Plex Systems, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider of the Plex Manufacturing Cloud (formerly Plex Online), has announced its collaboration with Insequence Coporation, provider of manufacturing sequencing technology. The joint capabilities should improve the process of delivering components to the manufacturing supply chain in an efficient fashion.

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Plex Systems Inc., provider of Plex Online, a cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) offering for manufacturers, recently announced the results of the survey entitled “2012 ERP Study: Implementation and Usage Trends for SaaS/Cloud vs. Traditional Systems.” Conducted by the Manufacturing Performance Institute (MPI) on behalf of Plex Systems, the study assessed implementations of ERP systems, satisfaction with those implementations, and the extent to which ERP systems have benefitted organizations.

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Pearson, a global education company, has selected Cameleon Software’s Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solution as part of a business transformation initiative aimed at enhancing the customer experience. Anticipating the growing need for customized and personalized services, as well as the shift from paper to digital content, Pearson adapted its business processes to the market changes and, as part of its strategy, implemented a CPQ solution. Read the rest of this entry »

SAP and VMWare will now offer another deployment architecture for SAP HANA. During the SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Madrid, SAP announced the upcoming availability of SAP HANA on VMWare vSphere 5.1 for testing and development.

SAP’s customers will have the ability to provide instances of SAP HANA in virtual machines faster, use advanced datacenter capabilities of VMware vSphere such as Dynamic Resource Scheduling and vSphere vMotion, and more easily configure their testing and development environments over the cloud.

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Editor’s note, December 19, 2012: According to the vendor, the product discussed below did not become available.

Exact Software has recently released a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) offering in the cloud. Headquartered in the Netherlands and with offices in North America serving 100,000 customers worldwide, Exact offers two global ERP products (Globe and Synergy), as well as other local products (Macola, MAX and JobBOSS for the Americas, Exact Financials for the Netherlands, etc.). The company exclusively markets its products for small to medium businesses (SMBs) spanning many industry segments, with a focus on manufacturing, wholesale and distribution, and professional services.

Having just had the opportunity to discuss the new offering with the product manager for the Macola line, Michael McPherson, I recap that conversation below. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series talked about my very first attendance of BigIdeas, BigMachines’ annual user conference that takes place in the fall in Chicago. I wasn’t the only one that attended BigIdeas 2011 for the first time, as in May 2011 the company’s financial backers brought in David Bonnette, a seasoned Oracle executive in the customer relationship management (CRM) realm, as the new president. Mr. Bonnette has since gradually replaced the company’s founder and former CEO Godard Abel.

The highlights of Bonnette’s keynote presentation were that BigMachines has recently moved towards acting as an established company with more structured processes rather than as a slightly disorganized rapidly growing startup. Predictable results for both the vendor and its customers should come from more simplified and prepackaged offerings, and the upcoming BigMachines 12 release was previewed.

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The fall of 2011 marked Theo Epstein’s move from Boston Red Sox to Chicago Cubs, whose fans have been yearning for a championship ring for well over 100 years and are fervently hoping that Theo’s curse-breaking success as the general manager in Boston will be repeated in the desolate Cubs nation. Well, 2011 also marked a much less important detail: after having to regretfully decline a few previous times, I was finally able to clear my calendar and attend BigMachines’ annual user conference dubbed BigIdeas, also in Chicago as the company’s base.

I have to confess that the attendance has changed my perceptions of the upbeat cloud software vendor somewhat. Namely, every time when we would meet in the past (most often at past salesforce.com’s Dreamforce and Oracle Open World events) the company’s staff struck me as too formal and somewhat standoffish. My earlier opinions on the vendor can be seen in this blog post from 2010 here.

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Many recent TEC articles have talked about quote-to-order (Q2O) or configure, price, quote (CPQ) solutions that facilitate business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) sales, thus helping companies sell more products and services faster. A number of thriving vendors provide on-demand product configurator, pricing and quoting, proposal generator, and B2B eCommerce (self-service portals, product catalogs, etc.) software solutions. These Web-based offerings facilitate sales across their customers’ diverse channels by streamlining their sales processes, from opportunity to order.

