Being a retailer these days is not easy. Consumers have strong demands and many options to get what they want. Delivering the exact products they seek at the best price and with the fastest delivery is the name of the game. And as I noted in my last post, Amazon has set the bar very…

“Retailers that don’t adopt control tower solutions will be put out of business by Amazon within five years,” proclaims James Cooke, principal analyst here at Nucleus Research. A strong statement for sure, but I know that James doesn’t pull any punches, basing his conclusion on research and his extensive supply chain expertise. That’s why I…

Most human resources employees get into the field with wide-eyed expectations that they’ll work to boost employee morale, recruit top talent and optimize overall work conditions. After all, they are the liaison between management and the ‘real’ workers on the ground. Over the past 15 years, however, that intermediary role has shifted away from guiding…

The term analytics was just starting to gain traction in 2003 when Nucleus Research launched the Tech ROI Awards. After the huge success of data mining in the 90s, vendors started to expand capabilities and introduce Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. And that in turn led to the analytics category. It may seem like splitting hairs,…

Over the past 12 years the Technology ROI Awards have recognized the best IT deployments in the industry. They’ve also identified powerful industry trends that have helped companies optimize tech value. For example, we saw early on how the cloud was delivering exponential returns as many award winners exceeded an ROI of 1,000 percent. Pay back was…

At Nucleus Research, we’ve been following the vertical solutions trend for enterprise software closely. In fact, I wrote a blog just a few weeks ago titled Verticalization is the New Cloud, discussing how industry-specific applications are emerging as a top differentiator for vendors. Several visionary challengers to the tech establishment have been leading that trend….

Microsoft seems to have a hard time making up its mind when it comes to product branding. Take the newly announced ‘Skype for Business’, for example. That’s the new name for Microsoft Lync, by the way. In fact, Lync was announced in 2010 with the headline “A new name for a new generation of unified…

Tipping point, paradigm shift, killer app or game changer. Whatever you call it, cloud computing has been its poster child for the past decade. In the aftermath of the dot.com bust, cloud computing demonstrated the real power of the Internet and fundamentally changed the industry. Vendors that embraced the cloud early started to outpace their…

You’ve got to question the latest marketing strategy of FinancialForce. Their “FrankenCloud” announcement earlier this month was a confusing shot at NetSuite, Oracle, and SAP that gained a sharp rebuke from NetSuite’s CEO Zach Nelson. Let me summarize the FinancialForce marketing pitch: “multiple clouds are bad.” Thanks for that info guys. The only surprise is…

Enterprise ERP just got interesting Perhaps nothing brings two companies closer than a common enemy. Case in point: the recent partnership between Microsoft and NetSuite. Microsoft, which offers its own Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution — Microsoft Dynamics — is teaming with rival NetSuite to optimize NetSuite applications for Microsoft Azure and eventually for Office365…

Vertical apps cut initial consulting costs by 65%, accelerate time to value by 57% As if the business analytics space isn’t competitive enough for vendors, we are seeing a new battle line emerge – vertical offerings. Customers are demanding more off-the-shelf solutions, and smart vendors are responding with applications tailored to specific vertical markets. This…

How regulatory pressure is driving a renewed interest in Workforce Management Whether you support the Affordable Care Act (ACA and often known as ‘ObamaCare’) or not, as the law it is forcing businesses to meet a complex new set of regulations. And while this adds new regulatory pressures to companies, a positive side effect is…

Supply chain blues in the age of the cloud Given the strategic importance of the supply chain to many businesses, I was surprised to see how many organizations are unhappy with their return on investment (ROI). A recent Nucleus Research survey found 52 percent of deployments are not meeting ROI expectations with 34 percent of…

The mainstreaming of business analytics was inevitable. Once the realm of data scientists, analytics are increasingly being leveraged throughout the enterprise to deliver valuable business insight. In fact, one of the biggest trends over the past few years has been integrating and even embedding analytics with other enterprise applications, such as CRM, ERP, back office…

Don’t be fooled by the ‘Pretend’ Cloud Marketing wizards have this uncanny way of branding their products with labels closely aligned to customer demands. Some stretch the truth a bit and dilute the entire category. Take organic food, for example. Not all foods labeled as organic meet the same stringent requirements. In fact, recent reports…

Board now or be left behind  As most of the of the enterprise has largely shifted to the cloud – from the CRM and analytics trailblazers to industry laggards such as ERP – Human Resource Departments have blissfully maintained their bucolic, old world existence. Even with several cloud options, many HR organizations have ignored them,…

Our top 10 predictions went out last week. This year’s report was bit delayed from our normal November timeframe but the analyst team was under a bit of pressure this past Fall. We’ve had a great track record since the first top 10 was published in 2004 and now 11 years later I’m proud of…

Well that was a shocker. The children at Google couldn’t turn Google Glass into a real product. Not to worry, the company with the worst case of corporate ADD has already forgotten about it and is off chasing butterflies. This isn’t a surprise and we saw it coming back in March. Google fell for what…

The cloud. Hard to call it a new topic, it’s not. What it is, to oversimplify, is just a delivery mechanism. But it is, to say the least, a very valuable delivery mechanism. We’ve been looking into cloud solutions and the actual returns achieved by the hundreds of ROI case studies we’ve published. So let’s…