The term "unified communications" (UC) is prone to market confusion, as it is often misapplied by vendors and misused by analysts. The goal of this Experts’ Guide is to get past the technology conundrum and marketing hype, in order to offer a clearer understanding of UC essentials, including essential advice on how to analyze your UC needs, and a how-to-buy guide that analyzes solution, cost, and vendor considerations.
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Does business intelligence (BI) make sense for really small businesses? While BI solutions can surface and analyze business data, providing a competitive advantage for enterprises, this inquiry puts the spotlight on smaller businesses. But how does a small business deal with the costs associated with this kind of system? Learn why (and how) BI can be a smart choice for even the smallest business.
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On-premise or on-demand, business intelligence (BI) solutions can help businesses become more intelligent about key processes. But what are the benefits to implementing cloud-based BI over traditional software? Are on-demand BI applications as popular in the enterprise as they are with midmarket companies? And what are some reasons people don’t outsource BI? Find out the answers to these questions and more. Download this guide now.
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Server virtualization is a top priority for midsize businesses in 2011. It offers immediate benefits to organizations of all sizes, although the benefits may differ between large and small. This guide will help you to understand what server virtualization is, where it fits in the overall virtualization landscape, how to determine if and how it can help your business, and how to choose the best solution for your specific needs.
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As smartphones and tablet computing devices get their foot in the enterprise door, companies are finding themselves at a much higher risk of data breach and loss. In order to mitigate this risk, Focus Experts Amy Babinchak, Martyn Davies, Bob Egan, Rasib Hassan Khan, Josh Lipton, and Ken Wineberg offer their top 6 best practices for managing security on mobile devices.
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As a set of products that provides a consistent, unified user interface and experience across multiple devices, unified communications (UC) is poised to become more widespread in the enterprise. How will IM, video, telephony, and other elements of UC change in the coming year? In this guide, experts Jon Arnold, Mike Barnes, Nicole Hayward, Dave Michels, and Blair Pleasant share their predictions for unified communications.
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The current economic environment is marked by more frequent changes than in the past. It’s no wonder that more businesses are looking to business intelligence (BI) software to identify and analyze business data to speed responses to these changes. So, what changes are ahead for BI? In this guide, experts Bill Cabiro, David Crandall, Wayne Kernochan, Kirsty Lee, Clarice Lin and Shawn Rogers share their predictions for BI.
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Like its Microsoft Office cousins, Word and PowerPoint, Excel is de rigueur software in businesses around the world. And in offices that lack a formal business intelligence (BI) solution, Excel often becomes the go-to tool for compiling and analyzing business data In this guide, John Wilson, CEO of Claim Insights, and other Focus Experts offer top tips and best practices for using Excel as a business intelligence tool.
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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions are large, and complex by nature, making them very difficult to evaluate and compare. So how do you select the ERP solution that’s best-suited to your firm? In this guide, Focus Experts Dana Craig, Jonathan Gross, Tim Hourigan, Michael Krigsman, Tom Rogers, Bob Swedroe, and Chintan Tyagi share their top 6 best practices for selecting ERP software.
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Business intelligence (BI) applications analyze a company’s raw data to provide business process insights that can be leveraged for competitive advantage. Are such lofty goals realistic for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) that lack the IT talent found in a large enterprise? What capabilities should SMBs expect to find in a BI solution? And what are the “gotchas” to avoid? Find out in this report from Focus Research.
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Business intelligence (BI) solutions can help businesses to become more intelligent about key operations and processes. But BI solutions are only as valuable as the data that is fed into them and the key performance indicators (KPIs) they monitor. Well-chosen KPIs and quality data ensure that BI solutions generate reliable, actionable information. Find out how to get the best information into and out of your BI solutions.
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Business intelligence (BI) software allows businesses to gather, store, and analyze data so they can make better business decisions. But what considerations you should make before shopping for BI software? This document leverages the expertise of Focus Experts and other Focus Community members to help you identify key factors to consider when searching for a BI solution, and give you insight into the BI vendor landscape.
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Telephony is changing as internet protocol (IP)-based phone systems take hold. An IP phone system can deliver calls over the network as clearly and reliably as the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and more and more companies are even choosing a hosted or cloud-based voice over IP (VOIP) solution over an installed system. Discover three key VoIP features that can help you take advantage of IP telephony.
