource, etc., the name Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) rarely comes to mind, unjustifiably.
While Progress itself is to blame in part for a less aggressive marketing effort (and for the-best-kept-secret-in-the-market status), it is still puzzling that the Bedford, Massachusetts (US)-based provider of application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration, and management of business applications is not more regularly mentioned within the press and analyst circles.
A company that was founded in 1981 and with about US$500 million in revenues in 2007, with over 110,000 customer sites and over 2,000 employees in 90 offices worldwide certainly deserves due attention. This is especially the case given the company’s long espoused goal to maximize the benefits of information technology (IT) while minimizing its complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO). Read the rest of this entry »
Going through our article archives, I stumbled across Glen Petersen’s excellent article A Lexicon for CRM Success.
Petersen takes aim at key buzzwords in the CRM industry, and I thought it’d be worth summarizing his list of the worst offenders–and his thinking about why they belong in the trash can.
Laws a’mercy, now that’s what you call a flame war.
The White Paper Pundit has taken direct aim at our Top 10 Most Ambiguous White Paper Buzzwords, decrying our use of the word “tool” to refer to so-called software “solutions.”
Anyone who’s ever been involved in choosing enterprise software knows it’s not an easy job. It takes months of preparation that involves gathering information from various departments, mapping business processes, preparing a business case, interviewing stakeholders, and getting buy-in from executives and users on the project. And that’s only the beginning!
But whose job is it to do all of this anyway? It’s often assumed that someone in IT (a technical professional) will be responsible for it. Other assumed targets are the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), the Chief Technical Officer (CTO), and sometimes even the Chief Financial Officer (CFO)—depending on the type of enterprise software that is required. But believe it or not, most often the person that is handed the title of software selection “Project Manager” or “Project Champion” is just an ordinary Joe—(or Jane to be politically correct)—a department manager or project coordinator who knows the organization’s business processes like the back of their hand. While he (or she) may not have any particular technical expertise, he may certainly be able to add value to the project by knowing the business. So, why not; who better to handle this type of job, than someone like that?
Which brings me to the point of my story… Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s face it; we’ve all had to deal with pushy salespeople.
How do they always get you to buy stuff—even when it’s something you didn’t need? It’s called the sales pitch. Every salesperson has one, and software vendors are no exception. In fact, they have several ways of pitching their products.
One such way is through a white paper—which often discusses particular problems that many companies may be facing. At the same time, it gives vendors the opportunity to enlighten you about the one possible solution that can “fix it.” However informative it may be, ultimately a white paper is a cleverly written sales pitch—a pitch containing certain buzzwords that gloss over the practical realities of their solution.
Here are ten of the most ambiguous buzzwords I’ve seen used in white papers—and they may make you think twice about whether or not a software vendor is truly focusing on your best interests.
Another buzzword (albeit not another three letter acronym [TLA]) that has slowly (or not) but surely crept into our collective mind is certainly Web 2.0. Although there have been some attempts at defining the term, such as at Wikipedia, ZDNet or TechTarget (and there are also some noble attempts of ZDNet bloggers, such as Richard MacManus or David Berlind), it is most likely that 10 different folks will provide 10 different interpretations (albeit most of these will revolve around mentioning wikis, blogs, AJAX, mashups, JavaScript, podcasts, social networking and so on).
Generally, I would venture to say any website that uses a little more interactive and dynamic technology (i.e. not just publishing “flat” HyperText Markup Language [HTML] pages) and supports some kind of online commerce, community, or other value-added activity that is enabled by the network would have Web 2.0 traits. But, is it still more buzzword than anything else, and is it being used to put “lipstick on a lot of pigs” even now?
Or, is Web 2.0 a genuine set of technologies that can even provide the “richness” of traditional desktop applications (read Microsoft Office) to the Web-based applications, without all the price and/or performance pitfalls/traps that are often associated with Office Business Applications (OBA)? At least we need to keep a close eye on how the next generation of office workers are using social networking sites/communities like Tagging, Facebook, Twitter, Instant Messenger (IM), etc., as they can give us a clue how effective collaboration should be driven into next generation of enterprise applications (of course, provided the security and privacy standards have been met). Read the rest of this entry »
Acronyms seem really convenient, at first.
It’s great using ERP instead of enterprise resource planning, for example.
You save precious time (not typing enterprise resource planning a million times) and there’s no way your reader won’t understand what ERP means, right?
Well, for ERP this may be true, but all acronyms are not as tidy as they appear.
What about BPM, for example? Does it stand for business process management or business performance management or business process modeling?
Aha…the troubles begin. Read the rest of this entry »
This Is For All Us Writers Out There: Oh, and All Us Readers Too!
Do you ever feel like you need a jargon buster just to understand what some companies are saying about their software products?
I know I’ve needed one, and often still do.
I am a content writer and editor for TEC and the learning curve was pretty steep when I started. I mean what is functionality, scalability, dynamic lead time, run time, and then there are features and functions…enough to boggle the mind!
How many people really know what these words actually mean?
Not what they think these words might mean or what they sound like they mean in a certain context, but what they really and truly mean.
Well, it’s part of my job to know. And if I can’t explain it in plain English, I can’t use it.
And how many times have I read a white paper and realized that if all the buzzwords were removed it would be half the length (and comprehensible).
I’ve collected some great examples along the way.
Here’s one:
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