Enterprise software survey 2007

September 2007 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns – “Our annual CAmagazine software survey is back and this year it’s bigger than ever. We combined all our surveys — accounting/ERP, customer relationship management, business intelligence/corporate performance management and professional services automation — into this issue…”

What's happening with Accpac?

September 20, 2007 based on an interview with Laurie Schultz, SVP and GM and Scott Zandbergen, VP – Accpac used to dominate the mid market accounting system market in Canada. Market share has been lost to competitors but Sage is now fighting back. Expect to see marketing campaigns with the themes of “customer for life”, “suites” and “simplification”. The customer for life idea is that organizations that outgrow Simply Accounting will want to move to Accpac. Merging ERP and CRM is the thinking behind suites. We have also noted a growing trend towards end to end systems where the back office (ERP or Accounting) is tightly integrated with the front office (CRM). Simplification will occur not only in ease of use in the application but also in the selling of the system making it easier to purchase. We think competition is good for all of us, so we look forward to hearing more from Accpac.

Telepresence: Finally, videoconferencing that works

July 31, 2007 from Computerworld – “Telepresence is expensive, requires two or more dedicated conference rooms outfitted with specialized equipment (or in some cases, custom-built to house the equipment) and often runs on proprietary network technology. But it's such a vast improvement over any previous video-based collaboration system that enterprise users are quickly signing up.”

180 View – We are waiting for the day that high quality videoconferencing is cheap and easy, which we think will come as telecommunication speeds continue to improve. To put speeds in perspective, the modems we once used to connect to the internet gave us a maximum of 56 Kbps (kilobytes per second) but it was usually less. Now we typically use Cable or DSL providing speeds of 1500-2000 Kbps. You can expect speeds to increase rapidly especially if we get optical fiber connections at our office. Optical Fiber can now deliver speeds of 10,000,000 Kbps (enough to download a movie in 4 seconds). At the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference, IBM scientists revealed a prototype optical transceiver chipset capable of reaching speeds at least eight times faster than optical components available today. Exciting times ahead…

Counting Clicks: Monitoring PC Usage at Work

July 31, 2007 from BPM Today – “If your business has started to find too many employees endlessly surfing the Web, constantly instant messaging their friends, or spending too many hours viewing the latest YouTube videos at work, it may be time to check out some of the software tools now available for tracking who's doing what with your company computers, on company time.”

180 View – Unfortunately there are companies that don’t trust their employees and employees who don’t deserve the employer’s trust in the first place. I (Michael Burns) would not want to work for a company that did not trust their employees. I also would not hire someone I did not trust. Trust is the key to any good relationship.

Exact to Acquire Longview Solutions

September 17, 2007 from Canada IT.com – “Exact Software, one of the world's leading providers of business software solutions and Longview Solutions, a leading provider of Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software solutions, today jointly announced the signing of an agreement for Exact to acquire Longview.”

180 View – The trend continues as ERP vendors extend their system to include Corporate Performance Management. Oracle acquired Hyperion. SAP acquired OutlookSoft. I am waiting for Microsoft to acquire Cognos. In the meantime, Cognos continues to grow with the recent acquisition of Applix.

Cognos Renews CFO Focus with Applix Buyout

September 27, 2007 from CIO Today – “Cognos is acquiring analytics software provider Applix for approximately $339 million. Cognos CEO Rob Ashe said that within the context of the company's overall strategy for serving large and midsize enterprises, the move will further extend the company's capabilities to offer innovative financial performance management offerings…”

180 View – Co-incidentally, we were working with a client interested in acquiring a Corporate Performance Management system. Cognos declined to respond to our RFP and Applix did respond but before the Cognos acquisition. There is some overlap between the systems. We think the acquisition will not only increase Cognos market share, but will also favourably raise the price for an acquisition of Cognos.

Companies Falter at Aligning IT to Business

September 10, 2007 from CIO Insight – “CIOs have been talking about it for years, decades even—preaching alignment with the business as the silver bullet for making IT departments most effective. But a new study reveals that most companies have, in fact, done a poor job with both.

In a yet-to-be-released survey, the consulting firm Bain & Company found that companies grew faster and lowered costs more dramatically by first focusing on making their IT departments effective. Those that favored alignment before effectiveness, on the other hand, faced tougher growth prospects and higher spending rates...

