Taleo Acquires Vurv — The Land Grab Continues

Taleo announced a definitive agreement today to acquire Vurv for $128.8 million in cash and stock amidst record financial results. Over the next month Taleo is going to identify how to best integrate the new company and report back to the market, but some initial thoughts are:

• This acquisition is very similar to competitor Kenexa’s acquisition of BrassRing for $115 million in October, 2006. The main difference is Taleo has a dominant existing applicant tracking system (ATS), whereas Kenexa was looking to fill a product gap along with rolling up customers. This means that Taleo’s acquisition is much more of a land grab than Kenexa’s.

• Taleo will acquire two net-new products — compensation management and transition management.
  - Compensation management is a fairly standard component of vendors offering performance management software to enable pay-for-performance and, if tightly integrated, will make Taleo more competitive in the performance management space.
  - Transition management is a product that helps manage off-boarding. It is a decision support tool that supports management during workforce reductions, mergers, and acquisitions. This product is unique to the market, and critical to end-to-end recruiting offering.

• Taleo will now have competing products for performance management and recruiting management. I expect these products to run independently for the short-term with a heavy push of migrating performance customers to Taleo’s new performance management platform. Customers with highly customized instances of Vurv’s recruiting product (we know you are out there) are at the greatest risk because they will either be forced onto one of the SaaS platforms or suffer from limited support of their customized software.

• Vurv has always struck me as a vibrant, innovative company with much of its zeal coming from CEO Derek Mercer. In Taleo’s conference call, Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire stated that Mercer would only stay on for a short period of time. Taleo will need to be careful to protect Vurv’s culture or deliberately integrate it into theirs.

A month from now we will know a lot more about the integration strategy of the recently announced acquisition, but it is safe to say that there are now two dominant companies (not necessarily products) in the talent acquisition space — Kenexa and Taleo.

Zach Thomas, Senior Analyst
Business Process & Applications
Forrester Research

Process and Performance: Joined At The Hip

We’ve recently introduced two related frameworks to help today’s business leaders to succeed in today’s highly competitive and volatile economic environment:

-Measuring And Aligning Business Performance. In order to anticipate and adapt to the rapid changes organizations face, they must articulate and execute a performance-focused strategy that provides relative context (how’s business relative to the competition) and the “critical few” relevant metrics that indicate financial and operational health.

-Forrester's Framework for Process-Driven Organizations. At the same time, as organizations face aggressive growth and customer expectations, a “graying workforce” that puts process knowledge at risk, and increased commoditization of products and services, they must adopt a process-driven strategy to differentiate themselves and innovate to compete.

The inevitable question in business leaders’ minds is — “So which should I be: process-driven or performance-driven?” Our take: both! Companies adopting a performance-driven strategy and a process-driven framework should not assess and adapt their strategies in isolation or choose one over the other. Process excellence methodologies such as Six Sigma, in fact, promote the use of measurements, which in turn are essential for managing business performance. Forrester sees both frameworks as complementary tools to help firms create predictable, measurable, value-added core processes that advance firms’ strategic objectives.

Paul Hamerman, Vice President
Business Process & Applications

Andy Salunga, Senior Analyst
Business Process & Applications

SAP Sets Management Succession Plan In Motion

April 2, 2008

Today’s announcement of the promotion of Leo Apotheker to co-CEO of SAP AG signals an orderly transition of command as current CEO Henning Kagermann’s contract expires in May, 2009. Mr. Apotheker has clearly been heir apparent since Shai Agassi’s departure a year ago. Although SAP put a positive spin on his sudden departure, evidently Mr. Agassi was not next in line for the job.

Mr. Apotheker, a 20 year veteran with SAP, has served as head of worldwide sales and most recently as Deputy CEO. While the practice of co-CEOs could be problematic in some environments, SAP has done this before as Dr. Kagermann ascended the throne and succeeded Hasso Plattner, now Chairman of SAP’s Supervisory Board. The transition should be orderly and Apotheker is well-suited for the job.

