The top career advice for future software engineers

Softwareengineers Quora-2129 By Quora2015-08-19 17:10:28 UTC This question originally appeared on Quora. What are the top 10 pieces of career advice for future software engineers? Answer below by author and Quora user Gayle Laakmann McDowell. First, let me explain what awesome careers look like. They don't look like nice linear graphs, where you're moving up a little bit each month. (Heck, even so-so careers don't look like that. You don't move up every month. You get a bit better at your career every month, but you move up in big steps.) Graph Great careers look more like this: They have some periods of slower growth and some "turning points," where your career shoots up. Graph2 The color changes? Those are career changes: software development to product management, sales to cofounder, etc. They also have some setbacks. Because you know what? Being great requires taking some risks. And taking enough risks means you'll fail a bit, too. So with that said... Coding Code. A lot. Schools are great at theory, but not so much at practical stuff. This is especially true at the top universities. Professors are academics and are often actually hostile to more "practical" forms of education. The best way to be a great coder is to just practice — a lot. It doesn't matter so much what you code (open source, iPhone apps, etc.) as long as you're coding and pushing yourself. Be language agnostic. Language is just a tool. It's valuable to know a language deeply, but it's also valuable to be learning new things. The best developers tend not to identify as a ____ developer. Career choices Prestige helps. Having a strong name on your resume helps open doors and show competence. If you can get a name like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Dropbox, etc., do it. (But don't stay long. See the next tip.) Leave the big companies quickly. If you want to build your career at a big company, then by all means, stay and build your career there. But if that's not what you want, leave quickly. One or two years post-college at a company like Google is great. 10 years? Not so much. You will continue to learn, but there are diminishing returns of sticking around. (Unless you want to be a big company person.) If you want an A+ career, come to San Francisco bay area. I love Seattle and began my career there, but I have to be honest: there are so many more opportunities in tech in the bay area. You will limit yourself as an engineer (or product manager/tech business role) if you live elsewhere. If you don't want an A+ career, don't come to the bay area. It is extremely expensive here. Seriously. That's worth it if you want a ton of career options. But if you just want a cushy career, there are more affordable cities with enough tech (like Seattle). A good software engineer can buy a nice house in Seattle. It's a stretch in the bay area. If you don't want to be a developer forever, then move on quickly. There is a lot of value in getting really deep technical expertise. But it doesn't matter that much whether you spent two years as a developer or seven years. Within a few years of college graduation, make a choice. Do you want to be an engineer for the next 10, 20, 30 years — or not? If you don't, start trying to move on now. More time as an engineer won't help you that much. Quit quickly. If I look at my friends who have switched jobs, almost all of them were thinking about quitting for the last six to 12 months. Some stayed for two or three years after they started saying that they wanted to quit. They've wasted so much time because of a resistance to change. If you're thinking about quitting, take action now. Start applying elsewhere — or possibly just quit outright. You probably won't be very successful if you're unhappy anyway, and there is a big opportunity cost in staying. Dealing with others Integrity matters. If you try to cheat and cut corners, it'll haunt you. Do the right thing in life. It's not only the good thing to do, but it's also the smart thing to do. People will trust and like you more. More doors will open — and those doors might just be the breakthrough moments in your career. Be helpful. When possible, help people who ask for help. The people who ask you for help right now will be much more likely to help you in the future. That "help" might be introducing you to their friends who can help you more directly. So even if you don't see how that person will be helpful, you don't know who their buddies are or will be. Make friends. You actually can't really be successful by yourself. If you're an entrepreneur, you need employees and business connections. If you're an employee, you need a job. Either way, it's friends who will be key to opening up these opportunities. It's friends, distant and close ones, who form the important part of your network, not that one person you met at a meetup and never talked to again. Being awesome Realize — no, internalize — that we've all got impostor syndrome. Even the most successful entrepreneurs and engineers (with very few exceptions) feel like they just "got lucky" and aren't nearly as good as people think, and that one day soon they're going to get "caught." Truly internalizing just how widespread impostor syndrome is can help you realize that feeling like you're a fraud doesn't mean that you are. Start stuff. Show initiative. Good things come to those who don't wait. Seek out new opportunities. Start stuff — a hackathon, a club, a project, a company, a new running group, whatever. You will learn so much from doing this and it will open doors. Take risks. Seize opportunities. When you notice that little flicker of opportunity, seize it. Run with it. See where it goes. Don't walk away just because you don't know exactly where it's going to go. Bias toward "yes." A great career hinges on the "breakthrough" moments. The problem is that you often can't identify those in advance. You don't know where that coffee meeting that you don't see the point of is going to lead. You won't know that, two months down the line, that person will end up introducing you to a guy who needs some advice and winds up as your business partner. Maintain a strong bias towards saying yes. This response has been abridged. View the full answer here. More Q&A on Quora: the best answer to any question. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from the experts and get insider knowledge. Mashable Job Board Listings The Mashable Job Board connects job seekers across the U.S. with unique career opportunities in the digital space. While we publish a wide range of job listings, we have selected a few job opportunities from the past several weeks to help get you started. Happy hunting! Topics: Business, career advice, Job Search Series, Jobs, mashable careers, quora, software engineers.

