SaaS Adoption Surveys Often Overlook Audience Composition

Over the past year, analyst firms, tech media, and even mainstream business media have happily showcased positive news about SaaS adoption.  The common theme remains clear – SaaS adoption moves beyond the tipping point in 2010.  Cloud adoption will reach a tipping point in the next 12 months.  All this bodes well for customers and SaaS providers as organizations now embrace SaaS as an acceptable deployment option in their apps strategy.  Unfortunately, recent SaaS/Cloud adoption surveys continue to provide confusing and sometimes contradictory data about adoption.  Close examination of these surveys reveal that not all adoption surveys are equally created.  The unspoken question, who’s answering the surveys?

SaaS Decision Making Firmly In The Hands Of The Business Buyer

Anecdotally, business users drive SaaS decisions, while IT leaders remain skeptical.  To validate this hypothesis, Software Insider conducted a quick survey of 100 Global 2000 organizations.  Starting with the most senior IT leaders, the question was posed, “Are you using SaaS in your organization for major business processes?” (see Figure 1).  Of the 46 organizations who responded, the procurement leaders were then asked the same question (see Figure 2).  After comparing survey results, the following conclusions emerged:

• IT leaders aware but hesitant on SaaS adoption. A little under a quarter of IT leaders (23.91% or 11/46) responded that they were using SaaS applications.  Key applications deployed include CRM, strategic HCM, expense management and project based solutions (PBS).  Delving deeper into these verbal and in-person interviews highlighted a desire to learn more about SaaS.  As one CIO at a major food and beverage concern stated, “The business heads keep showing up with these SaaS apps and then want us to integrate them.  We need to get a handle on all this!”  Key concerns included, “I don’t know if we can integrate all this in the future”, responded the CIO of a large Fortune 500 retailer and “I think we need better governance and security”, remarked the Director of Enterprise Apps for a Top 25 banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) entity.
• Procurement leaders reveal surprising adoption by business leaders en masse for SaaS solutions. Conversations with the procurement managers highlight how business users have taken matters into their own hands.  Every one of the surveyed organizations (100% or 46/46) had an existing SaaS contract, contradicting the IT leaders who did not respond that they ran SaaS solutions.  In fact – these contracts ranged from five seat deals to 2000 seats at one organization.  As the procurement head at a large professional services firm indicated, “The teams will buy whatever they need now.  IT has no clue!”.  “Business has to go around IT because they are too busy keeping the lights on”, retorted a procurement manager at a global 10 pharma.  A procurement manager for a large multi-national manufacturer stated, “Our main issue with SaaS is finding enough solutions that will support our needs.”
• Business leaders take charge but fail to communicate with IT leaders.  The key finding – lack of coordination among business, IT, and procurement.   Amazingly, the 35 IT leaders who stated they did not run SaaS apps for major business processes still may not know about the CRM, HCM, Project Based Solutions, and Finances deployments in their organization.  When some of them were shown the results, these leaders expressed amazement and surprise.  Organizations should be alarmed but not surprised by this lack of coordination between business and IT.

Figure 1.  IT Leader Responses Show Muted Adoption

Figure 2. Procurement Leader Responses Paint A Completely Different Picture

The Bottom Line For Users: Successful SaaS Strategies Will Require Business and IT Cooperation

Next generation CIO’s, technology leaders, business leaders, and line of business execs should build SaaS apps strategies that:

1. Begin with the business process and desired business value. Understand the desired business value and outcome.  Map back the key performance indicators (KPI’s) to the business processes. Identify what processes will be covered by the SaaS solution.  Determine overlaps and hand-offs between on-premise and SaaS to SaaS that are required to measure the desired KPI’s.
2. Engage stakeholders early and often. Today’s apps strategies must constantly evolve. Change is happening so fast that line of business leads and IT leaders must collaborate in real time.  The result – an ever changing list of requirements.  While SaaS allows business leaders to make go-it-alone decisions, success will require close collaboration on short term and long term requirements, dependencies, and strategy.
3. Bet on future suites, SaaS platforms or PaaS (Platform-as-a-service). Winners and losers will emerge in this wave of Cloud computing.  Vendors such as Netsuite, Workday, Zoho, Epicor, and SAP have built or will be building suites.  They provide safe bets as more and more functionality will be rolled into their offerings. Concurrently, organizations should also choose vendors who bring a vibrant and rich ecosystem to the table because those vendors will win in the market.  Salesforce.com and NetSuite already provide users with a platform to build on apps.  Other vendors such as as Google Apps Engine, Microsoft Azure, IBM, VMWare and Salesforce.com (via VMforce),  and Zoho provide rich developer communities.  Partner and customers will drive innovation which is why platform adoption (i.e. today’s middleware) makes a difference.
4. Augment with best of breeds, but avoid best of breed hell. No one platform can provide every solution, but choose wisely.  Best of breeds provide deep vertical capabilities and rich last mile solutions.  However, no one wants to manage hundreds of vendor relationships.  Create frameworks that allow business users to work with vendors which support open standards, integrate well with your existing integration strategies, and follow the bill of rights.   Reduction in the number of vendors will become a priority in 2010 going on into 2011.
5. Assume hybrid will be the rule not the exception. Prepare for hybrid deployments throughout the decade.  Despite the benefits of SaaS and broad adoption in 2010, legacy apps will not go away.  Just count the number of mainframe and client-server apps still in use today.  Many on-premise apps will take time to migrate to SaaS. In some cases, legal requirements will prevent data from being stored off-site.  Software plus services offerings from companies such as Infor, Lawson, Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP may become the norm in 2010 as companies seek private and public cloud solutions.
6. Design with good architecture. Keep your enterprise architects (EA’s) or hire some more.  Inevitably, more and more SaaS solutions will enter the organization.  EA’s will proactively plan for new scenarios and account for future business requirements.  Organizations should keep some rigor in terms of standards for solution adoption while accounting for the need to rapidly innovate.  Business leaders will need some frameworks on which solutions to adopt.
7. Choose the right integration strategy for the right time. SaaS integration strategies will evolve based on the organization’s SaaS adoption maturity.  The first set of solutions will probably require point to point integration of data.  Over time, users often migrate to centralized integration services that account for process.  Some will go full enterprise service bus (ESB) and look at business process orchestration as well.  Consider solutions from CastIron, Boomi, Pervasive Software, Informatica, and SnapLogic.  Going forward customer data integration and master data management will be more important than ever.
8. Minimize long-term storage costs with archiving. Storage represents a significant long term SaaS cost.  Savvy clients can reduce the cost of SaaS storage with a myriad of technologies such as EMC, IBM Optim, and RainStor.  By archiving, organizations will experience faster transaction times, maintain compliance, and reduce storage fees.
9. Hedge risk with SaaS escrows. Most SaaS vendors will require 5 to 7 years to achieve profitability.  End users often demand software escrows in the on-premise world when they are concerned about vendor viability, takeover threats, and other related breaches to performance or service level agreements.  Software escrows vendors serve as the trusted third party independent organization which holds a copy of the software code.  This often includes user data, source code, documentation and any application executables. SaaS escrows work in a similar way.  Vendors such as EscrowTech, InnovaSafe, Iron Mountain, NCC Group. and OpSource can provide such services.
10. Protect your rights. Client – vendor relationships in SaaS are perpetual.  Organizations have one shot to get the contract right and begin the relationship with the right tenor.  Apply best practices from The Customer Bill of Rights: SaaS. Work with vendors to find the right balance in approach.

The Bottom Line For Vendors: Focus On The Technology Spend With Business, Not The IT Budget

IT budgets should now be viewed as business technology budgets.   As with the mainframe to PC shift in hardware, SaaS/Cloud represents the shift in buying power to the operating and business units.   Business leaders are going to procure solutions because the price points allow them to.   Keep in mind, most IT budgets are 1 to 2% of revenues of a company.  While that may be a good chunk of money,  the operations side has about 4 to 5% of annual revenues to spend on technology.   With greater power in the hands of business leaders and a bigger budget, business technology budgets are what sellers/vendors should be aiming for as that’s where the money is.

Your POV.