Additional changes within SAP’s Executive Board were also announced in the same press release. Jim Haggeman Snabe, Bill McDermott and Erwin Gunst were promoted to the Executive Board. Snabe will manage product development for both the SAP Business Suite and Netweaver. McDermott will take over responsibility for worldwide sales. Gunst, the current head of EMEA operations, will become the company’s first Chief Operating Officer. The need for a COO signals the growing complexity of the business in maintaining controls over acquired businesses (e.g., Business Objects) and new products and business models (e.g., Business ByDesign). Snabe and McDermott represent new blood on the Executive Board as well, rising stars that have done well in their respective areas.

Perhaps even more newsworthy but unmentioned in the press release is the pending departure of Executive Board member Peter Zencke. Dr. Zencke is the father of SAP’s new SaaS product, Business ByDesign, which had a soft launch last fall. This is a promising risk/reward venture for SAP that has large revenue potential if it can roll out quickly enough. The speed at which the product is rolling out, or lack thereof, may be linked to Dr. Zencke’s departure. One possibility (unconfirmed by SAP) is that Business ByDesign is delayed by performance, usability, and channel development issues to the extent that Zencke was forced to step aside.

Paul Hamerman, Vice President
Business Process & Applications

R "Ray" Wang, Principal Analyst
Business Process & Applications

Not Surpringly, California Delays Its ePedigree Deadline

This Tuesday, the California State Board of Pharmacy decided to delay the implementation of electronic pedigree requirements for prescription drugs from the previous 2009 deadline to 2011. The state’s announcement carries some added significance at a national level; under direction from the FDA, other states like Florida and Utah have moved forward with similar pedigree rules as a means to thwart counterfeiting, but California’s e-pedigree legislation — and particularly the requirement to serialize all packaged items of prescription drugs sold within the state — is the most comprehensive and far-reaching to date. Companies at every stage in the pharmaceutical supply chain (e.g. manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies) as well as other stakeholders (e.g. technology firms, standards organizations, other regulatory bodies, etc.) have been keeping tabs on California’s industry-leading legislation and enforcement timeline with keen interest.

Forrester sees the implementation delay as being inevitable. California’s serialization rule requires that each sellable unit of prescription drugs must have a unique identification number established at the point of manufacture. Then, as these items are distributed throughout the pharma supply chain, ePedigree requires information on the packaging hierarchy (i.e. which items are packed in each case) and master data context (i.e. original batch, lot, expiration, and NDC data), and change of ownership (i.e. shipping and receiving transactions) must be is captured electronically by each trading partner through an interoperable system. It’s by no means simple, and two fundamental questions have remained largely unresolved, and are thus standing in the way of pharma companies agreeing on a consensus technology approach:

Which tagging technology should be used?

Given the large volumes of unique identifiers required, the two tagging technologies that are the most widely available and valid options to meeting pharma serialization are RFID and 2-D bar codes. But while 2-D bar codes may spell lower costs for manufacturers, wholesalers prefer RFID in order to capture and record the high volumes of item-level transactions without scanning each bottle (assuming that inference would not be supported by California or other lawmakers).¹ Even if RFID were to be universally embraced, the debate would then shift to the relative merits of using UHF or HF frequencies, as both RFID types are viewed as viable options but vary greatly in terms of cost, performance, maturity, and the effects of the radio frequency on drug properties.

How much data would be shared between trading partners?

By definition, an electronic pedigree requires trading partners to make basic transactional information such as shipments and receipts available to one another. The big unknown is how much additional business context — such as aggregate demand data, visibility of inventory across the distribution network, or even downstream customer data — would trading partners be willing to share. And since many of the potential business benefits of ePedigree are built upon sharing this kind of sensitive business data, individual firms have become very skeptical about seeing returns from collaboration opportunities such as improved supply chain efficiency, better reconciliation of chargeback fees, and reduced product diversion.²

These two uncertainties have resulted in a resounding brake on ePedigree’s progress — unsurprising in an industry that is as historically risk-adverse as pharma. Ironically, it is precisely this conservatism — grounded in the need to protect patient safety — that can drive more consensus going forward towards the new 2011 deadline. Manufacturers, wholesalers, and pharmacies now have some additional time to co-develop ePedigree systems that not only address product integrity concerns in the short term but also offer a platform for future collaborative endeavors in the longer-term. If pharma companies can agree on collaborative business opportunities as they agree on patient safety, both goals are mutually and entirely obtainable.

