Axon Americas, a division of Axon Group plc, the leading SAP Business Transformation consultancy, announces that it has acquired the business of SCM Solutions, a privately-held provider of Supply Chain Management Services.

Founded in 2005 by Pete King and Chris Botha, SCM Solutions is one of the premier supply chain consultancy firms that leverage SAP's world class Supply Chain Management (SCM) Solution. The acquisition is designed to accelerate Axon's expansion into SCM for SAP's Services Industry. SCM Solutions currently supports close to 50 service industries in all areas of SCM, including, Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO), Transportation Management (TM), Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM), Supply Network Collaboration (SNC) and Service Parts Planning (SPP). Industries represented include High Tech, Mining, Oil &Gas, Healthcare, Automotive, Consumer Products and Life Sciences.

Mr. King, Managing Partner of SCM, said, "We are delighted to become part of the largest SAP dedicated consultancy in the world. Axon's global reach will allow us to gain access to the premier global SAP operating platform and apply our insights into supply chain transformation for a broader range of clients using our SCM consulting capabilities. Our clients will benefit from Axon's capabilities in the full range of Business Consulting and SAP Solutions."

"I am excited about the addition of SCM Solutions to Axon. Their deep understanding of the SAP supply chain solution is consistent with our global vision of being the SAP Systems Integrator of choice," added Steve Peck, President and CEO of Axon Americas. "SCM Solutions' capabilities will help Axon provide enhanced transformational value and a strategic differentiator for all companies using SAP. We will maintain SCM Solutions' strong commitment to their clients' success and are dedicated to providing outstanding opportunities to SCM Solutions' consultants."

SCM Solutions serves as an exceptional fit for Axon. Since their inception, they have been dedicated to SAP's enterprise applications, and like Axon, their objective has always been to provide premier consulting services with clear, measurable results for each client.

About Axon

Axon (www.axonglobal.com) is a Business Transformation consultancy that delivers significant business value to large, complex organizations through the innovative implementation of SAP technologies. Axon has over 2,000 experienced professionals specializing in the delivery of sustained business improvement through technology enabled transformation programs. Axon's consultants bring in-depth industry expertise alongside best practice functional knowledge to address the strategic, operational, information management and organizational effectiveness challenges faced by organizations today. Axon is renowned for its ability to help clients define more ambitious strategies, build more effective organizations and shape more successful futures.

Founded in 1994, Axon today has offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, China, India and Australia.

Apply for the latest Axon jobs on our job board.

BearingPoint, Inc., one of the world’s largest management and technology consulting firms, announced today that it has established a new human capital management system for East Japan Railway Company, also known as JR East. The solution is built on the SAP® ERP Human Capital Management solution and has been running smoothly since its formal introduction.

JR East is the largest passenger railway company in the world serving 16 million passengers daily. Established 21 years ago, the company is now restructuring its operations to achieve further growth. Previously, JR East had managed human resources, payroll, social insurance and welfare data separately, distributing personal information across multiple systems. They needed a system that could streamline administrative work, provide better service to the employees and quickly adjust to personnel-system and organizational changes.

To address this need, JR East decided to deploy SAP ERP HCM and establish a new system to integrate its human resource-related systems. BearingPoint helped JR East merge the employee master data from its existing systems, build a new human resource portal for relevant departments to share data, and improve the Web service menus used by managers and regular employees to view and update information. This project involved completely replacing the existing dedicated human capital management terminals. Now, approximately 62,000 employees, including employees located at affiliated companies, use the new system, which is now one of the largest SAP ERP user bases in the Asia-Pacific region.

To establish the new system, JR East looked to BearingPoint for its experience and achievements in installing human resource information systems and providing business process redesign consulting. BearingPoint collaborated with JR East Japan Information Systems Company to develop the basic concept, define the system requirements, and design and develop the system. The two companies also worked together to provide support for smooth and stable operations, and conduct change management. On the advice of BearingPoint, JR East selected SAP ERP HCM because SAP and its products rate highly for reliability, functionality and technological superiority. JR East also took into account the compatibility of its current human resource processes and IT environment.

