The
Enterprise Applications 'Arms Race' To Be Number
Three
P.J.
Jakovljevic
- April 24, 2006
Event
Summary
In
the enterprise resource planning (ERP)
world there is fierce competition to be number
three (after SAP
and Oracle).
The leading contenders are Infor,
Lawson Software, and SSA
Global. For a detailed discussion of
Lawson, see ‘New’
Lawson Software's Transatlantic Extended Enterprise
Resource Planning Intentions).
This
is Part One of the series The Enterprise
Applications “Arms Race” To Be Number
Three.
Even
those who still believe that weapons of
mass destruction (WMDs) will be found in
Iraq (or in North Korea or Iran) should by now
have realized that the number one position in
the enterprise applications space will ultimately
be decided in the inevitable showdown between
SAP and Oracle (and their accompanying platform
and partner ecosystems). Certainly, this does
not imply that either of those will ultimately
dominate the tier two or high end of the tier
three market segments per se. Thus, the “arms
race” for the number three spot is no
less exciting (and is maybe even breathtaking),
given that the revenue rankings snapshot for
SSA Global, Lawson Software (soon to merge with
Intentia),
and Infor may change at any time, depending
on which vendor has most recently announced
yet another acquisition. One should also note
that Infor, Lawson, and SSA Global have no illusions
of dominance in the tier one segment, since
that battle will already have been decided between
the two aforementioned giants.
One
should also not ignore Microsoft
Business Solutions (MBS) or Sage
Group, in light of their total
applications revenues, but these two archrivals
are still fighting in the lower end of the market.
Their respective significance remains, however,
especially given Sage’s recent acquisition
of Adonix
(which certainly has many larger midsized customers),
and the fit of Microsoft Dynamics AX
(formerly Microsoft Axapta)
to like-sized enterprises, although this product
is impeded by its nascence. Also significant
are Epicor
Software (with its recent acquisition
of CRS Retail Solutions), and
China-based CDC Software (with
its ongoing digestion of the globally renowned
Ross
Systems, IMI,
and Pivotal
brands; its recent acquisition of JRG
Software; and vacillating plans to
nab Onyx
Software), but they are still at
a safe distance, revenue-wise, from the tier
two echelon.
Recently,
we have given due attention to the Lawson-Intentia
combination, and to the rivalry between MBS
and Sage (see The
Market Impact of Two Powerhouses),
so the time has come for a comparative analysis
of the remaining two foes: SSA Global and Infor.
Executives of these two vendors would be genuinely
(or not so genuinely) insulted at any mention
of similarities between the two entities, and
although the two do have mutually distinct characteristics
(which will be tackled further on), the two
vendors do indeed have many similarities.
Similarities
For
one, besides their similar size, similar geographic
coverage, significant industry overlap, close
partnerships with IBM,
and so on, both are, after all, aggressive acquirers
(being more or less strange conglomerations
of over a dozen enterprise products). This is
in distinction to “organic growers,”
which SAP, QAD,
IFS,
or IBS
largely remain (if one disregards their occasional
smaller, complementary acquisitions to fill
some functional gaps). Other so-called organic
growers include Oracle (prior to their acquisition
of PeopleSoft/J.D. Edwards, and Siebel),
and pre-merger Intentia and Lawson (see Rapidly
Consolidating Enterprise Applications Market:
The Worlds of 'Organic Growers' and 'Aggressive
Consolidators').
Both
vendors vehemently object to anyone characterizing
them as aggressive consolidators, since the
term gives the negative impression that acquisitions
serve the purpose of farming maintenance revenues
without any commitment to developing new solutions.
SSA Global contends that it is much more than
a consolidator, as it has been espousing and
executing a well-defined convergence strategy.
On the other hand, Infor claims to be a sort
of organic grower of the businesses that it
has assembled—adding close to 1,000 new
customers annually.
Related
to this is the similar youth of the companies,
which are both around toddler age. We know them
now as SSA Global and Infor respectively, but
via their progenitor companies, they can each
boast about thirty years of market existence
and industrial experience.
For
example, from bankruptcy (with about $130 million
[USD] in revenues and a cash hemorrhage of $16
million [USD]) in late 2000, SSA Global generated
almost quintuple revenues of $637.8 million,
with a net income of $20 million (USD) for the
fiscal year ending July 2004. This was accomplished
via nine acquisitions from April 2001 to August
2004. For fiscal year 2005, revenues totaled
$711.8 million (USD), not including the last
three acquisitions, which will be discussed
later. With about 5,000 jittery customers in
2000, SSA Global now has over 13,000 active
customers in 90 countries and 121 offices worldwide.
The company, which also went public in May 2005,
spends on average 15 percent of its annual revenues,
or over $100 million (USD), on the research
and development (R&D) of new solutions
and enhancements.
On
the other hand, from its first (hardly ever
publicized) acquisitions in 2002, Infor has
thus far acquired 18 companies, and estimates
are that it has become a nearly $780 million
(USD) company. This includes projections for
the latest, partial acquisition of Geac
Computer Corporation, and the complete
acquisition of Datastream
Systems, which will also be analyzed
later on. It now has more than 3,100 employees
in over 50 global offices, with earnings
before interest, tax deduction, and amortization
(EBITDA) currently around $140 million
(USD), or a projected $190 million (USD) after
the above acquisitions. The company is privately
held, but remains refreshingly open about its
finances, which is another similarity with private-era
SSA Global. Another similarity is that both
companies are far from being finished with their
acquisition streaks—both are keeping watchful
eyes around the clock on several dozen possible
acquisition targets. However, eager candidates
can also click designated buttons at these vendors’
Web sites and offer themselves up to “chief
acquisition officers” (or whatever their
titles might be).
Both
SSA Global and Infor will sooner rather than
later reach the magic $1 billion mark in revenues.
As a matter of fact, both vendors are occasionally
frustrated at being branded by analysts as mid-market-only
providers simply because their revenues do not
match up those of SAP and Oracle. In fact, many
of their customers are multinational corporations
with multibillions in revenues. Another striking
similarity is that a lot of due diligence and
integration takes place before any acquisition
is publicly and officially announced; there
is no confusion amongst their ranks about who
is staying in which capacity, and about who
has to move on. Also (at least at a mid-managerial
level), there is a tradition of meritocracy
in both houses, whereby incumbent employees
do not necessarily have a “free ride”
advantage over newcomers—many employees
from acquired companies have actually climbed
far up the corporate ladders.
So
Similar, Yet So Different (and Vice Versa)
However,
there are certainly somewhat different philosophies
underlying the current state of affairs for
SSA Global and Infor. Being the first to start
the acquisition streak, SSA Global had initially
shown (at least to lesser-informed outsiders)
something of a scavenger nature, by acquiring
struggling peer companies that typically had
products written off by many as technologically
outdated has-beens. But in hindsight, there
was at least some underlying method and consistency
to these acquisitions: all the products were
technologically similar (based either on Unix
or IBM iSeries [AS/400]);
they were mostly aimed at related discrete and
process manufacturing sectors; and they quickly
became cash-generating businesses within SSA
Global.
On
the other hand, with every acquisition, Infor
has attempted to solve essential, industry-specific
challenges faced by its (by now) more than 17,500
customers (26,700 after the impending acquisition)
and implementations in 70 countries. Also, each
acquisition has had the role of helping to develop
deep vertical expertise within the targeted
supply chain management (SCM) and ERP
solutions, and within certain regions (for example,
Infor has succeeded in becoming the mid-market
automotive supplier leader in Germany). The
addition of Datastream, a prominent enterprise
asset management (EAM) provider, reveals
a lot about Infor’s strategy to acquire
leading brands that round out the entire solution
footprint, and that provide compelling combinations
to compete against the larger horizontal players
like SAP and Oracle.
Certainly,
SSA Global has been less focused so far on capturing
certain industries with its acquisitions per
se, than on acquiring ERP and SCM vendors to
grow market share and share of wallet
(SOW) by broadening its product footprint. Consequently,
nowadays SSA Global develops, sells, and services
enterprise applications software, which encompasses
ERP, customer relationship management
(CRM), SCM, financial management, procurement,
project management, human capital management
(HCM), business intelligence (BI),
and product lifecycle management (PLM).
Even
without an initially deliberate focus, SSA Global
offers its applications to companies in a number
of vertical markets, with a concentration on
manufacturing industries (which represent about
80 percent of revenues, at least prior to the
Epiphany acquisition; but this
acquisition has shifted the revenue balance
to about 64 percent, with the remainder coming
from the service industries). The company offers
its applications to companies in various industries:
aerospace and defense (A&D); automotive;
chemicals; consumer packaged goods (CPG);
industrial machinery and equipment; general
process manufacturing; high-tech and electronics;
medical products, devices, and equipment; and
pharmaceutical. To that end, its SSA
ERPLN
product is targeted at companies in the A&D,
high-tech and electronics, and industrial machinery
and equipment sectors, and includes specific
functionality for companies in those sectors.
SSA ERPLX
has a similar focus on batch process
companies, in sectors such as pharmaceutical,
and food and beverage. Prior to the addition
of Epiphany (via eclectic acquisitions such
as Infinium or Computer
Associates’ Masterpiece), SSA
Global had widened market penetration by adding
business services, financial services, government
and education, health care, hospitality and
gaming, and retail vertical markets to its traditional
manufacturing stronghold. Its strategy has been
to add strategic solutions that allow customers
in targeted industries to support end-to-end
business processes with integrated applications
from a single vendor.
What
the two vendors have since been doing with their
acquired portfolios highlights additional similarities
and differences. As for similarities, the bedrock
policy for both vendors is that no product will
be sunset (i.e., “killed,” “stabilized,”
or discontinued) for as long as the customers
want to use the products and pay for maintenance
and support (which, incidentally, Infor has not
increased, contrary to the customary actions taken
by other acquisitive peers).
Also,
for new and more avant-garde customers wanting
to migrate to more contemporary technologies
and the broadest and deepest contemporary functionality,
both vendors have embarked on the development
and delivery of next-generation products. In
the case of SSA Global, this means converging
several technologically close legacy products
into the SSA ERPLN or SSA ERPLX next-generation
ERP offerings (see SSA
Global—The Right Product Strategy).
In theory, these offerings will draw on the
best functional characteristics of all individual
acquired products, in addition to new, internally
developed (on an ongoing basis) functional capabilities.
Building
Ecosystems of Extended ERP
Both
SSA Global and Infor have also been building
ecosystems of extended ERP, consisting of complementary
products that they can peddle (up-sell or cross-sell)
to their installed base (and even to new customers
in a stand-alone manner), to keep clients on
maintenance and sustain them as a source of
revenue for many years. Such a strategy has
been particularly successful for SSA Global,
since in the maturing market for ERP systems,
new license sales have long become more difficult
to achieve, and increasing revenue from existing
customers is thus becoming more important.
On
the other hand, although user companies want
new functionality, they are quite reluctant
to undergo a wholesale “rip and replacement”
of functioning legacy ERP systems, if extended
functionality from the incumbent vendor is likely
to be “good enough” (or even better).
These factors have led to the philosophy that
a vendor's revenue model might depend less on
constantly finding new customers, and more on
sustaining a large installed base of existing
customers, including sales of complementary
products and services for integration with the
user’s installed system.
Shifting
from an initial focus on “portfolio collection,”
SSA Global has recently been focusing instead
on a product convergence strategy, which means
developing interfaces between its main applications
and its acquired products. The vendor tends
to offer an upgrade path to either the iSeries
or the UNIX code bases via their respective
SSA ERPLX and SSA ERPLN products. Recently,
especially on the supply chain execution
(SCE) side, it has acquired add-on best-of-breed
point supply chain management (SCM)
solutions such as CAPS Logistics
(from former Baan), Arzoon,
and EXE Technologies (and very
recently, Epiphany for CRM and Boniva
for HCM capabilities, which will be discussed
later). SSA Global has been selling these ERP
extensions (which in the SCM and SCE applications
case are for all ERP products from the separate
strategic SCM unit) primarily, but not necessarily
to its existing ERP customer base (see SSA
Global Forms a Strategic Unit with an Extended-ERP
Savvy). The Epiphany acquisition has
resulted in a new strategic CRM unit too. The
integration of SSA Global's acquired products
in areas such as SCM, supplier relationship
management (SRM), and CRM should benefit
SSA Global customers seeking suite-level integration.
SSA
Global Warehouse Management System and Transportation
Management System Focus
This
benefit might be particularly apposite for customers
that increasingly are feeling the pressure of
doing business in a complex global supply chain
where rising transportation costs have a major
impact on business performance and profits.
