Over the last six months or so, Stewart Townsend has been working hard to bring Sun StartUp Essential programme to the UK. Whilst the details are yet to be finalised, a soft launched is planned for in December at Mashup* Events, with main launch taking place in early 2008. If you want to be part of this exciting launch, book a seat at:
References:
I do not normally cover technology news unless it is related to EIPP or ERP. But this is quite a big story – Dell selling Solaris operating system software. Sun declares the reasons for this partnership as market momentum and customer demand. Solaris will be shipped on selected Dell PowerEdge Servers. Dell is believed to be the third major vendor to endorse Solaris OS this year. Further information can be access through here
This is also great news for Sun ISV partners, who can now sell into Dell customer base. ebdex used to be an ISV partner of Sun Microsystems, and perhaps still is. But these days we are concentrating on providing advisory services and not involved with any product offerings. Yes, I still got couple of Sun boxes in my office – impressive designs.
This Guest Post is from Will Donovan of Paystream Advisors of USA
I spent a little while today discussing web-based auto-enrollment payments in the credit and collections industry, as well as what we call the “Payment Tsar” and the “Payment Quotient.” While I was doing so, it occured to me the extent to which electronic financial tools for the individual consumer are changing the nature of expectations and deliverables in corporate financial process optimization.
For example, EIPP has been around, but hasn’t entirely taken off. The technology has obvious advantages, but even major players like Ariba and OB10 don’t exactly have the market penetration that would reflect the service they offer.
But what I’ve noticed is that as customer banking tools are becomming more sophisticated, the expectations for what is possible in the corporate world are driving the discussion in a new and exciting way.
For example, it was the innovators who drove the EIPP technology into the forefront, because they saw the savings and process advantages. However, as more and more people saw they could achieve an enormous amount of visibility into their own finances with on-line banking and auto-bill-pay, now C-Level types are scratching their heads wondering why they can’t get the same Spend Analysis across their entire company.
This issue of innovation-drive is really a key when it comes to solutions available for corporate financial automation. The market, by and large, has not yet demanded the sort of solutions that “put it all together” until fairly recently, which is why Manoj continues to be an EIPP Evangelizer and not yet an EIPP I-Told-You-So-er.
At the same time, I don’t think that day is too far off now. With the acquisitions of Xign and Harbor, and as well the startling growth of OB10, Transcepta and Ariba, it is clear that many in the industry are beginning to believe EIPP and other next-generation tools are the next big step in business process improvement. It is quite possible we’re seeing a serious movement of next-generation automation technologies migrating from “early adopter” status to wide-spread implementation.
Are you a startup or early stage digital technology company? Or have you got a killer idea with some early code you want to tell others about? Are you looking for seedcorn or second round of funding, team members, mentors, partners, and/or ideas to commercialise your product? Do you need help writing the business plan? Or do you just like to hang out with startups? Have you got loads of money and love to invest in startups? Do you provide support services (e.g. PR)? Are you a blogger or journalist looking for breaking news? If so, register now to secure a place at NW StartUp 2.0 DEMO.
It’s a free event run back-to-back with Mashup Manchester, giving opportunity for Northern startup and early stage software companies as well as those individuals who might have early stage prototype or an idea they want to demonstrate and/or share with other attendees.
Programme: 5pm to 6:15pm on 6th December 2007
Venue: Sun Microsystems, City Gate, Cross Street, Sale, M33 7JF (click here for map)
Condition: Must vacate premises by 6:30pm unless you have registered for catered Mashup Manchester event on Content 2.0. Failure to honour this condition will result in requesting immediate payment. A White Knight has stepped in to sponsor few individuals. If interested e-mail manoj@ranaweera.name.
Companies accepted so far for DEMO:
Programme for Mashup Manchester – Content 2.0 from 6:30pm onwards:
You must register for Mashup Manchester on Mashup Site if you intent to attend the evening event.
