A Guide for Cloud ERP Buyers

In working with clients over the last decade, I've watched as cloud ERP vendors have been steadily encroaching on the territory of traditional ERP providers. As a result, ERP selection projects today are more and more becoming evaluations of cloud ERP providers.

However, buyers need to realize not all ERP systems that are labeled “cloud” are the same. To help buyers better understand these differences, I've just completed a new report for my research firm, Computer Economics, entitled Understanding Cloud ERP Buyers and Providers, based on my experience in selection deals as well as extensive analysis of vendor offerings over the years.

Figure 2 from that report sums up the differences:

In brief:

• Cloud-Only Providers: These are the “born-in-the-cloud” ERP vendors that do not have an on-premises offering and include such companies as NetSuite, Plex, Workday, Rootstock, Kenandy, FinancialForce, Intacct, and several others. These tend to be newer, smaller vendors (although Workday and NetSuite are each in the range of $500 million in annual revenue). Because cloud-only vendors have a single deployment option, they each can focus their entire business—from product development to sales to implementation and ongoing support—on the cloud. As a result, they make fewer compromises and tend to deliver the maximum benefits of cloud solutions in speed, agility, and scalability.
   
• Traditional ERP Vendors: These are larger, more established providers such as SAP, Oracle, Infor, Microsoft, and a number of others. They are growing more slowly than cloud-only providers. They have more complex businesses as they have to support their on-premises customers as well as their hosted or cloud customers. Because they have developed their solutions over many years or even decades, their functional footprint tends to be more complete than those of cloud-only providers.

There is much more in our analysis of the cloud ERP market, which describes these two major categories of cloud ERP providers in more detail. In addition, the report also segments cloud ERP buyers into two categories: first-time buyers looking for their first ERP systems and established companies replacing their legacy systems. As it turns out, generally speaking, these two categories of buyers have different pain points and different criteria driving their decision-making. 

At this stage of cloud ERP market maturity, each of these provider categories has its advantages and disadvantages, and there is no one right answer for a given buyer. Organizations considering cloud ERP need to carefully consider their requirements, their choices, and what tradeoffs they are willing to make. We, therefore, conclude with recommendations for buyers looking at cloud ERP. We also have some advice for providers that seek to serve these two types of buyers.

As a practical aid to buyers, the full report includes two lengthy appendices, which provide profiles of the key ERP vendors of hosted and cloud solutions today, along with an assessment of their market presence. Cloud-only ERP providers profiled include Acumatica, AscentERP, FinancialForce, Intacct, Kenandy, NetSuite, Plex Systems, Rootstock, and Workday. Traditional ERP providers with cloud/hosted solutions include Epicor, IFS, Infor, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, QAD, Sage, SAP, Syspro, and UNIT4.

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The Cloud ERP Land Rush

Oklahoma Land Rush

For those unfamiliar with US history, in 1889 the US government opened unoccupied lands in Oklahoma to settlement. Settlers could claim up to 160 acres, live on and improve the land, and then legally obtain title to it. Such an opportunity led to a land rush, in which thousands of settlers raced into Oklahoma to make their claims.

Today, cloud ERP is like Oklahoma in 1889, mostly unoccupied land, and there is a race as cloud vendors rush in. NetSuite and Plex were two early settlers. Today NetSuite has more acreage (number of customers), while Plex has fewer acres but more development of those acres (functionality)--at least in manufacturing. Cloud-only providers such as Rootstock, Kenandy, AscentERP, Acumatica, Intacct, and SAP (ByDesign) are also in the race. Traditional providers such as Microsoft Dynamics, Infor, Epicor, Oracle, UNIT4, and QAD have also entered the land rush, although they are moving more slowly, as they need to pull wagons full of their traditional on-premises software along with them.

