Friday, December 4, 2009

Deltek Remains the Master of Its Selected Few Domains Part Five: Deltek's Major Product Lines

Deltek Systems, Inc. (www.deltek.com ), the leading provider of enterprise software and solutions for project-based businesses and professional services firms, remains committed to a potentially unique, high level of investment in product development as compared to other software companies. According to Kenneth E. deLaski, Deltek President and CEO, the average public software company only invests approximately 14.5 percent of its revenue in product development and, at 24 percent, Deltek customers should take this as a strong sign that the vendor is deeply committed to continued investment and improvement of each of its product suites for project businesses and professional services firms. Deltek also announced that, once again, it achieved strong profitability and cash flow for fiscal 2002, which reportedly marked the 18th consecutive year of profitability for the company. In addition, the company added more than 300 new customers during the year in a variety of industries including aerospace, construction, engineering, IT services, consulting, architecture, and project-based manufacturing.
Within its marketing and proposal automation product, Deltek has an emerging CRM derivative known as client relationship management, which should help firms (such as accounting practices and law offices), other professional service companies; technical services; and, project-based organizations track client relationships in a more sophisticated manner than referrals or word-of-mouth, which were appropriate during the start-up phases of such companies. Subsequently accessing a client's record in Deltek Vision will also list the client's employees and former employers via hyperlink, enabling users to keep tabs on industry movement and turnover.

In a project-based business, there are no dedicated sales teams on the road chasing and securing new business since most senior partners and project managers bring in their own business and look after their own client portfolio. Consequently, traditional sales calls or consumer internet storefront ordering approaches become inappropriate in these situations. Therefore, the critical element of the client relationship process is to secure new business through proposal development. However, trying to recall the details of relevant past jobs and those who worked on them plus gathering the hard copies of such information from different people can be a nightmare. To that end, Deltek proposal management system allows a contractor to organize projects by various categories such as people, projects, designs, and expertise allowing appropriate information (e.g., resumes, document boilerplates, etc.) to become easily retrievable in the preparation of new proposals. Users can then track the progress of a proposal, share the information with other team members, review similar proposals, and analyze awarded jobs through a product that offers both government and customized commercial proposal generators.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

WT: I understand that your organization, BPT Partners, is creating its own social media space called myCRMcareer.com. Bruce, perhaps you could tell us

Bruce Culbert: Sure. myCRMcareer.com is the first Web 2.0-based, industry-specific social network. And it's being brought to market specifically to further the development of the practitioners who are involved in taking care of the customers and organizations. We've talked a little bit about how important the customer strategy is—the most important business strategy. And for those folks involved in sales and marketing, service, general management, and in the IT organization as well, who have customer responsibility, where do they get the training and education and the peer-to-peer networking to help them further their profession? It doesn't exist today. And you can go to some conferences, but they happen once a year. So if you aren't able to go to a conference, you may miss your yearly opportunity to get a refresher within your profession.

[The site] myCRMcareer.com is something that is being put into place so that there is peer-to-peer networking within the industry, so you can reach out to your peers [and] you can find mentors to help you grow in your career. There's expert content from people all around the world—training and education and guidance around methodologies, tools, and techniques so that you can grow in your career profession, [and] opportunities for user-generated content so the industry itself will be helping others in the industry grow by contributing. And then also as a component of myCRMcareer is a job board, addressing the needs of people in their careers at various stages, whether it's for internships, contract work, senior management, [or] entry level people. This becomes a forum or a social network where the CRM professional has the opportunity to grow in their career.

Wayne Thompson: Paul, perhaps you could kick things off by telling us what's happening in CRM.

Paul Greenberg: Actually, CRM is morphing from what it was when you were actually talking about managing customer relationships, and has changed entirely to a customer engagement model, or is beginning to make that change. And it's a model that is saying, “Not only do you have to get the attention of your customers and engage them, but you have to begin to share the results of those engagements,” meaning the experiences that customers have. What's going on is that you're seeing increasingly intelligent uses of the Web 2.0 technologies, which are these whole sets of communications media and social media that allow the customer to actually do that, and companies are trying to figure out how to provide it. The thing that's so funny is that when you look at social networks, and when you look at blogs and podcasts like this one, and wikis, a lot of them are being done by the so-called customers, but as just social and individual ways of doing it, and the businesses are on the outside looking in at them.

Applying the Power of Social Networks to Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) is rapidly morphing from a customer management model to one of customer engagement. Social networks, podcasts, blogs, and wikis are enabling customers to become advocates, and not simply the targets they were in the traditional CRM process. Find out what these sweeping changes mean to businesses and CRM professionals alike in this MP3 podcast.

MP3 Download - Applying the Power of Social Networks to Customer Relationship Management

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A Project Manager's Guide to Business Performance Management

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RETURN ON INVESTMENT

Ruckus Wireless has seen significant benefits from its investment in Arena, including:

Quicker ECO cycle times. With automated routings, electronic status notifications and the ability to update all relevant parts with a single change, Ruckus Wireless has been able to reduce ECO cycles by 70 percent or more.

Reduced cost of compliance. Arena compliance management features allow Ruckus Wireless to generate a compliance report with a single click, reducing compliance reporting time by more than 90 percentand eliminating the need to keep filing cabinets full of paper.

Fewer process-related errors and faster time to market. Reducing reliance upon manual processes virtually eliminates potentially costly human errors and helps Ruckus Wireless speed time to market by approximately 10 percent.

Affordable total cost of ownership (TCO). Because Arena is delivered on-demand, Ruckus Wireless did not need any additional IT infrastructure to support its deployment. Over a five-year period, the TCO of Arena is just 30 percent of the cost of traditional client/server software.

Support for company growth. Moving from being a start-up to being a successful, mid-size company required Ruckus to acquire an infrastructure that could effectively accommodate the crush of orders, requests and relationships that ensued as the company took off. Arena provided Ruckus with a low-cost, high-powered, scalable solution that meets its needs.

Greater security. As all of its data is hosted by Arena and protected by financial-grade security, Ruckus Wireless gains peace of mind knowing its data is safer than when it was stored internally and distributed through mail and email, which are neither controllable nor secure.

Case Study: Ruckus Wireless

It is no surprise that Wi-Fi is quickly becoming the de facto standard for connecting all types of computers and handheld devices. But, as use becomes more pervasive, so does concern with the reliability of Wi-Fi for supporting business-critical applications. At the same time, more sophisticated applications for Wi-Fi are being supported on new-generation handheld devices, such as iPhones, dual-mode handsets and personal digital assistants (PDAs).

Wi-Fi is now expected to do more than merely provide casual connectivity to the Internet. It is expected to reliably support voice, video and data over an extended range while delivering predictable performance.

Thus far, this has been impossible.

As a technology that operates in an unlicensed band, Wi-Fi suffers greatly from interference, erratic performance and poor range. In the wireless LAN marketplace, small and medium businesses and hot spot operators struggle with the problem of having no truly viable Wi-Fi choice. The only two choices they have are costly and cumbersome enterprise-class systems or cheap consumer-grade equipment that fails to address the issues of reliability, cost, extended signal range and security.

Wi-Fi technology innovator Ruckus Wireless (www.ruckuswireless.com) is the only Wi-Fi equipment supplier focused on addressing the issue of reliability and predictable Wi-Fi performance and bridging the gap between high-end and consumer-grade equipment. The company is working to make Wi-Fi reliable enough to be used as a utility in homes, offices and hot spots around the world.

Arena is a great application for managing our bill of materials and engineering changes. And were able to customize so many different departments can use the software to meet their needs. For example, we now put all of our industry and country certifications into Arena, so our salespeople have instant access to them. As we use the software, we continue to uncover more and more valuable functionality.
- David Hom
Document Control Manager
Ruckus Wireless
THE Challenge

Formed in 2004, Ruckus Wireless has become a competitor to watch in the explosive wireless LAN market.

In just under four years, the company, designated as a 2007 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum and named the 2007 Start-Up of the Year by EE Times, has shipped more than 150,000 Wi-Fi systems to customers around the world and raised approximately $32 million in financing from premier venture capital investors, consumer electronics companies and broadband operators. Its growth has been rapid and demand for its products strong.

Like all other successful, fast-growing companies, Ruckus Wireless needed to continue to innovate quickly, speed products to market, manage costs, maximize efficiency and meet quality and regulatory compliance requirements, while simultaneously ramping up its infrastructure to effectively accommodate the crush of orders, requests and relationships that ensued as the company took off.

This hyper-growth phase had Ruckus Wireless looking for an infrastructure that offered the company a high level of control and helped it avoid potentially costly errors related to manual processes. In addition, Ruckus needed this system to be able to scale as the company grew larger to support new product offerings, expansion into new markets and greater use by more employees and contractors around the world.

