Glovia International has created a software-as-a-service solution that is the first full-fledged, on-demand, enterprise resource planning application aimed specifically at small and medium businesses manufacturers.
A Veteran Enterprise Resource Planning Vendor Makes a SaaS-y Statement.
A Glimpse of glovia.com 9 Glovia International, a subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702 [Tokyo Stock Exchange listing]), recently released glovia.com 9, an on-premise suite that attempts to solve some traditional usability drawbacks rather than deliver any new functional modules. Thus, Glovia is the first full-fledged and versatile manufacturing-oriented, on demand enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor to offer a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. The foundation of this solution includes the acquisition of the intellectual property rights to Northgate's PRO-IV highly scalable development platform's kernel. The extension of this kernel's capabilities is such that the two development environments, PRO-IV and glovia.com 7, are no longer fully compatible.
For background information on SaaS, see SaaS-ing the Manufacturing Opportunity. For background information on Glovia, see A Veteran Enterprise Resource Planning Vendor Makes a SaaS-y Statement.
Hence, the new name for the application's development platform is Glovia VM (with VM standing for "virtual machine"), which is somewhat similar to the frameworks of Progress Software OpenEdge, IBM WebSphere, SAP NetWeaver, or Microsoft .NET. The vendor has used this opportunity to ensure that the product's source code never changes, while the migration or upgrade paths between virtually all product releases (and customers' customized instances) are preserved via metadata (which is in tune with the above depicted SaaS principles). This also creates more platform independence, since Glovia has long supported a wide range of platforms covering UNIX, Linux, and Microsoft Windows, but only supports the Oracle database, which is a possible downside (and becomes moot in the SaaS model).
The only third-party products that Glovia resells are those of Interstage, which is a Fujitsu infrastructure suite that provides a workflow management module, a high-volume application server, and other Internet technologies. Wisely, Glovia decided not to write the application itself. Fujitsu's Interstage Suite provides a collaborative business integration platform that enables user companies to share and exchange information relatively easily across disparate systems—whether internal or external. Fujitsu's Interstage Suite is one of the world's broadest families of application infrastructure software products for designing, developing, and managing scalable, customized, mission-critical applications. The application suite is used by more than 8,000 companies in over 83,000 installations worldwide. Other than that, Glovia resells Visual-ARMS from Edibar, Glovia's partner for automotive electronic document interchange (EDI) message processing. Cognos remains the only embedded business intelligence (BI) solution provider, since today Glovia has standardized on Cognos and has done all the data mapping to add value and speed up implementation for its customers.
However, on the downside, glovia.com has not traditionally been strong in distribution and transportation modules (that is, the "ship and deliver" business process), in enterprise asset management (EAM), or in so-called "white-collar" corporate functionality, such as global financial consolidation or human resources (HR). Its "not invented here" and do-it-yourself (DIY) attitude has to that end been both a blessing and a curse. Recently though, Glovia has begun to be more open to partnering and has added much-needed functionality in its above financial management module to help increase its win rate within enterprises with complex organization (that is, beyond its stronghold of the four walls of a single plant that has to collaborate with its sister plants or trading partners). Specifically, functionality has been increased in the areas of budgeting and financial reporting and consolidation (through Glovia's alliance with Cognos).
Glovia Mindset Change
This has been quite a mindset change for Glovia, who had until lately been a market follower in respect to product technology. The vendor has belatedly tackled delivery of support for Windows NT, Internet enablement, and product componentization of its core ERP system. Moreover, it had been remiss in opening the product and delivering application programming interfaces (APIs). Glovia has nonetheless lately realized that in order to attract customers outside of its limited ERP customer base, the back-office platform agnosticism of its e-business products should be its highest priority. Owing to its recently found flexibility through Java and extensible markup language (XML) enablement, glovia.com may now function well either as a corporate backbone system, or as a solution that executes operations and planning at the plant or unit level.
With regards to coexistence with other systems in the latter case, the vendor has lately begun to offer integration adapters to link with other enterprise or legacy systems. The best example of this is the glovia.com 9 product's openness via 105 total XML transactions (which are in turn 105 potential web services) and simple object access protocol (SOAP) connectivity via Microsoft BizTalk Server. Consequently, Glovia hopes to become a manufacturing service platform that will connect and integrate various business systems that a user company might currently use. Customers should hereby be able to get answers to "What? When? How many? How much? How to?" for demand throughout the supply chain via such optimized service platform engines.
