News Briefs and Product Shorts

PeopleSoft Invests in ALMs for Greater ROA

You've heard of ROI (return on investment). But what about ROA (return on assets)? If you're in an asset-intensive industry, such as construction or pulp products, ROA means making the most out of your physical assets, like trucks and saws. The latest release of PeopleSoft's EnterpriseOne Asset Lifecycle Management contains new ROA-related features, including support for condition-based maintenance and new cost analysis functions. The new condition-based maintenance feature in Asset Lifecycle Management Version 8.1 automatically alerts users when equipment starts performing outside of normal parameters, and suggests a corrective action in order to keep the equipment running at peak efficiency. The new maintenance feature also provides compliance and accountability by tracking the steps being taken to fix the problem and the people responsible. Another ROA feature gaining popularity across the midrange nation is called equipment cost analysis. This feature basically watches the long-term costs related to operating and maintaining equipment and allows people to tell when costs are going up too much and its time to fix, or otherwise dispose of, the equipment. PeopleSoft also now lets users access Asset Lifecycle Management programs and transactions they use the most, through personalized portals.

Waste Industries USA Sifts Through J.D. Edwards Data with Spreadsheet Server

Waste Industries USA, a $270 million refuse disposal and recycling company in North Carolina, is better able to analyze data housed in its J.D. Edwards system thanks to Global Software's Spreadsheet Server software, the software company announced last week. Global's Spreadsheet Server line of products allow users to access and manipulate OS/400 data from inside of the familiar Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Users at Waste Industries, which serves more than half a million customers in several Southern states, are reportedly thrilled to use the software. "Our team is genuinely excited about what the Spreadsheet Server application has done for us in terms of efficiency and simplicity," said Leslie Childress, the company's controller.

Cognos Provides the EAI and ETL for French Caterers

A $3 billion catering company has deployed Business Objects software to consolidate data residing in various systems across its enterprise, including a SAP ERP system and an AS/400. Elior, one of Europe's largest catering companies, with 47,000 employees, uses Business Objects' Data Integrator software to manage all data transfers involving SAP, its data warehouse, the AS/400 and other platforms, and the EDI server. Franck Savarit, the company's director of IT design and operation, says Data Integrator now serves as the "control tower" for all data exchanges under his command. The software processes and loads more than 140,000 EDI invoices into the R/3 system every month, for example. In addition to serving as the basis for enterprise application integration (EAI), Elior uses Data Integrator's extract, transform, and load (ETL) capabilities to consolidate and cleanse data bound for its data warehouse. "We are now able to put together a complete business intelligence system in an SAP environment, providing a very fine-grained analysis of the group's global performance," Savarit says. Elior also licensed three of Business Objects' Rapid Mart offerings, for Plant Maintenance, Account Receivable, and Cost Center analysis, in order to gain a better understanding of the performance of certain aspects of its business.

Proginet Boosts Automation, Authentication in File Transfer Utility

Proginet has issued Secure Internet File Transfer 2.0, a utility that simplifies setting up secure transfers for large amounts of data among business partners, running any type of Java-compatible computer. Unlike Proginet's other file transfer utility, the peer-to-peer-based CyberFusion, SIFT does not require the receiving party to install any software. Instead, Secure Internet File Transfer installs on a Web server and functions as a Web service, automatically uploading the necessary client software when invoked by a customer or business partner. With Secure Internet File Transfer 2.0, the Garden City, New York, software company had delivered new checkpoint restart, authentication, and FTP features. With Checkpoint restart, the software will automatically restart file transfers and persist until the transfer is complete, thereby guaranteeing delivery, the company says. The software can also now use Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories to authenticate users when they request access, while added support for FTP expands users' data transfer options. Secure Internet File Transfer 2.0 works on all platforms, Proginet says, and pricing is based on platform-specific packages and starts at $25,000.

Gartner Finds Business Process Management Delivers Good ROI

Chances are you will find a good return on investment (ROI) by implementing business process management (BPM) technologies, it was discovered recently by way of a Gartner survey. BPM, of course, refers to the class of Web services technologies that virtualizes business processes, allowing them to be managed and modeled independent of their original constructs. Gartner found that 80 percent of companies implementing BPM projects get an internal rate of return of 15 percent or more, which should boost their standing on the corporate IT "to do" list. The survey also found a high rate of success for BPM projects, with 95 percent of companies implementing BPM experiencing a 90 percent or higher success rate, and 67 percent completing their BPM projects in six months or less. The survey was sponsored by Sajus Technologies, a Mississauga, Ontario, BPM software provider.

OpSource Buys EnterpriseOne Hosting Business in Denver

OpSource has bought the EnterpriseOne application outsourcing operation of Fortrust Solutions, it was announced last week. As part of the deal, OpSource, based in Santa Clara, California, now owns Fortrust's 230,000 square-foot data center in a Denver, Colorado, suburb. To help smooth the transition, Tom Newman, Fortrust's director of security and application services, will join OpSource. This is not the first acquisition of a co-location facility for OpSource, which bills itself as a "next-generation IT infrastructure services company." In the 14 months leading up to February 2004, OpSource completed six acquisitions, including acquisitions of: the Chicago consultants Global Network Solutions; Quadrix Solutions, a systems integration and managed co-location services provider based in New Jersey; the Southern California managed services provider Space4Rent.com; and Ernst & Young Technologies of Virginia. More recently, the company has raised $12.5 million in a round of Series B financing and has opened an outsourcing center in Bangalore, India.