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Enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) systems have become more accessible to midsize and smaller companies. Standard features have matured, and systems have become easier to deploy and use. But some companies are struggling to support legacy ERP solutions that haven’t kept pace with new technologies. If you’re looking to make the case for an upgrade, use this checklist to sell your management on a new ERP system.
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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a mature segment of the software market. Most features are standard across solutions, and you can expect vendors to offer software for managing financials, supply chain and inventory, human resources (HR), and business intelligence (BI). Some vendors also offer specialized modules for vertical industries. Use this checklist to find the ERP modules that are right for your organization.
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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are intended to provide data to help employees make better decisions, to make your core business processes more efficient, and to help reduce costs across your organization. But implementing an ERP system for the first time is expensive, time-consuming, and requires a lot of planning. Following these 10 golden rules can help you choose the right ERP system for your organization.
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The enterprise resource planning (ERP) market has grown to include new solutions and delivery models, adding software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings to on-premise ERP solutions. This has prompted some companies to switch to more suitable solutions. But jumping into a “rip and replace” scenario can be trickier than installing ERP for the first time. These five steps for switching ERP vendors help ease the transition.
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Depending on the size and type of your business, your enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution may touch every department from accounting to warehouse management (WM). That can make it difficult to select the right solution for your company. But there are three critical modules an ERP system must have in order to deliver basic ERP benefits to any company, regardless of size or industry. Find out what they are.
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In successful contact centers, top agents provide a superior experience for customers and ultimately help grow revenue for a company. How does your contact center stack up to the competition? Are you doing all you can to run a high-performing contact center that keeps customers happy and builds long-term relationships? In this guide, experts share their top 6 best practices for improving contact center performance.
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Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing is "not procrastination, but making a commitment once the scales are tipped in favor of certainty,” explains Focus Expert Jerry Durant. How do you keep your company from falling prey to the “deer-in-the-headlights” syndrome and suffering from decision failures? Download this JIT checklist for the top seven best practices for managing JIT manufacturing.
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This primer is designed to provide business decision makers and other potential buyers with basic knowledge about the exploding market of the virtualization industry—its evolution and the current landscape, along with a glossary of terms. It also includes a checklist of signs that your data center needs virtualization.
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The network, once only a component of the business, is now the fundamental backbone by which business is conducted. Most organizations cannot maintain productivity if their network is unstable. But cost-effective network management is an elusive goal. This paper defines network automation, outlines how to select a network automation solution, and identifies the benefits of good network automation
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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects are more complicated than other information technology (IT) initiatives because they involve connecting departments across an organization. The value of ERP lies in bringing together data from the entire company, which means ERP implementation involves multiple departments and functional areas. This paper addresses five dimensions of ERP implementation for business success.
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Not all business intelligence (BI) solutions fit every situation, and many BI solutions can be quite pricy. As an organization grows and its experience with BI increases, new types of analysis from a broader range of sources become worth the additional spend. This guide will help you determine what stage of BI “maturity” you are in, and then what features you need and what vendor choices you have at that stage.
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Vendors offer a variety of ways to overcome many inconveniences by integrating mobile phones with office systems. Mobile integration isn’t as much product or technology of its own, however, as a range of capabilities built into phone systems and services themselves. Small to midsized businesses (SMBs) looking for mobile integration should focus on understanding what features are available and what they can do.
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The move to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) is fraught with technical and other considerations, but the gains in productivity and efficiency and long-term manageability, application integration, and multimodal communications options outweigh the problems if the map forward is well thought out. Read about the 5 features that your VoIP system should have for it to be considered the right solution for your enterprise.
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It’s the software industry’s dirty little secret. Over 65 percent of software implementations fail—wasting untold amounts of time, money, and resources. Learn from a panel of experts how to make sure your company doesn’t suffer these kinds of losses. Of course, making the right ERP selection goes a long way in avoiding major implementation pitfalls. That’s why Lessons from ERP Implementation Failures gives you the right approach to finding an ERP system that meets your company’s special needs. Learn the lessons of ERP implementation failures—and get a plan for successful ERP selection—all from the experts who have been there.
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A growing number of businesses are adopting enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to give their departments accurate and accessible shared data. Human resource Management (HRM) isn’t being left out of the loop. In fact, most major ERP vendors now offer their customers HRM modules that help automate an array of tasks while generating crucial data for enterprise planning and optimization. Know the top five modules.
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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can be integrated with nearly every function in your business. It’s helpful to segment ERP components into five building blocks. Understanding how these blocks are linked together should help you determine which components add the most value and how your existing systems may be integrated with new tools and systems to increase efficiency, produce better products, and reduce cost.
