Mitesh Agarwal talks about their cloud strategy, digital selling, role in GST and storage products.US based software firm Oracle has been one of the last entrants into Cloud computing and is gunning hard to pitch their hybrid cloud solutions to their old customers. They have even created separate teams to tackle startups and enterprises with their solutions. In a chat with ETtech’s Aritra Sarkhel, Mitesh Agarwal, VP, Solution Consulting and CTO, Oracle India talks about their cloud strategy, digital selling, role in GST and storage products. Edited ExcerptsOracle is a new entrant into cloud computing. Is your cloud strategy designed to prevent your current customers from defecting to other established cloud vendors?Globally only 6 to 8% of workloads have moved to the public cloud. So, the remaining 90+% of the market has not moved to the public cloud. The reality is that concrete money has not yet started moving to the public cloud. When we started 30-40 years back, Oracle was a strong player in information management. In the last 8-10 years, we have completely re-engineered to serve the ‘consumption economy’. If you look at the top 20 banks, Telco’s, manufacturing or public sector organizations, all of them use Oracle technologies inside their data centre. If you look at the largest e-commerce player in India they use their entire service cloud which is an extremely important part of their journey. Other start ups use Oracle’s Human Capital Management Solutions (HCM). It is a natural move to the public cloud and in some cases; we will have a first mover advantage. We are not in a race to become the first to come up with a service. Instead, we are looking from a perspective of customers, who are starting to become more and more ready to move to the cloud now. The point here is that when the customers will consolidate into choosing one or two cloud service providers because they wouldn’t want to go for every new thing, to a different cloud provider. If you look at some of our competitors, Amazon has nothing but Infrastructure as a Service. They don’t have SaaS or PaaS. Salesforce.com which is an early pioneer when it comes to Salesforce automation does not have anything to do with IaaS. So does Oracle has different teams to tackle start-ups and existing customers in India?Recently we have announced Oracle’s first Digital Hub of the APAC region in India where we sell completely digitally to customers. We opened this hub in Bangalore, the first one being in Berlin. We are using digital tools right from the origination of customer purchase decision to the actual sale, to the servicing and in the refreshing. For example, IFFCO (Indian farmer fertilizer co-operatives) who wanted to start a new business called IFFCO e-bazar, took their existing e-procurement application and just shifted it to the public cloud and were LIVE in one month. What is very clear is that you will find a variety of companies starting their journey somewhere, but with some of the competitors, the disadvantage is that their offering is just IaaS. Has it been difficult for you in terms of digital sales considering Indian organizations prefer face to face interactions?We don’t sell only digitally. We do sell digitally to prospects who are ok with it, like a lot of start-ups that don’t care about physical face to face discussions. If you look at large enterprises, we have a very large sales organization that continues to sell. Today, every customer is talking about digital disruption and digital transformation. In terms of India so far, what kind of organizations will take the cloud drive ahead?We are focused on selling hybrid cloud solutions. There are many organizations that continue to have a hybrid strategy. We don’t expect enterprises to move lock, stock, and barrel tomorrow morning and switch to the public cloud. It doesn’t work that way. Essentially, what is required is the initiation of their ‘cloud journey’. They could begin with SaaS or PaaS or IaaS or they could begin with a private cloud journey. We believe that the right strategy is to work towards the business outcome for the customer and therefore we have the ability to provide them different solutions depending on their requirement. So, from our perspective, it is these areas that are going to be interesting for business outcomes for the customers, and not necessarily the other way around. For Full Story, Please click here. The post Hybrid cloud is the way forward: Oracle’s Mitesh Agarwal appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/hybrid-cloud-is-the-way-forward-oracles-mitesh-agarwal/