BearingPoint won the 2008 SAP Award of Excellence presented by SAP Japan in the category "Project Award", which recognizes project impact and innovation. The award for was given to BearingPoint for the new SAP ERP HCM-based system implemented at JR East, a project in which BearingPoint completed one of the Asia-Pacific region's largest SAP ERP HCM-based systems.

About BearingPoint, Inc.

BearingPoint, Inc. is one of the world's largest providers of management and technology consulting services to Global 2000 companies and government organizations in more than 60 countries worldwide. Based in McLean, Va., the firm has more than 16,000 employees focusing on the Public Services, Commercial Services and Financial Services industries. BearingPoint professionals have built a reputation for knowing what it takes to help clients achieve their goals, and working closely with them to get the job done. Our service offerings are designed to help our clients generate revenue, increase cost-effectiveness, manage regulatory compliance, integrate information and transition to “next-generation” technology. For more information, visit the Company's Web site at www.BearingPoint.com. 

SAP AG, global leader on the business management software market, recently closed a $6.8 billion takeover of global intelligence software firm Business Objects and now plans to invest even more money in Canada.

The German software giant has 1,800 employees in its Business Objects office in Vancouver and a total of 2,900 employees across the counrty. Most of them are based in Toronto, Montreal and now in Vancouver.   

Henning Kagermann, co-CEO of SAP AG, told The Canadian Press: "We all have intentions to invest more here... I am not sure we would have done this with just our Montreal and Toronto offices, to be very honest. With this acquisition, I think it's obviously a key hub for us."

He pointed out that the acquisition and the company's stronger presence in Canada play a strategic role in SAP's operations:

"If the team is performing like I expect and we are not short of talent, there is no reason not to expand." 

The merger of SAP and Business Objects was originally announced last autumn.

Jeffries & Co. analyst Ross MacMillan has voiced some concerns over this move:

"The biggest question for investors is whether they will have to revise down. One could argue this year's demand environment is not as healthy." 

Kagermann said that he didn't believe the credit crunch would have a major impact on his industry:  

"I don't believe it will be tougher. My assumption is it will not recover shortly. I don't expect a much better market sooner, but I also don't expect a deeper recession. And, based on this assumption, we think we can make our targets this year." 

 

 

Deloitte and Cisco today announced a collaborative initiative that combines the intelligence in Cisco's network platform with Deloitte's broad array of business process and technology consulting capabilities. Deloitte and Cisco have entered into a go-to-market agreement focused on developing service offerings that take advantage of the intelligence of the network to enhance business processes. The Deloitte and Cisco collaboration will map business processes to network intelligent services, such as communication and collaboration, user identification, and wireless location detection, so businesses can achieve more visibility, control, and responsiveness across the enterprise while leveraging their existing business applications.

The go-to-market agreement between Cisco and Deloitte includes collaboration on service development, education, training, sales and delivery. Deloitte and Cisco will initially focus their efforts on the development and delivery of services aimed at risk, compliance and performance management challenges.

"Rapid response capability has increased dramatically with the heightened emphasis on risk management and the value of real-time information," said Lee Dittmar, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP. "The speed and consequence of adverse events require capabilities that can be delivered only when network services in the enterprise architecture are fully utilized. We agree with Cisco that the network can be the backbone for IT communications, and an important element in enabling better risk, compliance and performance management."

"The ubiquitous nature of the network offers our customers the opportunity to capture intelligence from every aspect of their organization and to take advantage of that intelligence in the continued innovation of the business. This go-to-market agreement with Deloitte will focus on practical solutions that help our customers respond faster to operational and market dynamics having an immediate impact on their business decisions," said Robert Lloyd, senior vice president of U.S., Canada, and Japan for Cisco.

