The two popular processes – centralized and decentralized – have both benefits and disadvantages. Centralized operations simplify ordering. One office or official is designated as the person who does all the purchasing. However, this can leave the individual departments without the supplies they need, ChainLink Research claimed. The focus remains on the school as a whole. Decentralized procurement has the opposite effect. The buying power is in the hands of the departments. They have the freedom to purchase what they need. Unfortunately, schools may go over budget with so many people having free reign of the finances.
LinkedIn’s making it harder to download your account data
LinkedIn has removed the tool that allowed users to easily export contacts. Now, users who wish to download their first degree connections will need to go through a process that can take up to 72 hours to complete. The change was first spotted by a Twitter user and confirmed by VentureBeat.
One key issue, the report finds, is that there is hardly a widely accepted definition of what Supplier-Enabled Innovation really means. That said, about two-thirds of respondents said that SEI should not be viewed as something special, but rather it should be intertwined with all the other tasks that procurement managers perform as a matter of course. However, an important block instead sees SEI as a “specific program, a set of dedicated workstreams, where the business invests resources, monitors progress, and builds the innovation output into organizational priorities.”
Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? Because We Shouldn’t.
Stick to the issue and don’t let things get out of hand or go out of bounds. Heated arguments are typical but the way to keep them productive is to coach people to attack the problem, not the person. It’s OK to say, “I think your idea is doomed and here’s why,” but not “I think you’re a clueless idiot.” It should never get personal. Also banish any extraneous topics to the parking lot and keep things moving along.
Medvec is a proponent of a negotiation technique called MESOs, orMultiple Equivalent Simultaneous Offers. The idea behind MESOs is to give the other party multiple options to choose from that are equivalent from your standpoint.
Mergers and acquisitions was a major news theme (again) this week. IBM announced they were acquiring DB startup company Compose. The HP/EMC rumors started up again, while Mr. Tucci expressed his desire to keep his company whole (not splitting off VMWare). Speaking of HP – they sold off a part of their troubled Autonomy business.
IBM
IBM Acquires Database-As-A-Service Startup Compose
While Compose started out as a MongoDB database specialist, the company now offers services around MongoDB, Elasticsearch, RethinkDB, Redis and PostgreSQL. The overall idea behind Compose is to allow mobile and web developers to create their apps without having to worry about their database backends.
This comes after a months long investigation into the job numbers at the Columbia facility and where the jobs are going. The company already lost some tax incentives from the state of Missouri back in May for not meeting the 800 jobs promised to the state.
As IBM has continually been focusing on bulking up its product offerings (combining “add-on” solutions stemming from investments in “strategic imperatives” with its “older” offerings), customer stickiness is likely to continue increasing. This is due to the fact that when a company utilizes IBM’s solutions for a larger proportion of its IT needs, switching to a competitor’s solution would not only be an increasing inconvenience, but the level of operational disruption is likely to be greater as well. As a result, IBM should be able to continue to increase prices while still retaining its clientele. Ergo, overall profit margins are likely to continue expanding in the future.
“Long term, the company (IBM) is putting itself in a position to grow again,” Kreher told InformationWeek. “Near term, they are expanding profit margins as they shed lower-margin businesses … They are going to have lumpy results for the next few quarters.”
“Splitting this federation or spinning off VMware is not a good idea,” said EMC Joe Tucci during an earnings call with analysts Wednesday. “I firmly believe that we are better together. A lot better together.”
EMC’s turbulent trifecta temporarily ties Tucci to top table The person who wrote this headline must be so proud of themselves (oh… British publication, of course)
“The companies that will be successful are the ones that are able to truly transform themselves. The board and management, we’re focussed on assuring and we are deeply engaged in making sure we have a very successful transformation. We have a number of options, really good options, and we have important next-generation winning technologies, great assets, and we have great people,” he continued. [The post also mentions the fabled HP/EMC merger]
EMC to cut jobs in Q4 2015 to reduce costs by $850M
EMC will cut $50 million through tighter spending and job cuts in the fourth quarter of this year. The company will increase the size of cost savings in each quarter until it reaches an annual rate of $850 million starting in 2017 by reducing other expenses, as well, in part by canceling underperforming products and closing facilities.
