The Plex Systems team was in town recently. TEC’s P.J. Jakovljevic and I took the opportunity to sit down with the new Plex CEO, Jason Blessing, as well as V.P. of Corporate Strategy Jim Shepherd, and V.P. of Marketing Patrick Fetterman. Read the rest of this entry »

Many companies today are obviously interested in using enterprise technology that they can access via the cloud. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model avails companies, as is well known, of technology without a large fixed cost, and that is device independent, and accessible by more users, without continual upgrades to worry about. While there are the oft-mentioned concerns around security (which we will not get into here), and SaaS is not the right software delivery model for every client for every deployment, there is no denying that SaaS has much to offer in the right situation.

We have been talking with clients and others about the influence of the cloud in supply chain areas such as these: Read the rest of this entry »

You have two major options if you’re looking for a place to live: own or rent. The pros and cons are fairly straightforward and break down as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

Kronos is one of the most important players in the human resources (HR) software market, with a global presence (serving 100+ countries), $820 million (USD) in annual revenue, more than 3,500 employees, and 30+ million users worldwide.

Until recently, the vendor had mostly focused on large enterprises, with its flagship product, the Kronos Workforce Central suite. This changed with the recent acquisition of SaaShr, a software-as-a-service provider specializing in workforce management for small to medium businesses (SMBs).

The solution has been rebranded as Kronos Workforce Ready, and I had the opportunity to learn more about it from Bob DelPonte, product line director for Workforce Ready. Here’s what I found out, along with my commentary on the new solution. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently had the opportunity, during Epicor’s global customer conference, to talk with Chad Meyer, director of product marketing, and he shared with me some of the highlights of Epicor’s vision and strategy for cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP). Read the rest of this entry »

Jaspersoft has decided to take the JasperReports Server Community Edition and make it available on Amazon’s recent offering called AWS Marketplace, free of charge. This will make it possible for users to use JasperReports as a preconfigured Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to be deployed as part of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

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In a very interesting move in what I would call a software consumerization trend, much like the AppStore, recently Amazon launched Amazon Web Services Marketplace (AWS Marketplace). The new service from Amazon will make available a number of cloud-based software to its users. Read the rest of this entry »

My TEC colleague Aleksey Osintsev and I recently made our way to the last stop of the SAP Run Better Tour in Montreal to get a taste of what SAP was cooking up in terms of improvements and strategies for 2011. I was hoping for some developments regarding mobile technology and support. Did I get my fill? Let’s just say I was still feeling a bit peckish when I left. Here’s the lowdown on SAP’s mobile strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

Lawson Software, a global enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendor, announced on December 20 that it will acquire Enwisen; a privately owned software-as-as-service (SaaS)-based human capital management (HCM) software vendor based in Navato, California and currently with around 260 customers. Read the rest of this entry »

This interesting question recently arrived in our Ask the Experts inbox, so I thought I’d write a brief post clarifying the difference between ASP and SaaS models. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, Rob Barry summarized some important points on the topic of delivering business process management (BPM) through the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model (see Choosing Business Process Management: SaaS BPM or On-premise BPM? According to this article, although managing business process in the cloud is in an early stage, this delivery model is becoming more noticeable. After reading this, I felt that it would be interesting to know business users’ attitudes toward the SaaS model while selecting BPM solutions. Luckily, I was able to look into BPM selection projects recorded in our BPM Evaluation Center and found that over 16 percent of BPM seekers, in 2009, were willing to acquire BPM capabilities through subscription or leasing agreements.

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Without a doubt, software-as-a-service (SaaS) as a software delivery model has become a hot topic in the enterprise software field and has gained some noticeable shares in sectors such as customer relationship management (CRM). On the other hand, the product lifecycle management (PLM) industry has seen increasing awareness of SaaS. Oleg Shilovitsky, the most active PLM blogger, has talked about SaaS and cloud computing in some of his recent blog posts on Daily PLM Think Tank Blog. Mark Burhop form Siemens PLM Software also initiated a discussion on cloud computing in a recent blog post. However, SaaS remains as a limited option for PLM users as I see it. Read the rest of this entry »

Software-as-a-service (SaaS): friend or foe? SaaS—also known as on-demand or hosted applications—is becoming more and more popular in a number of enterprise application areas and quickly changing the minds of many a skeptic. SaaS is changing the way organizations pay for, implement, and run their software applications. Unlike traditional applications, which are paid for up front and installed on your company’s premises (on premise), SaaS applications are hosted at the vendor site and are paid for through a monthly subscription model. While it sounds like the best thing since sliced bread, there are some pros and cons of the SaaS as a model. Today’s TEC Research Analyst Round Table discusses the SaaS model—the trends, the benefits, and the pitfalls. Read the rest of this entry »

Public Clouds and Hybrid Clouds,
Private Clouds and Fluffy Clouds?

That was the first thought that came to mind after attending this year’s IBM Rational Conference at Orlando’s Walt Disney World. I believe Dr. Danny Sabbah, General Manager of IBM Rational Software, said it best in his keynote presentation to thousands of conference attendees when he stated, “Vision without Execution is Hallucination.” Read the rest of this entry »

How many of you have walked into a store with the expectation that the product you purchase will probably not work? How many industries do you think can get away with product defects and incompatible components?

For almost three decades, the software industry has convinced consumers that “Bugs” (product defects) and “System Integration” (incompatible components) is a cost of doing business. Granted… enterprise software can comprise of millions of lines of code performing very complex operations. Moreover, today’s complex global economy made possible by the internet has complicated things further with businesses required to support the multiple languages, government regulations, and consumer demands of its customer base. Read the rest of this entry »