Archive for the ‘Global Sourcing’ Category
How To Get Vendors To Share Their Plans
Tech users groups want more than help–they want strategy.
By Larry Greenemeier
InformationWeek
Jan 13, 2007 12:00 AM (From the January 15, 2007 issue)
Whereas advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation will stand up to Congress over big-picture issues, business technology pros want someone on their side in their dealings with software and other vendors.
That’s where vendor-specific user groups come in. They began as a way for technologists to meet for training, networking, and direct contact with the vendors of the products they were using. That’s still the case, but with the Web’s ability to deliver tactical information, coupled with the growing diversity of huge vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Oracle, the groups spend more time pressing for vendors’ future strategy.
“Ten years ago, it was all about R3, how can I get a screen to work better?” says Rod Masney, president of the Americas’ SAP Users Group and global director of IT infrastructure services for Owens-Illinois, a maker of glass and plastic packaging products. “Now it’s all about NetWeaver, CRM, and other areas of SAP’s rapidly growing product line.” ASUG’s 50,000 members want to influence how those products are developed.
SAP doesn’t pick up the tab or tell ASUG how to operate, beyond its one voting member on a 13-member board. Membership costs a company with more than $5 billion in revenue $5,000 a year for an unlimited number of employees. The board meets annually with CEO Henning Kagermann, product and technology group president Shai Agassi, and global service and support director Gerhard Oswald.
The Independent Oracle User Group, with 20,000 members, has a similar independent model. That gives members the ability to be skeptical of promises Oracle makes for new features, release timetables, and security fixes, says Ari Kaplan, president of IOUG and manager of Datalink’s database practice. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and most other big vendors have independent user groups, as well. Without financial independence, the groups wouldn’t be of use to members–or vendors, says Robert Catterall, president of the International DB2 Users Group and director of engineering for CheckFree. Says Catterall: “IBM values the straight talk they get from IDUG.”
http://www.informationweek.com/industries/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196900622
Oracle Offers New Licensing Model
Oracle wants to make its pricing model easier to handle.
The Redwood Shores, Calif., company announced its new pricing model on Dec. 19, one day after posting a 26 percent revenue gain during its second fiscal quarter. Oracle also announced that its profits grew 21 percent compared with the same period last year.
In offering a streamlined pricing guide, Oracle is trying to clarify the numerous licensing metrics it has inherited during a nearly three-year buying spree.
“With a number of pre-existing and newly acquired products, each with its own licensing metrics, Oracle’s new simplified licensing model creates consistency across all product lines,” said a statement released by the company.
Some of the company’s product that will be affected by the new pricing structure include applications such as PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and the Oracle E-Business Suite.
Read this article here.
BuildOnline and Citadon Merge to Create Global Software as a Service Provider
Filed under: Consulting Methodologies, Global Sourcing, SaaS |
Leave a comment BOSTON, MA — (MARKET WIRE) — December 13, 2006 — Two leading providers of Software as a Service (SaaS) collaboration, BuildOnline and Citadon, have agreed to merge, creating the only truly global SaaS collaboration company. The merged entity will be known as CTSpace.
The SaaS business model has enabled both businesses to realize significant growth over the last eight years. The combined company boasts a global footprint serving some of the world’s leading multinational companies such as Balfour Beatty Construction Ltd, BNP Paribas, Chicago Transit Authority, IKEA and STRABAG.
CTSpace’s web-based collaboration, business process management and document management solutions allow companies to automate and streamline communications between departments, offices, companies, and countries — without purchasing costly hardware or software. The SaaS model ensures customers running business-critical projects benefit from a faster turnaround, increased accountability, reduced risk, and cost savings.
Read full Press Release here.
Infrastructure Is Integral To Supply Chain Success
Filed under: Consulting Methodologies, Global Sourcing, Productized Services |
Leave a comment According to AMR Research:
A company’s highest supply chain priorities are demand forecasting, supply planning, inventory management, and sales and operations planning.
Global outsourcing, leaner supply chains and the frequency of new-product introductions require substantially tighter collaboration and coordination among complex networks of trading partners. In response, corporations are building business processes, organizations and technology portfolios that allow them to manage this complexity and the ever-present uncertainty of supply and demand.
As supply chain managers build their technology portfolio to manage complex supply chains, the first issue they face is whether to buy application software from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors (such as SAP and Oracle) or from independent companies commonly known as best-of-breed vendors.
