A powerful supply chain is indicative of a strong business. Take a quick glance at companies like HP, Apple or Nike to see that being able to deliver a product quickly, affordably and reliably is essential to running a global business.

But as we continue to deplete our planet’s resources, sustainability within the supply chain will become a pressing issue. And for many leaders, it already has. “Today, sustainability has replaced cost, value and speed as the dominant topic of discussion among purchasing and supply professionals,” is what the authors of an Oracle white paper, The Shape of Tomorrow’s Supply Chains, assert.

Realizing sustainability within the supply chain is often directly correlated to how well the company is able to measure its efforts. Richard Bank, Director of the Sustainable Supply Chain Foundation, says that cost-reduction can be driven through sustainability projects, but effective measurement is necessary for these programs long-term success. Only through effective measurement can leaders truly analyze which initiatives resulted in the highest cost-reduction to investment ratio--and why.

If there's one thing that's abundantly clear in the tech industry, it's that the Cloud is here to stay. The Cloud has matured enough that it's even infultrating business applications--such as ERP MRP software--once thought to be impossible to support in the Cloud.

If you're like me, you rely on a host of cloud applications to get your job done each day. While the convenience and familiarity of apps built for the Web is great, I can't help but notice the differences among the user interfaces (UIs) I use. Currently, all cloud-based ERP software vendors are approaching the user interface with their own design style. For users that work with multiple cloud apps each day, this can be disorienting - not to mention bad for productivity and usability.

As more products are built for the cloud, I believe that we ought to start thinking about creating a set of standards for what cloud-based applications should look and feel like. Getting there won't easy, so it's time to start talking about creating these standards today.

What's the Benefit of Standards?

Inconsististency in UI design has negative impacts on usability and productivity. It results in having to invest in more user training and can lead to costly user errors. A unified and consistent UI, on the other hand, can boost productivity.

The enterprise is buzzing around the emerging trend of enterprise mobility. According to a recent report by Kelton Research, 9 out of 10 IT managers intended to implement at least one mobile application in 2011. A full 50 percent of managers stated that they thought managing mobile applications would be the top priority for this year. 

Clearly, the enterprise is anticipating a shift from performing work within the "four walls" of the enterprise to a world in which many of our job functions are performed remotely. To cater to the increasingly mobile worker, enterprise software vendors have started to focus intensely developing for a mobile platform. As enterprise software vendors develop for mobile applications, they're looking to the king of mobile - Apple - for design inspiration. 

I see three ways that Apple is influencing enterprise software development. Enterprise vendors are: 

1. Creating a mobile user experience that mirrors that of iOS.

As people that live and work with technology and enterprise software on a daily basis, it's easy to forget all the effort it took to bring us to where we are today. As we text and download the next coolest app, we forget that we hold more power in our hand than the mainframe computers that used to take up an entire room. 

At Software Advice, we decided that the tech world needed a bit of context to couch all the great technological innovations that we have around us today. Our editor, Lara Zuehlke recently did just that. She bravely dove into the last 60 years of enterprise software history to tell the story of how software became so integral to our businesses today. The product of her labors is a four-part series that relays the history of enterprise software and technology innovation itself. 

In addition to the great narrative that Ms. Zuehlke put together, she also pieced together an impressive infographic that encapsulates part one of her series, The Origins of Modern Computing. You can find the infographic below.

Though many businesses consider their financial data to be some of the most valuable information they don’t want outsiders privy to, more small and medium-sized businesses are shifting their accounting software from in-house servers to those of software vendors. These online accounting software solutions are easier to deploy than their on-premise counterparts, sold in an inexpensive monthly subscription model, and offer increased collaboration opportunities along with user-friendly interfaces.

As part of our Expert Roundtable series, we reached out to three online accounting software executives to gauge their opinions on industry trends and what they saw for the future of online accounting software. We asked the CEOs at ePartners (a Microsoft Dynamics GP VAR), Intacct, and Kashoo the following questions:

• What are the current trends in online accounting software?
• What’s surprised you about the direction of the industry?
• Who's choosing to adopt online accounting software?
• What are the benefits in switching to online accounting?

If you’re tapped into the enterprise software community, you know that SaaS is the hot new topic of software delivery. The cloud computing phenomenon is taking center stage in the enterprise tech community. For good reason, the SaaS business model and approach to software is completely changing the dynamic of enterprise software.

Much of the attention around cloud computing has focused on the innovation of the web-based architecture. In the race to compete against SaaS companies, many legacy vendors with older client/server offerings have evolved their technology to offer web-based deployment.

So why are SaaS companies like Salesforce and Netsuite rapidly growing their customer base and licensing revenue while legacy vendors amble along with only moderate growth?

It's because the innovation of SaaS isn’t just about web access to software. I can think of five other reasons that the disruption of SaaS companies is about more than the web access to software and the browser-based user interface.

At Software Advice, a website that reviews electrical estimating software, we’re starting up a new executive interview series highlighting various segments of the construction industry. To start off the new series, we decided to tackle the electrical contracting industry. To get a sense of the state of the electrical contracting industry, I caught up with the CEOs from three of the leading electrical estimating software companies to ask them about the state of their industry.

The panel of participants in our first executive interview series were: George Hague of ConEst, Giovanni Marcelli of Accubid, Todd McCormick of McCormick Systems, and Brian Hoffelder of Vision InfoSoft . I asked each CEO about current trends shaping the industry, where the industry is heading in the future and what role software plays in the industry. Here are some of the key takeaways from the Q&A session.

Adoption of Paperless Technology is Accelerating

At Software Advice, we hear from a lot of software buyers that are interested in the cloud and software as a service (SaaS). However, many still have lingering questions that no one has answered adequately. It's not surprising given that the term is rarely followed by meaningful answers to questions that buyers might have. 

Since we hear the same line of questions on a daily basis, we decided to put together a resource to fill the void and help buyers better understand exactly what SaaS is. To be fair the analyst and experts are already way past this level of knowledge, but that makes little difference given that these aren't the individuals making purchasing the products. In order for SaaS to truly succeed in enterprise software, there needs to be a better understanding amongst the layperson and buyer. 

Here are five of the top ten questions that I hear each day: