9 Options in the New Era of Enterprise Software
In this article, we’ll be exploring some enterprise applications that give large-scale companies an edge over their competitors. Although not exclusively cloud-based, these solutions focus on enterprise-level decisions, such as moving ERP to the cloud, that may have been put on the back burner for several years, but are now being reconsidered by enterprise companies in the new era of digital transformation.
So for now, forget about Salesforce, SAP, Netsuite and other commonplace products and think about expanding your enterprise solutions in ways you may not have considered yet. While it’s true that these solutions cover a range of enterprise companies’ pain points, they also provide a glimpse into the bigger, faster, and more coherent world of commerce that enterprise SaaS is still in the early phases of bringing into existence.
Just as we saw the traditional distinction between “enterprise software” and “SaaS” start to blur—and in many instances disappear entirely—so too will we see the state of enterprise software continue to evolve. By the end of this article, you’ll not only have some new ideas for current solutions, but you’ll also start to get an idea of future enterprise software solutions as well.
Table of Contents
Data & Analytics Software
MRP Prelytix
Partner Relationship Management (PRM) Software
ZINFI
Cloud-Based Manufacturing ERP
IQMS
Professional Services Automation Software
Kimble
Privilege Access Management
BeyondTrust
Human Resources Software
Officevibe
Data & Analytics Software
MRP Prelytix
MRP Prelytix is Account-Based Marketing (ABM) software that, among other things, draws on big data to make appropriate real-time changes to your marketing campaigns. In the bigger picture, what Prelytix provides you with is a great deal of valuable information outside of your normal point-of-view, even with a CRM and associated solutions. Prelytix works well with the data sets and tech stacks of enterprise companies for a number of reasons. Due to the platform’s acknowledgment of information coming from you, the client, you’ll have a powerful edge over your competition in terms of specified marketing. This takes the time-consuming and conjecture-based elements out of ABM. MRP Prelytix also provides a means for enterprise companies to govern their brands and make sure ad content doesn’t appear on sites that don’t fit with your company’s message and brand.
With features like real-time changes to ABM content, MRP Prelytix is fundamentally a more reasonable way to conduct ABM, a famously taxing, annoying, and often fruitless process. It’s a way to visualize and reimagine an old process which, for the money and work hours involved, now seems shockingly abstract.
Treasury Software
Kyriba
For companies looking to optimize cash and liquidity, cloud-based solutions like the ones offered by Kyriba are a definite consideration, particularly for companies operating on a global scale. Kyriba’s transparency and security are its major features, which means less money lost and more monitoring for better large-scale strategic decisions. Kyriba is especially beneficial if your company has bank accounts in numerous countries with different regulatory requirements. Banks accessible to the system include:
- 300 banks in the Kyriba system
- an additional 1800 banks through their SWIFT connection
Transactions with which are processed using 400+ supported statement and payment formats. Done more manually (although obviously with some software assistance) this kind of global money management is a risk-filled nightmare, but the current era of treasury software makes it transparent and productive.
Banking on a global scale presents a series of complex problems, but with solutions like Kyriba, you can simplify that extremely complex knot and monitor your company’s global liquidity in a much simpler way.
Partner Relationship Management (PRM) Software
ZINFI
It’s a matter of perspective whether you consider ZINFI a “famous” solution or not, but it still lags behind options like the Salesforce and Netsuite PRMs despite its various accolades. ZINFI offers a range of channel management solutions for marketing companies, products that make customizing campaigns for a wide range of clients easier. ZINFI provides a number of outreach solutions, like email campaigns, and even an automated phone redialer, but ZINFI’s main feature from the enterprise side is most likely its PRM-focused components. Covering business plans, contracts, learning, and onboarding, it’s an all-around solution for making sure you're on the same page with your partners.
ZINFI’s total list of offerings, however, can get a little too complex for their own good and the platform strays away from the promise of completion by fracturing into so many different solutions, some of which seem a bit overly-focussed on trending industry terms to deliver the right thing (is their “Gamification” exactly that? The incentives, rebates, and referrals that make up that part of the module aren’t exactly the sort of “gamified” platform components usually referred to by that term). Overall, the core of this PRM does a pretty good job of covering the bases.
Cloud-Based Manufacturing ERP
IQMS
Historically (in the narrow timeline of the SaaS world), it’s been difficult for physical, manufacturing-based industries to see the value of the cloud. However, now that so much of the world’s commerce is cloud-based, the conversation is back in the boardroom. Solutions like IQMS (far from a “new” solution as such—they’ve been around for over 25 years) are appealing options for manufacturing-based companies interested in moving their resource management to the cloud. IQMS lets you choose between on-premise and cloud-based options, so it offers a valuable compromise to the classic problem of enterprise software—what to do with your existing hardware and IT employees. Generally speaking, the current incarnation of IQMS is emblematic of the way the entire manufacturing world has changed in recent years and will continue to change in years to come.
Of course, there are popular alternatives like the SAP and Netsuite ERPs, but IQMS is often favored as an all-in-one solution that remains customizable. That might already sound familiar to some readers, but more on that later.
Professional Services Automation (PSA) Software
Kimble
Kimble’s set of PSA solutions is geared towards optimizing team efficiency and collaboration and, overall, scaling your company and scoping your marketing projects. While Kimble provides a few other solutions as well, the PSA software boils down to four components:
- Foresight Analytics: real-time forecasting of resource demand, revenue, margin, and cash flow with an “Intelligent Insights” feature for decision making.