Here is a collection of two recent documents published on to edocr on EIPP and related subjects:
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Causeway Technologies:A Case Study describing how a plant hire business, GAP, successfully adopted electronic invoicing solution from Causeway Technologies, and achieved both a reduction in operating costs and an increase in sales. |
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Paystream AdvisorsA webinar from Paystream Advisors on reasons why automation pays off, where does Imaging and workflow fit, hot trends in Procure-to-Pay(P2P) automation, learn from the innovators, and getting results. |
edocr also hosts a full collection of public-facing documents from Accountis, in addition to covering Nacha, DDC HRO, Ariba, United Data to name a few.
As you can imagine, I get to know quite a number of start up and early stage EIPP (and related) vendors, both here and across the pond. At the same time, I have also attracted a number of potential investors and acquirers seeking startup and early stage EIPP vendors. In these cases, with permission from both parties, I am able to make the necessary introductions.
More recently, due to my involvement in the technology startups through OpenCoffee, NW StartUp 2.0 and Mashup Manchester, the requests from investor community have broaden to include telecom companies.
Are you a startup or early stage company looking for seed corn, second or third round of funding? If so, it makes sense to get in touch privately so that I have a better understanding of your funding needs. As always, the information will remain confidential.
Whilst you may think that only start up and early stage companies require funding, I am aware of mature companies who have been in discussions with investment community in order to seek funding for growth. In these cases, funding is generally needed for geographical expansion. It is much easier for mature companies to raise funding than startups or early stage companies. While this is the general acceptance, courting potential investors for 8 to 12 months without closing the deal quickly, do put a significant strain on the business.
Given that EIPP is a growth market, almost every company continue to make losses year after year. Yes, I accept the cash flows are beginning to improve for companies such as OB10. Except those acquired by the banking and card sector, without further funding, their aggressive growth cannot be sustainable simply through cash flow generated. So how do they satisfy their funding needs? It then becomes a question of debt to equity ratio. Bank debt usually supports for short term working capital needs and not geared for high growth requirements. As one expect, these companies are significantly shy to mention their funding needs, as they believe that the need for additional capital will be badly reflected in the market place.
At the same time, the world continue to become a smaller place due to daily improving communications, both in terms of speed of communications and level of collaborative tools being launched. This environment makes competitors to meet each other and collaborate easily than ever before. Good examples are Facebook and LinkedIn. Whilst the LinkedIn functionality is somewhat limited and their Groups do not offer any functional support, most companies are using these on-line environments to seek potential partners and investors in addition to new customers.
In one occasion, whilst I was safeguarding a confidential discussion I had with one of the mature (simple rule of thumb: been around for more than 5 yrs) vendors, the market knew more or less of their funding needs. How is this possible? Do companies or advisers working on behalf of these companies leak limited information intentionally to test the market reaction? Surely, an advisor will not leak such information without the consent of their client, if they are to do breach confidentiality, they would not have clients for long. Damaged credibility is very hard to repair.
If you are a startup, early stage business or mature company, you might be interested in having a confidential discussion so that I might be able to introduce you to potential investors. At the same time, if you are a potential investor and seek investment opportunity into this segment including telecom, please get in touch. I love to see EIPP market segment flourish with more vendors in the market place.
Disclaimer: Whilst I used the name of OB10, none of the content is written with OB10 in mind, except the sentence in which OB10 was mentioned.
Here is a quick comparison of Google Rankings for some of the vendors already leveraging edocr:
| VENDOR | THIS BLOG | edocr |
| Accountis | 3 (Dec 06 post) | 7 |
| DDC HRO | 19 (Jan 07 post) | 8 |
| Paystream Advisors | 4 & 5 | 14 |
It will not take long for edocr to appear on Google first page for almost all companies that use edocr regularly to publish their product literature, product updates, press releases, white papers, case studies, news letters, event releases, etc. If you have not already started leveraging edocr for increasing market awareness for your products and services locally and globally, what are you waiting for? Having opened public registrations on 27 September 07 (still in Alpha), edocr achieved over 3500 visits yesterday. Based on early analysis of today’s traffic, number of hits is expected to be higher than yesterday’s. Join our journey.
As expected, we almost double the hits to over 6,000 the day after. The challenge now is growth, sustainability and conversion.