Deloitte and Cisco will also work together with SAP AG to combine Deloitte's broad array of consulting, advisory and implementation related services with Cisco's Network and Advanced Services in support of SAP® enterprise business solutions to help joint customers in their efforts to address their needs for governance risk and performance management.

About Cisco

Cisco is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, visit http://newsroom.cisco.com.

SAP AG today announced multiple ground-breaking projects coming out of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, located at the SAP campus in Palo Alto, California. Among the projects that are being created and developed in the lab are a private online collaboration workspace, support for enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) management, a disaster recovery solution, a real-time reporting solution for manufacturers, and solutions that help companies improve business performance. Established in June 2007 with support from founding sponsors HP, Intel Corporation, NetApp and Cisco, the SAP Co-Innovation Lab is a hands-on working environment for SAP, its customers and partners to build and execute joint projects, enabling them to co-innovate new business applications and technology solutions to address specific customer needs.

SAP Fosters Co-Innovation Through Private Enterprise Collaboration

Today's social collaboration tools provide readily available and easily accessible platforms for shared communications, but do not provide the governance and layered access required for business communications. In an effort to address this need, one of the leading projects developed in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab is the collaboration workspace from SAP. The workspace provides Web 2.0 infrastructure -- such as blogs, wikis and online forums -- with built-in governance for all companies to participate and collaborate in real time within a secure business network community. The collaboration workspace from SAP provides customers, system integrators, technology partners and independent software partners within the SAP ecosystem a secure online environment to collaborate and foster virtual interaction, while protecting intellectual property assets and tightly managing access levels and authorized information sharing.

The collaboration workspace is enabling 13 different programs at SAP to be more effective and efficient, bringing together more than 3,700 expert users from more than 275 companies, participating in more than 200 unique workspaces. Users include partners and customers participating in SAP's communities of innovation, including the Enterprise Services Community, the Business Process Expert community and the SAP Co-Innovation Lab itself.

"The collaboration workspace from SAP is a powerful, new tool -- and has brought an important additional dimension to Procter & Gamble's engagement in SAP's ecosystem," said Dietmar Giljohann, initiative manager, Order Acquisition, Procter & Gamble. "We're happy to see SAP's leadership around projects like this in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, producing tangible results that benefit the whole ecosystem."

SAP Ecosystem Tackles Opportunities in Enterprise SOA Management

Enterprise service-oriented architecture provides opportunities for customers to better align IT and business to achieve higher levels of business agility. SAP customers benefit from the visibility and control they achieve by managing the runtime aspects of their composite SOA applications. With an effective management infrastructure, these customers can enforce policies, manage service-level agreements and secure loosely coupled systems that span departments and extend to partners. Members of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab are working together to optimize these SOA runtime management capabilities for SAP enterprise services. To achieve this goal, customers and partners are working with SAP to define key real-world scenarios that are tested and evaluated in the lab. The results will enable the publishing of best practices for customers and partners around SOA-based policy management and enforcement, including in high-volume scenarios. Among the first technology firms supporting SOA management projects in the lab are AmberPoint and Sonoa Systems, both backed by SAP Ventures, and SOA Software.

"The SAP ecosystem, and the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in particular, have been a great asset as we shape our SOA adoption strategy," said Barney Sene, CTO, Ingram Micro. "Since SAP works directly with other companies whose products we've invested in, like SOA Software, we can get clearer, more aligned direction from both parties on topics like SOA management and operational governance. We also have access to implementation insights that have been thought through for the long haul in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab."

SAP Teams With VMware and NetApp to Simplify Disaster Recovery

Since SAP solutions are considered mission-critical to the daily operation of many businesses, these companies are constantly on the lookout for disaster recovery plans to ensure that their SAP solutions are back online quickly and reliably in the event of a system failure. However, many companies find that the formalized disaster recovery plans available today are expensive, time-intensive and difficult to implement. With a goal of addressing this business need, SAP teamed with VMware and NetApp in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab to work together on an automated and cost-effective disaster recovery offering for SAP implementations.

