Saturday, March 27, 2010

Ramco Ships Technology And Products

At the end of February, during the National Manufacturing Week (NMW) in

Chicago, IL, Ramco Systems Limited , a provider of

enterprise business applications and accompanied services, with a global HQ

in India, announced the delivery of a series of enterprise application suites

that it claims will "change the economics of application software". Instead

of releasing one application suite that is intended to meet the needs of

multiple industries, Ramco is providing distinct suites that are tailored to

meet the specific vertical industry requirements for process manufacturing

(Ramco Enterprise: Process), discrete manufacturing (Ramco Enterprise:

Discrete) and asset-intensive industries (Ramco Enterprise Asset Management).

In addition, the company delivered horizontal solutions in human resources

(HR) management (Ramco Human Resource Management System) and business

intelligence (BI) (Ramco Business Decisions); as well as back-office

solutions for finance and distribution (Ramco Corporate Solutions), tailored

to retail and service industries.

Ramco Enterprise Series Release 4.0 applications have been built on what the

vendor claims to be groundbreaking, model-based application development and

delivery platform called Ramco VirtualWorks. The platform includes a model-

based architecture based on a comprehensive model of granular business

processes, representing 70 different industries, a web-enabled set of

workbenches for the application development lifecycle, as well as

methodologies for all stages of development and implementation.

This is Part Two of a two-part note.

Part One detailed the Ramco announcement and discussed the Market Impact.

User Recommendations

Existing Ramco customers should continue to follow Ramco's product path. They

should evaluate the new products and technology with an eye towards moving

forward with Ramco.

Companies that see themselves as early adopters of technology should evaluate

Ramco to validate the potential breakthrough benefits. We suggest a pilot

project with Ramco may prove to be a very good investment.

Companies who are looking for new or replacement systems should not ignore

Ramco, which has proven its products, technology and services, and should

challenge the other competing vendors to match Ramco's value proposition.

Companies with both Process and Discrete manufacturing segments to their

business should particularly place Ramco on their short list. Multi-site and

multi-national corporations and/or their divisions should consider the

Ramco's value proposition, being cognizant of competitive offerings. The

verticals that would benefit the most likely from evaluating Ramco are:

* Batch Process Industries Food & Beverage, Cement, Specialty Chemicals,

Plastics, Textiles, and

* EAM Intensive Industries Aviation, Utilities

Companies who are working to "fill-in" their application portfolio and

perhaps bridge the gaps in existing applications should evaluate Ramco's

modules/components and technology. A strong point of the offering appears to

be the combination of application function, technology and offshore

development.

Companies who believe they need to deploy custom developed systems should

evaluate Ramco's approach to near term development and its long-term

consequences.

While Ramco covers most of the world its regional capabilities and industry

focus may vary. Therefore, potential clients should conduct a thorough

preliminary research on local industry expertise and reference sites when

Ramco is included in the selection process.

Supply Chain Management Audio Conference Transcript

Going to begin with an overview of problems and solutions relating to technology selection, starting first with the problem:

According to our research, over 80% of enterprise technology evaluations run over time and budget, and once completed, over 50% of the implementations fail to meet functional and total cost expectations. There are three main reasons that project teams run into trouble.

1. They have no effective way to identify the critical vendor and product questions necessary to successfully initiate the evaluation process.

2. They have no ability to prioritize the different criteria, once identified, relative to one another. As a result, final priorities are often more the result of internal political agendas than true needs and requirements.

3. And finally, project teams have no ability to gather objective, validated, updated data on the vendor alternatives. As you may well know, vendors have a tendency to exaggerate product, service, and corporate capabilities if it enables them to move to the next phase of the deal.

So, what's the solution?

The solution is to create a structured, repeatable process for evaluating technology solutions and the vendors that provide them. Best practices drawn from our clients that have completed internal technology selections suggest that project teams should examine five key categories of criteria. The first two categories examine product specific capabilities, while the remaining three investigate the software vendor's overall corporate capabilities.

So let's review these criteria categories.

Number 1: Product Functionality - Product functionality is the most obvious evaluation criterion and plays a dominant role in supply chain management software selections. Simply put, this evaluates the features and functions delivered by the product as it currently exists. Together with technology and architecture, product functionality often makes up over 90 percent of the overall importance within IT selections, but this is probably too high. Other criteria such as service/support, corporate viability, and strategy should make a stronger contribution.

Number 2: Product Technology - Product technology defines the technical architecture of the product, and the technological environment in which the product can run successfully. Sub criteria include things like application architecture, software usability and administration, and platform and database support. Relative to the other evaluation criteria, best practice selections place a lower relative importance on the product technology criterion. However, this apparently lower importance is deceptive, because the product technology criterion usually houses the majority of an organization's mandatory criteria, which usually include server, client, protocol and database support, application scalability and other architectural capabilities. The definition of mandatory criteria within this set often allows the client to quickly narrow the long list of potential vendors to a short list of applicable solutions that pass muster relative to the most basic mandatory selection criteria.

