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The sixth edition of BITSoftware`s Conference for customers and partners, held on February 4th, has become an important event for the software market, bringing together national and multinational companies from distribution, food industry, logistics, manufacturing, auto dealers, retail, telecommunications, construction, services professional. The event is organized each year and has been specifically designed to bring together the customers of Socrate+ and SocrateOpen applications.

Yesterday, at Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest, we launched our partnership with MicroStrategy, which means the development and distribution of the most complex and comprehensive Enterprise Business Intelligence solutions on Romanian market.

MicroStrategy is the main platform based on which Enterprise BI solutions are developed, the unique Data Warehouse architecture being the core of these solutions. Our BI expertise covers all styles of reporting: advanced web reporting, ad-hoc OLAP analysis, alert systems, predictive analysis, web and mobile dashboards. The MicroStrategy platform can be used together with our Socrate ERP systems, integrated or using the OLAP engines from Microsoft or Oracle.

In the press conference organized on this occasion, attended by both journalists and representatives of some of the largest companies operating in Romania, Remus Cazacu (right), General Manager of BITSoftware, and Juergen Loeffelsender (left), Sales Director MicroStrategy Europe asserted that „MicroStrategy works with companies that use or produce leading technology and provide products that complement their BI Platform”. „In addition, in order to become partner of MicroStrategy, a company must demonstrate it’s ability to provide high quality products and services and truly fulfill the requirements of each client. Over 10 years of experience in business intelligence implementation projects in different verticals, from FMCG manufacturing and distribution, to retail and telco, demonstrated our reliability and ability to provide professional services”, said also Remus Cazacu.

Microstrategy is a global leader in business intelligence technology, who provides integrated reporting, analysis and monitoring solutions, which allows companies to analyze all available data business in order to make better business decisions. Microstrategy customers are global leaders in their industries, like: Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Hallmark Cards, Metro Group, Carrefour, Starbucks, The Royal Bank of Scotland, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank AG, Raiffeisen Bank, Société Générale, Amway, Levi Strauss & Co, Giorgio Armani Corporation, Danone, Roche Farma, GlaxoSmithKline Pharma GmbH, Pfizer, Sanofi Pasteur, US Postal Service, ebay, Alitalia, Scandinavian Airlines, Turkish Airlines, Lexmark, Hyundai Motors, Visa International, Deutsche Telekom AG, France Télécom, British Telecom, Telefonica, Vodafone, etc.

I think there are many classifications of consultancy/advice. One of them refers to client relationship with the truth. From this perspective, the consultancy would divide into two types: one where the client has access to truth (to informations), but this does not involve the participation of self manager, and another in which access to truth and its use implies an unconditional change in self-manager, spoke in terms of the ancients, that means that only who can self-govern, can govern.

A recent study by Gartner pointed to the fact that the growing availability of services like social networking, combined with changing working styles, will make that in 2014 about 20% of employees use social networks as the main way communication for business purposes. How microblogging redefines the way organizations communicate, business communication is evolving. New employees enter into employment with a predisposition to communicate via a social network. The distinction between e mail and social networking as a means of communication will fade. The collaboration between the organization and the necessary infrastructure will change too. Gartner provides its transfer to the cloud, leading to an increase in sales to service providers either internalized or externalized in the cloud.

Just recently I came, incidentally, in possession of a study conducted in August 2010 by IFS North America and Affinity Research Solutions, Boston, on a sample of 325 executives at large/middle-market manufacturers and focus on a possible marriage between ERP / CRM and social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN). According to the study, social media has begun to influence, more powerful, the ERP market.
As a result, vendors are experimenting with integration between enterprise software, typically involving customer relationship management (CRM) with social media tools like Twitter or Facebook. In some cases, software vendors are already offering functionality to deliver benefits of enterprise 2.0, enterprise functionality with integrated, built-in Web 2.0 technologies.
The conclusion that emerged was that ability to integrate with external social media tools on the public internet does not weigh heavily on the selection process for ERP. However, the adoption of social media functions to include collaborative and communication capabili­ties is viewed with importance but is not seen as a major influencer. Also, manufacturing executives are optimistic about the potential benefits of social functionally embedded in ERP and realize that there could be great value if their ERP application includes features that mirror the functionality of online social networking tools.

