Companies to Watch 2004Intelligence | Integration | Infrastructure | Collaborative Business Collaborative Business
by Jeanette Burriesci The "virtual enterprise" is today's reality. Collaborative business automates interactions among suppliers, partners, and customers in order to lower costs and improve customer satisfaction. It also includes efficient knowledge sharing among domain experts within the enterprise. 1. PeopleSoft Inc.HQ: Pleasanton, Calif. PeopleSoft is getting the big picture, and most of the details, right. It acquired J.D. Edwards to become the number-two ERP vendor in the world. It seems to have thwarted Oracle's attempts at a hostile takeover. And it released PeopleSoft 8 Customer Relationship Management, showcasing its "Pure Internet Architecture" and supporting business process integration to third-party applications. 2. Fair Isaac Corp.HQ: San Rafael, Calif. Fair Isaac's blending of analytics and rules management puts it in a prime position to lead in the coming business activity monitoring (BAM) boom. Embedded in some of the largest enterprise applications and e-commerce platforms, and installed at many of the world's largest companies, its decision engines can turn hourly workers into seemingly omniscient experts. 3. Manugistics Inc.HQ: Rockville, Md. Customer satisfaction is high with Manugistics, provider of supply chain management and related software. Perhaps the focus on profit optimization that pervades its products contributes to that. Its SWARM technology boosts performance in very large-scale deployments. Although i2 still leads in revenue by a wide margin, its market capitalization is not much bigger than Manugistics's. 4. Optiant Inc.HQ: Boston For manufacturers that operate on thin margins, poor supply chain decisions have dire consequences. Inventory management, complex outsourcing decisions, and knowing when it's most profitable to ramp up or retire a product require calculations a mere human mind can't tackle. Optiant suggests optimal decisions tied to goals, through unique and successful analytic models that look holistically at your entire supply chain. 5. Pegasystems Inc.HQ: Cambridge, Mass. Alan Trefler founded the company to make enterprise systems autonomous and agile. He provides software that couples business process management with business rules management, forming a foundation for BAM and straight-through processing. Pegasystems is a technology leader and a viable, profitable company. 6. UGS PLM Solutions, an EDS CompanyHQ: Plano, Texas UGS PLM Solutions is a leader in product life-cycle management along several different dimensions. It has the most complete PLM product set offered, and the kind of complex, large-scale implementations that test a vendor's mettle. 7. Manhattan Associates Inc.HQ: Atlanta Manhattan Associates continues to provide robust supply-chain execution products that are practical but often leading-edge. New support for RFID compliance comes at time when retail goods manufacturers desperately need it. The Warehouse Management System now supports easier data sharing across applications in the supply chain. 8. Ilog Inc.HQ: Paris Ilog's JRules BRMS (business rules management system) gets high marks for putting power in the hands of nonprogrammer business analysts. It even helps you optimize rules. EAI and business process management vendors have been keen lately to add business rules management to their capabilities, and both Vitria (EAI) and FileNet (process management) chose to partner with Ilog. 9. Siebel Systems Inc.HQ: San Mateo, Calif. Siebel's future rests primarily on three legs: the Universal Application Network, CRM OnDemand, and Siebel Analytics. Now on the rebound from an extended downward stock price trajectory, Siebel has remained the CRM revenue leader. 10. Savvion Inc.HQ: Santa Clara, Calif. Savvion BusinessManager is not just any business process management system. It covers the entire process life cycle: modeling, deployment, management, and improvement of processes. Quick deployments, fast and significant returns on investment, and prepackaged elements that make it friendly to business users boost its popularity. 11. Inxight Software Inc.HQ: Sunnyvale, Calif. Inxight is a premier purveyor of knowledge management software. Its entity extraction capabilities let it efficiently categorize volumes of documents. The company has consistently grown, has received an investment from CIA funding arm In-Q-Tel, and has solid technological underpinnings. 12. Model N Inc.HQ: South San Francisco, Calif. Model N takes contract management to a higher level. With patent-pending "revenue execution" algorithms, its software prevents you from leaving money on the table while creating and executing contracts. Even when fully benefiting from the terms of a complex contract involves cross-departmental processes, Model N supports you.
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