Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

SSA Global Technologies gave a glimpse into the future of PRMS two weeks ago, when it announced its first new release of the ERP suite in 20 months, and the first release since the company bought it from Computer Associates last spring. In addition to about 40 functional enhancements, PRMS 9.2 features what the company calls a "common object model" underpinning, which eases integration with other applications and could pave the way for a BPCS/PRMS merger.

Of all the 13 applications that SSA GT acquired when it bought CA's interBiz business unit in April, PRMS was probably the best fit in terms of the Chicago, Illinois, ERP vendor's core competency in developing and maintaining BPCS. Both BPCS and PRMS are RPG-based ERP suites that were developed in the 1970s for the IBM S/3X platform. Today, both applications have comparable installed bases among midmarket and top-tiered manufacturers and distributors in consumer processed goods, pharmaceutical, automotive, and other industries.

When SSA GT acquired interBiz, company officials said one of their primary short-term objectives with the PRMS suite was to prepare a set of extensions that would provide PRMS users with the same types of CRM, business intelligence, and collaborative commerce capabilities that the company was bringing to its BPCS product line through OEM agreements with Applix, Cognos, and Logility. In the long run, company officials said, SSA GT will continue developing its two rival ERP suites, and they could eventually be targeted toward different industries, with BPCS taking the lead in the food processing and pharmaceuticals segments, for example. (See the article "SSA GT Gets Big OS/400, Unix Bases with interBiz Buy" for more information on SSA GT's interBiz acquisition.)

Following the release of PRMS 9.2, it appears that SSA GT has developed some of its plans and has adopted new strategies for others. SSA GT has developed its short-term plan to deliver e-business extensions to PRMS, through the growing collection of "Powered by" products the company has rolled out for BPCS. A Cognos-powered business intelligence product for PRMS should be the first to become generally available (it reportedly started shipping several weeks back, but there's nary a mention of it on the SSA GT or interBiz Web sites), and the company has plans to offer similar OEM products from other vendors, according to a company official.

Six months down the road, however, it's SSA GT's long-term strategy that appears to be changing slightly. Or, perhaps, the company's plans are just taking more of a definable shape than they had in the immediate aftermath of the acquisition, when SSA GT workers were understandably swamped with a 40 percent increase in the number of users they had to support around the world. Instead of developing, maintaining, selling, and servicing BPCS and PRMS independently, or even moving the two ERP suites into different target markets (as the company had hinted it might do), it looks as though SSA GT would like to consolidate as much of the two entities as possible, even to the point of merging them into a single product, which, officials say, could happen years down the road.

The 43 functional enhancements that SSA GT made to items such as EDI, drop shipment capabilities, credit card interfaces, purchase orders, and exit points were listed in three core areas: customer service, planning and execution, and general ease of use. SSA GT says these enhancements are geared toward helping customers get more out of their back-office software, with the eventual goal of making it easier for the software to integrate with other applications and to participate in e-business, officials said.

During a conference call with SSA GT last week, executives referred to a "common object model" in PRMS that will allow the ERP suite to be more flexible. "InterBiz brings what we call a common object model, which is an integration route to bring disparate systems together," said Lee Mashburn, who recently left SAP to become SSA GT's global vice president of solutions management and marketing. "The synergies brought together with interBiz and SSA products are really quite complementary."

Cindy Jutras, the company's solutions management director and a former interBiz employee, said that while much of the work in PRMS 9.2 is an extension of the work done on the 9.0 and 9.1 releases, it will also help customers in the future. "It puts our customers in a very good position to make some strides, and positions them for future plans, over and above PRMS 9.2," she said. "The common object model is a wrapper concept that allows us to write defined extensions to the product in terms of functionality. By virtue of the wrapper, any new development we do for one product" will be applicable to the other.

Mashburn said this approach will allow seamless integration links built from BPCS to collaborative commerce or business intelligence to also work for PRMS. "That's our long-term strategy for research and development," he said. "PRMS and BPCS may one day converge so we have the best of both worlds, but we'll protect the customers' investments."

When would SSA GT start melding BPCS and PRMS into a single product? "It's too early to tell when," Jutras said, adding that such a decision is at least two years down the road.

What such a convergence would do to SSA GT's research and development budget, which hovered around 12 to 15 percent before the acquisition, is unknown. On the one hand, the company could deliver upward of twice the new development for roughly the same cost. Or it could provide R&D for both product lines, comparable to what both have experienced, for substantially less than what it would cost to support both separately. Such a strategy is, of course, entirely unheard of in this industry. Just look at IBM's eServer initiative, which seeks to share the development and resources among its four major server groups. At this point, the team of PRMS developers from interBiz has been kept largely intact, Jutras said.

PRMS 9.2 is shipping now. Customers on Version 8.4 or later releases of PRMS can upgrade directly to PRMS 9.2, which requires OS/400 V4R4 or higher and will run with OS/400 V5R2. For more information, visit the companies' Web sites at www.ssagt.com or www.interBiz.com.