Intel to Invest Heavily in Software That Enhances Cloud-Computing Capabilities

Photo Diane M. Bryant, a senior vice president of Intel, in San Francisco. Intel has earmarked $100 million for cloud computing. Credit Elizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — Intel, the world’s biggest maker of computer chips, has seen its future. There may not be room for some of Intel’s old friends in it. “A new world is coming, and it is inevitable,” said Diane M. Bryant, who runs Intel’s business in chips for industrial-size computing centers. “Everyone has to act differently.” Indeed, Intel’s venture arm is expected to announce on Monday that it will put $100 million toward software that is used in cloud computing, an increasingly popular method for making bigger and more efficient computing systems. Intel will lead a $75 million equity investment in Mirantis, a little-known start-up specializing in open-source cloud software, and will spend another $25 million on bolstering its own resources for working with Mirantis-type products, according to several people familiar with the deal. They declined to be identified in order to maintain relations with Intel and other companies. Intel was part of a $10 million investment round in the company in 2013 and last year joined another group of Mirantis investors. Many longtime Intel partners like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM also make this kind of software, called OpenStack. Not long ago, the chip king would have been happy to lean on their work. But in anointing the start-up with more of its investment money, Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., is doing what a number of older tech giants have done in recent years: rely on a young, nimble company to help it remain competitive in a fast-growing market. The Intel investment in Mirantis also shows how old alliances among tech companies are changing into more nebulous combinations of partnership and competition — co-opetition, as it is often called — driven by what appear to be permanent changes to the industry. Since April, five of the six companies that Cisco Systems has acquired or has announced its intentions to acquire have been in cloud systems. EMC, a tech giant that specializes in storing data, has for years owned a company called VMware, which makes software that is integral to cloud computing technology; now both EMC and VMware have invested in Pivotal Software, which works on cloud products. Enterprise computing, as tech for business is called, has for years consumed about three-quarters of the $1 trillion of annual worldwide expenditures on technology. Intel enjoyed being the biggest chip supplier by a wide margin to that diverse market. But the advent of cloud-driven businesses like Google, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services, or A.W.S., which rents cloud capabilities to businesses, is shrinking the number of companies that would buy or even build machines using Intel’s server chips. “When you sell semiconductors to just a few cloud providers who buy at giant scale, you can be at the mercy of an A.W.S.,” said Lydia Leong, an analyst specializing in cloud computing at the information-technology research firm Gartner. Ms. Leong estimated that by the end of this year, one-fifth of the applications that companies build would be made on cloud systems, a number that she said would rise quickly. “Google is already in the top five server manufacturers — they can have power over Intel.” In other words, big customers can demand lower prices, and like any company, Intel does not want to rely on a handful of customers, particularly because it does not dominate the market for chips that go into smartphones the way it once did the market for chips that run PCs. Intel’s server business is well worth protecting. In the last quarter, Intel’s PC chip business shrank 14 percent from a year earlier, to $7.5 billion, while data center chips, Intel’s second-largest segment at $3.9 billion, grew 10 percent in the same period. Mirantis could be a hedge against that shrinking pool of customers for server chips. Mirantis software is a so-called open-source product; the same kind of software is also produced by Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM, Cisco and others. It enables about 50 computer servers to function in concert, creating one flexible machine, but Intel wants Mirantis to eventually raise that to 1,000 servers. The hope is that this software will make it easier for more companies to develop cloud-computing systems. And among restive start-ups like Mirantis, there is an increasing sense that, now that the serious money is moving around, there are plenty of opportunities to work with giants both inside and outside the tech industry. “Companies like AT&T and Goldman Sachs have realized that their future businesses are all enabled by software in the cloud,” said Adrian Ionel, the chief executive of Mirantis. “It creates a lot of opportunities for new companies like us, because the old enterprise companies can’t help them there.” Mirantis, based in Mountain View, Calif., has 750 employees, about 600 of whom are engineers who focus on improving its cloud operating system. In addition to cash, Intel can also use its marketing muscle, and perhaps find some new allies. A few weeks ago, Intel announced that it was working with Google on software that would make it easier to deploy and manage applications across a global cloud network. And Google is also working with Mirantis, said Craig McLuckie, product manager on the Google cloud. Other big companies, like Ericsson, the world’s biggest telecommunications equipment provider, are also investors. Ericsson is a Mirantis customer as well. Intel has also invested a reported $700 million in Cloudera, a start-up focused on data analysis. Cloudera looked as though it could work well in cloud systems, Ms. Bryant, of Intel, said. The more people store and analyze data, Intel figures, the more they will consume Intel’s chips to do the analysis. “We’re seeing a very major transition,” Ms. Bryant said. Computers used to be white boxes that businesses turned to for efficiency and data storage. Now they are smartphones in pockets, and they continue to move into all manner of devices, combining with sensors and cloud systems to deploy and manage intelligent machines everywhere imaginable. For those in the computer business, that means many longstanding assumptions and alliances will have to change. The winding history of the OpenStack technology that Mirantis is working on shows how big companies can sometimes make a mess of a good idea, and why Intel is interested in the start-up. In 2010, OpenStack was started by Rackspace, an early purveyor of cloud-type services, in conjunction with NASA, which turned over some code it had been developing internally. Rackspace enjoyed early growth, but it has stumbled as Amazon Web Services has expanded. (Among other things, the company has picked up NASA as a customer.) A collection of companies contributing to the OpenStack effort have bogged it down in bureaucracy. After considering selling itself last year, Rackspace now hopes to profit partly as a reseller of Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing service. Intel appears ready to force the issue. Last month, the corporation opened an OpenStack innovation center alongside Rackspace. “My job is to try and get things moving,” Ms. Bryant said. “Intel has a long history of being able to drive standards and getting everyone to move together.” She added, “You’d be surprised how much money I have for this.”

Google folds My Maps into Drive

by Jon Mundy 11 December 2014 | Share: Google has incorporated its My Maps map creation tool into Google Drive. The company's custom map creation tool can now be accessed through its cloud storage and document editing tool. In a recent Google Maps blog post, Google revealed that "Creating a custom map is just as easy as opening up a new Google Doc." Just head to Google Drive and hit the New button, then open out the More menu, and you'll find Google My Maps as the bottom option. The Google My Maps tool lets you create and save journeys, which is perfect for planning holidays or road trips, or for documenting such trips. With Google Drive storage now part of the package, you can now put your maps in folders and search for them just as you would a normal document. This latest update also gives you the ability to add more layers and points of interest to your maps, as well as to import bigger spreadsheets and include more details in info boxes. Google has promised that, over the next week, all of the maps you've already created with the My Maps tool will be available to you through Google Drive. All in all, this seems like a natural step in Google's push to place Google Drive at the heart of productivity rather than just cloud storage. Read More: Best cloud storage services You can now stow your own My Maps in Google Drive JC Torres With yet another holiday fast approaching, Google is trying to help make your vacation planning a lot easier, and keep you inside its ecosystem of services while doing so. But even if you're not dreaming of your remote island getaway, getting Google's My Maps creation tool inside Google Drive is still a convenience for any traveler, or even just a digital surveyor, as it puts all your custom-made maps in a single location, stored on Google's cloud, of course. Creating your own map is quite simple now really. No need to memorize a URL, bookmark a page, or dig through menus. Simply go to your Google Drive account on the Web, create a new document, specifically the Map type. From that point forward, you're free to create your map as you would normally in My Maps, adding layers of data from spreadsheets or map files. Aside from a single place to start making maps, Google Drive integration also means that you can manage all your maps in a single file manager interface. Group them into folders, copy them, rename them, and even delete them, all from a single location. Now you can keep your holiday plans separate from, say, your business trips. Google is also updating the My Maps service with even more functionality. The amount of layers, the distinct and independent pieces of information you can overlay on a base map, has been increased. Larger spreadsheets can also now be imported with ease. Sadly, all of these are not available from the convenience of Google's mobile apps. As My Maps is a browser-based tool, it stands that integration with Google Drive only works on the browser interface as well. The My Maps files themselves of course appear in the Drive mobile app, but you can only view them from within a web browser. SOURCE: Google Google Drive Errors Preventing Users From Working The past few months or so Google Drive has had numerous issues preventing users from fully enjoying the suite of applications available. The most recent of errors occurred today, where many are reporting receiving an Internal Server Error 500 message upon loading up the service. This issue has been experienced for the past few days now, with users having the most trouble signing in to the service yesterday. Google will need to release an update as soon as possible to ensure everyone may gain access to their files and work in a timely manner, though some may be able to gain access now. Unfortunately, the Google Drive app status page is suggesting there are no problems being experienced within the application at the moment, but the users are still reporting the problems. Users were taking to the social media site Twitter to report the problems, and a constant stream of them were occurring quite regularly. Most of these users were rather unhappy about being unable to access the service, which is understandable. Is it unclear whether Google realizes the current problems being experienced, but we imagine word has already made its way to them by now. Knowing the tech firm, however, it may take them quite some time to release a working update for everyone. The company is known for releasing updates in tiers, thus ensuring they have a chance to fix any issues occurring following the most recent update. Of course, that also means not everyone will receive the fix at the same time. If you’re experiencing any problems with Google Drive, we highly recommend sending in a report to Google, or take to the same Twitter page everyone else has been using the past couple of days. Hopefully Google will fix the solution soon, then everyone can get back to their work.

