Firms neglect contract management

According to Gartner, many organisations are failing to effectively manage outsourcing contracts owing to a lack of planning and foresight, reports V3.

The analyst firm says the situation has not been helped by the economic meltdown and the subsequent cost reduction programmes, which it predicts will have disrupted 30% of outsourcing deals by 2012.

The Gartner survey found that 55% of businesses focus too much on the operational level of outsourcing, and not enough on the strategic management of contracts.

Versata Software has won a patent lawsuit it brought against ERP software vendor SAP as the jury awarded Versata $138.64 million in damages, says PC World.

The patents, granted between 1998 and 2006, concerned methods for configuring systems, pricing products in multilevel product and organisational groups, and multisource transaction processing.

Since then Versata has made half a dozen acquisitions in the fields of contract management, project portfolio management, network management, Web software development and data integration.

Quorum Business Solutions is set to license the full upstream suite of its applications, states eMedia Wire.

The company will leverage Quorum Upstream Suite to manage its upstream accounting operations and commercial activities, including land management, capital budget tracking, production accounting, revenue accounting and financials.

Quorum Land Suite streamlines management processes throughout an organisation and consists of contract management, capital budget tracking, financial accounting, authorisation for expenditure, joint interest billing and fixed assets.