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Greetings Fellow ERP App Enthusiasts!

Posted by China Martens on February 18, 2011

Hi, and thanks for stopping by. I joined Forrester just over a month ago and I plan to post here regularly with some thoughts on the ERP apps arena. I’m hoping this blog will serve as a place for us to exchange views, and I very much welcome your input.

As you know, Forrester is structured around roles, and I’m part of the analyst team serving the needs of business process professionals. My primary area of focus is enterprise resource planning software. I’m currently pulling together my research agenda for 2011, and I was wondering what top-of-mind issues you think I should be tackling.

At a high level, some of the areas I’m considering include:

  • Midmarket ERP.
  • SaaS ERP and PaaS.
  • ERP-flavored project management.

I’m also interested in hearing about midsize organizations and enterprises that have benefited from the successful deployment of one of the following:

  • SaaS ERP.
  • A two-tier combination of one vendor’s SaaS ERP integrating with another vendor's on-premise ERP.
  • Commercial open-source ERP.
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HP Acquiring Vertica, Ramping Steadily Back Into Enterprise Data Warehousing Market

Posted by James Kobielus on February 14, 2011

  • 300 Recommendations

So you thought Neoview’s demise signaled HP’s exit from the enterprise data warehousing (EDW) market? You could not have been more mistaken. 

Yes, HP recently abandoned that slow-motion train wreck after several years of anemic customer adoption and directionless product management. But you should regard the unlamented Neoview as little more than a blip in HP’s long-running campaign to deepen its presence in all things EDW. And you should consider today’s announcement that they’re acquiring Vertica Systems as a key building block in HP’s emerging new strategy in the EDW market. It remains to be seen what that strategy is, inasmuch as new HP CEO Leo Apotheker has not yet articulated a clear vision. Perhaps he’s playing close to the vest so as not to call attention to further acquisitions in adjacent segments, such as business intelligence (BI) and data integration (DI).

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Waves of Innovation Continue to Transform Enterprise Data Warehousing Market

Posted by James Kobielus on February 11, 2011

Every Forrester Wave is an in-depth snapshot of an entire vendor market segment at a particular point in time. 

Yesterday was that point in time for the latest update to the Forrester Wave for Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) Platforms. We just published this update after a grueling 8-month process of revisiting the criteria, scales, and weights associated with the most differentiating features of EDW vendors’ complex solution value propositions. Clearly, the EDW market has evolved considerably in the 2 years since we published the first installment of the Wave. 

At the highest level of analysis, what’s new? For starters, more vendors made the crucial inclusion criterion of having at least 100 customers with in-production EDW deployments. The field this time around included all seven vendors in the 2009 Wave, plus Greenplum (now part of EMC) and Vertica. Clearly, big-brand EDW mergers and acquisitions consolidated the original seven down to 5, as IBM acquired Netezza and SAP purchased Sybase. Please bear in mind that, as these acquisitions were reasonably recent, we chose to evaluate the acquired vendors’ offerings separately from their new parents' pre-acquisition EDW offerings in this latest Wave (it's worth noting that neither IBM nor SAP has slightest intention of discontinuing their pre-acquisition EDW portfolios--if anything, they're both now evolving those product families even more aggressively post-acquisition). 

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