Technorati Tags: edocr, paystream Advisors, accountis, DDC HRO, e-invoicing, eipp, googl rankings
This Guest Post is from Will Donovan of Paystream Advisors of USA
So! First post on Manoj’s blog and I have to be honest with you, it will have little to do with EIPP, except a little tangentially. I’ll leave the expertise to the expert himself, and spend my time here at manojwaneera.com waxing about ePayables and on-line proliferation of solid knowledge on financial automation.
Manoj’s most recent project, “edocr” is like a dream come true for those of us who publish content both casually and professionally (and in between). Likewise, the blogging platform itself, whether via a hosted solution like Blogger or a personal solution like WordPress or Drupal, provides a similar conduit for personal expression that many of us would have never dreamed of even five years ago.
But the struggle to be heard continues unabated. And that struggle ultimately lies in the hands of that insurmountable mountain we all know as Google.
I have met this struggle head on since taking on PayStream Advisors’ web activities, most specifically in our ePayables analyst blog, PayStream Voices. And I’ve had some (limited) success. However, I don’t mean to sound my own horn here, but I am under the impression that those of you who read Manoj’s blog, those of you who work in the ePayables/Financial Automation industry, those of you who have something to say based upon your expertise, quietly (or loudly) dream of the day when yours and my posts are heavily digged, heavily disseminated to hundreds of RSS subscribers, and regularly return high PageRank scores.
Such as it is, try as we might, even operating on such streamlined interfaces as WordPress against content competitors using legacy systems, we often find only small victories.
We at PayStream have been working with a great guy, Ryan Pederson, who’s IT integration expert at Coke, Inc., and is also building an SEO tool called e3SEO. We’ve met with him repeatedly and our most primary concern is to have more analytic processing on keyword score and PageRank visibility than the puny and mostly useless data we get aggregated to us via Google Analytics and its lesser though often marginally more useful cousin, Google Webmaster Tools. We are sorely aware that backlinking is the greatest obstacle we face, even more than legacy code and CMS’s, when we are trying to increase the awareness of our content, due to a lack of synergy between industry bloggers. Ryan describes most corporate-expertise websites as “7/11s open for business 24/7 in the middle of the Sahara,” that is, we have what seekers want, but we are a tiny blip on their radar, if we’re on their radar at all. Ryan thinks that the tools he’s planning to provide (currently in beta) will help us with that.
So – My jist here is, if you’re interested (Manoj I’m sure is interested as I know he’s working on this in a variety of ways), I advocate for a new platform for those of us blogging in the finance industry that specifically is designed to both share content, share expertise, and almost as important, share backlinks.
If you’re interested in sharing thoughts, either post them here as a comment, or e-mail Manoj or I. We’re really open to hearing your struggles, and your successes, and in sharing them with those like us in our industry.
Thanks for the great introduction Manoj, and in the interest of repping edocr (and PayStream), I invite you to use Manoj’s excellent tool to view a recent PayStream whitepaper on Healthcare Document Imaging. The full report was published this week – If you’re interested, you can purchase it here.
Folks, let me introduce my friend, Will Donovan, Communications and Marketing Director of Paystream Advisors, who has accepted my request of becoming a guest blogger. Will and I continue to have extensive discussions on many subjects from Middle East to Mobile EIPP since we came to know each other in July 07. Will has driven Paystream Advisors’ On-line Communications and Marketing Strategy through PaystreamVoices, which has now become an integral part of their corporate web site. Will has achieved remarkable success bringing not only me to blog on PaystreamVoices as a guest blogger, but also Shan Haq and Mitch Baxter from Transcepta. Will can be reached through here.
A graduate of the George Washington University, Will has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and constantly looks to expand his skills in language and networking. He is also a poet and here is the proof:
Overtime, I expect the URL of this blog to change to www.eippworld.com, as the current URL has served its purpose. The design and layouts also require further improvements. I am also looking for other guest bloggers to join us, extending the conversation on e-procurement, sourcing and e-payments, in addition to EIPP.