Category: Product briefs

COMPANY OVERVIEW
With 24 years of field experience, Esker is no newcomer to document process automation. Headquartered in France, Esker has a worldwide presence with more than 80,000 customers and more than 2.5 million people using various products and services that help automate document-intensive processes. The company merged with several other companies in the United States in 2000 to round out its document process automation offerings, and the results are a platform of products that connect a company’s existing systems and move documents through processes in an efficient and cost-effective way. Esker’s products work particularly well within enterprises that have Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) systems such as SAP or Oracle E-Business Suite, helping them to eliminate resource-intensive order-to-cash or procure-to-pay processes that involve printing orders or invoices, walking them to another point and re-keying the data. Esker DeliveryWare is a solution that can automate a wide range of document-based processes such as accounts payable, sales order processing, purchasing and customer invoicing. The product works best in enterprises that have a significant volume of document handling tasks that can benefit from automation.

COMPANY STRATEGY
– Focus on providing products that automate labor-intensive workflows as well as reducing the integration challenges between internal systems and external sources.
– Offer customers measurable ROI with the potential for up to 70% reduction in order and invoice processing costs.
– Work closely with ERP system vendors (including SAP) to provide customers with value-added products that leverage installed ERP systems.
– Offer customers a variety of delivery models, including SaaS and on-premise solutions to complement customers’ existing IT infrastructure.
– Target manufacturing sector with many document-intensive processes and a high amount of ERP system usage.

IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY Esker DeliveryWare offers customers several options for implementation. For those companies that desire an on-premise solution, DeliveryWare can be implemented within existing IT infrastructure. Depending on the complexity of the implementation, customers are able to go live in as short as one or two days, up to 8 weeks, while costs can range from less than $20,000 to over $100,000.

For those companies that want to reduce the burden on IT resources and minimize capital expenditures, especially in light of the current economic conditions, Esker offers a software-as-a-service model for DeliveryWare that provides a flexible pay-as-you-go model and low implementation costs. Hosted data centers have the highest levels of availability, reliability, security, and disaster recovery to provide enterprises with a turnkey solution for document process automation.

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
– Raise visibility of Esker and DeliveryWare in North America to build document process automation market share.
– Increase partnerships and alignment with other ERP vendors and also Document Management vendors to create complimentary sell to installed bases.
– Define and communicate value of solution, even though it cuts across traditional market segments or product categories.

UPSIDE ANALYSIS
Despite the automation that enterprise resource planning systems provide, there are still gaps in coverage, especially when the processes go beyond the corporate walls. This is often a pain point for organization, because they must meld manual processes with automation, and the results can be resource-intensive, error-prone, and inefficient. For example, taking an order from inside an ERP system, printing it out, walking it across to another system, and re-keying the data is not an optimal environment for business operations, and yet it is often the reality in many companies.

Esker’s DeliveryWare solution is part of a category of tools that seek to remedy the situation highlighted above. Document process automation is an important part of increasing efficiency and effectiveness with processes throughout the enterprise. Despite the economic downturn, document process automation provides a bright spot because organizations see immediate cost-savings and bottom-line impact from implementing such a solution. Esker has the advantage of offering on-premise or on-demand services, enabling an even lower initial investment to start gaining efficiency and reducing costs and errors associated with manual document routing and processing.

Esker has carved out a specific niche in the broader BPM space, and as a result has a very focused, highly successful business model. Upside Research recommends that Esker continue to expand its alignment with the leading ERP vendors, tighten integration to their solutions, and build its brand awareness outside Europe to capture more market share.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
Esker DeliveryWare is a comprehensive solution for automating document processing throughout and beyond the walls of the enterprise. It replaces costly manual and error-prone steps in common procure-to-pay and order-to-cash cycles by automating document routing and reducing document handling times. DeliveryWare allows enterprises to capture, customize, transform, route and deliver data and documents from any source to any destination. The solution’s centralized management enables streamlined electronic business communications and facilitates faster payment cycles, increased visibility into order processes.

Upside Take
The area of document process automation is a subset of Business Process Management, and it has the benefit of a very clearly defined return on investment for organizations. Enterprises that have high volumes of paper- and document-centric tasks around sales ordering and payment are well aware of the pain points of their non-automated processes. Therefore, offering a solution to these problems with a clear ROI and several delivery options is a key to success. Esker has done a remarkable job aligning itself with one of the leaders in ERP to offer customers a complementary solution to the ERP systems that run their businesses. The key for Esker will be to raise its visibility and extend its interoperability with other ERP vendors to appeal to a wider swath of customers.