To that end, since the EXE acquisition in 2004,
the vendor has delivered a swath of warehousing
enhancements dealing with regulatory compliance,
integration with ERP counterpart products, event
management, radio frequency identification
(RFID), voice interface, and so on. Thus, SSA
WMS (Warehouse Management System) 2000 5.5 and
SSA WMS 4000 3.10, both from
former EXE, provide a better user interface
(UI), as well as compliance and warehouse operations
facilities, with some industry-specific capabilities.
Meanwhile, SSA TMS (Transportation Management
System) 6.2, bolstered by new development
since the Arzoon acquisition, provides more
functionality for international air cargo transactions.
The
array of enhancements slated for 2006 (for example,
wave planning, agent-based network fulfillment
execution, labor and task management, event
management, and a multiwarehouse visibility
platform) is no less impressive (see SSA Global
finds Little
Known SCM Gems in Filling Out its Solution Portfolio
and Who
Needs Warehousing Management and How Much Thereof?).
All these enhancements come with the concept
that users obtain deeper insight into their
customers’ demands to better match supply
with available product, based on flawless demand-driven
supply chain and production operations ideas.
SSA
has recently had strong momentum and organic
growth, especially in the WMS arena: sales of
WMS Solutions grew in 2005 from 2004 levels,
to now reach EXE’s peak revenue levels
of 2001. Acting as a stand-alone, best-of-breed
SCE supplier rather than an ERP supplier, globally
SSA Global has been regaining significant customer
share. Basically, by closing well over 100 significant
customer transactions with WMS solutions in
2005 (with more than half involving brand new
accounts), the vendor may be dispelling any
lingering perceptions that it is a mere ERP
scavenger. In fact, compared to the pure-play
WMS leaders, Manhattan Associates and
RedPrairie
(including recently acquired MARC Global),
SSA Global is more global, since most of its
SCE customers come from outside North America.
As for industry segments, retail and wholesale
distribution was the largest vertical for SSA
Global’s high-volume WMS transactions,
with transportation and logistics being the
second-largest vertical.
Similar
Infor Focus
It
is interesting to note that the Infor supply
chain planning (SCP) group is acting in
a similar manner, selling to several of its
ERP install bases within all geographic regions.
The group currently has estimated annual revenues
of $35 million (USD), more than 135 employees,
and over 450 customers—more than 75 percent
of these customers have come from a competitive
customer base (meaning that only one quarter
of these have come from an Infor ERP product
instance). SCP modules featuring industry focus
and deep domain expertise include inventory
planning and replenishment (including strategic
inventory planning and inventory optimization),
demand planning (including demand forecasting
and scenario analysis), supply planning (including
manufacturing planning and supply optimization),
production scheduling (including process and
discrete manufacturing scheduling), distribution
planning (including deployment and distribution
optimization), and sales and operations
planning (S&OP) (including S&OP
reporting and supply chain optimization).
Somewhat
differing from SSA Global’s comprehensive
convergence of products, Infor’s “assembler”
strategy for its major business units (discrete
manufacturing [automotive, industrial equipment
and machinery, high-tech and electronics, metal
fabrication, and so on]; process manufacturing
[food and beverage, specialty chemicals, pharmaceuticals,
life sciences, and the like]; and wholesale
distribution for durable goods [paper, plumbing
and heating, industrial supply, building materials,
electrical supply, and so forth]) is to acquire
solutions and to skim off the potential “superbreed”
modules, which it can then sell to users of
its own ERP solutions as well as of other ERP
solutions, while not losing sight of the vertical
focus. Also, the collective domain knowledge
and some acquired best-of-breed products will
be (or already have been) transformed into evolutionary
superbreed products for use across multiple
divisions.
The
best example, in addition to the aforementioned
newly formed Infor SCP division (which stems from
the SCT Process and Mercia
acquisitions), is the SupplyWEB supply
replenishment product for automotive suppliers,
which has already incorporated the best functionality
from former Future Three and
Brain (see The
Pain and Gain of Integrated EDI Part Two: Automotive
Suppliers Gain), and which has meanwhile
been rewritten in Java and is available for all
ERP products. Further examples include the Infor
eCommerce (formerly bizLinx),
eStorefront, and eCatalog
products from the Infor distribution division,
and VISUAL WMS, from former Lilly
VISUAL.
As
a result, Infor has been able to integrate the
collective industry-specific functionality and
savvy of the products and people it assembles,
as exemplified by Infor .NET’s
upcoming Center of Excellence
which will join the forces of the former Lilly
VISUAL and MAPICS SyteLine
product development teams in the discrete manufacturing
unit. Consequently, VISUAL WMS is being offered
to Infor SyteLine customers,
initially as a service offering, whereas the
VISUAL Quality Management module
is to be offered to both Infor SyteLine and
Infor XPPS (formerly
Brain XPPS) customers. As an independent
entity, MAPICS had already linked the SSyteLine
CRM product to Infor XA (formerly
MAPICS XA), well before its
acquisition by Infor; this product will soon
be sold to the original Infor COM users
and later to Infor VISUAL users. The forthcoming
accounting and trading management product ACmanager
is anticipated as a new global superbreed product,
together with eStorefront (from the distribution
group) for SyteLine and COM, and the enhanced
demand planning product Mercia Links
for XA, SyteLine, and COM. The vendor is also
currently analyzing the possible product candidates
for superbreeds in performance management, PLM,
and CRM.
Over
the last 12 months, Infor claims to have gained
nearly 1,000 name customers, mostly as a result
of the above superbreed products and the COM
(primarily in Europe), SyteLine (globally),
and VISUAL (primarily in North America) ERP
products (VISUAL’s new license sales reportedly
rose 50 percent year over year in the first
two quarters after the acquisition). Users are
showing confidence rather than consternation
after the new owner’s appearance. The
automotive sector has been a particularly successful
vertical for Infor: a reported 73 percent of
tier one and two automotive suppliers were already
using Infor solutions, generating $80 million
(USD) in revenues. Additional areas focused
on by Infor are wholesale distribution and the
make-to-order (MTO) discrete manufacturing
business, as well as process manufacturing,
including chemicals, and food and beverage,
which will be detailed later.
Not
to be completely outdone by Infor when it comes
to vertical focus, SSA Global has been adding
industry-knowledgeable people to its marketing
teams, to contribute to delivering solutions
addressing certain customer needs or pain points.
The vendor will not build different product
versions for different vertical industries (this
is in order to maintain the simplicity and effectiveness
of the two core ERP applications, which will
converge multiple product, multi-code functional
footprints), but will rather deliver optional
feature packs tailored for certain industries.
Needless to say, one would expect customers
to apply them as a matter of course. Service
packs are not optional (in that they correct
bugs), but most simply roll up a number of previous
changes. Conversely, some feature packs may
contain more features for one industry than
another, and it is quite possible that SSA Global
might launch a feature pack for one industry,
followed by a feature pack for another industry.
That, along with the notion that success breeds
success, has contributed to the fact that approximately
10 percent of SSA Global’s total revenues
currently comes from new licenses (although
not necessarily from as many new name accounts
as in Infor’s case).
This
concludes Part One of the six-part series The
Enterprise Applications “Arms Race”
To Be Number Three.
Contributing
to the Rejuvenation of Legacy Systems in the
Enterprise Resource Planning Field
P.J.
Jakovljevic
- April 25, 2006
SSA
Global’s Contribution to the Rejuvenation
of Legacy Systems
Lawson
Software’s upcoming Landmark
platform (see A
New Platform to Battle Software Bloat?)
and Infor’s
Corestone have been described
during our recent The
Blessing and Curse of Rejuvenating Legacy Systems
series, whereas Microsoft’s,
SAP’s
and Oracle’s
platform related forays have been duly reported
as well (see SOA-based
Applications and Infrastructure—The Next
Frontier? and Multipurpose
SAP NetWeaver). But the time has now
come for us to describe the corresponding moves
of SSA
Global, whose equivalent platform
is branded SSA Open Architecture.
This
is Part Two of the six-part series The Enterprise
Applications “Arms Race” To Be Number
Three.
The
common thread to all these platforms is a service-oriented
architecture (SOA) strategy built to meet
current market requirements, such as hidden complexity,
and low total cost of ownership (TCO).
Sound product architecture is critical to enabling
faster implementations, easier upgrades, easier
integration to other non-native applications,
and more flexibility to change processes on an
ongoing basis. For acquisitive vendors, there
is the benefit of lowering acquisition cost; they
can assemble component pieces that are non-proprietary,
with an upgrade path to greater functionality,
while still maintaining the replaceable nature
of these components (due to their standards-based
quality). The idea is to build anew only what
cannot be assembled from the existing component
repository. SOA is the unifying integration factor,
whereby one can assemble composite solutions from
disparate components: some that are built internally;
some that come with acquired companies; and some
that come from partnering with best-of-breed vendors.
One
can thereby thin down a monolithic application’s
bloated and unwieldy core, while putting increasing
amounts of functionality in thinner layer components
that can be snapped onto or shared with several
application kernels as required. Software built
in an object-oriented (OO) fashion is
thus less unwieldy; the leaner, more modular architecture
can result in quicker implementations, improved
flexibility, and easier uppgrades. This framework
also provides agility and flexibility for integrating
industry niche solutions, and for development
of industry-specific solutions, with insulation
from the vendor’s major release cycles.
For instance, SSA Global has recently been striving
to add new functionality to support the food and
beverage industry needs in the form of business
logic that supports country of origin labeling
(COOL), bioterrorism preparedness, and global
trade item number (GTIN) compliance.
Although
SSA Global has many service, software, and technology
alliances or partnerships with companies around
the world (such as Atos Origin,
Accenture, Fujitsu,
Cognos,
Sirius,
CSC, and Capgemini),
its quintessential partnership is with IBM.
This partnership was cemented in mid-2004, and
aimed to more easily modernize and integrate
disparate SSA Global systems across the extended
enterprise. Under the terms of the agreement,
the two companies jointly market SSA Global
extended enterprise solutions built on IBM middleware,
including IBM WebSphere Portal,
IBM WebSphere Business Integration,
IBM WebSphere Application Server,
and IBM DB2 Universal Database.
IBM Business Consulting Services
and SSA Global also collaborate to offer implementation
and consulting services.
With
thousands of customers already running SSA Global
solutions on IBM eServer xSeries,
iSeries, pSeries,
and zSeries technology, the
joint solution should further reduce TCO and
time-to-value, while helping these companies
adopt a growing list of industry standards and
information technology (IT) mandates.
In other words, while Intentia,
Lawson, and Infor are certainly major IBM partners,
SSA Global has possibly become the most exclusive.
SSA Global justifies this exclusivity decision
by referring to the following three concepts:
- Synergy:
Together, SSA Global and IBM should offer
a more complete and extensive solution, meeting
both business and technology needs. Namely,
SSA Global has been providing customers with
the industry solutions they need for competitive
differentiation, whereas IBM has been contributing
leading technology and infrastructure (this
technical standardization should ultimately
lower the TCO).
-
Affordability: The two vendors
have been developing solutions for large global
customers—solutions that can be scaled
down and made affordable for small and medium
customers as well.
-
Interoperability: SSA Global
is standardizing on the renowned IBM WebSphere
middleware platform, providing its customers
with industry-standard integration infrastructure.
Industry
Trends
Like
its peers, SSA Global has thoroughly analyzed
the industry trends and issues affecting manufacturing
and distribution companies worldwide. Business
is now moving faster than most companies’
ability to adapt. The velocity of business transactions—from
orders by mail, to orders by phone, fax, and
now the Internet—is ever-increasing, and
as a result there are increasing demands on
IT departments. In addition, executive strategies
passed down through the organization are expected
to be implemented faster and faster, which is
putting further pressure on IT departments to
be more agile and to implement solutions quicker
and more efficiently. Globalization is also
introducing new levels of complexity, and virtually
no company, big or small, has been unaffected
by globalization. Whether a company has operations
across borders or whether its supply chain extends
overseas, it must contend with economic, cultural,
linguistic, and regulatory differences, putting
more pressure on the IT infrastructure to efficiently
accommodate these needs (see Merging
Global Trade Management with Global Finance).
The
trend towards lowering TCO requirements also
needs only small mention, since top executives
are wiser today than they were several years
ago (given they are apt to have had direct or
indirect experience with IT projects that failed
to deliver promised business benefits). They
are also under more competitive pressure to
obtain a tangible return on investment (ROI)
and to extend the value of their IT infrastructures.
The level of detail for ROI studies has meanwhile
increased, and executives demand information
that tells them what the true, long-term cost
of a technology investment will be (without
a credible ROI forecast, the odds are that a
given project will not be approved).