Roy C. Wildeman, Senior Analyst
Business Process & Applications

¹ “Inference” would allow wholesalers to read the identifier of an intact case and infer that all the individual serialized items from the manufacturer are still contained within.

² When legitimate products are not purchased through legitimate channels, that drug is classified as “diverted.”

CHEP Brambles Acquires LeanLogistics

CHEP Brambles, best known for their pallet and containers services, announced on March 3rd that it has agreed to acquire LeanLogistics for $45 million cash.

LeanLogistics is a transportation management solution (TMS) provider who competes directly with Sterling Commerce as well as other smaller hosted TMS players like MercuryGate and Transplace. (See the January 29, 2008 "The Forrester Wave: Transportation Management Solutions, Q1 2008" report for more information)

This acquisition does raise a few questions. First and foremost, why would a pallet provider buy a TMS vendor? Certainly, there is an opportunity to leverage the software within their own operations, but does CHEP really want to be in the software business?

To learn more, we spoke with Pete Stiles, VP of Marketing and Strategy, and Dan Dershem, President and CEO of LeanLogistics.

Forrester: Can you give us some insight into why CHEP made this acquisition?

LeanLogistics: Because of the way CHEP charges for and tracks pallets they have quite a bit of information on the movement of goods, but they were lacking two things to really leverage that data: 1) an enabling technology platform, and 2) domain expertise to deliver a service offering around it. They look at LeanLogistics as an enabler to both.

Forrester: Leverage the data how?

LeanLogistics: The combined network of LeanLogistics and CHEP will have over 20 million shipments moving through it annually. Benchmarking is just one of the types of services we can provide. There is also the managed services aspect of this to help companies reduce the 9-16% empty miles they typically run repositioning equipment. For example, if you can go after certain lanes where five CHEP customers are going each way at once you can start to consider dedicated moves instead of point to point. This is our shared vision, but historically one of the missing elements to achieve this has been the lack of a network with critical mass that is neutral enough to take into execution. Our vision is that the combination our networks, technology, and the managed services expertise can accomplish that now.

Forrester: Are all 40 LeanLogistics customers also CHEP customers?

LeanLogistics: 60% of LeanLogistics’ customers are also CHEP customers. CHEP has 4,000 customers.

Forrester: In our recent TMS Wave, we identified LeanLogistics’ customer service as being a key differentiator. Now that you are part of a larger company, how do you plan to keep that personal touch?

LeanLogistics: LeanLogistics will continue to be a wholly owned subsidiary, so for existing customers it is business as usual with the exception of having an additional resource pool. The leadership team, the office locations will all remains the same. Also, LeanLogistics does not necessarily view itself as a technology company. We are really a services company and our customers recognize us that way. Our customers are excited because they see that as the next wave of value add. We are constantly motivated to continue to bring additional offerings to our customers since we are subscription based so this gives us a new channel to do that.

Forrester: Will the solution continue to be sold to non CHEP customers as a stand-alone TMS?

LeanLogistics: Yes, LeanLogistics will definitely continue to be sold independently of the CHEP solutions.

Forrester: LeanLogistics is not setup today to support global companies. Does this acquisition mean your plans to go global are now accelerated?

LeanLogistics: This will allow us to go global because now the infrastructure exists at a lower risk investment.

Forrester’s take on the acquisition:

Clearly, this acquisition is all about profiting from the wealth of supply chain visibility data CHEP is sitting on today in their network by bringing new service offerings to the table for carrier benchmarking and collaboration opportunities. That is not going to happen overnight, and in the meantime Lean will need to continue to build out their TMS aggressively to compete. Otherwise, over time, they risk being marginalized as just another tool in the CHEP portfolio of pallet service offerings. In the immediate future, LeanLogistics customers should rest easy that they will remain a wholly owned subsidiary. Over the next two years, we expect this vision to start to materialize and they will be able to bring new value add services to their subscription customers. We think LeanLogistics is a great option for TMS buyers seeking a less expensive, easier to implement solution than the traditional on-premise TMS, and really separate themselves from the pack when it comes to outsourcing services, industry expertise, ability to provide extensive carrier benchmarking, and trading partner collaboration tools.

