erp

Despite strong earnings, SAP recently announced that it would cut 6.7 percent of its workforce, or 3,000 positions, according to CNET. While the company reported an 8 percent increase in year-over-year revenue, SAP sees a stalling economy blocking the road before it.

Why not give open source a try?

SAP has invested in a wide range of open-source companies, including MySQL, Red Hat, Alfresco (my company), JasperSoft, and others, but it has never ventured far into actual open-source development and distribution, its MaxDB work with MySQL and its contribution to Eclipse serving as the exceptions that prove the … Read more

While open source has made its mark in just about every product segment within enterprise software, ERP (enterprise resource planning) has remained firmly proprietary. As CIO.com's Thomas Wailgum suggests, however, the time may be ripe for change.

The reason? Years of empty promises and overloaded invoices from the incumbent ERP vendors may finally ring hollow in a global recession:

Does a massive, 18-month, multimillion-dollar ERP rollout, with the odds of implementation and user acceptance stacked against you and 22 percent annual maintenance costs to boot, seem appropriate now?

ERP industry guru Vinnie Mirchandani likes to say that there … Read more

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Despite the recession, 2009 is going to be a critical year for all of those key vendors that best describe their turf in acronyms--CRM, ERP, BPO, and perhaps a relatively new one: VRM.

Those acronyms, which stand for customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, business process outsourcing, and vendor relationship management, respectively, are going to be more than just jargon in the year ahead. They are going to be critical to businesses, as they ponder upgrades, stand pat, or try to figure out how to revamp.

CRM: Get ready for … Read more

Dennis Howlett at ZDNet reports that SAP is reversing its earlier maintenance price hike, at least in Germany and Austria. While it appears that SAP was prodded into the move due to legal reasons, I imagine that the customer backlash in such a bleak economy might have prodded SAP to reverse course, anyway:

This is a major victory for SAP customers who, despite SAP management's protestations to the contrary have continued to lobby for reconsideration of SAP's maintenance package pricing. According to the FT, some 50-60% of SAP customers in Germany and Austria were deeply unhappy with the … Read more

Continuing this week's interest in enterprise topics, I spoke with Carl Lehmann, Senior Vice President, Strategy, Advanced Data Exchange about what's going on in ERP (enterprise resource planning) and MDM (master data management.

Companies have invested millions with ERP vendors to bind unique software modules to enable business process flows from across financial, customer relationship and supply chain functions. Even when SOA principles of loose coupling and services come into play there can be serious data integrity issues.

Inaccurate and/or erroneous data entry prohibits the benefits from cross-functional processes flows sought in environments like build-to-order manufacturing for example. Master Data Management (MDM) is the technology approach to solving this pain. … Read more

Longtime Oracle executive John Wookey joined SAP on Monday as executive vice president of Large Enterprise On Demand, in a move that will pit him directly against his former employer.

Wookey, who served as Oracle's senior vice president of applications development for 12 years, left the enterprise software applications maker 13 months ago. Prior to his departure, he was responsible for Oracle's Fusion initiative, which seeks to take the best features of its acquisitions and meld them together to create new offerings.

Under his new role, Wookey will work with several large SAP enterprise on-demand offerings, such as … Read more

SAP reported its third-quarter results Tuesday, posting a 5 percent decline in earnings and nixing its revenue forecast for the year, given the uncertainty of the economic climate.

The German enterprise software maker, which reported its results prior to the market opening, saw its shares head slightly south as the morning progressed, falling to $30.02 a share, down less than 1 percent in intraday trading.

The company reported revenues of 2.76 billion euros, up 14 percent over the same time last year. Prior to issuing its third-quarter warning earlier this month, Wall Street had expected SAP to post … Read more

There's nothing like a price hike in the midst of a recessionary economy to raise customer ire, as well as expectations as to what they're getting for their fees. SAP, perhaps more than any other vendor, is feeling that right now. By raising its maintenance pricing from 17 percent to 22 percent, with no perceived increase in actual value delivered, SAP has firmly placed itself on the hot seat, as CIO.com reports:

(Of) 203 customers Forrester interviewed, a whopping 85 percent expressed minimal utilization of (SAP's) Support offerings. In addition, SAP customers told Forrester that they … Read more

Openbravo, the open-source ERP vendor, has pulled in $12 million in Series B funding from new investors Amadeus Capital, GIMV and Adara Venture Partners.

As an advisor to Openbravo, I can attest to how hard the Openbravo team worked to finalize this funding. It is an investment well-earned, and should be money well-spent.

Openbravo has emerged as perhaps the leading open-source ERP vendor in a short space of time, in large part because of its strength as a hosted solution and due to its viability in emerging markets like Latin America and under-served parts of Europe.

Congratulations to the Openbravo … Read more