Bundled
with this is the trend towards application portfolio
rationalization; over the last few decades,
we have seen a move towards decentralization,
as a result of which companies have built elaborate
localized technology infrastructures to support
the needs of remote locations. Despite the flexibility
and agility of autonomous remote divisions (see
Standardizing
on One ERP System in a Multi-division Enterprise),
many top executives have realized that there
is a high cost of maintaining a software infrastructure
characterized by a disparate set of standard
and customized applications. To achieve greater
efficiency, cost reduction, and security, many
user companies are moving to consolidate and
standardize their applications and associated
technology platforms, whereby the objective
is to align IT infrastructure with business
needs.
Technology
landscapes are also consolidating, since customers
are beginning to realize that they can get significant
cost benefits by reducing the number of technology
platforms they support. In addition, there is
an inclination toward supporting open nonproprietary
standards that offer more control over the applications
they use and the vendors with whom they work.
The industry consensus is that more than 75
percent of new enterprise application development
is now built on platforms based on either
Microsoft .NET or J2EE.
In
summary, everyone needs more business agility,
as well as the ability to conduct more transactions
(including quality, service, management, production,
and so forth) with fewer resources and assets
(in terms of supporting applications and hardware).
Like most of its peers, SSA Global is focused
on providing business value via underlying technology
improvements, such as solving the business problems
of supply chain visibility, master data unification,
vendor-managed inventory (VMI), and
so on.
While
the vendor is tackling recent buzzword-based
technological concepts like Web services, composite
applications, extensible markup language
(XML), enterprise service bus (ESB),
SOA, and so forth, the point is to map these
concepts to true business value (in order to
prove that this horde of whiz-bang terms and
concepts really adds some value).
To
that end, SOA describes modular software which
is constructed using discrete executable tasks
as the primary unit of subdivision, and which
uses exposed service interfaces as the primary
method of modularization (see Understanding
SOA, Web Services, BPM, BPEL, and More).
As mentioned earlier, users have an increasing
need for greater simplicity, manageability,
and agility, and if their business processes
have changed, they want to know exactly how
long it will take for an IT department to modify
the software accordingly. As for what SOA means
for customers, it should enable more rapid integration
with existing systems, whereby customers can
acquire new services without going through full
upgrades. Additionally, it supports hybrid solution
rollout and insulation against technology changes,
and enables business process configuration and
orchestration specific to vertical industries
and distributed deployment.
SSA
Global’s Technological Vision
The
SOA enablers of agility in SSA Global’s
case too are Web services, commonly accepted
development standards, and common modules with
standard service interfaces. This technology
strategy has been driven by the customers’
requirement to implement and manage their solutions
quickly and effectively, while maintaining the
lowest possible TCO. SSA Global’s technological
vision is thus characterized by the following
objectives:
-
To support its recently minted corporate product
strategy of “modernization, convergence,
integration and industry focus.” Obviously,
the first three pillars have considerable
technical implications. Industry focus has
technical implications that are less obvious,
but remains very important to companies that
have specific technical requirements (for
instance, specific industry electronic
data interchange [EDI] requirements).
In particular, some of SSA Global’s
ERP products have been helping companies comply
with the requirements of Part 11, Title 21
of the Code of Federal Regulations
(CFR) from the US Food and Drug Administration
(FDA), which applies to pharmaceutical manufacturing;
and with International Financial Reporting
Standards (IFRS), the financial reporting
mandates for companies doing business in the
European Union. In addition, SSA Global has
integrated tax capabilities with its ERP products,
so that customers can more easily and accurately
process sales and consumer-use taxes for US
and Canadian requirements.
-
To provide a common environment in which customers
can model, administer, and deploy their solutions,
since many SSA Global solutions that currently
have their own proprietary infrastructure
should greatly benefit by leveraging a common
set of tools and technologies (commoditized
standard technologies).
-
To provide the lowest possible TCO by leveraging
technology standards like J2EE and Web services
as the vendor strives to provide more tailored
solutions with fewer customizations and quicker
deployments, all at lower cost.
Business
Strategy
SSA
Open Architecture follows a logical approach
based on strategic business processes in order
to deliver a message platform which is organized
around four basic service tiers:
- people-oriented
services
-
decision-making services
-
business process services
-
application services
We
will get into more detail shortly as to what
these different service tiers represent. For
now, let us explain what this strategy intends
to deliver, starting with the most important
element, which is preserving customer application
and technology investments, rather than imposing
a rip-and-replace approach. SSA Global pledges
to protect customer investment as much as possible,
while still modernizing user applications.
Another
key component of the strategy is the adoption
of the SOA model, whereby software is implemented
in the form of modular services that can be
reused across the enterprise. In order to do
this, the vendor wants to leverage commodity
technologies and standards to implement software
faster and more cheaply than the competition.
Furthermore,
given that SOA technology is not enough without
industry-based context and experience, SSA Global
also plans to focus on core competencies, and
to leverage its selected deep industry expertise
to deliver the best and most flexible solutions.
Lastly, the vendor pledges to partner whenever
someone else can provide value to the customer
quicker and more efficiently. By standardizing
first on an IBM technology stack (with some
oother upcoming complementary close partnerships),
SSA Global emphasizes that it is not in business
to create proprietary technology platforms,
but rather to maintain its philosophy as a solution-oriented
company.
As
for the abovementioned four service tiers, they
can all be depicted rather simply. Namely, people-oriented
services provide users with personalized UIs
to provide a more effective experience and operating
environment, allowing them to be more efficient
employees. They also provide the ability to
aggregate information across applications to
give a single, consolidated view of the user
enterprise, while they also enhance intracompany
communication by providing the ability for employees
to collaborate more effectively with the desktop
and each other. Decision-making services provide
reporting, analysis, and monitoring tools to
decision makers within the user company, so
that they can make informed decisions via better
and faster manipulation, configuration, and
analysis of business information. Under the
SSA CPM suite (which is powered
by Cognos business intelligence [BI]
technology), the SSA Financial Reporting,
SSA Enterprise Scorecarding,
and SSA Analytics modules provide
insight into business performance and required
changes.
Business
process services, as the term implies, aim at
enhancing operational efficiency through improved
business process management (BPM) functionality
for automating, integrating, and collaborating
across the enterprise and into the supply chain
(see Business
Process Management: A Crash Course on What It
Entails and Why to Use It). Standards-based
integration infrastructure opens up applications
and allows automation of business processes,
whereas collaboration allows users to interact
more closely with their customers and suppliers.
These advantages have been best illustrated
with SSA Global’s other recent focus on
the area of financial and regulatory compliance;
SSA Global's compliance framework appears throughout
multiple product areas, including functionality
in the SSA BPM, SSA
CPM, and ERP product lines.
Within
the SSA BPM suite, the SSA Workflow
capability (with the embedded iFlow
technology from Fujitsu) helps
companies establish preventative controls to
ensure that predefined business processes and
business rules are strictly adhered to. In addition,
the SSA Event Management capability
helps companies identify processes and data
that are not compliant. Several SSA Global ERP
products have been tightly integrated with the
SSA BPM, SSA CPM, SSA FM, and SSA HCM
suites to provide a broad range of
compliance capabilities. The use of BPM and
graphic modeling tools can speed implementation
and aid flexibility. For instance, the vendor
has lately built a series of templates for its
BPM engine, to allow WMS software components
to be quickly assembled for particular industries,
or styles of warehouse operations.
In
recent years legislation and regulations have
been introduced to ensure good corporate behavior
or governance, but unlike the Y2K issue, the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in the US,
and IFRS and Basel 2 in Europe, the Middle
East, and Africa (EMEA), are not issues
looking for a technology solution. Compliance
is achieved only through management best practices,
and SSA Global recognizes that technologies
such as corporate performance management
(CPM) and workflow management can be used
to facilitate the adoption of such practices.
For these reasons, the availability of CPM and
workflow integrations is standard within the
SSA FM suite, whereas report and process templates
will be available as SSA Global engages with
customers to define them. For more pertinent
information, see Joining
the Sarbanes-Oxley Bandwagon; Meeting the Needs
of Small and Medium Businesses.
Last
but not least, the application services tier
provides a common infrastructure across applications,
which allows for more efficient modeling, administration
and deployment of solutions. Their potential
benefit is in reducing the complexity and cost
of application management by providing a common,
enterprise-wide administration tool set.
Solution
Application Framework
The
Solution Application Framework (SAF)
delivers the previously described service tiers,
and allows customers to model, administer, and
deploy their solutions using a common set of
tools and technologies.
The
first SAF component is the studio environment,
which provides a single integrated development
environment (IDE) for modeling and customizing
SSA Global solutions. This includes portal,
UI, workflow, reporting, data warehouse, integration,
and development environments for solutions built
with J2EE, existing SSA 4GL environments (in
other words, fourth-generation languages from
Baan and BPCS AS/Set technology),
iSeries, and others. This is a good example
of SSA Global’s ability to leverage commodity
technologies, since Eclipse IDE
is an open source tool (originally developed
by IBM, but then donated to the open source
community) which is freely available to SSA
Global and its customers.
While
IBM has provided a number of free plug-ins to
support different languages, SSA Global has
been providing its own plug-ins to enable developers
to use a common development environment for
coding in Java, Report Program Generator
(RPG), or SSA 4GLs. This industry-standard technology
is providing significant value to SSA Global,
its customers, and system integrators who can
leverage the same tooling for their own customizations.
As
far as the administration section of SAF is
concerned, common services like unified user
management, single sign-on, central deployment,
licensing, logging, and configuration should
ease deployment and maintenance costs. The run-time
services component actually powers UI, portal,
collaboration, integration, workflow, application
server, and other needs, and it also provides
the common infrastructure that supports the
various platforms and databases SSA Global currently
supports (for example, IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft
SQL Server, and mySQL).
Finally, the repositories of metadata, solution
registry, and global solutions represent a significant
move toward adopting the SOA model by externalizing
functionality in its solutions in an effort
to reduce the cost of customizations. As is
well-known, customizations requiring coding
add significant cost to application ownership,
whereas SOA reduces costs by componentizing
functionality for reuse and by allowing customization
of business behavior by changing the order in
which the components are executed. SAF repositories
thus externalize configuration to allow for
changes in behavior, since by reconfiguring
the repository, users can change the business
logic and provide the custom logic they might
need without incurring the cost of the customizations
of the past.
SSA
Global’s strategy for delivering future
solutions is certainly not a “big bang”
approach; rather, it is evolutionary in nature.
The vendor started by releasing people-oriented
services components with the SSA ERPLN product
launch in 2004, whereas with the SSA ERPLX launch
some components of the decision services and
business process services have been added. Shortly
after the ERP LX launch in mid-2005, SSA
Open Architecture 5.0 was released,
and the vendor then initiated a cycle of two
releases per calendar year (one in the spring
and one in the fall) to continue too provide
enhancements.
In
September 2005, at its annual Global Client
Forum, the vendor announced the general availability
of SSA Open Architecture 5.1.
The latest version of SSA Global’s technology
architecture, SSA Open Architecture includes
enhancements to SSA Portal Studio,
SSA Collaboration Services,
and the new Eclipse-based SSA Studio for modeling
and customizations. The latest release features
new unified user management and single sign-on
capabilities, in addition to other administrative
enhancements. SSA Global also designed SSA Open
Architecture, so that customers of its predecessor
product, SSA Technology Architecture 5.0, could
easily upgrade to the new product.
But
the best way to describe SSA Global’s
technological vision is to invoke the idea of
customer-controlled introduction of innovation,
which is a key strategy for allowing customers
to adopt technology at their own pace. If customers
start down the path towards SOA, the vendor
pledges to work with them to find the best course
of action based on their set of implemented
solutions. It is not a matter of rip-and-replace,
since customers can introduce components to
work in their existing systems as they choose.
While most articles in the press focus mainly
on new SOA applications, most of what customers
will likely be investing in is the technology
that will enable their current solutions to
participate in SOA scenarios. This path should
provide the best ROI in the short term and the
best TCO in the long term.
Along
these lines, at the end of March 2006, SSA Global
announced the general availability of the next
release of SSA ERPLN,
a significant upgrade to its flagship ERP solution
for discrete hybrid manufacturers. The new release
provides customers with enhanced capabilities
in logistics, finance, projects, planning, sales,
purchase, and service, and is a key milestone
in SSA Global’s strategy to help companies
better understand and meet actual customer demand
by leveraging an agile, standards-based IT infrastructure.
