Magazine Reads

There’s a hypothesis in cosmology and astrophysics called the Fermi Paradox that ponders a simple question – where are the aliens? This thought experiment illuminates the contradiction between the absence of evidence for extraterrestrial life and the mathematical prediction that life should be evident throughout the cosmos

Why multi-cloud is the New Normal

Not long ago the IT landscape of an enterprise was a simple affair: one or a few data centres, usually determined by location requirements, would create a system landscape that every IT person with 10 or more year’s work experience grew up with. Fast forward to the 2010s and the landscape was characterised by duality – meaning that the data centres were still there – and a few workloads in the cloud, most likely a single cloud.

Will low-code / no-code drive or fix ERP technical debt?

It’s easy to jump on a bandwagon, especially in technology circles. When the next ‘killer app’ comes along (or the next Twitter starts to emerge), every protagonist, futurist, evangelist (and possibly a few tech-polygamists) wants a share of voice and a slice of the market pie.

Can a new entrant change the game in the experience economy?

Getting the band back together is not always a prudent idea. How many times have we seen legends reform in their twilight years only to undo their previous good work and rewrite their legacy with a failed attempt at making it again?

Living the EAM Dream: How asset management has changed

Asset Performance Management (APM) is the evolution of Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), so how will this technology now be applied inside the Industry 4.0 universe to give us the Maintenance 4.0 intelligence we will need to keep running?

Retail software & tech trends

Ask any retailer what keeps them awake at night and the majority will probably answer Amazon. The combination of product range, price, availability and delivery infrastructure has caught many asleep at the wheel. Just when everyone thought ecommerce was king...

Creating resilient end-to-end agility in the New Digital Supply Chain

COVID-19 has caused even the most robust supply chains to creak. What lessons can we learn and how should enterprises structure their supply chain so that digital technologies ensure goods and services flow?

Acumatica takes on Sage in the UK

Acumatica is the US-based cloud-native ERP vendor that has set its sights on a big slice of the UK market that is currently occupied by Sage. Acumatica is from the same stable as IFS...

Going green with the Cloud

We’re encouraged to choose more sustainable options every day – and this extends to the decisions organisations make when purchasing technology. For any number of reasons, sustainability is an increasingly important factor in the IT decision making process today...

Michiel Verhoeven: Can a new MD move the needle for UK customers?

Back in July 2020, SAP appointed Michiel Verhoeven as managing director in the UK&I – until now we haven’t heard much from the new top man. In his first media interview since taking over the hot seat...

Chris Pope: Digital Workflows

ServiceNow is the digital workflow organisation that has been around for 15 years but has recently seen a huge rise in uptake for its services and has been catapulted into the media headlines following the arrival...

Danny Attias: #1 Ranked CIO in the UK

Anthony Nolan’s Danny Attias has been ranked the number one CIO in the UK. A mid-sized organisation that is dedicated to saving the lives of people with blood cancer, the...

Retail Reborn – How technology change has become a source of high street hope

Technology can help reinvent the high street and deliver a new era of lean and mean retailers capable of capturing the imagination of a digital native generation. Given the carnage of...

Independent or Global SI – What makes a perfect match for transformation?

COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation plans of many organisations, in some cases bringing about years of change in just a few months. Whether those companies turn...

The Moment of Service

There’s a fragile point in time during every business deal when the blood, sweat and tears are condensed into a single instance. The efforts made to secure the sale, the capital invested to deliver your product, and the time spent nurturing relationships are boiled down to a solitary moment when it all comes together or fails to meet expectations. This is the moment you either delight or disappoint. This is the moment of service...

The time is NOW for Kevin Samuelson and INFOR

When we last wrote about Infor all the talk was around an IPO – and who doesn’t love a big IPO? I wrote bullishly about the expectation of Infor floating and becoming one of the biggest software IPOs of all time. It seemed certain that the prospect of raising a load of new cash coupled with the lure of being catapulted into the limelight would be too much for Infor (and their VC partners) to resist. Thank God it didn’t happen...

Stacks v Suites: Why make customers choose?

When it comes to investing in enterprise software, organisations have many options allowing them to choose whatever technology or consumption method best suits their business requirements...

Have third-party software support providers got ERP vendors on the ropes

In the ERP software world, as with most big business, perception is everything – that’s why software vendors invest so much in PR. Despite this, most of the software vendors we approached to participate...

The thin veneer of differentiation

I wrote to each of the ERP vendors and asked them to send me a few words on what set them apart from the competition - the results were depressingly vague. I hate to break it to you but ‘putting customers first’...

Another new dawn for Epicor

Epicor has been sold, again – this time to CD&R, a venture capital house with plans to double the business in five years. Paul Esherwood sat down (virtually) with Steve Murphy, CEO, to discuss what the new ownership means...

Just how low can the RPA ERP robots go?

If we were allowed to create new insertions to conjoin acronyms with acronyms, then our first mission would be to add ERP to RPA. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) augmented under (AU) robotic process automation...

What’s your COVID price? Is the pandemic threatening the consultancy model?

Consultancies and systems integrators have been both criticised and critical over the past few months but what does a post-pandemic future look like? Last year we predicted some big changes for the SIs in terms of their delivery methods...

What shape are your shared services in?

A simple way to think about shared services is as one back office installation that is used by various departments. The administrative tasks in an HR office, for example, can increasingly be carried out on a single system. This same system can then feed...

Is this the reckoning humanity needed?

t’s obvious to conclude that humanity doesn’t work. Our purpose in this world seems unclear and we have stumbled from century to century without direction or reason. Like a rudderless ship cast into the vast oceans, we have tried many ideas over several thousand years and none have delivered peace, purpose or paradise.

The future of human touch in business

Around the world, humans are struggling to ignore thousands of years of bio-social convention and avoid touching each other. What are the implications for how we conduct business?

HR in Lockdown

COVID-19 lockdown stipulations rocketed employee well-being and online collaboration to priority status practically overnight. HR teams scrambled to find ways to help the workforce keep in touch, maintain morale, and enable...

The importance of leadership, purpose and wellbeing in a crisis

When I interviewed Mike Ettling back in April 2019 he had just taken the hot seat at Unit4. He inherited a mixed bag of fortunes but told me about a bold plan to transform the company into a contemporary ERP vendor...

Software firms at forefront of COVID-19 efforts

Software vendors are leveraging their expertise to help customers, employees and the community overcome COVID-19 challenges. The way in which companies conduct themselves during the COVID-19 crisis has come under intense scrutiny. As we have already seen, companies that fail to support both their customers and staff during this period are likely to be judged harshly – and publicly – and could incur financial and reputational damage from which it will be difficult to recover...

COVID stress test demonstrates resilience in software values

M&A activity is set to play a key role in the enterprise tech sector as strategic alliances, opportune acquisitions and distressed sales bolster the ERP market. It used to be the case that it was only when the tide went out that you could see who was swimming naked...

New best practices for a Pandemic World

The COVID-19 pandemic has caught enterprises off guard and now CxOs are under pressure to determine their new business plans and how to get their enterprises started again. Markets, customers, business and ways...