SuccessFactors Acquisition Puts SAP In Direct Competition With Workday And Taleo

SAP (NYSE:SAP) announced its $3.4B acquisition of SuccessFactors (NYSE: SFSF) as it seeks to bolster its position in the Cloud and more importantly in the rapidly growing strategic HCM market.  Based in San Mateo, CA, USA, SuccessFactors brings over 15 million subscription users from 3,500 customers in 168 countries.  The company has 1450 employees and has been one of the SaaS/Cloud darlings of the industry.  When completed, SuccessFactors will remain an independent entity renamed, SuccessFactors, an SAP company.  Lars Dalgaard, Founder and CEO, SuccessFactors will lead the cloud business for SAP.  A quick analysis of the news reveals:

• SAP seeking a comprehensive and complementary HCM solution. SAP believes the combination of SuccessFactors and SAP will create a comprehensive HCM solution, marrying strength in enterprise applications with people-focused cloud applications. Today, SAP serves the market with a comprehensive and international Core HR and payroll.  Other on-premise offerings include talent management, workforce analytics, and shared services delivery. Key offerings from SuccessFactors include areas such as talent management, recruiting management, goal management, performance reviews, and business execution.  Further, SAP believes the core SFSF offerings will be an attractive to more than 500 million employees of SAP customers .  SAP has 15,000 HCM deployments (not customers) that could benefit from one-stop shopping.
  
  Point of View (POV): While the core offerings provided a solid approach, these applications remained in the systems of transaction world and lacked many of the newer requirements for systems of engagement.  In fact, many customers left SAP to go to SuccessFactors to accelerate innovation in the talent space. The rise of Taleo, Workday, and Ultimate Software comes from the lack of general innovation in the HCM space by legacy vendors such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP.  Cloud computing provided the opportunity to deliver rapid innovation to customers.  Consequently, existing customers will welcome the move while best of breed purists will have to overcome the surprise and determine how innovative they expect SAP to become in HCM.

• SuccessFactors’ provides SAP with massive cross-sell opportunities. SAP believes the core SFSF offerings will be an attractive to more than 500 million employees of SAP customers .  SAP has 15,000 HCM deployments (not customers) that could potentially go for one-stop shopping from SAP.
  
  Point of View (POV): SAP sees the acquisition as a great cross-sell opportunity for other cloud apps and analytics.  Other opportunities include CRM, Collaboration, Travel, and Procurement in the cloud.  In the past two years, Success Factors has made the shift to focus on business performance execution and provides a real time decision making platform.  While customers can acquire a solution from one vendor, the integration of the various cloud platforms may prove to be a challenge.  However, from a financial play, Co-CEO, Bill McDermott sees this as an easy way to meet his 2015 target of €20billion and move towards the 35% margin he seeks to bring shareholders.

• SuccessFactors’ brings enhanced social, and cloud expertise while SAP provides mobile assets. Lars and company do bring cloud expertise and know how.  They have shown how to manage and innovate in large scale cloud deployments.  In addition, the CubeTree acquisition provides some basic social features and a solid set of pre-built integrations to many consumer and enterprise products including Twitter, Google Docs and Google Reader, Salesforce.com, WebEx and Basecamp.  Meanwhile, SAP hopes to add the Sybase platform to add business to employee mobility capabiltiies.
  
  POV: SAP’s many efforts headed up by Peter Lorenz may have to be rationalized quite quickly.  Why? SAP’s complete portfolio comprises five different software architectures from ByD, Career OnDemand, Plateau, and Business Suite 7.  Without harmonizing the architectures, SAP will inherit a technical deficit.  Lars first task must be how to integrate such a cacophony of technologies including how to fit Sybase Mobile onto the SuccessFactors architecture.  The Streamworks team will also face challenges with integrating the social business assets of CubeTree which include wikis, blogs, polls, file sharing, link sharing, search, and other consumer tech features.

The Bottom Line For Customers And Prospects (Buy-Side): Proceed With Caution

On the call with SAP and SuccessFactors executives, they reconfirmed that SuccessFactors will remain an independent entity and operate as “SuccessFactors, an SAP company”.  Lars Dalgaard is recommended for addition to the executive board of SAP AG.  However, customers and prospects should:

• Shore up existing concessions and agreements with SuccessFactors. Use this opportunity to add additional licenses as needed, make contract revisions, and secure commitments on product enhancements.  Sales folks will be clamoring to complete end of year deals.  Now is the best time to negotiate a deal.
  
• Seek clarity on the future cloud road map. Questions about the future road map abound.  With so many different offerings from SAP, which platform remains.  How will SAP handle cloud based integration at the process, data, and meta data level?
• Explore other SAP offerings. Now with a broader portfolio, existing SuccessFactors customers who are not SAP customers may want to explore some of the other Line of Business Cloud offerings.

The Bottom Line For Vendors (Sell-Side): SAP Must Continue To Make Selective Acquisitions In Three Out Of The Five Pillars of Consumer Tech To Grow

This acquisition and many others show why large enterprise software companies such as SAP must acquire for innovation in order to grow top line revenue.  In the mobile, cloud, and social space, we are seeing a war for footprint and users.  The market can expect more consolidation and more chaos as these acquisitions change the overall market landscape.  For enterprise software, Oracle, Salesforce.com, IBM, and SAP must place bets on the five pillars of consumer tech entering the enterprise in order to remain relevant and grow.  SAP currently has built a solid foundation in analytics/big data with Business Objects and has made forays into Cloud with Business By Design and Mobile with Sybase (see Figure 1).  This acquisition moves it further along in Cloud.  However, SAP will have to do more in Social (CubeTree perhaps) and mobile to move forward.  Unified communications may come from a partnership with Cisco and Microsoft instead of an outright acquisition or organic development.

Figure 1. SAP Covers Three Out Of Five Pillars In The Consumerization of IT

The cloud does change many dynamics for all technology vendors.  Here’s why:

• Hardware vendors emerge as cloud providers.  Dell’s entrance into providing bundled Cloud services shows how the model can also provide bundled services from a trusted hardware provider.
• System integrators move to the cloud to provide differentiated IP. Capgemini’s Immediate offering shows how a system integrator can provide Cloud BPO with bundled services under a single SLA and contract.
• Full stack providers move to create value to both the IT buyers and the line of business executive. For example,  IBM has led the way with its Social Business and Cross Channel Commerce acquisitions.  Oracle has finally acknowledging that the cloud exists with the RightNow acquisition and accelerated the cloud wars.