Patrick Connaughton, Senior Analyst - Supply Chain
Business Process & Applications

Notes From IDS Scheer's ProcessWorld Conference

I’ve recently returned from IDS Scheer’s ProcessWorld Conference held February 13-15, 2008 in Orlando, FL. Although I missed the closing day, it was a brief but information-packed day and a half that afforded me the opportunity to meet with the firm’s leadership and share perspectives with their clients during the afternoon of the pre-conference user day and day one.

In his keynote, Thomas Volk, IDS Scheer’s CEO and President, proclaimed 2008 the year of the “rise of the operational CEO” who, in order to return shareholder value, increase market valuation, grow the top line, and mitigate risks:

• sets objectives prescriptively
• manages accountability objectively
• monitors execution constantly
• sees potential problems early
• makes adjustments regularly

To accomplish the above tasks, Volk described ARIS as the platform to provide “corner office command-and-control of the operational strategy”. While this could stir up visions of a corporate “Big Brother”, I prefer to see it as useful advice for today’s executives to keep an eagle’s eye view of their organization’s process performance at a high level.

Yet at the same time, this strategic view must be complemented at the operational and tactical levels. This theme of transparency at all levels is reflected in the ARIS Business Performance Edition for 2008. Dr. Helge Heß, a Director for the Process Intelligence/Performance Manager solution and Dr. Wolfram Jost of IDS Scheer’s Executive Board and IDS Scheer’s executive product steward, shared some product highlights ahead of the Q2 official release:

Process Intelligence/Performance Manager (PI/PM). As Dr. Heß noted, this functionality has been out for about six months, and after significant traction, makes it’s official debut.  Packed with statistical analytical tools for process owners, this capability pulls metrics from the execution engine and displays the actual process performance against the process model.

Process Event Monitor (PEM). PEM will provide business activity monitoring to provide real-time alerts to the operational staff whenever an event breaches process parameters. The alerts come in the form of visual indicators, trend analysis tools, distribution curves, and influence coefficients (an indicator or relative sensitivity of certain variables to process outcomes).  As part of the focus on agility, this combats the latency challenges from having data analysis available only at the process owner level. This capability also highlights its new partnership with Systar to integrate Systar’s BAM functionality into the ARIS platform.

ARIS Six Sigma.  Along with the announcement of its new solution to facilitate Six Sigma implementation, IDS Scheer introduced its technology partnership with MiniTab, the leading statistical analytical tool for Lean Six Sigma practitioners.  This integrated solution will provide customers of both applications full support across the entire Six Sigma Cycle of DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control), further weaving process definition, analysis, and optimization with rigorous data analysis capability.

ARIS 7.1 Platform Enhancements. These include:

• Process model versioning to provide graphical comparison between process model versions
• Timeline modeling (think Gantt Chart for process model development)
• A publishing component that will allow the publishing of HTML files, provide a file repository for ARIS artifacts, and allow users to customize reports and views of the process such as a spreadsheet view, left to right process maps for process experts and modelers, or a top down fact sheet view for a process owner or line of business manager.

An internal execution engine. For the record, this is not an execution engine for operational processes, but for process governance activities such as release cycles and artifact creation to service-enable the ARIS applications. To be fair, IDS Scheer clarified that point during follow-up discussions. Nonetheless, this announcement certainly created a bit of confusion among the press and analyst corps, since IDS Scheer’s lack of an operational execution engine limits its ability to claim ARIS as a full scope BPM suite. Not to mention raising the ire of its ERP partners. We’ll stay tuned, as I’m sure will the Big Four.

The trip report wouldn’t be complete without sharing the analyst luncheon theme presented by IDS Scheer’s founder, Professor Scheer. As we found out during his morning keynote, he plays an accomplished and passionate baritone sax. He expressed that same passion during our jazz brunch, as he and his quartet played and he explained the parallels between jazz and SOA (and in this jazz lover’s view, BPM) through the jazz standard “I’ll remember APRIL”. Here’s a brief summary of the parallels Professor Scheer discussed:

“A” for Autonomy: Just as the different members of a jazz ensemble have degrees of freedom and opportunities to individually express a particular piece, there are opportunities to design processes to allow for the customization of a perfect order through a standard process. At the same time, autonomy doesn’t mean chaos, but rather a resolving theme such as the melody or rhythm of a piece, or a company’s business goals and regulatory environment.

