
Salesforce Launches Chatter Communities
Salesforce is this morning announcing a new product, Chatter Communities, that aims to take the engagement aspects of its social tool Chatter out to specific verticals within organizations. Chatter Communities allows an organization to set up a specific community quickly – as an example it could be used to create

Cloud ERP Starts to Break Out–NetSuite Reports Good Numbers
Last week NetSuite reported it’s Q2 revenue and earnings – high level numbers include: Subscription and support revenue was $61.0 million, a 27 percent increase on an annual basis Cash flows from operations were $15.2 million, up by 80 percent from Q2 2011 While the specific numbers themselves are of vague interest, and more so […]

Social – An Enterprise Overlay, or an Enterprise Fabric?
On a recent trip to San Francisco I spent talking with both salesforce and NetSuite people about their approach and general view of “social” as it relates to enterprise software. I call out these two vendors because while both are cloud-centric enterprise software companies, they have very different views on social. In fact, salesforce and […]

The Rise of Two Tier ERP and Larry Ellison’s NetSuite Intentions
A few weeks ago I was in San Francisco for a few days for NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference [Disclosure: NetSuite funded my travel and accommodation to attend]. One of the announcements at SuiteWorld was that of CTO Evan Goldberg who talked about “Multi Book Accounting”, as my colleague Phil Wainewright explains; [multi book accounting is] for […]

SuiteCommerce and the Value of End To End
At the NetSuite SuiteWorld event recently the company announced SuiteCommerce an end-to-end solution that ties back end ERP functionality with customer facing e-commerce solutions that are optimized across any endpoint – desktop, mobile, tablet etc. It’s a compelling proposition and one which continues the theme of tying together similar services to provide a complete solution for […]

Responding to Competition–In the Cloud World–It’s All About Raising the Tide
It’s an interesting trait and one which I believe isn’t specific to Sage – in corporate rooms all across the world, highly paid strategy analysts are spending time agonizing over the impact of a tiny player in their space. That in itself is bad enough, but the flow on effects are far worse.

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 […]

Acumatica Offers Manufacturing Software on Azure
I have a bit of a particular interest in Cloud ERP providers moving into the manufacturing space. Manufacturing is a highly complex space and one where the traditional ERP vendors have a very strong position – manufacturing relies on complex interconnected functionalities and often needs the connection of multiple organizations, locations and divisions to work […]