Unit4 rebrands and re-platforms for people centric businesses

1. VENDOR NOTE
.Unit4 Rebrands and Re-platforms
for People-centric Businesses
By P.J. Jakovljevic, TEC Principal Analyst
www.technologyevaluation.com
Technology
Evaluation Centers
APRIL 2015

2. Unit4 Rebrands and Re-platforms for People-centric Businesses
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Unit4 Rebrands and Re-platforms for People-centric Businesses
Over a year after appointing new CEO Jose Duarte (formerly a top SAP executive
in Europe) and getting new private equity owners Advent International, it was
expected the Unit4 group would change its direction somewhat and espouse
some new strategy. That indeed took place in late March 2015, when Duarte
outlined the project- and people-based enterprise resource planning (ERP)
software company’s latest value prop and strategy to industry analysts via an
international webcast.
In a nutshell, what has worked for the company for decades will still remain in
place—the focus on a handful of people-intensive industries and an agile
architecture that accommodates constant business change. Its solutions can still
be flexibly deployed in the public cloud, private cloud, or on premise, with
flexibility for specific requirements around data residency and security. But,
contrary to the past practice of featuring multiple diverse local brands with
different messages, no synergies, and no global visibility, Unit4 will now have one
master brand with a clearer positioning and higher visibility. There is even a new
corporate logo with different colors and font to hint at a new cool company.
Rounding out Unit4’s International Portfolio
A more substantive change comes with product name changes—all of the
products are now called “Unit4 + a more descriptive name,” starting with Unit4
Business World (formerly Unit4 Agresso ERP) and Unit4 Financials (formerly Unit4
Coda Financials), as the flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) and global
financials software products, respectively. Then, under the other so-called best-in-
class (BIC) products that excel at specific tasks, former Unit4 Ocra will now be sold
as the Unit4 Consolidation and Unit4 Cashflow Planning modules, whereas the
former Unit4 Current Software is now Unit4 Travel & Expenses. Last but not least,
former Unit4 Accountancy will now be sold as the Unit4 Statutory Reporting,
Unit4 Account Analysis, and Unit4 Audit & Control solutions (see figure 1).

3. Unit4 Rebrands and Re-platforms for People-centric Businesses
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Figure 1. Unit4 international portfolio
Moreover, the new People Platform takes the best of the former Agresso VITA
architecture and acts as a foundation for the aforementioned Unit4 portfolio—
Business World ERP, Industry Solutions, and BIC products such as former Coda,
Orca, Current, and Accountancy (which have all been renamed, as mentioned
earlier). Unit4 Business World and the BIC products like Coda will remain as
separate products, but they will take advantage of the underlying capabilities of
the People Platform—the embedded analytics, social and mobile context, user
experience, and much more.
Given Unit4’s vast acquisition track over the decades, its many local (and
sometimes even esoteric) products come in two flavors—those aforementioned
that are being scaled to be sold internationally (e.g., Travel & Expense, Cash &
Consolidation, Account Analysis, Wholesale Distribution), and those that will
remain focused on the needs of the local markets. The international ones will
evolve to be integrated with and leverage the People Platform as well. The
wholesale distribution industry product is interesting, as it goes back to the
origins of Unit4. It has been around forever and eventually evolved onto the
former Agresso ERP platform, but it is only really sold in the Benelux today, where
it has a good chunk of market share. Unit4 sees it as a really great global
opportunity in the future.
People Platform Foundation
The aforementioned Unit4 People Platform will provide the foundation for Unit4
business applications from now on and delivers on the company vision for the so-
called self-driving business applications (that automate low-value repetitive tasks),
while enabling people to create impact (i.e., be more productive and make
smarter decisions). The platform aims to ensure better engagement through a
personalized user experience, in-context information delivery, flexibility, and out-
of-the-box functional capabilities for industries such as professional services,
education, public services, not for profit, real estate, and wholesale distribution.