“P” for Passion: While jazz allows an artist to invent and improvise on a jazz solo, the musician can’t hide those feelings that inspired the improvisation. The intense feeling must come out to provide the very best of the composition. Similarly in business, companies must be committed to their vision and convinced that they are taking the right path.

“R” for Risk: Once the composition is done, dress rehearsal is over, and the piece is to be premiered, artists and soloists must be willing to play the notes and make the mistakes. Only then can excellence that comes from improvisation break through. Business is fraught with risk — whether to enter a new market, take on a new methodology as part of their strategy, or to create a new product or service. This is not recklessness, but rather thoughtful risk-taking, based on data and research. Yet at the end of the day, after the analysis, information is imperfect and true leaders must be willing to make a decision — to risk.

“I” for Innovation: The beauty of jazz is the ability to take an old standard and put a new spin on it or take it in a completely new direction. A YouTube search for “I’ll Remember April” will return several musical renditions ranging from “traditional” jazz guitar, sax, and piano to ukulele, with various tempos, rhythms, and solo sequences. Similarly, SOA enables innovation and allows a firm to truly deliver value by utilizing the sustainable competitive advantage of its people and its processes. This is the true defense against the risks of commoditization competition.

“L” for Listen: As Professor Scheer noted, jazz musicians quite often close their eyes when they play. This frees the ensemble to really concentrate and hear the innovation among the individual artists — not just what to play, but when to play it, and when to transition and improvise. Whether soliciting and pursuing ideas from your employees or having conversations with your clients, listening is at the heart of business, and is critical to staying fresh and ahead of the curve.

As I shared with Professor Scheer, his morning teaser and extended lunch set summoned fond memories of distant post-college summer days spent among Paris jazz clubs and the Black Belt life. Okay, maybe Professor Scheer has yet to make his premiere at the Blue Note or Caveau de la Huchette, but as he noted, the 300 plus strong audience for his morning keynote was bigger than the German clubs where he normally blows. The fact that he had only met the other members of the quartet the previous evening reinforced the aspects of agility and innovation in jazz and business.

Andy Salunga, Senior Analyst
Business Process & Applications

Analyst Comments from SAP Insider Event in Nice

This week I attended SAP Insider's European three-part conference — covering Logistics & Supply Chain Management, PLM, and Manufacturing — and got a chance to catch up with both SAP PLM customers and the SAP executive team on the latest SAP PLM strategy and roadmap. Over the years, SAP's PLM solution development has been a story of evolution. Starting with basic document and image vaulting in the 1990's, the SAP PLM moniker has steadily expanded to include BOM management (leveraging common data objects from SAP ERP), a complex, concurrent product-process module called iPPE (co-developed and piloted with BMW), specifications and recipe management (building upon SAP's Environmental Health & Safety database), and engineering change workflows (basically the major integrating denominator across these modules). Most recently and starting in 2005, SAP has gone to market with its New Product Development & Introduction (NPDI) xApps — a suite of tools which includes cProjects (for phase-gate project management), xRPM (for resource and portfolio management), and xPD (for ideation and concept management). This steady proliferation of "SAP PLM components" has created some deployment challenges (such as customers requiring multiple, specialized consultants for each app) and confusion as long-time SAP customers struggle to assimilate and assemble the various offering pieces for end-to-end PLM process support.

In response to this challenge, the SAP PLM team is positioning their stable of offerings under a new theme entitled "Product & Service Leadership".¹  What does this new theme mean for SAP PLM customers? Less emphasis on singleton tools and more emphasis on longer-term, end-to-end process support. For example, the NPDI app suite is now captured under the "Continuous Product Innovation" value scenario where portfolio, project, and product analytic capabilities will be more-tightly integrated.²  Similarly, the value scenarios of "Integrated Product Development", "Product as a Service", and "Embedded Product Compliance" should prompt discussions — and up-selling opportunities — with SAP customers around their long-term application strategy to manage product data across the enterprise.³ 

I give SAP credit for taking steps towards more process-orientation — not an easy path given customer decision-making, pricing, and market definitions are still oriented around long-standing, three-letter application categories. The move also counters rival Oracle and their vision to assimilate Agile PLM alongside their CRM, SCM, and ERP suite of products to support integrated, enterprise-wide PLM processes. Customers I talk with, though, still cite foundation elements like usability as their number one expectation from future SAP PLM releases in order to lower deployment hurdles.