In the larger suite of enterprise applications, such as CRM and HCM, the land rush is further along.  Salesforce for CRM and Workday for HCM have already staked out large claims and are rapidly developing them. But Microsoft with Dynamics CRM, SAP with SuccessFactors, and Oracle with its Fusion HCM are also adding to their acreage. Core ERP functionality, on the other hand, is earlier in the land rush. There is still a lot of open territory with a lot of unclaimed land.

FinancialForce Staking Its Claim

One provider that is clearly in the land rush is FinancialForce, which today announced new branding to signal its claim in cloud ERP.

The company is now referring to its suite of enterprise applications as FinancialForce ERP. The new branding is necessary because FinancialForce long ago ceased to be a provider only of financial management systems.

FinancialForce previously added professional services automation to its portfolio and late last year acquired Less Software, which provides inventory management and order. Vana Workforce is another acquisition from last year, which adds human capital management (HCM) functionality.  FinancialForce also added its own functionality in areas outside of financials, such as advanced quoting and revenue recognition. With this broader footprint, FinancialForce now qualifies as a cloud ERP provider.

Building on the Salesforce.com platform, FinancialForce has direct integration to the Salesforce cloud applications as well as to all of the other providers in Salesforce's AppExchange marketplace. The recent evolution of this platform to Salesforce1 gives FinancialForce additional capabilities for building out its mobile deployment options.

How many acres will FinancialForce claim? The signs are hopeful. The company is reporting strong results: 80% growth in its revenue run rate, and 62% growth in headcount year-over-year, bringing it to over 260 employees globally.  FinancialForce now has customers in 27 countries with users in 45 nations worldwide. By all accounts, the company is on a strong growth trajectory.

Plenty of Land for Everyone

The economic and strategic benefits of cloud computing accrue to end-user organization that completely or at least largely eliminate their on-premises IT infrastructure.  Our research at Computer Economics shows that cloud user companies save more than 15% in terms of their total IT spending, and the money that they do spend goes more toward innovation and less towards on-going support. But it is difficult to move away from on-premises infrastructure if an organization's core ERP system is still on-premises. Therefore, the move to cloud ERP is essential if organizations are to fully realize the benefits of cloud computing. You can move your CRM and HCM systems to the cloud--but if you are still running on-premises ERP, you still have one large foot stuck in the old paradigm.

In my view, there does not need to be one clear winner in cloud ERP. Just as there were dozens of on-premises ERP vendors in the 1990s, especially when sliced by industry sector, there is plenty of room for many more cloud ERP providers. There is plenty of land for everyone.

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Four Cloud ERP Providers on the Salesforce Platform

As cloud ERP solutions mature, they are becoming viable alternatives to traditional on-premises and hosted ERP systems. Dreamforce 2013, the annual conference of Salesforce.com users in San Francisco last November, offered a good opportunity to review the progress of four such cloud ERP systems—all built on the Salesforce.com platform.

Salesforce1: The Next Generation Salesforce Platform

During the conference, Salesforce unveiled the latest iteration of its platform, now dubbed Salesforce1, as shown in Figure 1.  The platform has a lot going for it.

• It provides a complete applications development environment (a platform-as-a-service, or PaaS) running on Salesforce.com’s cloud infrastructure. Developers building on Salesforce1 can interoperate with any of Salesforce.com’s applications, such as its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, as well as other third party applications built on the platform. 
• It includes social business capabilities. Developers can incorporate Salesforce.com’s social business application, Chatter, as part of their systems. 
• The platform puts mobile deployment at the center, allowing apps to be written once and be deployed simultaneously on a variety of user platforms, including desktop browsers, tablet computers, and smart phones. In support of the so-called "Internet of Things," Salesforce1 can even be deployed on connected devices. 
• Finally, the platform provides a way for developers to market and sell their applications, by means of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace. 

For a detailed view of Salesforce1, see this review by Doug Henschen over at Information Week.

