Business 2.0 « A Software Insider's Point of View

Posts Tagged ‘Business 2.0’

Research Report: Constellation’s Research Outlook For 2011

Published on January 4, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Organizations Seek Measurable Results In Disruptive Tech, Next Gen Business, And Legacy Optimization Projects For 2011

Credits: Hugh MacLeod

Enterprise leaders seek pragmatic, creative, and disruptive solutions that achieve both profitability and market differentiation. Cutting through the hype and buzz of the latest consumer tech innovations and disruptive technologies, Constellation Research expects business value to reemerge as the common operating principle that resonates among leading marketing, technology, operations, human resource, and finance executives. As a result, Constellation expects organizations to face three main challenges: (see Figure 1.):

Navigating disruptive technologies. Innovative leaders must quickly assess which disruptive technologies show promise for their organizations. The link back to business strategy will drive what to adopt, when to adopt, why to adopt, and how to adopt. Expect leading organizations to reinvest in research budgets and internal processes that inform, disseminate, and prepare their organizations for an increasing pace in technology adoption.
Designing next generation business models. Disruptive technologies on their own will not provide the market leading advantages required for success. Leaders must identify where these technologies can create differentiation through new business models, grow new profit pools via new experiences, and deliver market efficiencies that save money and time. Organizations will also have to learn how to fail fast, and move on to the next set of emerging ideas.
Funding innovation through legacy optimization. Leaders can expect budgets to remain from flat to incremental growth in 2011. As a result, much of the disruptive technology and next generation business models must be funded through optimizing existing investments. Leaders not only must reduce the cost of existing investments, but also, leverage existing infrastructure to achieve the greatest amount of business value.

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News Analysis: Salesforce.com Announces Private Beta Of Chatter

Published on February 17, 2010 by R "Ray" Wang

Chatter Represents SFDC’s Unified Move Into Social

Announced at the 2009 Dreamforce conference, Chatter represents both a collaboration application and platform. Software built on the Force.com platform will gain the collaboration capabilities. Solutions in AppExchange will be able to use profiles, real time streams, and other API’s. With a 100 customers testing out user experience, scalability, and security, Salesforce.com, moves from vaporware to beta. Some key features include:

Aggregating streams of information. Employees can subscribe to feeds such as internal updates, social networks, and documents.
Automating status updates. Users can receive updates from system and user generated alerts. Alerts can include documents and related links.
Enabling secure document sharing. Chatter feeds can be searched to find relevant information. Document sharing is protected by a secure sharing model from the Force.com platform.

The Bottom Line For Customers – Chatter Represents A First Step Towards Social CRM

Customers seek solutions that bridge the gap between Enterprise 2.0 collaboration with enterprise applications. Investment in solutions like Chatter fit well with Salesforce.com’s existing list of innovative customers. Many require more in-depth social capabilities. Should Chatter be delivered in 2010, customers will win by being able to minimize the number of SaaS platforms, reduce the related costs of vendor management, and take a first step into Social CRM.

The Bottom Line For Vendors – Chatter Beta Buys Salesforce.com Time To Fend Of Best of Breed Competitors.

Learning from the lessons of Siebel, Marc Benioff does not intend for SalesForce.com to be a one trick pony. Force.com represented a step to build an ecosystem and extend beyond CRM. Success in AppExchange proves out the strength of the ecosystem. With Chatter, Salesforce.com establishes a second foothold into the world of Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0. The pre-announcing in November bought Salesforce.com time to fend off best of breed collaboration solutions and emerging Social CRM vendors. Announcing a private beta with 100 customers, not only shows momentum, but also gives Salesforce.com time to prove out the solution. In any case, they SaaS leader buys time and can keep some of the best of breed solutions temporarily out of its accounts.

Your POV

Are you a Salesforce.com customer? How will you use chatter? When do you plan to deploy. Let us know if you need help with:

Building a multi-vendor SaaS strategy
Negotiating your Salesforce.com contract
Crafting a SaaS integration strategy

Please post or send on to rwang0 at gmail dot com or r at softwaresinsider dot org and we’ll keep your anonymity.

