Rimini Street, Inc., a vocal third-party maintenance and support provider for enterprise software, including SAP and Oracle Corporation’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite (EBS), Oracle Database, and Hyperion software, recently announced that UCI International has selected Rimini Street to support its Oracle EBS applications to save substantial annual support fees. UCI International is a manufacturer and supplier of vehicle replacement parts and car care products in North America, with facilities and offices throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, and China. Its brands include Airtex Products, ASC Industries, Autolite, FRAM Filtration, Holts, Prestone, and Wells Vehicle Electronics.

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While SAP has lately given huge publicity to in-memory computing via its incessant promotion of SAP HANA, the technology has been around since the late 1990s, and there are currently over 50 software vendors delivering such proven solutions. Most recently, during the COLLABORATE ’13 Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) conference, Oracle announced new Oracle In-Memory Applications for Oracle Engineered Systems, leveraging dynamic random access memory (DRAM), flash memories, and the near zero latency InfiniBand network fabric to run ten to twenty times faster than commodity hardware. These tools can achieve these impressive speeds by transforming batch processing to real-time and shortening response time with improved user interface (UI) rendering.

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In a recent press release, Rimini Street boldly declared the end of full-price software maintenance. The vocal and upbeat third-party software maintenance provider for various popular SAP and Oracle enterprise systems believes that a tipping point has finally been reached in the market for annual maintenance (certainly, the public cloud enterprise software providers have long been preaching even the outright elimination of maintenance expenses in their deployment model, but the focus here is on on-premises software).

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Perhaps the best examples of continuing innovation in the existing Oracle ERP product lines were some announcements at the Oracle JD Edwards Partner Summit 2013. The event took place January 28 to February 1, 2013, in Broomfield, Colorado, with more than 600 partner attendees from 31 countries. Oracle announced the launch of Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Health and Safety Incident Management solution, to help organizations reduce or eliminate costly health and safety incidents. The solution manages the business processes associated with recording, tracking, reporting, and analyzing a health and safety incident. With 250 million occupational accidents reportedly occurring worldwide each year, health and safety should be a concern for all organizations.

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NetSuite announced that Matrixx Initiatives has accelerated its financial processes, improved business analytics and visibility, and reduced its IT costs since implementing NetSuite OneWorld. Matrixx, headquartered in Bridgewater, New Jersey, is the maker of Zicam brand cold remedies. After it was acquired by H.I.G. Capital in 2011, Matrixx faced a costly upgrade to its outdated Oracle JD Edwards client/server enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Rather than undertake a painstaking upgrade, it evaluated several other solutions and selected NetSuite over Microsoft Dynamics GP and Sage 300 ERP (formerly Sage ERP ACCPAC). The company has reportedly significantly reduced its software licensing costs and eliminated its in-house servers and the need for a full-time information technology (IT) employee to perform data backup since transitioning from JD Edwards.

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In the mid-2000s there was a beginning of public discussions and a surge in market awareness about support & maintenance (S&M) alternatives for users of enterprise applications. Companies in the market for enterprise software S&M services, like nearly every other market in the world, has responded to monopolistic-like pricing and profit margins by seeking choice. Enterprise software licensees now have a choice of annual support providers. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series talked about my attendance of the 11^th Vendor Shootout^TM for ERP event, which took place in Boston in mid-August 2011. I was able to experience this co-opetitive gathering of eight solution providers and several dozen end users seeking new solutions first-hand as a neutral (and yet very active) observer (for the inner workings of the event, see my article Demystifying “Vendor Shootout for ERP” events).

My blog post then mentioned the following four enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions (based on my partial attendance of their scripted demos): Infor ERP SyteLine, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Epicor 9, and Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. Part 2 of this blog series will conclude with the remaining four products that I had the chance to see at great length.

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Over the last few years I have repeatedly seen ads for the Vendor Shootout^TM for ERP event appearing in TEC’s website banners and newsletters. In addition, I would come across mentions of the event in other industry magazines, press releases (PRs), social media feeds, Web site banners, and so on and so forth.

Needless to say, I was curious (and dismayed by my lack of information) about the event that even carried the “Moderated by TEC” tagline on its official logo. Even more, every now and again various software vendors’ staff and other industry contacts would ask me about the event (probably expecting my in-depth knowledge), and I would somewhat embarrassingly have to pass them on to my selection services colleagues in the Montreal HQ office (who have been directly involved with the event).

Well, in mid-August 2011, the 11^th Vendor Shootout for ERP event took place in my neck of the woods, Boston, and I was able to experience it first-hand as a neutral (and yet very active) observer. What follows now is my report on the event and my take on several vendors’ demos that I attended. Read the rest of this entry »

They say a picture is worth a thousand words—but in my opinion, graphs are sometimes worth even more. Therefore, I decided to let the graphs do most of the talking about the main differences between Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (JDE) and E-Business Suite (EBS).

In order to do that, I have selected our Mixed-mode Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Evaluation Center because it has functionality from ERP for discrete, ERP for process, and ERP for engineer-to-order (ETO) manufacturing. Read the rest of this entry »

The launch of TEC’s blog has somewhat coincided with my visit to Belgrade, Serbia (what used to be Yugoslavia and then Serbia & Montenegro) for personal reasons. Those several days spent in my homeland in late October/early November (whereby I missed my beloved Boston Red Sox’ winning the MLB World Series ’07 Championship, darn it!) I at least used this time to also learn about the enterprise applications market in that region, and maybe even in the entire Balkan region. I have never seen any such market report from any other analyst house about this (possibly obscure) region, and I thought this topic might be of interest to our (curious) readers as well as to me. To be fair, I’ve seen other similar trip reports, such as this recent one about the Australian enterprise applications market. Read the rest of this entry »