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Find out how new emotion analytics algorithms are bringing feeling, emotional connection, and engagement to modern apps.Most app development focuses on what an application is supposed to do. However there is a growing interest in crafting applications that can respond to how we feel by weaving emotion-aware signals gleaned from faces, voices, and text. At the O’Reilly Design Conference in San Francisco, Pamela Pavliscak, CEO of SoundingBox, explored how applications that senses our emotions are already changing the way we relate to technology and other people. Already cameras are being used to capture emotional expressions in faces, microphones can analyze emotional tone of conversations, and sentiment analysis techniques are used to make sense of how people are feeling in social media. In addition, new edge devices with sensors gather data about our heart beat, brain waves, and the electrical conductivity of skin to make even more nuanced assessments of emotions. This was once the realm of self-hackers and high budget marketing teams. But now it is starting to go mainstream. Pavliscak said, “With Feelings 2.0, we are told we will get a new wave of technology that can read emotions and this will lead to a more emotional connection.” Apple for instance recently bought out Emotient, which analyzes emotional expression in the face. This could help bring emotion recognition capabilities to iOS. In addition, both Microsoft and IBM now offer a suite of emotion analytics capabilities as part of their cloud offerings. How does emotional analytics work?Text analytics is probably one of the most widely used techniques today. It analyzes word choices to associate sentiment with what people are writing. Companies can use these techniques to understand the impact of their brand or service. More intimate and personalized implementations can improve chatbot interactions. One simple implementation is the Hedonometer which measure happiness of twitter users and associates these with news and trends. But the current crop of tool struggle to interpret sentiment in sarcasm said Pavliscak. Vocal intonation algorithms analyze speech to determine voice impact. Companies like Beyond Verbal have implemented an API that can be leveraged as part of call centers or to improve spoken chat interactions. This could be leveraged by call centers to create business process for escalating calls from frustrated customers. They have also developed a smartphone app called Moodcall that can measure how phone calls affect your mood. Who is using emotional analytics?A number of companies have developed APIs for recognizing emotions expressed in faces. These techniques are based on the research of Paul Ekman who identified 5-universal emotion patters expressed across all cultures, popularized in the movie Inside Out. The first generation of these tools used cameras in stores to anonymously analyze the emotional impact of new products. Now developers are starting to use facial expression analytics to improve game play. For Full Story, Please click here. The post Improve your user engagement metrics with emotional analytics appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/improve-your-user-engagement-metrics-with-emotional-analytics/ The acquisition should help Western Digital offer more innovative ways for consumers and enterprises to create, store and manage critical data.Western Digital on Monday announced it’s acquired the cloud services company Upthere, which provides users with a single cloud-based storage space for photos, videos, documents and music. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition should help Western Digital offer more innovative ways for consumers and enterprises to create, store and manage critical data. Last year, the Redwood City, California-based company — founded by people from Apple, MongoDB and Oracle — launched its cloud storage solution out of beta testing. It aims to replace consumers’ hard drive or local mobile storage. The Upthere app is platform agnostic and available for iOS and Android devices, as well as macOS and Windows. The company also announced last year that it received $77 million in funding from the likes of Western Digital and KPCB. “Upthere is delivering on its mission to transform the personal storage market and we share their focus on providing consumers more rich and meaningful experiences with their data,” Jim Welsh, Western Digital’s SVP and GM of client solutions, said in a statement Monday. For Full Story, Please click here. The post Western Digital acquires Upthere to build up cloud services appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/western-digital-acquires-upthere-to-build-up-cloud-services/ HPE Demonstrates Internet Of Things (IoT) Leadership With The Opening Of Its Global Innovation Lab8/29/2017 Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Global IoT Innovation Lab’s grand opening event happened in Houston. Following Houston, it will open two other labs in Geneva and Singapore. The HPE team is serious about deploying IoT solutions from the data center to the edge and it has done an impressive job of addressing many of the challenges and concerns many CIOs have when establishing their IoT strategies. HPE’s IoT rollout is focused on how organizations collect, coalesce and use data gathered from sensors and meters on industrial equipment. Many organizations are looking for IoT to improve equipment efficiency from HVAC, mechanical equipment, machinery, etc. Other areas include smart cities, medical devices, connected cars and many other industries. Because of HPE’s diverse offerings, it is one of the only IoT vendors that can claim an end-to-end solution. Traditionally, HPE has built much of its success on its partners and its IoT strategy is no different. From my perspective, HPE demonstrated substantial industry leadership in the following three areas: Security Inherently, IoT creates its own attack vector. Distributed and stranded end