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I have been an Android user ever since the first day the first Motorola Droid was available for Verizon back in 2009. Over the years, I've accumulated some experience using Android on phones and tablets, and certain apps have made this experience better for me at work. Here's my list of essential Android apps for business - let me know in the comments below if you have any other suggestions. By the way - these are all FREE apps.
This list reflects the way I work, and your style of working may require different apps. I have a lot of meetings (including conference calls and WebEx sessions), travel a lot (locally, domestically, and internationally), and need to view and edit a lot of documents. I spend a lot of time with customers, have a quota, and need access to the corporate intranet. I write a lot of Microsoft Office documents, and read and write hundreds of e-mails per day.
Google built-in apps
Let's start with the standard Google apps, most or all of which come pre-installed on most devices. Not all Google apps are equally useful for business, but these are all quite helpful.
Calendar Widget: My most useful business app. This widget comes built in with your Android device. My home page on my phone is pretty much a nearly fully-screen calendar, plus Google Voice search, a folder for mail apps, a folder for navigation destinations I use a lot (like home and work), a folder for phone numbers I use a lot, and a link to a flashlight app. By the way, you can also edit which apps show up at the bottom of each Android screen - I like phone, Chrome, Settings, and the Camera, since I use those frequently. I hardly ever use any other page on my phone.
Chrome: Many older Android devices come with a browser that predated Chrome. Chrome is now the default browser on Android devices. It is stable, fast, and has some nice features (see Chrome to Phone).
Chrome to Phone: Chrome to Phone allows you to send web pages from Chrome on your PC or Mac to your phone. Let's say you're looking at a hotel web site on your laptop and want to send it to your phone to have the address (for giving directions in the cab) or the phone (for checking to confirm your reservation) - Chrome to Phone to the rescue. Since I often use just my phone in meetings, I often use Chrome to Phone to send reference web pages to my phone in advance.
Drive: Drive replaced Google Docs. You can use Google Drive to edit word processing documents and spreadsheets, as well as to view and share presentation documents and files across devices or with other people. As long as you have a network connection, Google Drive is a useful tool.
Gmail: Sometimes you need to send yourself information - or deal with personal business while in a meeting. Manage your Gmail accounts with this app.
Goggles: Google Goggles may be the Google app that has the most unrealized potential of any Google app. Goggles works well for QR and bar code scans, searching for information on a company by photographing its logo, and a few other applications. Where it falls down, however, is in its most potentially useful area for business - business card scanning. I've never successfully scanned a business card with Google Goggles. Worst of all, it doesn't even work with Google business cards.
Mail: Android devices come with a second e-mail app that connects with Exchange servers to send and receive corporate e-mail, set and receive calendar appointments and meetings, and access the corporate directory. If your company, like most, uses Exchange Server for mail and calendar, this app is indispensable.
Maps (and Navigation): When heading to a meeting, this app is a great way to get directions, check traffic, and save places ("star" them) for future reference. If I'm going to some exotic foreign location, I often scope out sights and places to see, save them as favorites, and then use Google Maps to walk from one to another. You can get driving, walking, and public transportation directions with the navigation mode, which does turn-by-turn directions.
MyTracks: MyTracks is an app that tracks your travels on GPS. You can use MyTracks to trace the route you walked from a parking space to a meeting, so you can find your way back later. You can save any pathway with MyTracks, really useful for retracing your steps particularly when in a strange city.
Search (and Google Now, and Voice Search): Google Search is an essential app (and home screen widget). Google Search not only surpasses Siri in voice search, but also includes Google Now, one of the most innovative mobile apps available. Google Now checks your calendar to see what you have coming up, and tells you when it is time to leave based on traffic. It tells you about any delays to upcoming flights, whether in cities you are in or will be in soon, sports teams you care about, and much more.
Translate: Helpful for translating web pages, e-mail messages, and phrases. If you want to add a thank you phrase to a message, read an article written in a foreign trade journal, or figure out if you're at the right restaurant, Google Translate is a must have app.
Voice: Google Voice is a great app for staying in touch, as well as for making cheap international calls. You can retrieve messages using a web interface while on the road - most are even transcribed for you automatically, allowing you to get your voice mail via text message, e-mail, or web browser. While not traveling, Google Voice can ring your cell phone and work phone (multiple phones at your choice) for in-bound phone calls. Very handy.
