Derek Singleton

Disclaimer: This article discusses evaluating the total cost of ownership (TCO) for on-premise and SaaS solutions. However, information in this article should not be construed as financial advice. Six months ago my boss sent me an interactive calculator that the New York Times created to help people decide whether it's a better financial decision to buy a home or simply rent one. He shared the calculator with me because, at the time, we were looking for interesting ways to visualize data and relate it back to our work at Software Advice where we review enterprise software systems and report on enterprise tech trends. More on that in a bit. Although I wasn't in the market to do either, I found myself adjusting values and playing around with the calculator just to see how long I'd have to rent at my current rate to make purchasing a home worthwhile. In case you haven't ... (more)

Here's Why We Need Cloud UI Standards

If you're like me, you rely on a host of cloud applications to get your job done each day. While the convenience and familiarity of apps built for the web is great, I can't help but notice the difference between each user interface (UI) I use. Currently, all cloud-based ERP software vendors are approaching the user interface with their own design style. For users that work with multiple cloud apps each day, this can be disorienting - not to mention bad for productivity and usability. As more products are built for the cloud, I believe that we ought to start thinking about creati... (more)

Can Open Source ERP Succeed?

Open source has been a great success for infrastructure software such as Linux, Apache and MySQL. Here at Software Advice, we've made use of all three. We've also made extensive use of open source development libraries like jQuery. For apps, however, we have either rolled our own or deployed commercial Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. We're not alone in that decision. Open-source applications have failed to gain mainstream acceptance. Despite passionate communities and a compelling value proposition, businesses just aren't buying open-source enterprise applications. The l... (more)

Cloud Computing: It’s Not About the Web Browser

The primary innovation behind software as a service (SaaS) is the web-based architecture - users accessing the system through a web browser rather than, say, a Windows application. Proponents of SaaS have trumpeted the benefits of this technological shift. Meanwhile, vendors with older client/server products have evolved their architectures to offer web-based deployment. Some systems are more elegant than others, but today just about every enterprise software vendor offers a web access option. Why then is the new class of SaaS (or cloud) application vendors racing ahead with gre... (more)

Why Activity Streams Matter for Manufacturing Software

These days, activity streams seem to be popping up everywhere in enterprise tech as vendors rush to add social features to their software. Twitter and Facebook-like streams are even starting to gain traction in manufacturing software. Two of the most prominent examples of vendors incorporating activity stream data into their manufacturing user interface (UI) are cloud enterprise resource planning vendors Kenandy and NetSuite. Incorporating activity stream data into manufacturing software UIs has important implications for collaboration manufacturing environments. For instance, i... (more)