With Salesforce.com now the market leader in CRM, it is no wonder that its platform has become more and more attractive to developers. Building on this platform, third-party developers become, in essence, an ecosystem around Salesforce.com, with strong network effects. The more popular the platform becomes, the more it attracts developers. In return, the more developers build on the platform, the more attractive it becomes to other developers. It is a virtuous cycle.

In our consulting work at Strativa over the past three to five years, I’ve seen several cases where organizations first implemented Salesforce.com’s CRM system, then based on that success started looking to see whether they could replace their existing on-premises ERP system with a cloud-based solution. And, when they search the AppExchange, they find four cloud ERP providers: FinancialForce, Kenandy, Rootstock, and AscentERP.

I’ve been following these four providers for several years, and this post serves as an overview and update, based on briefings and interviews I conducted with these four vendors during the Dreamforce user conference.

FinancialForce

As the name implies, FinancialForce started in 2009 as an accounting and billing system. It was formed as a joint venture between UNIT4 and Salesforce.com. The company expanded into professional services automation in 2010 with the acquisition of a PSA system from Appirio, built on the Salesforce platform, and by building out its own services resource planning (SRP) functionality. More recently, Financialforce developed offerings for revenue recognition and credit control on the new Salesforce1 platform for revenue recognition, pushing these functions out to sales and services users in the field.

The company lists 50 customer case-studies on its website, an impressive number for a vendor that is only four or five years old.

At Dreamforce 2013, FinancialForce took two more steps to expand its ERP footprint. First, it announced acquisition of another AppExchange partner, Less Software, which provides configure-price-quote (CPQ), order fulfillment, service contracts, inventory management, and supplier management modules. Founded just two years ago, Less Software was already partnering and doing joint deals with FinancialForce, so the acquisition does not appear to acquire much if any integration work. FinancialForce refers to Less Software as having supply chain management (SCM) capabilities, but I would view that as somewhat of an exaggeration. There are some light warehouse management capabilities, but no transportation management or supply chain planning functionality that I can see. Less Software has had particular success in selling to value-added resellers, such as Cisco resellers, as well as to industrial distribution organizations and one manufacturer of children’s furniture.

The second step, announced during the conference, was the acquisition of Vana Workforce, a human capital management (HCM) software provider—which is also built on the Salesforce platform. Vana's HCM functionality includes core HR, talent management, recruitment compensation, time management, and absence management. Payroll is not provided, but the system can connect with a number of popular payroll systems. As with Less Software, Vana Workforce was already partnering with FinancialForce, so the integration effort, again, would appear to be minimal.

Organizations in the professional and technical services sector should take a look at FinancialForce, as well as anyone needing a financial management solution. With its acquisition of Less Software and Vana Workforce, FinancialForce now qualifies for the short list for distribution and light manufacturing companies. There were hints during my briefings that FinancialForce may continue with an acquisition strategy, so it is likely that additional industry sectors may become potential targets for this solution provider.

Kenandy

I covered the launch of Kenandy back in 2011, when I interviewed its CEO Sandra Kurtzig. Sandy was the original founder and CEO of ASK Group, the developer of the well-known ManMan ERP system. Her coming out of retirement to launch a new ERP system made a big splash at Dreamforce 2011, where she appeared on stage with Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff and Ray Lane, former Oracle President and now Kenandy board member representing investor firm, Kleiner Perkins. Salesforce.com is also an investor in Kenandy.

Since that launch, Kenandy has been rapidly adding functionality. It has its own financial systems, including general ledger, invoicing, accounts receivables, and accounts payables. Multi-company and multi-currency support were added earlier this year, with up to three reporting currencies. According to Kenandy executives I interviewed, the system also supports multiple plants with multiple locations in a single tenant. There is a full MRP explosion. Lot tracking and serial tracking allow Kenandy to sell into foods and other industries that require track and trace. Item revision levels are tracked with multiple revisions allowed in inventory.