MySAP ERP upgrades: Users are the key to success

by Jon Franke, News Editor Those who have been down the road to a mySAP ERP upgrade have a suggestion: Don't forget the user communication. In the midst of a large software project like a mySAP ERP upgrade, it can be easy to get lost in the many details. Technical challenges aside, one key to a successful project is communicating with users, according to presenters at the Americas' SAP Users' Group mySAP ERP Upgrade Symposium. For the Ottawa-based Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada's public broadcasting network, user communication started on day one. "We made sure that everybody knew exactly what to expect throughout the process, so the users knew they were part of it from the get-go," said Stéphane Rivest, director of financial systems, processes and training for the CBC. User communication can have many facets, and for the CBC, change management throughout the project was of particular importance. "Change management is going to be the key," Rivest said. "There is no other component that is going to be more important in the process." CBC will expand the number of SAP users from its current 950 to all 10,000 employees once the upgrade to mySAP ERP 2005 is complete. Rivest felt that change management and user communication were especially important on a project involving SAP. "The perception out there is that SAP is not a user-friendly system, and we are fighting against that with every SAP project here as well," Rivest explained. "So we started out with a killer change management program that we're building on for the next activities." Donna McCormick, supervisor of IT training at SaskPower, a Regina, Sask.-based utility company that supplies most of the electricity for Saskatchewan residents, also said user involvement is a key to upgrade success. "[As] we get business [more] engaged [in SAP projects] and get partnerships built within our own company we'll be much more successful," McCormick said. SaskPower installed SAP in 1999. The company upgraded in 2001, purchased the mySAP suite in 2003, and upgraded again in 2006. It employs about 2,750 people. "Users were saying, 'When is this going to stop?' " McCormick said. "Every time they turned around, there was another change to the system with more and different functionality." With all these changes, keeping users trained on the system was very important, and difficult to accomplish. McCormick echoed Rivest's thoughts that SAP projects, especially, require close collaboration with users. "Contrary to popular belief, SAP is not intuitive. People do have some trouble figuring out what they should be doing," McCormick said. "We have to find ways to let them know that the SAP system is what we have and it's powerful -- it can do anything we need it to." SaskPower had its functional team conduct a comprehensive analysis of the system changes and issue a report that detailed what the old system and upgraded system looked like and described each business transaction where changes occurred. The functional team then reviewed the report with the training department, walking through how a transaction would be completed on the upgraded system compared with the old system. "That was really valuable in the training process," McCormick said. "Then we knew how to train each piece, and we could make it as simple as possible for users." The company is also constantly looking for and developing ways for users to locate the information they need, without necessarily having to ask someone. SaskPower is open to any product that will help in that endeavor, according to McCormick. She agrees that a comprehensive change management plan is crucial but says that following through on that plan is where an upgrade can be made or broken. "From a communication perspective, it's one thing to put a plan together, and it's another to follow it," McCormick said. "Some people might have thought that we over-trained or over-communicated. My feeling is: How can you do that? I would rather hear that we over-communicated than didn't communicate enough." Dig deeper on SAP ERP software MySAP fades into history At SAP's Sapphire, SAP laid MySAP to rest and resurrected it as SAP ERP 6.0. It's merely a name change and will have no implication for customers, said Philip Say, vice president of European marketing and sales. "MySAP was of the dot.com era, and was an artifact of 2005, when the product name was conceived," he said. At least we still have MyYahoo to remind us of those early days of the Web.

How to Migrate from Your Integrated Planning Solution to SAP BusinessObjects

[unable to retrieve full-text content]dept low in case of existing MS Excel knowledge excellent Score 50 What We'll Cover ... Understanding SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation and CPM Comparing SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation vs. HP TouchPad Needs 6 to 8 Weeks for Additional Shipments Hewlett-Packard will apparently need close to two months to start fulfilling backorders for the (temporarily) revived TouchPad tablet."It will take 6-8 weeks to build enough HP TouchPads to meet our current commitments, during which time your order will then ship from this stock with free ground shipping," read an email sent to customers and reprinted in a Sept. 7 posting on the Precentral.net blog. "You will receive a shipping notification with a tracking number once your order has shipped." That would place the new TouchPads in consumers' hands sometime in either late October or early November. The reduced-price devices are not returnable, according to the email. HP originally acquired webOS as part of its takeover of Palm in 2010. The manufacturer originally had big plans for loading the operating system onto a variety of devices, including tablets, smartphones, desktops and laptops.However, sales of its TouchPad proved anemic, and HP made the decision to end the tablet's life after a mere six weeks on the market. In order to clear out inventory, the manufacturer sliced the starting price to $99, which sparked a surge of consumer interest. In the wake of that, HP made the decision to revive the line for a limited time. In addition, HP plans on dividing its webOS arm into two separate units reporting to different areas of the company, according to two leaked memos that have made their way onto the Web. The webOS software assets will find their way into the arms, however welcoming, of its Office of Strategy and Technology. The other parts of the webOS corporate infrastructure, presumably including its hardware interests, will continue as part of the Personal Systems Group, which manufactures HP's PCs, and which will presumably be spun off into its own entity under the terms of the company's new strategy. "We have decided that we'll be most effective in these efforts by having the teams in webOS software engineering, worldwide developer relations and webOS software product marketing join the Office of Strategy and Technology," Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HP's Personal Systems Group, wrote in an email circulated to the webOS developer team and also leaked onto Precentral.net. "The remainder of the webOS team, under Stephen DeWitt, will continue to report into PSG."According to at least one analyst, flooding the market with additional TouchPad devices could have significant benefits for HP going forward. A "larger installed base of TouchPad and webOS devices should increase the value of webOS in a potential sale," Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu wrote in a research note widely circulated on Barron's and other financial Websites. "We believe logical buyers may include Samsung Electronics, Research In Motion, HTC, Amazon.com, Facebook, Sony, Microsoft and others."Follow Nicholas Kolakowski on Twitter Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

