By Suren
In this article I thought I’ll share with you all some of the latest happenings in the ERP Arena.
• SAP & IBM targeting SAGE - The big story right now is the rumours going around that SAP and IBM are looking to acquire SAGE. What this does is, makes the playing field smaller, just like it was forecasted a few years back when we saw a series of acquisitions in the ERP Arena, the number of ERP service providers core brand wise is going to reduce, however hopefully the number of ERP Products out there will continue to remain for some more time before we see any major change. My guess is a lot of products that have been acquired by larger ERP vendors could be eventually phased out in the next 5 -1 0 years, after all some of them have already been given time only until 2014.
• SAP ‘s new Business Analytics tool – SAP has been working hard on its business intelligence suits ever since it took over Business Objects, for all valid reason they don’t want to lose out on the benefits of not using the rich functionalities that BOBJ has to offer when integrated with SAP. SAP’s new applications SAP BusinessObjects Edge 4.0 and SAP Crystal Server are targeted at the small and mid-size companies.
• Sharing of SAP Support Staff: There seems to be a growing trend of companies which have SAP ERP implemented looking to share their SAP support staff with other similar companies in a way to generate some additional revenue and reduce the dependence on external expensive consultants. This trend seems to have picked up in a few companies in California, however time will tell if this approach is successful, I have personally seen one such SAP Support staff sharing model failing miserably and ended up with a company paying a very expensive price.
• A new Spanish based open source ERP is beginning to make its footprints in the US market. It’s called Openbravo.
• A state university which implemented Oracle PeopleSoft ERP suit is now suing ORACLE over Project Cost overruns. The case is in court and proceeding at its own pace as expected.
Those were just some of the news that have made headline over the past couple of weeks, I shall update the site with more as and when new events happen in the ERP Arena. Hope you found this post informative.
Feel free to drop me your comments, suggestions and feedback on ssurenlk@msn.com
