On the heels of Oracle's (Nasdaq: ORCL) successful bid to acquire BEA Systems (Nasdaq: BEAS) , SAP (NYSE: SAP) has provided the market and its customers with the first wave of products -- nine in total -- developed through its own US$6.78 billion acquisition of Business Objects last year. It has also revealed more details about its plans to integrate its product suite with the French business intelligence vendor's applications .
When the deal was first announced, both firms emphasized the integration goal for users: a platform that allows companies to more easily implement process changes resulting from business decisions and more efficiently execute across organizational lines. In essence, they promised a product suite that would close the loop between strategy and execution.
Fleshed-Out Plans
The two firms are now providing more specifics. The BI platform from SAP and Business Objects will integrate the core technologies in SAP's NetWeaver BI Accelerator with Business O..
Siebel's newest version of its
flagship CRM product builds on the Web-centric architectural
shift the company made in version 7. Users will be able to better integrate
disparate applications into 7.5, as the company's widely lauded Universal Application
Network (UAN) is embedded in this release. It also offers full Unicode support for
cross border implementations and for the first time unbundles its data model.
Siebel 7.5 "is the next logical evolution for Siebel," Denis Pombriant, vice
president and managing director of Aberdeen Group's CRM practice, told CRM Buyer
Magazine. Last year, Siebel introduced a modularized architecture that made its suite
more Web-centric and
provided a higher capacity for conventional client-server applications , he said.
"With 7.5, they have taken the next step in building in business processes,
methodologies and industry-specific best practices."
Kevin Nix, vice president and general manager at Siebel, told CRM Buyer that
with this release, S..
For decades Sage Software has focused on the mid-market and SMB space, selling a variety of accounting back office and CRM oriented front office applications around the world, but the company has always been something of an odd duck in the business software market.
For starters, Sage has been through a number of name changes -- it was known in America at least as Best Software for a while. More importantly, unlike the vast majority of vendors in the business software market who sell through massed armies of direct representatives, Sage has made a science out of selling through a militia of resellers -- a channel that many other vendors, now suddenly interested in the lower end of the market, overtly covet.
With a little cash, some training, and a lot of hard work, people with entrepreneurial drive can become resellers of Sage products, carving out their own niches in a market that still rewards ambition. It is, simply, the American dream, updated to the 21st Century. S..
Perhaps like no other industry before it, the IT industry has come to thrive on continuous innovation coupled with rapid and widespread product introduction. In the competitive -- at times mad -- rush to be first or early to market key things are sometimes overlooked. When it comes to security , it is impossible to identify every vulnerability, much less foretell just how hackers will try to exploit them.
Preventing data loss has taken on even greater urgency in light of the proliferation of portable computing and storage devices -- smartphones and USB flash drives prominent among them. Adding these new so-called endpoints to the stock of laptops, notebooks and lighter-weight handheld computing and communications devices in use means that more, possibly sensitive, data is traveling wider and with more frequency than ever before. Moreover, it is often carried across multiple, unsecured networks.
PGP and Lumension on Tuesday released PGP EndPoint, security software that integrates poli..
Several macro trends are working their way through the CRM industry right now and having a direct impact on how CRM is sold. These trends include application hosting, tailoring horizontal CRM applications to fit the specific needs of vertical markets, and increasing reliance by software vendors on reseller channels to better meet the demands of specialized markets.
Even in application hosting, whose major attraction is seen by many as its low-cost and pay-as-you-go pricing model, vendors are embracing an indirect model. But at the end of the day, how software is sold is far less important than ensuring that a CRM application -- or any other business application for that matter -- fits the customer's needs. Moreover, "fit" is not a one-time issue for most customers. As their businesses change and their requirements evolve, companies of all sizes require relationships with vendors who understand their businesses and their industries.
The Reseller Market
For smaller compa..