The next 12 to 18 months will show how innovation created by startups will find a natural path to existing legacy vendors.  The model is no different than in hardware 15 years ago.  However, with software, new innovators and entrants will continue to emerge due to the low barrier of entry for innovation and the compelling returns in exit strategies.

Your POV.

SuccessFactors customers, what’s your reaction to the SAP purchase?  SAP customers, will you move to SAP?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

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

• Mapping out the roadmap in the Future of Work
• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support for SaaS, Cloud, and On-Premises software.
• Evaluating SaaS/Cloud options
• 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
• Engaging in an SCRM, HR tech and strategy
• Planning upgrades and migration
• Performing vendor selection

Resources

SAP Conference Call Replay With Bill McDermott and Lars Dalgaard

News Analysis: Oracle Buys RightNow For $1.43B

Monday’s Musings: Balancing The Six S’s In Consumerization Of IT

Monday’s Musings: A Working Vendor Landscape For Social Business

Research Report: The Upcoming Battle For The Largest Share Of The Technology Budget Part 1

Media Coverage

20111203 ZDNet: Between The Lines – Larry Dignan “SAP acquires SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion: Cloud consolidation accelerates”

20111203 ZDNet: Irregular Enterprise – Dennis Howlett “SAP acquires SuccessFactors: a first take”

20111203 IDG News Service – Elizabeth Heichler “Update: SAP buys SuccessFactors for $3.4 bn to boost cloud offering”

20111203 SAP On The Cloud – Sven Denecken “SAP to Accelerate Cloud Strategy with Acquisition of SuccessFactors – will talk more #SAPSummit”

20111203 Bloomberg BusinessWeek -Ragnhild Kjetland “SAP to Buy SuccessFactors for $3.4 Billion to Match Oracle”

Reprints

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact sales (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

Copyright © 2011 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

Title: Workday Predict And Prepare 2011
Start Date: 2011-12-07  11:00 am PST
End Date: 2011-12-07   12:00 pm PST
Location: Webinar Link

For the fourth year in a row, join the country’s top IT, HR and Talent Management analysts and consultants for their predictions of next year’s critical trends, plus their advice on how you should prepare for them.
Their predictions include

Denver, Colorado, United States – November 1st, 2011
8:31 am (GMT – 7:00) Central Time

Constellation Research Inc, a next generation research analyst and advisory firm helping clients achieve business value from emerging and disruptive technologies, announced today that Yvette Cameron has joined as a Vice-President & Principal Analyst for People Processes and People Technology.  Yvette will provide strategy and counsel to four key constellation client types: Chief People Officers, Chief HR Officers, software vendors, and professional services firms.

Yvette is a proven executive leader and visionary.  She brings over 20 years of experience in designing, developing, communicating and managing global technology solutions.  Her work enables companies to align business objectives and workforce initiatives, foster employee engagement, and create a transformational workplace.

Prior to joining Constellation Research Yvette was with Saba Software as their VP and General Manager of Talent Management solutions where she helped incubate and launch their social networking technologies, and advanced their integrated learning and talent management solutions.  Before Saba, Yvette led product and marketing strategy teams at Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP and JD Edwards.  In addition to extensive software vendor experience, Yvette brings more than decade of experience as an HR practitioner, where she honed her skills in communication, change management, and the translation of business objectives into effective workforce processes and technology strategies

“Joining the Constellation Research team gives me the opportunity to continue sculpting the future of people processes and technologies from a new perspective”, says Cameron.  “It’s a highly respected organization and I look forward to bringing my experience and vision to Constellation to make it an even more dynamic presence for our clients.”

Yvette’s coverage will cover broad themes such as the “Future of Work” and include areas such as:

• Workforce collaboration and engagement
• Social strategies and technologies for strategic people processes
• Measuring and predicting results: Workforce Intelligence
• Cultivating leaders and pivotal talent
• Next generation HR leadership
• Implications and opportunities of deployment and service platforms: SaaS, PaaS, DaaS, BPaaS

“Yvette has both the practical experience and the thought leadership required to help people professionals bridge the gap between strategy and execution.  Her experience in advocating a client centric point of view coupled with credibility as an executive at many of the HR technology vendors provides our clients with invaluable and actionable advice.  More importantly, I’m energized by her passion for disruptive technologies in people processes.”, said  R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO.

Please join us in welcoming Yvette Cameron to the Constellation Research family and our growing Colorado presence!

COORDINATES

Twitter: @yvettecameron
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yvettecameron
Geographical Location: Denver, Colorado
Email: Y (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

About Constellation Research, Inc.*
Constellation Research is an award winning research analyst and advisory firm guiding organizations and their leaders through the hype and buzz of the latest disruptive technologies.  Constellation takes a holistic approach in achieving business value for board members, marketing, technology, operations, human resource, and finance executives.

The firm’s analysts deliver pragmatic, creative, and impactful research focused on business value, profitability, and market differentiation.  Research analysts bring real world experience, independence, and objectivity to our clients.  Most analysts bring over 2 decades of hands-on experience in working with senior leaders in enterprise organizations.

Constellation serves the needs of buyers and end users who seek insight, guidance, and advice in dealing with a dizzying array of disruptive business models and technologies.  The firm provide the bridge between legacy optimization and future innovation.  Constellation also advises sellers from both the buyer‚s point of view and how to deliver value to their customers.

Constellation builds partnerships with its clients.  The client and their organization’s success is Constellation’s only mission.

Insight. Inspiration. Impact.

*Constellation Research, Constellation SuperNova Awards and the Constellation Research logo are trademarks of Constellation Research, Inc. All other products and services listed herein are trademarks of their respective companies.

Press Contacts:

Contact the Media and Influencers relations team at press@ConstellationRG.com for interviews with analysts.

Sales Contacts:

Contact our sales team

Kieran Barr

Email: Kieran (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com
Office: +1.206.409.5009
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Email:David (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com .
Office: +1.719.357.7826
Twitter: @kiwigate

Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Social Business.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here.

Bobby Yazdani, CEO and Founder, Saba

Biography

Bobby Yazdani is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Saba. He was an industry pioneer in creating the Human Capital Management category in 1997, and has grown Saba into a $100 million+ profitable enterprise software business providing premier software and service solutions for people management and collaboration.

Saba’s people platform enables enterprise learning, performance and compensation management, succession planning, and workforce planning that align, engage, develop, mobilize, and foster collaboration across employees, customers, and partners. The company has been recognized by leading industry analysts for excellence and innovation in unified people management, collaboration, and social networking, and serves a roster of over 1,400 customers with more than 19 million users across 150 countries. Saba’s solutions are available on-premise or on-demand.