According to a recent outlook from Wikibon, we are on the cusp of a digital extinction event as today’s complex network storage architectures give way to more nimble server-side solutions. The firm predicts that within 10 years, 90 percent of storage revenues will flow toward server SAN or hyperscale server SAN solutions, marking a 150 percent annual growth rate from today’s current market estimate of about $1 billion. At best, traditional SAN and NAS may eke out meager existences within long-term data retention infrastructure in which the frequency of data access is low but metadata retrieval is fairly steady.
Right or wrong, EMC is committed to its path of evolving into a leading provider of “IT-as-a-service”. Likewise, the company remains committed to an operating structure that is going to continue to frustrate some investors, as it believes (correctly, in my view) that VMware (NYSE:VMW), Pivotal, and other components are vital to its future strategy.
HP study finds smartwatches could do more to keep user data safe
The smartwatches fell short when it came to encrypting data that’s sent to the cloud. While the wearables used SSL and TLS security protocols to encrypt information, some relied on SSL 2.0, an older version of the protocol that’s known to have security flaws. Additionally, 40 percent of the watches were vulnerable to POODLE attacks.
The iManage business that has now fully exited HP provides a work management solution that targets legal, accounting, and financial services firms around the world. It claims to have 3,000 customers and says that it continued to grow in its last full fiscal year under HP ownership.
“I think what [EMC CEO Joe] Tucci has done with VMWare is a good example of that, where you can take something that people don’t fully understand, buried in the portfolio, and unlock it while still having a partnership with the mothership,” said Durban, who sits on the Dell board of directors.
Salesforce Positioned as a Leader in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation
Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the Customer Success Platform and world’s #1 CRM company, today announced that Gartner, Inc. has positioned Salesforce as a Leader in its July 2015 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation (SFA). This is the ninth consecutive year that Salesforce has appeared in the Leaders quadrant.
Splunk Named a Leader in 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM
“Splunk is the only security provider to improve on completeness of vision in the Gartner 2015 SIEM Magic Quadrant which we believe serves as the latest evidence that Splunk remains at the forefront of solving advanced and emerging SIEM use cases,” said Haiyan Song, senior vice president of security markets, Splunk. “Splunk is growing well beyond the SIEM market rate, as an increasing number of companies recognize the value of taking an analytics-driven approach to security with Splunk as the nerve center. And with our recent acquisition of Caspida, Splunk is adding machine learning-based user behavioral analytics and extending our analytics-enabled SIEM to better detect advanced and insider threats.”
Yet buying and selling became central enterprises of business over the course of the last century. Corporations focused on standardization—the Deming ideal—so needs became predictable enough to compare vendors directly, find the greatest price value through the routinized process of request for proposal (RFP), and thereby provide what everyone needed. Buying became the science of squeezing price, sales the art of justifying price, and both functions grew into large organizations. Business is getting too complex and dynamic for centralized buying and selling machines. What’s more, the strategic sourcing initiatives of the past two decades all but erased margins for high-volume suppliers. When the absolute floor is the baseline, there is no need to sell, per se. There is only a need to serve. In fact, there is a heightened need to serve. The only way to differentiate a company is in helping customers profit through the use of products.
You want to build an awesome business right? Then you need to understand how to create an awesome customer experience. Well, you’re a customer too right? Most of what I’ve learned about customer service has been from being a customer. I look at each person or company I buy from as a mentor because they help me create better experiences for my customers by creating a good or bad buying experience for me.
McDonalds vow to end deforestation in its global supply chain
Applying throughout the entire supply chain, the core principles and practices of McDonald’s commitment on deforestation include: No deforestation of primary forests or areas of high conservation value; No development of high carbon stock forest areas and no development on peatlands regardless of depth, and the utilization of best management practices for existing commodity production on peatlands.
83% of supply chain executives report lackluster performance as they struggle to get to grips with effects of globalization
Supply chains are being held back by the effects of globalization, according to a new survey, with 83% of executives from leading enterprises claiming to see only average or poor performance. Over 60% said this is primarily due to the number of partners involved and the risks this creates, which is in turn limiting their flexibility.
The two new services include the Order Management Cloud and the Global Order Promising Cloud. Together, they offer order management, visibility and order fulfillment capabilities, the company said. But to go a step further, Oracle’s new services connect businesses’ current sales and order processes in its Configure, Price and Quote Cloud product and their current packing and shipping services in the Inventory Cloud product, all to Oracle’s billing in the Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud.
