While multi-CAD (computer aided design) situations have been a matter of course at large manufacturing organizations, it appears that multi-PLM (product lifecycle management) software deployments will follow suit. To that end, Aras, an upbeat open source PLM software solution provider for large enterprises, recently announced that MAN Diesel & Turbo (MAN), a provider of large bore diesel engines and turbo machinery for marine and stationary applications, headquartered in Augsburg, Germany, has selected Aras Innovator as a supplementary platform for engineering process automation. Read the rest of this entry »

Woe is HP. The company recently made headlines with news that its Autonomy division, which sells a number of products for enterprise content management (ECM), search and discovery, customer experience management, and more, misrepresented its financial situation to get itself acquired by HP. Indeed, HP says its pain from this misreprentation comes to about $5 billion (USD). Read the rest of this entry »

OpenText announced that the US Department of the Interior (DOI) is deploying OpenText’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution. Because some organizations cite their concerns with the security of cloud-based solutions, it’s notable that a large government agency’s deployment will be cloud-based. Read the rest of this entry »

Laserfiche recently implemented its enterprise content managment (ECM) solution for Oregon’s Jackson County. Like many public sector organizations, Jackson County has to adhere to strict records retention schedules. County employees with varied roles must access these records for different purposes, and thus they need distinct views to find, filter, and access the records according to their role requirements.

A new case study explains how Jackson County dealt with these issues using its Laserfiche ECM solution. Laserfiche supports the county’s processes from scanning, to organizing the records in its repository, to disposition.

TEC is preparing to publish more detailed information and reports on Laserfiche in the near future. In the meantime, you can find out more in our IT Showcase or you can evaluate ECM solutions in TEC Advisor.

We’ve just published a new brief, reporting on EMC’s Documentum family of enterprise content management (ECM) products and services. Read the rest of this entry »

Hannon Hill has grown its content management application over the years so that today’s solution targets midsized organizations with a depth of functionality at an accommodating price point. Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server is frequently adopted within higher-education institutions (roughly 80 percent of its clients) but Hannon Hill has also maintained a focus on the public sector, health care, technology, and publishing industries. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series analyzed the runaway success and genesis of Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). The article outlined the main reasons for the collaborative product’s widespread use and then analyzed its evolution.

Part 2 talked about SharePoint’s typical proven use case scenarios as well as about the product’s shortcomings and points of concern. Due to its workflow management and document management system (DMS) capabilities companies often attempt to use SharePoint as a full-fledged business process management (BPM) platform, but how successfully?

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series analyzed the runaway success and genesis of Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). The article outlined the main reasons for the product’s widespread use and analyzed its evolution. So, what is it that SharePoint’s treasure trove of tools (a la “grandma’s attic”) can (and can’t) do for companies?

Read the rest of this entry »

Notwithstanding Microsoft’s recent purchase of Skype, some pundits have started to question its relevance in the long term (in view of the ongoing consumer mobile devices and/or social media success of Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, salesforce.com, etc.).

However, there are still many Microsoft products that are quite relevant. One of them is undoubtedly Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Until the recent runaway success of the Kinect for Xbox 360 “gesturing entertainment platform” (which Microsoft hopes to deploy well beyond the juvenile games playing use, say, in harmful industrial environments), SharePoint was the product that reportedly grew the fastest to the US$ 1 billion mark in revenues (and it had been the fastest growing Microsoft technology for three straight years before the advent of Kinect). Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started a lengthy discussion about the value proposition and parts-and-parcels of business process management (BPM), with an ensuing focus on Pegasystems (also known as Pega) as one of the leading BPM suite providers. Part 2 then analyzed in depth the vendor’s ability to help business users capture (and then realize) business objectives and intent, while Part 3 focused on Pega’s ability to automate programming and execute actual workflows at customer organizations.

This part continues with more of Pega’s value proposition and its “BPM secret sauce” ingredients, such as a so-called “servicing backbone” for service organizations. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series provided a lengthy discussion about business process management’s (BPM’s) necessary parts-and-parcels, and the software category’s value proposition.  At the end of that post, I mentioned my recent attendance of a witty presentation that attempted to explain the essence of BPM via a bit of humor and the metaphor of the classic “Wizard of Oz” movie.

Namely, on March 23, 2009, Alan Trefler, Pegasystems’ founder and chief executive officer (CEO), gave his luncheon keynote presentation at the Gartner BPM Summit in San Diego. His theme was “Don’t just Survive…Capitalize.” Trefler began by reminding the audience that in today’s turbulent economy we are all “not in Kansas anymore,” and may just need some ruby slippers to find our way back home to profitability. If you have 14 minutes to spare, you can recapture the spirit of the event here. Read the rest of this entry »

The business process management (BPM) market is sizzling hot, with Gartner Dataquest estimating its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) at 13 percent in 2009. In fact, almost all leading BPM vendors have been buzzing about their unprecedented growth and profitability, especially amidst the ongoing economic drought.

It is truly difficult to argue against the need for companies from all walks of life to improve their business processes. Doing “better, faster, and cheaper” is the “slogan du jour.” Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series outlined Oracle’s recent (and seemingly genuine) change of heart and approach towards partnering. The analysis then moved into Oracle’s VAD Remarketer Program, which was launched about two years ago to allow partners to determine the best growth path for their business.

A Remarketer is a new class of Oracle reseller with the ability to resell only the products that fall under Oracle’s 1-Click Ordering Programs and strictly under standard terms and conditions. The current figures show over 1,200 recruited Remarketers with over 2,000 placed orders since the launch. Read the rest of this entry »

The IT industry is constructed of three-letter acronyms (TLAs). However, the total number of possible three-letter abbreviations using the 26 letters of the alphabet is only 17,576. This explains the stars-wearing-the-same-dress types of incidents in the IT world. When Sherry Fox discussed ECM and EIM, the acronyms represented enterprise compensation management and enterprise incentive management respectively. In this blog, the two “dresses” are worn by two different stars—enterprise content management and enterprise information management. Read the rest of this entry »

EIM/ECM 101: Cutting through the Confusion

If you’re like many people who’ve been put in charge of looking for your company’s next compensation solution, you may be somewhat bewildered about the different applications available. There has long been a confusion surrounding enterprise incentive management (EIM) and enterprise compensation management (ECM) solutions. The reason is that, technically, both types of solutions enable some of the same results—one of which is to provide a payment to an employee for services rendered. However, the reasons behind these payments can differ substantially (e.g., commissions versus bonuses versus spiffs, etc.). Read the rest of this entry »