Related resources and links

20100125 Monday’s Musings: The Hidden Value in SaaS Deployments

20091222 Tuesday’s Tip: 10 Cloud and SaaS Apps Strategies For 2010

20091012 Research Report: Customer Bill of Rights – Software-as-a Service

20090602 Tuesday’s Tip: Now’s The Time To Consider SaaS Software Escrows

20081028 Tuesday’s Tip: SaaS – Integration Advice

20090714 Sandhill.com – R ‘Ray’ Wang – “Opinion: Moving to a SaaS Offensive”

20070903 Trends: What’s all the fuss about True SaaS, OnDemand, Hosting?

20091208 Tuesday’s Tip: 2010 Apps Strategies Should Start With Business Value

20091109 Monday’s Musings: SaaS, SOA, Integration and How To Make A Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich In The Cloud

Event Report: Epicor Perspectives 2009 – Continued Transformation Towards Next Gen Apps

Published on November 10, 2009 by R "Ray" Wang

Perspectives 2009 highlights continued market, corporate, and product transformation

Celebrating its 25th anniversary, Epicor hosted over 1500 partner, customer, and employee attendees at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, NV. Conference highlights include:

Update on Epicor 9 adoption. Epicor has (deployed 11/19/2009 ) shipped 30,000 seats to 60 customers since GA in December 2008. More than 890 customers have purchased the product with 590 implementations in progress. The company hopes to be in 50 countries and 30 languages by end of year.
POV: With over 22,000 customers worldwide, product adoption may at first appear below average. But given the recessionary factors, Epicor has done well in taking its time to ramp up and build customer references for this next generation app. Epicor’s success will require a future specialization into verticals and indirect partner channels.
Shared benefits program. Epicor launched a new program to improve implementation outcomes with shared risks and benefits. Vendor and customers will own project scope definition and agree on outcomes and ROI. If the project is under budget, Epicor shares the savings with the customer. If the project runs over budget, the customer pays for half the contracted professional services hourly rates.
POV: Epicor builds on its previous program where it targeted a 1:1 license to implementation ratio. While there may be open issues about unintended consequences (i.e. as raised by fellow Enterprise Advocate Frank Scavo), Epicor’s intent to change the relationship is a great step towards improving outcomes for clients in the enterprise software world.

New eCommerce solution. Epicor launched an all-in-one eCommerce solution that covers design to delivery. Users of Epicor Commerce can synchronize master data elements such as products, pricing, customers, and inventory levels while managing website content and delivery. Other features include support for payment options, merchant account/gateway integration, and tax calculations via Avalara.
POV: Commerce customers at Perspectives were expressing interest in the new SaaS-ready options as well as hosted options. Prospects should take a close look at the Order Hub integration from retail activities to the back end ERP systems as this will prove the greatest integration value.

Feedback from 37 customers remain mostly positive

Conversations with 17 Vantage, 12 Enterprise, 5 Avante, and 3 Vista customers showed quite positive customer sentiment. Most (15/17) Vantage customers expected to move to Epicor 9 in 2010. Key drivers:

Key functionality addressed in newer release
Better usability
Newer technology
Greater ROI

However, only 3 Enterprise customers, 2 Avante, and 1 Vista customers expected to make the move in the next 12 months. Key drivers for not making the upgrade include

Economic recession
Waiting for functional parity
Over customization of existing product

Your POV.

If you get a chance, let us know:

Which Epicor products do you use?
When will you migrate?
What do you think about the shared benefits program?
Will you look more closely at Epicor as an alternative to SAP and Oracle?

Feel free to post your comments here or send me an email at rwang0 at gmail dot com or r at softwareinsider dot org.

Additional coverage and related links

20091110 ZDNet Irregular Enterprise – Dennis Howlett “Epicor Perspectives: The Analyst View”

20091109 IDG News Service – Chris Kanaracus “Epicor Seeks To Reign In Implementation Costs”

Wednesday’s Whispers: People Whispers October 2009

Published on October 21, 2009 by R "Ray" Wang

PEOPLE WHISPERS: MOVES, PROMOTIONS, AND MILESTONES*

Congratulations to all! Good to see that the job scenarios continue to improve in software/tech as a number of individuals made organizational changes and promotions. As always, thanks for your emails and alerts. If you’ve got a change or know of a promotion, keep dropping me a line! If you need a referral, and we’ve worked together in the past, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via Linked In.

Steve Apfelberg is now Vice President of Marketing at Yammer, Inc. Steve brings a wealth of marketing experiences from serving last as Chief Marketing Officer, SVP of Business Development at Callidus Software Other software experiences include time with Siebel, Remedy, and Oracle.

Rose Aulik was recently promoted from strategic business development manager to Outsourcing Business Solutions Manager for Epicor.

Sachin Bery is now Principal Consultant at Infosys Technologies Ltd. Sachin has built an 8-year career at Infosys serving as a consultant.

Jim Bozzini has been promoted to Senior Vice President, Operations and Services for Workday.

Jim Dellamore joins Deltek as Executive Vice President for Global Services from GXS where he served as a Senior Vice President of Global Solutions Delivery. Prior to working at GXS, Mr. Dellamore was Group Vice President, Consulting, at Oracle Corporation, where he managed the $450 million PeopleSoft consulting business.

