ERP Software

The future of Software?

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was talking at the alwayson seminar at stanford his thoughts for the future of software are

Multi-tenancy
99.9 + at < 300 milliseconds per transaction
Scalability–1 to 10,000 users on the same instance
Easy meta-customization transcends versions
Standard Web services APIs for easy migration
Mashups–composite Web services apps
Replicated development environment as a service
Application exchanges and directories
Multi-application execution
Write once, run anywhere

Would you agree with his points.

Alaways on

SOA working group

BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle and SAP have formed a working group (Open SOA Collaboration) to help standardize SOA.

They have focused on service component architecture and service data objects.

The group has created a Wiki help manage the process.

http://www.osoa.org/display/Main/Home

Microsoft LOBI

Microsoft is opening Office to third parties through a new add on feature called Line of Business interoperability, or LOBi, for Share Point Server. With LOBi, Microsoft Office applications will be able to manage transactions with back office ERP systems.

Microsoft will be offering this integration with their Microsoft Dynamics range half way through next year ,what is interesting is ,there are third party vendors who have signed up to use Microsoft LOBI with their own ERP systems such as Epicor and Workday.

Microsoft LOBI

Aberdeen SOA ERP

Aberdeen research has shown that there is 90% of one billion plus turnover companies are looking to or are deploying SOA.

These companies will need large budgets to move on to the SOA bandwagon with 40% of their IT budgets going to making this big leap.

There are three camps emerging

SOA Lite is for users who are primarily deploying web services that do not require mission-critical capabilities such as high-volume scalability, high availability and failover, management, governance, and security.

SOA ERP is used by companies that are choosing to deploy SOA surrounding their ERP application software.

Enterprise SOA requires and uses mission-critical SOA middleware suite capabilities

From the SOA ERP camp Aberdeen expects mostly Mid-Size Companies and some Large and Small Companies to opt into this category based on the following characteristics:

• The ERP vendor is a trusted supplier to the organization, and the relationship is
working;
• Business processes revolve around the ERP application software’s features, and
there are modest integration challenges with applications surrounding the ERP
package;
• A strong desire to get more intelligence out of the ERP application without extensive
custom programming due to limited skills or resources;
• Service-level expectations are in line with existing SLAs for the ERP package;
Enterprise Service Bus: An SOA Middleware Foundation
• Willingness to live with the SOA product features and development cycle of the
ERP vendor;
• Business transformation outside the limits of the ERP package are modest or not
expected.

Aberdeen whitepaper

Amazon's on-demand infrastructure for your company

If you are looking for a cheap way to manage online data storage then Amazon of all people might be able offer you a way forward.

Companies that have used Amazon are La Nacion, Microsoft and SmugMug.

Monthly flat rating pricing: $0.20 per GB transfer, $0.15 per GB storage 

Amazon web services info

Amazon S3 services

SAP profit warning

SAP has declined to comment on rumours of a profit warning; German law states today would be the last day for SAP to issue any second quarter profit warning.

Forbes SAP ERP Info

BI sector consolidating

There is talk about consolidation in the business intelligence (BI) software market after financial news Barrons reported that Business Objects is starting to look like a takeover target. After their stock dropped 22 %

IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP all moving into the BI market and causing a pit of pain for the BI specialists Business Objects and Cognos

John Hagerty of AMR Research said the BI market was ripe for rapid consolidation. "There are several large vendors out there now and the market is hot," he said. "It is not clear who will buy who first, but I'd expect consolidation to start in the next six to 12 months and when someone makes the move it will kick off other deals."

IBM hardware for JD Edwards

IBM is offering a i 520 Solution Edition for Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne for customers with under a hundred seats.

The package will offer as asset lifecycle, customer relationship, financial, human capital, project, supplier and supply chain management (RFID support)

Hardware costing about $21,000

You can get performance data at IBMERP.

Microsoft ERP CRM offer

Microsoft is offering a free CRM server when bought with Axapta ,Great Plains ,Navision and Solomen.

Navision and Axapta have their own CRM package included but now you would be able to select MS CRM server free .They will be sold on a named user basis when you could be looking for concurrent users.

SAP Discovery System for Enterprise SOA

For all you SAP developers out there ,SAP has released a sandbox for you to play in called SAP Discovery System for Enterprise SOA.

You need to speak to your SAP vendor for details but you do need to deal Hewlett-Packard they are offering a the package preinstalled on an HP ProLiant DL380

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/3860 cost you $8999.00 or there is some leasing deal.

SAP Discovery System for Enterprise SOA offers

SAP Enterprise Core Component (ECC 5.0) configured with the SAP Best Practices tool suite

SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer

SAP NetWeaver '04 SP 14:

SAP NetWeaver Portal

SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (MDM)

SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure (XI)

SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI)

SAP NetWeaver Application Server