A Software Insider's Point of View

Single Instance ERP Harder And Harder To Justify
The holy grail of an ERP implementation used to be the single instance deployment.  However, market forces, a move to adopt new disruptive technologies, slow pace of innovation from incumbent vendors, and high maintenance fees have changed many organization’s perspectives.  Add a slew of rapidly changing business requirements [...]

Keep In Mind Basic Rules Still Apply Regardless Of Deployment Option

The proliferation of SaaS solutions provides organizations with a myriad of sorely needed point and disruptive solutions.  Good news - business users can rapidly procure and deploy, while innovating with minimal budget and IT team constraints.  Bad news - users must depend more on their [...]

Perspectives 2009 highlights continued market, corporate, and product transformation

(Photos by R Wang & Insider Associates, LLC.   Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.)
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 [...]

Competition Intensifies For The Small And Medium Organization’s Software Budget

Software vendors such as Oracle and SAP can no longer rely on their large enterprise customers for double digit year-over-year growth.  In fact, their customers have not only reached a saturation point in being able to consume new solutions, but have also faced demands to cut [...]

Epicor Succeeds On Delivering A Converged Product Line
Epicor’s latest release, Epicor 9, provides a proof point that an acquisition intensive vendor can keep their promises to both acquire and deliver on innovation.  Under the themes of “Protect, Extend, and Converge”, the Irvine, CA based mid-market software provider committed to its customers to support prior releases, [...]

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 [...]

Title: Vendor Event: Epicor Perspectives 2009
Location: Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, NV
Link out: Click here
Start Date: 2009-11-08
End Date: 2009-11-10

Description: Perspectives 2009
Epicor’s Global CUSTOMER Conference
November 8-10, 2009 Caesars palace, las vegas
Mark your calendars for Perspectives 2009. This important event provides an opportunity for customers to maximize their investment in Epicor solutions. Explore thoughts from other customers [...]

Most on-premise vendor continue to slip into significant YoY losses in license revenue and overall revenues.  Meanwhile, economic conditions continue to favor SaaS, best-of-breeds, and purpose built solutions. Major themes in the 2009 Calendar Year Q2 include:

Economic conditions drive demand for best of breed and point solutions delivered by SaaS deployment.  Consequently, SaaS vendors posted [...]

FORWARD AND COMMENTARY
“An Enterprise Software Licensee’s Bill of Rights (LB0R) V2″ brings the 10th installment of an on-going series to provide clients with insight on how to better align their packaged apps strategies.  Version 2 of the LBoR updates the original groundbreaking list of 36 best practices for software licensing and pricing and provides a [...]

Most software vendor license revenues took a beating this CY Q1 when compared to 2008.  SaaS vendors managed to post double digit gains while only a handful of on premise vendors eeked out a positive gain.  Major highlights in the 2009 Calendar Year Q1 include

Big losses in YoY license revenue for on premise vendors such [...]

PEOPLE WHISPERS: MOVES, PROMOTIONS, AND MILESTONES*
Congratulations to all!  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, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via Linked In.
Bronwyn J. Allen became Director, Analyst Relations at Fujitsu America, Inc. [...]

Almost every inquiry over the past 3 months has ended up with at least one question about what vendors are doing to help their clients amidst an economic recession.  As blogged in the October 12, 2008 posting on “5 Steps to Restoring Trust in the Vendor - Customer Relationship” the issue of credibility and trust [...]

Usability and User Experience Matter in Enterprise 2.0 Apps
Welcome to the third in a series of Friday’s Features showcasing the latest and greatest in enterprise apps usability. Many ERP software vendors including Epicor, IFS, Infor, Lawson, Microsoft Dynamics, and Syspro have made significant progress in improving usability as they progress to Enterprise 2.0 [...]

PEOPLE WHISPERS: MOVES, PROMOTIONS, AND MILESTONES*
Congratulations to all!  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, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via Linked In.
Fayyaz Alam was promoted to Vice President IT Production Services at [...]

Title: Events: Epicor Perspectives 2008
Location: Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, NV
Link out: Click here
Description: Perspectives 2008
Epicor’s Global User Conference
Join us at Perspectives to leverage all the tools at your disposal to better understand your business, and to drive innovation and success. Epicor’s 16th annual user conference offers three full days to interact, learn and share with [...]

As many main app vendors continue to lower guidance on earnings, this calendar year Q2 public company quarterly earnings analysis shows that larger vendors and specialty vendors such as SAP, Oracle, Lawson, and Deltek gain ground in license revenue growth while growth for the mid-market players now comes from maintenance and services. SaaS [...]

Calendar Year 2008 Q1 numbers still show profitability for most vendors
Recession concerns for the enterprise software industry may prove to be a bit pre-mature. Recent earnings report over the past 2 months lean towards mild caution. While most vendors showed profitability, guidance numbers were down. The leading indicator is new software [...]