It is based on the above-depicted technology
architecture, which provides a Web-based UI,
eases the transition to SOA, and enables standards-based
cross application integration. The new release
embeds specific solution templates for its primary
target industries: hi-tech and electronics,
and industrial machinery and equipment. It also
extends the global reach of SSA ERPLN
(with new embedded localizations for southern
European countries and Japan), and in addition
to a range of other capabilities, adds an intuitive
interactive graphical planning board to simplify
the workload for planners.
New
Vendor Acquisition Strategies in the Enterprise
Applications Field
P.J.
Jakovljevic
- April 26, 2006
Analysis
of SSA Global’s Latest Acquisitions
Although
its consolidation appetite is not diminishing
by any means, SSA
Global seems to be showing signs
of more deliberation and even restraint, rather
than jumping the gun to indiscriminately gain
market share. Once seemingly insatiable, SSA
Global now admits that growth by acquisition
is no longer as straightforward and cheap as
it used to be in the early 2000s, due to the
increased costs of install base acquisition.
Namely, while the vendor has paid on average
$37,000 (USD) per customer for its 13,000 acquired
customers, recently Oracle apparently paid about
$2 million for each acquired Retek
customer. Thus, while acquisitions at the right
price will continue, SSA Global is shifting
its focus towards providing extended solutions
rather than acquiring peer enterprise resource
planning (ERP) products.
This
is Part Three of the six-part series The
Enterprise Applications “Arms Race”
To Be Number Three.
This
article continues a comparative analysis of
SSA Global and Infor,
two contenders in the fierce ongoing competition
to be number three (after SAP
and Oracle)
in the world of ERP vendors. See The
Enterprise Applications “Arms Race”
To Be Number Three for background information
and a discussion of vendor similarities, along
with Contributing
to the Rejuvenation of Legacy Systems in the
Enterprise Resource Planning Field.
The other leading contender is Lawson
Software. For a detailed discussion
of Lawson, see ‘New’
Lawson Software's Transatlantic Extended Enterprise
Resource Planning Intentions.
By
its own admission, until 2003, SSA Global was
merely a collection of ERP products, with a
desire to consolidate. At that time, its only
established ERP product extensions were the
embedded Cognos
business intelligence (BI) nuggets,
the acquired Warehouse BOSS solution, and a
collection of disjointed third-party products
(such as Applix for customer relationship
management [CRM], Logility
for supply chain planning [SCP], and
Digital Union/Verticalnet for
sourcing and procurement). Acquisitions were
focused on ERP as well as on the associated
research and development (R&D)
investment. This state of affairs is in contrast
to today’s nearly complete SSA Global
solution footprint and delivery of converged
solutions having predictable and published product
roadmaps. Also, the acquisitions have become
rather more strategic, bundled as they are with
balanced development investment, and deliveries
on promises of continued support.
Although
many might still consider SSA Global’s
acquisitions to be opportunistic, the vendor
has long instituted a so-called “4M approach”
underlying the evaluation of acquisition candidates:
-
Motivation—is the candidate motivated?
-
Money—will there be sufficient payback?
- Method—does
the candidate have the right people?
- Match—does
the acquisition fit SSA Global’s “big
picture”?
The
vendor’s goal is to ensure that it keeps
customers for life. In order to do that, it
must preserve the customers’ investments
while continuing to deliver a long-term product
strategy of convergence, modernization, and
vertical focus, all in a predictable and incremental
manner. The short-term strategy, on the other
hand, is to enhance the value of current applications
in delivering the functionality (with a consistent
tempo of releases) that customers have been
asking for, by delivering integration to extension
products like CRM and supply chain management
(SCM), and by delivering first-rate support.
SSA
Global’ s three most recent acquisitions
in particular, E.piphany, Boniva
Software, and Provia
Software, may indicate a new phase
in the vendor’s acquisition strategy and
development cycle.
Epiphany—A
Good Strategic Fit
In
the fall of 2005, SSA Global completed the acquisition
of E.piphany, Inc. (also known
as Epiphany), an innovative but financially
long-struggling global CRM solutions provider.
As a result of the merger, Epiphany now operates
as a wholly owned strategic CRM division of
SSA Global; shares of Epiphany common stock
have been delisted from NASDAQ, and deregistered
with the Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC).
Unlike
many earlier SSA Global acquisitions, Epiphany
certainly cannot be categorized as providing
an outdated product. In fact, the embattled
CRM vendor, which now prefers to drop the dot
from its official name, was famed for trying
to put the e (the electronic business moniker)
into CRM, and was a big name during the dot-com
era. Its CRM analytics were (and arguably still
are) an important part of e-commerce and e-business
development. To a certain degree, it succeeded
in building a business on applications related
to marketing automation, call center management,
real-time customer analytics, and real-time
interaction. These applications (the Interaction
Advisor, Insight Advisor, and Lead
Advisor modules) peaked at $125 million
(USD) in annual revenues in 2001, with Vodafone,
Nestle, Gap Inc.,
Citibank, Virgin Holidays,
HBOS, and Barclays
all signing up as users. However, revenues have
since fallen sharply, closer to the $70 million
(USD) mark.
Epiphany's
products have been widely implemented among
business-to-consumer (B2C) companies
that have large numbers of direct customers,
such as wireless carriers, travel and transportation
services, banks and other financial services
firms, telecommunications, utilities, and retailers.
The catch with these customers, however, is
that they tend to spread their applications
portfolios over multiple providers, making Epiphany’s
revenues much less impressive than its customer
list. In fact, Epiphany has never shown a profit
in any fiscal year since it went public in 1999.
Thus, in August 2005, after 7 years of consecutive
losses, including a whopping $2.6 billion (USD)
hit in 2001, the innovative CRM provider fell
into the arms of SSA Global, for a quite surprising
$329 million (USD) in stock. This was all the
more surprising given that the company had revenues
of about $75 million (USD) and losses of $16
million (USD) in the previous 12 months (although
a significant cash position of about $160 million
[USD] would have been a good rationalization
for SSA Global).
In
justifying the merger, the two parties cited
two major synergies between them. First of all,
out of 450 Epiphany customers, there was reportedly
a significant 20 percent of shared customers
in the manufacturing, finance, and services
industries, with certain cross-selling opportunities
owing to the complementary nature of the products.
Epiphany filled a major gap in the SSA portfolio,
with respect to inbound and outbound marketing
automation and analytics (see Why
Are CRM and Analytics Intrinsically Connected?),
sales force automation (SFA), online
solutions, and e-commerce. Some marketing automation
features are certainly top-notch, such as collaborative
filtering (identifying cross-selling campaign
opportunities based on past purchases), real-time
data mining and decision-making (using static
and dynamic customer attributes while the customer
is browsing online), and predictive analytics
capabilities (see Predictive
Analytics; the Future of Business Intelligence).
Although SSA Global had some CRM capabilities
with Baan (via the acquisition
of Aurum and subsequent in-house
developments), these were inconsistent and lacked
sophistication, so that the customer demand
and mind share for the SSA CRM suite have always
been very low. On the other hand, SSA
CRM’s native strengths lie in
sales configuration, order management, and field
service functionality, which are not areas that
Epiphany covers. Once the integration is complete
(some time in 2007 at the earliest), the SSA
CRM offering should be more well-rounded and
appealing than current native offerings for
users of Baan or the Applix add-on on the business
planning and control (BPCS) side.
However,
concern remains that the two companies have
thus far not had much of a common market focus.
Namely, while SSA Global is oriented toward
business-to-business (B2B) applications
(primarily in the realm of manufacturing), Epiphany
has largely focused on the aforementioned B2C
markets in service industries. These install
bases naturally have separate functional and
support requirements, and only time will tell
where additional outlets will arise once the
immediate cross-selling opportunities are mined.
SSA Global contends that manufacturers too should
be interested in reaching customers directly
via marketing campaigns (with the help of analytics),
as shown by recent success of marketing automation
specialists such as Unica
and SAS
(see Should
Uniqueness Vouch For Marketing Automation Niche
Players?). Also, since SSA Global had
a considerable business in service industries
even without Epiphany (for example, with KPN
as a customer), there may actually be more of
a common market focus than might appear at first
glance. With Epiphany, 37 percent of the installed
base is now in the services sector; conversely,
a significant percentage of Epiphany’s
customer base was in the manufacturing sector.
But
the second synergy—shared adoption of
technology based on open standards and service-oriented
architecture (SOA)—might be even
more compelling. Namely, while Epiphany has
long leveraged J2EE- and SOA-based
technologies to rewrite its products, SSA
Open Architecture explored in Part
Two of this series remains in part a statement
of direction, since many of its products will
need much retooling to conform to the SOA vision
(although fewer will need retooling as of the
third release of the product in the spring of
2006).
The
vendor will need developers experienced in these
technologies, and by buying Epiphany, it has
acquired a development organization which is
already at the place SSA Global is aiming for.
Apparently, the former Epiphany Customer
Relationship Backbone (CRB)
platform has already been rolled into SSA Open
Architecture (6.0, the first release where CRB
and Open Architecture converge, is due in the
spring of 2006), and the SSA SCM team has been
delivering new warehousing management capabilities
while leveraging the savvy of its CRM colleagues.
In
summary, existing Epiphany customers will breathe
a sigh of relief owing to the strength of a
global company behind the CRM products; this
assures financial viability and continued R&D.
Indeed, CRM is a strategic area of investment
for SSA Global, and the Epiphany’s team
in San Mateo, California (US) has been supplemented
by engineers in India, the Netherlands, Dallas
(US), and Toronto (Canada). As they have done
many times before, SSA Global will commit to
continued support for all CRM products. On the
other hand, existing SSA Global customers will
eventually be exposed to a more complete sales
force automation (SFA) and call center
solution that enables sales (and service of
customers) across multiple channels and lines
of business (LOBs). Some customers may benefit
from a comprehensive marketing automation solution
both for B2C and B2B environments, but all solutions
will be under a sole SSA CRM
brand which includes all current capabilities
on a modern J2EE platform, both for CRM solutions
and all future development activity.
The
go-to-market CRM strategy for SSA Global consists
of maintaining and growing business in B2C verticals,
where it plans to maintain a distinct sales
structure to focus on traditional Epiphany market
segments (such as the financial services and
telecommunications sectors). Also, the vendor
will try to widen cross-selling opportunities
in its installed base by leveraging existing
SSA Global sales teams and specific offerings
targeted at the mid-market. The idea is also
to expand sales into eastern Europe, Latin America,
and the Asian Pacific (APAC), by leveraging
a global sales organization and providing tier
one language support. SSA Global will also try
to leverage strategic alliances in some sectors,
for example, with IBM (for
financial services,, retail, and manufacturing),
with Capgemini (for telecommunications),
and with some resellers such as Harte
Hanks and Merkle (for
the mid-market).
The
combination of Epiphany and SSA Global may be
a win-win situation for both camps of customers,
as evidenced by recent increased momentum in
the market place. Namely, again dispelling the
perception of only milking installed ERP bases,
SSA Global can still boast (although not to
the degree of its supply chain execution
[SCE] team) thirty new CRM customers in
the last twelve months, and fourteen in the
last four months alone (since the acquisition).
Most of these customers came from the vertical
segments, namely, financial services (for example,
Charles Schwab, Banco De Brasil, Credit
Social des Fonctionnaires [CSF], Golden
1 Credit Union, and American
Express Merchant Services); insurance
(Linea Directa, Hartford, Pacificare,
Well Point, and Dahlberg Assurance
Brokers); telecommunications and utilities
(Essent Cablecom, Telefonica, and
Energies De Portugal); retail (Specsavers
Opticals, Family Christian Stores, Bombay Company,
Etam, and Macys.com);
and consumer electronics (Sony Computer
Entertainment and Yodabashi
Camera). Often, these new customers
came at the expense of fierce and respected
competitors such as Siebel/Oracle,
Amdocs, Unica, and Sigma
Dynamics.
