In The Era Of Simplification, The Complex Still Remains Complex More than 20,000 customers, partners, and prospects are expected to convene in Orlando, Florida for America’s SAP User Group (ASUG) and SAP’s annual conference known as Sapphire. Co-CEO Bill McDermott hopes to close a chapter in SAP’s history and open a new chapter as the […]

tibbr Continues To Show Momentum In Customer Adoption And Addition Of Key Enterprise Social Features On October 14th to 17th 2013, the Tibbr enterprise social crowd mingled with the core Tibco faithful at this year’s TUCON 2013 user conference in Las Vegas.  (An analysis of the broader Tibco announcements can be found from my colleague Holger […]

Unchecked Bad Behavior Plagues Both Vendors And Analysts. I’ve dreaded writing this post for a long time.  I normally think the best of everyone.  Yet, in the course of building our business at Constellation Research, I have to say I’ve seen everything that can go wrong with the industry analyst business.  I’m almost embarrassed to […]

Versytec Acquisition Addresses Growing Demand For JD Edwards Support Denver, Colorado based Spinnaker Management announced on March 6th, 2012 its acquisition of competitor Versytec.  For those who remember their third party maintenance (3PM) history, Versytec was among the first firms to announce third-party maintenance services within a year after PeopleSoft acquired JD Edwards in July […]

Forward And Commentary Software ownership costs continue to escalate as vendors accelerate their efforts to capture support and maintenance revenues. Some vendors have gone to the extreme to eliminate third-party options for their customers. This best practices report examines three strategies to free up unnecessary costs to fund innovation and new projects. A. Introduction On […]

Forward And Commentary This market overview provides a starting point to SAP customers seeking optimization solutions.  The document delivers actionable advice and insights into a proven collection of software solutions.  As part of the full series, best practices documents will follow with in- depth case studies and a critical product evaluation of this growing market […]

 SAUG Summit Delivered Great Networking Opportunities And Information Exchange Over 550 attendees converged on Sydney August 3rd to 5th, 2010 for the annual SAP User Group Summit.  Members were treated to 28 session, 7 keynotes, and 4 SAP 101 educational sessions.  The smart design of the conference gave attendees ample opportunities to connect and […]

Apps Users Seek Third Party Maintenance For Cost, Value, and Service Updated surveys from inquiries, client conversations, and user group meetings show a 113.8% increase in interest in third party maintenance (3PM) services from Q3 2009 to Q1 2010 (see Figure 1).  Key factors stem from (see Figure 2.): Continuing cost pressures. Budgets continue to […]

High Cost Of Ownership And Changing Requirements Drive SAP Users To Seek Optimization Solutions
As users await SAP to regain its mojo (see Dennis Howlett’s post) and implement it’s “Voice of the Customer” strategy in 2010, users must continue to reduce their cost of ownership and complexity. In addition, rapidly changing business requirements require some users to seek SaaS alternatives, additional point solutions, and extensions.
Consequently, vendors providing SAP optimization and extension solutions represent one of the fastest growing parts of the $78.7B (2009 Altimeter Group estimate), 850,000 SAP service partner and developer ecosystem. SAP users already embrace many of the solutions from vendors on this inaugural SAP Optimization List as part of their business value oriented apps strategy. The living list covers seven areas including:
1. application extension and usability;
2. application life cycle management;
3. archiving, storage, and test data management;
4. license management and optimization;
5. Microsoft Office integration;
6. third party maintenance; and
7. virtualization

DSAG project team and project leader departure could signal disagreement with methodology not SUGEN SAP embarked on an ambitious program to prove value in its Enterprise Support fee hike last year.   As planned, SAP should announce the results for the first set of SUGEN KPI’s in early December.  However, two key SUGEN KPI project […]

Building Innovation With And Around Your SAP Environment Location: Manchester CentralAuditorium Date:23/11/2009 Start Time: 16:25 End Time: 17:00 Speaker: R “Ray” Wang Company: Partner with Altimeter Group Keynote summary: Pace of change continues to increase in market forces, work dynamics, business models, and pace of technology adoption. Innovation is essential in this market. There’s a […]

SAP users in UK and Ireland remain equally skeptical about SAP (Photos by R Wang & Insider Associates, LLC.   Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.) The SAP user group hosted its annual event.  Conversations with 37 clients reflect the following broad trends in the UK and Ireland: SAP users remain skeptical about benefits promised […]

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 […]

Oracle’s Fusion Apps Addresses A Broad Set Of Horizontal Modules Oracle’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Larry Ellison announced the code completion of Fusion Apps in today’s late afternoon keynote.  Though Ellison did not give precise guidance on general availability (GA), he did hint that the product would be available, “sometime in 2010”.  The product […]

Labor Day (US Holiday) traditionally marks the end of summer BBQ’s, the beginning of the fall conference season, and yes, the time to begin a review of your software maintenance contacts that expire end of year.   As clients prepare for this seasonal ritual, a few trends in 2009 should set the stage for negotiations: […]