Considering SaaS/Cloud in your apps strategy as a deployment option?  What products are you looking at?  You can post or send on to rwang0 at gmail dot com or r at softwaresinsider dot org and we’ll keep your anonymity.

Please let us know if you need help with your apps strategy efforts.  Here’s how we can help:

• Evaluating SaaS options and vendor selection
• Assessing apps strategies (e.g. single instance, two-tier ERP, upgrade, custom dev, packaged deployments”
• Designing end to end processes and systems
• Comparing SaaS/Cloud integration strategies
• Assisting with legacy ERP migration
• Planning upgrades and migration
• Performing vendor selection
• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support

Resources And Related Research:

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

20100322 A Software Insider’s POV – R “Ray” Wang -”Understanding The Many Flavors Of Cloud Computing/SaaS”

20091222 A Software Insider’s POV – R “Ray” Wang “Tuesday’s Tip: 10 Cloud And SaaS Apps Strategies For 2010″

20091208 A Software Insider’s POV – R “Ray” Wang – “Tuesday’s Tip: 2010 Apps Strategies Should Start With Business Value”

20091012 A Software Insider’s POV – R “Ray” Wang – “Research Report: Customer Bill of Rights – Software-as-a Service”

20090602 A Software Insider’s POV – R “Ray” Wang ” Tuesday’s Tip: Now’s The Time To Consider SaaS Software Escrows”

20081028 A Software Insider’s POV – R “Ray” Wang “Tuesday’s Tip: SaaS Integration Advice”

Reprints

Reprints can be purchased through the Software Insider brand or Altimeter Group.  To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact r@softwareinsider.org.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us.  For the full disclosure policy please refer here.

Copyright © 2010 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

Lawson External Cloud Services Represents A Big Step In On Demand ERP Options

On March 31, 2010, Lawson Software (Nasdaq: LWSN) announced the Lawson External Cloud Services offering.  The venerable St. Paul, Minnesota vendor plans to deliver the full ERP Suite including Lawson S3, Lawson M3, and Lawson Talent Management via Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure by May 2010.  Key highlights of the announcement include:

• Full feature ERP offering. Lawson will include its full suite of products from both M3 (i.e. Intentia heritage), S3 (Lawson heritage), and new offerings which includes strategic HCM, Finance, enterprise performance management (EPM), supply chain management (SCM), corporate social responsibility, equipment and service & rental, and enterprise asset management.

  Point of view (POV): Lawson makes a significant investment in providing a new deployment option for its solutions.  Customers will lower IT costs, reduce time to deployment, and maintain ownership of the software using Amazon EC2 in the back end.  The result is a single instance approach to cloud delivery focused on IaaS (see Figure 1).  Virtualization provides the key factor in cost savings.

• Focus on mid-size companies looking to reduce time to market. Lawson specifically calls out how mid-market organizations can gain scale with security, computing capacity, and lower cost infrastructure.  Organizations pay for only the infrastructure they need.

  POV: Mid-size organizations gain the benefits of large enterprise solutions without the costly overhead of installation and deployment.  Prospects and customers can expect the hosted software to include centralized admin, faster installations, single technology stack, scalability, and faster time to value.   Mid-size customers can free up funds to focus on process design and business transformation.  However, there’s no reason why a large enterprise wouldn’t want the same advantages.

• Introduction of Lawson Test Drive. Lawson Test Drive gives customers the ability to try before buying Lawson products for up to 14 days.  Customers can try out two of  Lawson’s latest products, S3 directed Smart Office and Lawson Enterprise Search.

  POV: Lawson Smart Office and Lawson Enterprise Search take advantage of Enterprise 2.0 UI/UX prinicples and really change the user experience for customers.  A 14 day trial may be too short for customers.  Prospects should push for 30 to see how powerful and pervasive these solutions can impact user productivity.

• Flexible pricing options. Lawson offers customers the ability to start out with subscription pricing and convert to perpetual at the end of the subscription contract.  Customers retain flexibility in choosing their deployment models.

  POV: Choice and flexibility to the procurement process deliver the strongest argument for Lawson’s External Cloud Services.  Customers can start with annual subscription, rent to own, and then convert to a perpetual license with a traditional one-time payment.