Other useful Android apps:
Adobe Reader: Open and read PDF files with the authentic app from Adobe.
AK Notepad: Simple way to take notes during meetings.
Alarm Clock Plus: In my opinion, the best alarm clock to use, particularly when traveling. Very flexible way to set multiple alarms, including in advance.
Amazon Kindle: Another good way to read PDF files. Also useful for reading other kinds of documents sent wirelessly to your Android device.
AnyConnect: Cisco VPN access to corporate intranet from the road.
ASTRO File Manager: Astro is like Windows Explorer for your Android device. You can see, open, and manage all your files. Especially useful for finding that attachment you just downloaded.
Concur: If your company, like mine, uses Concur for expense reporting, this mobile app allows you to take note of any expense while traveling by taking a photo of the receipt and uploading the image. Very helpful for getting those expense reports in in a timely manner.
Dictionary: Sometimes you run into a word you don't really know - this is a handy app for looking up the definition of a word.
DroidRecord: There are lots of times when you need to record a meeting - in compliance with all laws and ethics. DroidRecord is the app to record these meetings for future reference.Evernote: Some meetings require more sophisticated notetaking, including words, drawings, and photos (screen shots of PowerPoints is a lot more efficient than trying to type it all in or take notes on a presentation you won't get until later). Evernote is a cross-platform app that works on many devices (not just Android devices), and allows you to sync notes across them for future reference.
GasBuddy: GasBuddy helps you find gas stations when you're driving around. Plus, you can find the best price when you need it, and it connects to Google Navigate to get you turn-by-turn directions to the gas station of your choice.
Kingston Office: I prefer Kingston Office to other Microsoft Office-compatible document editors. It's free and works well.
Magnificient Magnifier HD: Great little app for magnifying anything small you can't easily read, including magnifying, lighting up the item, and taking a picture. Very handy for things like serial numbers, which are maddeningly small for folks my age.
Okta: If your company uses Okta for single sign-on, this app can be set up by your IT folks to give you convenient access to everything from everywhere.PDANet: A lot of carriers charge a monthly fee for using your phone as a hotspot or for tethering. With PDANet,
you can use your cell phone's data plan over a Bluetooth or micro-USB
cable to get network connectivity on your laptop if you don't have a
cellular modem for your computer. The free version of PDANetcan be used to access any non-secure web site (http) or Internet connection (this works for Outlook for most companies!). For a small, one-time fee ($20), you can also access secure connections (https).
RealCalc: Great scientific calculator. Good for most business calculations. For you financial geek types, there are calculators compatible with your HP-41C if you need one.
Salesforce Mobile: Just about everyone uses Salesforce.com for CRM these days, and Salesforce Mobile gives you a great way to use it from anywhere.
Skype: So many people use Skype to stay in touch, that this app is indispensable. If you use Verizon, you'll need this version of Skype instead. Skype may be the best Microsoft app ever!
Stopwatch & Timer: Ever need to time a presentation, to make sure you don't run out of time during a speaking slot? Good for timing demos, presentations, or anything else.
Swype: Not available on the Google Play store. Google Swype revolutionized text input on mobile devices. If you have trouble typing on the small, on-screen keyboards, or if you think you can't give up your Blackberry, you'll love Swype. Seriously, I was a HUGE Blackberry user, and Swype allowed me to type two or three times faster and more accurately than I ever could on a Blackberry keypad. However, if you get Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, there is a built-in keyboard replacement that uses the same approach as Swype, so Swype's days may be numbered.
TeslaLED: You just need a flashlight sometimes, and this one works on just about every device I've ever tried.
TripIt: Organize all your travel info, if you fly a lot.
WebEx: I do a lot of web and teleconferences, most of them on WebEx. This app allows me to join in on any WebEx conference from anywhere. I can't present using this app, but I can view the web conference. I've used this in airports, my car, and many other places where I just couldn't conveniently use my laptop.
Where's My Droid: Some Droid devices come with a "find my phone" app - this app is for the rest of us. Easily locate your device when you've mislaid it. Keep your phone secure with a password, regardless, for those rare times when you may have actually lost your phone. Ask your IT shop if they can remotely wipe and disable your phone if it is really lost.
Wifi Analyzer: Find the best WiFi signal when you have a choice. Of course, also useful for setting up your WiFi at home or in the office.