Saba’s customers are global leaders across a broad range of industries and public sector organizations, and include BMW, Daimler AG, IBM, The American Red Cross, Procter and Gamble, Medtronic, U.S. Army, and U.S. Navy, among many others. Bobby is a frequent spokesperson at industry events held by organizations such as the United Nations and The Economist. Prior to founding Saba, Bobby held various senior R&D management positions at Oracle Corporation.

Bobby has a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley.

The Interview

1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Social Computing is changing the world for your customers?

Bobby Yazdani (BY): The world of work is changing – and we fundamentally believe social computing and cloud computing is at the heart of this. It impacts the speed, quality, expectations and characteristics of how we work. You can draw parallels between social computing and the effect email has had on the way we work, in terms of its transformative impact in how we engage and communicate.

Our customers who are embracing social computing are finding that it’s dramatically changing the way they interact with their employees, customers, partners and suppliers. Through social computing, they’re creating significantly more transparency, increasing the speed of business, and generating and sharing more ideas and knowledge across their entire value chain – we call this the People Network.

2. What makes social computing disruptive?

(BY): Information used to be at the center of the workplace, but now people are. This is without a doubt the single most disruptive change brought about by social computing.

Social computing is not just about sharing information but connecting people in real time – all the time – on a global and local basis. It’s essentially destroying the “functional organization” that’s based on a model of hierarchy, and replacing it with a fluid model that dramatically increases the rate of innovation, enables more intimate interaction and sharing of ideas and initiatives.

Social computing allows organizations to unleash the collective wisdom of the People Network to deliver real-time insights that effectively drive innovation and increase productivity. Work can be done wherever talent resides, increasing efficiencies and making people more effective.

3. What is the next big thing in Social Computing?

(BY): Social business is going to become both global and local. It will be prescriptive, open and organic, and will involve both public and private social connections. And content will be highly curated and personalized to the experience of the way we work. This more dynamic environment will liberate employees, create better customer experiences, and yield new values to the entire organization value chain.

4. What are you doing that’s disruptive for Social Computing?

(BY): As I mentioned, our view is that social computing is all about people – not just within the enterprise, but the entire People Network. We’re talking about more effectively organizing people and processes – in whatever language, for whatever purpose necessary – by removing every barrier to connection.

Ultimately, I want Saba to become a “recommendation engine” for how we interact, communicate and collaborate – in any language. These are the inherent benefits that social computing can bring to make people more effective.

5. Where do you see technology convergence with Social Computing?

(BY): Cloud computing and mobile technology are already converging with social, and this trend will continue as global pressures demand more flexibility in how we work, how quickly we respond and how we manage the scale of information available. We also see the convergence of personal and business information, with social computing becoming more prescriptive in nature and having the potential to curate more personalized experiences in real-time, all the time.

6. if you weren’t focused on Social Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?

(BY): Learning machines or machine learning, definitely. I’m fascinated by machinery that can learn who you are, how you behave and what’s important to you. The type of technology that can become your sidekick, your agent, your butler—and help you do everything you need to do, only faster and better. An interesting company (disclosure: I am an investor) is Clever Sense. They’re all about the notion of creating a personal robot.

I’m also very keen on algorithms and large data. And I’m deeply passionate about beautiful, creative experiences that can be formed in a computing environment. A great example of this is Qwiki, which improves experiences by turning information into more inspired, interactive experiences.

7. What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?

(BY): On the original “Star Trek” TV series, the ship’s medical doctor, Dr. Leonard McCoy, had a device that could tell him what was happening with a patient’s body. It could pick up vital signs and detect potential diseases, allowing people to have more insight and be more prescriptive about their health.

Your POV

What do you think? Got a question for Bobby?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

The Tech Vendor series is closed.  To be considered for the Business and Tech Innovators series, please reach out to Elaine (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

Reprints

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact sales (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

Copyright © 2011 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

After 11 months of behind the scenes work, CEO Charles Phillips and the Infor management team unveiled the launch of Infor 10 in New York City on September 13, 2011, to customers, industry analysts, media, and investment analysts.  The new Infor has kept busy with key management team hires, the $1.84 B acquisition of Lawson, the launch of Infor10 CloudSuite, and partnerships in CRM with Salesforce.com via Inforce.

Infor currently serves more than 75,000 customers in 164 countries. With combined revenues greater han $2.5B, Infor/Lawson is the third largest enterprise apps company. The Infor and Lawson combination brings deep industry presence in key industries such as aerospace, automotive, chemical, distribution, equipment service maintenance repair (ESMR), fashion, food and beverage, general manufacturing, healthcare, high-tech, hospitality, high tech, industrial equipment and machinery, industrial manufacturing, and public sector.

Key announcements from the September 13th launch event include:

• Reintroducing ION as the ‘the heart of Infor10. Infor’s lightweight middleware solution provides an integration tool for Infor and non-Infor applications. The intent is to provide devices such as desktops, tablets, and other mobile devices to gain access to information in existing applications. Key components behind the technology infrastructure include a common user interface, workspace, reporting and analytics, workflow, event management, master data management, localizations, mobility enablement, and packaged integration.
  
  Point of View (POV): Unlike Oracle and SAP who have spent billions addressing the integration problem through a comprehensive and heavy middleware strategy, ION take a more pragmatic approach. Through loose coupling, Ion gives the Infor family of products increased agility that matches use cases for a mobile, social, and analytical world. While ION aims to provide better integration, streamlined workflows and end to end business process integration, Constellation believes it will take at least 6 to 9 months before the first set of end to end processes span across the major product lines (e.g. Infor10 ERP Enterprise (LN) and Infor 10 Lawson M3).  The good news – Integration between Infor10 Lawson S3 and Infor EAM is planned for November, just 100 days after acquisition.
   

  On the management team side, customers and prospects will be reassured that both Infor’s second employee, Soma Somasundaram, senior vice president of Global Product Development and Dean Hager (i.e. originally from Lawson) remain key driving forces for carrying out this completed vision.

Figure 1. ION Plays A Key Role In Infor’s Long Term Strategy

Source: Infor

• Delivering a consumer grade experience. Duncan Algove, President of Products and Support introduced Infor10 Workspace. With an intention of bringing consumer world experiences to the enterprise, Infor10 WorkSpace provides a fresh start to helping users “work the way they live”. Key elements of the ION experience include role-based screens, role-based workflows, in-context business intelligence, event management, activity streams, tasks and alerts, and consumer-like search capabilities).
  