My advice on enterprise-wide PLM? Don't underestimate the change management challenges! Successful companies who orient their long-term PLM strategy on just one of the proven, measurable benefit cases like accelerating ECO cycle times, increased part/material re-use, or better compliance control use this clarity to be able to effectively educate and drive change across their complex mix of PLM stakeholders.

-Roy C. Wildeman, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

¹ The bundling of product and service dimensions under a single messaging banner is interesting; business models like Hilte equipment rental, GE’s uptime model, and Apple’s online music store were cited to emphasize the differentiating power — and lucrative margins — that a bundled product/service model can have in a globalized, ultra-competitive market.

² It's interesting to note that xPD was not included in the Continuous Product Innovation scenario — suggesting a potential future assimilation of this tool's functionality within the more popular xRPM/cProjects app areas.

³ SAP also presented a renewed investment commitment in Recipe Management in support of PLM for process-industries, addressing tactical opportunities such as product labeling and compliance checks, as well as extending earlier investments from the discrete-manufacturing roadmap like increased usability, NPDI integrations, etc.

You Need New CRM Solutions To Keep Pace With The New Social Consumer

It’s the start of the new year and my phone is ringing off the hook as CRM professionals and technology solution providers call to debate the impact of that burgeoning new phenomenon: the social Web. Does it matter to the CRM community? Big time.

The social Web, a.k.a. Social Computing¹ among my colleagues here at Forrester, includes the fast-growing peer-to-peer (P2P) activities like blogging, RSS, file sharing, open source software, podcasting, search engines, and user-generated content. These technologies have seen a rapid adoption — 22% of adults now read blogs at least monthly, and 19% are members of a social networking site.² Even more amazingly, almost one-third of all youth publish a blog at least weekly, and 41% of youth visit a social networking site daily. Technology and social changes are creating a potent mix of forces that will transform the way all businesses operate, create products, and relate to customers.

CRM is being redefined, with a torrent of new acronyms and labels spilling forth from consultants and pundits: “Social CRM”, “Collaborative CRM,” and “CRM 2.0.” Traditional CRM solutions will continue to be important to enable organizations to aggregate customer data, analyze that data, and automate workflows to optimize customer-facing business processes. But, changing consumer/customer buying behaviors and new Social Computing technologies are spurring the idea that new generation CRM solutions will, and must, emerge.

My clients are looking farther afield in their search for solutions to help them manage their relationships in the new world of the social consumer. They are looking beyond the traditional solutions vendors like Oracle (Siebel), SAP, Microsoft, Consona (Onyx), and even the newer software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers like salesforce.com, and RightNow, in their quest to collaborate with customers in new ways.³

If you want to listen to your customers more closely, consider creating and participating in private communities supported by vendors such as: Communispace, MarketTools, and Think Passenger. Monitor “market buzz” and perceptions, using solutions from: Nielsen BuzzMetrics, TNS MI/Cymfony, Umbria, and MotiveQuest.

Help the fans of your products spread the message more easily through social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Find ways to communicate continually with customers and monitor responses using blogs supported by technologies from Six Apart, WordPress, and Google Blogger.

Develop your capabilities to use customer opinions to increase sales through ratings and reviews using forums like Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews.

Help customers to solve each others’ problems with solutions that support customer forums from Lithium Technologies, Jive Software, and Prospero Technologies. Enable customers to build solutions together; think about using Wikis like SocialText, Confluence, and Wikia.

A New Year? Yes. A “next generation” of CRM solutions emerging?  Ditto.

-William Band, Vice President, Forrester Research

¹ See the February 13, 2006, "Social Computing" report.
² See the April 19, 2007, "Social Technographics" report.
³ See the February 5, 2007, "The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise CRM Suites, Q1 2007 report.