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For all but the smallest organizations, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system promises big gains, helping to grow revenue, increase productivity company-wide, improve efficiency throughout the enterprise, and manage costs. In this guide, you’ll find details on what to look for in a midmarket ERP package, the benefits it should bring to your midsize company, and what you need to know before you commit to a solution.
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The seas of enterprise resource planning (ERP) are vast, and navigating the rocky waters of the current market is no simple task. Midmarket ERP offerings may be scaled down to meet the requirements particular to midmarket companies, but that doesn’t change the inherently complex nature of enterprise-wide technology. To ensure you choose wisely, ask at least these 10 questions when researching vendors and their products.
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Before you commit to any enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, you should first answer several questions about what your organization needs and wants to accomplish with its ERP strategy. The answers will help you determine which applications and what kind of functionality your organization requires from its ERP solution, as well as go a long way toward easing the implementation process. Read how to prepare yourself.
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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) automates many aspects of an organization’s operations, cascading across traditional boundaries of operations, finance, manufacturing, and more. As such, changes in the ERP market can cause a ripple effect in an organization’s business. In this report, five Focus experts share eight of their 2011 predictions for ERP, so you can plan your business around these changing tides and trends.
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The days of deploying new equipment for the sake of having the latest and greatest ended when the Internet bubble burst. Nevertheless, there are many legitimate reasons for upgrading your company’s enterprise network. The trick is selling those reasons to the executives holding your company’s purse strings. Discover 10 ways to sell the members of your upper-management team on a network upgrade.
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Data center network design architecture is changing to reflect growing IT trends in distributed applications and virtual computing. New computing models require a flatter network that is flexible enough to handle unpredictable traffic patterns. Find out what that means for your company in this interview with Cindy Borovick, Vice President of IDC’s Enterprise Communications and Datacenter Networks programs.
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On-premise internet protocol (IP) private branch exchange (PBX) systems can provide a relatively easy way for businesses to move to voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and get a range of new features and capabilities for their phone systems. In this buyer’s guide from Focus Research, you will find details on what to look for, how to buy, what you can expect to pay and how to go about maximizing your investment in VoIP.
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Using this worksheet from Focus Research, you can evaluate your business phone system feature requirements in relation to how well vendors meet them. Score how well vendors perform the categories you’ve identified by filling in your ratings in the columns to the right, using a scale of one to five, with five being best. If the feature isn’t important to your particular needs, simply leave the field blank.
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Despite a voice communication system’s critical role in an enterprise, many people aren’t aware of the myriad available options and recent developments in the voice communication market. This primer provides insight into this market for potential buyers, decision makers and other stakeholders. It covers key aspects of business phone systems that you should understand before you decide to purchase.
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This comparison guide looks at 11 hosted voice over internet protocol (VoIP) private branch exchange (PBX) vendors and solutions developed specifically for small to midsize companies. You’ll learn about basic functions and features, pricing per user, features by vendor, phone and technical support options for AccessLine, Aptela, Bandwidth, Covad Global Phone, 8x8, Speakeasy, Smoothstone, Vocalocity, plus many more.
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To survive in today’s business environment, it is imperative for a business to adopt the latest innovations in communication technology. Is the time ripe for replacing/upgrading your existing phone system? Which solution will best suit your business? The six questions listed in this white paper can help you assess your business phone system needs, and give you some tips for choosing between hosted and on-premise systems.
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This brief aims to introduce the notion of business intelligence (BI) quotient (BIQ) and how it can be used as a metric for accelerating the time to insight and keeping the customer/end-user in perspective. It lists five best practices companies can follow right now to improve BIQ, discusses top products, costs, and vendor considerations, and provides buying advice directly from buyers—including worksheets every buyer needs.
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A big topic in business intelligence (BI) is the importance of “data quality”–cleaning data so that errors and inconsistencies are eliminated as much as possible. But what many users don’t realize is that this is just a part of a larger problem: How do you get the most out of business-relevant data floating around, inside and outside the organization? Discover the importance of clean data, and learn how to achieve it.
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Though most companies know about the benefits of enterprise resource planning (ERP), many lack awareness about how to evaluate products or when the time is right to upgrade change solutions. Moreover, they may not be up to date with the latest ERP features, market trends, and other essential information. Focus’s ERP System Market Primer offers necessary background knowledge on ERP to potential buyers and sales executives.