Number 3: Corporate Service and Support - This criterion defines the capability of the vendor to provide implementation services and ongoing support. Repeated industry surveys have identified this category as the single largest differentiating factor among potential selection options, as well as the greatest indicator of ultimate user implementation success and long term vendor viability. A proper professional services and support evaluation should include both subjective, qualitative measures validated by current product users, and objective, quantitative criteria within both the professional services and product support categories. Service and support includes categories such as consulting, systems integration, project management skills, geographic coverage, language and time coverage of the vendor help desk, and delivery mediums.

Number 4: Corporate Viability - Corporate viability is a critical, yet often overlooked category that examines the financial and management strength of the vendor. Given the huge number of dollars spent on IT procurements, not to mention their strategic importance, the financial stability of the vendor simply can't be stressed too much. The vendor viability category in WebTESS combines quantitative Wall Street ratio and metric analysis with qualitative management and corporate evaluations. Only by combining the two components can IT executives accurately assess the risk and benefit of corporate investment in a specific product and vendor option.

Number 5: Corporate Strategy - Corporate strategy evaluates the corporate road map and strategy of the software vendor with regard to specific timelines of how the product will be developed, sold, and supported within the supply chain management market. This is the most strategic and long term set of evaluation criteria, and rates how effectively the stated vendor's three to five year product, support and sales strategy maps to the overall market direction. Any dissonance between the stated vendor direction and market direction is a cause for concern, and should be rectified by the vendor through either a shift in corporate policy or a detailed and market validated explanation for the discord.

Now that we have given an overview of the requirements of a technology selection, I would like to move on to an overview of the Supply Chain Management Software Marketplace and as it exists today.

Enterprise Messaging Evaluation and Procurement Audio Transcript

Begin with an overview of problems and solutions relating to technology selection, starting with the problem:

1. Project teams have no effective way to identify the critical vendor and product questions necessary to successfully initiate the evaluation process.

2. Project teams have no ability to effectively prioritize the different criteria, once identified, relative to one another. As a result, final priorities are often more the result of internal political agendas than true needs and requirements.

3. Project teams have no ability to gather objective, validated, updated data on the available vendor alternatives. It is a well-known problem that vendors have a tendency to exaggerate product, service and corporate capabilities if it enables them to move to the next phase of the deal.

4. According to our research, the net result has been that over 80% of enterprise technology evaluations run over time and budget, and that once selected, over 50% of the implementations fail to meet functional and total cost expectations.

So what's the solution?

The solution is to create a structured, repeatable process for evaluating technology solutions and the vendors that provide them. Best practices drawn from TechnologyEvaluation.Com client organizations that have completed internal technology selections suggest that project teams should examine six key criteria groupings. The first three criteria sets should examine product specific capabilities, while the second three should investigate the software vendor's overall corporate capabilities.

So what are the criteria groupings?

1. Product Functionality - Simply put, this evaluates the features and functions delivered by the product, as it exists today.

2. Product Technology - This criterion defines the technical architecture of the product, and the technological environment in which the product can run successfully.

3. Product Cost - Initial and Ongoing cost of product, this is not TCO as it does not account for internal support costs.

4. Corporate Service and Support - This criterion defines the capability of the vendor to provide a high level of implementation services and ongoing support.

5. Corporate Viability - This is a critical yet often overlooked category that should examine the financial and management strength of the vendor.

6. Corporate Strategy - This evaluates the corporate road map and strategy of the software vendor with specific timelines regarding how the product will be developed, sold, and supported within the specific market.

Now that we have given an overview of the requirements of a technology selection, I would like to move on to an overview of the Collaborative Messaging Marketplace and as it exists today.

Today's Marketplace

We will be comparing and contrasting the three primary collaborative messaging servers within the industry today, comprising more than 130 Million end user licenses. These are, as you can see from WebTESS, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, and Novell GroupWise.

Lotus Notes R5 competes directly with Microsoft's Exchange e-mail server 5.5 and Novell's GroupWise 5.5. Microsoft will be releasing Exchange Server 2000 in the 2nd quarter of 2000, presently code named "Platinum".

Novell's offering comes well short of meeting the needs of collaborative messaging users in today's market when compared to Notes and Exchange, and continues to lose market share to them.

The collaborative messaging market is booming as e-mail has evolved into a mission critical application. Lotus Notes has just surpassed the 50,000,000-installed base mark, as has Microsoft. On the other hand, Novell appears to have gone into maintenance mode, holding onto their 20 million plus install base. However, we do expect to see some large improvements in Novell's next release of GroupWise, code named "BulletProof" which is based on XML and open standards to allow greater integration with 3rd party applications.

e-Business Service Provider Evaluation & Selection

We will review the critical differentiating criteria of a number of selected DBSPs chosen as a representative sample of the most common types of DBSPs a newcomer to the space may face. However, to help us understand the selection process, we need to get a handle on the DBSP space, and the companies that inhabit it. As a cautionary note, however, there are many facets, hybrids, and fringe areas, and any coarse characterization is of course subject to value judgments.