SAP Plans Stats Zone for Times Square's Super Bowl Boulevard

Back-end enterprise analytics company SAP, wanting a more public face, has designed an interactive hub with social media stats for Super Bowl fans. SAP, the B2B enterprise software company, would like to get to know its "customers' customers" and so has devised a way to hopefully meet several million of them on Feb. 2, during Super Bowl XLVIII.In a warehouse on Long Island, SAP has constructed the NFL Stats Zone with Insights From SAP—a little house of sorts that it plans to pack up and reassemble on Super Bowl Boulevard, a 13-block stretch of Broadway that will feature football-themed attractions beginning Jan. 29.An enormous display outside the Stats Zone will feature social media analytics—or, the Super Bowl's social pulse, as taken by SAP's NetBase real-time analytics tool. NetBase near-instantly scans Facebook, Twitter, other social media sites, blogs and really a large swath of the Internet, looking for keywords and making sense of the content it finds.SAP's Super Bowl analysis will include fantasy player of the year stats, player vs. player comparisons, team comparisons, word clouds showing trending topics, a geographic display of fan support and sentiment questions. In the chilly warehouse three days before its move to Times Square, the display outside the Stats Zone showed attractive, changing graphics and asked, "Which team are fans most passionate about?" It then showed the breakdown by week of which team had come up in positive conversations most often. (The scores were based on a scale from minus 100 to plus 100. If three negative things and three positive things came up in the search, for example, the score would be zero.) Other questions will include: Do fans prefer talking about the game or halftime show? Which quarterback has the most passionate fans? And, do fans want it to snow on Super Bowl Sunday?As of the data on the morning of Jan. 23, 65 percent of fans are hoping for snow on game day."Our goal is to make fans smarter," said Ben Richards with GMR, the marketing agency SAP tasked with designing and executing the Stats Zone. "We have real data, and we want to share it." People tend to glaze over when SAP explains what it does."But when we talk about it in terms of Fantasy Football, people get excited," said Dan Fleetwood, SAP's group director of world sponsorships. When the NFL wanted to increase enrollment in its Fantasy Football league last summer, SAP partnered with it to build a Player Comparison Tool that enabled team owners to benefit from SAP's abilities to make sense of data."There are all of these choices to make. Do I sit this guy, do I start him? With the Comparison Tool you could look at parameters and compare them," said Fleetwood. (The NFL met its goal of increasing Fantasy Football enrollment by at least 25 percent.) SAP vs. Oracle: Customers Avoid Choosing Sides Will it be the apps vendor's innovation or the stack vendor's one-stop shop? IT hedges its bets. This article originally appeared on InformationWeek.com Score a battle victory for SAP this week with its strong quarterly earnings and first gain in software license market share against rival Oracle in eighteen months. But it's not who wins the battle, as the old saying goes, it's who wins the war. Which vendor is in a better strategic position? SAP says its innovation strategy is winning, tapping into a "structural change in the IT industry" whereby companies are spending less on commoditized hardware and more on software and innovation. There's plenty of truth in this analysis, but don't expect to see a white flag from Oracle. Commoditized as hardware may be, it's a core piece of Oracle's end-to-end stack offering, which is aimed at helping customers to cut IT costs. Which side will customers choose? That will play out in the earnings reports in the quarters and years to come. But IT buyers just might be looking for a third option as consolidation raises concerns about interoperability and price leverage. The crux of the IT-spending shift that SAP highlighted this week is one in which more of your IT dollars are being spent on software and innovation and less on hardware and consulting. Where 85 cents per dollar used to be spent on hardware and consulting, that spending is shifting toward 60 cents per dollar, with fewer hardware refresh cycles and consulting projects freeing up money for software and innovation, William McDermott, co-chief executive officer of SAP, told financial analysts. What's the evidence of this trend? You need only look at the financials of the major hardware companies, which "haven't reported the kind of numbers that we've reported," McDermott said in an interview with InformationWeek. True, Dell and HP revenues were flat in the last quarter. Part of the story was that Apple's iPad took a big bite out of consumer PC sales, but growth in corporate sales was also less than robust. Among enterprise-focused vendors, hardware sales were down 6% at Oracle, while IBM had a 17.5% increase in the revenue of its Systems & Technology Group. (IBM clearly gained share from Oracle with its Power Server line, but its mainframe business also had a huge quarter.) By comparison, SAP's software revenue grew 26%, bolstering McDermott's software-outpacing-hardware analysis. The IT spending shift is a very real long-term trend, according to Andrew Bartels, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Enterprise expenditures on hardware have grown 4% to 5% per year over the past decade, on average, while software has been growing 9% to 10% per year, Bartels says. The disparity keeps widening because Moore's Law keeps driving hardware costs down, he says. And cloud computing and virtualization are accelerating the trend by cutting into hardware sales. Ray Wang of Constellation Research also sees the shift, but it's more like 70 cents of every IT dollar now spent on hardware and services, down from 80 cents in years past, he says. The trend is more about "less money going to keeping the lights on," meaning maintaining and administering existing deployments, Wang says. Outsourcing and data center consolidation are key trends cutting into hardware sales, he notes. Companies are replacing aging hardware, but they're spending even more significantly on software, in part to avoid hiring more people, Wang says. That along with shadow IT spending on things like software-as-a-service and iPads has tech spending up 22% overall, he noted. Will the pressures of the hardware business--relentless development cost rewarded by thin margins--ultimately be a drag on Oracle's prospects? Let's first consider SAP's strategy. Innovation is the key theme SAP has been talking up since McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe became co-CEOs early last year. It's the company's label for its in-memory, mobile, and on-demand offerings. In-memory is