Cordys - Jan Baan's company is gaining momentum

With the strong revenue increase reported in last year and a list of big customers like Citi Group and Philips Electronics, Cordys is gaining its momentum in the BPM market. Cordys' web page shows that Jan Baan has returned to be the CEO, which implies his dedication and confidence in his company( or maybe just because he is waiting for some suitable candidate to take this role).

More than 10 years ago, BPM or workflow software was claimed to replace ERP software, so Jan Baan's comment that BPM will replace ERP is just an old tone. In the past, we all believed this will become true, just like we now believe SOA will make ERP not necessary.

Gartner's new magic quadrant of ERP for midmarket

Gartner recently published its new magic quadrant of ERP for midmarket. It has raised some discussions on the web whether Gartner's evaluation logic is base on 'Pay to Play'.

But I think it can reflect how popular of these ERP products in the North America market. I am glad to see Baan(Infor ERP Ln) is still on the magic quadrant, although it is the product with the worst score on the list.

Baan's new customers are not many now. Most of its large customers have already switched to SAP. The owners of Baan made many mistakes in the past. Today it just become one of the insignificant members of Infor's product porfolio. It is impossible to see its sales up again.

If purely from a technical point of view, Baan should outperform most products on the list. I have studied, but not very in-depth, the architecture and programming tools of Axapta (MS Dynamics Ax), Navison (MS Dynamics Nav), Syteline, Oracle EBS and SAP, none of them can provide such a flexiable architecture and programming productivity as Baan. Comparing with Baan Tools, Syteline is just like a product designed by a primary school student, Axapta is one designed by a high school student. I have said many times that the guy or the team who designed the architecture of Baan Tools (at that time still called Triton Tools) about twenty years ago was very brilliant.

As a business application, Baan ERP or ERP Ln is not outstanding today, but application developers can still learn many nice ideas from Baan Tools.

Frank Scavo's suggestion to avoid vendor lock in

Frank Scavo recently suggested some ways to avoid vendor lock in.


I sketch a picture like this as a summary of Frank's suggestion. To aovid vendor lock in, the extreme case is each color block of application is provided by a different vendor.

My comment, today, implementing an ERP system is not suggested anymore. ERP systems are either shrinked to become a plant level operational system, or shrinked to become the global finance system. As customers become more cautious to purchase too many applications from the same vendor, software vendors should also question the value of vertical acquisitions to become an one-stop software shop.

Related Posts:

Practical action no. 6 to avoid vendor lock-in
Practical action no. 5 to avoid vendor lock-in
Practical action no. 4 to avoid vendor lock-in
Practical action no. 3 to avoid vendor lock-in
Practical action no. 2 to avoid vendor lock-in
Practical action no. 1 to avoid vendor lock-in
Practical actions to avoid vendor lock-in

June 4th - 20th Anniversary

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/world/asia/05hong.html?_r=2

Bing

We are waiting for 'Bing', the new search engine from Microsoft. My expectation is not high. I am quite sure Microsoft will once again disappoint the users. The problem is not the idea of 'decision engine' which 'Bing' proposed is not good. But how much Microsoft has improved its searching engine in recent years? The core value of a searching engine is still the relevancy of the search result. Can 'bing' match the result of Google?

We have tried MSN and live.com search engine before. I don't think it is because some kind of habit or inertia to make the users stick with Google. It is just the result of the search engine. Google just offers a much better search engine than Microsoft. In these years, I don't see any improvement on Microsoft has done on live.com to minimize the gap between Google.

SAP BBD, still not ready yet?

After one year's delay, SAP SaaS suite, BusinessByDesign, is still not ready for the market. SAP executives said it may take another two year for a market ready product, and about 70% of the work done on BBD may need to be replaced to achieve an ideal hosting cost.

SAP's problem is that it tries to build a very powerful SaaS suite, which no other companies have done so before. It is not a surprise scalability will become a serious problem for such complex SaaS suite. The problem of scalability is reflected as a high hosting and running cost.

Besides, a dilemma is the success of BBD will definitely hurt the sales of traditional business suite. SAP company internal should have serious conflicts on how to position BBD. I think which is another reason causes the long time delay.



Related Posts:

SAP adjusts the tone on SaaS
A look back on year 2008
SaaS suite is not a good idea
SAP delays BusinessByDesign

Bruce Cleveland's article - "The death of enterprise software?"

I find this article, "The death of enterprise software?", written by Bruce Cleveland quite interesting. Bruce gives the reasons why there is lack of innovations in business applications and suggests a new way of "spin-in" to fuel innovations.

What I find interesting is Bruce points out that there is few innovations in business applications. Actually no one could deny that this is true. Comparing with other technology, like semiconductor and telecommunication, mainstream business applications have little advancement in past decades. What is the major achievements in business applications, other than changing the coding language from Cobol to Java and SQL, changing the UI from text mode on terminals to graphical mode on web browser? Our developers are still writing codes like sphegeti, which take years to debug. ERP vendors are still providing an MRP engine which is slow in performance, and force customers to purchase so-called In-RAM engine which costs another million dollar to implement.