Intelligent Enterprise

Better Insight for Business Decisions

RSS
Webcasts
Whitepapers
Subscribe
Home

July 18, 2003

The Intelligent SMB: Opportunity Knocks

With leading strategic application solution providers pinning hopes for growth on small- to medium-sized businesses, companies have a golden opportunity to create competitive advantages with IT

by David Stodder

Continued from Page 2

Strategic Confusion

Of course, hovering over the entire market is the acquisition conundrum that, as of this writing, continues to roil customers and occupy the attention of Oracle, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards executives. PeopleSoft's original effort to buy J.D. Edwards was a clear ploy to capture that company's desirable mid-market customer base and pursue the SMB sector more aggressively.

The confusion benefits SAP, Microsoft, and other mainstays of the mid-market, such as Lawson Software. These vendors will deepen relationships in the indirect software sales channel — critical in the SMB sector — and take time to influence the influencers. IDC identifies these as "third parties who recommend product brands and may also offer brand advice, but don't necessarily sell the products they recommend." IDC reports that SMBs "tend to rely on influencers more for business than technology advice, which means that vendors have to invest in training and education, at least as much as they do in rebates and other influence rewards."

Partners are also essential for SMB strategic business application providers; they provide critical vertical industry or function focus that will sell an SMB on a strategic application investment. In the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, for example, "the ability to forecast demand accurately and set price and production levels accordingly is the difference between profitable lines and excessive and expensive inventories," reports AMR Research. In the CPG industry, "feature and function takes place in the context of how the customer[s] can best deal with cost, become more efficient, and manage how they do business without having to build out customizations," says J.D. Edwards' Hensarling. "Businesses want to look at processes they need to attack to gain the most value."

Smart Performance

Demand for tools that support better strategic process management has traditional ERP providers leading with their enterprise performance management, reporting, and embedded analytics features. "We're instrumenting our software," says Hensarling. "We've got the transaction system that defines the business process. Analytics provide the instrumenting."

ERP providers argue that their integrated suites ensure data quality and a closed loop with business processes and operations. However, some analysts suggest that the ERP suites are still too "horizontal" and don't offer the vertical depth SMBs need. AMR Research, among other analysts, praises Silvon Software's "attention to operations performance management for the manufacturing sector," which AMR says "gives customers insight into areas of process risk that can be plugged before they become problematic."

Rate This Article

Comments:

Optional e-mail address:

Leading BI and analytics software providers are aiming especially at companies that have outgrown simple reporting solutions or, without a data warehouse, face mushrooming numbers of reports and tables that defy their technical expertise to distill into actionable knowledge. "We're about empowering people who make decisions, and not necessarily by pumping data at them faster," says Bob Lokken, president and CEO of ProClarity Corp. "Ease of use is what they want: but I don't mean just 'push this button, wasn't that easy' features. I mean ease of use that addresses the user experience from the moment they see the data to the moment that they can make an informed decision. The complexity should be in the software, not in front of the user."

Drinking from the data fire hose isn't a solution, for SMBs, says Business Objects' Kellogg. Thus, emerging business performance management solutions from Cognos, Business Objects, Actuate Corp., and others — in which metrics, exception-based reporting, customized dashboards, and real-time visibility into business processes rule the day — could have strong appeal. Opportunity knocks for software providers that can meet tough SMB requirements — and for SMBs that seize the opportunity for competitive advantage.