ERP 2.0 Jargon
Great cartoon from Geek and Poke
May 16, 2008
March 05, 2008
Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint SaaS release
Microsoft has rolled out SaaS functionality for SharePoint and Exchange, as part of their Software plus service strategy for SMB companies with under 5,000 Microsoft seats.
General availability of both the Exchange and SharePoint hosted services is planned for the second half of 2008. The new online services will let end users access services like e-mail, calendaring, and Web conferencing at subscription prices. This will only be offered to companies who are already deploying the Microsoft products with an on premise licensing model.
Microsoft CRM 4 is now offering a multi tenancy model and through partners you can have Microsoft Dynamics ERP solutions hosted.
Microsoft normally announces a new service at their annual Microsoft Convergence conference in the US which will be in Orlando from the 11th to 14th of march, maybe they will have a announcement that you can have their ERP software packages (Microsoft Dynamics AX,GP,Nav and SL) as SaaS delivery model direct from Microsoft.
Microsoft’s competition from online documents (Google docs, ZOHO), hosted CRM (Sales force) and hosted ERP (Netsuite, SAP business by design) will force them eventually to offer all their software packages as an on demand business model if the consumer/customer wants it.
What do you think Microsoft will announce at MS Convergence Orlando?
December 04, 2007
Microsoft to buy SAP again?
Here we go again financial traders are talking up SAP stock saying that Microsoft is keen to acquire SAP ,this is not the first time this rumour has come out back in 2004 there was talks but was decided that the two companies would struggle to integrate.
SAP has a market capitalization of $65 billion and the largest purchase Microsoft has done so far is $1.5 billion so quite a jump on purchase size ,add in that they would struggle to get the combined company past the competition authorities and the huge cultural differences between the two companies might make this rumour just talk.
What is interesting is that SAP keeps coming up as the tier one erp company that wants to be purchased will it be Microsoft or IBM?
Update : Henning Kagermann from SAP said he has had no discussions with Microsoft about selling SAP.
August 30, 2007
BizTalk EDI Interview
Microsoft Biztalk Video interview with Tony Bernard discussing Biztalk for EDI and RFID.
July 06, 2007
Lose your Screen ,New toy from Microsoft
This has got nothing to do with ERP ,but what a great toy for your office maybe your CAD dept will say this is what they have to have. This is from Microsoft called their Milan project costing between $5,000 and $10,000 ,alowing you to move data around and transfer data without cables.
Just watch the video.
July 02, 2007
Netsuite IPO announced
After months of speculation NetSuite announced they are going for an IPO.
The company’s history is that they began as the small business division of Oracle ,around 2000 NetSuite licensed the Oracle brand and introduced its Oracle Small Business Suite.
The affiliation with Oracle was a no-brainer from an executive standpoint: Oracle's CEO, Larry Ellison, owns 41 percent of Netsuite.
In 2004, Oracle and NetSuite began to distance themselves from one another. NetSuite stopped developing and marketing the Oracle Small Business Suite and changed its name from NetLedger to NetSuite.
Last year, the company turned over $67.2 million in revenue, up 84.6 percent from the previous year. In quarter ended March 31, the company raised $23.2 million in revenue, up 71.8 percent.
The company has suffered a history of losses, of $23.4 million lost last year. and in the March quarter, it sustained a net loss of $3.7 million. NetSuite has accumulated a deficit of $193 million, as of the March quarter.
NetSuite, is using the IPO to create working capital and to repay the outstanding balance on its $20 million secured line of credit with Ellison's Tako Ventures.
June 24, 2007
Netsuite 2007 new release
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider NetSuite announced major new release of its integrated business application platform.
Called NetSuite 2007, the application is a single hosted platform running entirely from a single database, on which to run an entire business, covering everything from high-impact business functionality such as CRM, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and accounting down to stock control, handling and even shipping logistics.
"We have around 5,000 customers globally, and our UK business is growing, in some areas more rapidly than our main US business" said NetSuite chief executive Zach Nelson, this is the first time Netsuite has announced a major announcement outside the USA.
