Forrester Places Oracle, FrontRange's Launch, Rimini Street and UBid, Tectura and Microsoft, BigMachines and EPrize

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Forrester Places Oracle, FrontRange's Launch, Rimini Street and UBid, Tectura and Microsoft, BigMachines and EPrize

The news as of the fourth cup of coffee, and the music is 1990's Seven Turns, The Allman Brothers' best album released in the thirty-one year span between their other two best studio albums, 1972's "Eat A Peach" and 2003's "Hittin' The Note." Always a dependable live act, the Allmans have been, to put it charitably, hit and miss in the studio:
 
Oracle E-Business Suite Order Fulfillment and Oracle's Siebel Customer Order Management are both positioned as "Leader" in Forrester Research's November 2008 report "The Forrester Wave: Order Management Hubs, Q4 2008."

The research firm evaluated eight order management products for the report. The products were evaluated against 152 criteria. According to Forrester, the Oracle E-Business Suite "led the pack among the Leaders who delivered technologies that support the perfect order."

The research concluded that the Oracle E-Business Suite "articulates a strong, integrated vision for end-to-end order management," and Oracle "delivers a rich go-to-market strategy for the Oracle E-Business Suite."

Forrester's research also found that on the infrastructure side, "Siebel Customer Order Management ranked the highest with the most comprehensive support for inbound order channels. Market, leading areas include support for direct field sales, call center, mobile device, machine-to-machine, and partners."
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FrontRange Solutions, which earlier this year acquired SAM products specialist Centennial Software, has announced the launch of License Manager 3.0, the product described by company officials as helping organizations "automate the process of managing software license entitlements."
 
Central to the new features in License Manager 3.0, according to the FrontRangers, is the ability to accelerate the process of reconciling usage against entitlement for Microsoft software licenses through the ability to bulk upload licensing data from the Microsoft CLP report. This data can then be automatically reconciled against a full audit of the network, establishing how much software is installed and in use on the network against the organization's entitlement.
 
The product sounds like it'd be pretty useful for customers of volume licensing deals such as Select or Open License agreements, where this sort of information is important for negotiations and renewals.
 
License Manager 3.0 also has the ability to centrally manage entitlements for Microsoft server products that use either Client Access Licenses, such as SQL Server, Exchange and Terminal Services or per processor licensing.
 
Company officials say this includes the ability to create and manage CALs based on per device or per user.
 
Andy Burton, Vice President of the Infrastructure Management Group at FrontRange Solutions, said for the vast majority of organizations, "the first port of call when managing their software estate is to make sure they are accurately licensed across their Microsoft estate."
 
With many organizations buying PCs pre-loaded with Operating Systems and business applications, the ability to differentiate and manage OEM licenses, frequently more restrictive than software purchased through other channels, is important to maintaining an accurate view on license entitlement.
 
License Manager 3.0 also has an integrated version of the Centennial Discovery audit product, creating a single product for both the collection of software inventory data and the processing of license entitlements.
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Rimini Street, a third-party maintenance and support provider for enterprise software, has announced that online auction retailer uBid.com, part of Enable Holdings, an asset recovery products company, has confirmed its earlier decision to switch support for its Siebel system to Rimini.
 
Since moving to Rimini Street Support, uBid.com has achieved what the Riminians characterize as "significant annual support cost savings."
 
UBid.com, with over five million registered customers and more than $1 billion in cumulative product sales, buys brand name excess inventory and auctions it to consumers through its online site. Consumers also have access to excess inventory through uBid.com's new sister site RedTag.com, which offers brand name merchandise in a fixed price format.
 
As part of its IT plan, uBid.com sought to reduce annual software support costs while continuing to use its existing Siebel software investment. "UBid.com relies on its Siebel CRM system," said Sally Dahl, vice president, Seller Solutions Center, Enable Holdings. "After a detailed review and comparison, we found that Rimini Street delivers better support and more responsive service compared to the software vendor."
 
Seth Ravin, president and CEO, Rimini Street, claims that his company's "other Global, Fortune 500, mid-market, and public sector organizations" achieve average savings of "more than 50 percent in annual support costs." Company officials claim Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and SAP licensees save "at least 50 percent in annual support fees and to remain on their current software release without any required upgrades or migrations through 2020 and beyond."
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Tectura Corporation, a vendor of business consulting services, has been chosen to be part of Microsoft's Technical Adoption Program for the latest Microsoft Dynamics release -- Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009.
 
TAP is designed to provide "a consistent experience for Microsoft partners to obtain real-world customer feedback on Microsoft pre-release products," according to the Tecturians. The goal is to improve customer and partner experiences in evaluating and adopting Microsoft technologies.
 
Tectura is one of eight Microsoft Dynamics partners asked to join Microsoft's software experts in this initiative.
 
One of the major goals of this TAP initiative, Tectura officials say, "was to test the new Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 release along with one of Tectura's ISV products." Evidently, the way it worked was that each Microsoft Dynamics partner that was part of the TAP team ran an upgrade project with a selected customer. Andreas Voss, product manager for Tectura Germany, chose Tectura Process Manufacturing, a product used by more than 180 clients around the globe.
 
Explains Voss, "Our client was already considering updating their ERP product. Plus, they wanted to improve the organizational processes within the company. Integration between their ERP and Microsoft Office was one of their goals. Upgrading to Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 provided an excellent opportunity to reach their objectives."

A "major functionality component" of the Tectura product, company officials say, is personalized role centers.
 
"What we have done with the Technical Adoption Program will make next steps for other partners who must also update their products, much more streamlined," Voss says.
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BigMachines, a vendor of on-demand configuration and proposal software, has announced that ePrize, a vendor of interactive promotions, has replaced its previous sales configuration tool with BigMachines with the goal of "simplifying ePrize's quoting process and streamlining their sales cycle."
 
EPrize creates interactive promotions. The company has launched over 5,000 promotions in 36 countries, company officials say. The firm deployed BigMachines for "sales configuration, quoting and proposal generation, hosted with BigMachines' data hosting services."
 
Drew Bennett, SVP, Product Development of ePrize, said they chose to migrate to BigMachines "because they are able to provide the product we need to support our business, and we can maintain and update the quoting and configuration tools ourselves using on-demand administration features."
 
Godard Abel, CEO of BigMachines said the vendor "has been expanding its customer base into new markets, and with ePrize, we continue to provide products into the online media and promotions space."
 
Since 1999, ePrize has launched more than 5,000 promotions for 74 of the top 100 brands (as ranked by Advertising Age), including Coca-Cola, Dell, General Motors, The Gap, Yahoo!, Southwest Airlines, P&G, Disney and Subway. Headquartered in Detroit, the company also has offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and London.
 
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