Posted by Romeo Elias on Tue, Mar 19, 2013 @ 04:23 PM
According to a recent Gartner report the SMB market keeps expanding resulting in new opportunities for innovative IT solutions. “SMB will spend approximately $920 billion worldwide on IT in 2013. Out of those 920 billion…The SMB market represents 44% of the total IT spend worldwide”, Gartner reports. This comes as no surprise since SMBs have become a big part of our worldwide market. According to statistics there are 6 Million SMBs in the U.S. and a total of 65-70 Million SMBs worldwide.
SMBs find themselves continuously competing against larger businesses and as a result they need to be innovative on how they handle their IT needs to keep up with larger competitors. As a result, popular IT solutions have emerged that have adapted their technology to develop comprehensive solutions for business analysts and SMB business owners, reducing the need for programming, years of experience, extensive training as well as long and costly implementations.
According to Gartner, IT solutions for SMBs should:
- Be affordable with outstanding support
- Be easy to install, configure and manage
- Demonstrate fast ROI (Return on Investment)
- Provide flexibility in deployment options
- Provide entry level functionality that can be easily scalable
- Not require too long to achieve benefits
- Be delivered by providers that are “easy to do business with”
Gartner predicts that by 2015, the SMB market is projected to cross the trillion dollar mark in IT spending. While this change takes place the flexibility of IT services on the cloud for SMBs will also become more popular.
“By 2015, 70% of midmarket businesses with 100-999 employees and 40% of small
businesses with 20-99 employees will acquire paid public cloud services.” This change has already begun. In fact, Gartner estimates that in 2013, the percentage of SMBs moving their system to the cloud will jump by 20% over 2012.
Additionally, a new need is emerging with the popularity of tablet computing among SMBs: mobile connectivity from any location. Mobile connectivity to business applications will keep growing among SMBs. In fact Gartner projects that by 2015 the growth of tablet computing among SMBs will outpace that of larger enterprises.
Posted by Romeo Elias on Tue, Oct 02, 2012 @ 03:29 PM
Interneer Development Presentation
David Mines, Chief Architect, and Selim Ozyel, Software Manager, provided an overview on the software architecture and the development process at Interneer. The topics covered included the architecture, technology, configuration challenges, common configuration mistakes, release cycles, and a preview of the new iPad App that is scheduled to be released in 2013.
David began his presentation by summarizing the high level requirements that the Interneer Intellect Platform strives to achieve. Among them are: Allow business analysts to create highly-customized apps without programming, work with completely different industries, handle large amounts of data, support large number of users and have a reliable robust performance.
He compared the development of business apps in Interneer Intellect vs. traditional software development. In the latter, the developer usually has to create database columns, indexes, stored procedures, views and controllers. However, Interneer Intellect creates these automatically in design/edit mode. As a result, the advantages of Interneer Intellect are many: It accesses data as fast as a custom app, runs in an optimized, native environment, takes up less disk space, design/development is much quicker, and good database practices are automatically enforced.
Selim’s presentation focused on the various technologies used by the platform, Interneer’s data center partner nGenx, the development release process, and a preview of the product road map for 2013. The platform enhancements expected include the release of an iPad Application, Web UI enhancements, architecture security enhancements, and support for Windows 2012 and SQL 2012.
Click here to download the PowerPoint presentation for this session.
Posted by Romeo Elias on Tue, Oct 02, 2012 @ 03:25 PM
How to best leverage support and minimize issues
Lenin Martinez, Customer Support Manager, discussed the best ways to minimize issues and leverage Interneer support. In his presentation, he reviewed the difference between an urgent versus non-urgent support ticket, the process of submitting support tickets, and the different platform troubleshooting tools Interneer provides to help clients with technical support problems in the platform.
During the presentation, Lenin also provided an extensive review of the various features in the Help Desk system, including how to setup customer sites, check the status of an issue and download the latest software release and platform documentation. The presentation concluded with tips on how to maximize Interneer Performance and maintain a stable production environment as partners maintain and upgrade their customers’ sites.
Click here to download the PowerPoint presentation for this session.
Posted by Romeo Elias on Tue, Oct 02, 2012 @ 03:11 PM
Positioning to Sell Intellect in Small and Medium-size Businesses (SMB) and Mid-market companies Presentation
Gary Spaid, Chairman of the Board, CEO and President of Alligār shared Alligār’s strategy for how to "sell" the Intellect platform to Mid-market and SMB companies and demonstrate the need for BPM.
Spaid compared how IT manages each problem they are presented with at any moment to the game of Tetris: They have to learn how to manage any type of issue that comes their way in a very limited amount of time, but a good strategy is the first step to a successful outcome. In this game, one randomly selected block after another falls down the screen and you must arrange these blocks to prevent them from stacking up to the top of the play field. Each block is followed by another, not leaving enough time to implement the best solution and leaving gaps that after a short time pile up and kill the player.
Spaid expands his comparison by asking: What if you could influence which blocks are selected? What if you could empower the requestor to build custom-configured blocks? For Spaid this is the strategy for selling Intellect. He presents Interneer Intellect for its value as a BPM platform with a goal of not to sell but to be asked to deliver.
Lastly, he shares the steps he takes for a successful sale: earning a customer’s trust, understanding the entire business, building an enterprise model of the “As-Is”, determining areas of opportunity, and to always do the right thing for the customer.
Click here to download the PowerPoint presentation for this session.
Posted by Romeo Elias on Tue, Oct 02, 2012 @ 03:07 PM
Northgate Case Study
Harrison Lewis, CIO of Northgate Markets, talked about his experiences implementing Interneer Intellect at his organization, the successes, lessons, best practices, and issues encountered.