The decision to purchase a software solutions business - ERP, CRM - is not easy to take, is quite a complicated and elaborated process. This involved also, indirectly, the inability to test the product in advance, as result of inevitable customizations required for an ERP solution to fold perfectly, or as perfect, to client's business. The existence of demo sites and other average test helps only in addition of names to the list of potential suppliers.
Therefore, in this field of integrated management systems, perhaps more than in any other field, purchases are made based on the reputation of the solution. And, in some cases, on the provider promises, which often are not sustainable by the ERP system.
With regard to the reputation of ERP, or no-name ERP, that are responsible mainly buyers. Since the solution sold to a client does not exist when signing the contract, the beneficiary needs some security. Other words, he must know whether the supplier's ERP has already completed similar projects. And guarantee that the candidate has carried out with succes previous similar implementation is given by references. What has become, lately, the
subject preferred by marketing departments of companies providing ERP solutions. In a very small market, customer reputation sells. Especially if they are "la crème de la crème" of the respective vertical.
When a potential new client has before it a wealth of customer lists and case studies on successful implementations, the first thing he needs to do is to seek common skeleton of the system. It is therefore important to distinguish between the company and product references, because it is totally unnecessary for a purchaser a reference about a Web portal or e-commerce solution developed by the supplier, which did not interest the customer. Also, make references to international products, mainly imported and distributed without specific standard adjustments for the market in Romania, are irrelevant for the local market. On the one hand, because the implementation there was made by another team, not by romanian supplier, and on the other side, because the fundamental differences between the Romanian and external business model.
Faced with an avalanche of references and ERP solutions, customer will have to read beyond the marketing messages and to start in choosing of business solution on the premise that his business is unique and, as such, he needs a product that would be reliable for him.

Cloud computing blogger Chirag Mehta and Constellation Research Group published a list of their cloud computing predictions for 2011. According to Mehta, the public cloud adoption stalling temporarily, the spread of the app store model in the enterprise, the convergence of Development-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service and an overall simplification of the technology landscape as some of the most important trends in cloud computing in 2011.

The future is in cloud. The future is in open source. The future is great benefits and increased speed at low-costs. I've heard about it. I've read about it. But I never really understood what it was. So I started digging. I read a lot about cloud. And about open source. And I finally realized what it is. And from that moment I began to ask myself all sorts of questions. About communication, about documents, about archiving, about the possibility of sharing with others real-time information, and much more. And my universe has expanded considerably in just a split second. I understood that my fear of not being able to communicate and share documents with others because I had not installed on my notebook a version of Office from Microsoft was false. And I also understood that the future is something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: the open source Web office.

I read, recently, a Gartner study which shows that increasing the availability of services like social network, coupled with demographics and changing work styles, will do that in 2014 approximately 20% of employees use social networks as the main means of communication for business purposes. While so far the cooperation within an organization based on the e-mail and structured applications, in the future in organizations will be held even a social component convergent with e-mail, instant-messaging and e-presence services, creating new ways of collaborating. This integration will take place and will become effective only when organizations build their platforms and will educate their internal users in the spirit of new paradigm.
How microblogging redefines the way organizations communicate, business communication is evolving. New employees enter into employment with a predisposition to communicate via a social network. The distinction between e-mail and social networking as a means of communication will fade.
On the other hand, even the infrastructure for collaboration within the organization will change. Gartner foresees a transfer to the cloud, leading to an increase in sales for providers of services internalized or externalized in cloud.

Cloud's remains by far the segment of IT's most effervescent in recent years. And as the world understands what it means and, more particularly, what it provides, cloud attracts more users. A recent study in this field, developed by americans, shows that managers around the world believes that by 2015, 18% of their IT services are delivered by a public cloud solutions, and 28% by private cloud solution. According to the study, almost half of the services companies serving the business will be moved to "the cloud", a significant change compared with traditional IT infrastructures that currently exist.
According to experts, cloud computing represents an effective use of external information resources - computer servers, storage, services, applications, etc. - that can be configured in relation to the needs of each company, the beneficiary pays only what it consumes.