Serendipity, in addition to actual qualifications and experience, plays a major role in a job search. Indeed, scoring an interview increases one’s chances of impressing (or not) a potential employer. But how do you win that face time? Candidates struggle to distinguish themselves, while recruiting managers wade through the hundreds of cut-and-dried resumes they receive each day.

In the interest of “giving serendipity a nudge,” JobProx is a novel smartphone app that connects recruiters and employers with job seekers when they are near each other physically—putting a face on the endless stream of digital resumes. Using the app’s proximity feature, job seekers and recruiters or hiring managers are alerted when they’re nearby one another. Read the rest of this entry »

The slew of product announcements at the recent Inforum 2013 conference was underlined by the announced general availability of Infor 10x, an enterprise release that in Infor’s view marks a major step forward in achieving its vision. Infor 10x unites a multi-purpose middleware platform featuring social, mobile, analytical, and cloud capabilities with Infor’s suite of solutions.

All major applications feature a reinvented HTML5 user experience, the new Infor Ming.le platform for social collaboration, business process improvement, and contextual analytics, and pervasive in-context analytics embedded throughout workflows that are packaged within the Infor ION integration framework for managing business process flows, workflows, and alerts. Read the rest of this entry »

Eccentex Corporation provides dynamic case management (DCM), a.k.a. adaptive case management, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions using its multitenant cloud-based AppBase platform as a service (PaaS). DCM solutions should support what the evolving knowledge worker needs and allow organizations to optimize case outcomes, improve customer services, and mitigate risk.

Eccentex recently announced the launch of AppBase 5.0, which includes user-friendly creation tools and templates or frameworks (referred to as AppTemplates) for quick delivery of case management systems by business analysts and line-of-business personnel (rather than IT staff). The vendor is hereby trying to redefine the fundamental processes and user interfaces of the modern knowledge worker. Read the rest of this entry »

Sage North America yesterday announced the results of its mobile device survey, which recently polled 490 small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in the United States. The Sage SMB Survey on Mobile Devices showed that employees accessed work-related information when they were not in the office most commonly using laptops (80 percent) and smartphones (81 percent), followed by tablets (57 percent).

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in November 2012, Intuit launched an Intuit Pay pilot project for the United Kingdom. The company has since learned a lot, improved the product, and announced that Intuit Pay is generally available, giving anyone who sells products or services in the UK a reasonably easy and low-cost way to accept credit and debit card payments, whether in person or over the phone.

Read the rest of this entry »

Adding to its ongoing array of wins in the realm of filed service management (FSM), IFS recently announced that Spencer Technologies, a provider of network design, infrastructure installation, and technology deployment services for retail locations, has selected IFS Metrix Service Management as its FSM solution. Spencer Technologies, of Northborough, Massachusetts, will use IFS Metrix Service Management software to support its more than 150 technicians across five locations.

Read the rest of this entry »

The human capital management (HCM) space is apparently becoming attractive and important to even upper mid-market vendors that have traditionally focused on manufacturing and distribution, and have mainly partnered for HCM capabilities. After Infor’s recent acquisition of Certpoint Systems for learning management (to add to its HCM portfolio that came from the merger with Lawson Software), Epicor announced general availability of its latest Epicor HCM version 5.7.1.

Stemming from the 2010 acquisition of Spectrum Human Resource Systems Corporation, Epicor HCM is a human resource information system (HRIS) that automates HR processes and enables companies to track, manage, and analyze employee data throughout the entire employee lifecycle. Epicor HCM currently covers the realms of recruiting, onboarding, learning & development, goals & objectives, and performance management.