Northgate Markets was founded in 1980 and is widely known for its 36 retail fresh Mexican grocery stores. Harrison joined the company in October 2011 as CIO where he faced an internal process problem that had been plaguing them for over six years and was not resolved after many prior attempts.
Northgate’s problem related to the tracking of credit shortages and product return requests to buyers. The manual process provided no visibility into a request’s status, no way to see if the request was approved or denied and they were not able to track whether the credit was issued when approved. The result was a great amount of time spent in trying to solve an internal conflict between the stores, buyers, merchandisers, and distribution centers.
In his presentation, Harrison explained how the problem could not wait another year. He began looking for a solution that would address all their internal conflicts. Working with Interneer’s professional services, the company deployed a Store Credit Workflow solution powered by the Interneer Intellect platform. The Intellect Platform allowed store personnel to create requests for damaged products, out of date products, over and under shipments and return requests.
During his presentation, Harrison shared how Interneer helped bring transparency into the entire process, launching the process in just a few weeks across 33 stores, enabling everyone to see status of the requests, and gaining business intelligence on various products.
Harrison closed his presentation by talking about future plans with the platform and shared his thoughts on why the project was successful. Interneer focused on delivering a solution that worked and helped his team through the entire process, from gathering the requirements to implementing and launching the process.
Click here to download the PowerPoint presentation for this session.
Posted by Romeo Elias on Mon, Aug 27, 2012 @ 05:51 PM
Just returned from the UBM Channel annual XChange 2012 conference. We had a chance to present, meet and speak with many solution providers across North America, who focus largely on SMB and Mid Market companies.
I was surprised to learn that the solution providers were not as aware and knowledgeable on Workflow and BPM as the customers they serve, especially the Mid Market focused companies. However, as they learned what the technology was capable of, it became obvious to them how BPM and workflow management could help their customers and that the need was there.
Being a cloud BPM solution was also a big hit among the solution providers. It turns out their SMB and Mid Market customers have been aggressively driving demand for cloud based solutions and it was good to receive that feedback and validation.
Overall a good event and we will be updating our partner program thanks to their feedback and adding many more new partners to our channel.
Posted by Romeo Elias on Fri, Jul 22, 2011 @ 12:39 PM
I'm often asked how is Sharepoint different than a BPM Platform? If a company already is invested in it, can they use it to automate business processes and workflows? Here's my view on Sharepoint:
Sharepoint is not a BPMS tool, it’s a content management tool. Fundamentally, it is a content management system (CMS) for organizing information and content in an intranet or extranet. For example, many companies use it for sharing information internally and or with the public. Essentially you can use it to create websites, portals, store and search documents.
After integrating Sharepoint with Visual Studio, Info Path, SQL Server, Workflow Foundation, BizTalk Server and Outlook you can then begin to have a BPMS tool that a developer can begin to work with. It's very complex, resource intensive, requiring high skill sets and is like a development environment as compared to a BPM Platform or Rapid Development environment.
As a result, companies that attempt to implement business process management in Sharepoint find themselves spending a lot of time, money and resources to customize it, dependent on expert developers and with a system that is costly to maintain and improve over time.
As a rule of thumb, you are asking for trouble anytime you try to use a system out of its intended purpose.
Posted by Janet Jin on Mon, Jun 06, 2011 @ 12:28 PM
Are you looking to learn about BPM or freshen up on how to use the platform? Or maybe you want to build your knowledge on macros or how to build more complex workflows?
Training is an important resource to have while using a business process management software platform. Interneer believes in providing the best quality training and support so you can gain hands on experience to start automating your business processes and workflows. Free training webinars covering introductory topics to advanced concepts are available every month in a series of instructor led classes. In each information packed webinar trainings you will learn how to create a new workflow application. Webinar classes can be taken as often as needed with prior registration and are open to all.
All webinar trainings are completely free! We highly encourage anyone interested in learning about BPM technologies and how it can apply to your organization to sign up risk free. Please register at http://training.interneer.com.
Posted by Janet Jin on Mon, Jun 06, 2011 @ 12:21 PM
Now that you have a Business Process Management software solution in your hands, some of you may be asking yourselves now what—where do I begin?
Maybe, it’s simply that you need assistance in documentation and or maybe you’re researching your options in BPM solutions and inquiring about what services are offered.
Professional Services provide customers and partners with the expertise and skills to assist in implementing your BPM solution. Professional Services are available to assist with implementation including requirements, design, configuration and testing. In addition, Professional Services can assist with installation, support, training and documentation.
Please visit http://www.interneer.com/products-services/professional-services/ for more information.
Posted by Romeo Elias on Wed, May 04, 2011 @ 05:42 PM
In the world of research, funding is primarily driven by research grants that are issued by various non-profits or federal agencies. Medical research, science laboratories, engineering and science institutes, and universities all receive funding similarly. The institution typically applies for a grant and is then awarded or denied the grant based on the merits of its proposal and their reputation.
The process of applying and tracking these grants, the many details, legal agreements, approvals and so on, requires heavy documentation and constant communication amongst colleagues, is very time consuming and manual. Workflow management is a perfect solution to streamline these processes.
It can start with automating the process of initiating the grant application, organizing the flow of information and documents between the various people involved and ensuring the deadlines are met through notifications and reminders. In addition, business process management can provide visibility into the status of every grant and its corresponding approvals, streamline the process of receiving legal sign offs and help finalize details of receiving the awards.
With business process management the process becomes clear, accountability increases through visibility of all steps in the process, award rates increase and funds are received much faster.
