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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NetSuite continues to round out its exacting capabilities for retailers and distributors. Having acquired the Retail Anywhere cloud point of sales (POS) system in early 2013, on the eve of the SuiteWorld 2013 conference NetSuite has acquired OrderMotion Inc., a provider of order management solutions based in Burlington, Massachusetts, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition of OrderMotion’s cloud-based Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) Order Management capabilities adds to NetSuite’s own cloud-based order management system, furthering NetSuite’s focus on this increasingly important and complex business challenge and critical functionality—omnichannel order fulfillment.

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SAP has announced SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service, taking the logical but no less important step of taking its SAP HANA platform to the cloud, giving organizations a new deployment option for the in-memory platform.

The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service will enable organizations to run mission-critical instances of SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and Netweaver Business Warehouse solutions in the cloud, powered by HANA.

SAP plans to deliver the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud through its partners within what SAP calls an “open + us” strategy, offering the capabilities from the partner data centers and/or SAP’s own data centers located worldwide. 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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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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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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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 »

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 »

As part of its recent major global IT transformation, Telefónica has selected TOA Technologies as its global field service management (FSM) solution provider. This is a global contract agreement for TOA to be the standard FSM provider with its ETAdirect solution suite, covering all 24 countries in which the telecom provider does business across Europe and Latin America.

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Microsoft Convergence 2013, which took place in mid-March 2013 in New Orleans, Louisiana, was reportedly the largest annual Convergence conference ever, with more than 11,000 attendees. Although I could not attend the multiday event in person, today’s collaborative technology marvels made it possible for me to follow it fairly closely even from a thousand miles away. Many of the conference messages I first heard at the Microsoft Dynamics’ Fall Analyst Event (FAE) back in November 2012, where the industry analysts and bloggers got conference peek previews (see blog here). Featuring high-profile customers, such as Chobani Inc., Habitat for Humanity International, Revlon Inc., Shock Doctor Inc., and Weight Watchers International Inc., the opening keynote by Microsoft Business Solutions president Kirill Tatarinov talked to how Microsoft Dynamics, as a unifying fabric, is “uniquely positioned in the market to serve as a catalyst to help businesses unite their organizations, unite their people and technology, and unite with their customers.” Read the rest of this entry »

At SugarCon 2013, in New York, SugarCRM demonstrated the new capabilities of its customer engagement platform, Sugar. It features the following developments: Read the rest of this entry »