It is not surprising to hear that enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are not particularly beloved by their users. Indeed, companies are not exactly infatuated with their pricey enterprise system “toys” the way some consumers love their tablets or smartphones (not to mention the unconditional way my 5.5-year-old loves her teddy bear). So the recent InformationWeek piece on users being frustrated with their ERP purchases could have been just another article on that theme. But, what caught my eye here were the words “the UK” and “public sector.” Reportedly, more than 60 percent of IT decision makers in British local government feel their ERP investments haven’t delivered, according to a recent poll.

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TEC is pleased to announce that Coda Financials software by UNIT4 has been TEC certified and is now available for online evaluation in the TEC Accounting and Financial Packages Evaluation Center. As usual, the vendor performed an in-depth demonstration of software capabilities following a demo script suggested by TEC research analysts. So we had a good opportunity to see the system in real time, assessing its performance with requested tasks and its workflow capabilities, in addition to trying out the system’s navigation, and selected features and functions.

Netherlands-based UNIT4 is well-known as a global ERP and other business software vendor; in fact it is in the top ten mid-market ERP vendors worldwide. Its customer base is also impressive—the group has more than 6,000 clients with over 2 million users, and there have been more than 10,000 global deployments of UNIT4’s software applications.

The company has been pioneering and successfully leveraging its solution within a unique market niche of software that offers the capability of accommodating any business-related changes easier, faster, and, consequently, at a much lower cost compared to other solutions offered by competitors in the space. As such it targets a segment of the market that’s referred to as “Businesses Living IN Change” (BLINC). The change-friendly design runs through all of UNIT4’s applications. Read the rest of this entry »

Not as well known as the JRocket Marketing Grape Escape but still highly effective (and entertaining), the analyst road show organized by Judith Rothrock every year in December brings together C-level executives from SYSPRO and UNIT4 and analysts from the most important firms in the field, including Technology Evaluation Centers.

I had briefings with both SYSPRO and UNIT4. They highlighted some of their accomplishments for 2011, and made some interesting announcements. Here’s a summary of the conversations I had with the two vendors: Read the rest of this entry »

For me, the third week of December 2011 was a week of revelations of sorts in the realm of enterprise applications. Amid all the IT punditry/buzzword talk throughout the year about cloud computing, analytics, mobility, social, and in-memory, there were two concrete announcements in mid-December from two vendors that gave me pause. Both vendor product announcements are still far away from their commercial use in earnest, but their visionary nature is what had impressed the usually skeptical analyst in me (to the point of being accused of Drinking the Kool-Aid).

First, at SAP’s Influencers Summit 2011 in Boston, I learned that the much-publicized SAP HANA offering is not merely an in-memory server blade appliance for quick analytics and data crunching. Rather, it is the underpinning of SAP’s future architecture, both on-premise and in the cloud, and it is a general-purpose database in its own right. Look for an in-depth article on this topic, and you can read this 2011 review article by TEC’s analysts in the meantime.

Another revelation took place during UNIT4’s winter Boston tour in the very same week.

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Part 1 of this blog series talked about the historical background of the JRocket Marketing Grape Escape(TM) event. Grape Escape has become a June fixture over past several years, after the high traveling season to major vendors’ events subsides and before everyone takes their summer vacations. It is a signature event that showcases the intimate analyst relationships (AR) and event expertise that JRocket Marketing’s president and founder Judith Rothrock delivers to her software vendors’ client base by giving them exposure to a selected group of industry analysts.

Part 1 also analyzed the news announcements by Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce.com, followed by the testimony from its customer Wi-Fi Alliance. Part 2 analyzed the Grape Escape 2010 news announcements from Meridian Systems CEO John Bodrozic and SYSPRO US CEO Brian Stein, followed by these vendors’ customers (Walt Disney and Lee Spring, respectively).

Part 3 analyzed major news coming from UNIT4’s Agresso product line, as presented by Shelley Zapp, CEO of UNIT4 North America, and followed by the company’s higher education customer, Augsburg College.

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Part 1 of this blog series talked about the historical background of the JRocket Marketing Grape Escape(TM) event. Grape Escape has become a June fixture over past several years, right after the high traveling season to major vendors’ events subsides and before everyone takes their summer vacations. It is a signature event that showcases the intimate analyst relationships (AR) and event expertise that JRocket Marketing’s president and founder Judith Rothrock delivers to her software vendors’ client base by giving them exposure to a selected group of industry analysts.

Part 1 also analyzed the news announcements by Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce.com, followed by the testimony from its customer Wi-Fi Alliance. Part 2 analyzed the Grape Escape 2010 news announcements from Meridian Systems CEO John Bodrozic and SYSPRO US CEO Brian Stein, followed by these vendors’ customers (Walt Disney and Lee Spring, respectively).

Part 3 will analyze major news coming from UNIT4’s Agresso product line.

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Part 1 of this blog post series started with my invitation by UNIT4 (formerly Unit 4 Agresso), the second largest business applications provider in continental Europe, to attend its UK 2010 users conference. Frankly, I was a bit skeptical about what new and exciting I might see and hear about at this event in light of the vendor’s analyst tour in Boston in late 2009.

The post then discussed the recent development that preceded both the UK user conference and the Boston analyst tour (but which was not the topic of either gathering). Namely, in the fall of 2009, UNIT4’s on-demand venture, CODA 2go, evolved into FinancialForce.com, backed by both UNIT4 and Salesforce.com.

Part 2 then focused on FinancialForce.com’s strengths and potential challenges and on its step-sibling CODA-Financials’ recent developments. This final part of the series will present my observations of the recent UNIT4 user conference in the UK. 

