For any business today, purchasing enterprise software ( ERP, CRM, BI and supply chain apps) is probably unlike any other corporate activity.
"Of all the assets that an enterprise acquires, enterprise software brings with it the most unusual, onerous and restrictive set of constraints," notes Forrester Research VP and principal analyst Ray Wang, in a brand-new report on software licensing best practices.
No one has to remind CIOs just how bad the last 10 months have been: New data from CIO's exclusive survey of top IT executives shows that CIOs may have hit rock bottom with their budgeting and cost-cutting measures.
First, the bad news: Just 14 per cent of the 171 IT leaders who took part in the May 2009 "CIO Economic Impact Survey" expect IT budget increases in the near future, which is down from 20 per cent in a similar survey conducted in January, and 63 per cent in March 2008.
Every enterprise software vendor is hearing the same thing these days from their customers: "I need to cut my software licensing and pricing costs. What can you do to help me out?"
At SAP's 2009 Sapphire Show, Leo Apotheker gave no ordinary keynote presentation. In Apotheker's first opportunity to speak to the masses as SAP's sole CEO, he officially took the ceremonial CEO reins from retiring Henning Kagermann, his long-time friend and his co-CEO for the past year.
AMR Research released its annual "Supply Chain Top 25" list, and the top dog leading the supply chain pack this year -as it did last year - is Apple.
It's not shocking that many companies are scaling back, delaying or canceling IT projects. Recent Gartner survey data of 475 IT decision makers in global enterprises with 1000 or more employees found that more companies are actually postponing or scaling back computing projects rather than canceling them outright.
Conventional wisdom would hold that customer relationship management (CRM) software is one area of the business not to be ignored during tough financial times. But who's got millions to spend on new CRM apps and functionalities?
Carmine Gallo, presentation coach and author of the upcoming book The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs (McGraw-Hill, October 2009), has counseled many executives on how to give a great presentation. He's also witnessed many common-yet avoidable-presentation errors that people always seem to commit.
Here are Gallo's top five ways that people ruin their presentations and his strategies on how to avoid making them. Above all, Gallo says, remember that the most engaging speakers have a simple secret weapon: "They practice much more than the average presenter."
Sometimes, one year can make all the difference for corporate IT departments.
Conventional wisdom and decades' worth of IT project failures and less-than-desirable outcomes tell us that every tech-related investment-from a massive SAP ERP rollout to a small Salesforce.com SaaS CRM deployment-comes with some amount of risk.
Somali pirates who brazenly attacked container ships in the Indian Ocean have garnered a lot of recent attention. But for companies that source products from Chinese manufacturing partners, there are even greater and longer-term business risks due to pirating attacks on companies' intellectual property and supply chains.
Oracle's announcement of its intended US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun has certainly shaken up the hardware and server operating system (OS) business markets.
During the next several months, important questions will have to be sorted out by Oracle, such as can the Silicon Valley behemoth succeed in a subsuming Sun's wares and employees into its own world, and will Oracle be able to achieve the lofty earnings predictions made by CEO Larry Ellison?
If IBM does end up acquiring Sun Microsystems (over the weekend, heated talks <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/488416">on the proposed $7 billion deal broke down</a>), history tells us that IBM has a good chance of creating long-term shareholder value and greater returns on its big investment.
The world of enterprise applications ( <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/40323">ERP</a>, <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/40295">CRM</a>, <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/40296">BI</a> and <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/40940">supply chain</a> apps) may seem boring to those caught up in the <a href="http://advice.cio.com/thomas_wailgum/wake_up_people_forget_twitter_and_iphone_apps_and_focus_on_sap_and_erp_apps">hysteria over Twitter and iPhone applications</a>, but there's plenty of drama to be found (even more than on an episode of "The Bachelor"): Troubled multimillion-dollar software deals that produce spectacular failures and huge spending nightmares; vendor marketing bravado that breeds cut-throat competition and contempt; and embarrassing and costly lawsuits over botched implementations and intellectual property breaches.
In today's economic climate, once desperate business measures now appear plausible at any given time, inside any given company: a sudden bankruptcy, a hurried acquisition, a sale of a profitable division to free up cash.
Not many people can claim to have been <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/448997">telecommuting</a> for as long as Jack Nilles has been untethered from office life.