Nelson is targeting current and potential customers of rival companies such Salesforce and Sage with the new release, in particular Sage which offers both traditional client server accounting and CRM software as well as retrofitting some of its applications into a hosted environment.
"Heavy customisation is usually required to make them fit into a business, and users struggle to get comfortable with complex applications. Making the same apps easier usually happens at the expense of the functionality and the features the users actually need and want" Nelson added.
By making use of modern web technologies such as AJAX, the NetSuite product provides a fast dynamic and interactive front-end to business data, sitting alongside an enterprise-level reporting engine and graphing system that can show the information in real time and in ways that makes it easy to understand and follow.
Primary users for the NetSuite product have come from the smaller business community, but with recent releases, the company has picked up several large customer deployments,
"SaaS is increasingly being a strategic decision for large enterprise businesses" said David Bradshaw, principle analyst in Ovum's software group. "It is bringing business professionals and the IT department together in the buying process and ensuring that all sides have a better understanding of what work takes place and what tools are needed to do it."
New features in NetSuite 2007 include SuiteBundler, a batch automation system for new feature deployment and configuration of accounts and reseller deployments; as well as the globalisation of the accounting software, making it easier for a company to manage multinational accounts and subsidiaries all via the one NetSuite deployment. This is possible by allowing divisions to work and report figures in local currency while still running the business as a whole in a different one. All currency calculations are performed in real-time as demanded using live or pre-set currency data.
The company unveiled NetSuite Assistants, a refinement of its current ERP package that will make setup, data import, and ERP back-office management simpler.
Services within the Assistants suite include a setup assistant, a data import assistant, and a graphical transaction form assistant.
Matrix Item Assistant will now allow for inventory tracking of multivariate products.
NetSuite Global CRM and PRM adds the ability to manage orders, forecasts, quotas, and commissions on a per-country basis in local currency.
Also included is a dashboard that can aggregate global information from across an organization into a single, consolidated view.
An upgraded analytics capability, SuiteAnalytics, will add scorecards and the ability to include Excel-like customized formulas within a dashboard.
April 19, 2007
Workday working on SaaS ERP
CEO Dave Duffield endorsed SaaS at the SaaScon meeting today .
Dave’s thinking is "We thought, well, it works, why not make it work in an ERP application?"
The company's new release, in June, will add financials, and there's an aggressive roadmap to fill out ERP capabilities to serve the needs of typical service companies. Once that happens, and the company has proved itself with smaller companies, then Workday aims to target larger enterprises, aiming squarely at SAP and Oracle's heartlands.
"Within eighteen months we'll be easily on feature parity with SAP in our target industries," said Duffield.
March 21, 2007
Enterprise mashups partnership
Worklight an Enterprise 2.0 software product that consumerizes the enterprise application experience, and Teqlo, a mashup provider, today announced a partnership that enables the first secure integration between a mashup and an Enterprise 2.0 server. This cooperation offers business users to create a secure enterprise application mashups for protected enterprise data without having to write any code.
"This partnership is an important step in providing a secure mashup platform for real business use cases," said Rod Boothby, senior director of solution marketing at Teqlo. "Using WorkLight's secure feeds and Teqlo's platform, business end users can build their own customized applications."
Mashup provide the tools to build composite applications based upon multiple internal and external web services. However, Enterprise class mashups require complex connectors to retrieve data from enterprise applications. Prior to Teqlo only technical users and developers were able to create even simple mashups.
March 16, 2007
SAP postpones first release of SaaS ERP ?
SAP has revealed that they have delayed the launch of the much touted A1S for the SMB market ,the software is being tested by customers and now the release date will be put back to Q2?.
"It looks like building a web-native, ERP-based suite from scratch is a bit harder than SAP anticipated,”‘said Netsuite CEO Zach Nelson.
A1S which has "SOA by Design” Will allow SAP to slash the total cost of ownership by 90% which I would love to see if they are right then the other software vendors might as well pack their bags but this does sound like a marketing statement.
A1S is part of SAP's strategy to get 100,000 customers by 2010; this service will be focused on volume and will be only offered as an online service with on premise being available at a later stage.