Only three years in existence, the installed customer base is small but growing, with some impressive wins. During Dreamforce, Kenandy touted its recent win with Del Monte Foods, which implemented Kenandy for its acquisition of Natural Balance, a pet food manufacturer. I spent some time one-on-one with the Del Monte project leader, who provided quite a bit of insight into the dynamics of the implementation. Del Monte was able to implement Kenandy’s full suite—financials, customer order management, and distribution—in just three months. This included integrations with third-party systems for EDI, warehouse management, and transportation scheduling.

He also shared with me that he wrote a trade promotion management (TPM) system on the Salesforce platform, integrated with Kenandy, in just six weeks—and he did it by himself. He had previously built a similar system integrated with Del Monte’s legacy system, but that effort took seven months with a team of seven developers. Even discounting the fact that his previous experience might have made development of the second system easier, by my calculations this is about a 50 to 1 improvement in productivity, illustrating the power of the Salesforce platform.

Del Monte is not finished with Kenandy. The firm reportedly plans to eventually move all of Del Monte’s ERP processing from something like 60 internal systems to Kenandy.

More information Del Monte’s experience can be found in a case study on Kenandy’s website.

Rootstock

Rootstock Software is another manufacturing ERP provider with an interesting history. The management team, headed by CEO Pat Gerehy and COO Chuck Olinger, has decades of experience building manufacturing ERP, most recently at Relevant. Following the sale of Relevant to Consona (now Aptean), the team embarked on a new venture to build a manufacturing cloud ERP system from scratch. They developed their first iteration of Rootstock on the NetSuite platform in 2008, interoperating with NetSuite for financials and customer order processing. In 2010, however, they disengaged from their NetSuite partnership and rewrote Rootstock on the Salesforce platform. (That the Roostock developers could build a complete system so quickly on the NetSuite platform and then again on the Salesforce platform speaks to the power of these modern cloud platforms for rapid software development.)

As a result of the replatforming on Salesforce, Rootstock developed its own customer order management product and now partners with FinancialForce for its accounting systems. It also has good functionality for purchasing, production engineering, lot and serial tracking, MRP, MPS, and capacity planning, shop floor control, manufacturing costing, and PLM/PDM integration. The system can support multiple companies, multiple divisions, and multiple sites, all within a single tenant on the Salesforce platform.

On its website, Rootstock highlights an impressive list of 25 customers. These include Astrum Solar, a residential solar provider with operations in a dozen states in the US. EBARA International, a manufacturer of pumps and turbine expanders in the energy industry, with 77 subsidiaries and 11 affiliated companies worldwide.

Over the past year, Rootstock has been gaining traction. After the Dreamforce conference, it announced four more wins in the month of November: Microtherm, a business unit of ProMat International; Proveris, which provides testing protocols for drug developers; Source Outdoor, an outdoor furniture manufacturer; and Wilshire Coin, a coin dealer.

Buyers looking for strong manufacturing functionality, including hybrid modes of manufacturing, should consider Rootstock. Project-based manufacturing is also a sweet spot.

AscentERP

AscentERP approaches manufacturing ERP from the execution side of the business. Its co-founders, Michael Trent and Shaun McInerney, have a long history in warehouse management and data collection, and it shows in the capabilities of the product. Built from the start on the Salesforce platform, AscentERP supports production modes of build-to-order, assemble-to-order, and configure-to-order along with repetitive manufacturing capabilities. It can take opportunities from Salesforce.com and convert them into sales quotes and into sales orders in the production system. The system supports the complete manufacturing process from master planning, purchasing, production, and shipping. Reverse logistics is also supported through an RMA process.

Like Rootstock, AscentERP supports the accounting function through partnership with FinancialForce. In addition, the system also integrates with Intacct, another SaaS financials system. For smaller companies, Ascent created an integration with Quickbooks.

During Dreamforce, AscentERP announced advanced manufacturing functionality, including workflow and alerts, multi-plant and multi-location support, production scheduling and tablet computer data collection using the new Salesforce1 platform.

