Some time in mid-2005 TEC published a six part article on IQMS, a relatively small and obscure enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor based in Paso Robles, California (US), with offices across North America (i.e., in Chicago, Canada, and Mexico), Europe (i.e., Sweden and with recently announced indirect presence in the UK) and Asia (i.e., China and Taiwan). Some readers were likely wondering why I “made so much mileage” out of a seemingly unimportant vendor of fewer than 70 employees and with only a few hundred customers at the time.

Well, I might have been somewhat vindicated in early 2009, when IQMS announced that it closed 2008 with double-digit profitability and a 10 percent increase in new customer accounts. Even as manufacturing markets have tightened and  doom-and-gloom sentiments have pervaded the globe, IQMS has accumulated revenue gains for several years. Namely, in 2005 and 2006, the company grew by about 25 percent each year (which was a multiple of the industry’s average growth), demonstrating its value proposition to selected manufacturing industries worldwide, including medical devices, automotive, aerospace, plastics, and consumer packaged goods (e.g., appliances, electronics, computers/business machines). 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 »

Part I of this blog series analyzed the appropriateness of global sourcing and spend management applications for helping companies improve their cash flows and reduce working capital. It also introduced the question what might happen to global trade management (GTM) applications down the track.

Indeed, what about this credit crunch and recession, and how will that affect the global trade, imports from China, Letters of credit (L/Cs), etc.? With the current sad state of the banking world, many think that discussion about anything other than survival falls on deaf ears at the moment. We are in a bad state, and there is no trust in the system.

The initial sentiment is that corporations are not going to be investing in GTM and sourcing solutions in droves any time soon, other than to make sure they have liquidity to survive. Certainly, the exports/imports will be slower for a while, but does it necessarily follow that people do not need any help from GTM applications? In other words, are there any good GTM features that might even help folks be more effective in these trying times? Read the rest of this entry »

No, my intent here is not necessarily to provide a typical analyst alert after attending a vendor’s annual user conference, in this case the QAD Explore 2008 in Orlando, Florida (US) last month. This is not to imply that there was nothing there to write home about either.

Quite the contrary, the multiple-day event was, well, eventful for market observers and hundreds of QAD’s global customers from both an official (announcements, product demos, etc.) and a fun (food, booze & entertainment) viewpoint. While all of the recorded keynote and breakout sessions can be seen here, the event revolved around the following major themes and highlights: Read the rest of this entry »

While most discussions about the Software as a Service (SaaS) market revolve around the likes of Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Google, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, OpSource, etc., the name Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) rarely comes to mind, unjustifiably.

While Progress itself is to blame in part for a less aggressive marketing effort (and for the-best-kept-secret-in-the-market status), it is still puzzling that the Bedford, Massachusetts (US)-based provider of application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration, and management of business applications is not more regularly mentioned within the press and analyst circles.

A company that was founded in 1981 and with about US$500 million in revenues in 2007, with over 110,000 customer sites and over 2,000 employees in 90 offices worldwide certainly deserves due attention. This is especially the case given the company’s long espoused goal to maximize the benefits of information technology (IT) while minimizing its complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO). 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 »