ERP Software

Salesforce as a ERP player?

Salesforce has released AppExchange OEM Edition

Salesforce will be the platform allowing developers to develop and bolt on specialized on demand services; these services will be separate from Salesforce CRM service.

Salesforce has 250 Applications such as

• Sales demand generation
• Human Resources
• Finance?
• Administration?

What is interesting is by using Salesforce small development companies can write extremely specific functionality for micro markets e.g. an on demand eBay management module.

With the traditional software development market the costs of developing a software package for a tiny niche would be too high to justify the resources now Zegei in the Ukraine can offer a service that will be supported and branded by salesforce for 25 dollars per person a month.

How many long tail niches are there out there and Salesforce is in the middle of this development community.

SAP and Oracle have released SaaS CRM how long will it be before they offer an option for SME’s to have on demand ERP applications.

SAP did say on the 20th of April “that an on-demand approach is an important way to bring the power of a single suite to the mid-market and that on-demand software can be applicable beyond CRM in the lower mid-market”.

Tier 3,4 ERP vendors must be scratching their heads about is Salesforce a ERP competitor.

http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/

update :

Salesforce users have delivered "over 43,000 custom objects and custom applications". More than salesforce.com could ever deliver on its own. So the power of the network and community has been crucial to their growth over the years, and will continue to be going forward.

"the custom application is the next killer application",

Oracle Fusion upgrade path ,costs

Migration to Fusion may require multiple upgrades of each oracle fusion application package. For the majority of applications, Oracle will issue an upgrade to Fusion from only the two latest oracle versions If you’re using an older release, you’ll have to upgrade to one of the newer versions first.

Fusion is a complete rewrite. New product releases  have more problems than normal upgrades. It’s often better to upgrade after the software has been in the field long enough for the initial bugs to be identified by some other company.

There will be a shortage of Fusion specialist expertise after the initial product release. individuals with Fusion experience or even Fusion training will be in  demand and very expensive.

According to Ronald Schmelzer, analyst at  Zapthink (a SOA consultancy), SOA promises tremendous benefits for manufacturers because 70 to 80 percent of their IT costs are for just maintaining their systems. However, even if a manufacturer chooses not to go down the SOA route ,adopting SOA will not be optional because in the next few years, says Schmelzer, “the major ERP vendors, SAP and Oracle, are making their customers adopt their latest platforms … both of which are SOA to the core, and basically providing no other upgrade path.” These are indispensable ERP applications for any manufacturer.  he claims, “By 2010 80% of manufacturers will have adopted SOA because they had no other choice.”

Oracle Fusion resources

Oracle Fusion road map and transition costs

Oracle applications up 56%

Oracle shares  jumped after the ERP company said fourth- quarter profit and revenue beat its own forecast because of high sales.

The growth in new database licenses shows Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison's acquisition strategy is spurring customers to buy an array of programs. Redwood City, California- based Oracle has spent about $19 billion to buy 17 companies since January 2005, mostly for software to manage backoffice tasks.

New license sales of applications gained 83 percent, including the results from Retek  and Siebel Systems , bought in the past year. Excluding those, new application licenses gained 56 %  a sign that sales picked up for PeopleSoft, which Oracle bought for $10.6 billion in January 2005.

Companies are looking for stability and Oracle's results show big is better.

Cadbury's implementation pains

Cadbury has taken a £12m hit on its profits after IT problems caused too many chocolate bars to be produced.

Cadburys was left with warehouses full of chocolate bars at the start of the year, after the rollout of a new SAP-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system led to an excess of chocolate bars building up at the end of 2005.

The new SAP ERP system is part of project called Probe ,Cadbury is hoping for £500m efficiency savings.

Cadburys is offering a unique experiment to increase their employee’s pay packet offering a month’s salary and a hundred thousand chocolate bars free to choose to what brand they want, have to get rid of the chocolate some how.

RFID Biztalk new release

Microsoft is releasing BizTalk Server 2006, which includes native support for the EDI and AS2 communication protocols, and a new set of services supporting RFID technology. This should be available in 2007

Microsoft has purchased adapters from iWay software so instead of having to purchase your specific EDI, RFID product from a third party ,Microsoft is offering one package allowing you to vent your feelings at one company when the software does not work out the box.

The RFID services will utilize a set of open APIs that Microsoft business partners, such as Unisys, can use to create an end-to-end solution for customers.

Pricing for BizTalk Server 2006 costs $30,000 per processor, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 will also support the new WinFX programming model that Microsoft is building into Windows Vista and the next release of Windows Server.

Link for beta tester’s connect.microsoft.com.