While deeper analysis of glovia.com 9 deserves a separate research article (especially the new supply chain planning [SCP] engine or enhanced factory planner capabilities), the gist of the product's embellishments could be summarized in two aspects. The first is an aesthetically pleasing and easy to use graphical user interface (GUI) that is in tune with the Web 2.0 trends and that should bolster system use, acceptance, and the learning curve for all users. The new GUI metaphor significantly heightens the level of clarity, accelerates the speed of navigation, and controls the flow of information contextually.
The second functional aspect creates major advances in planning, scheduling, and near real time execution capabilities via improved granularity. Namely, lead times can now be expressed in days or hours, fixed lead times can be set in units as little as fifteen minutes, and variable lead times can be calculated and rounded to the quarter hour. All planning documents such as orders, quotes, and requisitions have time fields, thereby adding date and time granularity to planning dates. The item substitution (in lower-level bills of material [BOMs]), the ability to create more than one work order per part number per day, additional order status codes, and hours or minutes sequencing capabilities all vouch for users being able to provide much more accurate promises to their customers and execute plans based on those promises.
Still, both Fujitsu's and Glovia's big league aspirations are rather optimistic at this stage, as both continue to suffer from laid-back and stealth marketing (at least so far), and consequently low market visibility and brand recognition outside Japan and the Far East. The vendor has seemingly long been happy with shoring up the existing install base and expanding within its customers' new divisions. Thus, one cannot help feeling that Glovia's knowledge of its target market has always been deeper than its market visibility and share. Further, both companies' channels have been rather nascent. Glovia has not yet built a reliable and established indirect channel (Fujitsu is certainly its biggest reseller in emerging markets like China and Brazil), and, with around 1,000 customers, its client base remains significantly smaller compared to many ERP vendors.
While the Fujitsu-Glovia relationship has worked well in Japan (a difficult market for many other ERP vendors to penetrate for various cultural and business peculiarities due to established local sales, support organizations, and delivery of product enhancements that support Japanese manufacturing styles), it may prove to be quite a different case in other markets.
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/an-erp-vendor-with-its-powerful-parent-backing-tackles-software-as-a-service-18880/
A Veteran Enterprise Resource Planning Vendor Makes a SaaS-y Statement.
A Glimpse of glovia.com 9 Glovia International, a subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702 [Tokyo Stock Exchange listing]), recently released glovia.com 9, an on-premise suite that attempts to solve some traditional usability drawbacks rather than deliver any new functional modules. Thus, Glovia is the first full-fledged and versatile manufacturing-oriented, on demand enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor to offer a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. The foundation of this solution includes the acquisition of the intellectual property rights to Northgate's PRO-IV highly scalable development platform's kernel. The extension of this kernel's capabilities is such that the two development environments, PRO-IV and glovia.com 7, are no longer fully compatible.
For background information on SaaS, see SaaS-ing the Manufacturing Opportunity. For background information on Glovia, see A Veteran Enterprise Resource Planning Vendor Makes a SaaS-y Statement.
Hence, the new name for the application's development platform is Glovia VM (with VM standing for "virtual machine"), which is somewhat similar to the frameworks of Progress Software OpenEdge, IBM WebSphere, SAP NetWeaver, or Microsoft .NET. The vendor has used this opportunity to ensure that the product's source code never changes, while the migration or upgrade paths between virtually all product releases (and customers' customized instances) are preserved via metadata (which is in tune with the above depicted SaaS principles). This also creates more platform independence, since Glovia has long supported a wide range of platforms covering UNIX, Linux, and Microsoft Windows, but only supports the Oracle database, which is a possible downside (and becomes moot in the SaaS model).
The only third-party products that Glovia resells are those of Interstage, which is a Fujitsu infrastructure suite that provides a workflow management module, a high-volume application server, and other Internet technologies. Wisely, Glovia decided not to write the application itself. Fujitsu's Interstage Suite provides a collaborative business integration platform that enables user companies to share and exchange information relatively easily across disparate systems—whether internal or external. Fujitsu's Interstage Suite is one of the world's broadest families of application infrastructure software products for designing, developing, and managing scalable, customized, mission-critical applications. The application suite is used by more than 8,000 companies in over 83,000 installations worldwide. Other than that, Glovia resells Visual-ARMS from Edibar, Glovia's partner for automotive electronic document interchange (EDI) message processing. Cognos remains the only embedded business intelligence (BI) solution provider, since today Glovia has standardized on Cognos and has done all the data mapping to add value and speed up implementation for its customers.
