Deltek Remains the Master of Its Selected Few Domains

Deltek Remains the Master of Its Selected Few Domains

Deltek Systems, Inc. (www.deltek.com ), the leading provider of enterprise software and solutions for project-based businesses and professional services firms, remains committed to a potentially unique, high level of investment in product development as compared to other software companies. According to Kenneth E. deLaski, Deltek President and CEO, the average public software company only invests approximately 14.5 percent of its revenue in product development and, at 24 percent, Deltek customers should take this as a strong sign that the vendor is deeply committed to continued investment and improvement of each of its product suites for project businesses and professional services firms. Deltek also announced that, once again, it achieved strong profitability and cash flow for fiscal 2002, which reportedly marked the 18th consecutive year of profitability for the company. In addition, the company added more than 300 new customers during the year in a variety of industries including aerospace, construction, engineering, IT services, consulting, architecture, and project-based manufacturing.
Within its marketing and proposal automation product, Deltek has an emerging CRM derivative known as client relationship management, which should help firms (such as accounting practices and law offices), other professional service companies; technical services; and, project-based organizations track client relationships in a more sophisticated manner than referrals or word-of-mouth, which were appropriate during the start-up phases of such companies. Subsequently accessing a client's record in Deltek Vision will also list the client's employees and former employers via hyperlink, enabling users to keep tabs on industry movement and turnover.

In a project-based business, there are no dedicated sales teams on the road chasing and securing new business since most senior partners and project managers bring in their own business and look after their own client portfolio. Consequently, traditional sales calls or consumer internet storefront ordering approaches become inappropriate in these situations. Therefore, the critical element of the client relationship process is to secure new business through proposal development. However, trying to recall the details of relevant past jobs and those who worked on them plus gathering the hard copies of such information from different people can be a nightmare. To that end, Deltek proposal management system allows a contractor to organize projects by various categories such as people, projects, designs, and expertise allowing appropriate information (e.g., resumes, document boilerplates, etc.) to become easily retrievable in the preparation of new proposals. Users can then track the progress of a proposal, share the information with other team members, review similar proposals, and analyze awarded jobs through a product that offers both government and customized commercial proposal generators.

SAP Launches Sustainability Management App

SAP Launches Sustainability Management App

SAP on Thursday unveiled what it believes is the software industry's most comprehensive and useful green application to date with the launch of SAP BusinessObjects Sustainability Management.

The application, which was developed with the help of some of SAP's (NYSE: SAP) largest and most environmentally conscience customers including Lexmark and Nestle, will give enterprise customers the ability to cull through hundreds of business applications and extract the pertinent sustainability data and consolidate it in one dashboard to manage an organization's overall sustainability program.

Sustainability, which obviously includes environmental responsibility but also incorporates social and economic considerations, is not just something corporations do for good public relations these days -- it's a business imperative.

In October, Walmart (NYSE: WMT), which recorded more than $406 billion in sales last year, threw down the gauntlet to its 100,000-plus suppliers worldwide with the creation of the Walmart Sustainability Index.

The index is designed to provide Walmart and its customers with a single source of data for evaluating the sustainability of the products it sells and, not unintentionally, raises the bar for manufacturers looking to do business with the world's largest retailer.

Along those lines, more and more multinational corporations are voluntarily participating in the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), a network-based organization that's established the framework for benchmarking organizational performance with respect to sustainable development and commerce.

To meet the demands of the Walmarts of the world -- to say nothing of current and future environmental legislation by local, national and international governments -- companies are faced with the daunting challenge of gathering all their data, like carbon emissions, water consumption, electricity used in the datacenter, and so on. And they have to make sense of it without spending millions in what's still somewhat of an altruistic endeavor.

SAP, which prides itself as the leader among software vendors on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for three years running, said its new sustainability management application will deliver that data quickly from all the disparate production, sales, manufacturing, HR and health and safety applications running in the enterprise.

"We are so proud of this product," Peter Graf, SAP's chief sustainability officer, said during a conference call Thursday. "It gives companies the ability to truly drive their sustainability and live up to the promises made to their customers, their employees and their management."

The software provides a holistic view of an organization's sustainability indicators and features an easy-to-use interface that streamlines internal and external reporting. SAP officials said it then helps turn data into actionable insight that can be cascaded and executed on throughout an organization, making it easier to track compliance with sustainability strategies across the business.

It includes a library of more than 100 key performance indicators that were jointly developed with Nestle and Lexmark to identify the most important environmental, social and business metrics required to deliver a comprehensive view of an organization's overall sustainability.

Using the business intelligence and analytics features developed by BusinessObjects, the application analyzes these KPIs and provides them in a single snapshot view, so C-level executives can quickly ascertain just how well or how poorly a particular region or business unit is doing in its sustainability efforts.

SAP officials said the application is designed to support SAP and non-SAP business applications and can be used to manually input some data in an organized and structured fashion that keeps all the data fresh and pooled in the appropriate data fields.

"In conversations with our customers, they've told us that [sustainability management] isn't really a voluntary activity," Graf said. "It's a mainstream task and managing it through phone calls and Excel spreadsheets is to expensive."

"The public and governments are putting pressure on them to be accountable," he added. "You have to make sure the information you have is easily retrievable and audited."

As the Walmart Sustainability Index was announced, the retailer made it clear that there was an undeniably competitive element to the program -- it was designed to "create a race to the top," according to a statement at the time from Matt Kistler, Walmart's senior vice president of sustainability.

Along with helping it facilitate the selection of "preferred products," Walmart said it also expects the index to help it track its enormous supply chain, drive product innovation and variety and hold its buyers and suppliers accountable for their impact on the environment and their local communities.

"Sustainability is increasingly mission-critical across the corporate world," said Stephen Stokes, AMR Research's vice president of sustainability and green technologies. "Managing and reporting an organization's sustainable performance via transparent and high quality data collation, analysis, optimization and modeling is a new basis for defining and communicating operational excellence."

Lower Enterprise Storage Costs: Open Source

Lower Enterprise Storage Costs: Open Source

Two data storage vendors have released new products that they claim can save users a bundle over more traditional storage systems.

Nexenta and ParaScale both use open source software and commodity hardware to lower storage costs for enterprises.

Nexenta uses Sun's (NASDAQ: JAVA) ZFS file system and x86 servers to create enterprise-class storage, while ParaScale uses Linux and commodity hardware to create a "private cloud" of tier 2 file storage.

Along with NexentaStor 2.2, the latest version of Nexenta's unified NAS and SAN solution based on ZFS, the company has also introduced a new software suite, Pomona, that automates provisioning and management of multiple NexentaStor and other storage systems.

NexentaStor 2.2 also includes additional support for both VMware (NYSE: VMW) and Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS), and the solution supports CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel protocols.

The latest version also includes stronger database integration with Oracle and MySQL. Data deduplication is also planned soon, thanks to Sun's addition of the data reduction technology to ZFS, and pNFS support is also in the works.

Nexenta claims it can save users 70 to 80 percent over proprietary solutions. The company boasts 13,000 free users and 727 paid users to date.

Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Terri McClure said in a statement that "Efforts like Nexenta's are propelling storage into the 21st century, much like Red Hat and Linux did for the server industry."

Nexenta CEO Evan Powell said the company was founded by the creators of the Open-iSCSI.org project, which is now part of the Linux kernel. They latched onto OpenSolaris as soon as it became available to start Nexenta.org, and from there they moved into selling their software and services to enterprises.

Powell said he isn't worried about the fate of ZFS if the Sun-Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) merger ever gets cleared by the European Union.

“Gigantic storage users are using ZFS. It's the best file system on the planet and it's open source. The code and the community will continue even if something happens counter to expectations.”