Websense introduces Express for SMB market
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Company rolls out new version of its Web-filtering and bandwidth-management gateway for small to midsize businesses.
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Cisco Systems&#39; collaboration with Microsoft to target the SMB market is starting to bear fruit as the networking vendor Monday launched a new application that integrates Microsoft CRM with its VoIP platform.
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Partners who use IBM's WebSphere Application Server Community Edition or the vendor's DB2 Express-C database will be able to directly tap IBM staff for advice on integration, scalability, testing and support issues and won't have to pay for the privilege.
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BEA Systems on Monday is releasing a version of its application infrastructure suite designed to enable ISVs to deliver products for SOAs (service-oriented architectures).
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The 3SP SSL-Explorer is the world's first open-source SSL-based VPN solution of its kind. Released under the GPL, this entry-level VPN solution provides users with a means of securely managing their IT infrastructure from outside the network perimeter, armed with just a standard web browser. This second release now provides full Active Directory authentication for use within Microsoft Windows Server environments. The release also sees a change from using the MySQL database to an internal HSQLDB database and this means that post-installation database configuration is no longer required.   Download the SSL-Explorer v0.1.1 here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=116065  Find out more information on SSL-Explorer at: http://3sp.com/products/enterprise/ssl-explorer/ssl-explorer.jsp
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BEA Systems Inc. is planning to release this week a new version of its application suite targeted at its ISV partners. WebLogic Platform ISV Edition is an integrated suite that features core BEA technology
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Good news for big business, but what about SMBs? Comment Last week IBM announced that it was acquiring US-based Internet Security Systems (ISS) for $1.3bn.â¦
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The increasingly competitive Web mail market has a new player: Instant messaging provider ICQ now offers a fee-based service that includes 2GB of storage, a calendar feature, task manager, notepad, wireless access, and support for both POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol).
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(InfoWorld) - Midmarket applications vendor Infor Global Solutions Inc. sees challenges for companies like SAP AG and Oracle Corp. to adapt their enterprise software products for small and medium-size business. Earlier this month, SAP announced plans to establish a dedicated SMB unit and expand the company's footprint in the huge midmarket, a move that Infor Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jim Schaper thinks is easier said than done. In an interview with IDG News Service, Schaper talked about Infor, a relatively young provider of business applications that has grown through acquisitions and now generates more than US$2 billion in annual sales, and discusses growth markets and competition with SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Corp.. The following is an edited transcript. IDGNS: The midmarket means different things to different people. How do you define it? Schaper: Midmarket customers are typically independent businesses that range in revenue from $25 million to $2 billion. We believe that somewhere between 60,000 and 62,000 customers of our total 70,000 customer base are in the midmarket. If we compare that with SAP, which estimates that 65 percent of their 36,000 customers are SMBs or little more 23,000, we are clearly twice the size of SAP in the midmarket. IDGNS: How large is the market you're going after? Schaper: Our market is globally 1 million prospective customers, including the plants and divisions of large enterprises. IDGNS: Why do you include these? Schaper: A number of very large global enterprises run our applications on a decentralized plant or division basis. That's why, for Infor, a classical view of an SMB definition doesn't work. IDGNS: Why should a midmarket company choose Infor and not SAP or Oracle, which have substantial expertise in business software and have stepped up efforts to target SMBs? Schaper: We fill a hole in the market. We have maximized on what smaller niche providers provide -- namely business-specific solutions with domain expertise to implement them -- and on what the large players have to offer: global distribution. We provide our customers with global reach, alternative channels and products built for their markets at the lowest total cost of ownership. IDGNS: SAP would argue that it also offers products with deep industry-specific functionality. Would you disagree? Schaper: If they're digging down deep, then they've just started because that hasn't been their business model in past. They said they will do this primarily through partners. IDGNS: SAP does offer different versions of its software for different markets. Could this provide a competitive edge? Schaper: They've attempted to take a tier 1 product and move it down market. You don't leave the complexity of the product behind, or the cost or length of time it takes to implement. IDGNS: And Infor has a different approach? Schaper: Our products were built for the markets they're serving. We're not attempting to take a product that was built for large enterprises and cram it down into the midmarket. We're equally not trying to take something that is prepackaged for mass consumption and move it up market as Microsoft is trying to do. There are inherent complexities that are built into a product to serve large enterprises. IDGNS: So what do SMBs want? Schaper: They want very specific functionality at the lowest total cost of ownership with the least amount of complexity. IDGNS: Where are your customers? Schaper: Fifty percent of our revenues come from the Americas, 41 percent out of Europe and 9 percent out of Asia Pacific region. IDGNS: How important is China? Schaper: Not unlike every other software company, including SAP, it is our highest growth area. We have typically looked at the Chinese market, earlier in the evolution of Infor, as a market where we wanted to go after multinationals, whether U.S. or European-based. We have now moved with some new product capabilities into the mainland Chinese market, which is a much lower-end market but one where we believe we're perfectly positioned IDGNS: And what challenges do you face in this particular market? Schaper: You start small but your products must be able to scale quickly because what today is a local Chinese auto supplier, for example, is likely to become in a few years a global supplier as China exports automobiles to the U.S. and Europe. This is coming in the next 18 months. IDGNS: Do you offer any on-demand or hosted services? Schaper: We do but not for all applications. Most of what we build is at the request of customers. They have a lot of influence in our long-term development plans. But there are components that can be provided on either a hosted or on-demand model. Asset management is one, customer relationship management is another. But when you get into the extended supply chain, like warehouse management, planning and scheduling -- all core ERP applications -- we just haven't seen customer demand for that. Our products are capable of being hosted and we will host them as we see customer demand. IDGNS: What about open source? Schaper: Open source is a key contributor to Infor and we will be a key contributor to open source over time. It is one of the critical differentiators in our business strategy of how we will SOA-enable our applications.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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New subscription service links Web mail with the desktop e-mail client.
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IBM Wednesday introduced a significant overhaul to its WebSphere J2EE application server, with new support for standards-based messaging protocols, better management features and enhancements to improve availability of applications, according to an IBM
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Startup FastSoft is shipping an appliance for speeding up IP WAN links that requires customers to install just one box per connection rather than two, which is the more standard approach.
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IBM will announced the pre-release of several tools for SMEs designed to speed development of solutions built on IBM middleware. The tools support the IBM Solutions Builder Express Portfolio, which provides
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Web-services security company releases appliance designed to authenticate access into business networks.
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The company is releasing its new ASE Express Edition for free in hopes of attracting customers who will later upgrade to Sybase's ASE Small Business Edition.
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To make it more palatable for independent software vendors (define) to adopt BEA Systems&#39; (Quote, Chart) middleware software suite, the company released WebLogic Platform ISV Edition, an &quot;SOA in a box&quot; solution tailored to meet specific application
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Shadow Z/Services is a SOAP-based mainframe integration solution that allows organizations to transform CICS, IMS, and Advantage CA-IDMS applications into Web services.