The
vendor pledges to continue to make significant
investments in order to expand the SSA CRM solution
suite, via in-house development, acquisition,
and partnering. SSA Marketing Version
7.0, slated for 2006, will lead the
market in terms of breadth and depth of marketing
automation functionality, with its upcoming
enhancements:
-
goal-based arbitration and dynamic arbitration
logic, for maximizing revenue and margins
-
meta-learning, to optimize offer messaging
with real-time analytics
-
sophisticated decision-making strategies by
customer segment (with the ability to test,
learn, and fine-tune these strategies)
-
real-time miner enhancements (the ability
to learn by customer group, channel, or time
period, and to use multiple real-time miners
on a single offer for advanced learning)
-
the ability to use statistical models in real-time
decisions
-
multi-row customer profiles
-
rule sets, global rules, faster rule definition
-
User interface (UI) and reporting interface
enhancements
Furthermore,
all planned SSA Sales, SSA
Service, and SSA Marketing releases
beyond the 7.0 version will deliver new or enhanced
CRM capabilities, including seamless integration
with ERP offerings
The
table below shows the due diligence and go-to-market
homework (with key target segments analysis)
conducted by SSA Global following the Epiphany
acquisition:
Segment
|
Characteristics
|
Key
Business Needs |
Key
Solutions |
Financial
Services
Insurance
and Communications |
-
Millions of named customer relationships
-
High cost of customer acquisition
-
Fragmented customer interactions
- Organic
growth as key to success
|
-
Maximization of average revenue per
user, and products per household
-
Minimization of churn
- Multichannel
customer service
|
- SSA
Inbound Marketing
-
SSA Outbound Marketing
- SSA
Service
|
Retail
Travel
and Leisure
Hospitality
|
-
Millions of customers but limited
number of named customer relationships
-
Low marketing effectiveness
- Targeted
promotions to premium customers
|
- Maximization
of wallet share
- Multichannel
customer service
|
-
SSA Inbound Marketing
- SSA
Outbound Marketing
- SSA
Service
|
Consumer
Electronics
Consumer
Packaged Goods
Food
and Beverage |
- Millions
of customers but limited number of
named customer relationships
- Targeted
promotions by customer segment
- Large
distribution network
|
- Effective
management of dealers and distributors
- Direct
relationship with premium customers
|
-
SSA Service
- SSA
Outbound Marketing
|
General Manufacturing (Discrete and Process)
|
- Business
customers
- Complex
orders
|
-
Zero-error order capture
- Streamlined
opportunity to cash processes
- Optimized
field Service
|
- SSA
Sales
-
SSA Service
- SSA
Outbound Marketing
|
Boniva
While
the Epiphany may partly align with SSA Global's
established business model of mining its installed
customer base by bringing new CRM functionality
(such as marketing analytics and call center
applications), additional install bases, and
particularly a CRM mind share to the SSA Global
portfolio, the August 2005 acquisition of Boniva
Software, Inc., a human capital management
(HCM) start-up, was a pure technology buy,
since there were hardly any current customers
there. Boniva’s J2EE-based strategic talent
management portfolio of e-learning, employee
recruitment, skills management, and performance
management applications has already been integrated
into the SSA HCM solution.
The suite should now enable companies to automate
core processes such as human resources
(HR) administration, benefits, and payroll,
but should also offer capabilities such as self-service,
analytics, and workflow, in order to better
connect managers and employees in real time.
Built on open standards (including J2EE and
extensible markup language [XML]),
SSA HCM can be deployed on multiple platforms,
including the UNIX, iSeries,
and Microsoft Windows operating
systems.
Provia
In early March 2006, SSA Global announced the
acquisition of Provia Software, Inc., a Grand
Rapids, Michigan (US)-based mid-market provider
of order-to-delivery SCE solutions, such as
the ViaWare warehouse management
system (WMS); the FourSite
order management system (OMS) and billing
solution for third-party logistics (3PL) providers;
labor management solutions and yard management
systems (YMS); visibility and analytics
solutions; transportation management systems
(TMS); small parcel shipping (SPS) systems;
radio frequency identification (RFID) systems;
and scheduling solutions, all recently enabled
as Web services, and integrated within the ViaWare
suite (see Provia
Tackles RFID in a Twofold Manner).
Despite
our initial impression that SSA Global was thereby
crowding its SCE solution portfolio, the acquisition
of Provia should provide the vendor with a small-to-medium
market SCE solution which affords a more cost-effective
approach for distribution-intensive companies.
Provia's solution complements SSA Global's existing
supply chain management offerings, which target
larger, high-volume distribution fulfillment
customers, whereas the existing SSA Global
WarehouseBOSS mid-market solution remains
for IBM iSeries customers. By adding Provia,
SSA Global now believes that it can offer SCE
solutions for any company supply chain (no matter
what the size of the company), in many more
vertical industries and geographies.
At
second glance, there might indeed be strong
synergies between SSA Global and Provia. This
is especially true given that many of SSA Global's
customers serve the same industries as Provia
(including 3PL, consumer packaged goods
(CPG), food and beverage, high-tech and
electronics, wholesale, and retail), and also
given that Provia has been integrated with SSA
Global ERP solutions at many customer sites.
The acquisition of Provia’s products should
strengthen the SSA WMS offering and market share
immediately, owing to a focused 3PL sales and
marketing team. Provia has a strong position
in the 3PL market, which represents about half
of its customer base (with such customers as
Menlo, NYK,
and Hanson); SSA Global also
has a strong position in the global 3PL market,
with tier one customers such as UPS,
DHL, FedEx,
and BAX Global). Provia products
will thus address the lower-end 3PL markets
in North and Latin American with a lower TCO
solution, whereas the products that come from
former EXE will address tier
one 3PL and the high-volume warehouse operations
markets globally.
As
expected, there will be a drive towards a common
SCM SOA solution in the long-term. At first
glance, existing SSA WMS customers should expect
to benefit from Provia’s Visibility
and Analytics solutions. Conversely,
Provia’s existing customers may benefit
from SSA SCM solutions, such as Slotting,
Event Management, voice-directed
systems, and TMS.
The
Impact of the 'Assembler Strategy' in the Enterprise
Applications Field
P.J.
Jakovljevic
- April 27, 2006
Genesis
of Infor Process Group
In
evaluating recent acquisitions in the enterprise
resource planning (ERP) field, it will be useful
to describe Infor Process Group’s
vertically-focused “assembler strategy”
(also see Stability
and Functionality for Process and Discrete Manufacturers).
It is interesting to note that the Infor
of today originated with the Infor Process Group;
its very first acquisition was the 2002 Process
Group spin-off from the former SCT Corporation,
which brought Adage ERP and
Fygir SCP process manufacturing
products into the fold (see iProcess.sct
Enters Golden Gate Opportunity). It
is ironic, however, that this very functional
and prosperous “mother” product
portfolio has been left largely unattended by
Infor for some time, owing to a spate of other
acquisitions, especially within the now much
larger discrete manufacturing and wholesale
distribution groups.
This
is Part Four of the six-part series The
Enterprise Applications “Arms Race”
To Be Number Three.
But
any “injustice” in this regard has
seemingly been rectified. For one thing, in
late 2004, Infor acquired IncoDev Software-Entwicklung
GmbH, headquartered in Hamburg (Germany).
Over the past twenty-five years, this company
has provided ERP software to large and midsized
European companies within the chemical, dyes
and paints, life sciences, and food and beverage
industries. Their software has deep a vertical
focus, supporting most requirements of the lot-
and recipe-oriented manufacturing industry,
which, combined with its broad customer and
partner base throughout Europe, was an important
factor in strengthening Infor’s position
within process industries.
The
combination of IncoDev’s ERP capabilities
with Infor’s existing supply chain
planning (SCP) offerings, international
presence, and financial strength, provided additional
benefits to its customers while increasing the
vendor’s competitive advantage. IncoDev’s
ERP solution, rebranded into Infor Blending,
now supports many aspects of financial management,
production planning, and inventory management
for specific process industries, and is certified
for the pharmaceutical industry. The solution
also includes integrated quality management,
a laboratory information management system
(LIMS), and hazardous materials management.
The product serves over 200 large and midsized
customers, and has more than 10,000 users; this
is a result of being marketed directly (in a
big way) in Germany, and through a dedicated
network of solution partners throughout western
Europe.
Consequently,
the Infor Process Group now boasts over 120
employees (with over 80 percent of employees
in the research and development [R&D],
support, and professional services departments)
and over 400 customers (of which 150 are specialty
chemical enterprises, 50 are pharmaceuticals,
and 200 are food and beverage companies). The
group has estimated annual revenues of about
$36 million (USD), with license reevenue amounting
to 27 percent (with an equitable split between
the support and maintenance revenues). Europe
contributes 53 percent of revenues, and North
America contributes the remaining 47 percent.
This
continuation of a series comparing SSA
Global and Infor Process Group,
two contenders in the fierce ongoing competition
to be number three (after SAP
and Oracle)
in the world of ERP vendors, analyzes Infor’s
acquisition of Adage ERP and Fygir SCP from
the former SCT Corporation, and of Datastream
Systems. Later articles will discuss
Infor’s acquisition of Formation
Systems and Geac.
See
The
Enterprise Applications “Arms Race”
To Be Number Three for background information
and a discussion of vendor similarities. For
more information, see Contributing
to the Rejuvenation of Legacy Systems in the
Enterprise Resource Planning Field.
Also see New
Vendor Acquisition Strategies in the Enterprise
Applications Field for a comparable
analysis of SSA Global. The other leading contender
is Lawson
Software. For a detailed discussion
of Lawson, see ‘New’
Lawson Software's Transatlantic Extended Enterprise
Resource Planning Intentions).
In
combination, the two ERP products, Infor
Adage and Infor Blending, feature support
for the resolution of many process manufacturing
“fatal flaws” (see The
Fatal Flaws for Process Manufacturers,
Fatal
Flaws in ERP Software Create Opportunity for
Niche Software in CPG Companies, and
Process
Manufacturing Software: A Primer).
Some key differentiators worth mentioning include
support for variable weight or “catch
weight”; lot traceability to help food
processors trace any portion of each batch or
lot (for purposes of damage control, the US
Department of Agriculture [USDA] requires
food processors to be able to trace any portion
or product of, for example, a processed chicken);
quality management; variable weight-based costing
and pricing throughout the supply chain; regulatory
compliance; and a comprehensive supply chain
management (SCM) solution for process industries.
Challenges
The
vendor does acknowledge some technological and
functional shortcomings, especially with respect
to the Adage product, which still lacks a proper
graphical user interface (GUI). Also,
Adage often needs to interface with strong financial
management products (such as SAP
or PeopleSoft solutions), and
lacks US Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) regulatory compliance for pharmaceutical
companies. For that reason, a helpful target
division of products would involve using Adage
for larger companies in the food and beverage,
and chemical sectors, and Blending for smaller
companies in the pharmaceutical and consumer
products sectors.
In
the short term, which means by the end of 2006
(or even earlier), the products are slated for
user interface (UI) enhancements (in terms
of browser deployment and improved usability
for Infor Adage 5.0), and for
integration with Infor WMS
(i.e., VISUAL WMS) and Infor
Global Financials (for the Infor Blending
5.9 release only)—the latter stemming
from Varial. The idea is to
migrate the Adage 6.0 and Blending 6.0 releases
in 2007 to the adopted Infor client (within
Corestone) and to integrate
them into Infor Global Financials. Also, both
products are to be migrated to n-tier architecture,
with complete encapsulation of business logic
in a manner enabled by service-oriented
architecture (SOA). All these short-term
and midterm functional enhancements have been
driven by user groups, regulatory compliance,
and industry trends.
The
long-term roadmap, for 2008 and later (and for
both product releases 7.0 and later), is to
eventually converge the products into an Infor
Process ERP product (in a way that is somewhat
similar to SSA Global’s current forays),
using Corestone architecture components, with
core process industries applications such as
process manufacturing, order management, and
costing. By then, the product will also be integrated
with Infor Global Financials, Infor WMS, Infor
CRM (coming from SyteLine),
and Infor SCM.
Datastream
Acquisition
Related
to the process group, which has many asset-intensive
customers (although the Infor Distribution
Group may also have many customers
with interests in fleet tracking and management),
is the acquisition of Datastream Systems
in early 2006. The merging parties are working
to close this transaction as soon as reasonably
possible, and it is expected to be completed
in the second calendar quarter of 2006. Datastream,
founded in 1986, provides asset performance
management software and services to more than
6,700 enterprises (in more than 140 countries),
including more than 60 percent of the Fortune
500. Its solutions combine enterprise asset
management (EAM) functionality with advanced
analytics, to deliver a platform for optimizing
enterprise asset performance.
The
flagship product, Datastream 7i,
delivers an asset performance management infrastructure
combining an advanced SOA (which is in tune
with the upcoming Infor Corestone platform),
with broad enterprise asset management (EAM)
functionality, integrated procurement, analytics,
and multi-site capability. By using these solutions,
customers in sectors such as manufacturing,
hospitality, health care, transportation, telecom,
facilities management, and government can maintain
and manage capital assets. These assets might
include manufacturing equipment, vehicle fleets
(including mobile assets like forklifts or automated
guided vehicles [AGV]), and buildings.
