Ovum Evaluates: Enterprise Business Applications
An Ovum Evaluation Service by Neil Anderson and Philip Carnelley
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 Svenska
An essential new service
Ovum Evaluates: Enterprise Business Applications is an essential new service from Ovum on today's Enterprise Business Application (EBA) solutions - and their future. It is invaluable for corporates, software vendors, platform suppliers and consultants.
The transition to e-business integration with your value chain demands total company buy-in from the top down. It must be based on the right software platform. But this imperative opens up many questions for suppliers and users alike:
- Will your enterprise applications supplier be able to satisfy your internal processes and external e-business needs?
- Will the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform that you implemented to make you more efficient, also support your drive to be more effective?
- Who can supply a complete platform for e-business?
- What are the major enterprise application suppliers offering? What are the strengths and weaknesses of their products?
- What are the company strategies, their internal focus, and how does the market perceive them?
- Who will be the winners and losers?
- Is this a growing market and how big will it become?
Ovum Evaluates: Enterprise Business Applications will help you answer these questions.
Corporates - Keep your IT plans on the right path
As more companies become fully integrated e-businesses, or e-service providers, you need to decide whether to build new facilities around your existing core systems, or replace those systems entirely to provide a suitable platform for e-business. And, as you know, this is a major investment decision.
Get it right and your company's operations will become more effective, with an operational capability that extends to global 24x7 e-business.
Get it wrong , and this decision will have severe financial and operational implications.
But this is not all. You need to know that the vendor you use currently is in a strong enough position to survive the increasingly competitive e-business software market - and provide the facilities you need. To put it simply - will your vendor still be around in 5 years time?
The 'Big 5' - a safe investment?
Even the biggest vendors can stumble. The market is so volatile that today's leading light is sometimes tomorrow's casualty. SSA, Baan and D&B Software are just some of the big name companies that have seen major swings of fortune in recent years. You need to constantly keep under review your commitment to your core business application provider. You need to decide whether to use its add-on facilities to power your e-business initiatives, or integrate with best-of-breed facilities from elsewhere. Is the system you installed in the 1990s to make your company more efficient the platform you need to make your business more effective ?
The need for Enterprise Business Applications to maximise effectiveness within your company
Companies are looking to evolve and integrate their internal and external operations in order to compete in the new e-business economy. ERP suppliers have evolved into Enterprise Business Applications (EBA) suppliers to address this need. But the ERP platform you purchased in the 1990s to improve efficiency and reduce costs may not meet your need for an e-business platform to increase revenues. Which products currently in the marketplace can do this?
These are the essential conditions that Enterprise Business Applications must fulfil:
- Integration of back-office, front-office and e-commerce functions in order to increase effectiveness and use this to drive the external operations of the company.
- E-commerce support integrated with back office transactional and planning capabilities to turn a business into a global e-business.
- Process support to harness the skills and knowledge of staff to enable them to become proactive contributors.
The evolution from ERP to EBA and the benefits your company can reap
ERP was
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EBA is
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Client-server
Local
Internally-focused
Employee-oriented
Efficiency-oriented
Cost reduction-focused |
Internet
Global
Externally-focused
Partner-oriented
Effectiveness-oriented
Revenue generation-focused |
Suppliers and consultants - invaluable information and advice for your marketing strategies
ERP is dead - an image with which most vendors happily concur. But in fact, companies are now looking to boost their ERP investment. They need to expand its reach to all internal and external functions. The need is there for the enterprise business suites, but how do your offerings fit into the world of e-business? You need to know how your services compare with, or complement, those of the leading enterprise business software suppliers. You need to understand their strategies and their products to correctly position and steer your own strategies and offerings.
What all suppliers and consultants need to know
Ovum's new service will answer your key questions about the enterprise business applications market and its leading suppliers:
- What are the major suppliers really capable of? And what are they telling the marketplace? How good is their performance, today?
- Where should you partner? And where should you compete?
- How big is the enterprise business applications market today? Where will it be in 5 years time?
- Application suppliers: understand the offerings and strategies of the major players to enable you to decide where to compete and where to complement their offerings;
- Consultants and systems integrators: understand the capabilities, strategies, strengths and weaknesses of the major offerings to enable you to give best advice to your clients;
- Platform suppliers: understand the companies you must partner with, and where you can offer support and integration facilities to best advantage for your clients and your business.
What the Ovum Evaluation Service offers
The most effective way for you to keep constantly on top of the developments in the enterprise business application market
Product and vendor evaluations - continuously updated over a whole year. As new releases become available we will update our evaluation to keep them current.
Quarterly Strategic Analysis Report - the reports provide you with an in-depth look at the issues of the day, user research and market development and forecasts.
Ovum Evaluates: Enterprise Business Applications will provide you with all this information:
- Company issues - find out about the stability, direction, company performance, and global support of each of the key vendors;
- E-commerce capabilities - understand how the Enterprise Business Application suites support the move to transactional Web presence;
- Integration between back-office and front-office functions and sheer breadth of coverage - can the Enterprise Business Application suites do what others can?
- Implementation, architecture and integration - how good is this platform for your present and future needs (and how is it developing)?
- Support for the processes and needs of different vertical markets - what is offered?
For expert, independent advice to help support your IT strategic planning and decision decision-making, you need to consult Ovum Evaluates: Enterprise Business Applications first!
We will provide you with an ongoing package of information on the leading e-business suppliers including an in-depth review of their products and what they can do for your company. This is regularly updated during your 1-year subscription period, in order to keep you constantly informed. You will also receive a Quarterly Strategic Analysis Report, which provides you with an in-depth look at the issues of the day, user research and market development and forecasts plus a product directory.
The vendors Ovum evaluates
You will receive 30-page evaluations of each of the leading EBA vendors and their products:
- Baan
- JD Edwards
- Oracle
- PeopleSoft
- SAP.
All evaluations will be updated regularly to reflect strategy, product and market evolution.
Future issues will cover other major suppliers, for example Siebel, i2, Lawson and IFS.
We evaluate all vendors for
- company strategy
- technology strategy
- financial performance.
We evaluate their offerings for
- enterprise functionality (external e-business capability)
- operational functionality (core business process support)
- platform capability (architecture design, flexibility and usability).
About the authors
Neil Anderson, Lead Analyst
Neil's industry experience spans the full business process lifecycle, and includes the integration of client-server and web technologies. Neil has direct experience in the specification and implementation of enterprise applications strategies.
Neil has provided consulting services to end-users in numerous verticals on projects ranging from IS strategy, business cases and vendor selection to enterprise architecture planning and end user training.
Having worked for both user and vendor organisations, Neil has implemented several different EBA packages including SAP and Oracle.
Philip Carnelley, Service Director
Philip is responsible for commissioning and managing the production of all reports on front and back-office software applications and markets.
He advises leading-edge companies on the adoption and deployment of advanced technologies, and has recently focused on customer-facing and document management systems. He is a frequent conference speaker and author of articles for many industry publications. Recent Ovum reports which he has managed and contributed to include Knowledge Management: Applications, Markets and Technologies, Ovum Evaluates: Call centre Software and Ovum Evaluates: Document Management.
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