Read the rest of this entry »

It appears that SAP HANA’s launch has been the catalyst for not only in-house innovation, but also SAP’s onslaught of tuck-in acquisitions of its close partners. After the recent SmartOps acquisition in the supply chain management (SCM) space, SAP today announced plans to acquire Camilion, a provider of insurance product development, product lifecycle, and underwriting solutions that help insurance companies improve the quality of the business they underwrite and bring new products to market faster. Camilion was founded in 2001 and insurers use its products to gain enterprise-wide agility with their products and underwriting. The vendor was privately held, with offices in Canada and the United States. SAP and Camilion have collaborated since 2008.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, more and more companies are breaking down into a slew of collaborative networks of smaller organizations with ever greater specialization. In this new ad-hoc collaborative world, most companies are small, lean, and nimble, relying on extensive supplier networks. Companies have multiple clients and contracts across a globally diverse workforce available on a supply-and-demand (as needed) basis. These trends are giving rise to a massive and rapidly growing “contingent” workforce that will make up to 40 percent of the entire workforce by 2020 (currently at 30 percent, according to CNNMoney). BusinessWeek reported that 26 percent of employees in 2005 had nonstandard jobs, i.e., temps, part-timers, independent contractors, freelancers, free agents, self-employed, so-called “micropreneurs,” and so on.

Read the rest of this entry »

In its ongoing competition with IBM, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Moxie Software, salesforce.com, and KANA Software, Pegasystems (a.k.a., Pega), an upbeat provider of business process management (BPM) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, announced the latest version of its process-centric CRM solution. The latest release, Customer Process Manager (CPM) enables real-time collaboration amongst customers, the customer service representatives (CSRs), and supporting back-office teams across the enterprise.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently released FinancialForce PSA Winter ’13 builds on FinancialForce.com’s commitment to making professional services teams more effective, mobile, and social (having been built on the Salesforce Platform and natively embedded with Salesforce CRM). Winter ’13 is based on enhancement ideas submitted online by the company’s growing community of users via the FinancialForce Community portal that was launched in 2012.

Read the rest of this entry »

While it may not be surprising that IFS has lately had a streak of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and enterprise asset management (EAM) wins in its traditional asset-intensive industries, it is interesting to note that some recent wins and expanded project footprints are in the realm of field service management (FSM). IFS has tackled this attractive software category via the recent acquisitions of Metrix and 360 Scheduling (see the related article for more details).

In late 2012, IFS won an Asian telecom company. In January 2013, IFS announced that the seventh largest Pepsi-Cola franchise company in the US is expanding its footprint with the IFS Metrix Service Management Mobile solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Informatica Corporation, an independent provider of data integration software, recently acquired Active Endpoints, a private business process management (BPM) provider.

As a public company with over $800 million in annual revenue and over $500 million in cash, Informatica seems to be a great new home for Active Endpoints’ technology and customers. Not only will Active Endpoints technology be integrated throughout Informatica’s product line, but Informatica pledges to continue to support every ActiveVOS BPM customer and partner (although the jury is still out on whether Informatica can deliver, given that BPM has not been its core competency). Read the rest of this entry »

As part of its ongoing quest for innovation, Intuit recently announced that QuickBooks Online is now available for mobile devices. QuickBooks Online for iPad (the name is somewhat deceiving given that the product runs on multiple mobile devices and not only on the Apple iPad) is the newest addition to the QuickBooks Online suite. Through a single QuickBooks Online account, a business can access and interact with its data from a computer, tablet, or other mobile device. There are native apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android smartphones (but no native Android tablet app yet). Data automatically syncs between devices and users, so small businesses can manage their finances anytime, anywhere.

Read the rest of this entry »

In many service industries, such as financial, insurance, utilities, healthcare, government, and others, case management is the lifeblood of the business. These highly unstructured (dynamic or adaptive, if you will) processes where the next process step’s best action depends on the outcome of the previous step require apt human process stewards, a.k.a. “knowledge workers.” These knowledge workers, characterized as workers whose main capital is knowledge, are aided by a multitude of tools such as sophisticated business rules engines, knowledge bases, predictive analytics, etc. in executing tasks exactly when, where, and how they are needed to achieve customer satisfaction, while maintaining corporate governance and compliance requirements.

Yet, Eccentex Corporation, a provider of AppBase platform-as-a-service (PaaS) applications for dynamic case management (DCM), just announced the results of a recently conducted survey, which found that companies are failing to equip their employees with the tools they need to thrive in today’s work environment. Survey results, which included responses from knowledge workers in a variety of industries, pointed to widespread demand for mobile and cloud-based access to business-critical information systems and platforms needed to do their job.

Read the rest of this entry »