These solutions also allow customers to create
analyses and forecasts so that they can take
action to improve future performance. The Web-based
product, which is strong in capabilities such
as asset tracking; work order management; scheduling;
preventive maintenance; parts inventory; and
maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO)
procurement capabilities, allows users to view
maintenance activities across multiple plants.
There is also a separate e-procurement package
(Datastream 7i Buy), which
is integrated with Datastream 7i to provide
automatic requisitioning of parts as reserved
by maintenance orders, with access to the catalogs
of hundreds of MRO suppliers, along with support
for internal catalogs.
Furthermore,
a calibration module manages tools and equipment,
and an e-records and e-signature module enables
record keeping for compliance with such regulations
as the well-known US Food and Drug Administration
Code of Federal Regulations (FDA CFR) Title
21 Part 11. The analytics module provides calculation,
contextualization, correlation, connectivity,
and visualization tools, for a better understanding
of the trends and root causes of equipment performance
and reliability (thus enabling visibility and
better decision making by pushing data to dashboards,
palmtop computers, web-browsers, and pagers).
These EAM and manufacturing intelligence capabilities
(see Plant
Intelligence as Glue for Dispersed Data?),
while not yet being at the level of SAP, especially
following SAP’s recent acquisition of
Lighthammer (see Has
SAP Nailed Plant Level Leadership with Lighthammer?),
certainly raise the bar for Infor in comparison
to the capabilities of SSA Global, Intentia,
IFS,
Oracle, IBS,
Ross
Systems/CDC Software, Epicor
Software, QAD,
Glovia,
and so on.
Acquisitions
Fuel Vendor Growth in the Enterprise Applications
Field
P.J.
Jakovljevic
- May 1, 2006
More
Acquisitions
Both
SSA
Global and Infor
continue to grow through the acquisition of
companies that extend the scope of their offerings.
New
Vendor Acquisition Strategies in the Enterprise
Applications Field and The
Impact of the “Assembler Strategy”
in the Enterprise Applications Field
began an examination of these acquisitions.
We continue by examining Infor’s acquisition
of Formation
Systems and Geac.
This
is Part Five of the six-part series The
Enterprise Applications “Arms Race”
To Be Number Three. Parts One to Four were
published April 24 to April 27.
This
is part of a comparative analysis of SSA Global
and Infor, two contenders in the fierce ongoing
competition to be number three (after SAP
and Oracle)
in the world of enterprise resource planning
(ERP) vendors. See The
Enterprise Applications “Arms Race”
To Be Number Three for background information
and a discussion of vendor similarities. Also
see Contributing
to the Rejuvenation of Legacy Systems in the
Enterprise Resource Planning Field.
The other leading contender is Lawson
Software. For a detailed discussion
of Lawson, see 'New'
Lawson Software's Transatlantic Extended Enterprise
Resource Planning Intentions.
Infor
Acquires Formation Systems
Infor
cites continued organic growth, license revenue
from new customers, and install base cross-selling
and up-selling as key growth drivers for the
group. The company is also betting on expansion
outside the North America and Germany strongholds,
into the UK and other key markets such as the
Asian Pacific region and China. A potentially
expanded footprint in the realms of product
lifecycle management (PLM) or enterprise
asset management (EAM) should also contribute
to the top line. To that end, in August 2005,
Infor announced that it had acquired Formation
Systems, a privately-held provider of PLM solutions
exclusively for process manufacturing companies.
This acquisition further strengthens Infor’s
broad product portfolio for process industries.
Formation Systems has since joined the Infor
Process Manufacturing Group, which
is led by Hermann Stehlik (vice president
[VP] and general manager [GM]), and
which continues to operate in Southborough,
Massachusetts (US).
As
a leading provider of PLM solutions for the
food and beverage, home and personal care, and
specialty chemical industries, Formation Systems
should significantly enhance Infor’s capability
to integrate, streamline, and manage the entire
process of product development. For ten years,
the company has provided PLM software solutions
to high-profile process manufacturers, and has
built a highly skilled and dedicated workforce
having a deep knowledge of PLM best practices
in the vertical markets they serve. Thus, the
acquisition of Formation Systems supports Infor’s
vertical strategy, and should establish the
combined company as a global leader in providing
solutions with an integrated PLM system to selected
process manufacturing industries.
For
a more detailed discussion of process manufacturing
ERP, see Preparing
for Product Development in Process Manufacturing.
Many
regulatory bodies have renewed their focus on
product compliance, and the Formation Systems
acquisition confirms the trend towards PLM functionality
becoming an essential element of an enterprise
application portfolio. It also confirms that
industry-specific functionality is increasingly
critical to buyers of enterprise applications.
Naturally, regulatory requirements vary according
to the industry, as do many other PLM requirements
(for more information see PLM
is an Industry Affair—Or Is It?).
While
product design rules engines may eventually
be retrofitted to apply across several vertical
industries, the tricky makeup of recipes/formulae
and security mandates will require a deep understanding
of process manufacturing requirements. Consequently,
defining and formulating recipe-based products
requires industry-tailored solutions to adequately
allow product development. The Optiva
product suite from Formation Systems features
strong formula management capabilities which
might give Infor a differentiating value proposition
when selling to prospective customers in process
manufacturing, as well as the ability to up-sell
and cross-sell to a larger installed customer
base. Infor and Formation Systems customers
may mutually benefit by gaining the opportunity
to standardize on a single broad process solution
for all their process ERP, supply chain
planning (SCP), supply chain execution
(SCE), corporate performance management
(CPM), and PLM needs.
The
centerpiece of the suite is Optiva Workbench,
which accelerates product development by supporting
design collaboration with suppliers on formulas
and specifications, as well as by providing
the visibility needed for fully using existing
information to avoid unnecessarily “reinventing
the wheel.” Other modules in the Optiva
product suite, such as Optimization
(for constraint-based formulating),
Requirements Management, and Specifications
Management, are designed to capitalize
on the data management features of Workbench
(see Formation
Systems Pioneers Product Design Collaboration
For The Process Industries). Also widely
deployed are integrated packaging management
(from the primary pack to the pallet), integrated
label content management, product performance,
safety and efficiency testing, material safety
data sheets (MSDS) and hazard label generation,
nutritional and nonconformance analysis modeling
integrating laboratory information management
systems (LIMS) assay results, integrated stage
gate, and portfolio management. Capabilities
such as parametric searches, visual comparisons,
material usage restrictions, best practices
feedback, and role-based modeling are used from
concept to launch.
In
its entirety, the Optiva suite speeds up the
product development lifecycle by easing collaboration,
facilitating access to supply information, and
managing product testing and the other tasks
that precede a commercial release. Combining
process PLM with process ERP can produce a unified
sample management solution that allows product
samples to be shipped in the same manner as
commercialized products. Furthermore, combining
process PLM with process-oriented supply chain
solutions can provide unique recipe optimization
capabilities that evaluate current inventory
to develop least-cost or best-fit formulations,
thereby accelerating the new product introduction
(NPI) process and achieving globally compliant
products with lower development costs and a
shorter time to world markets. It is thus no
small wonder that Coca-Cola Co.,
Akzo Nobel, Gillette
Co., GE Plastics,
Campbell Soups, and over forty
other process manufacturing clients (several
of them are also Infor customers) are on the
vendor’s roster of high-profile process
manufacturing clients.
The
downside, however, is that Optiva, despite deep
and broad collaborative product data management
(PDM) functionality, is not yet a full-fledged
PLM suite, since it is missing important pieces
like strategic sourcing, product configuration,
portfolio management, shop floor integration,
and regulatory compliance for multiple industries
(both discrete and process). For more information
on what constitutes a full-fledged PLM system,
see Critical
Components of an E-PLM System and The
Many Faces of PLM.
In
fairness, Optiva integrates sourcing and extends
traditional strategic sourcing, to meet process
industries’ specific requirements and
to drive significant material cost and cost
avoidance savings. Strategic sourcing applications
are nonetheless limited to total spend analysis,
and lack pervasive content management. With
Optiva, companies like RPM
have a purchasing action component that not
only analyzes total spend across more than twwenty
companies having multiple ERP packages, but
also more accurately projects cost, time, and
risks involved in material and vendor rationalization.
This automated business process thus helps refine
the business case, since once a project is approved
and resources are apportioned, executive management
has insight into trade-off decisions and achieved
cost savings.
This
business process helps the diverse teams managing
materials, formulas, packaging, and vendors
to better rationalize their charges. By using
the integrated design and compliance applications,
more projects should be completed, and more
savings should be delivered. Also, since all
product development teams have insight into
material, vendor, formula, and packaging status,
redundant materials or rationalized materials
are not re-introduced, and cost savings are
sustained. Additionally, as part of new material
introduction, the sourcing team should have
visibility the instant a new experimental material
is entered; alternate approved materials or
vendors can then proactively be suggested.
Many
companies have cross-functional teams which
continually assess material value-add and regulatory
risk. In an effort to minimize compliance risks,
one customer reportedly turned off over 48 percent
of its materials, and achieved significant cost
savings. As companies buy, sell, close, or reconfigure
plants, they need strategic sourcing suggestions.
To that end, Optiva plays a critical role in
requalifying, reformulating, and repackaging,
in order to ensure regulatory, cost, and quality
compliance. Companies are also finding that
they are making sourcing decisions based on
incomplete information, although the item and
vendor item module in traditional ERP systems
is well-suited for nascent regulatory requirements.
A hypothetical scenario provides a good demonstration
of the utility of this kind of module: Once
an ERP item (a vitamin, for example) is entered
and certified, alternate vendors may be sourced
from, and entered as vendor-specific items,
with differences in cost also entered. If a
new allergen law (let’s say) is enacted,
it might suddenly be relevant that the first
vendor uses peanut oil as a processing aid.
But if one or more of the vendors uses vegetable
oil as a processing aid instead, then a critical
decision needs to be made.
Since
sourcing is a numbers-oriented game, factors
such as compliance risks and product quality
need to be included. Several customers have
integrated such sourcing metrics into product
development, in order to ensure that products
require less post-launch effort when developing
alternate sources for single-sourced vendors,
or when finding lower cost providers. These
customers will focus R&D efforts on having
fewer single-source materials, or will calculate
the percentage of materials coming from preferred
vendors. Integration of Optiva with ERP systems
allows product development to leverage high
volume (and often in-stock) materials. Rather
than simply selecting an approved material,
using these higher volume or in-stock materials
means that managers can avoid generating new
purchase orders, as well as the carrying costs
of partial drums (or other bulk packages). If
the material has shelf life issues, material
write-off can be avoided too. Rather than needlessly
duplicating existing strategic sourcing capabilities,
Optiva has extended these capabilities to drive
cost reduction and cost avoidance.
Optiva
can also send recipes compliant with Instrumentation,
Systems, and Automation Society (ISA) standard
S88 to manufacturing execution systems (MES)
used at multiple customer sites. Using integrated
business process management (BPM) capability,
the system can integrate with one or more ERP
and MES systems, which should eliminate time
and cost wastage, while optimizing cost performance
and compliance. As these platforms are approved
for multiple plants and markets, product platforms
that are truly global can be relatively quickly
adapted to company specificities, and companies
can minimize time to global rollout.
With
every new release, Optiva’s portfolio
management capabilities are enhanced. Most customers
are using rule-based scoring and prioritization,
risk rating, and readiness rankings, which are
rolled up with each activity to provide near
real-time visibility in Web-based dashboards.
Being focused on process manufacturing, Optiva
has developed a process-focused product configuration
capability which is based on application platforms.
Common uses include color matching, flavoring,
or scenting of application platforms. Rather
than maintaining a separate formula and packaging
bill of material (BOM) for every possible
combination, customers are building product
platforms which are certified for permissible
options (by plant, market, brand, use and user,
and sometimes customers). This allows new requirements
to be matched to the option, and also allows
the most cost-effective and compliant intermediate
material to be identified. A unique formula
and package can be derived and validated for
compliance.
Still,
this laser-sharp focus is likely the reason
why SSA Global was not more aggressively involved
in the bidding for Formation Systems, although
it would come as no surprise to learn that it
was involved in preliminary (at least) merger
discussions. Again, lately SSA Global has been
considering only the acquisitions that would
help in a “bigger picture” manner.
In a way which is analogous to its CRM case,
the vendor has a decent PDM solution stemming
from Baan, but admits that the product’s
low brand recognition has limited it to only
the existing install base (and even there it
has to contend with best-of-breed PLM products).