  POV: Existing customers and new prospects expect next generation applications to meet the Six S’s of Enterprise Class Consumerization of IT. Infor’s key design principles of flipping the structure of work to be data and event driven, contextual data at the point of decision, social computing metaphors, and design for mobile play a key role in making this a reality for Infor customers. This provides a compelling reason for customers to put their maintenance fees to use in an upgrade or purchase of Infor10 components.

Figure 2. Scenes From The New Infor User Experience

Source: Infor

• Bring social analytics or socialytics to the Salesforce.com offerings. Sales and Service Cloud will gain new capabilities in social media monitoring and engagement.  Today’s companies seek the tools to bring social customer strategies with existing CRM processes and organizational structures. A social media monitoring and engagement platform provides a critical tool for success in Social CRM (SCRM).
  
  Point of View (POV): The market seeks deeper and greater purpose built capabilities. Many of Infor’s acquired products provide a deep industry functionality that is unmatched. However, much of the rich functionality remains trapped in legacy technology. Customers and prospects will wait and see if ION provides the technology to expose this functionality in new paradigms such as mobile and business intelligence.

• Providing flexible deployment options. Infor10 includes new options that support on-premise, on-demand, and hybrid deployments. The Infor10 CloudSuite Platform provides a hosting capability to take advantage of cloud-based deployments.  Infor 10 CloudSuite solutions are architected for true multi-tenant SaaS.
  
  Point of View (POV): Infor gets kudos for providing choice in deployment options that provide a unified user experience and security regardless of deployment option. The good news – the same application code is used for both on-premise and cloud and integrations support two-tiered and hybrid deployments.  CloudSuite ERP, CloudSuite EAM, and CloudSuite Expense management area ll examples of true-multi-tenant offerings.  For those offerings that are not multi-tenant SaaS, Infor offers dedicated hosting, shared servers with separate copies of the application for each customer, and virtualized environments to support multiple customers.

The Bottom Line For Buyers (Users and Prospects). Infor10 Sets The Stage For A More Viable Alternative And Competitor To The Status Quo

Infor10 captures many of the elements required for the next generation of applications. It also addresses the key forces in the Consumerization of IT. But more importantly, users will sense that this new management team has the momentum and capability to take Infor to the next level. Constellation suggests that:

• Customers should assess ION in their apps strategy. ION can play a key role in consolidating legacy applications and preparing organizations for the next generation.
• Customers and prospects should consider Infor in two tier ERP deployments. Organizations with Oracle and SAP as the corporate system of record, should look to Infor for industry specific assets. Companies who have not upgraded or kept up with the latest Infor product should take the time to work with the management team to achieve reference customer status.
• Customers and prospects should see where industry specific applications play a role in core apps strategy. Dario Castello, CIO of Ferrari mentioned that they spent 7 months evaluating ERP options and ultimately chose Infor because of the depth of functionality and the future direction of the company and technology. The Ferrari decision to go from Baan 4CIV to ERPLN7 reflects how the new management team is partnering with customers to ensure success.

The Bottom Line for Sellers (Vendors): Infor may seem far behind but an IPO and new management team makes a big difference.

The combined Infor and Lawson industry expertise place Infor as a leading choice in many verticals such as healthcare, hospitality, and specialty manufacturing.  On a horizontal level, a strengthened financial suite paired with continued investment in Lawson’s HCM assets will help keep Infor top of mind in many vendor selection short lists.  Expect Infor to provide increased competitive pressure on SAP and Oracle.

After years of under-investing in products, the new management team has made the key technology investments required to take Infor to the next level. Improved user experience, a focus on verticals, and the commitment to faster time to market may be the ticket to bring Infor into the spotlight.  It appears that Charles Phillips and the management team have learned from the mistakes that Oracle and SAP have made – taking too long to deliver a product and not being innovative enough.  Time to market is the critical success factor in an era of Consumerization of IT.

Your POV.

Does this announcement surprise you?  Are you an Infor customer?  Will you be ready to make the leap with Infor10?  Have you had a good experience with Infor?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

How can we assist?

Buyers, do you need help with your apps strategy and vendor management strategy?  Trying to figure out how to infuse innovation into your tech strategy? Ready to put the expertise of over 1000 software contract negotiations to work?  Give us a call!

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

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

Related Resources

20110314 A Software Insider’s Point of View – R “Ray” Wang – “News Analysis: Infor Extends $1.84B Unsolicited Offer For Lawson”

20101025 A Software Insider’s Point Of View – R “Ray” Wang – “News Analysis: Charles Phillips Takes Over As CEO Of Infor”

20100422 A Software Insider’s Point of View – R ” Ray” Wang – “News Analysis: Lawson Puts Its Full ERP Suite Into The Cloud”

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

Reprints

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact sales (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

Copyright © 2011 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Social Business.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here.

Daniel Debow, Co-CEO,  Rypple Software

Biography

Daniel is co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, a social performance management platform that helps Facebook, Gilt Groupe, and other innovative companies recognize great work, run fast, efficient feedback loops, and coach employees to achieve their goals. A sought after speaker on how social media is changing the workplace, Daniel is a regular contributor to Fortune.com and the Huffington Post. He’s been widely quoted in Wired, the Financial Times, the Economist and Bloomberg Businessweek. He holds a JD/MBA from the University of Toronto and an LLM in Law, Science and Technology from Stanford University.

The Interview

1.  Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Social Computing is changing the world for your customers.

Daniel Debow (DB): Ray, Social Performance Management (what we do) is changing the world for our customers because it takes a dreaded and ineffective process—the performance review—and makes it relevant again.

Over the last decade, the review process has become disconnected from real business performance. By delivering key feedback and information in real-time, rather than in six-month batches, we are helping managers and their teams work more effectively, efficiently, and collaboratively. At the end of the day, this is the core promise of any type of business software: improved business results.

More generally, social computing is effective because in many cases, it is more efficient. While it may seem like an oversimplification, large corporations have succeeded by standardizing the delivery of products and services as they scale. These large-scale standardizations of “process” work incredibly well when it comes to managing supply chains or product pipelines. But when it comes to the management of people, standardization of process has translated into enterprise applications that suck. They remove the “human” from the workplace, and are major contributors to the alienation of people from their work.

In order to get people to the next level, we have to bring the “human” back into the work place. A huge amount of value-creating work gets done outside standard process—through social interaction. Today’s enterprise applications don’t model the corporation this way. But social computing does.

Social computing is about taking the metaphor, modelling the reality, and moving faster. It recognizes that when it comes to people, companies are not simply processes moving mechanistically. Instead, the social computing metaphor reflects more accurately what companies actually are: groups of people talking—and coordinating—with each other to deliver productive goods and services in a highly non-standard world. By recognizing this more accurate representation of the corporation, social computing has the potential to make companies more efficient by optimizing the faster, more natural flow of information between people.

