EAM versus CMMS: What's Right for Your Company? Part Four: IFS and Intentia Responses

Although both vendors, IFS AB (XSSE: IFS) and Intentia (XSSE: INT B) are showing surprising resiliency in a difficult market, they are often still regarded as just regional rather than uniformly global players. For example, still nearly two thirds of IFS' sales are in Europe, almost a third is in North America, and it has sporadic single digits percentages elsewhere in the world. Conversely, while Intentia might have better recognition in Australasia then IFS, but it is still a fledgling vendor in North America, while both vendors are stalwarts in Europe.

The reason why IFS has made many more inroads in North America (with a 300-strong customer base) than Intentia could in part lie in the fact that IFS has long established a local marketing center there and thus can deliver a better-attuned message. As previously mentioned, IFS is also more aggressively moving forward with a partnership strategy to further grow its business outside Europe. To date it has tackled vertical markets in various regions (and even countries like China through a joint venture with IFS UFSoft) where the barriers to entry are reasonably low.

However, if IFS truly wants to be a global player, it will have to bolster its image as a company with strength in the target verticals, regardless of its location. A possible remedy to IFS' global image predicament and the long run high cost of direct selling could be a greater shift of focus to its still relatively undeveloped indirect channel, which will be executed through a number of announced market and industry-based partnerships. This focus on the underdeveloped indirect channel has been a major success factor for many mid-market vendors.

Also, as the vendor becomes eligible for future larger deals, IFS is also likely to become more focused on strategic partnerships with some of the large system integrators and consultants (such as CAP Gemini Ernst & Young, IBM, Atos Origin, or NEC) in order to cover larger multinational customers. While IFS' opportunistic "can do" corporate culture and responsibility for most of its own implementations have served it well during the early years of its ascendance, the endorsement of the above-mentioned partners should help it establish credibility more quickly in IFS' given markets than it could ever do it on its own.

On the other hand, Intentia has been tardy to partner with any non-IBM technology provider, and its partnerships in the past have been rather reactive to a sporadic opportunity or customer request than really strategically proactive. While Intentia's direct model helps it with the customer intimacy in a way similar to IFS (except in Asia where Intentia utilizes channel partners), nevertheless, the direct model hampers Intentia's faster expansion through distribution channels, visibility, and noise created by system integrators (which, in fact, will likely have promoted the competitive products).

Last but not least, one common streak that is pertinent to this article is that both vendors' roots stem from the maintenance and asset management arenas of some twenty years ago. For Intentia, this area was in aerospace and defense (A&D) and for IFS, it was the utilities sector. Both vendors seem to be returning to their roots in their quests to return to prosperity. For example, during its early years, IFS had built up specific expertise in relational database technology, and linked this with the knowledge of preventive maintenance, which it had acquired in connection with assignments in the nuclear power industry. This resulted in the development of IFS Maintenance, the first software product of IFS, which was launched in 1986. However, only in 1990 did the vendor release the first version of its flagship product, IFS Applications.

Thus Intentia and IFS should have a significant head start compared to some ERP vendors that have belatedly chosen to support maintenance management by developing add-on plant maintenance or asset management modules to their existing product suites. Rather than developing scheduling, project management, inventory management, purchasing, quality management, and other core maintenance capabilities, Intentia and IFS will have adapted their existing work-order-centric manufacturing functionality to support these maintenance needs. Other enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors might have addressed these capabilities by acquiring a computerized maintenance management (CMMS) or an enterprise asset management (EAM) package and integrating it into their product suite. However, the downside here is that these solutions typically will not have the seamless look-and-feel nor the unified data and architecture of the internally developed ERP and EAM modules.

On the other hand, some best-of-breed CMMS/EAM vendors may provide applications program interfaces (API) between their products and selected, usual-suspect ERP suites. Nonetheless, these are subject to true strategic intentions and cooperation between these disparate ERP and CMMS/EAM solution providers.

This is Part Four of a four-part note.

Part One defined EAM and CMMS.

Part Two discussed integration concerns.

Part Three began the analysis of two major vendors.



source
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/eam-versus-cmms-what-s-right-for-your-company-part-four-ifs-and-intentia-responses-17214/