Wikipedia: Sometimes, you just have to look things up. Of course, you can always do this just using your browser if you prefer.
Missing:
I still haven't found two free apps I'd love to have - a great business card scanner and a document scanner (including optical character recognition - OCR).
Summary
Some folks love their iOS devices, and some won't give up their Blackberries, but I love Android. Android has great voice input, Swype, widgets on the home screen, great integration with Google Apps, and all these great free apps. Let me know if you have other favorites or your thoughts on this list in the comments area below. Enjoy!
Highlights from the world of Enterprise Software and Solutions over the past six weeks:
- Salesforce.com had a strong Q3. NetSuite had a strong Q3. HP did not.
- Workday had its IPO. It's doing well, with a market cap just over $8.5 billion and a constrant stream of innovation.
- Lots
of IT failures recently, including Queensland (IBM/SAP), Avantor
(IBM/SAP), US Air Force (CSC/Oracle), State of California (SAP/SAP), and
ScanSource (Avanade/Microsoft).
- Oracle
continued its acquisition binge, buying Instantis, taking a stake in
Engine Yard, acquiring Eloqua. Other notable acquisitions include IBM
closing its Kenexa acquisition, Actian (Ingres) buying Versant, NCR
buying Retalix.
- Google had an eventful end of 2012 - they announced poor earnings early by accident (beta software at fault, no doubt!), but managed to somehow stash $10 billion tax free in Bermuda and get away without any significant restraints or penalties from an FTC investigation into monopolistic practices. For more info, google "cronyism." Google Chairman Eric Schmidt declined an invitation to become a cabinet member as "Secretary of Business" in President Obama's administration.
- Google introduced new devices, which were very cool despite the phone lacking 4G LTE support. Apple introduced the iPad mini and another new iPad, but continues to lose share to Android-powered devices (particularly to Samsung). RIM plans to return to relevance with its upcoming release of a new OS and new devices. The holiday season brought a huge surge in buying of smartphones and tablets, but not PCs.
- VC funding fell sharply in Q3 2012, perhaps due to a lack of new bandwagons for overinvestment. MongoDB and Cloudera raised big rounds.
- SAP launched yet another new platform - this time, it is a cloud platform based on HANA but not apparently related to SuccessFactors or Ariba. However, developers can now access HANA as a service at a reasonable price on Amazon.
- SAP had a strong Q3, and became an official sponsor of the NFL (National (American) Football League). Can't wait to see their Superbowl commercial ...
- Oracle has announced that they not only "get" the cloud, but that they invented it. In other news, Oracle hired Ensign Pavel Chekov as a spokesperson.
- Oracle had a generally strong Q2, but hardware continues to be a millstone around the company's earnings and revenues.
- Microsoft launched some great commercials and a mediocre, overpriced tablet. Microsoft is struggling in the tablet and phone markets, and the new Windows 8 is struggling.
- Key folks left Microsoft (Sinofsky, Mundie) and Apple (Forstall), but it seems likely those companies will somehow survive.
- The UN tried, and failed, to take over the Internet. Is there any problem with the same dictators, despots, and bureaucrats who run the UN Human Rights Commission controlling Internet censorship and access globally?
- Lots of folks issued summaries of 2012 and predictions for 2013, but very few evaluated their predictions for 2012.
- John McAfee.
- HP/Autonomy.
- @LarryEllison is still at just the one tweet. Perhaps we'll see a second, equally impressive tweet in 2013? ;)
Stay up to date on #EnSW by following @dbmoore or hashtag #EnSW on Twitter.
A half-million lines of custom code wasn’t enough to produce a viable
Dynamics AX ERP (enterprise resource planning) system for point-of-sale
and RFID products distributor ScanSource, according to a lawsuit it has
filed against Avanade, the joint venture between Microsoft and
Accenture.
[No, a half million lines *is* the problem ... -DBM]
Key improvements include:
Virtual nodes, which improve the granularity of capacity increases
and dramatically improve repair and rebuild times in larger clusters.
See also this post on upgrading an existing cluster to vnodes.
CQL3 improvements, notably the addition of collection types, queryable system information, and a CQL-native protocol.
Request tracing is available to both CQL and classic Thrift requests, and can also be managed programatically.
Atomic batches address the possibility of mid-batch coordinator failure.
Configurable policies for disk failure
Last but not least, many performance improvements to memory usage,
column indexes, compaction, streaming, startup time, and more.