highlighted by the Hana appliance, technology aimed at analytics today but expected to take on data warehousing and, eventually, transactional database duties. SAP's mobile apps and infrastructure are mostly Sybase products, including the Sybase Unwired apps development and Afaria device management security platforms. SAP's on-demand offerings are led by the Business ByDesign SaaS suite but also include a Sales OnDemand app released in June, a Carbon Impact OnDemand app, and other offshoots planned for the same platform. McDermott puts SAP in the same category with Apple and Google as "companies that are reporting strong momentum because they're following innovation strategies." That may be a bit of a stretch, but there's evidence SAP's innovation strategy is working. The Hana appliance, for example, has a 400 million Euro ($570 million) sales pipeline, and SAP is counting on about 100 million Euros ($142 million) in completed sales this year, McDermott said. About 3,000 companies are embracing SAP and Sybase mobility apps and infrastructure, and the mobile sales pipeline is "in the same zipcode as Hana," he said, though he stops short of offering hard figures or average deal sizes. With only 1,000 customers expected to be using Business ByDesign by year's end, SAP's on-demand revenue will scarcely register. But let's throw that in with Hana and mobility and call it 200 million Euros ($286 million) in top-line impact for 2011. That's a rounding error compared to the 12.9 billion Euros ($18.4 billion) in revenue SAP expects this year. Nonetheless, McDermott insisted that the bulk of the revenue boost has yet to come and that the innovation strategy is having an outsized impact on core application suite sales today. "Once companies hear the in-memory and mobile story, they're confident that SAP has the best process, data, and mobility strategies of all the major software companies," he said. Counting cloud, mobile, and analytics among the "big levers" in the IT market these days, Wang says, SAP has made "all the right bets." The BI and analytics bet (with SAP BuisnessObjects) has paid off particularly well, driving 30% to 40% of revenue, he estimates. But companies like Salesforce.com also are placing these bets, and the question for customers is who has the most cost-effective approach? That remains to be seen, says Wang. How Oracle Stacks Up For the last two years, the innovation at Oracle has been all about Exadata and the integrated stack. In the wake of Charles Phillips' departure as company president, software appears to have taken a back seat. Acquisitions have been small tuck-in deals, like this week's purchase of InQuira, a self-service knowledge management systems provider that will bolster Oracle's CRM offerings. After several years of delay, Oracle's Fusion Applications are finally available, but the company has been very quiet about their release. No doubt, there will be a big splash at Oracle Open World in early October. But will the story be about applications or the vendor's one-stop-shop, single-stack approach? If the focus is on the apps, expect to hear about the innovative blend of on-demand, on-premises, and hosted deployment options. It won't be hard to outdo SAP's conservative embrace of cloud computing. If the emphasis is on Oracle's stack play, expect to hear about IT manageability, vendor consolidation, and the promise of reducing the cost of keeping the lights on. Wang sums up the story line as "just buy the red stack, and we'll get rid of a dozen vendors and save you money." Even if hardware business is commoditized, that doesn't mean it's not a strategic assets for Oracle, says financial analyst Brett Korsgaard of Koa Capital Management. In this recent article, Korsgaard speculates that Oracle's strategy is to "render hardware less relevant while it recoups the profits through value-added applications and systems software." Oracle's diverse product line has made revenue predictable, shielding results when new software license revenue might suffer, he says. So there you have it: SAP's innovation story versus Oracle's stack appeal. SAP's fortunes appear to be on the rise for now. But Oracle's diversity may overcome what some see as an innovation deficit. The wild card in this war is customers, who may not react to innovation or stack-appeal as expected. In fact, the rampant vendor consolidation of recent years has raised concerns about the vendors still standing. In our just-released InformationWeek Analytics Enterprise Apps 2011 report, nearly two-thirds (64%) of 274 IT pros responsible for enterprise apps cited the "ability to integrate with existing systems and infrastructure" as the most important quality they look for from enterprise applications vendors. The next most cited quality, responsive service and support, came in at 38%. Customers are mightily concerned about interoperability. They're also worried about counting too much on any single vendor. "We see more and more SAP customers becoming less SAP-centric," Wang says, "and we also see Oracle customers trying to create a buffer against the single stack." The fear, Wang and others observe, is that overreliance on any single vendor will diminish a customer's ability to influence pricing. And that's the sort of fear that promises of innovation or IT cost savings might not overcome. In our research 39% of respondents agreed with the statement "core ERP system(s) are crucial, but we have a heterogeneous environment that requires application-independent information infrastructure." That was the top response, but not far behind (with 31%) was the view that "our enterprise is committed to a core ERP system as the platform for running the business. We want to build and extend initiatives around this platform." Even when companies commit to one ERP suite, chances are they have eggs in lots of other baskets. It's estimated that more than 60% of SAP customers, for example, run their apps on Oracle database. I don't see that changing quickly, and SAP hasn't bothered trying to aggressively push the newly SAP-certified Sybase ASE database on those customers as an alternative to Oracle database. In fact, despite their market battles and legal feuds, SAP and Oracle have managed to agree on support for each of their hottest new products. That is, Oracle has cleared the way for SAP customers to integrate SAP Hana with Oracle databases running SAP apps. And SAP has recently certified Oracle Exadata to run SAP apps. That happened because customers demanding interoperability. This article originally appeared on InformationWeek.com Doug Henschen is Executive Editor of InformationWeek, where he covers the intersection of enterprise applications with information management, business intelligence, big data and analytics. He previously served as editor in chief of Intelligent Enterprise, editor in chief of ... View Full Bio More Insights