However, on the downside, glovia.com has not traditionally been strong in distribution and transportation modules (that is, the "ship and deliver" business process), in enterprise asset management (EAM), or in so-called "white-collar" corporate functionality, such as global financial consolidation or human resources (HR). Its "not invented here" and do-it-yourself (DIY) attitude has to that end been both a blessing and a curse. Recently though, Glovia has begun to be more open to partnering and has added much-needed functionality in its above financial management module to help increase its win rate within enterprises with complex organization (that is, beyond its stronghold of the four walls of a single plant that has to collaborate with its sister plants or trading partners). Specifically, functionality has been increased in the areas of budgeting and financial reporting and consolidation (through Glovia's alliance with Cognos).
Glovia Mindset Change
This has been quite a mindset change for Glovia, who had until lately been a market follower in respect to product technology. The vendor has belatedly tackled delivery of support for Windows NT, Internet enablement, and product componentization of its core ERP system. Moreover, it had been remiss in opening the product and delivering application programming interfaces (APIs). Glovia has nonetheless lately realized that in order to attract customers outside of its limited ERP customer base, the back-office platform agnosticism of its e-business products should be its highest priority. Owing to its recently found flexibility through Java and extensible markup language (XML) enablement, glovia.com may now function well either as a corporate backbone system, or as a solution that executes operations and planning at the plant or unit level.
With regards to coexistence with other systems in the latter case, the vendor has lately begun to offer integration adapters to link with other enterprise or legacy systems. The best example of this is the glovia.com 9 product's openness via 105 total XML transactions (which are in turn 105 potential web services) and simple object access protocol (SOAP) connectivity via Microsoft BizTalk Server. Consequently, Glovia hopes to become a manufacturing service platform that will connect and integrate various business systems that a user company might currently use. Customers should hereby be able to get answers to "What? When? How many? How much? How to?" for demand throughout the supply chain via such optimized service platform engines.
While deeper analysis of glovia.com 9 deserves a separate research article (especially the new supply chain planning [SCP] engine or enhanced factory planner capabilities), the gist of the product's embellishments could be summarized in two aspects. The first is an aesthetically pleasing and easy to use graphical user interface (GUI) that is in tune with the Web 2.0 trends and that should bolster system use, acceptance, and the learning curve for all users. The new GUI metaphor significantly heightens the level of clarity, accelerates the speed of navigation, and controls the flow of information contextually.
The second functional aspect creates major advances in planning, scheduling, and near real time execution capabilities via improved granularity. Namely, lead times can now be expressed in days or hours, fixed lead times can be set in units as little as fifteen minutes, and variable lead times can be calculated and rounded to the quarter hour. All planning documents such as orders, quotes, and requisitions have time fields, thereby adding date and time granularity to planning dates. The item substitution (in lower-level bills of material [BOMs]), the ability to create more than one work order per part number per day, additional order status codes, and hours or minutes sequencing capabilities all vouch for users being able to provide much more accurate promises to their customers and execute plans based on those promises.
Still, both Fujitsu's and Glovia's big league aspirations are rather optimistic at this stage, as both continue to suffer from laid-back and stealth marketing (at least so far), and consequently low market visibility and brand recognition outside Japan and the Far East. The vendor has seemingly long been happy with shoring up the existing install base and expanding within its customers' new divisions. Thus, one cannot help feeling that Glovia's knowledge of its target market has always been deeper than its market visibility and share. Further, both companies' channels have been rather nascent. Glovia has not yet built a reliable and established indirect channel (Fujitsu is certainly its biggest reseller in emerging markets like China and Brazil), and, with around 1,000 customers, its client base remains significantly smaller compared to many ERP vendors.
While the Fujitsu-Glovia relationship has worked well in Japan (a difficult market for many other ERP vendors to penetrate for various cultural and business peculiarities due to established local sales, support organizations, and delivery of product enhancements that support Japanese manufacturing styles), it may prove to be quite a different case in other markets.
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/an-erp-vendor-with-its-powerful-parent-backing-tackles-software-as-a-service-18880/
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