TEC’s recent article Rootstock Software Steps Out on Force.com outlined the genesis of Rootstock Software and its cloud-based ERP offering. Rootstock Software and FinancialForce.com (a joint venture between UNIT4 and salesforce.com) announced a partnership earlier in the year to deliver a comprehensive manufacturing and accounting solution on Force.com. Rootstock is vying for its ERP solution to become the standard for manufacturing ERP solutions in the cloud, as discussed in the aforementioned recent blogpost all about Rootstock, looking at the background and capabilities of the Force.com-fortified solution. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my recent blog posts talked about the emergence of a few natively cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions that leverage salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. But looks might be somewhat deceiving here—while the products might be brand new and hosted on the latest cloud architectures, their owners and founders have been around the ERP block a few times before.

Take Rootstock Software’s co-founders Patrick “Pat” Garrehy and Chuck Olinger for example. They each have over 35 years’ expertise building software for complex manufacturing environments (Lockheed, Solectron, etc.). I’ve known them for over a decade, since, prior to Rootstock, they were involved with Relevant Business Systems. That ERP product, now part of Aptean after the recent merger of CDC Software and Consona Corporation (the latter in turn acquired Relevant ERP back in 2006) has had a couple of incarnations within Relevant Business Systems (at some stage also called INFIMACS).

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Well, the ERP Graveyard blog might sometimes be slightly deceiving, since not all enterprise resource planning (ERP) products necessarily die there. Some of them might even be resurected under a different name and ownership.

To that end, Infor might even seem like old news today. It’s been five years since its formation (no pun intended here, given its subsequent acquisition of former Formation Systems, with the Infor Optima PLM product as a result). Also, many articles have meanwhile been written on our web site about Infor’s collection/arsenal of once all but deceased ERP products, such as:

• Infor ERP LX (formerly SSA BPCS),
• Infor ERP LN (formerly Baan),
• Infor ERP System21 (formerly Geac System21 and JBA System21),
• Infor ERP Visual (formerly Lilly Visual),
• Infor ERP XA (formerly MAPICS XA),
• Infor ERP SyteLine (formerly MAPICS SyteLine, Frontstep SyteLine and Symix SyteLine),
• Infor ERP Adage (formerly SCT Adage),
• Infor ERP SX.enterprise (formerly NX-Trend),
• Infor ERP FACTS (formerly Aperum) and
• Infor ERP TRANS4M (formerly BRAIN Trans4m).

However, 2007 has seen the emergence of two brand new names in the space — Consona Corporation and Solarsoft Business Solutions. Read the rest of this entry »