The myth of standardisation
After reading the ERP paradox by Kailash Awati, I had that “Oh yes” feeling of recognition: someone was hitting the nail right on the head here. Standardisation is a myth, especially when you go global. There are two simple reasons for that: customer demand and business supply Ask a CEO what makes his business so [...]
Nimsoft Monitors SAP Environments
Nimsoft, the company that provides IT management as a service (more on them here) today rolled out monitoring for a range of SAP products and services. The aim here is for Nimsoft Monitor to become the default monitoring service across all the products and services an enterprise uses – the addition of SAP to this [...]
The (ERP) Shootout That Isn’t.
<rant> We’ve often discussed SaaS Suites, ERP, specific vendors like SAP and Netsuite, so seeing this tweet by SAP a good month ago of course piqued my curiosity: @SAPByDesign RT @VendorShootout: Business #ByDesign: The Most Complete,Adaptable OnDemand Business Solution http://spr.ly/6019RH4S #erp <-reg 2 download Wow. It looks like SAP’s SaaS offering, Business ByDesign won some [...]
Gartner Says Worldwide SaaS Revenue To Grow 21% This Year
Gartner, the leading research firm, said SaaS will grow by 21% this year with CRM leading the way. Based on the trends we have been observing in the recent years, this is pretty much expected. After the initial FUD and maturation of cloud based technologies, enterprises are looking beyond the security and privacy issue to [...]
SAP On Amazon Web Services
Sapphire Now conference is going on in Orlando right now and it is time to hear about another player from the traditional era making their software available on AWS (previous CloudAve coverage). According to Arik Hesseldahl, Amazon today announced that they are working with SAP (previous CloudAve coverage) to run their applications on Amazon cloud. [...]
SuiteWorld 2011: My Thoughts
I spent the last three days at SuiteWorld 2011, NetSuite‘s first ever user conference, attending the keynote and analyst sessions. My interest in SuiteWorld stemmed from the fact that I really wanted to see the evolution of ERP into the cloud (It should be noted that ERP is considered to be the last frontier for SaaS) [...]
The packages – customisation MQ
I got Rt’ed today on the #ITF11 hashtag: RT @MartijnLinssen: @johnrrymer @TomGrantForr There is no one-size-fits-all. Pure packages is wrong, as is pure customisation #ITF11 >YES and that’s basically all I have to say about it – not. There is a human tendency to do either-or. Black or white, good or bad, pretty or ugly [...]
OpenERP offers Cloud Option To Their Customers
OpenERP, the open source ERP and business applications provider since 2005, today announced the new version of their offering giving customers choice between on-premise and SaaS options. The new version OpenERP v6, a major upgrade from the previous version that makes implementation and use of a comprehensive set of business applications (CRM, Purchase Management, Manufacturing, [...]
Zoho Rounds Out Small Business Suite with Accounting App–Zoho Books
This morning Zoho, known for SMB focused SaaS offerings in the areas of productivity, collaboration, business processes launched an Accounting app: Zoho Books. I typically don’t do detailed product reviews, when I see the first good ones, will link to them – just a few points here and then let’s discuss how it rounds out [...]
Big Jump In SaaS ERP Interest
ERP has been considered the last frontier for SaaS and we have seen tremendous resistance from even organizations who were otherwise open to the idea of SaaS. Part of the reason was that SaaS ERP offerings were not robust enough for deployment, unlike say CRM applications. The most important reason for the resistance is that [...]
Key success factor for SaaS suites: functional parity
As we all know, software-as-a-service (SaaS) has been one of the bright spots in the enterprise systems marketplace these days. The advantages are becoming more widely recognized: lower total cost, faster time-to-benefit, little to no capital expenditure, and less pain in system upgrades.
In fact, in some segments of the enterprise market, SaaS is already where most of the action is…
NetSuite Fights Hairball Epidemic with New Release and Edgy Marketing Campaign
NetSuite’s marketing team has been known for their edginess, starting from pranks like the SAP for the Rest of Us Party during SAP’s annual conference to staging a shootout at the anti-SAP Conference or releasing edgy videos a’la Mac vs. Windows. Today they are doing it again, by establishing the Hairball Institute for Business: (The [...]
German User Groups Stepping Up The Pressure On SAP
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung notes that after the quarrelsome and strained relationship with former CEO Léo Apotheker, starting with but certainly not ending over proposed maintenance hikes, the SAP German User Group – DSAG is experiencing a better relationship with the SAP’s new co-CEO, Jim Snabe. What I gleaned from the article is that DSAG [...]
Steel Horses, Thorny Roses and Long, Winding Roads
As anyone who knows me knows, I have a borderline obsession with 1980’s hair metal and heavy metal. It was the music of my teenage years: I grew up listening to everyone from Iron Maiden to Bon Jovi, and I watched in absolute horror as my beloved form of music mutated into some kind of [...]
Questions to Discuss with your SaaS Provider
Today I’m practicing the part of the Lazy Blogger, who just points to what others write… Two years ago Krish wrote about Questions To Ask Before Trusting a Cloud Vendor. His focus was largely infrastructure, security, data ownership, privacy and service level. He listed 14 questions, not because it was some magic number, but he [...]