Using Q2O/CPQ solutions, dispersed sales teams and channels can quickly configure products, generate quotes, proposals and contracts, manage complex pricing, and manage orders. Most recently, I’ve reported on Cameleon Software’s bullish posture. The company was visibly present at salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce 2010 user conference expo floor, making hay out if its Apple iPhone- and iPad-enabled sales application and integration to the Salesforce Chatter cloud collaboration product. 

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Part 1 of this blog series talked about my recent reunion with Cameleon Software (formerly Access Commerce) a provider of on-demand and on-premises configure, price, and quote (CPQ)/quote-to-order (Q2O) solutions. Prior to analyzing the recent events at Cameleon, Part 1 first established the need and market drivers for such software solutions.

I then analyzed how Cameleon helps product managers and marketers during the design phase of new product and service offerings, with the focus on being amenable to business (vs. power IT) users in these departments. Part 2 continues with the analyses of how Cameleon helps the sales process (often via multiple channels) and a discussion of recent developments at Cameleon. 

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In this fast-moving world, use of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing has grown rapidly owing to its straightforward subscription-based pricing model and relatively quick deployment. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the niche quote-to-order (Q2O) or configure, price & quote (CPQ) market segment. Indeed, BigMachines, FPX (formerly Firepond), Webcom, and Experlogix continue to report notable on-demand software subscription and accounts growth even during these economically depressed days. 

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This interesting question recently arrived in our Ask the Experts inbox, so I thought I’d write a brief post clarifying the difference between ASP and SaaS models. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series explained Plex Systems’ ebullience and growth despite a hostile and depressed environment, especially in the discrete manufacturing sector. While the software as a service (SaaS) model is now mainstream in many functional areas of business, the article concurred with Frank Scavo’s recent assertion that, for the time being, there is only one true SaaS enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for manufacturing companies: Plex Online [evaluate this product].

Part 2 then zoomed into Plex Online’s capabilities in terms of technology, customer size, international capabilities, and so on and so forth. The article ended with an analysis of Plex Online’s traceability capabilities that are critically important to medical devices manufacturers.

The final part of this blog series will peer into Plex Systems’ future, and will conclude with a brief question and answer (Q&A) session with the company’s top executives. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series explained Plex Systems’ ebullience and growth despite a hostile and depressed environment, especially in the discrete manufacturing sector. While the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is now mainstream in many functional areas of business, the article concurred with Frank Scavo’s recent assertion that, for the time being, there is only one true SaaS enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for manufacturing companies: Plex Online [evaluate this product].  Read the rest of this entry »

The software as a service (SaaS) model is now mainstream in many functional areas of business, quite outperforming its on-premise counterpart in this tough economic environment. Consider customer relationship management (CRM), transportation management, talent management, payroll processing, travel and expense (T&E) management, strategic sourcing and procurement, and many other point (or departmental) solutions in many sectors.

But what about a comprehensive multi-tenant on-demand enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for manufacturing companies? Well, the choices are still quite slim in that regard.

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Part 1 of this blog post series started with my invitation by UNIT4 (formerly Unit 4 Agresso), the second largest business applications provider in continental Europe, to attend its UK 2010 users conference. Frankly, I was a bit skeptical about what new and exciting I might see and hear about at this event in light of the vendor’s analyst tour in Boston in late 2009.

The post then discussed the recent development that preceded both the UK user conference and the Boston analyst tour (but which was not the topic of either gathering). Namely, in the fall of 2009, UNIT4’s on-demand venture, CODA 2go, evolved into FinancialForce.com, backed by both UNIT4 and Salesforce.com.

Part 2 then focused on FinancialForce.com’s strengths and potential challenges and on its step-sibling CODA-Financials’ recent developments. This final part of the series will present my observations of the recent UNIT4 user conference in the UK. 

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