Conversely, as mentioned earlier, the vendor
has become a feared competitor in the supply
chain execution (SCE) space, given the
successful assimilation of once well-known products
such as EXE or CAPS
(indications are that the license revenues from
these products have quadrupled under SSA Global,
compared to their status under their formerly
independent and struggling vendors). Thus, if
and when the time comes, SSA Global will most
likely acquire a well-rounded and well-known
PLM product (or a strategic sourcing and supply
chain planning [SCP] product), although
it recognizes that specialty process PLM vendors
such as Selerant,
Prodika,
Sequencia, and IMS
would be a good fit for its process-manufacturing-oriented
products, which stem from both BPCS and the
former Marcam’s Protean
and PRISM products (see The
Name and Ownership Change Roulette Wheel for
Marcam Stops at SSA Global). For the
same reason, Infor will also likely remain in
the hunt for more solutions, in order to round
out its PLM, EAM, and product configurator capabilities.
The
Optiva strategy is to develop tier one applications
in modeling, vendor collaboration, compliance,
and portfolio management, and also to increase
its open integration capabilities. This will
likely be used to integrate withapplications
from Infor or other vendors; as these tier one
capabilities are developed, Infor pledges to
develop best practices offerings that can be
deployed by smaller process manufacturing customers.
Deconstructing
Geac
This
brings us to Infor’s latest acquisition,
which again highlights a differing strategy
compared to SSA Global. In early November 2005,
Infor’s parent company, Golden
Gate Capital (a San Francisco, California
[US]-based private equity firm focused on investing
in high-growth businesses in change-intensive
industries), and Canadian company Geac
Computer Corporation Limited (TSX:
GAC and NASDAQ: GEAC) reached a firm agreement
that Golden Gate Capital would acquire Geac
in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately
$1 billion (USD), which represented a 27 percent
premium over the trading price at the time.
Geac thereby capitalized on its diverse industry-specific
focus and expertise in the manufacturing, government,
financial services, health care, and retail
sectors. The company claims that its vertical
market success will be enhanced by the current
initiatives and momentum within the Golden Gate
portfolio.
With
more than $2.5 billion (USD) under management,
the technology businesses acquired by Golden
Gate are carefully selected based on their growth
potential and ability to deliver vertically-specific
enterprise software offerings and deep market
expertise. Golden Gate views Geac as a natural
addition to a successful strategy of looking
at acquisitions with a different perspective
compared to most private equity firms. Namely,
as witnessed with Infor, the parent firm seeks
to integrate companies that can grow significantly
faster together than they could on their own.
This strategy has been implemented successfully
with respect to Concerto/Aspect Software,
AttachmateWRQ, Inovis,
and Infor; the firm pledges to aggressively
support the Geac business units with its “assembler”
acquisition strategy. Consequently, upon completion
of the acquisition, Geac will be reorganized
into two separate Golden Gate Capital portfolio
companies.
As
part of the reorganization, Infor will acquire
Geac’s ERP software products, including
System21, RunTime,
Ratioplan, StreamLine,
and Management Data; the employees
who support them will move to Infor. By bringing
together the resources, talent, and expertise
of Geac and Infor, customers should benefit
from the combined entity’s solutions and
services. On one hand, Infor customers will
have access to additional domain expertise,
while on the other hand, Geac’s ERP customers
should benefit from increased product diversity,
additional product investments, and improved
global reach. In addition to the immediate product
and service portfolio enhancements, customers
should also benefit from Infor’s strong
financial backing and proven deep focus on developing
enterprise solutions for manufacturers and distributors.
Geac’s
financial applications and industry-specific
applications (ISA) will become two business
groups under a newly formed company, which will
be launched under the name Extensity
immediately upon finalization of the transaction.
In addition, Geac’s general and administrative
(G&A) staff, including the finance and accounting,
legal, information technology (IT),
and human resources (HR) teams, will provide
a global G&A infrastructure for Extensity.
The newly formed financial applications business
unit under Extensity will include the products
and employees currently involved with Geac’s
Enterprise Server, Anael,
Expense Management, and MPC
products. This business unit will target the
integrated financial applications software market;
the combination of these solutions will become
the foundation of a complete offering of financial
performance management applications. Geac’s
ISA businesses (commercial systems division,
libraries, local government, public safety,
and restaurants) will form a second business
unit under Extensity, and will continue to target
their current industries; each ISA business
will remain independent from the others, similar
to the structure existing within Geac today.
Ken Walters, president of Infor, has been named
chief executive officer (CEO) of Extensity.
He has been with Infor through all eighteen
acquisitions, and will now leverage his successes
there to guide Extensity.
Over
the years, Geac has grown considerably via acquisitions,
thereby garnering a broad portfolio of diverse
applications, including its SmartStream
financials system (which it picked up in 1996
from Dun & Bradstreet),
and its System21 ERP suite, a well-regarded
(at the time) process industry system, which
Geac picked up in its acquisition of JBA
International in 1999. More recent
deals include the company's $52 million (USD)
acquisition of business intelligence
(BI) and CPM provider Comshare
in August 2003, and the $47 million (USD) purchase
in September 2002 of former Extensity (whose
name will be used for Geac under Golden Gate),
which had one million seats worldwide for its
automated employee-based finance processes such
as time and expense (T&E) management.
Previous acquisitions include Interalty;
the real estate unit of GTE Enterprise
Initiatives; the assets of Princeton
Network Systems; Management Data; the
midrange software business of EBC Informatique;
and many more (see Geac
Gets Its Commonsense Share Of Consolidation,
With Revolving Door CEOs No Less).
Geac
Background
Although
since 1990 Geac has acquired over 50 companies
(and since 1999 spent over $550 million on acquisitions),
it failed to add significant value and synergy
to its highly unrelated acquisitions. To make
things worse, the market prices for some coveted
but unfulfilled recent transactions (which Geac
attempted to conduct in a bid to revive its
business) have been very high, and it has been
difficult to find accretive targets.
Size
certainly matters in the IT industry, and those
which are not big enough (or not focused enough)
can hardly hope for new big deals. Thus, these
vendors will not be able to finance further
business development, which in turn will result
in a rapid downward spiral. Geac was such a
case; following a losing bid for its acquisition
target MAPICS early in 2005
(ironically to none other than to its eventual
suitor Infor/Golden Gate), it found itself facing
the future as acquisition prey rather than acquisition
hunter. Geac CEO Charles Jones simply had to
concede that he could no longer find a catalyst
acquisition capable of turning around declining
revenues and profitability. Some products like
System21’s Aurora ERP
product (see Geac
Hopes To See System21 Shine Again Like 'Aurora')
and Geac/Comshare’s MPC CPM product have
apparently been going down well with users,
but their impact is not enough to make the difference
with respect to the entire awkward congregation
of unrelated businesses and products.
Geac
became far more attractive as a takeover proposition
after it began to turn the company's dwindling
sales and spiraling losses into flat (at least)
revenues and growing profits (it also maintained
a hefty cash position). With a customer base
of 18,000, including half of the Fortune 100,
Geac would have been a tempting prospect for
serial acquirers like SSA Global or CDC
Software, the China-based enterprise
application vendor which would have used Geac
as a beachhead to move beyond its Asia-Pacific
stronghold. Geac might even have been an attractive
target for Intentia for several
reasons: it has a substantial installed base
in North America, which Intentia needs (even
with the impending Lawson merger); and a good
part of Geac’s installed base runs the
IBM
iSeries, which matches Intentia's installed
base. Also, Geac's System21 installed base is
largely in the food and beverage and apparel
industries, which matches two key verticals
targeted by Intentia. And of course, the Geac
connection with Intentia's new leader, Bertrand
Sciard, could only be helpful (although the
same would hold for some SSA Global executives).
Geac
would even have been remotely attractive to
Microsoft
and Oracle, which have both been building their
applications divisions; or to SAP, which always
wants to add even more weight to its mid-market
presence, so as to keep the heat on and to maintain
a distance from a growing Oracle and its PeopleSoft/J.D.
Edwards units. Finally, even if unwanted
by the enterprise applications vendors, Geac
would have been of interest to members of the
BI society, such as Cognos,
Business
Objects, MicroStrategy,
or Hyperion,
since they would have liked the composition
of Geac's customer base as well as its increasing
recent focus on software for the chief financial
officer (CFO) (see Business
Intelligence Vendors).
Why
Infor?
But
while all the above publicly traded companies
had an advantage in terms of visibility and
public fundraising mechanisms, Infor’s
private nature, along with the backing of a
wealthy parent, came in handy. SSA Global and
others might have wished to cherry-pick only
a few good Geac ERP products, instead of buying
the entire company with all its “baggage”
(a low ratio of license revenue to service and
maintenance revenues, several legacy-status
products in unrelated industries, and so on)
and thus affecting future earnings per share
or similar financial metrics for its investors.
Again, it is commendable that SSA Global exercised
restraint and forethought in this respect, given
that only a few years ago the vendor would not
have thought twice before jumping at the market
share growth opportunity (and also given its
2003 acquisition of mainframe-based cash-cow
financial management product Elevon,
which now sticks out like a sore thumb within
the vendor’s aforementioned service-oriented
architecture [SOA] forays).
Thus,
Golden Gate (and indirectly Infor), not having
the burden of quarterly reporting, has been
able to leverage returns to its equity investors
by using debt financing for a portion of the
purchase. With about $440 million (USD) in revenues,
$70 million (USD) in profits, $100 million (USD)
in generated cash, and $186 million (USD) in
cash on Geac’s current balance sheet,
this appears to be a good deal.
Moreover,
Infor will now add the IBM iSeries-based System21
to its growing discrete manufacturing ERP (and
associated software) portfolio, along with its
much-vaunted Geac Style version,
mostly aimed at the textile sector and fashion
or apparel industries. This shows Infor’s
continued assembler focus, and its recognition
of another vertical segment opportunity; if
Infor had wanted mere market share growth, it
could have gone for the whole Geac package,
albeit with consequent diluted focus. Conversely
(similarly to the Adage and
Blending ERP combinations with
Optiva PLM in the process group), the addition
of System21 as its ERP provider and RunTime
as its PLM offering (RunTime was formerly QuestPLM,
which former JBA International acquired prior
to being acquired itself by Geac) should provide
Infor with a strong offering in apparel manufacturing.
With the end of apparel import quotas, this
sector is growing rapidly in India and the Far
East, while the passage of the Central America
Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) promises to
bring additional activity into Central America
as well. Infor thereby joins SAP, Intentia (see
SAP
Learns The Ropes Of Fashion/Outfitting
and Intentia:
Stepping Out With Fashion and Style),
3i-Infotech,
Jesta
IS, STYLEman, New
Generation Computing, Gerber,
and several other niche players in attending
to this quite underserved and less contested
(yet seemingly lucrative) market segment.
System21,
wiith some 2,000 customers (primarily in the
UK), has lately experienced limited functional
extensions and enhancements under Geac (most
prominently with the new Web-enabled user
interface [UI]). This is fertile ground
for Infor, which will gains about $120 million
in additional revenue, become one of the largest
iSeries ERP suppliers, and also have the largest
installed mid-market base in the UK. The deal
for the product, as with its other siblings
within the Infor discrete manufacturing group
(VISUAL, SyteLine,
and so on) implies absolutely no sun-setting
of existing systems, but rather the promise
of support and advancement incrementally, at
any time, with new technology modules such as
the warehouse management system (WMS)
and SCP elements being reversed into the existing
systems.
Furthermore,
process industry users of System21 will have
access to Formation’s Optiva PLM system,
whereas automotive users will have access to
SupplyWeb, if they so desire.
RunTime, a solution focused on rapid design-to-production
of clothing, will obtain additional channels
in Asia and Latin America. This PDM product
may gain the expertise necessary for sales to
seating and interior suppliers in the automotive
industry, which is another stronghold of Infor.
Certainly,
the downside is a somewhat dubious future for
Geac’s StreamLine, Ratioplan, and Management
Data suites, which, as niche products, will
likely have backburner status within the Corestone
migration. The same holds true for about 600
System21 Aurora customers within the process
industries; these customers will be supported
in the future, but the bulk of focused process
manufacturing R&D will certainly be within
the native Infor Process Group, to which this
product is not going to belong (it has been
added to the discrete manufacturing group).
Also, there have been different code bases within
System21 (for example, Geac Style
versus Geac Beverage) for different
industries, which was an additional acquisition
deterrent for the likes of SSA Global.
But
this is really the best that anyone could have
done with Geac’s unfocused business in
the first place. Golden Gate has shown shrewdness
in not mixing apples with oranges (by not mixing,
for example, Infor’s manufacturing and
distribution businesses with solutions to libraries,
realtors, and many other esoteric vertical areas
for which Golden Gate will likely find other
appropriate “assembler” portfolios).