- Proposal Modeler: this scopes future projects by taking into account such factors as resources, margins, effort, and expenses. This is enhanced when integrated with a CRM.
- Resource Planning: this pairs required skills with available resources for optimal project execution.
- Delivery: supporting all delivery methods (Waterfall, Agile, and so on), this component of Kimble’s platform prioritizes actions and makes real-time delivery decisions easier to make.
This is followed up with a relatively streamlined Billing component as well as a Customer Community for support.
Kimble is definitely an option, but only in the PSA category as such. While Kimble is indeed an indication of the new service economy, it does leave something to be desired in the way of total end-to-end coherence. Nevertheless, Kimble has the capability to fulfill PSA (and all constituent projects) on the enterprise scale, so it definitely remains a contender in its field.
Development Software
GitLab
Hitting over $1B in valuation in 2019, this company is the first Ukraine-based “unicorn” in the SaaS world. Well-funded and used by some of the world’s most elite enterprise companies, this Slavic start-up is on course to make an even bigger impact in the world of code than it already has. The application covers the entire DevOps lifecycle, from planning to creation, testing and deployment, and everything in between. It’s an extremely helpful tool for the pace of the current SaaS world, in which companies often find themselves promising to develop partners’ solutions in advance.
As a freemium cloud-based solution with big benefits to upgrades and which operates remotely (with a central San Francisco HQ), GitLab is definitely an indication of things to come—with an IPO increasingly likely.
Privilege Access Management
BeyondTrust
Even though companies invest a great deal in security solutions, their employees’ passwords and access points can compromise their entire operation. This happens constantly to all sorts of companies, but it doesn’t have to. Password solutions for enterprise are practically a must-have in the contemporary world and a few options stand out from the pack. BeyondTrust, for one, offers a set of privilege solutions that are popular among some of the world’s biggest companies. While it’s useful to frame it in terms of password security, it’s a much bigger issue. The BeyondTrust platform integrates with endpoint and remote access security, so your company’s total attack surface is greatly reduced. To break it down more specifically, BeyondTrust offers products in three categories:
- Privileged Password Management: including Password Safe, Cloud Vault, and DevOps Secret Safe.
- Endpoint Privilege Management: available for Windows, Mac, Unix, and Linux.
- Secure Remote Access: including Remote Support and Privileged Remote Access
Much like IQMS, the current, cloud-based incarnation of BeyondTrust comes from long-term industry experience (originating from Symark, BeyondTrust was acquired by Bomgar and now operates under the BeyondTrust name). This pattern of moving solutions to the cloud is an increasingly common pattern in the industry and we’ll no doubt continue seeing its expansion, likely to the point of ubiquity.
Human Resources Software
Officevibe
A company’s internal culture is becoming more and more important in the contemporary business world as internal dynamics and company identity continue to be major factors in funding and partnership decisions. Particularly in the SaaS field, it’s valuable to keep a company’s initial energy and ambition alive and out in the open, but it’s not always easy to maintain the culture a successful start-up began with when the company is evolving so rapidly. That’s why something like Officevibe makes sense as an option for the cultural side of enterprise solutions for HR.
Officevibe is HR software that’s focused on maintaining healthy, positive attitudes across your workforce. More specifically, Officevibe is a relatively easy way to maintain the more intangible aspects of your company and brand’s appeal.
It’s important that your HR software backs up its quality from the UX side, as well, which is also one of Officevibe’s strong suits. In many ways, it offers the same receptive, caring aspect to HR software that you would expect from talented HR staff members. That is, Officevibe is an effective way to deal with difficult personal and professional issues. With features like anonymous feedback, your staff will feel more comfortable with pointing out important problems that they may have been hesitant to bring up otherwise.
Officevibe lets you keep your finger on the pulse of workplace satisfaction and determine which divisions could have more harmonious and productive cultures and atmospheres and in the contemporary context of SaaS and beyond, companies rise and fall based on exactly these satisfaction metrics—don’t let them slip by.
End-to-end Commerce Platform
Vendasta
Although the company had its start with early products like Reputation Management, Vendasta has grown into a fully end-to-end commerce Platform, Marketplace, and Marketing Services provider. Simply put, the Vendasta Platform strikes a great balance between ease of use and effectiveness: while great UX design makes the Platform stand out from the pack, Vendasta doesn’t sacrifice power for usability. Everything is white-labelled, so end users never interact with “Vendasta” even though the company's platform and fulfillment teams do the heavy lifting. With numerous partner support resources like the Conquer Local Academy, featuring a range of LMS courses, it’s easy to get started. Once the Platform’s automation kicks in, you’re off to the races and seeing new revenue with little work.
Vendasta is an excellent choice for enterprise-level businesses for a number of reasons. For one, the Platform is modular enough to accommodate an enterprise company's unique tech stack and just like other offerings, Vendasta’s Integrations team does the majority of the work to make the Platform right for your company. The white-labelling is the other major benefit to using Vendasta for enterprise: by letting you rebrand the Platform, Vendasta gets out of the way and lets your brand’s reputation have its full effect.
Conclusion
Right now, more and more enterprise companies are making the shift to cloud-based solutions, but it’s still just the beginning of a new way of operating on a large scale. As Vendasta takes a bigger place in the enterprise solutions market, we’ll be sharing more of the enterprise SaaS story and our role in it. Bringing enterprise business to the cloud is one of the biggest stories in the world of commerce, so make sure to subscribe to The Art of Enterprise to stay up-to-date on the world of enterprise SaaS (and more).