points create an attractive target for bad actors. HPE leverages a stable of partners to bring security and privacy solutions to their IoT platform, but the backbone of their IoT security platform is Aruba’s ClearPass. It provides, among other things, Medium Access Control (MAC)- level authentication, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) fingerprinting, real time logging and endpoint behavior analysis to identify anomalies that indicate breaches or malicious activity. ClearPass also provides security policy controls to control how endpoints operate and communicate. From an IoT security perspective, ClearPass is the equivalent of the “kitchen sink” approach. It is a comprehensive solution that addresses most security concerns today’s CIOs have when implementing their IoT strategy. In many cases, though, it may be overkill for smaller organizations and companies dipping their toes into IoT. As always, it depends on the application. Analytics in the cloud and at the edge IoT endpoints are creating a significant amount of organic data outside the cloud and within the data center. As IoT networks become decentralized, these edge devices need to process more data and make decisions based on collected information. By moving autonomy to the edge in terms of security, analytics, and protocol translation, companies can enable their endpoint devices to make many decisions without the human factor. HPE is investing wisely in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). To be successful with AI, you must train the algorithms to learn. AI learning is difficult to do in a distributed environment. Currently, HPE trains its AI data centrally within the confines of a data center. As the industry evolves, HPE will need to train new algorithms using aggregated AI data within a federated learning approach. A federated approach to AI learning makes the decision process more secure. Through successive iteration and learning at the edge, it will make endpoint devices more energy efficient – with lower latency – and deliver an overall secure and smarter device for processing information. HPE knows this and I am confident it will deliver. One of the most impressive components of HPE’s IoT lab is the convergence between IT/OT systems. OT solutions are associated with Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), Distributed Control Systems (DCS) and Industrial Control Systems (ICS). Moreover, OT solutions from companies such as the ABB Group, Emerson Electric Co Automation Solutions, Honeywell International, National Instruments Corp. and Schneider Electric SE do not normally play well with others and use closed, proprietary protocols rather than open standards. This, in turn, normally creates both a quagmire of amalgamated protocols at the endpoint and a nightmare of policies from a standardized security perspective. For Full Story, Please click here. The post HPE Demonstrates Internet Of Things (IoT) Leadership With The Opening Of Its Global Innovation Lab appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/hpe-demonstrates-internet-of-things-iot-leadership-with-the-opening-of-its-global-innovation-lab/ IoT is an ecosystem with various components ranging from devices/sensors to communication gateways, to network connectivity plus a management platform. For today’s young millennial, mobile phone and broadband internet services are basic needs. However, a quick glance at the history of telecom shows that these services are just over a hundred years old. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876 and in 1901 Marconi transmitted the first trans-Atlantic radio message. Mobile networks were introduced in 1979, with the first commercial automated cellular network starting in Japan and then spreading throughout the rest of the world in the 1980s/90s. The World Wide Web (WWW) was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. And today, the number of mobile connections stand at more than 8 billion globally with 3.7 billion of those connected to the Internet. In the last few decades, telecommunications technology and the Internet have had a revolutionary impact on human culture and commerce. But, if one thinks this is revolutionary and that the last hundred years have been phenomenal in the growth of telecommunication technology and its use, just take a look at the future predictions and outlook. The latest Ericsson mobility report, as of June 2017, forecasts 29 billion plus connected devices globally by 2022. Nearly 10 billion will be phones (mobile/fixed) with another 1.7 billion PC, laptop and tablet connections and the remaining 18 billion will be IoT connections. These IoT connections can be machines, connected cars, meters, sensors, point of sales terminals, consumer electronics, wearables and many more such devices. Internet of Things (IoT) has arrived and is growing at a rapid speed each day. The Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as “the inter-networking of physical devices, vehicles, buildings and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators and network connectivity which enable these objects to collect and exchange data”. It can be divided into short-range and wide-area segments. Short-range consists mostly of devices connected by unlicensed radio technologies with a typical