Saugatuck QuickTakes are net / net 2-3 page assessments of key market trends and leading and emerging vendors – with a focus on key strategies, strengths and challenges, including product / service positioning, go-to-market tactics and marketing / partner relationships. Bottom-line SWOT analysis and net/net market impact assessment provided. 

In addition to viewing the list of QuickTakes below, organized by date, please take advantage of our Advanced Research Search capability to input a free-form text search, or the ability to search by author, by date, or by topic area -- or visit our Research Library by Topic.

07-28-08 Antenna Software: A Platform for Enabling Mobility-as-a-Service (M. Koenig, 6 pages, QT487, $$$)

Growing use of advanced mobile devices such as smart phones, WiFi-enabled PDAs, tablet PCs and similar tools is leading to increased competition among device makers to capture and defend share in the enterprise user market.

The burgeoning plethora of devices (and their attendant networks) is forcing more enterprise IT departments to move beyond one-off mobility projects toward a coordinated and strategic approach to enabling and managing mobile access and use of enterprise IT resources. Many departments now seek enterprise mobility platforms and middleware to deliver functionality from back-end applications to handheld devices in a centrally manageable way.

Antenna Software’s mission is to provide this capability via its open-standards, component-driven Antenna Mobility Platform (AMP), and its mobility development platform, the AMP Studio. AMP and AMP Studio are designed to deliver connectivity and interoperability that enable functionality from major business applications through virtually any carrier to any of the major mobility devices.

Saugatuck believes that Antenna’s platform offers advantages in both flexibility and functionality over other offerings, particularly with regard to the ability to deploy “mobility-as-a-service.” However, these advantages could be short-lived if the company is not able to solidify its position in user enterprises. 

06-24-08 Parallels Inc. – Virtualization and SaaS Enablement (C. Burns, 5 pages, QT-474, $$$)

Saugatuck research shows that user IT organizations are being challenged to reduce costs of their infrastructures and to rapidly provide new application functionality. To reduce infrastructure and support costs, implementation of virtualization has become the most widely adopted element in IT plans. And, for rapid delivery of new functionality, users are increasingly turning to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings.

06-20-08 European BPM Leader IDS Scheer Targets North America and Asia (M. West, 4 pages, QT-473, $$$)

With more than 20 years of experience behind it and close partnerships with Hewlett-Packard, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, IDS Scheer AG has long established itself as a leading vendor of rigorous business process management (BPM) tools. IDS Scheer holds a dominant market share in BPM in Europe, but so far has only a minor presence in the U.S. market –partly attributable to less market awareness in the United States , partly due to its rigorous academic approach, more favored in Europe .

Unlike Microsoft Visio, its chief competitor in the U.S. market, IDS Scheer’s ARIS provides a proven, rigorous business process model designed to improve corporate efficiency. This business process rigor is particularly valuable in highly-regulated industries, e.g., finance and pharmaceuticals, where formally-structured business processes are all but mandated by compliance concerns.  IDS Scheer products are found in many financial and pharmaceutical organizations in Europe . Now with a proven product and an economic engine centered in Europe, IDS Scheer is preparing to drive its expansion worldwide, particularly into North America and Asia. The world markets it is entering offer huge growth opportunity, but also significant challenges deriving from differences in culture.

04-28-08 Reflex Security – Security in an Appliance Form Factor (C. Burns, 4 pages, QT-457, $$$)

User IT organizations are being challenged to reduce the costs of their infrastructures and to demonstrate social responsibility by reducing electrical power consumption. As a result virtualization is becoming the most widely adopted element in IT plans. And, as more infrastructures are virtualized, more IT organizations are learning that while virtualization can deliver dramatic cost savings, it also brings new challenges in IT management. One key challenge is security, for the network, and for the infrastructure overall.

03-31-08 Hyperic – Next Generation Systems Management (C. Burns, 4 pages, QT-448, $$$)

User IT organizations are being challenged on multiple fronts including implementing Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA), and integrating and managing new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) workloads. Simultaneously, user IT management is turning to virtualization in the hopes of reducing infrastructure costs. These forces are causing IT management to evolve from managing assets to managing processes, and transform from a “do it myself” to a “help me do it” and eventually to a “do it for me” approach.  

03-27-08 EthicsPoint: Transforming Compliance into Business Process ROI (M. West, 4 pages, QT-447, $$$)

Portland, Oregon-based SaaS service provider EthicsPoint focuses on turning ethical and compliance issues into business practices that reach beyond HR and corporate attorneys’ offices to support actions and provide benefits throughout the organization. Founded in 1999, EthicsPoint focuses on highly regulated industries such as banking and financial, mining, health care, pharmaceuticals, retail, manufacturing, and transportation. These organizations operate under very precise, demanding business regulations that carry severe penalties for non-compliance, including in some cases possible prison sentences for CEOs, CFOs, and other senior managers. Complicating this environment further, many of these companies operate in multiple geographies (e.g., USA , Canada , European Union , Japan , India , China , and Russia ) worldwide and are subject to different sets of regulations in each of those geographies.

Despite the far reaching nature of many of these regulations, compliance and ethical enforcement activities in many organizations have been confined to a few specific operating silos such as HR, corporate security, and legal, and have been conducted either on paper or on spreadsheets, making the procedures difficult to share across the organization.

01-31-08 Transitive – Cross Platform Virtualization for Application Migration (C. Burns, 4 pages, QT-431, $$$)

Founded in 2000, Transitive Corp. provides unique capabilities for migrating applications from one platform to another without modifications and despite hardware and operating system incompatibilities. (See Figure 1 for additional company details and contact information.)

