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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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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At Oracle Open World in San Francisco, Oracle launched PeopleSoft Mobile Expenses, PeopleSoft Mobile Approvals, and  PeopleSoft Mobile Company Directory. As a result, users will have the option to access important business information, processes, and analytics in real time. The three PeopleSoft mobile apps employ HTML5 and CSS3 technologies, which implies relatively low costs for deployment and maintenance. Oracle also announced that the applications are available with the latest version of PeopleSoft (9.1) and that current customers will not have to incur any additional costs for any of the three mobile apps.

Part 1 of this blog series described the genesis and current state of affairs of Workday – a novel company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. Part 2 of this series then got under the hood and analyzed Workday’s secret sauce: its object-oriented and in-memory database (IMDB) and definitional services approach, which involves no coding by developers.

The final part of this series will discuss who should be a good fit for Workday and who might not, and why.

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Part 1 of this blog series described the genesis and current state of affairs of Workday – a novel company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and notable PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. For a few years now I’ve been listening to a slew of otherwise hard-to-please analysts and bloggers raving about this software company that has purportedly finally overcome the traditional shortcomings of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems of the 1990s.

One of Workday’s earlier marketing slogans said that it was the first new business management solution to come to market “since the Web turned 2.0, Sarbanes met Oxley, and the world became flat.” In fact, Workday is a younger company than Facebook. The vendor says that its biggest distinguishing factor over traditional ERP platforms is its inherent flexibility, most notably its ability to logically reorganize personnel in a global organization on the fly as required.

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In 2005, after his PeopleSoft venture ended (successfully in financial terms, at least), I was sure that Dave Duffield would not sit still for long. And in fact, I’ve been listening to a slew of otherwise hard-to-please analysts and bloggers raving about Workday for a few years now – this company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri.

Dave Duffield is Workday’s co-CEO, co-founder, and chief customer advocate. As mentioned earlier, he was co-founder, CEO, and chairman at PeopleSoft, and Workday is the fifth company that he has founded (see his full bio here). Aneel Bhusri is Workday’s co-CEO and co-founder (he was vice chairman at PeopleSoft). Aneel was named #15 on the 2011 Forbes Midas list (see his full bio here as well as other Workday leadership bios here).

Indeed, David Dobrin, Naomi Bloom, Ray Wang, Vinnie Mirchandani, Dennis Howlett, Dana Gardner, Nick Carr, Mike Krigsman, Jason Busch, Phil Wainewright, and Brian Sommer are only a few of the renowned market observers that have been talking, blogging, tweeting, and whatnot about Workday as possibly the best invention since sliced bread. Naturally, the skeptic in me has wondered what all this fuss and adulation was about. For some flavor, here are the blog posts on Workday by Dennis Howlett of ZDNet, Nick Carr of the Rough Type blog, and Vinnie Mirchandani of Deal Architect, and these seasoned and discerning fellas are not easily impressed.

I finally had a deeper look at Workday at the recent Dreamforce 2011 conference by salesforce.com (where Workday had a noted presence at the expo floor), and the vendor’s conceptual design and approach is beyond reproach. In many ways, Workday can be viewed as the next generation of good-old PeopleSoft enterprise applications. Like its predecessor, the company started with a set of best-of-breed applications around human capital management (HCM).

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Over the past couple of years, the electric utility industry has changed in terms of the different software solutions available. The old approach to addressing this industry’s needs was the “best-of-breed” approach, meaning that software vendors were creating solutions addressed to only one group or business unit within the company doing one specific task. Generation, Transmission, and Distribution all had their own specific software packages that were almost never fully integrated with each other. Or, the interfaces were poorly designed, thus creating a lot of data issues and discrepancies.

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Lawson Software (NASDAQ: LWSN), headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, the United States (US), and with offices around the world, provides software and service solutions to about 4,000 customers in manufacturing, distribution, maintenance and service sector industries across 40 countries. Its solutions include Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and industry-tailored applications.

Lawson has not lately been accused of being too exciting, glitzy or so, at least not compared to a decade ago, when its erstwhile slick marketing machine was crafting catchphrases like “self-evident applications (SEA)”, “drill-around”, “web-addressable applications” and so on.  Some recent attempts in touting corporate social responsibility (CSR) and a witty marketing spot on YouTube have been noted (even acknowledged by the competition), albeit with mixed reviews/reception.

Nevertheless, according the “still water runs deep” adage, Lawson’s relative quietness certainly does not mean that the vendor has not been active in the field and in its research and development (R&D) labs. I’ve been made aware of many recent moves to execute on the roadmap that was outlined at the vendor’s CUE 2007 conference. Read the rest of this entry »

In the last decade or so of covering the enterprise applications market, I’ve witnessed so many products and vendors disappearing and reappearing under a different name, ownership, etc., but it is for the first time now, at the end of 2007 that I saw basically the same vendor go public for the second time (and in a 10 year timespan). Namely, Deltek (evaluate its flagship product), the leading provider of enterprise applications software designed specifically for project-focused businesses (those with business processes revolving around the engagement, execution and delivery of projects), has done it again. Its common shares begun trading November 1, 2007 on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the trading symbol “PROJ”. Previously, the company, which was founded in 1983, used to be publicly traded under the symbol “DLTK” from 1997 till late 2002/early 2003, when it was de-listed and went private again (for the time being).

I don’t intend to bore you with the financial figures (about the number of shares offered, its current share value, market capitalization, etc.), since many wire alerts have repeatedly already done so. What is more interesting here is Deltek chief executive officer (CEO), Kevin Parker’s statements that the company — which, as mentioned above, was taken public 10 years ago before being taken private about five years later by the founding deLaski family — launched its second initial public offering (IPO) as a means to boost recognition of the Deltek brand. Parker believes that it is an important time to have a broader audience, and the company is thus focusing on expanding globally. Proceeds from the offering will be used to pay down debt, which Parker said will give the company greater ability to reinvest in the company.

In his recent blog post, Ray Wang of Forrester Research is quite positive and upbeat about the IPO, and fully agrees with Parker’s ideas and justifications. Myself, I often tend to mostly agree with Ray, with the difference that one should always mention some caveats too (and please, can anyone show me a single company without some challenges?). On the other hand, a report that preceded the Deltek IPO by a few months (i.e., it was posted after Deltek’s pre-IPO S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] ) was quite negative, berating the S-1 filing (especially the “Description of business” part) as sounding so outdated (so 1990-ish), and without any references to the contemporary trends like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS)/On-Demand, Web 2.0, etc. Also, the article opines that the heydays of the Professional Service Automation (PSA) market (one in which Deltek competes) are far behind us (I might agree with the fact that the PSA acronym might be a “goner”, but not really the market opportunity – certainly not in a services economy). Read the rest of this entry »