The goal of this project was to help companies lower the cost of maintaining a disaster recovery program, and to simplify the disaster recovery process and increase its reliability. Using VMware Site Recovery Manager and NetApp storage solutions, this project explored solutions for simplifying the previously complex disaster recovery steps by providing automated disaster recovery testing procedures and offering the option of automated daily disaster recovery tests. The results demonstrated the ability to improve recovery time from days to hours or minutes, and improve recovery point objectives from 24 hours to one hour or less.

Cisco and SAP Collaborate to Address "Borderless Manufacturing"

Today's manufacturers frequently operate across several different geographies, often in far-flung locations, and require instant and accurate visibility across their supply chains. SAP has teamed with Cisco in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab to explore solutions that help enable manufacturers to share and deliver with industry-leading security key performance indicators (KPIs) and production data across plants. Taking advantage of the SAP(R) Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) application and the Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) from Cisco, the project simulated near-real-time reporting from a vendor or customer manufacturing facility.

The project included several different demonstration scenarios that support the vision of "borderless manufacturing" for inventory and KPI metric collaboration across a manufacturer's worldwide locations. The results of the project provided manufacturers with the ability to interact with vendors' inventory systems in a controlled environment, access to real-time messaging and collaboration with vendors -- all supported by Web-based entry that is accessible from anywhere within a manufacturer's network.

SAP, Business Objects and Deloitte Consulting LLP Help Businesses Improve Corporate Performance

Many companies today lack a comprehensive solution to manage corporate performance across the enterprise. They are often faced with information silos that prevent them from making informed business and execution decisions that can impact financial performance. To address this business need, SAP and Business Objects, an SAP company, are collaborating with Deloitte Consulting LLP (Deloitte Consulting) through the SAP Co-Innovation Lab to create industry and market-specific service offerings that help companies in their efforts to close the loop between strategy and execution. The collaboration will showcase service offerings that combine SAP solutions for governance, risk and compliance (GRC), enterprise performance management (EPM) and the Business Objects business intelligence (BI) platform with Deloitte Consulting's thought leadership in performance improvement applications and industry consulting experience, knowledge and skills. The companies are working together to demonstrate that customers can benefit from integrated GRC, EPM and BI solutions to enable more effective decision-making and to improve business performance across the enterprise.

The demonstrations hosted in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab will show how companies can adaptively change corporate strategy and launch campaigns dynamically in response to market and competitive risks. The advantage to customers is to be able to embed risk management into operational processes and to continually monitor and adjust a company's performance against strategy.

"Software vendors are relying more on their partner networks to expand into new markets and provide competitive advantage to their customers and partners," said Joshua Greenbaum, principal, Enterprise Applications Consulting. "SAP has clearly taken a leadership position in this regard by leveraging its ecosystem to collaborate and develop new solutions with its customers and partners. The interactions between customers and partners enabled by the SAP Co-Innovation Lab are proof that SAP understands the value of placing its customers at the center of innovation."

SAP Co-Innovation Lab Showcases the Power of the SAP Ecosystem

Along with the development of ground-breaking projects, the SAP Co-Innovation Lab also supports other collaboration-rich activities. The lab hosts a series of seminars and Webinars, thought leadership forums, and onsite and online collaborations with SAP and other industry leaders. The lab offers high-impact demonstrations and solution showcases with onsite and online access, providing a rich customer experience. The lab also helps to lower the cost of innovation by enabling close cooperation with partners and customers, and by providing a simulated heterogeneous and full-featured data center. (For comments from partners, see the addendum quote sheet.