ERP and best-of-breed vendors provide applications for demand planning, transportation and logistics optimization, warehouse management, multi-echelon inventory optimization, supply chain visibility and event management, global trade, and overall supply chain network design and optimization. The trend has been to use whenever possible the supply chain applications provided by the ERP vendor to reduce integration complexity and overall cost of ownership. In many cases, however, companies find that the functionality they require is either insufficient or nonexistent within their ERP systems. For this reason, best-of-breed supply chain software applications are still chosen to address the business requirements of their company or industry.
ERP vendors are expanding the breadth of their supply chain offerings and continue to gain favor in terms of increased market share. However, rather than coming at the expense of best-of-breed application providers, the data show that users are beginning to shift away from internally developed applications to packaged supply chain applications provided by ERP and best-of-breed providers.
In a recent AMR Research supply chain spending report, manufacturers report that their highest priorities for supply chain technology and process investment are demand forecasting, supply planning, inventory management, and sales and operations planning.
Companies are increasing their investments to either upgrade or buy new software. Budgets were expected to grow by 4% in 2006.
Read more here.
IT System Agility, Manageability and Cost Effectiveness to Drive the Asian IT Market Forward in 2007
Springboard Research, a leading innovator in the IT Market Research industry, today released its Predictions 2007 Executive Brief for what IT vendors can expect to see across Asia in the coming year. The brief was based on executive interviews with CIOs and IT decision makers at leading organizations across the region to identify their key issues and plans for 2007.
The full Predictions 2007 Executive Brief is available for free on Springboard’s website at http://www.springboardresearch.com.
“2007 will be an interesting year for IT vendors with fundamental market shifts being driven by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service, Virtualization and the Mobile Workforce,” said Dane Anderson, CEO & EVP of Research at Springboard Research. “When combined with the emergence of Asia as a key engine for global economic growth, 2007 is sure to present unique opportunities to IT vendors well positioned to take advantage of the dominant market trends” added Mr. Anderson.
“CIOs and IT Managers are continuing to be forced to do more with less. Even when their budgets increase, it seems as if organizational technology needs are increasing even quicker,” added Ravi Shekhar Pandey, Senior Market Analyst for Springboard Research. “Companies in Asia will continue to increase their spending, but they will be more focused on serving business needs instead of being seen as just buying technology,” added Mr. Pandey.
This year’s predictions (more detail on each is included in the Executive Brief) include:
1. IT Vendors will see Service-Oriented Architecture guiding a larger percentage of their customers’ IT infrastructure investments
2. Virtualization will mature and come into its own in 2007, driving changes in hardware and software pricing models
3. Organizations will see a sharp increase in their focus on network-friendly applications
4. Windows Vista will stimulate IT buying activity, but mainstream adoption will be delayed in 2007
5. Software as a Service will see substantial gains in acceptance among Asia Pacific enterprises
6. Mobility will transition from being a secondary issue to a key element of enterprise IT strategy
7. 2007 will see an increase in the number of strategic partnerships in the Open Source arena
8. The SMB segment will continue its momentum in 2007, and increasingly turn to outsourced solutions
9. Indian IT service providers will come under increasing pressure from MNC providers
10. Indian IT service providers will be more aggressive with acquisitions, with one major tie-up expected before the end of the year
Springboard’s predictions are focused on the Asia Pacific IT market as a whole and are meant to provide an outlook at what we are seeing from decision-makers in the market. The 2007 Predictions Executive Brief is positioned to help IT vendors understand the changes and trends that Springboard believes will affect the IT markets in Asia in the future.
Read original Press Release here.
Process, Not Product ?
Heather Clancy, CRN writes:
“Here’s the high-level synopsis: By 2009, IDC predicts the BPO market will reach $641.2 billion, compared with roughly $382.5 billion in 2004. There are eight main solution segments that make up this pie: human resources, procurement, finance and accounting, customer service, logistics, sales and marketing, product engineering, and training.
While normally I haven’t associated BPO numbers with the channel’s traditional business activities, I couldn’t help but notice at least two of these segments—finance and accounting and customer service—are what’s driving most of the current activity surrounding the SaaS and managed services movements. Moreover, when you think about it, one of the most compelling things about Vista and all the Linux brethren that have come to market this year is the features they promise on the management and administration side behind the scenes for someone like you.
I believe we’ve finally reached that oft-predicted inflection point where you will have to combine the best sales arguments of the IT and BPO worlds to be successful. Sure, your technicians will need conversational familiarity with all the latest features of the latest thing-a-ma-bob. That’s a given. But can they talk about one of those aforementioned process areas and relate it to the technology they’re selling? Could that managed services pitch work better when combined with a BPO twist? ”
Read the original post here.
