Dovetail Software Blogs

"SAP announced today that it will increase maintenance fees for customers on its lower-cost support option, moving them to an enhanced support offering that will cost 22% of their net licensing fees by 2012. The change affects about 17,000 customers on SAP's Basic Support, offered at 17% of net licensing fees, according to Mark Cordrey, SAP's vice president of active global support. Customers receiving Premium Support, already 22% of net licensing fees, must also move onto Enterprise Support."

"Disparate data sources and systems, and the inability to draw accurate conclusions from company data, are at the very core of today's financial services marketing challenges. To address sales and profitability goals, financial institutions must automate and streamline marketing processes throughout the three core customer marketing areas: attracting, retaining and growing customers. Organizations that implement a cohesive campaign management solution across all departments are well positioned to increase revenues by establishing long-lasting dialogues with customers that translate into ongoing sales."

"The idea of context-driven architecture, as coined by Gartner, has been bouncing around my head since the Gartner AADI and EA Summits I attended in June. It’s a catch phrase that basically means that we need to design our applications to take into account as much as possible of the context in which it is executed. It’s especially true for mobile applications, where the whole notion of location awareness has people thinking about new and exciting things, albeit more so in the consumer space than in the enterprise."

"You’ve already instituted a travel ban, relinquished the open head count and froze spending for the foreseeable future. These obvious tactics are being executed at companies everywhere in response to the growing fear of the ‘r’ word and all those other water cooler discussions related to cost cutting. You should actually be grateful – yes grateful – that you’ve been forced to push the pause button on your IT projects. Now you have an opportunity to evaluate your IT landscape and uncover lost money hidden within your enterprise applications."

"As is the case with a number of other tech trends, Agile first gained popularity with consumer-oriented applications and is making its move to a somewhat skeptical enterprise. Looking at it from a high (and admittedly non-technical) level, I am not sure why companies seem so suspicious. Agile values flexibility, simplicity and getting tasks accomplished quickly — three characteristics that are hard to see as negative."