Vendor Rating and Certification Updates: BI and ERP

It’s mid-November and time to tell you about some of the new product ratings and certifications that we’re covering in our research. TEC analysts recently completed certifying products from BatchMaster and Targit.

Each vendor successfully demonstrated how its product addressed a script of functionality as identified by TEC analysts. (Look for products proudly wearing the TEC certification badge in our evaluation centers and vendor showcase.)

* The Targit BI Suite, with its “few click” approach is covered in our BI Evaluation Center.
* The BatchMaster Enterprise solution focuses on the requirements of companies in the process manufacturing industry, as covered in our ERP Evaluation Center.

In addition to those TEC certified products, we also published new data about the following products.

* Newly revised data on the OpenAir professional services automation suite.
* Webcom joined our Business Process Management (BPM) Evaluation Center with the submission of its ResponsAbility product.
* Software development and QA company, Technosoft, joined our outsourcing evaluation center.

Straight Up on Leads Management

No, I’m not about to launch into a Paula Abdul cover (I won’t even dignify that with a link).

Lead generation is a process that uses information to create interest in an enterprise’s products or services. It’s end objective is to generate sales.

Several steps are involved in this marketing process. Before a company begins, it needs to define the market that its product or service caters too, segment that market, and then identify its most profitable areas. Once this is done, the leads generation process begins. The leads generation process involves prospecting, preapproach, approach, and close. As a prospect moves through the leads cycle, information is being created and filtered. Sensibly, a business should use this information to follow up with its customers to see if they were satisfied with the service or product, and then generate leads metrics which will be used to further refine the leads generation and sales process.

The leads generation process gathers a lot of information and involves a lot of tracking, and it should generate dialogue not only between the company and customers, but within the company between sales and marketing in particular. A leads management solution uses different methodologies and practices to govern this information and distribute it to the appropriate people within an organization.

There are a couple of factors that are spurring the need for effective leads management tools. The biggest factor is that consumers are becoming more savvy, and are not easily compelled by traditional marketing. Companies are seeking to effectively target their core market by catering to their target’s specific needs.

The following white paper by BLUEROADS (original caps), outlines a some of rules that vendors should adhere to when managing leads distribution. Some recommendations include

* Using clear terminology for each stage of the lead pipeline
* Using partners that are relevant and experienced in a particular area.
* Having realistic expectations.
* Using lead pull methodology.

Given this, enterprises need to find software that is appropriate to their needs. In his excellent blog, Brian Carroll points readers to a Forrester Marketing blog by Laura Ramos which highlights four key buckets of leads generation technology, aimed at improving the efficacy of leads generation. I’ll repeat them here (but I do encourage you to visit both sites)

1) web analytics
2) database services
3) marketing automation
4) pure play leads management

Needless to say this involves a lot of technology and integration with existing CRM and SFA systems. On its own, a leads management system will not be a panacea for a business’s slumping sales. On this, Carroll reflects

“Software will not spontaneously generate collaboration between sales and marketing…I regularly encounter organizations that invest in expensive software before they fully understand the fundamental operational processes that it will be supporting.”

In other words, enterprises do not appreciate the type of information they need and who will be using it within the company. (He also writes how his company spent over a million dollars and nearly a decade to almost perfect their current leads management system. Brian, if you’re reading this, I invite you to try TEC’s tool…) A good leads management system is one that is used. There must be management buy-in, and the sales and marketing teams must be diligent in imputing and extracting information. For stakeholders to use the system, it must offer tools that they need. Failing this, money and resources are wasted housing dirty data—data which has no form or function outside of confounding business.

Enterprises should use a decision support system to help them map out their needs and measure their priorities. The decision process itself can be long and arduous if it is not managed correctly (It’s detailed here as a part of TEC’s software evaluation and selection methodology)

For different vendor’s take on leads management issues, visit our white paper site.