Figure 1.  Lawson’s Cloud Offering Reduces Infrastructure Costs

The Bottom Line For Customers – Check Out The New Cloud Deployment Option But Don’t Confuse This For SaaS

Given that a good majority of Lawson’s customers already take a cautious view to SaaS and OnDemand, the Lawson External Cloud may be the safe bet for customers looking to try OnDemand because the are not:

• Convinced that a multi-tenant one-size fits all True SaaS model works for them. Despite the success at so many companies,  SaaS deployment options may scare clients who feel their business is unique and need to customize and determine their own upgrade timing.  Though constraints in configuration are not completely true here, its a reality that some customers have unwarranted fears.
• Ready to give up software ownership. While the cost structures provide upfront advantages in the first 5 years, costs will even out over a 10 year period.  Some customers still prefer outright perpetual license rights over perpetual payments obligations.  Subscription pricing with the right to own provides a key selling point.

Lawson’s offering is clearly not SaaS, but nor is it a reincarnation of hosting.  The offering takes full advantage of the virtualization services in Amazon EC2 and seems best suited for Lawson’s existing customers.  However, new prospects will most likely push hard for multi-tenancy and private clouds in the future.  When will Lawson create private clouds?   Will they finally go multi-tenant?  Maybe we’ll find out more at Lawson’s CUE event from April 25 – 28 in San Antonio, TX.

Your POV

Are you a Lawson customer?  What do you think?  Will you go cloud?  Would you prefer this to a True SaaS solution?  Do you even care if its hosted or SaaS?  See you at CUE 2010 from Monday the 26th to Wednesday the 28th!

Add your comments to the discussion or send on to rwang0 at gmail dot com or r at softwaresinsider dot org and we’ll keep your anonymity.

Please let us know if you need help with your overall apps strategy.  Here’s how we can help:

• Assessing SaaS and cloud
• Determining custom vs package
• Assisting with legacy ERP migration
• Evaluating middleware platforms
• Planning upgrades and migration
• Considering third party maintenance
• Assisting with cost optimization
• Performing vendor selection
• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support

Related resources and links

20100409 Intelligent Enterprise – Doug Henschen “Lawson Cloud Plan Taps Amazon EC2″

20100402 ChannelWeb – CRN – Andrew R. Hickey “Lawson Looks To Cloud To Woo ERP Customers”

20100331 ZDNet: Irregular Enterprise – Dennis Howlett “Lawson teams with Amazon for cloud ERP -ahem”

20100331 Enterprise System Spectator – Frank Scavo “Lawson cloud services: good start but no SaaS”

20100331 Deal Architect – Vinnie Mirchandani “Lawson: I’m OK, you’re not ok”

20090425 A Software Insider’s Point of View – R “Ray” Wang ” Event Report: Lawson Cue09″

20090313 A Software Insider’s Point of View – R “Ray” Wang “Friday’s Feature: Snapshots in Enterprise 2.0 UI/UX – Lawson Smart Office

Copyright © 2010 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

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, standardize key apps and infrastructure to deliver common solutions, and complete a super set solution.

Epicor 9 became generally available (GA) as of December 10th, 2008.  After almost 11 months in the market, most customers and prospects confirm that Epicor has delivered on their three promises.  More importantly, they have achieved a converged super set of solutions from Avante, Clientele, DataFlo, Enterprise, Manage 2000, ManFact, iScala, Vista, and Vantage.  Key suites in Epicor 9 include:

• Financial management
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Sales management
• Production management
• Supply chain management (SCM)
• Planning and scheduling
• Product data management
• Service management
• Human capital management (HCM)
• Enterprise performance management (EPM)

Point of view (POV):  Epicor’s business strategy to grow via acquisition may seem to mirror the business models of Oracle, Infor, and Sage.  However, Epicor is the first to deliver on a converged solution while supporting all existing releases.  This is no small feat as the first phase of convergence brings together the largest base of its acquired products.  In addition, Epicor consolidates a multitude of Microsoft and Progress technology platforms via ICE 2.0, an SOA based foundational middleware.  Epicor rolled out Epicor 9 with significant beta testing from 70 customers and 13 partners.