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Prompted by volatile markets and a troubled economy, the need to reduce costs is a top business driver impacting enterprise resource planning (ERP) strategies. Combine this need with the need for transparency, and the marriage of ERP with business intelligence (BI) becomes the perfect storm, igniting improved performance and visibility. This report from the Aberdeen Group is a benchmark to companies seeking these results.
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Hosted voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services are proliferating, and small to medium businesses (SMBs) now have a better range of choices for IP telephony. But making decisions around hosted services is different than for premise-based systems. This SMB Phone Systems Comparison Guide has been developed to help you survey the field and narrow down the best choices for the specific needs of your business.
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Implementing or upgrading an enterprise phone system is a strategic investment for any large enterprise. To reach an informed decision, you should understand the following crucial aspects: phone systems buyer types, product requirements, cost considerations, and vendor relationship needs. This buyer’s guide from Focus Research explains those considerations, and helps prepare you to make the right choice for your company.
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Business intelligence (BI) efforts can only result in a truly intelligent, agile business if they are driven by business goals—comprehensively deployed and adopted; and managed in ways that produce meaningful, measurable and credible results. Discover five BI trends to watch out for in 2010, and learn how to develop an approach to BI that’s effective, and tailored to your organization’s unique needs and goals.
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When the term “enterprise resource planning” (ERP) was introduced, it applied primarily to the planning and management of resources needed to manufacture goods. Today, however, most business decision makers realize that their enterprises rely upon resources, and that planning is essential to optimize how those resources are acquired, allocated, and used. Learn how the definition of ERP has evolved, and what it means today.
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Because optimized resource planning helps to maximize business agility and revenues, the functions and applications referred to collectively as enterprise resource planning (ERP) are some of the most business-critical. Once you’ve surveyed the ERP market and prioritized your business needs, this comparison guide from Focus Research can help you craft your best possible shortlist of candidate offerings and vendors.
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As businesses adopt enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to give their departments accurate and accessible shared data, human resources (HR) isn’t being left out of the loop. In fact, most major ERP vendors now offer their customers HR modules that help automate an array of tasks while generating crucial data for enterprise planning and optimization. Get Focus Research’s take on the top 5 HR modules for ERP systems.
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For IT departments drowning in complex and expensive software maintenance chores, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model can ease the burden. SaaS reduces complexity by outsourcing most of the infrastructure needed to run software applications, and reduces costs by charging only for what is consumed. But you can also adopt a hybrid SaaS model, in which some systems are outsourced and others are kept in-house. Learn more.
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For all but the smallest companies, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system promises big gains, by helping to grow revenue, increase productivity, improve efficiency, and manage costs. Right now, ERP for the midmarket is a hot topic. More and more midsized companies are replacing outdated ERP software or are jumping into ERP technology for the first time. Find out about what midmarket ERP buyers need to know.
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Calculating the total cost of ownership (TCO) of an Internet protocol (IP) telephony system is complicated. And you need to know the return on investment (ROI). But knowing the TCO doesn’t make it easy to figure out the ROI—because the benefits of IP private branch exchange (PBX) aren’t easy to quantify. You can, however, get an idea of your ROI by knowing 10 ways a new IP phone system can repay the money you spend on it.
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If you are a small to medium business (SMB) looking to purchase a business phone system, you’ve no doubt discovered that buying one is not easy. You must quickly identify your specific needs before you contact vendors and compare phone system options. To make an informed decision about which phone system is right for your company, you should understand four crucial aspects, from product requirements to cost considerations.
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For a midsized company, finding the right enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a tall order—but that’s not always a bad thing. Now, big-name vendors are aiming their solutions at small and midsized companies. With a little savvy, you can make this new market dynamic work to your advantage. Leverage the new realities of mid-market ERP by bearing in mind 10 strategies when shopping for an ERP solution. Learn more.
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No matter how effective your sales staff is, there’s always room to boost efficiency and increase sales. But how you go about doing so may be a point of contention. Sales force automation (SFA) solutions come in many flavors, but they don’t all offer the comprehensive SFA functionality you need. Find out how to avoid the pitfalls of choosing SFA software, and get help matching your needs with the right solution for you.
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The implementation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to automate business processes is a strategic investment. Buying the right system and choosing the best vendor for you are critical to a successful ERP implementation. As a decision maker, you need to quickly identify your ERP requirements, effectively communicate these needs to vendors, and successfully compare various product alternatives. Learn how.
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