4. Unit4 Rebrands and Re-platforms for People-centric Businesses
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Figure 2. Unit4 People Platform layers
The platform is designed for extensibility and adaptability to current and future
business needs and consists of four layers (see figure 2). The top Personal
Experience layer provides a simple and relevant yet complete user experience that
people have come to expect in the digital era, i.e., social, mobile, and with
relevant analytics and alerts. The next layer, the Business Capabilities layer, is
about providing relevant specific functionality for the aforementioned people-
centric industries.
The Smart Context layer is where the self-driving applications’ rubber meets the
road. It leverages technologies such as social, mobile, predictive analytics,
machine-learning, and other tools (see figure 3) to provide in-context and in-time
information delivery and collaboration, which in turn enables users to focus on
better engagement with customers and citizens. For example, the Smart Context
layer minimizes time spent on administrative tasks by pre-populating timesheets
and expense reports based on location data and behavior analysis of big data (e.g.,
pattern recognition). Additionally, a process engine automates workflows, an
analytics engine feeds exceptions while mining data, and pattern recognition
delivers the best possible answers to certain situations.

5. Unit4 Rebrands and Re-platforms for People-centric Businesses
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Figure 3. Smart Context ingredients
Last but not least, the bottom Elastic Foundation layer, which builds on the former
Agresso VITA architecture, allows organizations to model and remodel data
structures and functionality to meet evolving business requirements (e.g.,
mergers, reorgs, divestitures, etc.). It provides context around relationships and
keeps all modules, all reports, and all workflows within Unit4 applications in
lockstep. In other words, the Elastic Foundation provides intelligence around
relations regarding projects, customers, and time.
The Elastic Foundation layer’s extend-and-relate architecture incorporates
“extend” (the ability to allow organizations and end-users to model data
structures and functionality and meet evolving business requirements) and
“relate” (the ability to bring context around relationships to extended data
structures and functionality). It drives execution of changes behind the scene
across access rights, workflow, reporting, analytics, etc. automatically. It also
feeds the “digital graph” of the organization, including rules and timestamps (see
figure 4).

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Figure 4. Elastic Foundation ingredients
Unit4 People Platform Adoption
Unit4’s flagship ERP and financials applications already benefit from the power of
the People Platform, with Unit4’s commitment to add more applications over
time (see figure 5). While the just-released Unit4 Business World Milestone 5 is
already fully on the platform, Unit4 Financials is benefiting already from new user
experience and smart context and will continue to embrace more capabilities of
the People Platform going forward.
As an example of the latter, new flexi-fields technologies enable finance
professionals to combine business data with contextual information from inside or
outside the system, such as pipeline data and customer retention data. This
flexibility in Unit4 Financials empowers the finance team to manage critical
information key to monitoring and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs).
New contextual information and data automatically become integral to Unit4
Financials for future use. In addition, in-memory analytics capabilities (part of the
platform’s smart context layer) are embedded in the latest version, enabling real-
time analysis of important data and providing actionable insights.

7. Unit4 Rebrands and Re-platforms for People-centric Businesses
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Figure 5. Unit4 products on the People Platform
While not much is earth-shattering here—the People Platform is basically building
upon Unit4’s established erstwhile VITA architecture—it is hard to debate the idea
of having a common architectural framework, to obtain the best available
functionalities from several disparate products, and cross-purpose them for other
products. Unit4’s new strategy is positive and plausible. The company will also
have to expand its partner ecosystem, which has been rudimentary in the past,
but announcements of these partnerships will come at another time (perhaps at
the upcoming Unit4 Analyst Summit in June 2015).
The vast majority of Unit4’s nearly $600 million (USD) revenues come from the
European market. Just by penetrating the North American and Asia Pacific
markets more, one could easily see Unit4 reach a $1 billion (USD) revenue mark.
But the task of penetrating those market will be fiercely defended by the market
leaders and/or incumbents such as SAP, Oracle, Infor, Microsoft Dynamics,
NetSuite, Deltek, etc. Interesting times are definitely upon us market observers.
Related Reading:
UNIT4’s Renewed Focus on the User

8. Unit4 Rebrands and Re-platforms for People-centric Businesses
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