VENDOR DATA
Esker Inc.
U.S. headquarters
1212 Deming Way
Suite 350
Madison, WI 53717 www.esker.com
Phone: 800.368.5283
Email: info@esker.com
Founded: 1984
Ownership: Public
Employees: 240
Employees in R&D: 25%
Total Company Revenue: 26.6 million Euros (2008)
Industry Segment:
Process Automation
Key Partners:
– SAP
– Microsoft
Reference Accounts:
– Whirlpool
– Kimball International
– Pentair Water
Product: DeliveryWare
Number of Installations: 80,000 customers worldwide, with more than 2.5 million users.

Download the complete Esker DeliveryWare Upside Research Product Brief.

Endeavors Technologies believes it is one of the best-kept secrets in application virtualization and streaming. From its roots as a research project at University of CA Irvine more than ten years ago, the company has grown and developed three new versions of a commercial product, Application Jukebox, aimed at providing on-demand application delivery through a portable application virtualization and streaming architecture. Perhaps most interesting is Application Jukebox SaaS Edition, which extends the flexibility of on-demand virtualization and streaming beyond the enterprise to deliver applications to users when and where they need them. The applications of Application Jukebox are numerous, from enterprise IT application distribution and license enforcement and version control to consumer gaming through a web portal. Currently, 500,000 users are utilizing Application Jukebox (or one of its previous versions). If rumors regarding an upcoming pilot program from Microsoft that will allow service providers to stream Microsoft Office through a SaaS model prove true, Endeavors will be poised to make an even more significant impact on the SaaS market.

Company Strategy
– Today, offer three different versions of Application Jukebox to appeal to enterprise IT departments, individual developers, and consumer-focused ISVs.

– Deliver fully configurable virtualization by enabling administrators to choose between sandboxed and integrated virtualization, or any combination of the two.

– Partner with Service Providers and ISV’s to enable them to offer a variety of application virtualization and streaming options to their customers.

– Extend channel development in enterprise market through channel partnerships that define the benefits of Application Jukebox Enterprise Edition.

Implementation Strategy
Application Jukebox includes three primary components to enable application virtualization and streaming. The Application Jukebox Player is the client installed on end-user machines that creates the virtual environment for the application to execute in. The Application Jukebox Server is based on an Apache server, and provides the interface for the SaaS environment as well as the administration component to oversee license enforcement and a database to manage users and provide reporting capabilities. Application Jukebox Studio is used to create streamable and virtualized application sets from an original installer. As a SaaS implementation, Application Jukebox enables applications to be streamed to the user desktop with zero footprint – once the user is finished using the application, it is removed. This is a significant advantage of the solution from an implementation perspective because it doesn’t consume any bandwidth on the desktop and also provides protection from piracy as the application is never installed on the client. The server can be installed by following the install wizard and documentation. Installation typically takes several hours for someone who understands the prerequisites: Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS (optional for a SaaS Edition), Apache Tomcat/Java KRE and Active Directors (optional service for Enterprise Edition).

Critical Success Factors

– Successfully build out channel relationships to extend reach of Application Jukebox into target vertical markets.

– Educate market about advantages of application virtualization and streaming for the enterprise.

– Leverage recent market momentum of SaaS to extend reach to undeveloped channels.

– Communicate specific benefits of Application Jukebox in relation to competitors and illustrate how Application Jukebox is being used by each category of users (IT, service and content providers, consumer, etc.)

Upside Analysis
SaaS is an approach to enterprise software that is gaining steam across corporate IT departments. Its benefits are numerous – the ability to better control and manage application licenses, upgrades, and usage while delivering exactly the application services that users need, when they need them and where they need them. Endeavors Technologies has been working to bring the benefits of application virtualization and streaming in a SaaS model for quite some time, and Application Jukebox is the culmination of its decade-plus efforts. Among the benefits of Endeavors’ solution are its light footprint, standards-based foundation, portability, flexibility of applications, and rapid deployment. The fact that Application Jukebox enables the administrator to control whether an application is launched in a “sandbox” or integrated virtualization environment, or any combination of the two, is a key differentiator from the competition.

