Given all of the technology strategy work and software evaluation and selection work that TSI does with our clients, it is critical that we remain up to speed with macro-level technology trends. Besides understanding what’s happening now, we ensure that we know where the leading software vendors are planning to go on their roadmaps. May and June have been filled with learning opportunities and growth with TSI both attending and presenting at these sessions. The conferences included NetSuite’s SuiteWorld in Las Vegas, Infor SUN in Dallas and Epicor Insights in Nashville. Provided below are the top takeaways we would like to share from these conferences from spring 2018:
- NetSuite – SuiteWorld: Organizationally speaking, since Oracle has acquired NetSuite, the focus areas and points of coordination between NetSuite and Oracle are getting more defined and clear. This should make it easier to determine who and how to work with each organization. From a technology perspective, Oracle has significantly ramped up the R&D budget with great new things coming out much more rapidly. Some of the standouts are intelligent supply chain, enhanced reporting utilizing embedded pivot tables along with additional data centers coming online for NetSuite both nationally and internationally.
Epicor Insights: Exciting new things are happening at Epicor with a new executive team on board in the Sales, Marketing & Technology areas including a new Cloud strategy that is based on the MS-Azure platform. Additionally, they just released an ISV portal and Jitterbit development platform along with a new customization layer between all products called “Kinetic Design Platform”. This allows their partners to develop extensions on an upgradeable platform to address the version-lock issues that older ERP systems have had in the past. Epicor is looking like a viable contender in the space once again since they’ve always had the deep functionality and are now addressing the Cloud evolution with renewed vigor and direction.
Infor SUN: Cloud Suite Industrial (Syteline) was the focus of this conference and highlighted Infor’s newest strategy of providing a “single-version” cloud platform that addresses the version-lock issues of the past in an exciting new way. As they have already developed an industry model nature of the “Cloud Suite” bundling, this now gives their very experienced partner community the tools they need to compete on a level playing field in the Cloud. The functionality of their 5 major offerings of the past (LN, SL, Visual, S3, M3) have always had the deep functionality so this new strategy of providing a platform to help keep each client account in upgrade ready mode is a critical element to provide Infor clients a solid path in what they call an “evolution rather than a revolution” towards getting all their clients to a cloud platform whenever they are ready.
In addition to these conferences, via other current software reviews we are involved with, we have spent extensive time reviewing some of Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and other products.
- Significant developments have taken place with the MS D365 cloud platform including the latest Enterprise version (based off AX) featuring Financial & Operations module along with the robust CRM functionality bundled and available in a single-tenant (dedicated cloud) platform model on MS-Azure. The latest is the newly released Business Central version of D365 (based off NAV) available as their multi-tenant public cloud offering that just came out in April 2018 and offers a lower price point yet still utilizing similar development extensions allowing multiple industry models to be developed by the vast MS partner network. Lots of activity and looks like a major new player in the multi-tenant cloud space.