As a highly entrepreneurial organization, cross-company communication was a mustmarketing, operations, sales and engineering needed a strong platform on which to collaborate to bring products to market. In addition, because Ruckus outsources manufacturing, the platform had to be able to handle the added complexity of managing those relationships with timely and accurate communications, monitoring each partner and the information distributed to it. Ruckus Wireless realized that to maximize growth, it had to proactively take advantage of a collaborative tool to centralize and control its product information.

Last year, the company did a lot of hiring and decided to put together an infrastructure that could help us move our products from concept to manufacturing more efficiently. We transitioned from managing our processes with Excel spreadsheets, email and phone calls to having one central location for product information that is accessible to our employees and designated suppliers, said David Hom, document control manager of Ruckus Wireless. When Ruckus adopted Arena, it solidified its move from being a start-up to being an established company.

Case Study: Ruckus Wireless

It is no surprise that Wi-Fi is quickly becoming the de facto standard for connecting all types of computers and handheld devices. But, as use becomes more pervasive, so does concern with the reliability of Wi-Fi for supporting business-critical applications. At the same time, more sophisticated applications for Wi-Fi are being supported on new-generation handheld devices, such as iPhones, dual-mode handsets and personal digital assistants (PDAs).

Wi-Fi is now expected to do more than merely provide casual connectivity to the Internet. It is expected to reliably support voice, video and data over an extended range while delivering predictable performance.

Thus far, this has been impossible.

As a technology that operates in an unlicensed band, Wi-Fi suffers greatly from interference, erratic performance and poor range. In the wireless LAN marketplace, small and medium businesses and hot spot operators struggle with the problem of having no truly viable Wi-Fi choice. The only two choices they have are costly and cumbersome enterprise-class systems or cheap consumer-grade equipment that fails to address the issues of reliability, cost, extended signal range and security.

Wi-Fi technology innovator Ruckus Wireless (www.ruckuswireless.com) is the only Wi-Fi equipment supplier focused on addressing the issue of reliability and predictable Wi-Fi performance and bridging the gap between high-end and consumer-grade equipment. The company is working to make Wi-Fi reliable enough to be used as a utility in homes, offices and hot spots around the world.

Arena is a great application for managing our bill of materials and engineering changes. And were able to customize so many different departments can use the software to meet their needs. For example, we now put all of our industry and country certifications into Arena, so our salespeople have instant access to them. As we use the software, we continue to uncover more and more valuable functionality.
- David Hom
Document Control Manager
Ruckus Wireless
THE Challenge

Formed in 2004, Ruckus Wireless has become a competitor to watch in the explosive wireless LAN market.

In just under four years, the company, designated as a 2007 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum and named the 2007 Start-Up of the Year by EE Times, has shipped more than 150,000 Wi-Fi systems to customers around the world and raised approximately $32 million in financing from premier venture capital investors, consumer electronics companies and broadband operators. Its growth has been rapid and demand for its products strong.

Like all other successful, fast-growing companies, Ruckus Wireless needed to continue to innovate quickly, speed products to market, manage costs, maximize efficiency and meet quality and regulatory compliance requirements, while simultaneously ramping up its infrastructure to effectively accommodate the crush of orders, requests and relationships that ensued as the company took off.

This hyper-growth phase had Ruckus Wireless looking for an infrastructure that offered the company a high level of control and helped it avoid potentially costly errors related to manual processes. In addition, Ruckus needed this system to be able to scale as the company grew larger to support new product offerings, expansion into new markets and greater use by more employees and contractors around the world.

As a highly entrepreneurial organization, cross-company communication was a mustmarketing, operations, sales and engineering needed a strong platform on which to collaborate to bring products to market. In addition, because Ruckus outsources manufacturing, the platform had to be able to handle the added complexity of managing those relationships with timely and accurate communications, monitoring each partner and the information distributed to it. Ruckus Wireless realized that to maximize growth, it had to proactively take advantage of a collaborative tool to centralize and control its product information.

Last year, the company did a lot of hiring and decided to put together an infrastructure that could help us move our products from concept to manufacturing more efficiently. We transitioned from managing our processes with Excel spreadsheets, email and phone calls to having one central location for product information that is accessible to our employees and designated suppliers, said David Hom, document control manager of Ruckus Wireless. When Ruckus adopted Arena, it solidified its move from being a start-up to being an established company.