e-DUG Events Calendar

You can now find interesting events on the shared e-DUG Google calendar!

Click the calendar icon in the sidebar to view the entire calendar.

Events coming up include user group meetings for the Columbia Maryland Deltek User Group, Cognos Planning DC Area User Group, Capitol Area Cognos Users Group, the Deltek Insight '08 user conference and the Cognos Forum user conference.

Technorati Tags: deltek,costpoint,cognos,google calendar,deltek insight,cognos forum

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Cognos Planning DC Area User Group Meeting

The Cognos Planning DC Area User Group will meet on Wed. April 2nd

from 9am-12 at the IMF in downtown DC. From the meeting announcement:

"The April meeting of the BI user group will include a presentation on the TM1 product that Cognos acquired last year. This may be a topic of interest to members of the Planning user group so please join us if you can."

To attend this meeting, sign up to join the group and RSVP at:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cognos_planning_dc/

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Cognos YouTube Channel

Cognos has a YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/cognosBI. It currently has three short videos describing new features in Cognos 8 BI v3. Here is the first one titled "Easier to Deploy and Manage".

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Lumigent and Deltek Sign Partnership Agreement

Lumigent will bring to market an automated auditing solution specifically designed for Deltek Costpoint customers. Called the Lumigent Advantage Pack for Costpoint, it brings a custom-designed version of the industry's most complete application data auditing solution to Deltek's Costpoint customers.

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The Lumigent Advantage Pack for Costpoint enhances database security and thereby strengthens SOX compliance and fraud prevention by providing continuous data-level auditing of relevant Costpoint tables and fields as well as the tracking of unique Costpoint users IDs to application data changes. Pre-configured rules, policies and reports specific to the Costpoint application provide users with the simplest and fastest way to implement and maintain continuous monitoring and auditing of the underlying Costpoint infrastructure. In addition, the solution provides comprehensive vulnerability scanning of the customer's implementation and immediately flags any changes to the system which would reduce security and introduce risk.

The Lumigent Advantage Pack for Costpoint is available in April 2008. For more information and a demonstration, please visit www.lumigent.com or call +1-866-586-4436.

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New Deltek partners

Deltek Expands Market Reach by Signing Bredet Services Inc. as a Deltek Software Partner

Deltek... has signed Oakville, Ontario based Bredet Services Inc. as a Deltek Software Partner further expanding the company’s growing partner network.

Bredet Services, established in 1983, has grown from a computerized accounting service to a firm specializing in business management software solutions involved with ERP implementations on a global scale.

Valiant Announces Workforce Management Solution with Deltek, Inc.

Valiant, a premier provider of comprehensive workforce management solutions delivered on a hosted SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, announced today that it has partnered with Deltek...Together the companies will deliver a complete software solution for contract security firms that combines the power of Deltek’s leading financial and project accounting system with Valiant’s single-database workforce scheduling, HR and payroll solution. Organizations that manage large, highly-regulated hourly remote workforces will see immediate sustainable benefits.

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Meetings In Profile: Attendee Feedback Spurs Tech Co. Meeting Changes

The Deltek annual user conference - Deltek Insight '08 is coming up May 19-22nd in Nashville. BTNonline has an article on how Deltek analyzed feedback from the conference last year and made changes for 2008 working with Maritz Travel (disclosure: I once worked for Maritz' local St. Louis smaller competitor Meridian)

Deltek late last year implemented a customer evaluation strategy to increase the return on investment of its annual user conference.

Deltek reassessed its annual Insight event for users of its enterprise management software after implementing third-party meetings management firm Maritz Travel's Meetings Effectiveness approach, which surveys meeting stakeholders and attendees to ascertain goals and determine the type of event that would provide the best return on investment (Meetings Today, Aug. 13, 2007).

"We were looking to figure out how we could continually make our events more effective and more appealing to our audience," said Deltek chief marketing officer Bill Clark.

Deltek started working with Maritz in August and within one month developed a 20-minute survey to send to its customers, "working very closely with the Maritz team to figure out the right questions to ask," said Caroline Proctor, vice president of corporate marketing. Survey questions covered customer preferences for the conference, including speakers, breakout session topics and time devoted to networking.

"It was very helpful to us to understand precisely what the customers like and what they don't," Clark said. "It's always helpful when you have real data as opposed to comments."

The survey results led to changes in this year's program, to be held in May, including more advanced topics for breakout sessions.

"We found out that those who tend to come to our conference have between three and 10 years of experience with our products, and tend to rate themselves as intermediate or advanced users," Proctor said. "We looked at that and said, 'We need to offer a lot more intermediate and advanced sessions versus entry-level.' "

She added that while many conference planners thought that attendees overwhelmingly would be new customers, "we find it's the customers who have been with us a few years who come in greater numbers, so we've changed the mix of sessions."
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Customers also indicated that they wanted to meet with Deltek product specialists at the conference, so Deltek invested in a "meet the experts" area where customers can do so.

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Q&A: Kevin Parker, CEO Deltek - Yahoo!7 News

Some interesting comments from the Q&A:

Before I started out at Deltek two-and-a-half years ago, I didn't know much about the company. Its one of the best-kept secrets in software, but its probably the worlds leading provider of software for projects. Other companies have specialized in ERP for manufacturing or other industries, but they operate in fundamentally different ways from us.

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We have 12,000 customers built up over a long period time, particularly in government and areas such as in architecture and engineering. It can also be used in places like consultancies and advertising agencies. Most ERP customers buy stuff and then spend lots of time customizing, but most of our software is deployed with no customization.

Its basically ERP for services companies or projects. We occasionally see SAP and Oracle for bids, but most we co-exist, as companies will use Oracle for rest of the business and our software for project work.

Our biggest footprint is in the mid-market; 98% of our customers have less than 1,000 employees.

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Deltek strengthens its position in the project software market...

Bloor research has a very upbeat analysis of Deltek post-IPO:

In November 2007, Deltek completed its Initial Public Offering (IPO), pricing its shares at $18. Deltek's shares are currently priced around $13 largely due to the global downturn in the financial markets. Not that this is bad—the share prices of SuccessFactors and NetSuite, who IPO'd at the same time, are down 35% and 45% respectively.

One key difference between Deltek and the SaaS vendors is that Deltek is profitable. Revenues for 2007 increased 22% to $278m and net income increased 47% to $22m. These are profit figures that SaaS vendors can only dream about. For example, Salesforce.com's 2007 revenues were $497m and net income was only $1/2m.

In addition, Deltek is investing back into its business. Around 15% of Deltek's sales revenues are ploughed into R&D, whereas Salesforce.com's R&D accounts for 1% of sales revenues. Deltek's more traditional business model therefore offers relatively more to its stakeholders in terms of product innovation, sustainability, and profits

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