Reference accounts include Chambers Gasket in Chicago and All Traffic Solutions, a manufacturer of electronic roadside signs. Both of these customers use FinancialForce for financials. Other reference accounts include The Chia Company in Australia, the world’s largest grower of Chia seed and products, so familiar during holiday season, and SolarAid, an international charity that provides access to solar lighting.

Buyers may want to short list AscentERP if they are looking for a nuts-and-bolts production system with good support for warehouse management and data collection. Smaller companies may find the Quickbooks integration an interesting option, allowing them to implement ERP without having to give up Quickbooks.

One sales strategy I wish more enterprise SaaS providers would follow: AscentERP offers a free 30 day free trial on its website.

Cast a Wide Net

All ERP systems have their strengths and weaknesses, and these four are no exception. For example, all of these systems are relatively new. Although they are rapidly building out their functional footprints, there are still gaps in their functionality. Buyers that insist on having every box checked on their RFPs may not like this, but those buyers who are willing to do some system enhancements on the Salesforce platform may find that the advantages of speed and flexibility outweigh any short-term gaps. It all depends on whether buyers are viewing pure cloud deployment as a strategic advantage.

The four vendors outlined in this post are not the only cloud ERP providers in the market. Buyers should also consider other providers, not built on the Salesforce platform. These include established cloud players such as NetSuite and Plex, as well as newer entrants, such as Acumatica. Finally, some of the traditional providers of on-premises ERP systems, such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Infor, and Epicor, offer hybrid cloud deployment options that may be alternative to these cloud-only providers.

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Choosing the right ERP system—whether cloud, hosted, or on-premises—can be challenging. Those looking for more in-depth analysis and independent advice in navigating the process should consider our software selection consulting services at Strativa.

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Making Sense of the New Epicor

Epicor held its annual Insights user conference this week in Las Vegas. This was the first gathering for customers of both Epicor and Activant since the two firms merged last year. As such, it was a good opportunity for the firm's executives to introduce what they are calling the "New Epicor" to 4000 conference attendees.

Three Elements of Strategy

Although Epicor made many announcements, in this blog post I prefer to focus on three elements of Epicor's strategy, along with my point of view. 

1. Blending of Two Cultures. CEO Pervez Qureshi and other presenters made a point of emphasizing the new Epicor as a blending of the best of "heritage Epicor" and "heritage Activant." (In the enterprise IT world, the word heritage is preferred to legacy.) Qureshi characterized heritage Epicor as having been a global company, technology-oriented, entrepreneurial, and top-line focused. Heritage Activant, he said, was oriented more toward service, process excellence, and profitability. The new Epicor blends the best of these two cultures, he claimed.
    
2. Protect, Extend, Converge. The second element is Epicor's strategy and vision to protect, extend, and converge the product portfolio. "Protect" means to continue investment in the current products in its portfolio. "Extend" means to introduce new applications and infrastructure capabilities that deliver additional value across current products. Finally, "converge" implies a gradual evolution of current products with new technologies.
    
3. Azure as the Cloud Platform. The third element is Epicor's evolving cloud strategy. Prior to the conference, Epicor's cloud strategy was limited to a small business cloud version of its Epicor ERP product ("Epicor Express") along with some hosted solutions for functions such as HCM and retail merchandising. However, the strategic direction announced at Insights went much further. Wading through the dense language of the press release, I see the Azure announcement as having three sub-parts: (a) Epicor will allow its Epicor ERP product to be deployed on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, planned for Q3, 2013, (b) Epicor will also use Azure to provide interoperability between on-premises Epicor systems and Epicor point solutions deployed on Azure. (c) A new version of Epicor's SOA middleware ("ICE") will also be deployed on Azure to provide a PaaS offering, facilitate mobility apps, and satisfy other integration needs between Epicor and third-party products.

Epicor executives were upbeat in presenting these and other elements of the new Epicor. But how differentiated is Epicor's strategy, and what does it mean for Epicor customers? Here's my take.