Transitive positions their offerings as providing “Cross-Platform Virtualization” software that enables software applications to run on any hardware platform without any source or binary change. Saugatuck has categorized this type of functionality and Hardware Virtualization in our recently published Strategic Research Report “The Many Faces of Virtualization: Understanding a New IT Reality,” SSR-420, 28Dec07.

01-09-08 Plexus Online: New-Generation Manufacturing Management  (M. West, 4 pages, QT-423, $$$)

Born in the automobile industry and designed by manufacturing engineers, Plexus Systems, Inc.'s, SaaS service, Plexus Online, delivers next-generation ERP functionality in an easy-to-use, easily customized, integrated set of modules.

Unlike older generation ERP systems such as Oracle and SAP, which were built around accounting systems and which have problems, therefore, capturing shop floor information in a timely manner, Plexus Online starts with events on the shop floor and populates information up from there. Thus it works the way manufacturing companies work.

One of its chief features is complete traceability – if a defect turns up in a part or subsystem, Plexus Online can trace the defect back to its source, determine what lots are affected and then identify any finished products containing pieces from those lots and any remaining pieces from them in inventory, allowing the manufacturer to correct the problem. This is vital in high-precision, high-liability industries such as automotive and aero-space, where a defective part can be deadly.

11-14-07 DreamFactory: Delivering Business Essentials Across the Web  (M. West, 4 pages, QT-405, $$$)

Founded in 2002, DreamFactory has focused on extending horizontal office functionality – such as project management, interactive reporting and dashboards, business forms and now document collaboration – in the cloud and therefore across geographic and organizational boundaries. DreamFactory’s focus is on the user experience, and it defines one of its largest challenges as continually enhancing its services and improving the user experience. In addition to offering these SaaS solutions directly to customers, DreamFactory has found market leverage by offering these services as native add-ins to leading SaaS platforms salesforce.com, the soon-to-be-released Cisco WebEx Connect, and potentially others.

10-26-07 Birch Street Systems: Verticalization is Key to Success for SaaS-based Procurement Solutions Vendor (M. Koenig, 5 pages, QT-399, $$$)

Designed from ground up as a SaaS solution, Birch Street Systems focuses on a narrow niche market – optimizing purchasing for the food and beverage services of large hotel chains. This operation presents a complex problem since it must balance orders of non-perishable products such as hard cheeses that are best ordered in aggregate ze for a region or entire chain with orders of fresh food items such as mushrooms with very short shelf lives, that are best ordered locally and used as soon as received, and are usually seasonal.

Birch Street has carved out a unique market niche in part because hotel chains live and die not on back-end savings but by optimizing their occupancy rate. Thus the focus of automation and analysis in the industry is the front-end reservation system rather than back-end purchasing.

Birch Street’s initial challenge was to get the hospitality industry to recognize the potential of back-end optimization to provide significant improvement to a hotel’s bottom line. Its client list – including Hilton, Marriott International, Global Hyatt, Omni Hotels, Carlson Hospitality, Interstate Hotels and Resorts, Marcus, and Cipriani – shows its success. Today the company’s major challenge is that the growth potential of this market is limited. Once it has sold its services to the limited number of large and medium-sized hotel chains, it will need to either expand its services to its existing customers or move into new markets (such as hospitals, restaurant chains, institutional food services, high-end retirement residence chains).

08-21-07 VMware: Making x86 Server Virtualization Real (C. Burns, 3 pages, QT-377,  $$$)

Founded in 1998, acquired by EMC in 2004 for $625M, and publicly launched via IPO last week, VMware targets user IT organizations with a functionally-rich suite for virtualization of x86 servers.

08-02-07 Service-now.com – IT Management as a Service (M. West, C. Burns, 3 pages, QT-373, $$$)

Founded in 2003, as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution provider, Service-now.com targets large and very large enterprises with a rich set of integrated applications as a platform for IT service management.

Service-now.com offers both fully-hosted and on-premise deployments of data and functions which include incident, problem, change, release, asset, configuration, service catalog, and enterprise application mapping discovery technology.

07-20-2007 Pragmatech Software: Foundation for Sales Effectiveness (M. Koenig, 6 pages, QT-368, $$$)

Pragmatech’s SaaS-based sales effectiveness solution, inciteKnowledge, is a purpose-built content management platform designed to support the activities of the sales rep throughout the sales process. Unlike its competition, inciteKnowledge takes a process-oriented approach to sales effectiveness that enables alignment between corporate marketing and sales management and the field.

06-26-2007 Ketera Technologies - Redefining the Spend Management Value Chain (M. Koenig, 5 pages, QT-360, $$$)

Founded in 2000, and built from the ground up to be a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, Ketera Technologies staked out a claim early-on as a low-cost provider of easy-to-use enterprise spend management solutions for large and very large enterprises (Global 2000). Today, by adding complementary capabilities around analytics, compliance and business process improvement, Ketera is positioning itself as a must-have technology foundation for these global companies as they continue to wrestle with the challenges of managing their indirect costs.

06-08-07 Fiberlink: Managing the Mobile Device Lifecycle (M. Koenig, M. West, 4 pages, QT-355, $$$)

Having already transformed itself from a provider of network access services to value-added managed services targeting the mobile device life-cycle, Fiberlink Communications can now lay claim to a leadership position as a developer of innovative SaaS-based mobile security technology.

05-31-07 Prolifiq Innovates with Analytics-Based 1-to-1 Messaging Solution (M. West, 4 pages, QT-353, $$$)

An innovative company at the nexus of CRM, content and mobility, Prolifiq Software has evolved sophisticated tools for analytics-driven 1-to-1 messaging. Prolifiq’s strategy is to improve the immediacy, availability, efficiency and effectiveness of customer-targeted digital content through an in-the-cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that integrates well with content management systems and supports leading mobile devices.

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