STL Affiliate Receives DEA Registration - Broadens Range of Capabilities
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Aerotech Laboratories, Inc., an affiliate of STL and a part of the Aerotech P&K team, recently received its U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Registration for its Phoenix facility.
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Siebel Systems is mounting an effort to alleviate a major hassle that comes with licensing its customer information systems -- the labour-intensive task of tuning and tending to its software in complex computing environments.
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TRW Automotive, a Tier One global supplier of auto safety products, had a big control problem. âWe had always operated as a dozen or so largely independent business units, each with its own systems,â says Joe Drouin, vice president and CIO. âAs a result, we had dozens of mission-critical applications, including multiple flavors of SAP, running in dozens of different places.âADVERTISEMENTNEW 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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Many organizations allocate large resources to implement and deploy packaged ERP, CRM and SCM applications. Now these organizations need to move away from operational efficiency gains achieved and into leveraging their data for performance management and business intelligence.
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St. Louis-based Commerce Bank has finished rolling out a system that enables tellers at its 340 branches to quickly access customer records and better sell new products.
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There is a fascinating article on Groklaw called Searching for Openness in Microsoft's OOXML and Finding Contradictions. One of the most relevant comments in the article is "So, they plan to be the only one in the Linux world that can actually interoperate with Microsoft. How do you think they will achieve that? By sharing? On the contrary, they already market themselves as uniquely interoperable, which means they get to interoperate and you don't, unless you are their paying customer."  There is also the Novell comment, "Only Novell has Microsoftâs endorsement as its partner to drive Linux-Windows interoperability."
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Microsoft is offering updates Wednesday on the progress of interoperability initiatives, including the Interoperability Executive Customer Council (IEC) and the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA).The company's announcement is "a way of taking stock after a year of fairly intensive activity," said Tom Robertson, Microsoft general manager for interoperability and standards.Formed last year, the IEC features 41 members from governments and corporations who work with Microsoft executives and product teams. IEC is meeting in Redmond, Wash. this week.According to Microsoft, IEC has addressed more than 60 issues in its four defined work streams, which include:* Office productivity and collaboration tools to ensure that tools can exchange documents and enable collaboration and document management across systems * Developer tools and run time, in which application development has been boosted across platforms and systems * Security and identity management with the promoting of security across many identity platforms * Systems management through enabling end-to-end, cross-platform service managementHighlights in security and ID management include Microsoft collaboration with industry partners Fraunhofer-Institute FOKUS, ThoughtWorks, and Zend Technologies to develop open-source interoperability projects on information cards for Sun's Java language, Ruby, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), and C-module. These initiatives will give users better control over personal information on the Web, Microsoft said."We're ultimately trying to provide people with better control over their personal information on the Web and improve the trustworthiness of Web-based interaction," Robertson said.In the system management area, Microsoft acquired enterprise management company Engyro to incorporate monitoring products into Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2007.The IVA, launched in November 2006, discusses mutual customer feedback and focuses on technical collaboration to resolve interoperability challenges through scenario-based testing, Microsoft said. Companies like Linspire, Sun, and AMD participate.At the Interop New York 2007 conference this week, an IVA pavilion will showcase collaborations, such as EMC, CA, and Microsoft streamlining management of heterogeneous systems, including Linux, Oracle, JBoss, and Windows. This is being done via a Systems Management Interoperability Lab.Also, IVA members Centrify, Quest Software, and Microsoft worked to demonstrate how to centrally manage security identities across Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows. Cross-product federation is being demonstrated as well by several members as part of a federated identity initiative.To advance portal document repository collaboration, IVA members Merido, Microsoft, and others have shown how to identify and collaborate on documents across portals and repositories.Also, Microsoft began working to deliver interoperability by design based on commitment to XML in 2005. Since then, the company has announced more than 30 interoperability deliverables including moving dozens of specifications to the OSP (Open Specification Promise), interoperability projects like Linux and Windows virtualization and management work being done by Microsoft and Novell, Microsoft said.Microsoft is announcing on Wednesday that OSP is being extended to hypercall API in Windows Server Virtualization. This applies virtualization to further enable interoperability across commercial and open-source software solutions, Microsoft said.Microsoft's interoperability efforts have not been without criticism. A deal with Novell on interoperability between Suse Linux and Windows, featuring payments going between the two companies, has drawn criticism in the open-source community as a concession to Microsoft.Robertson said Microsoft has made a lot of progress with interoperability, detailing with issues that are not universally easy to address. But he acknowledged not every single issue will be solved.
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NOVEMBER 10, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - In a bid to further differentiate itself from open-source rivals, Microsoft Corp. yesterday said it will expand its indemnification program to cover the vast majority of its customers.