In our case, we’ve found that the interactions related to human performance and getting the most out of people are absolutely social. They involve helping people talk to each other in a more collaborative and real-time way: How do we recognize people in real-time? How do we help managers and teams collaborate on people performance. How do we recognize and account for the reality that managers aren’t omniscient about team performance? How do we get one-on-one’s with the boss to be high impact and frequent? How do we create agile goals that reflect changing business reality rather than reality as it existed six months ago? The answer is social computing, which views a company not as a static org chart and a number of interconnected process flows—but rather as a social network with ad-hoc and ever changing relationships and interactions.

This is the essence of social computing.

2. What makes social computing disruptive?

DB: As with all disruptive technologies it meets three key criteria:

1. It attacks a problem in an orthogonal way.  Almost all social technology appears at first to be a toy.  Customers don’t asking for them, yet they spread into companies like wild fire.  Users say, “I’d never do this in the enterprise.”
2. It breaks the price-performance curve on a different scale. In many cases, Rypple included, we make it cheaper to deploy than existing technology.
3. It appears as an incomplete solution from the perspective of incumbents.  Incumbents will state you don’t have the 1000 features they have.

The telegraph, the phone, and email all changed the number of nodes of communication and improved the flow of information between people. Social technologies take communication to the next level. This isn’t just a technological shift; it’s a societal one. We are taking the same metaphors of openness and transparency that have been used to describe the web and applying them to organizations.

When you value results above internal politics and velocity over caution, you create a more innovative, less hierarchical—and ultimately disruptive—organization.

3.  What is the next big thing in Social Business software?

DB: Recently I was on a panel on the future of the workforce, where I talked about two huge developments on the horizon. The first is the shift from an economy of companies to an economy of individuals, as everyone’s reputation and personal brand moves to the cloud. It will be interesting to see what this means for consumer brands like Nike and Pepsi, and how people interact with them.

The second big shift is the ability of social media to create more meritocratic systems for rating true influence and power within organizations. Cloud-based social applications are asking people to rate one another and provide opinions based on far more objective data than the vague subjective impressions that often determine influence.

As that data migrates to the cloud and becomes portable, it will have profound changes on the labor market. It will transform how we look for talent, where the power resides, and potentially the very nature of the corporation.
As reputation becomes a more objective measure, it will force companies to become more fluid in their hiring practices and their operations.

4.  What are you doing that’s disruptive for Social Computing?

DB: Rypple is trying to live by the values we’ve been talking about—the values that our service provides to customers: transparency and visibility. We sell and market the product in a disrupitve way. You can try our product for free and decide on your own whether it has value. Our approach to marketing is to be as human and authentic as we can. We are helpful to people instead of being shills.  Without faking, we want you to buy our product.  We work hard to pull in all the key data people need to complete their jobs.

Just as important, we want to make the way people communicate at work more seamless and efficient—to surface all the data currently living in CRM, support, and product development and bring it into people’s daily work flow. This will lead to improved communication, collaboration, and ultimately business performance.

We are reinventing the way people manage their performance at work. The world has changed in the past 50 years,taking advantage of new technologies to bring a more efficient, just-in-time philosophy to so many parts of the organization. Yet performance management remains the same.  For the most part, it is conducted on pieces of paper—forms that may or may not have been automated for the desktop. We want to help companies deliver that  feedback immediately, when it can impact performance, rather than six months from now, when it’s too late. And we are changing the paradigm to consider how to make this process more social, more natural, and more relevant to business leaders, HR professionals, managers, and individual employees.

We don’t pretend to be creating Utopia. Organizations still need to implement and follow the best practices of engaging, coaching, and motivating their employees. We’ve just made that process far more efficient, intuitive, and fun.

You’ll see more announcements in the next few months.
5.  Where do you see technology convergence with Social?

DB: Today, we have many outside repositories such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter that work in concert with inside repositories. You no longer have to own the platform to create value. In our case, we’ll follow the Zynga strategy.  Find the platform people are using to interact at work—and build on top of it where there’s value.

We expect to move further in that direction with the information and knowledge contained in workforce process flows, such as support tickets and supply chain management. Beyond a simple automation of existing processes, we see a real opportunity to incorporate these sources of information into performance.

6. If you weren’t focused on Social Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?

DB: Personally, it’d be music.  I’m passionate about music.  Can we find a way for students to learn faster, better, and share?  We need new learning mechanisms to help people accomplish this.  Can we create the right feedback loops? Part of what makes social software better is that it makes social feedback loops more effective.

Transparent decision making ties back to learning.  Take how John Boyd changed the effectiveness of fighter jets and military strategy through decision loops.  The team with the fastest decision making loops wins.

7.    What’s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?

DB: If I had to pick one gadget, it would be the time machine. The classic HG Wells type. I’ll need one that works and I’d just want to ensure I could get back to our time.

Your POV

What do you think? Got a question for Daniel?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

Additional interviews will be added and updated!  To be considered for the series, please reach out to Elaine (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

Reprints

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact sales (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

Copyright © 2011 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

The Social Business (Social Enterprise) Moves Beyond The 18 Use Cases Of Social CRM

As social media adoption continues to move from mainstream to pervasive ubiquity, enterprises will begin to benefit from these advancements in the consumerization of IT (CoIT).  Just 18 months ago, early adopters identified 18 Use Cases for Social CRM (SCRM).  These ground breaking use cases showed enterprises how to bring social into existing CRM processes.

Consequently, the market has moved on beyond just marketing, service, and support use cases.  In the latest Software Insider “State of Social Business” survey, 103 respondents identified 25 additional use cases that spanned across key enterprise business processes that impact eight key functional areas, from external facing to internal facing (see Figure 1):

1. Public relations/ marketing (PR/MA).  Key impacted business process: Campaign to lead
2. Sales (SFA).  Key impacted business process: Lead to deal
3. Service and support (CSS).  Key impacted business process: Incident to resolution
4. Projects (PBS).  Key impacted business process: Kickoff to delivery
5. Innovation/ product life cycle management (PLM). Key impacted business process: Concept to production
6. Supply chain (SCM). Key impacted business process: Sourcing to acceptance
7. Human capital management (HCM). Key impacted business process: Hire to retire
8. Finance. Key impacted business process: Invoice to payment

Figure 1. Constellation Defines 43 Social Business/ Social Enterprise Use Cases and 24 Key Analytics

(Hint: right click to expand and view the full image)

Early Adopters Identify HCM And Projects As The Next Growth Area For Social Business

Survey respondents chose their top 3 internal collaboration and external engagement social business use cases (see Figure 2).  Not surprisingly, service/support use cases led the pack with Reactive support-External (68.9%) and Support escalation and resolution – External (64.1%).  Lead generation – External in the PR Marketing category rounded out the top 3 at (63.1%).  Meanwhile, Projects and HCM gain traction among the top 5 use cases. Respondents report an increase in adoption of Projects Workspaces- Internal (36.9%) such as wiki’s and similar internal collaboration tools.  Meanwhile, HCM Recruiting – External (34.0%) emerged as the fifth most utilized use case.

