SOA filling the Gaps

More than ten years ago I presented in a local ERP conference in Haifa . I am not an ERP expert. I was invited to present because I worked as a self-employed consultant for GiGa Information Group , which was acquired in February 2003 by Forrester Research .   Instead of presenting non-expert's presentation, I preferred to tell the audience that I am presenting Giga's Analyst's Byron Miller's presentation. Miller's presentation was interesting. He described three ERP states, depicted in the simple image above. I built a simplified image based on his classification. The current state, in 2002, was Suite state. transformation to the other states requires advancements in Technical Integration and in Semantic Standards. The harder task is Semantic Standards, therefore different ERP states are applicable for the same level of Technical Integration. Suite state, in which you have to chose a single ERP vendor solution, is the less desired state. According to...

For decades we are talking about closing the gap between business and IT , but the gap is still as wide as it was. In the beginning of the ERP era, we focused on aligning Business Processes and Core Systems, but in most enterprises we failed. SOA was the next alignment promise: defining the SOA Services in Business boundaries instead of Technical boundaries, should narrow the gap. However, despite of SOA Business Value ( Agility and Reuse )  in most enterprises,  the large Business-IT Gap remained as large as it was.  The IT Community aimed at the next alignment attempt: SOA is technical and BPM is its Business related complement.  Will the current BPM based alignment attempt succeed? I do not know, but Nick Heath's article  titled: Stop doing what the vendors tell you, CIOs told , published in  Tech Republic , suggests that the root of the problem is not Technological .   Stop Doing What the vendors Tell You Nick Heath's article is based ...

I recently read Tien Tzue 's post titled The End of ERP . As usual, I suspect the validity of statements beginning with the End of ... without a question mark in the end. Tien Tzue's statement is not an exception. According to Tien Tzue there is a shift from 20th century products based economy to 21th century Service subscription economy, therefore ERP is doomed. He refers to the acquisitions of Cloud ERP solutions companies,  Successful Factors by SAP and Taleo by Oracle , as an End Of Life signs of traditional ERP.   No ERP company can afford to ignore Cloud based ERP, but that does not mean that SAP, Oracle and other traditional vendor, are going to kill the goose who lays golden eggs i.e. their traditional On-Premise ERP suits. SaaS based ERP is a better fit for some enterprises and Traditional ERP fits better for other enterprises. Three years ago I already discussed the issue of Future Applications: SaaS or Traditional .   Basically it i...

There is an old saying: Respect and Suspect. When someone declares, writes or says something, do not decry or ignore him – respect him.  It may turn out that the information he provides is valuable or useful. On the other hand, Suspect and check whether what was manifested is true, half true or false. This attitude is the corn stone of Scientific Research. I am not a Scientist, but during few decades in IT , I found Respect and Suspect as very useful approach as well as in my hobby playing Bridge (respect and suspect your opponents bids and play). The old saying came to my mind, while reading good news: Oracle Fusion Applications was released for use by Early Adopters after five years of development. The article was published by Mark Fontecchio in PeopleSoft Planet site. The following bullets summarize the article: 1. Oracle Fusion Applications is ready but are the customers ready for using it? 2.   Potential users  Those wh...

Few years ago I participated in a strategic CRM consulting. The customer was using  Siebel and SAP ERP . He considered  other alternatives for CRM. My role in the consulting team was to analyze the CRM market and trends. CRM as a SaaS or on Demand was one of the major  trends I mentioned. I wrote on SalesForce.com transforming the CRM market. I wrote on Seibel on Demand as well as on other SaaS style CRM solutions. Sap was an exception. It was the only vendor with no On Demand CRM strategy or solution. According to SAP, CRM should be integrated with ERP components and database, therefore it is not possible to properly implement CRM as a Service, together with Data Center based ERP. I explained to the client, that sooner or later we will find SaaS CRM solutions by SAP. However, about two days before we completed our paper Oracle announced Siebel acquisition. The most important questions were: Is the acquisition is due to Installed Base or product features? ...

Do you think that ERP matters? If the answer is yes, you could learn something from its past and present in order to forecast its future. I recently came across a site trying to build a "wiki" timeline that covers the history of manufacturing & ERP software. The timeline includes key events that have shaped the ERP software industry over the last 50 years. It's a quick way to understand the context of current enterprise software events. The term ERP's definition in this context is a broad definition including applications such as CRM .  The following chart and title are an example of one of the key events.  1990 Gartner Coins "Enterprise Resource Planning" If you would like to read or contribute, you can visit that site. I shared with the site's creators some of my opinions about ERP & SOA and ERP & SaaS . If you read previous posts such as  Future Applications: SaaS or Traditional? , you are aware of my opinion.

After hearing a podcast of Dana Gardner's interesting interviewing Aneel Bhusri Workday CEO , I tried to figure out what went wrong in the transition from traditional applications suites composed of large components to Service Oriented based application suites. In 2003 I had to present Giga Information Group's view in a local ERP conference in Haifa. A presentation by Giga's Analyst (and afterwards Forrester Research Analyst) Byron Miller titled: "ERP Technology Is Going Mainstream" was used for that purpose. The presentation depicts three possible future ERP states: Suite State – proprietary vendors suits. Industry or Vendor Ecosystems – more evolved standard based suits. New B-O-B World – standards based Best of Breed state. Use of ERP components from different suits is possible because of the standardization. New B-O-B World is the most desired state; however according to Giga's prediction the most probable future state is Suite ...