Everyone wants their business to grow, to broaden its operations within a territory or country and, eventually, across borders to other countries and continents. However, business expansion abroad entails a great deal of forethought, especially with regard to enterprise software applications. In fact, the differences in business environments may not only affect corporate business strategy, but also pose various hurdles to an organization’s software extension strategy and strategic information technology (IT) decisions overall. Such hidden issues should be researched ahead of time so that the necessary allowances and adjustments can be made to your plans for growth.

Companies need to consider numerous aspects when planning their expansion. I’ve identified four major types of possible problems that have a direct impact on IT and corporate software decisions. Read the rest of this entry »

In a past life I was a consultant on behalf of an enterprise software company. This is a tale of what happened during one engagement to install a new system.

This involved travelling to different cities every week in order to do implementations and the like. I regularly saw the impact of software selection processes that ought to have been more thorough. Read the rest of this entry »

TEC’s research analysts are currently putting together a calendar of enterprise software buyer’s guides for 2011. Our Buyer Guides and State of the Market Reports provide a wealth of analyst insight into various types of enterprise software, and include sections on the state of the marketplace, vendor case studies, solution overviews, and a technology directory of hundreds of software products. With all this information in one place, you’ll learn about the many challenges businesses like yours face, as well as getting an overview of the latest solutions on the market. Read the rest of this entry »

Positioning Part 2: Choosing what you want to say

In Part 1, I introduced positioning and talked about how easy it is to miss your mark. This time, we focus on how successful campaign positioning depends on saying and doing just the right thing—at the right time—for the right audience.

Advertising is great fun in that you can choose what you want to say about a product or service—but it’s also where trouble begins. Just as there are great salespeople who can captivate their prospects by saying just the right thing—they seem to be far outnumbered by those who boor, badger and don’t seem to understand the needs or concerns of their prospects. Wouldn’t you agree? Read the rest of this entry »

“Truth is one; paths are many.” - H. H. Sri Swami Satchidananda

Buddhism and software selection. Say what? Yes, you read that correctly. As an “aspiring Buddhist,” I’ve come to learn that Buddhist philosophy can find its way into virtually every aspect of one’s life. While ancient Buddhism still remains a mystery to many, it could certainly help shed some light on a few modern-day dilemmas! Choosing enterprise software for your business is one that comes to my mind.

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2008 seemed to be the year for mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the world of enterprise software—with companies like Oracle picking up Primavera Software’s project and portfolio management (PPM) offering, and Symantec grabbing up MessageLab’s messaging and web security offering. But it was also a year for some software firms to see their latest solutions shine.

With 2008 nearing its end, Technology Evaluation Center’s (TEC’s) research analyst team takes a brief look at 10 of the newest vendors to join its research roster, as well as some of the more noteworthy enterprise software solutions to hit the market this past year. Read the rest of this entry »

As a TEC research analyst, I get to see a lot of really interesting (and some not so interesting) stuff when it comes to enterprise software and the like. With technology changing at the speed of light, there’s always something new that I haven’t seen before, that grabs my attention and makes me say “Wow, that’s cool”!

Like this past week for instance. I had a product briefing with a company called Saba to get an overview of their learning management solution (LMS). I was fortunate enough to have Kenyatta Berry (Saba’s Director of Product Marketing) speak with my colleagues (TEC’s team of analysts) and I to show us Saba’s suite of enterprise software offerings. Along with that we received an overview of the company and its unique strategies for training its clients on how to use its software.   

This leads me back to my opening remark about ”something I haven’t seen before”; that something is called Saba University.

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The Guardian’s excellent article How to Do Business Like the Mafia lists 7 rules for running a successful business—legitimate or otherwise.

And where there are business rules, of course, there’s enterprise software.

Which led me to wonder just how the Mafia would go about the enterprise software selection process. Read the rest of this entry »

Puzzled by process? Dazed by discrete?

First, let’s understand who should use a discrete ERP application.

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I just read Khoi Vinh’s quacking cow dolphin post (by way of Nicholas Carr’s blog) about how unfriendly he thinks enterprise software is (both posts are generating insightful commentary). Vinh makes a point about enterprise applications not receiving the same sort of wide-spread critiques that popular commodity applications do. He attributes this to the idea that the software is used by a less-varied base of people, which aren’t very likely to be merciless with their feedback. He says

“Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users.”

I suppose that could often be the case, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I can think of at least two ways that situation doesn’t have to come to pass. Read the rest of this entry »