The Azure Strategy is a Winner

Taking these three elements in reverse sequence: although I do not see the Azure strategy as unique, I do see it as attractive. In fact, it is more attractive because it is not unique.  Epicor is at least the fourth major enterprise software vendor in the past three months that has announced plans to deploy ERP in the Azure cloud. The first, of course, is Microsoft Dynamics, which in March announced its plans to deploy Dynamics GP and Dynamics NAV on Azure by the end of 2012.Then, earlier this month, Sage announced similar plans. And now, Epicor.

I have no doubt that others will follow, making Microsoft Azure a first choice for delivery of cloud-based enterprise applications. I have long felt that, just as on-premises database management systems have been standardized on just a few popular products, so also cloud platforms should be standardized. By way of analogy, very few on-premises vendors today write their own DBMSs, with Oracle being the exception that makes the rule. Why then should SaaS providers build their own cloud infrastructure? Salesforce.com did it. NetSuite did it. Workday did it. But how many more can or should roll their own IaaS and PaaS platforms? There is a tremendous amount of cost and effort involved in doing so, not to mention the economies of scale that can only be realized by having thousands of customers. Epicor, Sage, and others are making the right choice by building on an established public cloud infrastructure provider.

Why didn't this happen earlier? Essentially, because Azure (specifically, SQL Azure database capabilities) has not been robust enough to support ERP-class applications. But in speaking with Microsoft earlier this year, it appears that these limitations are now being overcome, which explains why Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, and Epicor are all moving to Azure at about the same time.

There is one more advantage to the Azure strategy. The current Epicor Express offering is limited to customers with under 20 users. I do not believe Epicor's current infrastructure architecture allows customers to scale beyond that point in a multi-tenant environment. Moving to Azure frees Epicor from that limitation, allowing it to sell cloud ERP to larger customers, though I suspect in practice it will still be most attractive to small and midsize businesses.

Finally, moving to Azure immediately allows Epicor to offer cloud ERP in a number of geographies where it does not have partner data centers. Epicor ERP has good international capabilities. Now customers in international locations will also be able to choose cloud deployment in their own geographies to meet regulatory or performance requirements.

Strategy of "Protect, Extend, Converge" Is a No-Brainer

The protect/extend/converge message has two things going for it: it's easy to remember and and it's customer-friendly. It also happens to be the only product strategy that makes any sense for a vendor such as Epicor. Epicor's growth strategy, like Infor's and Oracle's, has been to acquire or roll up a number of smaller vendors to build a large customer base with a diverse portfolio of products. The benefits of such a strategy is clear: growth. The downside of such a strategy is the diverse portfolio. But with a certain level of attention paid to customer support, the large number of existing customers will continue to pay maintenance revenues (the mother's milk of enterprise software) and will also be candidates for cross-selling other Epicor products.

It is interesting, therefore, to compare Epicor to Oracle and Infor and to see the similarities. All three have large customer bases. All three have diverse portfolios. All three have some sort of middleware offering to connect all the solutions: Oracle has Fusion middleware, Infor has ION, and Epicor has ICE. All three have customer programs to "protect" existing customer investments: Oracle has its "Applications Unlimited" program, Infor made its promise to "never sunset" a product, and Epicor has its strategy of "protect." Likewise, all have their strategies to "extend," such as Oracle with its continued point releases of J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel and others; and Infor, with its continued investments in its portfolio. Finally, all have some sort of convergence strategy, such as Oracle with its Fusion Applications, Infor with its development of ION, common user interface, and other common functions.

In other words, Epicor's strategy is the only rational way to deal with a large and diverse installed base built through acquisition. Qureshi's plan to continue aggressively with new acquisitions means that successfully protecting, extending, and converging its product portfolio will become even more important.

The Culture Message Has a Subtext

I found Qureshi's keynote regarding the blending of the Activant and Epicor cultures to be interesting, if not unusual for a customer conference. It would be the sort of thing one would expect to be presented internally, in an "all hands" meeting, for employee consumption. Delivering this message to customers, however, also sends an implicit message: heritage Epicor needed  improvement in product quality and customer service.

