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Month: June 2007

OpenCoffee London – Meeting the team behind Sun StartUp Essentials programme

I attended OpenCoffee London this past Thursday specially to meet the team from Sun Microsystems. Here is a snap shot of my interactivity: Sun Microsystems Discussed two aspects with Sun team which comprised of my friend, Stewart Townsend from Manchester, and Sanjay Sharma (Director – Startups and Emerging Markets Market Development) from the USA and Sharon Moore (Senior Director – Partner Marketing EMEA) from Paris: Sun and Causeway Technologies – the idea behind this discussion was to understand how Sun Microsystems could help Causeway Technologies (vice versa) drive its revenues and profits within the UK Construction market. Unfortunately, computer hardware…

EIPP Savvy North West Venture Capitalists

In my opinion, Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP) is not an easily understood subject by Venture Capitalists (VCs) even though Burns e-Commerce, OB10 and Accountis had significant funding from the VC community. In the case of OB10, this is believed to be in the range of US$30m. But according to Jamie Gunn, CEO of OB10 “we never had the level of investment widely reported”. May be this is due to not meeting the financial targets set by the investors. To my knowledge, OB10 is not yet profitable but has achieved significant year-on-year sales growth over the last 3 years.…

Mercator Advisory Group #1 – Latest report on Purchasing Cards, Integrated Procurement Solutions, and the Commercial Card Market

Mercator Advisory Group has released a 28 page report with a whopping price tag of $2,450 on purchasing cards, integrated procurement solutions, the commercial card market capturing supporting solutions such as Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP). According to the press release, the highlights of this report include: The field for purchasing card issuing has changed in the last decade to better accommodate end-user enterprises’ technological and operational needs. Recent acquisitions and investments by major issuers have brought enhanced solutions technology in-house as an added value to current and prospective customers. The impending launch of the federal General Services Administration’s SmartPay®2 charge card…

Causeway Technologies #4 – Tradex Product Roadmap

Today, we discussed the product road map for Causeway’s Tradex. I wish I can talk about it. The plans and the additional functionality that will be available within the next 6 to 12 months will change the Status Quo. In addition, we also had some great sales wins this month that is worth talking about. Well done Duncan! I am glad to be part of the team, even though my involvement will come to an end shortly. The learning has been immense. Thank you Phil for the opportunity! Technorati Tags: Causeway Technologies, Tradex, Duncan Speight, Tradex Product Road map

Forthcoming BASDA event – a must attend event for software vendors

BASDA is the Business Application Software Developers Association based in the UK, which represents almost 200 of the world’s leading business software vendors including Causeway Technologies. BASDA works with governments and policy-making groups in the UK, Europe and worldwide. In early 2000’s BASDA came up with ebis-XML standard for exchange of structured documents between organisations. ebdex standardised ebis-XML as its internal standard. These days, number of accounting software vendors has ability to exchange documents with other applications using ebis-XML, e.g. Sage Transaction E-mail. BASDA events are great opportunities to build relationships. Good example been meeting Phil Brown (CEO of Causeway Technologies) at my…

North West based e-invoicing players

It amazes me to know that there is real talent in the North West (NW) of England with respect to e-invoicing providers. These include: Burns e-Commerce – hub based EIPP player – targeting multinationals Version One – accounts payable automation combining scanning/OCR Digital Vision – accounts payable automation combining scanning/OCR from Kofax Kewill – EDI based solutions Freeway Commerce – EDI based solutions Technorati Tags: Burns e-Commerce, Version One, Digital Vision, Kewill, Freeway Commerce, e-invoicing, EIPP, EDI, accounts payable automation, accounts payable, A/P, NW e-invoicing vendors

OpenCoffee Manchester – 4th Event

  4th event of OpenCoffee Manchester was held today at the usual venue. Number of attendees were disappointing to say the least, a drop from 15 to 8, but we attracted two new comers Nick Burton and Siobhan Clarke, and had more time to network with smaller number of attendees. Many areas were flooded in surrounding areas such as Sheffield, which may have resulted in the absence of Dean Sadler (plus.net CTO) and Lee Strafford (plus.net ex-CEO). I hope everyone is OK. Here are the attendees and some of the discussions that took place: Ed French of Rising Stars– I…

Ditching Qumana and moving to Windows Live Writer

I recently installed Vision from Sun Systems to interrogate a database, which I believe resulted in corrupting Qumana database. All my attempts to speak to Qumana has resolved to nothing. After weeks of low blogging activity, I finally decided it is time to move on. I lost access to several half written stories, one particular long story about JP Morgan Chase’s acquisition of Xign. In a crisis like this (if you call this a crisis in the first place), wouldn’t it be nice to call a friend who has significant knowledge about blogging and associated tools than spend hours searching…

Google EIPP rankings

These days most of us use Google for search. These are the results one gets when entering “eipp” as search criteria (time sensitive results, as you very well know): ebilling.org– ah, the NACHA’s Council for Electronic Billing and Payment site. Good starting point for anyone interested in EIPP. Forrester – this is Penny Gillespie’s 14 page report published in 2004. Still relevant. Still selling at US$399.00. I call this daylight robbery. Forrester is a genius at making money. This comes down to brand. Would anyone be interested in purchasing similar quality reports for fraction of the money Forrester is charging? Forrester–…

Sun Microsystems #1 – StartUp Essentials

  The idea behind Sun Microsystems’ StartUp Essentials program is to help startups get companies off the ground without breaking the bank. The programme started on 2 Nov 06 on an exprimental basis, and currently limited to US companies only. According to Sanjay Sharma, Director of Sun Startup Essentials programme: “A lot of these companies have expertise in their specific area where they are building an application, but they may have all kinds of technical questions. They could be about specific products or technologies, something as simple as ‘Which server should I buy?’ or as complicated as ‘How do I…