Best Practices for SAP Cash Application Process in Accounts Receivable

Reducing costs is one of the main reasons why companies attempt to improve their accounts receivable order-to-cash cycles. However, it's complicated. According to Dolphin Corporation, "Accounts receivable is much more than just collecting what is owed. It has become a core business process." More importantly, accounts receivable is a customer-facing process. When approached the right way, the customer's experience can be enhanced and a relationship fostered. When approached the wrong way, it can prompt customers to start looking for a new vendor. To further complicate matters, numerous challenges exist. For example, some businesses consolidate their invoices when making a payment, and progressive discounts may be applied based on when the invoices are paid. Meanwhile, diverse payment types such as EDI, paper check, and credit cards require different settlement practices. With these thoughts in mind, use the best practices below to simplify and improve both the SAP cash application process in accounts receivable and your relationships with your customers. Capture check stub details from electronic images. Using scanners and optical character recognition (OCR) software allows you to capture remittance advice from check stubs electronically. Images of checks from the bank via lockbox or scanned at the desktop can be used. This steps eliminates the need for manually keying in the data and results in faster, more accurate processing. Convert captured invoice data into payment advice notes in SAP. SAP can automatically convert invoice data (such as invoice number, date, terms, and amount) into remittance advice. Again, this eliminates the need for manual data entry and improves accuracy. Match payment advice to customers' orders. Since invoice, customer, and payment advice data is linked, SAP can automatically match payment advice to customers' orders. Once posted in SAP, payment can be applied resulting in faster and more accurate processing yet again. Match payments to invoices. SAP can automate matching payments to invoices. Exact matches are easily handled by SAP while discrepancies such as overages, shortages, and write-offs are typically resolved based on algorithms, logic, and AR interventions. Situations that require review or approval are automatically flagged and any related workflows activated. Develop systems that can handle various forms of payment media. As paper checks become less common, other payment forms emerge, making payment processing a multifaceted process. Workflows and systems for each payment type must be developed so that payments are processed consistently regardless of how they arrive. Monitor performance. In order to ensure that the order-to-cash process is meeting its targets, it's crucial to monitor performance. Use reports to monitor the volume of payments received and applied as well as to identify issues that need attention. How does automating the order-to-cash process enhance customer relationships? An inefficient order-to-cash process can result in order fulfillment delays, incorrect orders, incorrectly applied discounts, incorrectly applied payments, or even unwarranted collections calls. By automating the process in SAP, these problems can be turned around to result in a better customer experience. For accounts receivable departments using SAP applications, Dolphin's Accounts Receivable solution suite provides the tools needed to automate the order-to-cash process. Use this suite to automate discrepancy management and gain insight into the process. Works Cited: 1. ReadSoft, "Five Steps to Best Practice AR Cash Application Processing in SAP," - http://www.readsoft.com/docs/default-source/resource-library/five-steps-to-best-practice-ar-cash-application-processing-in-sap_fl04 2. Citibank, "Best Practice in Accounts Receivable Reconciliation," - http://www.citibank.com/transactionservices/home/about_us/articles/docs/accounts_receivable.pdf 3. Dolphin Corp, "SAP Accounts Receivable Cash Application," - http://www.dolphin-corp.com/business-process-management/ar-cash-application/

SAP Readies a Big Business Marketplace

SAP, one of the world’s largest makers of software for business, is readying an ambitious plan to build a global marketplace for business products and services, according to senior company executives. Photo William McDermott, SAP’s chief executive. William McDermott, SAP’s chief executive.Credit Uwe Anspach/DPA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images SAP, which is headquartered in Germany but whose chief executive, William R. McDermott, is American, could make money selling the software, Mr. McDermott said. The company might also gain valuable economic information about business behavior that it could then sell. “Participants conducting digital commerce, and the insights that can come from there,” he said. “All through HANA,” SAP’s tool for rapidly managing and analyzing large quantities of information. The plan, still in development, will be announced early next year, he said. If successful, SAP could become a direct competitor to Alibaba, which already enables significant commerce between businesses through an online marketplace. Given SAP’s customer base, however, the business would most likely aim to be far bigger and more sophisticated and to involve larger sums changing hands. If SAP could succeed in analyzing that, it might be able to identify the kind of economic behavior that stocks trade on faster than most government agencies can presently publish. That plan is a long way off, however, and faces numerous hurdles. Several Internet companies have already tried to be alternatives to government reporting, without success. None, however, have SAP’s size, nor have they worked deeply in a world of cloud and mobile computing. SAP follows Oracle as the world’s top maker of software for things like planning and managing global manufacturing and financial operations. It has more than 263,000 customers in 188 countries. For several years SAP tried to move more of its business from older-style computers inside companies to cloud computing, selling the software not as a packaged item but as a service. This has involved several acquisitions, including Ariba, a maker of software for corporate purchases, for $4.3 billion in 2012, and Fieldglass, with software for hiring and managing temporary workers, for more than $1 billion last May. On Thursday, SAP closed a deal to buy Concur, used in filing expenses, for $8.3 billion. HANA was first offered as a cloud-based service in May 2013. The Concur acquisition was particularly important in Mr. McDermott’s plan to build a network of software available online. Concur’s chief executive, Steve Singh, has previously discussed using the expense system as a way of procuring and accounting for things like airline flights, cars and hotels. United Airlines and other travel and lodging providers have deals with Concur to allow booking through the expense system. “There is an amazing opportunity for technology to anticipate our needs and act on them, whether it’s getting goods and services to run business, hiring people or buying trips,” said Mr. Singh, who will be running the planned new business for SAP. By opening the marketplace up to outside developers, even SAP competitors, SAP would be able to increase the number of offerings in its store, and also derive more data. “We want this to be an open and global, digitally connected network,” Mr. Singh said. “Anyone can build software on it.”

ERP 9 for BlackBerry now available for Tally.ERP 9 users

ERP 9 for BlackBerry, the latest application for the Tally software series is now available on the BlackBerry World storefront giving existing Tally.ERP 9 customers enhanced business capabilities on their BlackBerry smartphones. ERP 9 for BlackBerry offers real-time access to critical business information on Tally.ERP 9 through Tally.NET framework. With all the features required for high-performance business management, Tally.ERP 9 customers with a BlackBerry smartphone will not need to make frequent calls to their accounts team for information. Customers will receive instant and important financial updates for modules like creditors, debtors, bank balance, top 10 customers, inventory status and more, directly on their BlackBerry smartphone. The app provides instant access to customer information including concerned person, email id and contact information amongst other details. Users will also be able to make a call from the customer information accessible from creditors and debtors module. Mr. Vikash K. Agarwal, President, Tally Solutions (P) Ltd. said, “In today’s world, instant access to information is very vital and enterprise mobility using smartphones has become a business necessity. At Tally, we continuously strive to make the lives of our customers simpler and this includes bringing mobility solutions into the country. We are very happy that BlackBerry shares this vision of ours and has taken this initiative with aggression. With ERP 9 for BlackBerry now being available for BlackBerry smartphones, customers will be able to leverage the tremendous potential of Tally.ERP 9 on the move.” Commenting on the announcement, Mr. Hitesh Shah, Director Commercial Business for India at BlackBerry said, “BlackBerry smartphones have always been about empowering business customers, and Tally being an important tool used across industries is a welcomed addition. The availability of ERP 9 for BlackBerry provides more value to business customers by giving them the opportunity to make important and timely decisions while on the go.” With Trusted Remote Access, Audit & Compliance Services, an Integrated Support Centre and Security management, Tally.ERP 9 is a complete product that retains its original simplicity yet offers comprehensive business functionalities such as Accounting, Finance, Inventory, Sales, Purchase, Point of Sales, Manufacturing, Costing, Job Costing, Payroll and Branch Management along with capabilities like Statutory Processes, excise and other functions. Key benefits of Tally.ERP 9: Simplifies business processes while delivering a host of unmatched functionalities Adapts to the way businesses work with an intuitive interface Ensures business continuity even in unforeseen and exceptional situations Offers solutions to real life business problems Ensures businesses perform more in the same amount of time ERP 9 on BlackBerry is now available on BlackBerry World BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10 smartphones. ERP 9 for BlackBerry now available for Tally.ERP 9 users SummaryERP 9 offers real-time access to critical business information on Tally.ERP 9 through Tally.NET framework. ERP 9 for BlackBerry, the latest application for the Tally software series is now available on the BlackBerry World storefront giving existing Tally.ERP 9 customers enhanced business capabilities on their BlackBerry smartphones. ERP 9 for BlackBerry offers real-time access to critical business information on Tally.ERP 9 through Tally.NET framework. With all the features required for high-performance business management, Tally.ERP 9 customers with a BlackBerry smartphone will not need to make frequent calls to their accounts team for information. Customers will receive instant and important financial updates for modules like creditors, debtors, bank balance, top 10 customers, inventory status and more, directly on their BlackBerry smartphone. The app provides instant access to customer information including concerned person, email id and contact information amongst other details. Users will also be able to make a call from the customer information accessible from creditors and debtors module.

Singapore Exchange Delays Trading Start Following Software Glitch

[unable to retrieve full-text content]SINGAPORE— Singapore Exchange Ltd. Wednesday delayed the start of trading in its securities market by over three hours to give brokerages a chance to correct any errors on behalf of clients caused by a software glitch two days earlier. The interruption ... Dropbox Opens Up to Business Software Developers As Dropbox pushes to become an online-storage provider for businesses, the startup is learning it has to play nice with the dozens of enterprise software products those organizations already use. The company today announced a new set of tools to help integrate Dropbox’s file storage and security features with other business software. The tools, part of an application programming interface, or API, include the ability to manage employee activity logs, authenticate teams of workers with single sign-on services and back up large amounts of data, the company said in a press release. Dropbox, already a popular app with millions of consumers, hopes to bolster its credibility with the corporate-tech managers who buy software for large companies and want tools that work well with the applications they already run. The storage service is used in more than 4 million businesses and is increasingly deployed in bigger organizations, including Hyatt, Hearst, National Geographic and Under Armour. More than 100,000 companies now pay for Dropbox, up from 80,000 in July. “What customers were asking us is not to build our own solutions, but to open up and make [Dropbox] accessible to existing providers,” said Dennis Woodside, a veteran of Google who in February left his job running that company’s Motorola division to become Dropbox’s first operating chief. Woodside is leading a push into business software that could be critical to Dropbox’s future. Over the past year, larger rivals including Google and Microsoft have courted consumers — Dropbox’s core customers — by lowering the prices of their storage services for individual users. That’s put pressure on the startup to sell to higher-margin business customers. Woodside is also overseeing the company’s expansion internationally, including new sales offices in Japan and Australia. The majority, or 70%, of Dropbox users are outside of the U.S., and a “large percentage of revenue” comes from international markets, Woodside said. Offices in the U.K., France and Germany are scheduled to open next year, he said. Dropbox gives its basic service away for free, but charges $10 a month for extra storage and other features. Its business service costs $15 a month per user and includes additional security and administration features. More than 20 business software makers already have taken advantage of Dropbox’s new business API. Splunk, a data-tracking service for businesses, now pulls into its dashboard information about employees logging into and out of Dropbox files. Guidance Software, which helps companies prepare for litigation and regulatory investigations, added support for files stored in Dropbox. The business API extends the software development tools previously made available through Dropbox’s general API. More than 300,000 applications use the general API to incorporate Dropbox capabilities such as the ability to save and attach files from Dropbox in Yahoo Mail messages. The new tools follow Dropbox’s partnership last month with Microsoft to let users easily save Microsoft Office files to Dropbox from their desktop or mobile phones. Woodside said Dropbox is following in the tradition of large enterprise software companies like Salesforce, which have become more useful to a variety of businesses by opening up and partnering with outside developers. “Salesforce has expanded its API to thousands of developers,” Woodside said. “It’s become a much stronger company because of it.” ______________________________________________________ For the latest news and analysis, Get breaking news and personal-tech reviews delivered right to your inbox. More from WSJ.D: And make sure to visit WSJ.D for all of our news, personal tech coverage, analysis and more, and add our XML feed to your favorite reader.

How startups are making software more appealing for end users

BENGALURU: Chennai-based software maker Zoho is focused on making its products more intuitive and appealing to end users amid a growing trend of no longer treating business software as a utilitarian product but one that can work across personal devices that employees bring to the office. "There have been so many instances that people sign up independent of their corporate policy," said Sridhar Vembu, chief executive of Zoho, which competes with some of the largest enterprise software makers such as Microsoft and Google. Over the past four years, the company has learned to consciously think about design so that its suite of enterprise software comes with a friendly, easy-to-use interface. This phenomenon of consumerisation of IT - where enterprises are coping with changes brought on by end consumers and tech-savvy employees - is in turn benefiting start-ups that are primed for this transformation. "Every CIO's top agenda today is to do something with start-ups," said Lalit Ahuja, co-founder of Kyron accelerator and former managing director of the Indian arm of US-based Target Corp. Thanks to mobility and cloud, large enterprises are trying to appeal to and make themselves visible to their end consumer. "Enterprise software is beginning to become cool. That's the new mantra," said Virender Aggarwal, CEO of Ramco Systems. "Phones can support so many apps, employees demand cool software for internal IT teams," said Aggarwal, whose company is working with several start-ups to augment its everyday IT needs. Gone are the days when enterprises would buy licences for software, install them on each system and spend a few days training employees to work on it. The intuitive interface and the subscription-based services of cloud-based products and services have eliminated it all. "Start-ups have now started enterprise grade software, robust in quality and security," said Jayant Kolla, analyst at Convergence Catalyst. Being mobile-first economies that skipped the desktop era, the leaders in the consumerisation trend are China and India, followed by Brazil and Mexico, according to the US-based Burrus Research. Consumerisation of IT can help not just start-ups but is imperative to enterprises as well, according to experts. "Additionally, your Gen-Y and Gen-X employees are very techno-savvy and need to use what they consider to be the newest devices so they can feel empowered," said Daniel Burrus, CEO of Burrus research, adding that better communication, collaboration and greater satisfaction of the workforce can be achieved through consumerisation of IT. Earlier this year, VMWare acquired AirWatch for $1.54 billion (about Rs 9,537 crore), to help professionals seamlessly access their private cloud from a multitude of devices. But with mobility comes the threat of security of data. Two-year-old i7 Networks, which sells security solutions for the BYOD age, has bagged Aditya Birla group, online bus ticketing service Redbus and IT firm Happiest Minds as his customers. "The IT teams have no control over what devices employees bring," said CEO Manjunath Gowda, whose company is growing at 50% every year and expects revenue of $1 million (about Rs 6 crore) in the next two years. Previously, IT companies in India moved slow on technology, laying a greater emphasis on robustness than efficiency. "Now, we're past that stage. Companies want efficiency; products that will give them an edge over their competitors," said Akilesh Tuteja , an analyst at professional services firm KPMG. "And start-ups are best positioned to do that." "There have been so many instances that people sign up independent of their corporate policy," said Sridhar Vembu, chief executive of Zoho, which competes with some of the largest enterprise software makers such as Microsoft and Google. Over the past four years, the company has learned to consciously think about design so that its suite of enterprise software comes with a friendly, easy-to-use interface. This phenomenon of consumerisation of IT - where enterprises are coping with changes brought on by end consumers and tech-savvy employees - is in turn benefiting startups that are primed for this transformation. "Every CIO's top agenda today is to do something with startups," said Lalit Ahuja, co-founder of Kyron accelerator and former managing director of the Indian arm of US-based Target Corp. Thanks to mobility and cloud, large enterprises are trying to appeal to and make themselves visible to their end consumer. "Enterprise software is beginning to become cool. That's the new mantra," said Virender Aggarwal, CEO of Ramco Systems. "Phones can support so many apps, employees demand cool software for internal IT teams," said Aggarwal, whose company is working with several startups to augment its everyday IT needs. Gone are the days when enterprises would buy licences for software, install them on each system and spend a few days training employees to work on it. The intuitive interface and the subscriptionbased services of cloud-based products and services have eliminated it all. "Startups have now started enterprise grade software, robust in fessionals seamlessly access their private cloud from a multitude of devices. But with mobility comes the threat of security of data. Twoyear-old i7 Networks, which sells security solutions for the BYOD age, has bagged Aditya Birla group, online bus ticketing service Redbus and IT firm Happiest Minds as his customers. "The IT teams have no control over what devices employees bring," said CEO Manjunath Gowda, whose company is growing at 50% every year and expects revenue of $1 million (about Rs 6 crore) in the next two years. Previously, IT companies in India moved slow on technology, laying a greater emphasis on robustness than efficiency. "Now, we're past that stage. Companies want efficiency; products that will give them an edge over their competitors," said Akhilesh Tuteja, an analyst at professional services firm KPMG. "And startups are best positioned to do that." quality and security," said Jayant Kolla, analyst at Convergence Catalyst. Being mobile-first economies that skipped the desktop era, the leaders in the consumerisation trend are China and India, followed by Brazil and Mexico, according to the US-based Burrus Research. Consumerisation of IT can help not just startups but is imperative to enterprises as well, according to experts. "Additionally, your Gen-Y and Gen-X employees are very technosavvy and need to use what they consider to be the newest devices so they can feel empowered," said Daniel Burrus, CEO of Burrus research, adding that better communication, collaboration and greater satisfaction of the workforce can be achieved through consumerisation of IT. Earlier this year, VMWare acquired AirWatch for $1.54 billion (about Rs 9,530 crore).

Financial Health Software to the SMB Market

New SYSPRO Module measures critical profitability and liquidity factors K3 Business Technology Group (K3), a leading enterprise business software company, has announced the release of a groundbreaking Financial Ratio Analysis module for use with SYSPRO General Ledger software. The new module is designed to help monitor and measure financial health for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB). The Financial Ratio Analysis module incorporates more than a dozen financial metrics, including ratios for efficiency, profitability, business activity and liquidity enabling SMBs to accurately gauge their financial performance. K3 customers will gain the new functionality automatically as part of the SYSPRO General Ledger solution at no additional cost. K3's proactive approach to adding enhancements for its SYSPRO solutions removes the need of waiting months or even years to install a major release or expensive upgrade. The new SYSPRO financial capabilities include a comprehensive set of standard ratio/metrics, as well as specific financial health monitoring/analysis capabilities designed especially for the growing number of SMB manufacturing and distribution organisations served by K3. For example, the working capital cycle ratio allows companies to easily monitor daily operating liquidity, while the Du Pont analysis measures the rate of return on equity for stockholders. The library of ratios covers everything from inventory turnover analysis to payables turnover to debt ratios. All ratios are also available via standard reporting as well as through executive dashboards that provide management with instantly accessible reporting and querying capabilities. "The inclusion of financial ratio analysis as an out-of-the-box addition affirms our commitment to delivering value beyond accounting and transaction processing for our SYSPRO financial offering - it adds real business value and vision to ERP," said Howard Joseph, Managing Director, K3 Business Technology Group. "This new solution is extremely useful for top executives as well as for boardroom reporting, real-time performance monitoring, detailed analysis and what-if analysis." Howard Joseph, continued: "The added capabilities of providing business ratios to the general ledger without having to purchase an expensive business intelligence suite will be welcomed by our customers to enhance better decision making." These new financial capabilities for SYSPRO enable companies to compare operating results with those of specific competitors or the industry as a whole. Managers can identify relative strengths and weaknesses and by comparing changes in a firm's ratios over time can identify opportunities for improvements and cost cutting. K3's forward thinking approach to adopting new technology for its SYSPRO solutions, such as web services and SOA platforms, also reflects the desires of customers who are driven by business needs and not by the latest headlines. This exemplifies K3's ongoing strategy of helping to simplify the success of its customers. About K3 Business Technology Group K3 Business Technology Group employs 90 people at its Manchester head office and its branches throughout the UK and Ireland. The company offers solutions in enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management, advanced planning and scheduling, warehouse management, human resources and e-business. SYSPRO is used by some 12,000 sites across the world. K3 Business Technology Group is part of K3 Business Technology PLC which is a global leader in providing next-generation enterprise software for businesses in the retail, manufacturing and distribution sectors. With more than 3,000 customer installations in over 30 countries, K3 is recognised as a safe, innovative and reliable provider of world-class solutions, backed by world-class service.