range of 100m (using Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Bluetooth) or connected by fixed-line LAN, PLC. Wide-area segment consists of devices connected using cellular or unlicensed low-power technologies (LoRa, Sigfox) or satellite connection. It is the industry/vertical and the use case that determines whether short-range or wide-area IoT solution shall be used. It further determines whether the requirement is of Massive IoT or Critical IoT application. Massive IoT applications are characterized by high connection volumes and small data traffic volumes, low cost devices and low energy consumption whereas Critical IoT applications have very different demands of ultra-reliability, high availability, low latency and high data throughput. IoT applications are now starting to be used across all industries/verticals like Transport, Home automations, Autonomous vehicles, Public safety and emergency services, Health care, Smart cities, Industrial automations / Manufacturing, Retail, BFSI sector, Energy and Utilities, Agriculture and across a variety of use cases such as: – asset/inventory management and remote monitoring As these are still evolving areas and technologies, additional use cases and further evolution of the existing ones are expected to continue to happen. The uniqueness of IoT is evident from its definition – “inter-networking of things, network connectivity to enable collection and exchange of data”. IoT is an ecosystem with various components ranging from devices/sensors to communication gateways, to network connectivity plus a management platform. The management platform shall further include capabilities of device management, connectivity management, application management, data management & visualization, analytics and external integration for sharing the data/insights. As a matter of fact, exchanging data and deriving valuable insights across use cases cutting across industries/verticals shall potentially evolve this ecosystem to a “network of IoT ecosystems” (something like the world wide web of IoT). IoT shall hence lead to new business models and new opportunities in the market and network service providers who have until now excelled in connecting phones, PCs/Tablets and other consumer devices shall have to develop new capabilities to create and manage the IoT ecosystem and as it matures/evolves to the network/web of IoT ecosystems. It still being early days, the network service providers can explore multiple approaches towards IoT: Connectivity – this is the core capability of network service providers and their basal offering towards IoT solutions. They have to ensure that they are ready to offer the range of connectivity options required for IoT solutions such as LTE-M, NB-IoT, unlicensed band LoRaWAN/Sigfox and going forward 5G. Currently the existing cellular technologies are being used for IoT and globally most operators are deploying or in the process of evaluating/deploying IoT specific connectivity solutions like LTE-M, NB-IoT, LoRa/Sigfox and starting 5G trials. For Full Story, Please click here. The post IoT and the new role for network service providers appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/iot-and-the-new-role-for-network-service-providers/ Compassvale students look into classroom conditions for National Science ExperimentHere’s a tip for study time: If your classroom or study environment is too warm, you might not be able to concentrate or cram for that paper you need to ace. Five students, all aged 15, from Compassvale Secondary School found that keeping the temperature of the surroundings below 28 deg C was optimal for allowing students to study and stay focused in class. The research was conducted as part of this year’s National Science Experiment (NSE) Big Data Challenge, organised by the National Research Foundation. The competition required participants to submit a report of their experiment design, results and findings by Aug 4. The finale will be held on Sept 13. At Compassvale, the team found that a second factor – the noisiness of the environment – did not affect most of the 77 students surveyed. These students could still concentrate well even when noise levels increased during periods such as recess breaks for students of other levels. Also, humid environments did not seem to affect those in the survey, who wore a SENSg device around their necks on a lanyard. The sensor device was used to measure the heat, noise and humidity levels of their surroundings. The competition, now into its third year, has two categories – one for secondary schools, and another for junior colleges, polytechnics and the Institute of Technical Education. For Full Story, Please click here. The post Using big data to improve study space appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/using-big-data-to-improve-study-space/ Companies are increasingly opting for cloud financial management toolsERP products are undergoing some key changes and giving companies new ways of handling the volumes of daily transactions tracked inside their systems. The overarching trend is that ERP and other financial management tools are more often being offered with a subscription over the cloud. As alternatives to legacy on-premises ERP, companies are increasingly opting for ERP features provided via software as a service and realizing significant benefits from the move, including easier use and scale and more agility, according to a January report by Forrester Research. Before SaaS, when ERP software ran on computers on site, customizations were costly, repetitive and time-consuming, and it was sometimes difficult to access data. Financial management tools delivered as SaaS offer strong security with encryption and automatic and regular updates managed by the vendor, though a user has less say on upgrades and pricing. However, the era of cloud-based software may still be in its infancy. Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd has said he expects all customers to eventually move to lower-cost cloud applications at their own pace, but he pledged the vendor would continue to support E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and other on-premises software that provide the lion’s share of sales. Meanwhile, many companies are obtaining ERP-like functions with SaaS or even on-premises add-on financial management tools. Wildman Business Group, for example, uses on-premises ABBYY FlexiCapture to automate accounts payable and integrates the tool with its on-premises Sage ERP for managing transactions and with Microsoft SharePoint for electronic filing. For Full Story, Please click here. The post Agility, scale rate highly in cloud ERP financial management systems appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/agility-scale-rate-highly-in-cloud-erp-financial-management-systems/ When it comes to saving a patient’s life in medical emergencies, quick decisions should be taken. Big Data and Analytics could help physicians make better decisions in high-stress scenarios, by letting them do genetic data sequencing, peruse several treatment records of patients with a similar condition all over the world, providing them deeper comprehension of treating patients. Furthermore, IoT could also help doctors in benchmarking patients against previous health cases, investigating how patients with a certain gene respond to different treatments and make decisions which are based on facts, instead of judgment. Big Data would really be valuable to the healthcare field in what is known as the IoT or the Internet of Things. The Internet of things is a growing network of daily objects, from industrial machineries to consumer goods that could share information and accomplish tasks while one is busy with other tasks, such as work, exercise or shop. Soon, homes, cars, major appliances and even city streets would be internet-connected. Creating this network of objects is called the internet of things. Made up of millions of devices and sensors which generate incessant data streams, the IoT could be used to boost people’s lives and businesses in a lot of ways. Big Data and IoT aims for managed care would want to keep people at home instead of in a hospital. Wearables and sensors would collect health data on patients in their homes. Moreover, they will push all data into the cloud. BP monitors, electronic scales, SpO2 sensors, proximity sensors continuously blast data from millions of patients. Healthcare institutions as well as care managers use sophisticated tools and could monitor massive data stream. Furthermore, the Internet of Things will keep patients healthy. Using the latest technology has boosted home fare facilities and help in bringing down the costs. It is projected that the use of Big Data in healthcare could lower the healthcare data management costs by $300 billion to $500 billion. Furthermore, a survey stated that as much as 60 percent of healthcare facilities feel that cloud-based Big Data services have the potential to lower costs by approximately 45 percent. Big Data and Analytics could affect healthcare in a lot of ways. Diseases could be prevented or treated at the early stages. Moreover, this would also help prevent unnecessary hospitalization, visits to emergency rooms and increase in ailment severity. All these translates to reduced costs of care as well as better health. Big Data and the Internet of Things healthcare includes data of the medical information of a patient, which include doctor’s notes and prescriptions, imaging results and laboratory and pharmacy data, data in EPRs or electronic patient records, machine generated or sensor data, social media feed, including blogs, tweets and Facebook status updates and many more. The technology is fast evolving into a promising field in the industry and could offer insight into vary huge sets of data and enhance outcomes while at the same time could lower costs. A patient who is in ICU and his kin should not have to worry if the healthcare providers are around or not. Regardless of the location, the patient is under the scanner continuously. Several healthcare use cases are perfectly suited for a big data solution. Some academic-centric or research-focused healthcare institutions either are doing experiment on big data or utilize it for advanced research. The institutions draw upon statisticians, data scientists, graduate students and the like to wrangle the big data complexities. Big Data and IoT is less expensive, due to its open source roots and unstructured nature. Moreover, it doesn’t need many design work and is fairly easy to maintain. Many storage redundancy