Other general trends include:

• Use cases split mostly evenly between internal collaboration (9) and external engagement (11)
• Service/support (6) and Sales (6) dominate the top use cases followed by HCM (3),  PR/Marketing (3), Projects (2)
• Respondents identified new use cases for areas such as supply chain, finance, and innovation/PLM

Figure 2. The Top 20 Social Business (Social Enterprise) Use Cases For 103 Early Adopters

(Hint: right click to expand and view the full image)

Recommendations: Apply Constellation’s DEEPR Disruptive Adoption Framework For Social Business (Social Enterprise)

The DEEPR framework shows users where they fit in the five levels of disruptive technology adoption (see Figure 3). The framework applies to social business and provides the basis used in early adoption surveys such as Constellation latest report, “Lesson Learned From 100 Early Social Business Adopters”.

1. Discovery. A few individuals begin the process of discovering new tools. As these individuals identify consumer tech innovations that impact enterprise business processes, leaders must discern hype from reality and garner executive support. Teams should take the time to understand the target audience and what challenges/gaps a social solution will help them solve. Solutions should focus on business value at the outset.
2. Experimentation. As small teams experiment with new tools they often fail fast on experiments, learn, and move on. Leaders must foster a safe environment for experimentation. From there, they can encourage internal collaboration and begin the process of selecting a short list of appropriate tools.
3. Evangelization. In this level, small department leaders seek repeatable processes and begin test pilots of technology. Momentum begins to build for projects. Leaders incorporate social into business models and track meaningful business metrics
4. Pervasiveness. Successful evangelization leads to enterprise wide acceptance. Processes become repeatable and predictable. Leaders scale to match demand and ensure long term-funding.
5. Realization. With a successful project at hand, the enterprise seeks to expand the usage to ecosystem stakeholders. Suppliers, partners, and customers are brought into the fold. Leaders anticipate convergence and develop social business governance plans.

Figure 3.  Inside Constellation’s DEEPR Disruptive Adoption Framework For Social Business

(Hint: right click to expand and view the full image)

The Bottom Line: More Use Cases Will Emerge

While areas such as social marketing may have peaked, other innovative use cases will emerge beyond the 43 social business (social enterprise) use cases.  Why? Social media continues to permeate into and across key enterprise business processes.  With the rapid consumerization of IT , buyers should seek advice and assistance from those who understand enterprise class issues.

In fact, buyers can expect many pseudo research based consulting firms and social media pundits to quickly shift gears as they try to enter the enterprise space.  However, buyer beware – many will fail their clients because of a lack of understanding about complex business processes and the constraints of legacy IT.

Your POV.

As part of our ongoing research, we are seeking new case studies from both early adopters and vendors.  Send us a new case study (see Figure 1) and in return we’ll send you a copy of the latest Constellation Report, “Lessons Learned From 100 Early Social Business Adopters” (a $2000 value)

What’s your use case?  Did we miss one? Let us know!  Got a question?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

Please let us know if you need help with your Social CRM/ Social Business efforts.  Here’s how we can assist:

• Assessing social business/social CRM readiness
• Developing your social business/ social CRM  strategy
• Vendor selection
• Implementation partner selection
• Connecting with other pioneers
• Sharing best practices
• Designing a next gen apps strategy
• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
• Demystifying software licensing

Related Research:

• Monday’s Musings: Balancing The Six S’s In Consumerization Of IT
• Monday’s Musings: A Working Vendor Landscape For Social Business
• Product Review: Google+, Consumerization of IT, and Crossing The Chasm For Enterprise Social Business
• Monday’s Musings: Using MDM To Build A Complete Customer View In A Social Era
• Monday’s Musings: Mastering When and How High End Brands Should Use Daily Deal Sites Such As Groupon
• News Analysis: Salesforce.com Acquires Radian6 For $316M
• Monday’s Musings: Q1 2011 State of Social CRM and CRM From An EMEA Point Of View
• Best Practices: Applying Social Business Challenges To Social Business Maturity Models
• Research Summary: Software Insider’s Top 25 Posts For 2010
• Best Practices: Five Simple Rules For Social Business
• Research Report: Constellation’s Research Outlook For 2011
• Research Report: How The Five Pillars Of Consumer Tech Influence Enterprise Innovation
• Research Report: Next Gen B2B and B2C E-Commerce Priorities Reflect Macro Level Trends
• News Analysis: Jive Fills Warchest, Ready to Battle Enterprise Software Giants And IPO?
• Tuesday’s Tip: Applying The Five Stages Of Adoption Towards SCRM Projects
• News Analysis: Lithium’s Acquisition of Scout Labs Ups The Ante in Social CRM
• News Analysis: Biz360 Acquisition Signals Attensity Group’s Move Into Social CRM
• Monday’s Musings: Avoiding Failure In Social CRM Projects Requires Ecosystem Coordination
• Research Report: The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM – The New Rules of Relationship Management
• News Analysis: Siperian Acquisition Vaults Informatica Into An MDM Leadership Position
• News Analysis: Jive and Radian6 Partner – Great For Business, But Could Fragment IT Systems
• Event Report: Salesforce.com Pushes Social CRM Technology — But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone
• Monday’s Musings: Why Every Social CRM Initiative Needs An MDM Backbone
• Personal Log: Altimeter Group – Helping Organizations Bridge The Technology Obsolescence Gap
• Monday’s Musings: 10 Essential Elements For Social Enterprise Apps

Reprints

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact sales (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, see the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

Copyright © 2011 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

SAP’s Sales OnDemand Strategy Reveals A Longer Term Product And Cloud Strategy

In an exclusive briefing on February 24th with SAP’s Executive Vice President of Line Of Business Applications, John Wookey, he provided fresh insight into the new product design and Cloud philosophy at SAP.  This pre-CeBit announcement coincided with the SAP Analyst Day in Boston.  A few take-aways from the briefing reveal:

• An investment in design thinking behind future Line-of-Business products. With consumer technologies entering the enterprise at a blistering pace, it’s become obvious that today’s enterprise apps only support a small percentage of the work people must accomplish on a daily basis.  SAP’s Line Of Business apps team starts with a design thinking approach.  The initial objectives leverage SAP’s rich history of process excellence, focus on people empowerment, and align with business objectives to achieve a clear purpose.etc.
  
