Event Summary
The enterprise applications market is rapidly consolidating and "high-flying" vendors are now falling to the wayside en mass (see Rapidly Consolidating Enterprise Applications Market: The Worlds of "Organic Grower" and "Aggressive Consolidators"). This coupled with the dread of functional parity and software commoditization among the surviving solution providers has lead many to believe that only a vendor's size will matter from now on, and that small, focused local or niche providers have little to offer, let alone to hope for in the market. (see If Software Is A Commodity...Then What?)
However, one should still not be hasty and dismiss small specialist providers as some are making a comeback. Tampa, Florida-based (US) Verticent (www.verticent.com) is one such company. Verticent is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Framingham, Michigan-based (US) ASA International, Ltd. (www.asaint.com), a private holding company of vertical enterprise business-to-business (B2B) software solutions and value-added services. Verticent is a provider of integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), e-business, and business intelligence (BI) software solutions, and strives to meet the unique business demands of small-to-medium size discrete manufacturers and distributors.
Verticent is committed to only a few specific vertical industries in areas where it has proven experience, and lately it has successfully leveraged industry-specific knowledge and functionality to deliver a flexible, yet affordable, enterprise business systems.
Recently the vendor announced that it has enjoyed several key license sales in the US Midwest, namely in Detroit, Michigan; Chicago, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and central Illinois. Verticent believes its focus continues to payoff, since these new license sales were won in its targeted verticals: metal service center industry, metal fabrication, and configure-to-order (CTO) manufacturing. Moreover, early in 2005, Verticent announced that Kandil Industries (Cairo, Egypt) licensed the vendor's ERP Plus suite for metal service centers. Kandil Industries reportedly chose ERP Plus to better match its demand and supply chain so it could achieve lower inventories; improve capacity management at critical bottlenecks in its process; reduce scrap costs and improve yields; streamline financial consolidation of all its divisions and companies; and move the company from islands of automation and spreadsheets to an integrated enterprise solution.
This win should allow Verticent to leverage its accomplishments in the North American metals industry and give it "a foot in the door" to the Middle Eastern market. Kandil Industries is a well-known and respected company in Egypt and the Middle East, and Verticent hopes to parlay its partnership to showcase its solution's capabilities, and replicate this success throughout the Middle East.
This is Part One of a two-part note. Part two will discuss the functionality of ERP Plus and analyze Verticent's target market.
Verticent's Background
Formerly called PowerCerv Corporation, the once publicly traded company been on a "rollercoaster ride" since its founding in 1992. In its first four years, the company grew meteorically seeing revenue of approximately $38 million (USD) in 1996 (although its ERP-related revenue was only one quarter of this). PowerCerv, which started as a reseller of PowerBuilder tools, evolved into a value added reseller (VAR) for Powersoft (now part of Sybase), reselling Powersoft's development tools and providing complementary services. PowerCerv spent its first few years crafting its business applications product and expanding its sales and marketing organization to support application sales. During that time, PowerCerv developed a suite of products aimed at PowerBuilder developers, including an object class library, workflow and asynchronous processing tools, and a security system.
The extraordinary growth of PowerBuilder during the mid 1990s fostered a market for PowerBuilder-based applications. In response, PowerCerv begun to develop and garner a set of modern enterprise applications, initially called the EnPower Series. However, the rapid transition from a software tool reseller to a "Johnny came late to the party", full-fledged enterprise resource planning (ERP) software developer took its toll, and since 1997, PowerCerv has made numerous major attempts to revitalize itself.
Throughout 1996 and 1997, the company did away with its unfocused strategy where it tried to serve multiple markets, and it began to focus on the discrete manufacturing mid-market offering a single product suite renamed ERP Plus. PowerCerv then divested several businesses that were not in tune with its new strategy, including its general consulting, application development tools, and database software reseller businesses. However, since 1997, the company continued to shrink. Its total revenue in 2001 was approximately $6 million (USD), down more than six times from its peak in 1996, and it had almost no new license revenue in 2002. This eventually lead to its "yard sale" where ASA bought several of PowerCerv's assets, assuming certain liabilities (see PowerCerv Finally Overpowered by the '02 Hurricane Season).
The nature of PowerCerv during its pre-acquisition days in the early 2000s were indisputably different than those in 1997. Like other tier two and tier three vendors, PowerCerv attributed its woes to the Y2K pinch which morphed into a seemingly never-ending economic slump. Even now, the company admits that it simply could not compete in the tough general, discrete manufacturing ERP markets where many larger vendors are considered to be a more viable option, as customers became more cautious of a vendor's viability.
source
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/the-strengths-of-a-vertically-centric-enterprise-software-provider-18310/
The enterprise applications market is rapidly consolidating and "high-flying" vendors are now falling to the wayside en mass (see Rapidly Consolidating Enterprise Applications Market: The Worlds of "Organic Grower" and "Aggressive Consolidators"). This coupled with the dread of functional parity and software commoditization among the surviving solution providers has lead many to believe that only a vendor's size will matter from now on, and that small, focused local or niche providers have little to offer, let alone to hope for in the market. (see If Software Is A Commodity...Then What?)
