
Survey Results: Challenges and Opportunities for Professional Services Firms
Earlier this summer one of my clients, Deltek, sponsored IDC in a survey and white paper on current challenges and opportunities for professional services firms world wide. The phone survey of 280 consulting firms in the US, UK, Belgium, Scandinavia…

NetSuite OpenAir untangles the professional services ‘hairball’
NetSuite OpenAir released services resource planning, to bring ERP-style benefits to professional services organizations.

How to really transform a service business
Every time I go to a NetSuite event, I wonder to myself why other vendors don’t make more of a song-and-dance about the potential for highly impactful business transformation that SaaS enables. Maybe it’s the particular sector of the market that NetSuite targets, where the early adopters are companies that want to find some way […]

The Year in Review in Software & Services
2009 had some interesting twists to it as far as the software and services industries go. Here are top five services stories of 2009. 1) The breakup of BearingPoint – BearingPoint had some big bills to pay this year. When the time came to do so, they couldn’t. The company began the process of selling […]
Shouldn’t services firms have their own ERP?
I caught up this week with Morris Panner, CEO of OpenAir (now part of NetSuite). One aspect of our wide-ranging conversation concerned the continuing evolution of businesses, the economy, etc. towards a greater services orientation. Drawing on that, we discussed how services firms need their own version of ERP.
Here are just some of the […]
Interview with Microsoft’s Seth Patton
More from the Project Conference
Seth Patton is the senior marketing director for Microsoft Project. I got thirty minutes alone with Seth at the Microsoft Project Conference 2009 show this afternoon.
We discussed several topics impacting the PSA (professional services automation) and PPM (project portfolio management) software space. Here are the highlights from that conversation:
1) How […]
More on Microsoft Project 2010
The Completeness of the PPM Solution Grows
(More from the Project Conference 2009 in Phoenix)
As the demonstrations of Project 2010 continue, I noted the following:
1) Microsoft has added a lot of functionality in its Resource Management and Time Entry components. The resource management capability gives project managers, staffing professionals and others a lot of visibility into […]
Microsoft’s Project 2010
The conference announcements so far…
I just watched Microsoft executives demonstrate the upcoming Project 2010 product here in Phoenix at the Project Conference 2009.
Here are my first blush comments/observations:
1) The product has matured significantly as a PPM solution. The portfolio management functions are more robust, more graphical and address executive what-if needs quite well. This […]
Interesting things I’ve been briefed on lately…
NetSuite, CA, iTrade Network, Meridian Project Systems, UC4, Project Open,….
NetSuite has some new financial consolidation/planning functionality in their SaaS solution. It permits global firms to handle currency conversion. Adaptive Planning’s software is at the core of this solution. This technology does not currently use an in-core memory resident database. The more of this sort of […]