When Endeavors Technologies calls itself one of the “best-kept” secrets, it wasn’t far off the mark. Upside Research believes that the technology that Endeavors has developed has a wide range of applications, and the company is pursuing several of them currently. The consumer application of streaming games is an intriguing one and has been very successful to date. However, we believe that the enterprise capabilities of this technology are equally, if not more, valuable, and we encourage Endeavors Technologies to further develop these channels with specific enterprise-focused applications and success stories. The ability to optimally control application distribution, licensing, and updates will deliver significant benefits to overworked IT departments. The biggest challenge that Endeavors Technologies faces is having the bandwidth to develop all of the potential that Application Jukebox presents.

Download the Complete Endeavors Application Jukebox Product Brief.

Adobe Systems has established its products as the ubiquitous desktop client for viewing dynamic forms and documents, most notably with its Adobe Reader and Flash Player. With more than 900 million connected desktop computers and devices utilizing Adobe client software, there is no doubt that Adobe products are an integral part of the business landscape.

In 2004, the company launched LiveCycle, a set of servers designed to make forms and documents more interactive, extending PDF to back-end processes. The latest version, LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, merges this with the Flex and Flash capabilities from Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia, providing companies with the ability automate business processes with customer engaging forms and user interfaces. Based on a re-written and unified J2EE server platform, LiveCycle ES provides a collaborative development environment for automating business processes across industries such as financial services, manufacturing, life sciences, and government. As a player in the human-centric category of BPM, Adobe currently has more than 1,300 LiveCycle ES customers.

COMPANY STRATEGY

• Encourage the creation of “customer engagement” applications that are web-based processes to help simplify and automate process that cross organizational boundaries and improve communication with external constituents.

• Provide a unified, standards-based platform that supports SOA and web services to create processes that extend back-office systems outside the corporate walls.

• Build on momentum of Reader and Flash products as de facto clients for engaging users to execute human-centric processes.

IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY
The latest version of LiveCycle ES has been designed to enable collaborative development. With a standards-based J2EE foundation and an Eclipse-based integrated development environment, LiveCycle ES runs on a wide variety of platforms. The solution utilizes SOA to connect with back-office interfaces. LiveCycle ES offers an inclusive development environment with development and production repositories that can be shared among different types of users. The solution is available in a turnkey configuration with JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere, and runs on Windows, Solaris, Linux and AIX operating systems.

Adobe finds that its customers are typically using three different methods for implementation. Some have contracted directly with Adobe for professional services, while others choose to use one of Adobe’s many regional systems integrators for assistance. Finally, some of the customers choose to implement the solution themselves. Average implementation time varies, but typically runs six months. However, with the latest release of LiveCycle ES, there have been a number of implementations that have been completed in the three-month timeframe.

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS

• Build strong use cases in vertical markets to expand reach of solution across targeted verticals.

• Strengthen partnerships in target vertical markets to deliver stronger offering to customers.

• Increase packaged solutions offerings, including forms, templates, solution accelerators to enable customers to more quickly implement the product.

• Clearly define how LiveCycle works with existing traditional integration and business process management solutions that customers may have.

UPSIDE ANALYSIS
Adobe LiveCycle ES is an intelligent and powerful extension of several desktop client applications that have become indispensable in everyday business. Leveraging the ubiquity of Adobe Reader and Flash, LiveCycle ES enables organizations to create human-centric business processes that engage the end user in a format they are already familiar with, an important component of the ultimate success of BPM. The latest version of LiveCycle ES solves some of the challenges of earlier releases by replacing more than 12 separate servers with one unified J2EE server platform and an integrated development environment that promotes collaborative development by all stakeholders. This product shines in human-centric processes that require approvals or exceptions tied to forms but do not require heavy back-office integration and transaction processing.

Upside Research believes that Adobe has a compelling solution for extending the use of interactive forms routing and online rich internet applications that seek to engage customers. While the product is not intended to do some of the heavy system-to-system process integration or back-office transaction processing that other BPM solutions provide it fills an important need in the market for a process solution that can be rolled out via user centric interfaces to a variety of constituents. Extending some of the pre-packaged component of LiveCycle ES will further enhance the product’s differentiation in the market as well as its ability to be implemented more quickly.

Download the complete Adobe LiveCycle ES Upside Research Product Brief.

