Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Peregrine Offers Cradle to Grave Procurement

Peregrine Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: PRGN) has been known for applications that automate the management of complex, enterprise-wide information and infrastructure assets. While staying in that general territory, it is building a new field with its "Get.It" application suite. The first team member is Get.Resources, an E-procurement application that is being pitched at companies that acquire capital assets. The company's existing products in this area, Asset Center and Service Center, are designed for professionals within the company.

Get.Resources is a self-service application that distributes capabilities and responsibilities to individual desktops. Functionally it rides on top of Asset Center and may optionally use capabilities of Service Center.

Capital assets, ranging from real estate to desktop computers, differ from such consumables in that their acquisition cost is typically only one-quarter to one-third of the total lifecycle cost. Additional expenses accrue from such lifecycle activities as configuration, installation, maintenance, monitoring, help desk support, redeployment and retirement. Peregrine's Get.Resources works with the company's existing Asset Center and Service Center products to manage assets through their entire lifecycle. It can also be used to purchase consumables.

Asset Center contains modules that, in totality, track the initial and ongoing costs, location, and status of assets ranging from industrial machinery to software licenses. Both purchased and leased assets can be accommodated, and cost tracking can include acquisition, repair, operations, related consumables, and disposal. Purchasers of Get.Resources need the core engine from Asset Center but do not need to purchase every one of the modules.

Service Center can add such capabilities as the automatic generation of work orders, tracking service levels provided by third-party service providers, and consolidated service desk management including trouble ticket and work order tracking.

Product availability was announced December 8, 1999. The product is currently in beta with two customers, although 1-3 more beta customers are expected. The formal launch of the beta program is planned for February 2000.

Besides the actual Get.Resources product, the initial launch is very likely an incremental step toward a new architecture. While the company is making no formal announcement of any architectural changes at this time, it is clear that its stated goal of providing an integrated suite of employee self-service applications requires such a move within the next year, because its current applications run on individual databases and servers. A truly integrated suite would have a single database for all products. This is clearly not a serious issue as far as Get.Resources alone is concerned .


SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/first-look-peregrine-offers-cradle-to-grave-procurement-15206/

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