However, one should still not be hasty and dismiss small specialist providers as some are making a comeback. Tampa, Florida-based (US) Verticent (www.verticent.com) is one such company. Verticent is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Framingham, Michigan-based (US) ASA International, Ltd. (www.asaint.com), a private holding company of vertical enterprise business-to-business (B2B) software solutions and value-added services. Verticent is a provider of integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), e-business, and business intelligence (BI) software solutions, and strives to meet the unique business demands of small-to-medium size discrete manufacturers and distributors.
Verticent is committed to only a few specific vertical industries in areas where it has proven experience, and lately it has successfully leveraged industry-specific knowledge and functionality to deliver a flexible, yet affordable, enterprise business systems.
Recently the vendor announced that it has enjoyed several key license sales in the US Midwest, namely in Detroit, Michigan; Chicago, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and central Illinois. Verticent believes its focus continues to payoff, since these new license sales were won in its targeted verticals: metal service center industry, metal fabrication, and configure-to-order (CTO) manufacturing. Moreover, early in 2005, Verticent announced that Kandil Industries (Cairo, Egypt) licensed the vendor's ERP Plus suite for metal service centers. Kandil Industries reportedly chose ERP Plus to better match its demand and supply chain so it could achieve lower inventories; improve capacity management at critical bottlenecks in its process; reduce scrap costs and improve yields; streamline financial consolidation of all its divisions and companies; and move the company from islands of automation and spreadsheets to an integrated enterprise solution.
This win should allow Verticent to leverage its accomplishments in the North American metals industry and give it "a foot in the door" to the Middle Eastern market. Kandil Industries is a well-known and respected company in Egypt and the Middle East, and Verticent hopes to parlay its partnership to showcase its solution's capabilities, and replicate this success throughout the Middle East.
This is Part One of a two-part note. Part two will discuss the functionality of ERP Plus and analyze Verticent's target market.
Verticent's Background
Formerly called PowerCerv Corporation, the once publicly traded company been on a "rollercoaster ride" since its founding in 1992. In its first four years, the company grew meteorically seeing revenue of approximately $38 million (USD) in 1996 (although its ERP-related revenue was only one quarter of this). PowerCerv, which started as a reseller of PowerBuilder tools, evolved into a value added reseller (VAR) for Powersoft (now part of Sybase), reselling Powersoft's development tools and providing complementary services. PowerCerv spent its first few years crafting its business applications product and expanding its sales and marketing organization to support application sales. During that time, PowerCerv developed a suite of products aimed at PowerBuilder developers, including an object class library, workflow and asynchronous processing tools, and a security system.
The extraordinary growth of PowerBuilder during the mid 1990s fostered a market for PowerBuilder-based applications. In response, PowerCerv begun to develop and garner a set of modern enterprise applications, initially called the EnPower Series. However, the rapid transition from a software tool reseller to a "Johnny came late to the party", full-fledged enterprise resource planning (ERP) software developer took its toll, and since 1997, PowerCerv has made numerous major attempts to revitalize itself.
Throughout 1996 and 1997, the company did away with its unfocused strategy where it tried to serve multiple markets, and it began to focus on the discrete manufacturing mid-market offering a single product suite renamed ERP Plus. PowerCerv then divested several businesses that were not in tune with its new strategy, including its general consulting, application development tools, and database software reseller businesses. However, since 1997, the company continued to shrink. Its total revenue in 2001 was approximately $6 million (USD), down more than six times from its peak in 1996, and it had almost no new license revenue in 2002. This eventually lead to its "yard sale" where ASA bought several of PowerCerv's assets, assuming certain liabilities (see PowerCerv Finally Overpowered by the '02 Hurricane Season).
The nature of PowerCerv during its pre-acquisition days in the early 2000s were indisputably different than those in 1997. Like other tier two and tier three vendors, PowerCerv attributed its woes to the Y2K pinch which morphed into a seemingly never-ending economic slump. Even now, the company admits that it simply could not compete in the tough general, discrete manufacturing ERP markets where many larger vendors are considered to be a more viable option, as customers became more cautious of a vendor's viability.
source
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/the-strengths-of-a-vertically-centric-enterprise-software-provider-18310/
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