  Point of View (POV): The software industry has taken note in how Design Schools around the world solve problems in user experience and adoption.  SAP’s design thinking process reflects the classical 7 phases of define, research, ideation, prototype, objectives, implement, and learn.  Pairing a design thinking approach and agile development methodologies has led to an understanding of what tasks people need to get done and how to quickly create iterations.   The result – more intuitive user experiences and new product releases every 6 months.  More time is spent on upfront design not engineering.  If successful, Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe will have shown how his focus on agile will pay off across the development organizations.
  
  
• Solutions such as Sales On Demand (Sales OD) that empower people to be effective. From the beginning, the product begins with collaboration through the use of activity streams (i.e. Facebook, Twitter like user experience).  Team collaboration is enhanced with access to key content, analytics, and even competitor information (see Figure 1).  Design points focus on delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time, on the right form factor.  Analytics provide self-service reports (see Figure 2).  Sales effectiveness concepts build around the 4Cs (i.e. the right context, right contacts, right content, and the right contract).
  
  POV: Sales Force Automation (SFA) solutions in the past failed to address the needs of the Sales Professional and the customer.  As with most customer relationship management solutions, they covered the “M” in CRM and ignored the customer (C) and the relationship (R). SAP’s Sales On Demand product is different as it addresses the key issues in helping sales professional receive relevant information and collaborate with their networks in an intuitive manner.  Users will be surprised that this is an SAP application. Despite only delivering 20% of the full SAP CRM suite Sales application capability, the 20% provided delivers 80% of the key capabilities to support sales person effectiveness.

Figure 1.  Activity Streams (Feeds) Deliver A Intuitive And Collaborative User Experience

(Source: SAP)

Figure 2.  Analytics Provide Sales Professionals With Relevant, Self-Service Insight

(Source: SAP)

• A steady stream of break through solutions to come. Sales OD is the first of many solutions to enter the market.  Sourcing OnDemand has been available on the Frictionless platform for some time.  Career on Demand and Travel on demand will arrive in 2H 2011.   Other products on the list include Carbon Impact OnDemand, Business Intelligence OnDemand, and the top secret Project Columbus.  All products will be designed to support new form factors including blackberries and iPads (see Figure 3).
  
  POV: Despite jettisoning the Frictionless Commerce platform, the new solutions build on SAP’s Business ByDesign (ByD) platform.  In retrospect, the benefits include process, meta data, and data integration with the rest of the ByD suite.  Pre-packaged integration with the core NetWeaver stack and Business Suite 7 (BS7) will most likely show up in future releases.  For SAP shops, these new Line Of Business OnDemand apps may provide a credible alternative to today’s best of breed SaaS players.
  

Figure 3. Product Design Accounts For Emerging And New Form Factors

(Source: SAP)

The Bottom Line:  SAP’s New Approach Transforms More Than User Experience

Next generation applications address 10 key elements in order to capture the hearts and minds of users.  These elements focus on three areas: dynamic user experiences, business process focus, and community connectedness.  SAP’s OD strategy seeks to address these 10 elements.  If successful, SAP could stem the losses from SAP customers seeking two-tier ERP and cloud strategies that surround the core SAP products.

However, SAP has some hard work ahead.  The first releases come with limited features.  Users will have to bet on SAP’s ability to quickly iterate and add grow the product footprint.  In addition, for SAP to grow outside of its install base, these OD products must deliver good integration libraries that support hybrid clouds and mixed environments.  Despite being a late comer to the cloud religion, this new SaaS offensive could provide the catalyst and design point for future SAP successes.  Existing SAP customers should consider these OD solutions in head-to-head SaaS best of breed vendor selection short lists.

Your POV.

Will you make the move to SAP’s OnDemand applications?  Are you an existing SAP customer looking at two-tier ERP? Will this keep you from looking at best of breed SaaS apps?  Add your comments to the blog or send us a comment at r (at) softwareinsider (dot) org or info (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.

Let us know how we can assist with:

• Building a Cloud Strategy
• Designing your apps strategy
• Addressing SAP new license and maintenance contract negotiations
• Supporting a Two Tier ERP analysis

Related Links

20110302 ZDNet:SocialCRM: The Conversation -Paul Greenberg “SAP Sales OnDemand, Got It, Got It, Need It?
20110302 TechTarget/SearchCRM.com – Barney Beal “SAP takes another shot at CRM on-demand”
20110301 TMCNet.com – Linda Dobel “SAP Sales OnDemand Presents New Competition To Rivals”
20110301 IDG News Service – Chris Kanaracus “SAP Readies Salesforce.com Rival”
20110301 IT World Canada – Jeff Jedras and Chris Kanaracus “SAP enterprise-class hosted CRM targets Salesforce.com”
20110301 Information Week – Josh Greenbaum “SAP Plays Games With the Analysts”
20110302 Beagle Research – Denis Pombriant “SAP @CeBit and Sales OnDemand”
20110302 Silicon.com – Nick Heath “SAP Eyes Facebook and Apple for secrets of success.”

Related Resources

20100808 User Event: SAP Australian User Group Summit
20100802 Vendor Event: SAP Teched 2010 Las Vegas
20100518 Event Report: Sapphire 2010 Brings Customers Back To A New Sense Of Normalcy
20100512 News Analysis: SAP Bets On Innovation With $5.8B Sybase Acquisition

Reprints

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact sales@ConstellationRG.com.

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

Copyright © 2011 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

Cupertino, CA – January 24, 2011
9:00 AM (GMT -8:00) Pacific Standard Time

Constellation Research Inc, an emerging and disruptive technologies research and advisory firm, announces the addition of Amy Wilson as a VP & Principal Analyst in the research team.   Amy will focus on emerging and disruptive business models and technologies in the human capital management (HCM) arena.

Wilson is a software industry visionary with over 15 years of experience focused on the intersection of people, business, and technology.  Most recently, Amy drove product strategy for Oracle’s next generation Strategic HCM Fusion applications.  At PeopleSoft, Amy served roles in development and product strategy from financials to HCM during the shift from PeopleSoft 8.0 to PeopleSoft 9.0.  End user client work at Arthur Andersen and PeopleSoft brings a pragmatic buy-side point of view to disruptive business models and technologies.