Founded in 1991 in Paris, MEGA International has grown to be an enterprise architecture solutions provider with a business process modeling perspective.
MEGA International’s new version of its MEGA Modeling Suite has added a new component, MEGA Advisor, to the comprehensive set of tools that enable enterprise architecture (EA) and business process analysis (BPA). MEGA Advisor is an on-demand, web-based reporting application intended for users that need access to essential business process modeling information. The tool adapts to the viewer’s perspective and filters through all of the information in the EA repository to present the relevant information via a web portal to the user. The latest version of MEGA Modeling Suite also includes interfaces to third-party complementary toolsets for EA and BPA. With a customer base of more than 1,800, including large enterprises such as Michelin and Philip Morris USA and more recently many government agencies, MEGA is an established player in the enterprise architecture market.

Download the full MEGA Modeling Suite Upside Research Product Brief.

Appian holds a unique position in the BPM market. The company was founded in 1999 in order to help organizations across industries optimize their business processes. With three of its founders coming from business intelligence vendor MicroStrategy, the company wanted to move beyond mere reporting to help its customers tie high-level business goals to the work employees do every day. Therefore, to help organizations turn insight into action Appian began to build out a standards-based BPM platform that provided an easy-to-use framework for designing, managing and optimizing business processes. Appian’s BPM suite was designed and optimized around a completely Web-based interface using AJAX and Web 2.0 technologies.

Appian’s BPM suite has evolved into two primary product lines: Appian Enterprise, for commercial-off-the-shelf enterprise BPM software needs behind the firewall, and Appian Anywhere a BPM suite offered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Appian Corporation is completely self-funded and has been profitable since its inception.

COMPANY STRATEGY

• Strategically satisfy the high-end of the enterprise market with Appian Enterprise, bringing significant depth in professional services (75 employees) and experience as a core differentiator.

• By growing organically Appian has been able to take a long-term approach to the market, making customer success its number one priority.

• Serve the small-to-medium size market for process improvement with Appian Anywhere.

• Develop strategic OEM, VAR and technology partnerships to drive channel sales to augment direct sales approach.

• Bring targeted solutions to market to address specific customer needs, including the small and mid-sized markets.

UPSIDE ANALYSIS
Appian Enterprise BPM suite is built with the business analyst in mind. Throughout the product, Appian’s in-depth background in business intelligence and analytics is visible. From the manager-oriented dashboard through the process modeler that includes the ability to add analytics and reports at each step, Appian has closely linked business process management with the analytics and business intelligence that are needed to optimize their processes. Upside Research believes this is a particular strength of the solution, and Appian benefits competitively from this built-in functionality.

Upside Research believes that Appian has been a quiet but growing force in the BPM market. Since the company has only recently focused on building market awareness, Appian doesn’t have the brand awareness
of some of the other pure-play BPM solutions. However, with its strong product and focus on customer success and ROI, Appian has already built an impressive customer base. Upside Research believes that Appian will benefit from building broader market awareness, and as it continues to add marquis customers it is well-positioned to become a major force in the enterprise business process management market.

Download the full Appian Upside Research Product Brief.

Lombardi Software is a BPM pure-play that has been making its BPM solution available to enterprise customers since 2000. Currently, the company has more than 130 customers, with half of them in the Fortune 2000, and it is recognized as one of the leading pure-play BPM solutions. The company is privately held and backed by several significant venture firms, including Austin Ventures, Palomar and InterWest. In 2006, Lombardi doubled its revenues and added more than 50 employees to support the growth.

Lombardi TeamWorks Enterprise Edition®, Lombardi’s BPM suite, provides a business-user focused solution to process optimization, and includes tools for business analysts and managers in addition to developers. Lombardi has worked to make its user interface seamless with popular business productivity applications, with the release of a fully integrated add-on product for Microsoft Office, Teamwork for Office, something its customers have appreciated. Lombardi’s newest offering is called Blueprint, and it is designed for companies that are looking for a faster, service-based way to enable collaborative process discovery. The hosted model enables companies to quickly leverage Blueprint in their business process discovery initiatives.

COMPANY STRATEGY

• Lead with a consultative sales approach that seeks to help customers identify the best opportunities to use process to transform the business.

• Offer Lombardi Blueprint as a hosted option for companies that want to quickly enable collaborative business process discovery as the first step toward more effective BPM projects.

• Provide Lombardi TeamWorks product suite that focuses on simplifying actions, increasing individual effectiveness, making collaboration easier and driving process performance.

• Deliver “BPM to the Masses??? through TeamWorks for Office.