Perhaps this subtext is so well understood by the majority of Epicor customers that there was little risk in sending this message.  Still, if Activant's strength--in contrast with Epicor's--was (among other things) process excellence and customer service, what does that say about heritage Epicor?

It didn't end with the keynote. Later in the day, there was a session on the product roadmap for Epicor ERP. The presenters were proud of reports from early adopters of the most recent point release (ERP 9.05.700). But in touting the quality of the release, they were, in effect, reminding Epicor customers of their past experiences. One customer quote was damning with faint praise, referring to the new version as:

A more solid product than we've seen before.

If my wife makes me a nice dinner, the last thing I would tell her is, "This is a more delicious dinner than you've made me in the past."

But, if Epicor customers are all-too-familiar with product quality and service delivery problems in the past, perhaps Qureshi's approach is best: to tacitly acknowledge the problem. Key executives in the new Epicor come from Activant, starting with Pervez Quereshi (CEO), Kevin Roach (EVP and GM, ERP Americas), and Paul Salsigiver (EVP and GM, Retail), sending the message that Activant's focus on software quality and service delivery processes will prevail in the new Epicor.

My question, however, is this: are customers seeing an actual improvement in Epicor's product quality and customer service? Or, is it too early to tell?

I invite Epicor customers and partners to send me an email, or leave a comment on this post. As always, confidentiality is assured.

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Glovia Returns to the ERP Market

An ERP sales professional, whom I've know for many years, recently called to let me know he'd taken a new job with Glovia International. I indicated that I hadn't heard anything about Glovia recently. Maybe now I could get an update.

So he arranged a briefing with James Gorham, who heads up Glovia's North American business, for me and two of my senior associates at Strativa, Bob Gilson and Nick Hann.

A Long History

Glovia's roots go back to the 1970s, when Xerox Computer Services launched a time-sharing application for manufacturing companies. The product went through several iterations and was eventually relaunched in client-server form in 1990 as Xerox Chess. The company was acquired in 2000 by Fujitsu, who renamed it Glovia.

For many years, Glovia has been a well-respected mid-market ERP solution for automotive manufacturers, aerospace and defense contractors, capital equipment makers, and other industries. In the past, when I was looking for solid functionality for project-based manufacturers, Glovia would be one of the first to come to mind.

But, as just mentioned, that changed about two or three years ago, when Glovia suddenly fell off my radar. I knew they were still in business--I just never saw them in deals or even in press releases. They wouldn't even respond to my inquiries.

In our briefing with Gorham, we soon found out why. Glovia had undertaken a deliberate strategy three years ago to pull back, abandon all new sales efforts, and invest in rewriting the entire product.

Retrenchment Strategy

Glovia system had been developed in McDonnell Douglas's PROIV 4GL language, which though a good language, was not a platform with a wide developer base. They spent two years to rewrite the product with a service-oriented architecture, migrating the business logic to .NET, developing a new user-interface in Microsoft Silverlight, and providing a full deployment of web services with over 140 integration points. The latest version of Glovia runs on Oracle's database and is being released for Microsoft SQL as well.

Now here's the interesting part: during this retrenchment period, Glovia was profitable and actually grew, through organic growth of its existing customers adding new plants, new acquisitions, and new users. So, retrenchment turned out to be a good strategy during recessionary times: kill off marketing and net-new sales, redouble your service and support for your installed base, and invest in rewriting the product for a relaunch.

This retrenchment strategy (my term) could only work because Glovia had an enviable position as the incumbent for some very large and loyal customers, beginning with its corporate parent, Fujitsu, which deploys Glovia in 43 factories. Fujitsu had the resources to support any fall-off in Glovia's business, but as it turned out, Fujitsu's deep pockets weren't needed. Xerox (Glovia's former parent) is still a customer, as are several other large and well-known global brands, such as Panasonic, Dell, Carrier, Bridgestone, Avery Dennison, Honda, Honeywell, Phillips, and General Electric.

