Things have become so depressing for some U.S. retailers that rather than filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection and trying to slog through the recession, they're simply throwing in the towel.
Sharp-eyed and highly caffeinated regulars might have noticed the brand-new employee at the Mercer Island Drive Thru Starbucks in November.
The newbie, wearing the standard-issue green apron, was receiving a crash course in just about every function at the 1,800-square-foot store. He took a turn as a barista, manned the drive-thru, handed out samples to customers, took out the trash, and assisted a patron who was trying to connect to the Wi-Fi network. He tinkered with the store's point-of-sale (POS) system. He even did some scheduling.
A worldwide economic recession, volatile energy prices and mistrust of Chinese products are conspiring to end China's reign as the low-cost supplier to the world.
The latest versions allow users to "quickly create high-impact, dynamic presentations, while integrating workflow and ways to easily share information," notes Microsoft's PowerPoint overview webpage.
If a car owner doesn't pay back his car loan, the repo man usually arrives in the dark of night to take back the automobile. If a homeowner defaults on his mortgage, the bank forecloses on and seizes the house. The car and the house serve as the collateral for the financing organization-they can be cleaned up or cleaned out, as it were, and resold. But what if a company defaults on a loan for a multimillion-dollar SAP ERP software purchase? Or can't repay <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/465097/subject/IBM+Corporation">IBM Global Financing</a> for the hardware, software and services that it bought two quarters ago?
Forrester Research last stacked up the application strategies of <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/40323">ERP</a> heavyweights SAP and Oracle in 2006. Back then, Forrester analysts noted that both business apps vendors had just launched new architectures for a <a href="http://advice.cio.com/thomas_wailgum/what_21st_century_erp_needs_to_succeed">new generation</a> of service-oriented and flexible <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/177300">enterprise applications</a>.
David Placek, founder and president of Lexicon Branding, has worked with numerous high-tech vendors during the past 26 years -- Microsoft, Intel, Nokia, Apple and RIM, to name a few. Product names that have come out of Lexicon's four-month creative and linguistic processes can be found throughout the tech industry (Intel's Pentium and Apple's PowerBook), and many have crept into pop culture. Ever heard of the BlackBerry?
Most recent, Lexicon worked with Microsoft on Azure, its new cloud-computing operating system, that will be available in the second half of 2009. Lexicon Branding works in industries other than high-tech, too: automotive giant Toyota (the Scion car) as well as Procter & Gamble (Febreze spray) are two of the many well-known product brands that have been created in Lexicon's Sausalito, Calif., headquarters.
Not surprisingly, SaaS vendors have decided there's no time like the present to make a full court sales press. In a down economy with slashed IT budgets, when there's no tolerance for 18-month software implementations and the price tags of on-premise software from Oracle and maintenance fees for SAP applications are not falling, software-as-a-service and cloud computing offerings become more attractive options for businesses.
Marc Benioff, the CEO of SaaS CRM vendor Salesforce.com, recently explained just why his flavor of the cloud computing model was best suited for today's troubled economic times. Forget big contracts with Microsoft, Oracle or SAP, and get beyond outdated hardware and software solutions, Benioff told CNBC in early October. Benioff said that Salesforce.com's "pay-as-you-go, elastic model" offers clients much more flexibility.
Mergers and acquisitions are not usually quick affairs. Just the due diligence process of examining a company's enterprise IT systems -- the infrastructure, applications, outsourcing deals and vendor contracts-- can take up to a week, according to industry consultants.
But as Wall Street imploded in September, entire deals in financial services have closed over a weekend. Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. JPMorgan Chase buying Washington Mutual. The Wells Fargo purchase of Wachovia.
Change is not just a political hot topic these days. According to a Gartner analyst, four emerging software solutions are reshaping software as we know it and will likely cause major disruptions to vendors and how the software industry delivers its products and services.
In the world of high-tech product announcements, Jan. 18, 2006, seems like an awfully long time ago. On that date, Oracle executives, including <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/452717/subject/Charles+Phillips">President Charles Phillips</a>, boasted that they were halfway through the Oracle Fusion Applications development process.
If you work in IT at a financial services company-or any organization reeling from the country's economic woes-you're probably feeling insecure about your job not-not to mention powerless over market forces beyond your control.
SAP's Steve Mann is a blogger, a big Twitter user and is hooked into many other online services--LinkedIn and the Social Media Collective, to name just two. Mann is wedded to and embedded in all things related to social media.
He's trying to do the same, in a sense, with SAP. As a vice president of global marketing, he is tasked with leading the German software giant's evolving social-media strategy. Mann has been at SAP for six years in variety of roles--from marketing innovation and intelligence, to competitive strategy, to customer experience.
A recent report from Gartner throws a big bucket of cold water on software-as-a-service ERP hype, especially for larger enterprises. Gartner analyst Denise Ganly writes in the SaaS Impact on ERP report that enterprises' dire need for a suite of integrated ERP solutions is not something that SaaS vendors can reliably deliver right now.
"Because of the complexity of ERP suites, SaaS offerings for administrative and operational functions typically have provided functionality that is confined to one domain, such as sales force automation, or one business process, such as payroll," Ganly writes. "Thus, ERP SaaS suite offerings are still immature."
In an internal company e-mail obtained by several media outlets in early August, <a href="http://www.apple.com">Apple</a> CEO Steve Jobs fessed up to the problems surrounding the company's summer product blitz. "It was a mistake to launch <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/443620/subject/Apple+MobileMe">MobileMe</a> at the same time as <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/443620/subject/Apple+iPhone+3G">iPhone 3G</a>, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store," Jobs wrote in the e-mail, which was obtained by <a href="http://www.macworld.com/article/134854/2008/08/jobs.html"> Macworld </a>.