One major problem, in Puryear's eyes, is that technology and business executives misunderstand the concept of alignment. Instead of synching up strategies, companies tend to allot IT resources to different business units and call that alignment. But that process leads to increased complexity—rife with fragmentation, redundancy and subscale operations. "By definition, that complexity is going to drive up spending," Puryear says.

Bain polled technology and business executives at 450 publicly-traded companies, asking two questions. First, the executives were asked how IT is aligned with the business organization. Bain defines alignment as the IT department fully understanding business priorities and having adequate staff to respond to those needs.

Second, Bain asked how effective—getting projects done as specified, on budget and on schedule—those IT departments have been. Based on that definition, 85 percent of respondents characterized their IT operations as ineffective…

With those findings in mind, Puryear urges companies to focus first on effectiveness before tackling alignment.

180 View – Bain defines effectiveness as “getting projects done as specified, on budget and on schedule”. We think that Bain and most project managers are ignoring the most important measure of effectiveness, which is whether the project helps the organization achieve its Critical Success Factors (CSF’s - those things that an organization must do well in order to be successful). And guess what, if the project does help achieve CSF’s, then it’s aligned.

SAP A1S Morphs into Business ByDesign

September 19, 2007 from eWeek – “After perhaps the biggest build up in recent memory, at least in the business applications sector, SAP unveiled its on demand suite built for the mid-market Sept. 19 at an event here at the Nokia Theater. SAP's long-standing code name for the product, A1S, is now officially buried. The new product name: SAP Business ByDesign…

The applications themselves are completely new, written from scratch, according to Peter Zenke, SAP executive board member and technical lead for Business ByDesign. "The [application] code is 95 percent fresh code." Underlying the applications is also a new Foundation Layer that is comprised of "all the key objects" a company would need to define highly personalized items like products, bill of materials or recipes, according to Zenke.

The user interface for Business ByDesign is also new, although it is roles based, similar to Microsoft's UI approach. SAP has decoupled the UI from the business logic which lets users (through consultants) design their own interfaces. Within the applications themselves, users are able to connect to live user communities and to SAP to get help…

The cost is $149 per user, per month with a minimum of 25 users. A $54 per month per user price is available for up to five users—a plan designed for companies looking to access limited portions of the suite."

180 View – We have not seen the system yet, but if SAP delivers on the software’s key principals: “completeness, ease of use, adaptability and lower TCO”, then ByDesign may be just as successful in mid market businesses as its big brother, SAP ERP, in the high end. We also think that ByDesign may explain the departure of Shai Agassi, who brought SAP Business One to SAP, which was to be SAP’s mid market solution. We wonder whether SAP Business One will be phased out.

Startup software maker Netbooks takes on Intuit

September 5, 2007 from Yahoo News – “Privately held NetBooks Inc started selling a line of computer programs designed to help run small businesses on Wednesday, taking on QuickBooks provider Intuit Inc and NetSuite Inc, which has filed to go public. Netbooks' software is accessed via Web browsers and hosted on servers maintained by the company, which is based in Rohnert Park, California. It also said it raised $6.9 million in capital from CMEA Ventures, Integral Capital and other advisors. NetBooks provides accounting software along with programs for managing sales and marketing, inventory, purchasing, shipping and manufacturing. The company was founded by Ridgely Evers, who helped lead development of Intuit's QuickBooks accounting software.”

180 View – We have not seen this system yet, but it could fill a void. QuickBooks and Simply Accounting were not developed for web access. NetSuite was developed for web access but now targets mid market companies.

Massive Amounts Being Spent on KM (Knowledge Management) Apps

September 27, 2007 from CIO Update – “The magic number this year is $73 billion. That’s what U.S. companies are going to spend by year’s end on KM software this year. And more will be spent next year. Why? Because many companies are going to great lengths to capture and utilize the vast amounts of unstructured information that is flowing through, and around them. KM is a vast, catch-all phrase that encompasses all kinds of software from portals to search engines to content management systems. It also encompasses the software needed to deal with compliance and ediscovery efforts. This is why the numbers are so big.

180 View – In the Information Age, knowledge is power.