The goal of this section is to highlight articles and other industry resources that may be of interest to you.

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Software Maintenance Trends

• Best of Breed — Coming Full Circle

  2007 PRISM User Group Meeting — keynote presentation by Craig Piekarz; Chief Product Strategist, Boston Logix

  Two distinct groups of software vendors developed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) products, the Platform Players, and the Best-Of-Breed Players. These groups had different go-to-market strategies. Platform Players targeted the executive levels of prospective clients selling global enterprise accounting systems. Best-Of-Breed Players targeted industry niche business requirements which were often at the operational level of the organization. Their philosophy was “go deep and specialized.”

• Evidence Grows That App Modernization Tops App Replacement

  SystemiNetwork— blog post by John Ghrist, November 27, 2007

  “The assertion that modernizing your applications is a better investment than replacing them outright recently gained a little more credibility… …A recent study by Forrester Consulting conducted for Software AG, maker of Adabas (a data-management solution) and Natural (an application and deployment environment), both mainframe tools, found that legacy modernization would produce a five-year return on investment (ROI) of 331 percent, with payback achieved in less than four months in a composite case study of several representative enterprises…”

• Is Your ERP System Safe from Industry Consolidation?

  WAM Systems Newsletter — article by Dave Kravitt

  As the enterprise business software industry continues to consolidate, many companies employing these applications are faced with a dilemma — continue to invest in their existing mission critical systems or migrate to newer, “state-of-the-art” systems. Often legacy applications are working well, addressing current business requirements and providing value, but have been orphaned by their vendor. Frequently the financial justification to replace is uncertain and the risk assessment immeasurable. This article explores the continuum of choices: keep, replace, or augment…

• Managing Business Intelligence Complexity

  Vanguard Business Analytics

  Overcoming the complexities assciated with traditional BI approaches