Ned Desmond became Advisor at Silent Cal Productions in July 2009. Former roles include serving as President at Time Inc. Interactive, President and Editor at Business 2.0, and a Vice president at Infoseek.com.

Phil Fehrst left AMR Research to become an AVP for strategy with Cognizant Technologies. The former star analyst brings significant experience in the IT BPO and outsourcing contract space and will be reporting directly to the CEO.

Tim Fortier named IFS North America Vice President of Sales. Fortier brings 20 years of sales management experience from J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, AFS Technologies and most recently Borland Software.

Chuck Gillespie is now Adjunct Professor at IUPUI. Chuck was responsible for HR technology at Peoplebase and served as President of Vigor.

Simon Griffiths joined SYSPRO as a Product and Industry Marketing Consultant. Griffiths previously served as a SYSPRO reseller in South Africa. Other roles include stints at JD Edwards and a Microsoft Dynamics NAV partner.

Ray Grigsby joins Rimini Street as Vice President of Global Support Services Delivery for JD Edwards Software Products. Grigsby’s served previous roles as a Vice President for JD Edwards Support services. Grigsby was the executive overseeing the implementation, upgrade, and support of a full range of World and OneWorld (EnterpriseOne) releases for the largest and most complex domestic and global implementations.

Brian Haven became Vice President, Strategy at iCrossing in July 2009. Brian brings social computing and customer engagement experiences from Forrester, Catapult Thinking, and InnoVentry.

Tony Kender rejoins SAP as a National VP Sales at SAP America. Tony served roles as a Senior VP at Oracle, Director at SAP, and Senior Director at ADP.

Alex Koshy is now Business Development Executive at Synaptris. Koshi served previous roles as a Pre-Sales Consultant for MS Dynamics ERP and Resource Lead for Microsoft Dynamics Competancy at Mahindra Satyam.

Kirk Laughlin became Founder/ Editorial Director at Nearshore Americas in June 2009. Kirk’s served senior roles as Managing Director/ VP of Live Events, Senior Editorial Director, Custom Media at Ziff Davis Enterprise, Editor in Chief at America’s Network Magazine, and Editor-in-Chief at Cygnus Business Media

Leighanne Levensaler joins Workday as Vice President, HCM Strategy. She formerly served as a principal analyst covering Talent Management for Bersin & Associates. Prior to joining Bersin & Associates, she led the Learning Consulting Practice at SystemLink Enterprise Solutions. Leighanne has also held positions at SmartForce, Edutrek International/AUI and Deloitte Consulting.

Emily Marchant is now Cofounder | Investor Relationship Manager at the FundingPartnership. Previous roles include a stint as Global Business Development Manager FLB at Forrester Research, Business Development Manager at Dianomi, Sales Manager at Emedia, and various roles at Informa Telecoms and Media.

Jeff Onesto is now Director of Product Marketing at OptionEase. Jeff’s brings industry experiences from his various positions as Director of Sales & Marketing at Advanced Systems Integration, Business Development Executive at Collins Computing, and Business Development Manager at Jefferson Wells International

Milind Padalkar has updated their current title to Global Practice Head – Oracle at HCL America. Padalkar previously served as the Senior Vice President & Head of Enterprise Applications at Patni Computer Systems.

Mahesh Rajasekharan is now Chief Operating Officer at SumTotal Systems. He served 12 years at i2 with roles ranging from Vice President of High Tech Industry Group, Senior Director Operations and Solution Sales, and Senior Director for High Tech Industry Marketing.

Norman Scobie is now SAP Project/Integration Manager at HP Enterprise Services. Previous work includes Aerospace & Defense Industry Solution Expert at SAP, Program Manager at Eurofighter, and Software Manager at BAE Systems

Mike Stankey joins Workday as president and COO from Greylock Partners. Mike spent five years as chairman and CEO of PolyServe, a storage virtualization software company. Prior to PolyServe, Mike was senior vice president of North American sales for PeopleSoft, driving more than $1 billion in sales and services revenues.

Laurene Stevens became Product Strategy Analyst at Ultimate Software in May 2009. Laurene’s served as a senior applications consultant for Sage Software.

Jason Zintak became the Executive Vice President for Sales and Marketing at JDA Software on August 18th, 2009. Zintak most recently served as the executive vice president of sales at HCL Axon. Other senior-level software sales executive and management includde roles at Capgemini, SAP and Blue Martini Software.

Your POV

Got a scoop or something to share? Please post or send on to rwang0 at gmail dot com and we’ll keep your anonymity.

* Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions. However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt.