Sungard Business PLUS

Posted by spencer on March 26, 2010 under ERP Software, Government Software, Non-Profit Software | Be the First to Comment

SunGard is a unique software vendor with its roots actually in the oil business – in the early 1980’s, SunGard spun-off from the Sun Oil Company. Their growth as a software company has primarily been through acquisition – concentrating on 3 software target verticals: Financials, Higher Education and Public Sector.

Recently, SoftResources participated in scripted demonstrations of SunGard’s new flagship product for the Public Sector – BusinessPLUS. BusinessPLUS is the result of an effort by SunGard to integrate its Public Sector software acquisitions into a single, web-based Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) product. The products included in this integration were: BiTech, Pentamation, HTE, Open Software Solutions, Inc. and Vivista Holdings Limited out of the UK. What about IFAS? IFAS was actually the new name of the BiTech product and used as the basis for the new BusinessPLUS major release approximately 18 months ago. (Software vendor’s like to re-name and re-brand their products so it is important to truly understand the genealogy of the software you are considering!)

BusinessPLUS was considered a “major release” because .NET code was used to bring together several applications with different underlying source code (C++, C#, COBAL, etc.) to create a unified look and feel of the system. .NET technologies allow SunGard to have a web-based product without completely rewriting the source code to these systems. It should be noted that SunGard has some pieces of the “classic” system in their solution that have not been written in the .NET technology. For example, if a payroll clerk is doing head’s down multiple timecard entry, the “classic” timecard screen is best suited for that purpose at this point. However, the parts of the system that have not been enhanced with .NET are likely to be updated over time.

SunGard’s roadmap includes a commitment to develop and enhance BusinessPLUS as their flagship product, In fact, they will no longer sell the older products like Pentamation or HTE and will only support 2 prior versions of the software. This means that customers on the older software solutions will either need to go off maintenance and support their own software internally, or they will eventually move to the BusinessPLUS system. They have formed specific professional services groups for sub-sets of the Public Sector such as municipalities, non-profits and K-12 school districts. SunGard believes this focus will allow current and potential customer’s access to industry experts in their respective fields who understand how the software should work for their vertical market.

SunGard is showing some momentum. They estimate that 30 – 40 customers have either upgraded or purchased BusinessPLUS since its release in November 2008. If you are going through a software evaluation in the public sector, you should definitely consider BusinessPLUS on your list of ERP software solutions.

Epicor 9

Posted by spencer on March 19, 2010 under ERP Software | Be the First to Comment

We are currently doing a software evaluation for a client and one of the software vendors we are considering is Epicor. You may recall that Epicor is the old Platinum Software that started in the 1980′s and was a very big competitor to Great Plains (now part of Microsoft) and State of the Art (now known as SAGE). They have acquired many software vendors over the past 10 years and now claim to have done what Microsoft and Oracle have failed to do – make a Super ERP product by combining the “best” of all of their acquired software products into one ERP solution.

They called the new software Epicor 9 because it is a combination of 9 software products – Vantage, Enterprise (Formerly Platinum SQL), Vista, Avante, Manfact, DataFlo, Manage 2000, iScala, and Platinum for Windows. They currently have about 130 total installations that are live with the product and about 200+ companies that are in some stage of installing the software.

It is important to note that they say they will remain committed to continue to support and upgrade each of the individual software solutions they have acquired. However, their sales efforts have been focused on the Epicor 9 solution which means that upgrades and enhancements will slow for the other products and they will eventually phase them out.

The reality is that this software is a major upgrade to the Epicor Vantage product – written in .NET (They claim to be more Microsoft than Microsoft’s products). They have taken pieces and ideas from the other solutions they offer but this is really a Vantage upgrade. That being said, they have been making some noise in the market and are gaining traction. We will watch this product with interest and they should definitely be considered for an ERP software evaluation project.