SAP AG and Endeca Technologies might not appear to have much in common at first glance, other than occasional partnering in some joint opportunities, and perhaps that SAP Ventures owns a piece of privately held Endeca. In the world of home appliances, SAP would be analogous to a tried-and-true refrigerator, but with the most advanced features in the market, such as a built-in TV set.

Such an appliance stores important food (i.e., data and transactions) and provides some important basic information and entertainment (i.e., news reports) to nearly 90,000 customers in over 120 countries. Indeed, SAP is the world’s leading provider of business software, offering enterprise applications and services to companies of all sizes and in more than 25 industries for nearly four decades. Read the rest of this entry »

Many CFOs, CTOs, supply chain managers, and logistics managers struggle to decide which supply chain management (SCM) software is best-suited to their organizational needs. It doesn’t help that there is an abundance (literally hundreds) of SCM solutions available on the market. Today, I’ll help you understand key SCM modules, and look at some key players with well established SCM solutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Part II of this blog series allowed members of the two global trade management (GTM) software providers, TradeBeam and Precision Software, to voice their outlooks on the market (in light of the recent global trade decline). But at the end of the post I introduced the question of the possible threat to GTM providers coming from the large enterprise resource planning (ERP) providers.

Given that SAP, Infor and Oracle now have their own GTM offerings, and QAD has recently acquired Precision Software, what can GTM pure-players do against becoming a commoditized offering? In other words, what is it that the likes of Trade Beam, JP Morgan Chase Vastera, GT Nexus, Kewill, or Management Dynamics (and Precision Software if we look at its autonomous operations within QAD) do much better than ERP guys, so that ERP guys will not eat everyone’s lunch? Is it still about some functional features, or also about the service side (consulting and know-how)? Read the rest of this entry »