The new company will adopt a similar strategy
to Infor’s, which is to build one business
unit focused on financial applications (for
example, former Comshare CPM solutions, Extensity
expense management products, and Dun & Bradstreet
financials). The other business unit will acquire
other software companies in particular verticals,
such as libraries and public safety.
Recommendations
for Users of Acquired Enterprise Resource Planning
Systems
P.J.
Jakovljevic
- May 2, 2006
Added
Value
The
added value of both SSA
Global and Infor
is that existing users of relatively small and
dubious enterprise resource planning
(ERP) providers should now gain the benefits
of synergistic software developments from other
ERP siblings.
This
is Part Six of the six-part series The Enterprise
Applications “Arms Race” To Be Number
Three.
This
article is part of a comparative analysis of
SSA Global and Infor, two contenders in the
fierce ongoing competition to be number three
(after SAP
and Oracle)
in the world of ERP vendors (see The
Enterprise Applications “Arms Race”
To Be Number Three for background information
and a discussion of vendor similarities). The
other leading contender is Lawson
Software. For a detailed discussion
of Lawson, see 'New'
Lawson Software's Transatlantic Extended Enterprise
Resource Planning Intentions.
Both
SSA Global and Infor have also been building
ecosystems of extended ERP consisting of complementary
products that they can peddle (up-sell or cross-sell)
to their installed base (and even to new customers
in a stand-alone manner), to keep clients on
maintenance and sustain them as a source of
revenue for many years.
Essentially,
the ERP suppliers that were acquired could not
afford the software investment necessary to
continue building a globally competitive solution.
In addition, the development of modules and
components which run across all solutions dramatically
improves the financial viability of each code
base, in an economy-of-scale manner, compared
to their individual pre-acquisition viability.
However, integrating a multiplicity of ERP components,
which were written with different data semantics,
domain expertise, and development philosophies,
remains challenging and usually more painstaking
than expected. Thus, it is logical to expect
that some less globally promising solutions,
such as Infor Swan (former
Infor COM purchased this small
product in the UK, and subsequently sold very
few of these systems) or Geac’s
Management Data, Ratioplan,
and Streamline, and possibly
Datastream’s MP2,
will not have a simple and quick upgrade path
within Infor’s upcoming integration and
development platform (although all Infor products
should in principle benefit from this strategy).
Incidentally,
Infor’s technology framework initiative
Corestone was depicted in detail
in Enterprise
Resource Planning: Bridging the Gap between
Product Vision and Execution; it suffices
to recap by saying that Corestone includes a
drive towards a common user interface (UI),
coding, navigation method, and messaging standards,
in addition to database independence and the
adoption of dominant information technology
(IT) standards (including in particular Java
2 Enterprise Edition [J2EE] and Microsoft’s
.NET platform). Needless to
say, this is a major initiative, whereby Infor
plans to exploit both platforms and to offer
the same business functionality on each. The
Corestone initiative aims to cover a multitude
of development subjects: security, authentication,
service-oriented architecture (SOA),
application integration standards, Java and
Microsoft .NET development standards, and so
on. Internally, Corestone takes form in several
ways: a strategic direction in the form of specifications
(the Security Model being an example); strategic
development components (the Bedrock
Server for Java or common UI for Microsoft
.NET being examples); and overall corporate
standards (for example, the use of POJO’s
[Plain Old Java Objects] rather than Enterprise
Java Beans [EJBs]).
The
vendor expects the first Corestone release to
include a browser-based UI and data dictionary,
followed by a master data management
(MDM) application; by the end of 2006, all planned
functionality should be available. As for how
it will play out, while SyteLine has long been
ported onto .NET (see Frontstep
Ups the .NET Ante), the VISUAL Quality
Management module will be ported onto the platform,
and then made generally available where required.
Similarly, the SupplyWeb supply
chain visibility and supplier relationship
management (SRM) system will run with all
ERP systems, whereas the Java-based Infor
Varial financials solution will also
become the financial management system
(FMS) component for all products over a three-
to four-year time frame.
SSA
Global Added Value
Coming
back to similarities between Infor and SSA Global,
Infor’s offering is in tune with the
SSA FM (SSA Financial Management)
2.0 product stemming from the Masterpiece
product used by nearly two thousand customers
around the world, and which is becoming available
to most SSA Global ERP products. The scope of
SSA FM 2.0 covers both core and extended financial
management; core financial management consists
of the general ledger (GL), accounts
payable (AP), accounts receivable (AR),
fixed assets, purchasing, inventory control,
fund accounting, job costing, labor distribution,
and draft services modules, which have meanwhile
been augmented by numerous customer-driven enhancements.
The core financials element can also be augmented
by integrations with a number of SSA Global
strategic solutions, to provide a range of extended
financial management capabilities, such as role-based
portals, corporate performance management
(CPM), supplier collaboration, and workflow,
at no additional charge.
SSA
Global recognizes the need to go beyond the
transactional support of back-office accounting
procedures and the need to provide chief
financial officers (CFOs) and other financial
executives with “best practice”
support for strategic financial decision making,
whereby a broader range of ancillary financial
functionality is needed to facilitate enterprise
financial management:
-
integration of planning and forecasting data,
so that planners can allocate resources to
support business strategies, operational plans,
and customer demand, and so that executives
can allocate resources to ensure operational
plans are met.
-
configurable key performance indicators
(KPIs), to measure how well operational activities
meet strategic goals; performance measurement
and analysis tools need to be available for
evaluating these KPIs relative to strategic
objectives and operational goals.
-
the ability to share data and analyze results,
so that CFOs can interpret data and make strategic
decisions based on the data.
-
the ability to communicate strategic objectives
to employees and stockholders so that employees
know what the strategy is and how to put it
into action.
Further
along the line of similarities, given that the
user productivity bundled with analytic reporting
is the main pillar of all next-generation product
architecture forays (see Portals:
Necessary But Not Self-sufficient),
the Java graphical user interface (GUI)
from the Infor COM solution is being leveraged
for Infor XPPS too, and this will likely become
the GUI for all Infor products. On the SSA Global
side, since 2002 business planning and control
system (BPCS) users have seen the BPCS
Enable thin-client UI, whereas since
mid-2004, the vendor has offered a thin-client
Web-based UI for SSA Baan IV
customers (SSA Baan IV was originally released
in 1995). This UI has since become universal
for all SSA Baan ERP versions and for SSA ERPLN,
and should enable customers to upgrade to future
releases more easily. Continuing the SSA Global
model of supporting customers for life, SSA
Baan IV customers can continue to leverage the
Web interface even when they choose not to upgrade
to newer releases. The Web UI affects the technology
layers of the product but not the application
logic, and Baan IV customers more easily do
not need to reinstall or maintain the Web application
at any user location, or to deploy additional
hardware. On the IBM
iSeries side, the vendor now
has a new iSeries Web UI; this Web-based thin
client UI for the iSeries-based ERP products
is based on InAbler technology
from former Infinium, and is
available for SSA ERPLX,
SSA PRISM, and SSA
Infinium.
Recommendations
for Users
The
information provided in this series of notes
is indisputably great news for users of products
that are now under SSA Global and Infor respectively,
given the recent successes of these vendors,
along with their apparently winning (albeit
somewhat different) strategies. While their
large cash coffers are reassuring, a more positive
sign is their candid intent to reinstate themselves
as true software-developing vendors, rather
than simply software brokers or dealers. To
see the latest instance of similarity between
the two vendors, one need simply note their
maintenance renewal rate percentages, which
are in the high nineties—much higher than
before their acquisitions. The number of new
customers, especially for Infor, speaks volumes
about the ability of these vendors to round
out compelling value propositions for supporting
broad business processes in selected industries.
Thus,
their respective customers should consider their
recent acquisitions as a move toward a more
viable position for their IT investment, and
treat it in a “business as usual”
manner, albeit with open eyes. The crucial step
for current and potential users will be to discern
each vendor's corporate strategy viability within
the product line or industry in question.
Existing
Customers
Existing
SSA Global and Infor customers should seek assurances
that their current infrastructure will not radically
change; they should evaluate product roadmaps
and related impacts by understanding the vendor's
roadmap for the industry in question and by
assessing how the next-generation platform fits
into the user’s current business and technology
environment. They should also vigorously question
vendor executives on how their product line
will evolve, and investigate all alternative
solutions in order to fully understand their
situation and options.
Current
users will benefit from approaching Infor or
SSA Global, as the case may be, to find out
what the company is planning with respect to
future service and support (or discontinuation,
or product stabilization) for its individual
products, and to discover what the ramifications
of migrating (or not) to a new product offering
might be. In particular, those who have been
yearning to rejuvenate their nearly outdated
technologies should welcome the merger plans
discussed in this series, and should check to
see which next-generation product might be a
suitable candidate for a fresh replacement or
(long-awaited) migration path. They should bear
in mind, however, that switching products is
typically a bumpy road, even for users of legacy
applications.
As
for existing users and those currently going
through implementation projects, business as
usual would be the best course of action. Most
of the recently acquired products are valuable
properties, and will probably be taken seriously
by their new owners, at least for significant
maintenance revenue (if not for ample cross-sell
and up-sell opportunities within the existing
install base and beyond).
Effects
on Customers of the Acquired Vendors
To
be more precise, the acquisition by Infor is
generally a positive development for Formation
Solutions customers, because it enhances
the small company's financial viability, while
also indicating Infor’s serious intent
with respect to the process manufacturing segment
(some onlookers might have had doubts of late).
However, those who are not customers of Infor
Optiva should request regular product
development plan updates from Infor, and make
contingency plans if they believe that the product's
planned evolution will not meet their needs.
Formation's exceptional product lifecycle
management (PLM) functionality for batch-manufacturing
process manufacturers, along with Optiva's open
character, will necessarily be maintained, and
customers of ERP products other than Infor’s
Adage and Blending
will continue to benefit from the integration
(including a small contingent of Infor
XA process manufacturing customers).
The same holds true hold for the existing Datastream
customers, especially those in sectors yet to
be tackled by Infor, such as transportation
or government services.
The
same also holds true for existing Epiphany
customers outside SSA Global’s strongholds,
as well as for other enterprises considering
business-to-consumer (B2C)-focused
marketing automation functionality, such as
campaign management and real-time interactive
cross-selling; they should certainly seek direction
about SSA Global's customer relationship
management (CRM) roadmap. Those consumer-oriented
customers looking for tight CRM and ERP integration
might want to evaluate alternative solutions
until true integration between SSA Global and
Epiphany is consummated.
Epiphany’s
CRM customers and other prospective customers
evaluating CRM suites should consider SSA Global's
CRM offering if they think they would benefit
from the SSA Global enterprise applications
portfolio, including its native CRM functionality
(sales order configuration and quoting, and
field service). Current SSA Global business-to-business
(B2B) manufacturing customers should investigate
whether and how Epiphany's campaign management,
integrated view of the customer, and call-center
functionality could help their businesses, and
thereby better round out the SSA CRM
suite.
Less
technologically aggressive global companies
(or their divisions) that are happy with their
product instance’s performance may be
better off staying with older products for the
time being. Nevertheless, many users will eventually
have to undergo thorough “what if”
scenarios, such as porting onto another platform,
keeping the status quo, migrating to another
SSA Global/Infor product, choosing another ERP
provider, and so on. The best course of action
would be to approach the local SSA Global/Infor
sales representative, to vigorously negotiate
assurances and firm commitment to future product
roadmaps, service, and support. For more on
what to do about the legacy application in place,
see The
"Old ERP" Dilemma: Replace or Add-on
and The
Old ERP Dilemma: How Long Should You Pay Maintenance?.
Users
should become involved in special interest-focused
groups, since by voicing concerns or requirements
that might have otherwise been overlooked by
SSA Global or Infor, they increase the likelihood
of future enhancements to their system. They
should still be aware that no core development
enhancement is likely to be provided for very
old products—or that if it is, it will
be for a price. Users might even benefit from
helping the vendor figure out these dinosaurs,
as they will thereby gain a clearer understanding
of the choices confronting them.
Until
the new product strategy is crystal clear and
publicly committed to by the new owner, we advise
potential users to warily evaluate even the
products corresponding to their manufacturing
sweet spot. (Of course, learning about new features
and attractive pricing would be beneficial,
at least for purposes of information and leverage
with respect to other vendors.) We suggest evaluating
the flashy bells-and-whistles components, price,
and reference sites within the pertinent industry,
as well as the corporate viability of other
vendors, before making a selection. Current
customers with embedded components from many
outgoing or current partnerships should clarify
any ramifications of recent acquisitions on
their current IT investment.
This
concludes the series The Enterprise Applications
“Arms Race” To Be Number Three.
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