Posts Tagged ‘SAP’

New report: Plex Systems flexing its muscles

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Tom Ryan, good friend and colleague, and I took a fairly good look at Plex Systems recently.

If you don’t know Plex, they’ve got a solid SaaS (software-as-a-service) ERP solution. We’ve interviewed customers, top management and more to develop this report.

Vital Analysis 2010 Plex report

Here’s an excerpt from our Market Prognosis section of the report:

Currently, Plex Systems is enjoying significant market uptake in spite of the general economy. Why? We believe software buyers are becoming ever more attracted to the favorable economics behind true SaaS products. For those customers who are in the verticals that Plex Systems supports, Plex Systems has very limited competition.


The competitive landscape may change soon as RootStock, a NetSuite based MRP solution, may be gaining ground in the SaaS space. Likewise, we anticipate SAP making new moves with its Business ByDesign product suite. Mark Symonds, CEO of Plex Systems, remarked that SAP’s announcement of Business ByDesign in 2007 was a positive for his firm as it showed a major ERP vendor embracing software as a service.He added that SAP’s decision to slow down or halt sales of that product was an even
bigger favor.

VisionPlex, the Plex Systems PaaS, may benefit from additional utilization by Plex partners. Product line extensions by these partners will only extend the market uptake of Plex applications.


We believe that Plex has market awareness, customer credentials and market momentum going for it now. It will need to embrace more service partners, strengthen the relationships it has with current partners and aggressively position its SaaS credentials
before prospects as competition will undoubtedly increase
.”

SAP Business ByDesign

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Big, Report,

Big Investment,

Big Product Suite

Enterprise Irregular Dennis Howlett  and Vital Analysis founder Brian Sommer have teamed up to write a single, definitive report on SAP’s Business ByDesign product suite.  While both of them have blogged and/or developed short research reports on this product suite, both parties believed that something this big and expansive deserved a more nuanced, deliberate review.

The report has been written and is awaiting a final fact-check from SAP. We are also awaiting a couple of graphic files to insert into the document.

Sap_comprehensive_draft

Here’s some the teaser copy relating to the report:

__________________________________________________________

                  Comprehensive SAP Business ByDesign Report

 

It takes a comprehensive report to cover a comprehensive product suite like SAP’s Business ByDesign. This is a product suite that involved the efforts of thousands of developers and took approximately five years to bring to market. While much has been written about Business ByDesign, this report succinctly summarizes it all in a compact 20-page analysis. We examine subjects such as:

 

· The Target Buyer for Business ByDesign – Do you have what it takes to be a Business ByDesign user?

· Process Design vs. Functional Silos – This may be the single most important choice you make in buying a SMB software solution

· Product Review – A walkthrough of the 8 major functional components of Business ByDesign along with our requests for needed improvements in each area

· Vertical Assessment – How well does Business ByDesign serve your industry?

· Product Enhancements – Where should/will SAP expend its future efforts? What role will channel partners play?

· Technical Enhancements – Is the software delivering the performance that both you and SAP demand now?

· Competitive Assessment – How does this solution stack up against Workday, NetSuite and other on-demand ERP offerings?

· Author Summaries – See what our two report authors think. These are two of the software industries most visible and long-lived pundits.

The report is out for fact checking and will come out under the Vital Analysis brand. We’re hoping it will be available for delivery by the end of next week. Yes, it is a paid for item because a combined 65+ years’ experience applied to this kind of thing doesn’t come free, especially when you’ve put in a lot of time into understanding the product, its position and value to the market.

For professionals looking to extend their consulting practices, we believe ByDesign is a superb opportunity to get deep into what your clients’ businesses really do, how they’re shaped and the problems they meet. I’m encouraging practitioners to consider this as a way of massively improving the value they offer. It requires the kind of mindset that professionals need to be both methodical and have that all important eye for detail. Learning the solution is not the issue for new people. Understanding process most certainly is.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Ordering and other information will be out shortly. Stay tuned.