"These examples show how the SAP Co-Innovation Lab is providing a completely new type of collaboration platform for the industry's top minds to work together on the most pressing business challenges our customers face today," said Zia Yusuf, executive vice president, Global Ecosystem and Partner Group, SAP. "Our mutual customers stand to gain substantial benefits, as the work done at the lab pulls together the SAP ecosystem to address the right problem at the right time with a real, tangible solution. The combined efforts of SAP and its customer-focused ecosystem are continuing to deliver on the promises of co-innovation, collaboration, and thought leadership."

About SAP

SAP is the world's leading provider of business software(*), offering applications and services that enable companies of all sizes and in more than 25 industries to become best-run businesses. With more than 47,800 customers (excludes customers from the acquisition of Business Objects) in over 120 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE, under the symbol "SAP."

 

Technology services leader EDS announced that it has appointed Randy J. Hendricks as senior vice president of Applications Services and Systems Integration, effective June 16. He will report directly to Charlie Feld, the organization's senior executive vice president.

Hendricks, 51, will lead all aspects of EDS' nearly $7 billion applications business. He will work closely with Feld to accelerate EDS' growth and investments in high-end, industry applications development and consulting.

Additionally, Hendricks will help expand EDS' current global applications practices - including SAP, Oracle and global testing. He will also drive delivery of end-to-end consulting and systems integration capabilities to clients worldwide.

"Randy brings nearly three decades of deep IT services and consulting experience in the financial services industry and government sector to EDS," said Feld.

"His broad industry expertise, combined with his in-depth systems integration knowledge, will be instrumental as we help our clients modernize their global business processes. I look forward to working with Randy as EDS aggressively competes in a global market estimated at $250 billion."

Hendricks joins EDS from Unisys Corporation. As corporate executive vice president and president of Global Industries, he was responsible for driving sales, business development and delivery for the company's worldwide financial services, commercial and public sector businesses.

Previously, Hendricks served as corporate senior vice president and president of Unisys Global Outsourcing and Infrastructure Services. Under his leadership, Unisys' outsourcing operations expanded to become the company's largest services division. Hendricks earlier led the Unisys Public Sector practice in 26 countries in which the company does business in the EMEA and Asia Pacific regions.

Before joining Unisys in 2002, Hendricks served as president and CEO of Digite, a Silicon Valley based technology firm that develops integrated applications for software lifecycle management.

Previously, Hendricks spent more than 10 years with Andersen Consulting, serving in senior partner positions in the firm's government and higher education consulting practices.

Hendricks earned a bachelor of science degree in industrial administration from Iowa State University.

Accenture has opened a new delivery centre in Monterrey, Mexico, with the goal to improve its systems integration and outsourcing business in North America and expand its Global Delivery Network.

This is Accenture's sixth delivery centre in Central and South America. It had previously opened two centres in Brazil, Argentina and another one in Mexico.

The company's Global Delivery Network now counts 51 centres employing 76,000 professionals.

The experts employed at the Accenture centre in Monterrey share knowledge, experience, practices and architectures with delivery centres across the globe in order to deliver technology consulting, application development and maintenance, systems integration and testing services to clients in various industry sectors.

The Monterrey centre supports a wide range of platforms and technologies: SAP, Oracle, JAVA/J2EE, Microsoft.Net and mainframe among others.

Keith Haviland, senior managing director at Accenture’s Delivery Centre Network for Technology, says:

“The ability to serve the needs of our clients using a global capability is a key feature of Accenture’s global sourcing approach. We bring together the right mix of people, skills and common standards to provide our clients with price-competitive and cost-effective solutions and services. Our global network offers the flexibility of multiple locations for the integrated delivery of services to clients.”

The management consulting careers site Top-Consultant.com has a number of career events scheduled for the coming months.

If you are interested in attending open evenings with IBM or the Place Group, please make sure you fill out the registration forms on the Events page by the end of the month.

Open evenings provide job seekers with an excellent opportunity to check out a company and its employees before applying for a job there and they often help consultants decide on the next step in their career.

IBM hosts a Recruitment Open Evening for SAP Professionals on June 12th. The company is eager to meet seasoned SAP professionals who are interested in joining their Global Business Services Team.

