Over the last few years I have produced a number of articles and blog entries on two once-independent and occasionally competing products: Agresso Business World (ABW) and CODA Financials. Since early 2008, these two products and their related owner companies have become siblings within the Unit 4 Agresso parent.

Unit 4 Agresso is a Netherlands-based business software company that has grown since its inception in 1980 in great part via several mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The company offers a number of regional products for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) that are deployed mainly in the Benelux region. In addition, the vendor offers local business applications that are sold in Norway, Sweden, the UK, Germany, and Spain.

However, most of Unit 4 Agresso’s revenue is still derived from the Agresso Business World (ABW) product line. ABW [evaluate this product] is a non-manufacturing enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite targeted at upper midsize service-centric enterprises, and Unit 4 Agresso acquired it in August 2000 through a merger with the former Norwegian ERP vendor Agresso.

Agresso Nowadays

Thus, for the rest of this blog post, I will use the shorter “Agresso” name to denote the entire company. Agresso completed the CODA acquisition throughout 2008, which now makes it the sixth largest mid-market ERP vendor worldwide according to IDC. In 2008, the company had about US$ 550 million in revenues and 3,500 employees, and was operating in 19 countries in 3 continents around the world. Read the rest of this entry »

I have done blog posts lately on how some supply chain management (SCM) applications could fare in a down economy. One was about pricing optimization solutions while the other one was about how sourcing and procurement can help enterprises in a down economy. But in the meantime the global credit crunch has dawned with a vengeance.

This has not only promoted the economic downturn and recession into possible prospects of a depression, but has also recently had economics and/or political pundits ranting and raving all over the cable news, pro or contra the governments’ rescue (or bailout) measures (the two terms have been used depending on how someone views those state intervention measures). While I personally was not particularly in favor of rescuing via Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) those Wall Street crooks and inept misfits (and I’ve never been fond of the $20 martini drinks and $40 valet parking prices in New York City), it is difficult to neglect the other side that needs help.

Namely, it was appalling to watch the politicians’ inability to initially explain the true burning issue: the financial market’s unavailability of the short-term lines of credits that companies use regularly to make payroll, procure stuff, keep inventory, etc. Read the rest of this entry »