August 11th, 2008
An iGeneration view of TLAs
Over on Enterprise Alley, I’ve been joined by Zack Whittaker. Zack’s a computer science student so is ideal for providing a fresh pair of eyes on the world of enterprise application startups. I was interested to get his take on three letter acronyms - TLAs - something upon which the industry survives. With Zack’s permission, here’s his take as rendered to me in email:
SAP: a company which creates enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. ERP, which I’ve done in my studies, is essentially a business resource, allowing people to shift people, money, organisational structures, projects, customer relationship management etc. around. Even though I know this, I still don’t see the use for it, but ultimately businesses would be royally screwed without it.
CRM: got it; call management, customer management, keeping the customers sweet and happy through technology of some description. Yawn.
SCM: making sure the flow of raw materials or products get processed and shipped down a conveyor belt into something wondrous at the end, which eventually sells to make money.
GISMO: that New York geographic company which presumably provides Google and the big wigs with maps and data, and suchlike. (Google, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle = GISMO)
Gartner analysts must be rolling their eyes heavenwards but heck - it’s a new generation of potential buyers out there.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Irregular Enterprise via Email alerts or RSS.