The Place Group Open Evenings will be hosted in Birmingham, Manchester and London in May and June. The consultancy is currently recruiting Consultants, Project Managers and Client Directors across England to join their team of professionals who aim to deliver 21st century education to British schools and pave the way in the transformation of Children's Services.

To find out about other career events and how they may benefit your career, please visit Top-Consultant.

The Aberdeen Group, the leading research and market intelligence company in the technology sector, has released its Annual State of the Market Report.

This year, the report includes the list of the top 100 organizations – hardware, software and service providers – whose contribution to the business community has excelled in recent years.

The report also pinpoints the top criteria businesses use when choosing technology solutions: total cost of ownership (43%), product functionality (42%), vendor stability (24%), market specific knowledge and experience (24%), domain or industry expertise (22%) and reputation (21%).

Microsoft, Oracle and SAP took the leading spots on the list of the top technology vendors. They were followed by other prominent global technology providers like IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco and others.

The IT services sector is well represented in the Top 100 with technology companies like Accenture (#25), EDS (#36), Tata Consulting (#43), Infosys (#56) and Capgemini (#79).

The report is based on five years of research and a survey of 4,645 respondents. In 2008 alone, the Aberdeen Group will conduct more than 240 benchmark studies. 90 percent of the Fortune 500 and 75 percent of the Global 500 companies rely on the Group's research.

 

Here are the top 25 technology vendors for 2008:

 

1. Microsoft

2. Oracle

3. SAP

4. IBM

5. Cisco

6. Hewlett Packard

7. Dell

8. Salesforce.com

9. EMC

10. Sun Microsystems

11. Google

12. RIM (Blackberry)

13. Siemens

14. Adobe

15. AT&T

16. Apple

17. Sage

18. Infor

19. Nortel

20. Avaya

21. Red Hat

22. Motorola

23. Verizon Wireless

24. Dassault

25. Accenture

 

For the full list, go here.  

Business software provider SAP AG has unveiled plans to build on the program for SAP® Business All-in-One solutions, which were announced recently, in ongoing partnership with tech giant IBM.

The solutions will be aimed at small to midsize enterprises (SMEs) with the goal to help the businesses achieve optimal implementation times and total cost of ownership.

SAP made the announcement at the company's international client conference, SAPPHIRE ® 2008 and America’s SAP Users’ Group Annual Conference, also held in Orlando, Florida, in early May.

IBM Power Systems, SAP Business All-in-One, an optimized database and operating system, System x and BladeCenter servers are some of the elements that will be included in the offer.

The new solutions make it possible for companies to deploy end-to-end business processes quickly and at low costs of ownership.

Ray Boggs, vice president of SMB research at IDC, says:

“The joint business relationship between SAP and IBM is in keeping with the interest of midsize businesses in preconfigured and pretested ERP software that runs on preferred hardware types. The flexibility in hardware platform choice combined with appropriate software will help encourage midsize firms to invest in ERP and related solutions that are becoming easier to implement.”

The new solutions for SAP Business All-in-One combine database, hardware and software into a single package, with every component optimized to allow mid-size businesses to reduce costs of their IT investments.

Rainer Zinn, general manager at the Global IBM SAP Alliance, says: “This agreement represents IBM’s continuing commitment to deliver targeted industry solutions for the mid-market. We look forward to working even closer with SAP to bring innovative business solutions to our joint SME clients.”

Hans-Peter Klaey, Global SME president and corporate officer at SAP AG, adds:

“IBM servers are an excellent platform for innovation and to address new market segments and channels based on open standards and leading edge technology. The intended offering will provide midsize companies with faster access to integrated business and IT solutions that are easy to implement, competitively priced and optimized for each other. I am confident that this package will simplify the deployment and use of on-premise solutions, drive adoption of integrated business solutions in the SME market and further deliver the best value to our customers.”