Call 'em social networks, discussion forums, blogs, whatever. Some businesses have never learned to distinguish between participating in a conversation and trying to sell an online audience. Here's a free clue: the latter doesn't work.
Coming up with a great technology product or service is only half the battle these days. Creating a name for said product that is at once cool but not too cool or exclusionary, marketable to both early adopters and a broader audience, and, of course, isn't already in use and protected by various trademarks and copyright laws is difficult--to say the least.
There's an old Persian saying that goes something like this: The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.
Pity the poor software vendors these days. The economy is in full meltdown, IT budgets and workforces have been slashed, and buyers of ERP, CRM and supply chain management software have become even more demanding regarding their application purchases, especially during 2008.
Enterprise software analysts and industry observers usually refer to the competition in the ERP and CRM space as essentially a two-horse race between Oracle and SAP. The breadth of applications in both vendors' stables, their collective R&D budgets, and the fact that these giants aren't shy about buying up the competition cements that market reality.
Overstock.com, the upstart unafraid to battle e-commerce goliath Amazon, has become semi-famous because of its brash and highly quotable leader, CEO Patrick Byrne, who once explained a US$14.2 million third-quarter loss to investors this way: "My bad."
Wal-Mart has demanded that its Chinese suppliers adhere to green, environmentally friendly and product safety standards. But experts say that ensuring compliance in the complicated, vast network of Asian suppliers will be nearly impossible.
With the global economy in turmoil, SaaS vendors of all stripes (ERP, CRM, supply chain, BI, you name it) will be pushing their fast-to-implement and less expensive products even harder. But do you know how to look before you leap into the cloud? Consider this five-step checklist.
In my analysis yesterday of SAP's recent increase in maintenance fees for all of its customers, and why that pricing should actually have gone down, I might have left some of you hanging: "Well, now that you've told us we're basically stuck with SAP, then why don't you give us a solution, Mr. Bigshot Opinion."
Banks and lenders make no secret of the fact that they rely on their own and the credit-card companies' data mining, analysis and predictive-modeling software to scour databases chock full of consumer financial and personal information.
Nobody likes to pay more for something that they've been already getting, for roughly the same price, for a decade.
That delicious sound bite was delivered recently by SAP's co-CEOs, Henning Kagermann and Leo Apotheker, in an internal company e-mail sent to SAP employees. Mind you, these are the same two executives who, a couple months back, brightened SAP's full-year forecast to the "top end" of its previous financial guidance.
It's just a fact of life in the enterprise software business: Many deals close at the very end of a quarter. Customers know this. ERP and CRM vendors know this. And Wall St. analysts know this. It's just the way it is.
Fear not IT and infosecurity personnel: Most of your remote workers, mobile users and road warriors toting around laptops and BlackBerrys have the business's best interests in mind when it comes to network security.
Today's ERP systems are remarkably similar to those ERP systems that took the corporate world by storm in the 1990s. The main goal of the applications back then, and now: Manage businesses' day-to-day operations and transactions, and make companies more efficient.