Demand Management Inc. has been very busy as of late, with a recent flurry of new products and features. In a series of press releases, Demand Management has recently announced the availability of the Demand Solutions platform as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering; configurable workflows that provide alerts for exceptions and escalations; a new predictive lead time capability; and new industry-specific business intelligence capabilities. With more press releases in the past five weeks than in all of 2012, TEC decided we should check in with Demand Management’s president, Bill Harrison, to find out what this is all about. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently attended the Microsoft Dynamics Fall Analyst Event (FAE) 2012 in Washington state, which started with a tour of a local Microsoft Store (see Part 1 of this blog series, Microsoft Analyst Event Part One: What’s New for Fall 2012). At the company’s Redmond, WA Microsoft headquarters, Kirill Tatarinov, President of the Microsoft Business Solutions Division (MBS), gave us the 2012 year-end review. One major point that he made was that he and the entire MBS department have been promoted into a full-fledged Microsoft division (no longer folded together with SharePoint and Office), and that the division has been recruiting new executives and rank-and-file employees. I take this as a sign of the company’s serious investment in Microsoft Dynamics.

Read the rest of this entry »

During its first customer conference, YamJam’12, Yammer announced the Enterprise Graph—a new app directory and platform. The intended customers for this product are enterprise software vendors. Given the current social surge, software vendors are seeking to integrate social features into their products. Read the rest of this entry »

In Part 1 of this blog series I admitted to being a late adopter of a sort, in part for not immediately jumping onto the social media bandwagon. In particular, my initial reaction to Salesforce Chatter (a.k.a. Collaboration Cloud) was tepid. To be frank, Marc Benioff, salesforce.com’s flamboyant and engaging CEO, gave an atypically incoherent and dry keynote speech when he introduced Chatter at the Dreamforce 2009 conference.

However, a few months have passed and this period has helped salesforce.com craft a much clearer message. In addition, Chatter has reportedly been used within salesforce.com’s own organization (as the largest beta site/tester), which has given the vendor much more time and experience to improve and tweak the product.

Read the rest of this entry »