ERP Software

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

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/

Siemens and SAP working together on SOA

Siemens Communications will be releasing their first SOA initiative saying that IBM, and SAP will use Siemens SOA components in ongoing application development projects.

SAP will use one of the SOA components, called Identity and Access Management, in its NetWeaver application-building platform

Workday HR release

Workday is going to be released next month focusing on the HR market.  Dave is creating a new way to organize HR data delivered through the web using SOA.

Workday will focus on building a set of HR applications to handle such tasks as employee hiring, succession planning and multinational capabilities. The next stage Workday will add financial and supply-chain applications.

Workday website

Oracle Middleware on course

Oracle has announced that 26,000 customers are now using Oracle middleware which will help the transition to Oracle Fusion. They have been hacking away since 2001 and claim to be the fastest growing middleware players.

Project Fusion is Oracle's plan to create an integrated suite of the best components of all the ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications it has acquired over the past year. These won't be just mixed and matched components cherry-picked from the PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards or Siebel Systems product lines. They will be replications of the best features and technologies from those products reproduced in entirely new applications developed in Java all will have lifetime warranties?

Oracle has certified these packages to work with Fusion Middleware

Oracle eBusiness Suite,

PeopleSoft

J.D. Edwards

Retek retail software

SAP Netweaver plans

SAP is moving forward with its NetWeaver technology and it’s Enterprise Services Architecture, saying that most of their customers are way behind in the upgrade cycle a sap upgrade can be expensive and time consuming.

SAP is pushing ESA to combine their Netweaver platform with business process modeling e.g. order to cash SAP wants to move away from inflexible middleware to more of a services based operation giving their customers greater flexibility with their SAP ERP Beast they installed.

SAP has 30,000 companies with a 100,000 different installations Netweaver has been implemented across 5000 sites .Senior management wants a slow upgrade cycle. "God forbid we would have had everybody migrating at the same time," the president of Sap’s products and technology group, Shai Agassi, said. "We would have had a disaster on our hands."

With the big ERP vendors the battle is being fought on the SOA services front and SAP has to be seen to be leading the race even if their customers are reluctant to buy into SAP as a flexible ERP software package.

SAP is planning to have 6000 Netweaver deployments in 2006.

Oracle SOA Bundle

Oracle is releasing a bundled up set of SOA web services letting the tech boys sort out infrastructure for SOA projects.

This consists of

• BPEL Process Manager for web services orchestration.
• Business Rules Engine to design and manage business rules.
• Oracle Business Activity Monitor for real-time insight into operations.
• Oracle Enterprise Manager to deploy and managed applications.
• Oracle JDeveloper 10g IDE and connectors for peoplesoft,sap applications.