Infrastructure Is Integral To Supply Chain Success
An article in Industry Week by AMR Research says that:
Global outsourcing, leaner supply chains and the frequency of new-product introductions require substantially tighter collaboration and coordination among complex networks of trading partners. In response, corporations are building business processes, organizations and technology portfolios that allow them to manage this complexity and the ever-present uncertainty of supply and demand.
As supply chain managers build their technology portfolio to manage complex supply chains, the first issue they face is whether to buy application software from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors (such as SAP and Oracle) or from independent companies commonly known as best-of-breed vendors.
ERP and best-of-breed vendors provide applications for demand planning, transportation and logistics optimization, warehouse management, multi-echelon inventory optimization, supply chain visibility and event management, global trade, and overall supply chain network design and optimization. The trend has been to use whenever possible the supply chain applications provided by the ERP vendor to reduce integration complexity and overall cost of ownership. In many cases, however, companies find that the functionality they require is either insufficient or nonexistent within their ERP systems. For this reason, best-of-breed supply chain software applications are still chosen to address the business requirements of their company or industry.
ERP vendors are expanding the breadth of their supply chain offerings and continue to gain favor in terms of increased market share. However, rather than coming at the expense of best-of-breed application providers, the data show that users are beginning to shift away from internally developed applications to packaged supply chain applications provided by ERP and best-of-breed providers.
In a recent AMR Research supply chain spending report, manufacturers report that their highest priorities for supply chain technology and process investment are demand forecasting, supply planning, inventory management, and sales and operations planning.
Companies are increasing their investments to either upgrade or buy new software. Budgets were expected to grow by 4% in 2006.
Read the original article here.
The End of Blue Ocean for SaaS Hosting
An interesting post from the Mural Ventures Team members:
“SaaS Hosting is the relatively new term that refers to Managed Hosting offering targeted as ISVs, specifically SaaS ISVs, as the customer. The concept is based on the premise that ISVs should host the service delivery infrastructure for their SaaS offerings, and free their own valuable resources to focus on product development, while allowing the SaaS Hoster to provide the operational expertise and even Level-1 support services for the ISV’s end-customers.
SaaS Hosting was pioneered by companies such as OpSource and 7Global, who rightly saw the focus on ISVs as a way to differntiate themselves and create some blue ocean for their managed hosting offerings. But with the SaaS industry heating up in a big way, the end of the blue ocean for SaaS Hosting is nigh upon us.
A number of additional managed hosting providers have stepped up their marketing activities targeting SaaS ISVs as the potential customer, and my prediction is that many more will enter this fray. Today’s list of self-advertised SaaS Hosters includes OpSource, 7Global, ServePath, Connectria, NaviSite, and Attenda. I’m sure that there are more that belong on this list as well.
One of the reasons behind the increased attention being given to SaaS Hosting is Microsoft’s Windows-Based Hosting for Applications initiative, which is actively encouraging ISVs to build on the Microsoft platform, and actively encouraging service providers to offer these types of SaaS Hosting services and create a place for ISVs to soft-land when they are ready to launch their SaaS offerings.
One thing is very clear — NO ISV should be running their own infrastructure (data center, network, servers, storage, backups, monitoring, etc, etc) for their SaaS offerings. It is dilutive to their core business and likely dilutive to their profit margins as well. SaaS Hosters can do this better and cheaper than a company can do by themselves. ”
Read more here.
Oracle’s Small Biz Strategy in Asia
The applications vendor says a majority of Asia-Pacific SMBs still want traditional on-premises customer relationship management
Where customer relationship management (CRM) software is concerned, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) still want more than an on-demand delivery model, says an Oracle executive.
Will Bosma, vice president of CRM for Oracle Asia-Pacific, said at a media briefing Tuesday that even though hosted CRM is a growing market, a “vast majority” of SMBs still look for software to be delivered the traditional way, or “on-premise.”
Making reference to Gartner statistics, Bosma noted that the Asia-Pacific CRM market will grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 17.9 percent, to reach US$679.6 million in 2010. The research house estimates that software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a fast-growing segment in the CRM space, but Bosma said that revenues from this sector will still make up a smaller portion of the overall market. Citing figures from Gartner, he noted that by 2011, only 25 percent of new software revenues will be delivered as SaaS, while 75 percent will still be implemented on-premise.
Read more herefrom Business Week.
Consulting 2.0 