So, now the rewrite is complete. The functionality offered by Glovia for its target manufacturing industries--which was already well established--has grown even more impressive.

• It offers heavy visualization, with real-time graphical information flow.
  
• There is support for assemble-to-order and engineer-to-order, with "available to X" planning calculations, such as available-to-order, to-make, to-buy, and to-service.
  
• Production scheduling and optimization is granular down to the minute.
  
• There is load-balancing at all levels of production: the plant, cell, machine, skill, and person.
  
• The supply chain planning capabilities allow synchronization of supply to demand or demand to supply.
  
• Lean thinking permeates the execution functions, with the Toyota Production System natively embedded in the product.
• For defense contractors, there is the necessary "borrow-and-payback" functionality as well as pegging to contract.
  

The rewrite also gave Glovia the opportunity to build mobility apps, which appear much further developed than many larger and better known competitors. Apps include work orders, financial apps such as expense reporting, purchase requisition approvals, and executive dashboards. Glovia even provides device management capabilities. Apple's iPhone and iPad are supported, as well as Android devices, Blackberry, and Windows Phone. Everything is developed in HTML5 and available through the appropriate apps store (e.g. iStore).

There are even some nods to social business: Glovia gives engineers at different links in the supply chain the ability to collaborate. Planners also have visibility into customer and supplier engineering changes and inventory positions. Integration with Microsoft's Sharepoint is also provided.

What about the Cloud?

These days, no briefing is complete without asking about cloud options. Glovia offers an on-premise deployment (of course) as well as an on-demand option. Although the on-demand version is currently a simple hosting arrangement, when Microsoft Azure is ready for enterprise applications, Glovia will be able to host its system on Microsoft's cloud, assuming customers demand it.

Separately, Glovia has built a set of manufacturing modules on Force.com to inter-operate with Salesforce.com's CRM system. These are full multi-tenant SaaS applications that provide functionality for product configuration, order management, inventory, manufacturing, invoicing, purchasing, and returns. These are separate and independent from Glovia's flagship G2 system.

My own view is that Glovia's current support and stated direction for cloud computing is probably sufficient for now in light of the industries and size of organizations that it targets.

Where is Glovia Headed?

Behind us in Glovia's conference room was the obligatory "customer wall," with logos of Glovia's largest and most well-recognized customer names. My associate Nick Hann asked, "Three years from now, what will that wall look like?"

This led to an interesting discussion. Customer attrition during the retrenchment period was surprisingly low: a loss of any of these large customers would have been huge, and in fact none were lost. The sales team is now expanding to focus on new deals in addition to incremental sales into the installed base. There are also some resellers being added strategically for certain vertical industries.

Will Glovia be successful as it transitions from retrenchment to new sales? So far, some signs are promising. There are some big names in the sales funnel, including one Fortune 100 company. Interestingly, many of these new sales opportunities have come out of introductions by existing customers.

But will that be enough? The market is crowded, as Gorham noted, with SAP and Oracle gunning for the top tier of customers and Infor, Epicor, and IFS hungry for the mid-market and individual facilities of large multi-nationals. Syspro, Consona, and QAD also play in some markets and industries.

The markets that Glovia competes in are not under-served. In addition to the traditional players that Gorham identified, I would be concerned about newer cloud ERP providers: specifically Plex, which has a big bulls-eye on the automotive sector, NetSuite, and SAP's Business ByDesign.

Nevertheless, circling back to the retrenchment strategy: I like Glovia's story. How to leverage a recession to retrench and recover. In warfare, retreat is sometimes a good strategy, and in Glovia's case, the retrenchment appears to have paid off.

I hope Glovia's success continues, because buyers can only benefit by having a greater number of well-qualified choices.

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