Phase 2 of the convergence strategy will most likely involve the Epicor Retail line and Epicor’s Enterprise Services Automation.  Other details of Phase 2 may involve greater adoption of the Azure platform for delivery in a Software plus Services model.

ICE Architecture Bridges The Gap Between Web 2.0 Innovations And Enterprise Class Requirements

ICE 2.0 is Epicor’s business architecture built to SOA design principles and Web 2.0 sensibilities.  As a next generation middleware, ICE 2.0 separates the applications layer from the presentation and logic layers – enabling flexibility to update and modify the middleware and presentation layer at separate times from the applications through different release cycles.  Server and client logic outputs as business services that can be made available and modified by users.  These loosely coupled business services improve connectivity and integration and carries critical XML metadata.  Users benefit from much desired Web 2.0 capabilities that support application to application integration and business to business collaboration (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.  Epicor Innovations Stem From Strong Middleware Foundation In ICE 2.0

<iframe align=center src=http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=35408001@N04&set_id=72157614091349617&detail=yes frameBorder=0 scrolling=no width=500 height=450></iframe>
(Source: Epicor Software)

Consequently, ICE 2.0 delivers on many of the 10 elements of Social Enterprise Apps and includes dynamic user experiences, business process focus, and community connectedness.  Key tools include a technology platform based in Microsoft .NET and business logic via Progress’ Open Edge offering.   On the usability front, Epicor 9 addresses role based design, consistent experiences, and contextual and relevant delivery of information through:

• Improved user experience.  Epicor 9 takes advantage of new Microsoft Office UI/UX paradigms and portal design elements to provide themes, styles, skins, tooltip controls, drag-and-drop designs, and floating palettes & previews.  Users may also drill into and around reports and data. Key personalization features include favorite groups, sheet and toolbar layouts, options windows, short cut bars, and a theme maintenance wizard.

  POV: Users immediately gravitate towards the Office- styled ribbons.  Leveraging the XML schema, Epicor Portal enables role specific content and allows users to craft queries and personalize access to information.  Personalization capabilities smartly tie back to the user ID and persist throughout all solutions.

• Consistent user experience. Regardless of the user interface, customization and user personalization remains intact because everything starts from the same meta data.  Consequently, Epicor 9 can run on a C#.NET Smart Client, any web client, and mobile devices on platforms such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Apple iPhone

  POV: Epicor’s Everywhere Framework smartly stores client business logic as XML metadata and generates AJAX base forms.  This allows client agnostic rendering of the apps in any UI presentation layer and personalization format using the same source code.  The result – a consistent user experience across any channel and even operating system.

• Business Activity Management (BAM). BAM tools enable users to track changes, create even triggers, and send alerts based on parameters and rules.  Out of the box, Epicor 9 supports auto print reports or labels, BAM rules, change logs, custom global alerts, and custom procedure extensions.

  POV: BAM tools provide contextual and relevant delivery of information across the enterprise.  By being able to monitor changes to database fields and tables, useful alerts can be set up for scenarios such as a customer exceeding a credit limit, a workflow approval that’s on hold because of a approver’s vacation, or the automation of defined and common outcomes.

• Software-as-a-Service.  Customers can choose among various deployment options from on-premise, hosted, to multi-tenant SaaS.  Epicor 9 is designed to support multi-tenancy and metadata configuration.

  POV: Today’s mid-market organizations share strong opinions on whether or not to take a SaaS deployment option or stay on-premise.  For this reason, Epicor wisely offers a choice to its customer.  Unlike most of Epicor’s competitors, Epicor 9 delivers a true SaaS solution because it supports multiple customers sharing a single shared instance.

On the business process side, Epicor 9 meets key criteria in configurability and adaptability, outcome focused & results oriented, and proactive – predictive – actionable categories with:

• Business process management (BPM). Epicor BPM exposes all business services so customers can apply business rules, monitor actions, and modify processes.  The system uses a Microsoft Outlook style rules engine which allows business users to make changes without painful customization or coding. Users can define actions, condition statements, holds, and set data triggers.