Introducing Success Imperatives

Welcome back from an end of year respite and into the New Year. As you change gears from the goals of 2007 and reassess where to focus your efforts as Business Process & Applications professionals in 2008, our analysts are poised to provide the most relavant research and analyses to address the core competencies of your role.

In 2008, expect our analysts to weave the importance and impact of five key trends on Business Process & Applications professionals throughout our research and commentary. While numerous trends will affect how BP&A professionals approach their roles, these will center on next-generation applications and architectures and becoming a more business-process-oriented organization. These trends are: Dynamic Business Applications; Web 2.0 and tech populism; software-as-a-service (SaaS); business process centers of excellence (COEs); and the evolving business analyst role.

Additionally, Forrester will tailor all of our research not only to your role, but to your role's most important objectives -- what Forrester calls Success Imperatives (SIs). On January 12th, Success Imperatives will transform the forrester.com site experience. While all of Forrester's research will remain accessible, you will be able to tailor your primary site experience to the SI most critical to your success at any given time. The result? The most finely attuned offering of pertinent and up to date research, tools, teleconferences, and videos accessible all in one place.

Without further ado BP&A professionals' SIs:

1. Become a more business-process-oriented organization

2. Define a strategy and framework for governing all enterprise app decisions

3. Prepare for next-generation packaged applications and architectures

4. Continuously improve customer relationship management processes and technologies

5. Continuously improve supply chain processes and technologies

6. Continuously improve human capital management processes and technologies

We hope you will give us feedback throughout the year on our SI coverage.

Sharyn C. Leaver | Vice President, Research Director | Forrester Research

Comments From The SAP CRM 2007 Analyst Conference — December 4th and 5th

What’s important to note from the conference?

SAP hammered industry analysts with three key takeaways for SAP CRM 2007. SAP wants customer relationship management (CRM) application consumers to know that SAP CRM 2007 is:

• Easy to use
• Solves real business problems
• Makes the complex simple 

Why is it important?

To some degree, SAP achieved its goals. What it needs for momentum is proof, and more specifically, success stories from clients using it.

With CRM 2007, SAP unveiled a newer, very slick-looking user interface (UI) to its CRM offering. The facelift, based on cascading style sheets (CSS) and Ajax, allows users and system admins to customize the product to look and feel as an organization prefers. Organizations can dynamically brand the application style guide the way they want, and users can select specific styles to satisfy personal preferences. The solution offers many out-of-the-box customization features, including prebuilt “skins” and personalization settings to satisfy various user pallets. Additionally, SAP made strong strides to allow different roles to customize dashboards and bring in other third-party application information that may be pertinent to their job function and help them execute their jobs more efficiently. SAP showcased a couple demos to illustrate how a sales rep and a sales manager could customize the home page dashboard and bring in other third-party applications, RSS feeds, and other “widgets” so that SAP CRM 2007 could be used as the single sales application.

Customization capabilities are impressive and powerful, but with customization empowerment comes great responsibility to manage it. A few large SAP customers at the conference shared some of their lessons learned with past CRM initiatives, and CRM application “over-customization” was something that had led to significant painpoints for these customers — primarily in the areas of technology standardization and platforming, consolidated reporting, and data management.

What does it mean for CRM technology customers?

So what does SAP’s new CRM 2007 rollout mean for customers? Well, SAP has certainly raised the bar on its CRM product. With traditionally strong capabilities in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and back office apps, SAP has strengthened its front-office CRM offering with this release. Usability improvements and flexible configuration capabilities to address common business challenges sales reps and managers face daily will likely catapult SAP to a stronger competitive positioning amongst its CRM vendor peers. Previously, sales at SAP back-office shops had to bear the brunt of lackluster usability for front-office application tools. Customers were forced to trade front-office usability demands for back-office integration needs with other SAP back office tools. Some of those SAP back-office customers not willing to concede front-office usability needs sought out and implemented alternative CRM solutions. With the release of SAP CRM 2007, however, SAP has reduced the front/back-office tradeoff gap — something that may cause enterprise customers running SAP back-office solutions to rethink which CRM solution they will employ as part of their long term applications strategy going forward.

Pete Marston, Analyst, CRM - Business Process & Applications