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Part 1 of this series started with my invitation by UNIT4 (formerly Unit 4 Agresso), the second-largest business applications provider in continental Europe, to attend its UK 2010 user conference. Frankly, I was a bit skeptical about what new and exciting I might see and hear about at this event in light of the vendor’s analyst tour in Boston in late 2009.

My post then talked about another important development that preceded both the UK user conference and the Boston analyst tour (but which was not the topic of either gathering). Namely, in the fall of 2009, UNIT4’s on-demand venture, CODA 2go, evolved into FinancialForce.com, backed by both UNIT4 and Salesforce.com. The spin-off joint venture combines CODA’s 30 years of designing and building financial applications with Salesforce.com’s cloud computing development platform, Force.com.

The creation of the new entity and expanded relationship with Salesforce.com avails FinancialForce.com (and indirectly UNIT4) of many practical go-to-market and operating benefits, from branding and lead-generation to Salesforce.com providing hosting and the first-line customer support for the new offering (so that clients only have one number to call).

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February and bleak mid-winters are not exactly the high season for software user conferences in North America, and thus I accepted the invitation by UNIT4 (formerly Unit 4 Agresso), the second-largest business applications provider in continental Europe, to its UK 2010 user conference. The attraction, in addition to the Celtic Manor Resort in lush South Wales as the venue (where the 2010 Ryder Cup will take place later this year), was the fact that this was, for the first time, a unified event for both Agresso Business World (ABW) and CODA Financials customers (and customers of many other lesser-known products in the large UNIT4 family).

Frankly, I was a bit skeptical about what new and exciting I might see and hear about at this event in light of the vendor’s analyst tour in Boston in late 2009. Even that very recent analyst tour did not present any earth-shattering news compared to what I had already ascertained in my mid-2009 report on positioning of ABW, CODA, and CODA 2go within Unit 4 Agresso. 

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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 »

Part 1 of this blog series revisited Agresso’s post-implementation agility capabilities as a major tenet for the vendor’s continued growth in a hostile and depressed environment. The continued organic growth has been complemented by in-house developments, acquisitions, and/or partnerships.

More important, however, is the issue of whether Agresso has become a legitimate force to replace larger (and better known) competitors’ installations. Read the rest of this entry »

Sadly, it is not difficult for so many of us to concede that, except for maybe the historic elections in the US and the successful Olympic Games in Beijing, 2008 was a terrible and somber year. It felt long-drawn-out, and many of us will have trouble sinking it easily into oblivion.

Without even talking about our retirement funds and investments being slashed by about 40 percent (as part of a potentially more far-reaching financial crisis) or about 2.6 million jobs lost in the US only, just look at mushrooming late 2008 layoffs news at even the biggest and typically impervious enterprise applications vendors. For example, both Bruce Richardson of AMR Research and Frank Scavo of Enterprise Systems Spectator have reported in their respective December 2008 blog posts about Infor’s deliberate preparations for a downturn.

Along similar lines (although about some vendors there have been rumors rather than a public acknowledgement by the vendor) were the recent cost-cutting and restructuring moves by Sage, Consona, Lawson Software, Oracle, and Epicor Software. The market leader SAP has not yet been plagued by major layoffs per se, although there have been rumors/reports about the recently enacted stringent internal corporate-wide cost-cutting policies, such as restricted traveling, training, events, and so on.

I am indeed aware of the fact that there was no traditional SAP Influencer/Analyst Summit this past fall/winter, after several years of being a major winter event solely for industry analysts and media. Thus, trying to think positively, I am happy to report about coming across at least one vendor with upbeat news and upright posture in these dreary days.

In fact, how often have we heard about a mid-market enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider’s quarterly global results in late 2008 revealing a 37 percent increase in revenue and sales (with 30 percent growth in North America), with the company claiming many significant new orders worth over US$ 1 million? Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog topic has revisited Agresso’s post-implementation agility capabilities (as to accommodate businesses living in a change — so called BLINC’s), and its devised growth strategy via in-house developments, complementary acquisitions and/or partnerships. Most recently, Agresso expressed the intent to acquire the United Kingdom UK-based competitor CODA, but the analysis of this potential merger deserves a blog post on its own. For now, some other blog posts, such as these one from AccManPro on the merger and on CODA’s recent software as a service (SaaS) forays, should do.

As for the future customer relationship management (CRM) offering, I could quite understand Agresso’s initial temptation for leveraging Microsoft Dynamics CRM [evaluate this product], whose latest version, formerly code-named “Titan” has been completed and released to manufacturing in December 2007. The new version is offered under two product names: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for on-premise and partner-hosted deployments and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live for Microsoft-hosted deployment. Read the rest of this entry »

Writing about failed partnerships in the enterprise applications market is like writing about the sun setting in the evening and to the west, given almost daily occurrences of vendors announcing alliances that never materialize. However, it doesn’t happen every day that a potential high-profile alliance gets called off at the 11th hour and in favor of an overlooked in-house solution.

The protagonist of the story is enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor Agresso, which reported approximately US$225 million  in revenue in 2006. Agresso is the primary operating business of the Netherlands-based Unit 4 Agresso (Dutch Stock Exchange EURONEXT-U4AGR) and has subsidiaries selling its ERP platforms (Agresso Business World and others) around the world.  In aggregate, Agresso is one of the top five providers of ERP solutions for people-based businesses, i.e., professional services and public sector organizations (besides SAP, Oracle, Infor and Lawson Software). Read the rest of this entry »