Duncan Jones

Today, Forrester published a report on how “Modern Smart Applications Are Transforming Supplier Value Management” (available to Forrester clients). It explains why AI was relatively slow to reach the procurement function and also what changed to belatedly power a wave of innovation. I cite several examples, both from large SVM software suite vendors and from […]

For UK food retailers, coronavirus crisis has demonstrated the importance of flexible supply chain management. Read more, including potential solutions.

SAP today announced that it will continue to support customers on Business Suite 7 until 2030. This won’t surprise many people, because the 2025 deadline was unrealistic given how slowly SAP’s customers are moving to S/4HANA. It was never likely that SAP would risk its €11.5 million maintenance stream by switching off support for a […]

Why do hotel web sites fail to support business travellers' customer journeys, in both the digital and physical sense? B2B eCommerce sites should help business shoppers balance price with value, which is a nuanced combination of many factors, not a series of binary choices.

Forrester’s vision for the future of business applications is that modern specialist SaaS platforms will replace on-premises “omnisuites.” Forrester clients can read more about this vision in our new report: “Create A Modern Software Strategy With AI-Driven Platforms And Their Ecosystems.” The enterprise resource planning (ERP) era is over. The ERP model of a single […]

Oracle customers should renegotiate their commercial relationships with this important vendor, using adoption of Oracle’s SaaS products as an incentive and cancellation of maintenance as a credible threat. Oracle’s SaaS strategy seeks to pull customers forward, but it has also undermined the value of its maintenance offering for its legacy on-premises products. Both factors increase […]

Clients often ask me, when they are selecting an ePurchasing product such as eProcurement, whether they should choose the best product in that category or look for a vendor that also offers products in related categories such as contract lifecycle management (CLM) and supplier risk & performance (SRPM). My answer is that it’s a tradeoff, […]

The CIOs of SAP customers need to pay close attention to the vendor’s announcement earlier today with details on how it intends to modernize its software licensing model. Please don’t think that “software licensing” is an esoteric topic that you can delegate to someone a level or two down in your organization. It isn’t. There […]

SAP Ariba & IBM today announced a partnership that had been a rumour for a few days now. Part of the deal includes IBM gradually retiring Emptoris and encouraging its customers to migrate to SAP Ariba. http://www.ariba.com/about/press-releases/sap-ariba-and-ibm-transform-procurement It’s an ambitious move by SAP Ariba. IBM Emptoris’s leadership had an exciting vision of next gen digital […]

At last, exactly two years later, the long-awaited sequel to my hit, if overly censored, blog post: Five Shades Of Grey (How software buyers and license managers should be compliant without being submissive). The trigger is the SAP vs Diageo verdict, which generated a lot of hysterical blogging and tweeting with dire predictions for SAP […]

Most leaders of SaaS providers understand the importance of minimizing Churn and maximizing account enrichment, but few fully appreciate how vital to those goals is a good pricing and licensing strategy. My newly published report Pricing Strategies For Software-As-A-Service  is a must read for any business software company that sells or is thinking of selling […]

I’ve recently been studying what a customer-obsessed operating model means for Purchasing functions and the software they use. I've concluded that Purchasing needs to transform its approach to visibility and control, due to the tradical impact that Mobility has on procure-to-pay (P2P) processes. I've been warning ePurchasing software companies for years about the potential impact […]

If you’re trying to use e-commerce in a B2B context, it is no longer safe to ignore the procurement role within your customers’ organization. At the moment you may be able to market and sell successfully direct to end-user customers, but not for long. The growing imperative for chief procurement officers (CPOs) to guarantee compliance […]

Any procurement or asset management professionals who have seen the new movie based on E.L.James’ best selling novels may have noticed the similarity between the eponymous antihero and a license management services consultant.  Mr. Grey will use charm and threats to persuade you to run his audit scripts on your network. You have an obligation […]

Today’s announcement by Microsoft of a per-user subscription licensing (USL) option for Windows is significant, and good, news for its customers. I’ve been telling Microsoft product managers for years to phase out their obsolete per-device licensing models, and this is a major step in that direction. it marks a major change in Microsoft’s attitude to […]

I've just published a Quick Take report that explains why the Nevada District Court’s recent decision on some of the issues in the four-year-old Oracle versus Rimini Street case has significant implications for sourcing professionals — and, indeed, the entire technology services industry — beyond its impact on the growing third-party support (3SP) market. http://www.forrester.com/Quick+Take+The+Rimini+Street+Ruling+Has+Serious+Implications+For+Oracle+Customers/fulltext/-/E-RES115572 […]

Transformation Should Focus On Improving Outcomes, Not Merely On Increasing Competition I’ve spoken with many IT Procurement leaders in public sector organizations ranging from US county schools districts to national governments. Most are prevented from applying best practices such as Strategic Software Sourcing by their politicians’ ill-conceived edicts and directives, such as those included in […]

Many of you will be in the midst of a negotiation with SAP at the moment, because SAP does about 40% of its license deals in the October to December quarter. It’s a sourcing cliché that software companies give their best discounts at their fiscal year end, but just because you are making a purchase […]

I’m part of a team called “sourcing and vendor management” (SVM). Forrester organizes its research teams by individual client roles, so my teammates and I all focus on helping clients who are sourcing and vendor management professionals. Wait a moment. Should that read “helping clients who are sourcing or vendor management professionals”? Aren’t they separate […]