UPSIDE ANALYSIS
Lombardi has performed well as a successful pure-play BPM vendor. The company continues to be recognized within the industry as one of the leaders, and it is steadily adding customers to its roster to solidify its market position. Lombardi has been particularly good at listening to its customers, and a perfect example is the close integration of TeamWorks with the Microsoft Office user interface. Based on feedback from customer roundtable discussions in 2005, TeamWorks for Office is now a major component of the solution.

TeamWorks does a good job of making the collaboration between business users and IT more seamless. The fact that both types of users design and build the process using the same model is a significant benefit and encourages a close relationship between what each party brings to the BPM equation. The optimization components of TeamWorks reflect Lombardi’s belief that BPM needs to be iterative and processes will continue to change and grow as the business changes. This flexibility is something Upside Research believes is critical to the successful adoption of BPM within the enterprise. In addition, the newest product, Blueprint, reflects the market needs for more flexible tools to assist in helping businesses discover their business processes before launching an extensive BPM project. Lombardi is one of the leaders in what Upside Research sees as a growing trend in BPM software as a service.

Lombardi’s TeamWorks is a very strong BPM product. It combines good technical capabilities with interface and modeling capabilities that are well suited for both business and technical users. On the back-end, its Eclipse-based platform provides extensibility and flexibility. We are also particularly impressed with Lombardi’s support for process optimization. For many organizations, this type of support is crucial for realizing the complete potential of a BPM investment. Upside Research expects Lombardi to continue to be a significant player in the business process management arena.

Download the full Lombardi Teamworks Upside Research Product Brief.

COMPANY OVERVIEW
E2E is a relatively new entrant in the enterprise integration product space, but the company brings with it deep roots in enterprise model-driven integration. Founded more than 10 years ago as a systems integrator in Switzerland, the company quickly built its reputation as a provider of integration services for UBS. As the company continued to support critical enterprise integration projects, it decided in late 2005 to offer the product it had developed for its customer projects to the global market.

In January 2006, the company made the switch to a pure product company and since then has been building traction in the model-driven integration market worldwide. With more than 12 customers today, many of them multi-billion dollar enterprises, E2E is bringing its solution, the E2E Bridge, to the global market. The E2E Bridge is a UML-based enterprise service bus (ESB) that provides code-free, model-driven integration with a company’s existing back-end systems. The E2E Bridge supports service-oriented architectures (SOA) and is fairly lightweight because of its UML virtual machine, which does not require a Java application server.

COMPANY STRATEGY

• Educate the market about the success of bringing model-driven integration to enterprise-level SOA initiatives.

• Expand global presence beyond Europe and Asia into the North American market.

• Continue to provide customers with integration adaptors as they demand, beyond the more than forty that are available today

• Build out extensive partner network to sell through the channel predominantly, especially boutique system integrators.

UPSIDE ANALYSIS
E2E is adding new life to a saturated market – enterprise integration. The company has the background and credentials to stand up as an expert in the space, and Upside Research believes that the creative use of a UML virtual machine and XML-based technology for an enterprise service bus is unique and sets E2E apart from other solutions. The largest hurdle that the company faces from a technology perspective is convincing the existing integration teams, often full of expert developers, that it is possible to achieve enterprise integration without extensive coding, instead using a purely model-driven approach. If E2E can use its customer references to exhibit the success of this new approach to an ESB, then it stands to build its customer base.

From an execution standpoint, E2E needs to continue to build momentum in the North American market with some lighthouse customer wins and strong success stories. In addition, the company needs to continue to build out its channel with regional, vertically-focused ISVs and OEMs to expand its geographic reach and market share. Continuing to develop technology partnerships with other enterprise software vendors will also assist E2E in its efforts to build a presence in the North American market.

Download the full E2E Bridge Upside Research Product Brief.

HandySoft was an early player in the pure-play BPM market. The company’s BizFlow solution gained attention early as a flexible process management tool that was particularly adept at helping organizations manage their compliance needs. After releasing several SOX-based and compliance solutions, BizFlow gained a large following in the government vertical, and currently 35% of its customers come from this market segment, including 40 agencies of the U.S. Government. Recently, HandySoft released OfficeEngine, a thin client application that is designed to enable all corporate users to bring workflow and task optimization to their existing business productivity environment, namely Microsoft Outlook. With OfficeEngine, HandySoft is positioning itself to bring BPM to every corporate user through a vehicle they are already using. The company hopes to recharge its BPM market visibility and add to the more than 300+ customers it has around the globe.

Download the full HandySoft Upside Research Product Brief.