Business Solutions of the Future

The future is tomorrow’s present. Many have tried to predict it using silly or scientific methods, from chiromancy (palm reading), aleuromancy (fortune cookies), and other -mancies, to the three Ps (possible, probable, and preferable futures) and a W (or wildcard—low-probability events with a high impact on the future) used in futurology.

Without trying to create a “CRMorology” or “ERPmancy”, I aim to write a series of articles about the future of business software. Since this concerns everyone—and because I’m not Nostradamus or Hari Seldon (Asimov’s famous psychohistorian)—I would like to involve you, our readers, as well as business professionals and decision makers from the enterprise software industry. From students with little knowledge (but extraordinary imagination), to analysts who know everything about the market and vendors who know for sure what will NOT happen in the near future, I need you to let me know how you see the future of business applications.

How Is It Going to Be?

A future in which business applications will not be needed is too far-off to foresee, so that will not be discussed here. So, if we can’t live without these applications, how will they evolve? Will there be one huge, global business software provider, employing armies of programmers and customer support people? Or maybe myriads of open source products that will work together and be as easy to assemble as the pieces of a puzzle?

I guess we could let our imagination wander indefinitely, but let’s get a bit organized here: what we’ll aim for is seeing what could possibly happen in the next ten, fifty, and one hundred years.

Ten Years in the Future

A decade is not such a long time, so it should be easier to foresee the major trends in the business software industry that may happen during this time span. Still, even in the short term, this is quite a challenge. Look at meteorology: the weather changes so fast and unexpectedly that we can only know for sure what it is after it has happened.

Speaking of meteorology, I see some clouds gathering above the world of enterprise resource planning (ERP). Is there going to be a storm? No, they say cloud computing is the alternative to the traditional storage of information—instead of storing the data on a server in your company, you can put it on data centers anywhere in the world. Some don’t believe it will work, but it was not so long ago that people used to keep their money under the mattress because they did not trust banks.

We don’t trust banks today either, but we do use e-banking and credit cards. The same thing will happen with the clouds: their utility and efficiency will eventually be stronger than the fear of losing data. They already exist and the biggest in the world has 150 locations and will store 150 million gigabytes (GBs) every year, or 100 GBs every four minutes.

We will probably have sufficient space for the data, but what about its security? According to a study from Oracle, twenty percent of IT managers think that data security breaches will happen at their organizations in the next year. And the main threats are not from viruses and hackers, but mostly from inside the company. Do we need an occurrence of massive, worldwide data loss to learn from our mistakes (as we supposedly do now), during the economic downturn?

Let’s say we store and secure the data—how do we access it? It doesn’t look like a problem now, but it will surely become one—maybe sooner than we think. According to an IDC report, we created 281 billion GBs of data in 2007, and by 2011, that number will increase to 1,800 billion GBs.

While we do have more sophisticated tools to extract and manipulate data, one of the challenges of the future will be to have structured data. This involves the existence of workflows for data creation and administration, data cleansing, and data deduplication (removal of duplicate records).

Business data is created by users through an interface to a database. Despite the fact that all enterprise software vendors pretend to offer “intuitive” and “user-friendly” solutions, the complexity of these tools keeps on growing. Since the trend seems to be grouping several solutions in the same suite—most of the time, from different providers acquired by the same vendor—integration seems more important than innovation.

Some vendors offer a platform as a service (PaaS) (also known as cloudware), which is aimed at helping customers easily design, develop, and test their own applications. Large companies can benefit from PaaS, as it will allow them to create applications tailored to their complex needs, thus reducing costs. On the other hand, once you choose to use a PaaS platform, transition to another platform becomes very difficult, and potentially impossible. Will the emerging open platform as a service (OPaaS) address this problem by letting programmers use whatever tools and languages they need?

The way we work will also change. According to a study conducted by Accenture, by 2013, seventy percent of mobile phones in developed nations will support Internet browsers. The same report reveals that the millennial generation (people born in the last decade of the twentieth century) will change the face of the workforce.