allows for hardware failures that are more tolerable. For Full Story, Please click here. The post Big Data Analytics and IoT can solve some of the hardest medical problems appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/big-data-analytics-and-iot-can-solve-some-of-the-hardest-medical-problems/ ERP solutions won’t necessarily go away but a new generation of solutions gives us clues as to where major productivity gains will come from.Most ERP systems are stuck in the past or are improving incrementally. The next wave of productivity savings for businesses will likely come from technology vendors you’ve never heard of. They’ll come from firms unfettered by traditional ERP transaction processing systems. They’ll come with a different business viewpoint and solve very different problems. It’s all these differences that will make this new productivity wave come to life. New vendors are designing solutions that:
The new wave of business productivity will come from:
A New AeraThere are several all-new firms creating something different. These aren’t ERP replacements or alternatives to ERP. These are new solutions that mix old (i.e., ERP) data with new data such as sensor, weather and other big data items. Along with this data, they’ve added new technologies like machine learning, deep vertical knowledge, in-memory cloud technology and more. To this list of new companies like C3IoT and Uptake, let’s add Aera Technology. Aera, nee FusionOps, recently got a $50 million VC investment and a new CEO, Fred Laluyaux, who, until recently was the CEO of business planning/forecasting software firm Anaplan. Laluyaux also has some serious ERP chops in his background as he was an SAP executive. Aera is how the software answers a user’s question like “What’s our cash balance?”. Aera doesn’t just serve up a direct response to the question. It also interrogates the question and the immediate answer to anticipate the next 1-2 questions you might have. For example, if it thinks you’ll not be happy with the cash balance, it will volunteer a number of cash improvement ideas. It might, for example, suggest following up on a couple of large outstanding customer receivables. Or, it could also recommend the liquidation of some excess inventory. The software tells the user the dollars involved in these different scenarios and it awaits the user’s instructions with which it can complete. What’s happening behind the scenes is that a natural language processor interrogates the voice question, it then maps the request to a taxonomy of values found in the company’s data stores (e.g., ERP data) and, via integration technology, it serves up the initial response. That’s when the fun gets started. The software reviews the answer and makes a judgment call. It decides, if you will, whether the answer is good or bad news, and suggests ways to either minimize the adverse effect or to continue the positive trend. It does this because someone has taken the time to create rules and workflow logic behind these kinds of queries. Should the user choose one of these suggested courses of action, the software can help complete the business event as the pre-programmed workflow is ready to do so. If you think the voice-enabled approach sounds too much like a consumer-grade Alexa app, then simply turn the interrogation logic on to the real-time data coming from sensors, ERP software and other sources. When an anomalous event becomes apparent, rules kick in and options are presented to business users. Management, in the future, will be less about finding anomalies and more about fixing or exploiting them. The analogy that Aera customers use is that systems need to be like a self-driving car. The system is always on and always recommending course corrections in real-time. How much better would a value chain be if companies tied their financial planning activities to external data sources such as customer growth, seasonal sales, sales of competitors’ products, retailer point of sale data and more? Minor changes in some aspect of the value chain could be picked up, analyzed and then the manufacturing and distribution aspects of the company are tuned to achieve optimal revenue and profitability. This kind of external data-driven analysis is not what ERP has been about. For example, do ERP systems monitor weather patterns and recommend shifts in production and distribution to accommodate changes in demand due to an upcoming hurricane hitting the southeast U.S.? No – that’s why a newer generation of solutions and the value they throw off is needed. Aera is already capturing the attention of large firms like Columbia Sportswear and Merck KGaA. Why? Businesses are looking for ways to automate a number of decision making aspects of their supply chain and other processes. Aera organizes around Skills. It has skills for manufacturing performance, predictive demand, delivery optimization, revenue maximization, market share growth, predictive sourcing and margin optimization. Customers can take advantage of a number of pre-built dashboards, integrations and more to jumpstart their new productivity improvements. For example, the manufacturing performance skill uses machine learning to predict batch failures. There are more than 20 different algorithms in the predictive sourcing skill. There are even AI tools creating pricing recommendations in the margin optimization skill. Old challengesNot surprisingly, Aera and its competitors are finding that getting useful, viable data out of ERP solutions is not easy. Companies may have:
For Full Story, Please click here. The post A new Aera for ERP in the search for productivity gains appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/a-new-aera-for-erp-in-the-search-for-productivity-gains/ Today’s ERP landscape offers more options than ever before. Here’s a look at how two companies took a strategic approach to choosing the right software for their needs.The number of options that companies have when choosing an ERP system has changed in a big way. Just take Stratus Ventures Group, which invests in early stage startups. When the company decided to deploy an ERP system that would be used to run three of its portfolio companies, it started with one overarching requirement: The software had to be cloud-based, and it could not be an Oracle or SAP product. “They are slow-set in concrete,” Ofir Baharav, general manager of Stratus, said of the biggest names in legacy ERP. “You build them, and then you can’t really move much unless you have a sledgehammer.” The changing definition of ERPA seismic shift has occurred in the ERP landscape. The term ERP once evoked a years-long, multi-million dollar deployment followed by a 20-year commitment to an inflexible product and for good reason — that’s what an ERP implementation typically required. Yet that’s changing for companies both large and small. Today’s ERP can be whatever a company needs, from isolated pieces of back-office functionality to full-blown cloud-based suites tightly integrated with customer-management systems. In the case of Stratus, the sales teams at the three companies in question — energy snack-maker Energems, business content platform Expressible, and industrial fan-maker Breezer Mobile Cooling — all wanted to use Salesforce as their CRM platform, which necessitated using ERP software that integrated with Salesforce. Salesforce pointed Baharav and his team toward Kenandy, a Salesforce partner that delivers ERP functionality as tables that map to existing business processes, putting the software closer to data. The fact that Kenandy wasn’t able to deliver all of the functionality of an on-premises legacy ERP system like Oracle or SAP was of no concern. “If you use one of those systems, you can’t be agile, so you sacrifice agility for completeness,” said Baharav. “We want to spend time dreaming of what we want to build rather than getting involved in something that doesn’t allow agility.” And it’s not like Kenandy doesn’t deliver the core ERP functions. Currently, the three companies, all of which roll up into Stratus’ overarching profit-and-loss statement, are able to manage accounts, opportunities, customer service and other functions in Salesforce while taking care of orders, inventory and shipments in Kenandy. “The beauty is that it’s end-to-end,” said Stratus’ CIO Yael Lindenboim. “They’re all talking to each other. The users don’t even know what is Salesforce and what is Kenandy because [they are] so well integrated.” Know your ERP prioritiesAnd then there are the hard benefits. Baharav said the combined revenue of the three companies has tripled since deploying Kenandy, while the back-office staff has been cut by two-thirds. (The companies employ about 100 people combined.) Meanwhile, when there’s a change in the business that requires a tweak in Kenandy, Lindenboim is able to make all the needed changes within a week. And as anyone who’s worked with legacy ERP systems can attest, that is a huge advance in agility. But what may be the biggest advantage of Stratus’ use of Kenandy is how it lets the three companies become collaborative businesses by demystifying ERP and making the underlying data accessible across their organizations. “We don’t forget who our audience is,” said Baharav. “We want everyone to be able to use the system, not just the CFO.” While Stratus was looking to combine three portfolio companies under one ERP umbrella, Precision Disposables had a slightly different priority. The company’s COO, Bruce Capagli, who came on board last July, wanted to move from Google Sheets to something more formalized, and he only had a month to do it. “I started having a mini-heart attack,” Capagli said. “I knew [Google Sheets] was not going to be a long-term scalable solution.” Scalability was central to Capagli’s decision when it came to choosing an ERP system. A spinoff of Precision Medical Products (a seven-year-old, $30 million-a-year maker of clinical medical equipment), Precision Disposables had lofty goals: It wanted to capture a big piece of the market for disposable medical and industrial products, and grow to $100 million in revenue within five years. That aggressive growth path doomed two ERP contenders, Zoho, which didn’t offer the scale Precision needed, and Xero, which scaled better than Zoho but didn’t support the kind of built-in integration Capagli was looking for. For Full Story, Please click here. The post The modern approach to choosing an ERP system appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/the-modern-approach-to-choosing-an-erp-system/ |
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