The “little” SAP Business One solution is an unsung hero of sorts at SAP. Indeed, more than 38,000 customers worldwide in nearly 30 languages and over 630 partners are often ignored as less newsworthy by market observers. The business management solution for small businesses (with 10–20 users, on average) can be deployed on premises or in the cloud, and is accessible via mobile devices.

During the SAPPHIRENOW 2013 conference, SAP announced the general availability of the 9.0 version of the SAP Business One running on Microsoft SQL Server (which is the product’s original database). With more than 50 new features, the latest version offers enhanced capabilities for warehouse management, infrastructure, and inventory management, as well as improved systems performance.

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Part 1 of this series talked about my long-standing coverage of Exact Holding, and in particular about my recent update briefing with the Exact Americas division. My post concluded with the vendor’s intent to go back to its local roots and push its well respected North American manufacturing and distribution enterprise resource planning (ERP) products, especially Exact Macola ERP.

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Yesterday SAP announced its strategy to provide small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with the services of the SAP HANA platform via SAP HANA analytics for SAP Business One and the SAP HANA Edge Edition. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series discussed the genesis of ProfitKey International, one of the longest-standing enterprise resource planning (ERP) providers for small to midsize discrete manufacturers that has never been merged with another peer product. After the protracted bankruptcy saga of its former parent company, HALO Technology Holdings, ProfitKey was recently bought out by Phoenix Asset Management, and is now keen on starting a new chapter.

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This post starts with a trivia question: Please name the mid-market enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor that has existed the longest in the market with an ERP product that has never been merged with another product? In addition, the vendor and its product offerings have never been covered by TEC and myself. As a hint, the company was founded in 1979 and has always focused on discrete make-to-order (MTO) and engineer-to-order (ETO) manufacturing.

Is there anyone out there wanting to venture a guess? If more hints are needed, it is not MAPICS XA, which was founded in 1977 by IBM, but now belongs to Infor and is currently called Infor ERP Discrete iEnterprise (and before that had changed many ownerships and shared a roof with other ERP products). SYSPRO has been independent since 1978, but has been a frequent topic on this site. It is not QAD either, which has been independent since 1979, but TEC has repeatedly reported about this vendor (see the most recent article on the company). It is not ABAS Software AG either, which has also been independent since its founding in 1980 (TEC just published an article on the company).

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Openbravo ERP is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution on the less expensive side of the spectrum, which is valued by distribution and retail industries as well as by manufacturing, services, public-sector, and nonprofit organizations.

I caught up with Openbravo’s John Fandl recently about the company’s latest iteration of its ERP solution (version 3). In the past, we’ve mostly mentioned Openbravo as a peer to other open source ERP vendors, but it deserves to be considered in its own right. Read the rest of this entry »

The recently held SAPPHIRE NOW 2011 event in Orlando, Florida had many newsworthy items with regards to SAP’s solutions for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). For one, the much publicized and anticipated multi-tenanted software as a service (SaaS) SAP Business ByDesign product has reached a milestone of 500 customers and availability in a dozen countries or so (after initial hiccups and faltering). For its part, the proven lower-end SAP BusinessOne offering has reached a whopping 30,000 customers worldwide.

The upper-end product for SMEs, SAP Business All-in-One, which packages functionality from the flagship SAP ERP product (i.e., the two products have the exact same DNA), continues to do well in its target markets. The product has lately been bolstered by 22 (and many more coming soon) SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions (SAP RDS), which are fixed-scope and fixed-price add-on (tuck-in) sets of focused functionality that can be deployed with SAP Business All-in-One, including those in the realm of supply chain management (SCM), sales & marketing, product development & manufacturing, and finance.

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Part 1 of this blog series outlined Oracle’s recent (and seemingly genuine) change of heart and approach towards partnering and catering enterprise applications to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The analysis then moved onto the Oracle Accelerate program, which was launched about three years ago to allow partners to sell more of smaller projects in a fixed time and price manner.

Oracle Accelerate is not only a partner program but also Oracle’s go-to-market approach to provide business software solutions to midsize organizations. Part 1 described the main constituent parts of the approach, while Part 2 talked about the program’s current state of affairs. Part 3 of this blog series analyzed the program’s latest partner-enablement developments as well as the inevitable room for improvements.

This final part will analyze the offering that Oracle Accelerate is most likely to face in the market, which is SAP Business All-in-One. The series will end with analyzing mid-market enterprise resource planning (ERP) incumbents with an innate industry focus (i.e., without the need for templates and pre-configured approaches) as well as with general conclusions and recommendations. 

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Part 1 of this blog series outlined Oracle’s recent (and seemingly genuine) change of heart and approach towards partnering and catering enterprise applications to small and medium enterprises (SME’s). The analysis then moved onto the Oracle Accelerate program, which was launched about three years ago to allow partners to sell more smaller projects in a fixed time and price manner.

Oracle Accelerate is not only a partner program but also Oracle’s go-to-market approach to provide business software solutions to midsize organizations. Part 1 described the main constituent parts of the approach, while Part 2 talked about the program’s current state of affairs. Part 3 of this blog series will analyze the program’s latest partner-enablement developments as well as the inevitable room for improvements.

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series outlined Oracle’s recent (and seemingly genuine) change of heart and approach towards partnering and catering enterprise applications to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The analysis then moved onto the Oracle Accelerate program, which was launched about three years ago to allow partners to sell a greater number of smaller projects with fixed time and price.

Oracle Accelerate is not only a partner program, but also Oracle’s go-to-market approach to provide business software solutions to midsized organizations. Part 1 described the main constituent parts of the approach, while Part 2 will talk about the program’s current state of affairs.

Read the rest of this entry »

The blogosphere and other media outlets might still be raving about major announcements at Oracle OpenWorld 2009, such as the one about Oracle’s professed strategy of “gently” and thoughtfully assimilating Sun Microsystems. The impending merger (subject to somewhat more difficulty than previously expected, due to regulatory hurdles in Europe) should make Oracle not only the world’s largest business software company, but also a major hardware player. References to Apple Computer and its ability to successfully design and offer both hardware and software were cited several times during the event.

Basically all other major highlights from the “ginormous” user event revolved around Oracle’s “complete, open, and integrated” product strategy across the board. Some of these highlights would be the Specialized Oracle Partner Network (OPN) Program for 25,000 OPN partners, or the quite anticipated Larry Ellison’s explanation of the upcoming first generation of Oracle Fusion Applications.

Still, my special interest at this overwhelming multi-day event (with over 40,000 attendees, it likely made San Francisco residents feel sort of besieged) was about Oracle’s continued efforts to become more attractive and appetizing to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). My recent blog post featured Oracle’s VAD Remarketer program targeted at the low-end of the market. The current figures are over 1,200 recruited Remarketers and over 2,000 placed orders for the (primarily technology infrastructure) products that fall under the ORACLE 1-CLICK ORDERING program since its launch over three years ago. 

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The role of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in society cannot be underestimated—indeed, many think SMEs are the most important sector of a nation’s economy due to their  creative and innovative abilities, as well as the flexibility they execute in order to survive in our competitive world.  Yet, as editor Ruth Hillary explains in the collection of essays in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises and the Environment, their day-to-day activities aren’t always positive. Read the rest of this entry »