Unlike product selections, service comparisons depend on reference information provided by vendors and their clients, and are subject to value judgments and specific engagement situations. This is perhaps one of the hardest aspects of comparing vendors. However, there are many aspects that are not so soft which we can deal with, and provide measures of vendor capabilities and performance. We will also attempt here to map out the core corporate players and player types.

A Brief Market Overview

We are concerned here with DBSPs who enable business capabilities within digitally networked environments. This not only includes e-business operations on the web, but can also refer to intranet development capabilities (B2E for example), and government-to-consumer or citizen or other government etc. We have adopted the generic term Digital Business Service Provider or DBSP as the a way of describing the area, and reserved e-business service provider for profit taking companies building out digital capabilities to sell and buy over electronic networks.

From our research, there a number of flavors of DBSPs arising historically from advances in computer and network technologies. Briefly, the main DBSPs arose from seven sources:

1. Legacy/Traditional Consulting Houses, which arose from the evolution of commercial uses of computer technologies from the late 1950's to the mid 1970's. Deloitte represents the traditional consulting houses, with EDS and CSC as representative of systems engineering companies that came out of that time.

2. Network Consultants arose to service rising computer network needs during the 1980's. Lante and Proxicom are examples of this genre.

3. Systems Integrators from the mid 1970's to mid 1990's evolved to meet the needs of tying together systems and products as generic products appeared in the marketplace, chiefly financial, MRP and technical systems. EDS, begun in 1963, moved rapidly to become a major systems integrator of the day. Osprey, a latecomer to this market, started in 1993.

4. Product Centric service branches were established in the 80's and early 90's out of product developers such as Oracle and IBM. These companies developed services around their products as a means to symbiotically cross-sell products and services.

5. Website Creators and Designers (Creatives / Early Pure Plays) stepped out in the early to mid 1990's as the early Internet began to show promise for business. Businesses migrated from teletext bulletin boards and created websites to do business in the new medium. Razorfish, Agency.com, and later Organic typify these technology driven creative organizations.

6. Advertising Agencies developed technology wings from the mid 1990's (or later in many cases), creating websites for special events such as the Women's World Soccer Championship or special ad campaigns. Companies such as DDB Needham and JWT moved into the site building business, incorporating their Fortune 1000 branding and marketing expertise.

7. Late Pure Play Service Providers evolved in the late 1990's dedicated to bringing businesses to the web. Dot-com's began their fantastic market ride at this time, giving these Pure Plays high revenue contributions - up to 50% or more of total revenue. However, since the dot-com meltdown, these DBSPs are turning to more traditional business partners. Scient, Sapient, Xcelerate are examples.

On the sidelines of the market are many fringe DBSPs offering services such as ASP, site hosting, and specialized services including language translation, educational systems, telecommunication services, advertising rich media, branding and marketing research to name but a few.

Enterprise Resource Planning Systems Audio Conference

Here are a couple of disclaimers before we proceed, due to a number of queries we received prior to this conference. First, the vendors we included in the first round were those vendors requested by both our offline selection clients and online readership. With those vendors we have long established an ongoing line of communications and, prior to including them in eBestMatch, we also published a research note on them on our site (we encourage you to check it out on our Web site under 'Business Applications' section). We do realize that there are a number of other worthy vendors that can and should also be included; off the top of my head I could think of at least 20 more vendors that will be added over time. Therefore, please regard this model as an ongoing work-in-progress. This conference may be its official launch, but the idea is to repeat it periodically, as new vendors are added and/or existing vendors' ratings reviewed.

Second, the idea of eBestMatch is not to give evaluations or produce magic quadrants, which are set in stone. It is rather envisioned to show you the flexibility of our software in conducting selections, where one can conduct a number of simulations by tailoring criteria, varying weights and/or factor ratings. There was the intent to give some very generic, high-level idea of vendors' standings though. Through our own research activities, client interviews and surveys, our ERP selection engagements, interactions with our counterparts and vendors, we have rated vendors at a high level across the critical ERP selection criteria. You will appreciate the fact that it is very difficult to do anything more detailed with only 270 criteria (at least in the ERP space), and more than that would cause our Web software version to be very slow or almost non-operational. A proper selection exercise, using our desktop version of the software, would involve significantly higher number of criteria (amounting to several thousand), with a sharp vertical industry focus, and that would be rated strictly in a quantitative way, as opposed to the more open-ended, descriptive rating scale that we had to use for this purpose.

Having clarified this, I'm going to begin with an Overview of problems and solutions relating to technology selection, starting first with the problem:

According to our research, over 80% of enterprise technology evaluations run over time and budget, and once completed, over 50% of the implementations fail to meet functional and total cost expectations. There are three main reasons that project teams run into trouble, in our view:

Teams don't have an effective way to identify the critical vendor and product criteria necessary to successfully initiate the evaluation process.

They have no ability to prioritize the different criteria, once identified, relative to one another. As a result, final priorities are often more the result of internal political agendas than true needs and requirements.

And finally, project teams have no ability to gather objective, validated, updated data on the vendor alternatives. As you may well know, vendors have a tendency to exaggerate product, service, and corporate capabilities if it enables them to move to the next phase of the deal.