  POV: Next generation apps utilize BPM tools to enforce controls and enhance policies and processes.  Epicor provides a rich BPM tool that not only extends base capabilities without customizations but also saves time and money by reusing common established processes.  Existing users find the system easy to use and note the ease of use with HTML e-mail formats, Microsoft .NET Action Content, Property Bag Support, and XML Data Nodes.

• Epicor Service Connect. Using the graphical workflow designer, users can map out and modify business processes.   The system automates business processes such as task assignments, logical routing, and human interaction points.  Epicor Service Connect delivers on message based SOA through XML messages and mapping and leaving a complete audit trail.

  POV: Customers who have used Service Connect rave about the ease of use in copying and sharing common processes.  The system makes these changes without modifying source code and the Visio-like usability is key to its successful adoption.  Customers benefit from BPM without the complexity.

• Role based dashboards provide actionable insight. Users are treated to a series of role based interactive dashboards.  Dashboards take advantage of Microsoft UI metaphors such as the outlook navigation pane and ribbons. Users can drill into and around data, export to excel, make changes, and come back to the same screens. Role based security at the field level ensures the protection of confidential information.  More importantly, the dashboards support offline disconnected scenarios as well as mobile EPM delivery.

  POV: Users immediately find value in the support for ad-hoc reports, monitoring tools, workbenches, and alerting capabilities.  Existing Epicor users will take for granted the large number of out of the box reports.  New customers will be surprised by the quality and relevance of the 100 dashboards and 250+ key performance indicators (KPIs).

On the community connectedness end, Epicor 9 meets many of the key criteria to engage stakeholders, foster collaboration, and provide enterprise class security via:

• Epicor Information Worker integrates with Microsoft Office technologies.  Information worker usability leverages Office Business Applications.   Users improve access to business data through this desktop productivity solution and can work in native applications such as Outlook, Word, and Excel. Other key features include disconnected lists and offline transaction support.

  POV: Most users expect Microsoft Office integration but remain disappointed with what’s been delivered by most vendors to date.  Clients express amazement with the ability to use Epicor Portal to work within Office and execute actions that propagate into Epicor 9.

• Epicor Enterprise Search.  The solution builds off of Microsoft Search capabilities such as SQL Full Text indexing to return structured results such as Epicor data and unstructured information such as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Search results can be ordered by relevance and tuned to meet role based requirements and priorities.   Key features include advanced searches, business activity query searches, named searches, and user configurable quick searches.

  POV: Users gain quicker access to information resulting in increased productivity and knowledge sharing.  Existing clients enjoy the tag clouds and ability to directly access the application from the search results.

• Epicor Presence and RSS.  Out of the box support for really simple syndication (RSS) feeds gives users the ability to consume information at their own pace.  Support for presence will enable collaboration via tools such as instant messaging (IM).  Key containers include the Windows Gadgets and the Outlook Syndicated Content Directory within Microsoft Office.

  POV: With growing use in mobile form factors, expect presence capabilities to play a greater role as next generation apps incorporate this design element.  Support for RSS feeds delivers on a key Enterprise 2.0 capability representative of next generation apps.  Most users will access this via the Epicor Portal or Outlook to monitor any changes to subscribed topics or sources.

Layered Client Stack In ICE 2.0 Provides Flexibility Across Markets, Sizes, and Industries

The Epicor layered client stack provides a key framework for organizations and partners to make modifications regardless of business size, country and industries.  The seven levels include:

1. Base Form – provides the foundational source
2. Productization – allows different editions of Epicor 9 to be created
3. Verticalization – stores industry specific functionality and terminology
4. Localization – delivers geo specific capabilities and terminology
5. Extension – gives partners and orgs the ability to change look and feel
6. Customization – supports standard customization capabilities
7. Personalization – allows end users to make modifications to their environment

POV:  Through the layered stack, Partners and companies claim that Epicor 9 is easy to modify and provides a strong framework to deliver last-mile solutions.  Technically inclined business users can also use Epicor Composite Applications to create mash-ups that bring web forms, analytical web parts, search queries into a portal served up in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.   Key industries with deep support include:

• Aerospace and defense
• Automotive
• Consumer goods
• Distribution
• Electronics and electrical equipment
• Fabricated metals
• Financial services
• Furniture and fixtures
• Industrial machinery
• Measuring and controlling devices
• Medical devices
• Primary metals
• Rubber and plastics
• Stone, clay, glass, and concrete

Epicor 9 Designed For Organizations With Global Requirements And Ambitions

Epicor 9 provides growing mid-market companies, subsidiaries of large enterprises, and aspiring ventures capabilities to conduct global commerce.  Key capabilities include:

• Global Engines. Epicor ships a number of global engines designed to support global deployment and adoption.  Using a series of interlocking global engines, configuration rules determine postings, regulatory support, tax rules, rounding, books, and multi-currency.  For example, the global posting engine provides rule based capability.  The global tax engine supports country and local specific tax rules.
  
  POV: With each country roll-out and localization, Epicor enables the mid-market organization to span geographies while meeting key regulatory and local requirements.  Even domestic companies with expansion aspirations will gain the capacity to truly conduct global business.
• Global Capabilities. On the localization front, the solution currently supports 18+ languages for 30+ countries delivering unicode and double byte support throughout the product.  Mulit-currency addresses exchange rate effective dates and multi-book integration.  Multi-company supports intercompany requirements.  User’s can determine their language as a personalization preference.

  POV: Epicor currently supports a limited number of localizations with a goal of 30 languages in 50 countries by 2010.  However, partners have been able to cost-effectively and rapidly deliver on localizations due to the configurability of Epicor 9.

• Global Multisite Management. Organizations with federated production or distribution capabilities and centralized shared services can take advantage of the multisite capabilities for key areas such as financial consolidation, forecasts, inter-company trading, plant scheduling, and global customer management.  Multisite management allows customers to synchronize master data and goods across multiple sites.

  POV: Multisite capabilities are often provided as workarounds.  Epicor’s approach applies an SOA philosophy to supporting this level of complexity.  Support for visibility across multiple facilities gives Epicor 9 the ability to move into the large enterprise space over time.

Customer feedback to date has been mostly positive.

As with each new release, beta customer often find the bugs and unexpected deployment issues.  Most complaints about Epicor 9 come from clients who chose to self implement or provide a considerable amount of implementation resources.  Not surprisingly, early issues focused on a need for more detailed documentation, best practices, and Microsoft technology skill sets required to self deploy.  With almost a year under their belt, newer customers have mostly expressed satisfaction with the productivity gains, ease of use, and ability to scale up as their business expands.

The Bottom Line For Customers – Consider Epicor 9 For Mid-Market Organizations And Subsidiaries/Divisions of Large Enterprises

Continued enterprise software vendor consolidation has resulted in limited choices for enterprise.  Vendors such as Epicor who acquire, streamline, and adequately reinvest will most likely emerge as leaders in their markets.  Epicor 9 provides customers seeking an alternative to large enterprise apps force fit to meet mid-market requirements.  As customers consider replacement strategies for old generation enterprise apps, Epicor 9 should be considered in short lists for vendor selection.  Organizations betting on Microsoft platforms will also want to evaluate other offerings built on Microsoft .NET tools and technologies to gauge their level of adoption and sophistication.  In general Epicor meets the key needs that SMB organizations have expressed (see Figure 2.)

Figure 2. Mid-market organizations seek enterprise class solutions but lack the resources to support complex deployments

The Bottom Line For Vendors – Middleware Matters, Invest or Perish

Enablement of Social Enterprise Apps and their related Enterprise 2.0 capabilities require rich middleware platforms.  In each advancement from mainframe, mini-computer, client server, web based, to this current phase of social enterprise apps or social business solutions, vendors who wait to late to invest will relegate themselves to the has-been pile of vendor companies who failed to make it.  (e.g. Burroughs, Wang, Control Data, MSA, McCormack and Dodge, etc.).  Success and survival requires a software vendor to deliver across the 10 elements of Social Enterprise Apps in the next 2 to 3 years.

Quick Facts: Epicor Software

Location: HQ in Irvine, CA, globally located in 50 countries

Founded: 1984

Revenues: FY 2008 $495M

Employees: 2,800

Customers: 22,000

Event Information: 2009 Predictions for HR and SaaS