SSA Global (formerly SSA GT) has finally announced plans to merge its dozen or so products into two main product lines. One product line will bring together all of the iSeries (formerly AS/400) systems, including BPCS, Infinium, and several systems acquired from Computer Associates, such as PRMS and KBM. The other product line will bring together the Unix based products, such as the recent Baan acquisition as well as several other products acquired from CA. Integration will be based on open standards wherever possible, using Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and IBM Websphere. SSA expects the migration to take two to four years. However, the company is still promising to maintain support for older products indefinitely.
I've been expecting this move for some time now. There's no way SSA Global can be successful by maintaining so many separate product lines. As SSA's Cory Eaves says, "There's no need for us to support 12 different general ledger systems or 12 different accounting systems. It just doesn't make sense; it's not economical for us."
Rationalizing the portfolio and consolidating to two families should allow SSA to leverage product development resources across a larger base of customers and should make it easier to accommodate future acquisitions into these two families.
CNET has a good summary of SSA's direction.
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