Part 1 of this blog series analyzed Infor’s latest acquisition of SoftBrands Inc., a company with a somewhat complicated history and lineage, and formerly called Fourth Shift and AremisSoft.

The post concluded that, from a higher level overview, Infor has a good synergistic opportunity with the SoftBrands Hospitality solutions but some serious tweaking to do with the SoftBrands Manufacturing solutions. Some issues discussed were the long backpedaled development of the original Fourth Shift product due to SoftBrands’ focus on partnering with SAP for the SAP Business One Fourth Shift Edition product. Read the rest of this entry »

Just when I had begun to think that Ned Lilly’s ERP Graveyard blog might go out of business soon (or at least change its name and charter), here came his new blog entry in early June 2009. The blog post’s cause was the official press release (PR) entitled “SoftBrands Enters Into Definitive Agreement To Be Acquired By Affiliate Of Golden Gate Capital And Infor.”

Now, the acquisition was certainly not an earth-shattering event by any stretch of imagination; after all, we are talking about a moderate US$80 million price tag here. Still, this move at least has a psychological and morale-boosting significance for Infor. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me start this blog post with a huge disclaimer: I have no intentions of wilfully beating up on SAP whatsoever!

Sure, the enterprise applications titan has lately been embroiled in an intellectual property lawsuit with archrival Oracle over improper use of support data through its TomorrowNow third-party support (recently discontinued) subsidiary.

As if this wasn’t enough, SAP is being sued again, and this time over an allegedly failed software implementation. Namely, in late March, Waste Management Inc. filed suit against SAP with claims of fraud (or gross over-promise, if one wants to sound a bit gentler here). Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog topic has revisited Agresso’s post-implementation agility capabilities (as to accommodate businesses living in a change — so called BLINC’s), and its devised growth strategy via in-house developments, complementary acquisitions and/or partnerships. Most recently, Agresso expressed the intent to acquire the United Kingdom UK-based competitor CODA, but the analysis of this potential merger deserves a blog post on its own. For now, some other blog posts, such as these one from AccManPro on the merger and on CODA’s recent software as a service (SaaS) forays, should do.

As for the future customer relationship management (CRM) offering, I could quite understand Agresso’s initial temptation for leveraging Microsoft Dynamics CRM [evaluate this product], whose latest version, formerly code-named “Titan” has been completed and released to manufacturing in December 2007. The new version is offered under two product names: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for on-premise and partner-hosted deployments and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live for Microsoft-hosted deployment. Read the rest of this entry »

Reading in-flight magazines and running through airports today, we can see advertising for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, but it is always a serious stuff (albeit well done and to the point), such as “Best run businesses run on SAP” (or so). Nowadays, however, if we go to the virtual online, social-networking world (with viral marketing and advertising at its core), we can even find attempts at humor in marketing ERP. To see what I mean, please go to YouTube and see a humorous take on ERP systems and ERP vendors.

With the “cat in the tree” theme, Lawson Software (evaluate some of its products) is attempting to use viral marketing, with cartoonish humor, to gain a small corner in the otherwise big budget advertising fight between SAP and Oracle (if not Microsoft and IBM too). Lawson is a relatively large vendor, with revenues nearing the US$1 billion mark, but is quite far from the financial muscle of SAP (evaluate some of its products) and Oracle (evaluate some of its products). Therefore, can creativity and viral marketing make a dent in this big budget world or is this just “budget envy” on the part of Lawson? Read the rest of this entry »