Active in the HR blogging community, Amy shares her insight and opinions on the industry-leading group blog TalentedApps she co-founded in 2007.  TalentedApps has been recognized as a Top 25 Talent Management Blog by Fistful of Talent, an Alltop Best of the Best blog, and has been frequently highlighted in online aggregators such as HR Tech Central, HR Carnival, and Leadership Development Carnival.  In addition, Amy has appeared in leading publications such as Human Resource Executive Online and Workforce Management. She now blogs under the moniker Shiny & Useful on her site wilsoninsight.com.

Amy’s an experienced keynote speaker, presenting at notable industry conferences including The Conference Board, TED, Human Capital Institute, and Bersin IMPACT.  Wilson has drawn large crowds at PeopleSoft Connect, Oracle OpenWorld, and the Oracle HR User Group.  Amy’s audiences appreciate her creative and enthusiastic style as well as her ability to provoke a new way of thinking.

Wilson will expand Constellation’s coverage to include:

• Next gen HR leadership
• Strategic HCM
• Social recruiting
• Talent management
• Social collaboration
• Project based solutions
• Legacy optimization of HR systems

“I’m thrilled to join this esteemed team of multi-disciplinary thought leaders.  Constellation’s collaborative and creative community offers a way to bring deep and broad insight to business and HR leaders.  I look forward to being right in the middle of that.” noted Amy Wilson.

“Consumer technology advancements in mobile, social, analytics, and cloud computing have created long lasting disruptions in human capital management.  Amy’s background will provide our HCM leader clients with pragmatic, credible, and timely advice. ” stated  R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO.

Please join us in welcoming, Amy Wilson to the Constellation Research family!

COORDINATES

Twitter: @awils
Blog: http://wilsoninsight.com
LinkedIn :http://www.linkedin.com/pub/amy-wilson/0/656/6a1
Geo: San Francisco, CA, USA

About Constellation Research, Inc.
Constellation Research is a leading research analyst and advisory firm guiding organizations and their leaders through the hype and buzz of the latest disruptive technologies.  Constellation takes a holistic approach touching board members, marketing, technology, operations, human resource, and finance executives.

The firm’s analysts deliver pragmatic, creative, and disruptive research focused on business value, profitability, and market differentiation.   Research analysts bring real world experience, independence, and objectivity to our clients.  Most analysts bring over 2 decades of hands-on experience in working with senior leaders in enterprise organizations.

Constellation serves the needs of buyers and end users who seek insight, guidance, and advice in dealing with a dizzying array of disruptive business models and technologies.  The firm provide the bridge between legacy optimization and future innovation.  Constellation also advises sellers from both the buyer’s point of view and how to deliver value to their customers.

Constellation builds partnerships with its clients.  The client and their organization‚s success is Constellation’s only mission.

Press Contacts:

Contact the Media and Influencers relations team at press@ConstellationRG.com for interviews with analysts.

Sales Contacts:

For more information on how to engage with Constellation Research, Inc. contact:

David Stanley, Vice President of Business Development and Sales
• Email: David@ConstellationRG.com
• Office: 719.357.7826
• Twitter: @kiwigate

Kieran Barr, Senior Director of Business Development and Sales
• Email: Kieran@ConstellationRG.com
• Office: 206.409.5009
• Twitter: @kierobar

Fort Myers, Florida – January 11, 2011
1:00 PM (GMT -5:00) Eastern Standard Time

Constellation Research Inc, a next generation research analyst firm helping clients navigate emerging and disruptive technologies, announced today the addition of Naomi Lee Bloom of Bloom & Wallace to the Board of Advisors.

Constellation Research’s Board of Advisors play a key role in shaping the research agenda and providing advice and guidance to its members.  Board members bring significant industry experience, represent the leaders in their field, and serve in 6 to 12 month terms.  These esteemed individuals:

• Guide research direction
• Advise on business strategy
• Maintain an outside-in perspective
• Deliver mentorship from seasoned professionals
• Garner input from clients and prospects
• Grow the constellation of experts
• Identify new talent
• Maintain and exude the Constellation values in public

Board members do not have a commercial relationship with Constellation nor are they represented by Constellation.  Board members do not have fiduciary responsibility.

Naomi’s responsibilities as an advisory board member will be to help shape Constellation’s research agenda, contribute her thinking to the research and the resulting analysis, and bring the human resource management perspective to both the research on disruptive technologies (i.e. which of them and how might they impact the intersection of HRM and IT) and on the challenges of technology adoption in the enterprise.

“My interest in taking this role is the opportunity to continue learning and contributing in areas that are beyond the range of any one person to monitor, specifically the mega-changes underway and soon to come in enterprise technologies. I‚ve collaborated for years, but very informally, with colleagues at the traditional IT analyst firms in order to learn from their research.  As an advisory board member, I‚ll now have a greater opportunity to help shape that research.”, states Naomi Bloom.

“As with all our board members, Naomi is a force to be reckoned with in the industry.   Our analysts will directly benefit from her experience and her wisdom.  Clients will notice the impact on the research agenda.  More importantly, Naomi will provide the mentorship to analysts that is often a scarce commodity in today’s organizations.  This is a key issue we wanted to address early on in our inception.”, noted  R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO.

Please join us in welcoming, Naomi Bloom and Bloom & Wallace  to the Constellation Research family!
COORDINATES
Twitter: @infullbloom
Blog: http://infullbloom.us/
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/naomibloom
Geo: Fort Myers, Florida, USA

About Constellation Research, Inc.
Constellation Research is a leading research analyst firm guiding organizations and their leaders through the hype and buzz of the latest disruptive technologies.  Constellation takes a holistic approach touching board members, marketing, technology, operations, human resource, and finance executives.

The firm’s analysts deliver pragmatic, creative, and disruptive research focused on business value, profitability, and market differentiation.   Research analysts bring real world experience, independence, and objectivity to our clients.  Most analysts bring over 2 decades of hands-on experience in working with senior leaders in enterprise organizations.

Constellation serves the needs of buyers and end users who seek insight, guidance, and advice in dealing with a dizzying array of disruptive business models and technologies.  The firm provide the bridge between legacy optimization and future innovation.  Constellation also advises sellers from both the buyer‚s point of view and how to deliver value to their customers.

Constellation builds partnerships with its clients.  The client and their organization‚s success is Constellation’s only mission.

Press Contacts:

Contact the Media and Influencers relations team at press@ConstellationRG.com for interviews with analysts.

Sales Contacts:

Contact David Stanley, Vice President of Business Development and Sales for more information on how to engage with Constellation Research, Inc.
• Email: david@ConstellationRG.com
• Office: 719.357.7826
• Twitter: @kiwigate

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