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(InfoWorld) - Just a day afterÂ debuting a new initiative to produce more industry-specific functionalityÂ for users of its Dynamics business applications, Microsoft Tuesday announced it had purchased IP (intellectual property) and code relevant to the manufacturing sector. Previously, Microsoft relied on its partners to meet the industry-specific needs of its customers, but in response to feedback from those communities, itÂ is now working to add in capabilities to its ERPÂ applications in five key vertical markets -- manufacturing, distribution, retail, services, and the public sector. Microsoft said Tuesday at its Convergence conference in San Diego that it has acquired the IP and code for eBECS's lean manufacturing module. EBECS is a Microsoft partner and reseller of Dynamics AX based in Chesterfield in the U.K. The companies didn't reveal any financial details around the deal. Lean manufacturing is an approach designed to streamline manufacturing, ensuring the shortest time between receiving a customer's order and shipping that order by getting rid of any inherent waste of resources involved in the manufacturing process. Microsoft will use the eBECS module to extend the existing core functionality of its Dynamics AX ERP software so that users can better optimize their processes and connect and integrate their entire supply chains from their customers through to their supply partners, according to Glenn Bray, senior director of Microsoft's industry solutions. By the end of this year, Microsoft will make the English-language module available to its customers, with plans to integrate the code into the next version of Dynamics AX and fully localize it to support all of the 40 languages in which its ERP software is available. Partners who've been trying to attract high-end customers told Microsoft that they were keen for the software giant to become more proactive about industry-specific offerings. "They want Microsoft to stand behind a solution," Bray said. Customers are keen to know they can still count on Microsoft's support should a particular partner change the focus of their business to a different industry or run into some kind of trouble. Microsoft highlighted acquisition as one way it plans to build in additional vertical functionalities to its Dynamics ERP families along with internal development and strategic alliances with its partners. Back in January, the vendor announced a co-development effort with public-sector information management software vendor Tyler Technologies. The two companies are working together to provide public-sector accounting functionality for Dynamics AX with an enhanced version of the ERP software due to appear in the latter half of 2009. Looking ahead, Microsoft expects to create multiple relationships with partners in each of its five chosen industries, Bray said. He doesn't believe that Microsoft getting more involved in providing industry-specific functionality will lead to cannibalization of existing offerings from its partners. There'll be no requirement for partners, for example, to use Microsoft's own lean manufacturing module, Bray said. Instead, partners will be free to choose whichever software is most appropriate for them, so offerings from Microsoft and its partners addressing the same industry needs will coexist. Â
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By Scott Wuerz, Belleville News-Democrat, Ill.  Feb. 10----   After 10 years as a Computer Renaissance franchisee, Toby Griggs has gone independent and changed the name of his store to Action Computer Co.
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Microsoft yesterday said it will expand its indemnification program to cover the vast majority of its customers in a move to set itself apart from open-source rivals.
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Taking a page from major enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP, Microsoft announced this week Business Ready Customer Care, an initiative that includes major enhancements to its maintenance and support program for Microsoft Dynamics, ERP and CRM, applications.The customer support initiative does three things: Extends for five years the time over which Microsoft will support its products; offers more creative financing solutions for buying its CRM and ERP products, and promises to create a more transparent environment for its channel partners and their customers about future upgrades and products.Industry analyst Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, said the fact that Microsoft is offering an additional five years of software support is in recognition of how well Oracle's extended support program is working for its customer base.Under the new Microsoft program there will be a total of five years of "mainstream" support for its products plus an additional five years of extended support, according to Christine Bell, director of global services product management, for Microsoft Business Solutions.Greenbaum says the extended support is a smart move on Microsoft's part."Oracle found out that extending support for their applications does not mean customers are gong to stall on [buying] new releases. They [Oracle] have a good upgrade flow despite or maybe because of extended support," Greenbaum said.In today's market, most vendors make upgrades a revenue-neutral event."You still get maintenance revenue either way, so why cause anxiety when you don't have to," added Greenbaum.On the financing side, Microsoft is now offering more options, including financing both the cost of hardware and software.Also available through March 2008 is a program called Smart Pay which will allow customers to select what their monthly payments will be for the first year.Finally, Bell said that Microsoft is making the commitment to deliver statements of directions that look out to the next 12 to 14 months."It will be very specific and talk about features and functionality," said Bell.Microsoft will include written documents on a special partner and customer Web site and will not require signing a non-disclosure agreement.The roadmap details are expected to start in November.
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Systinet on Monday is releasing an upgrade of its UDDI-based business services registry that adds a configurable services console, advanced classification management, and publishing wizards for mapping and publishing of service data.
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Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) is expanding its indemnification program for Windows and other software products in order to shield users from legal claims and patent
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Some business software vendors are determined to steer their own ships in a sea of acquisitions.
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In a bid to further differentiate itself from open-source rivals, Microsoft this week says it will expand its indemnification program to cover the vast majority of its customers.
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SBC Communications selected the new Microsoft IPTV Edition software platform for its Project Lightspeed initiative. The deal, which is valued at $400 million over 10 years, is the first of its kind for any US-based telecommunications provider.