Cassandra NoSQL distributed database has been updated to better use
larger servers through the introduction of virtual nodes and
configurable policies for disk failure.
The newly released Cassandra 1.2 also features the ability to perform
atomic batch operations, and comes with a new version of the Cassandra
Query Language, CQL3.
Highlights for the second-generation high-performance, NoSQL database
include clustering across virtual nodes, inter-node communication,
atomic batches and request tracing. In addition, Cassandra 1.2 also
marks the release of version 3 of the Cassandra Query Language (CQL3),
to simplify application modeling, allow for more powerful mapping, and
alleviate design limitations through more natural representation.
[Self-dealing? -DBM]
Workday, a software company with headquarters on Stoneridge Mall Road in
Pleasanton, plans to gradually move its workforce into buildings a few
blocks away in Stoneridge Corporate Plaza, which is being acquired by
NPC Holdings, LLC, a wholly-owned affiliate of Dave Duffield.
This is a strategic investment for Duffield and his venture, NPC,
which is separate from Workday. NPC will continue to manage the space as
a multi-tenant office and Workday will occupy some of the space as an
expansion of its corporate headquarters.
But “citing the importance of the Reconnaissance Article in the
Protocol and the importance of a meaningful penalty” the jury has now
decided to fine Oracle US$15,200 (NZ$18,350) and deduct the final five
days of the second testing period – from April 26-30.
The fine is small change to the mega-rich American syndicate. But the
loss of testing days will hurt them given their current struggles.
In fact, the military stands to save hundreds of millions of dollars
from the deal. According to the Armed Forces Press Service, the official
DOD news agency, the Air Force estimates $50 million in annual savings,
the Army $70 million in annual savings, and the Defense Information
Systems Agency (DISA) 10% as compared to its existing Microsoft
contracts.
The new enterprise license agreement includes a broad array products,
and gives the Air Force, Army and DISA immediate access to the latest
Microsoft software, such as Windows 8, Microsoft Office 2013 and
SharePoint 2013. The Army and Air Force have been working with Microsoft
to create standard Windows 8 configurations, and could begin adopting
the new operating system soon.
“The Tizen was born as Samsung hoped to lighten its growing
dependence on Google on concerns that its top position in the smartphone
market may weaken following the Google- Motorola tie-up,” Byun Han
Joon, an analyst at KB Investment & Securities in Seoul, said by
phone today. “Intel always wanted to boost its presence in the mobile
CPU market.”
“Tempered optimism. That’s how I’d describe the state of technology
recruiting as we move into the New Year,” said Alice Hill, Managing
Director of Dice.com. “For every pair of companies likely to staff up in
2013, there’s a company saying they’re not looking to grow their
technology workforce in the immediate future. So there will be good job
opportunities and there will be hiring, but we’re expecting steady,
modest growth, not a snowball gaining speed into an avalanche.”
Asked if the time to fill open technology positions had changed
compared to last year, more than half the respondents (55%) said it had
lengthened (including 16 percent who labeled the change “substantial”).
Accounting for the slower hiring process, nearly half the hiring
managers (47%) pointed to an inability to find qualified applicants,
while another third (33%) cited a desire to wait for “the perfect
match.”
Likewise, there is no haste by qualified technology professionals to move on in their careers. Seven out
Time and time again, our clients express an aversion to co-mingling
data. They want us to have a hard physical separation. They want us to
have a virtual private database.
RW: Isn’t that really just multi-instance like Taleo and RightNow, which weren’t pure SaaS plays?
Across the Atlantic, European regulators also aren’t yet finished
with their probe — a process once thought to be more likely to produce
the sort of tough concessions Google critics seek. And those companies,
back in Washington, have been privately meeting with Justice Department
officials and are said to be urging them to re-open the Google case,
which the agency conceded to the FTC in 2011 after the two regulators
fought for primacy in the investigation.
After people activated a record-breaking 17.4 million iOS and Android
devices on Christmas Day, the following week saw record-smashing
activity as well: over 50 million iOS and Android-powered smartphones
and tablets activated, and a staggering 1.76 billion apps downloaded.
“no support for the proposition that Amazon has expressly or
impliedly communicated that its Appstore for Android possesses the
characteristics and qualities that the public has come to expect from
the Apple APP Store and/or Apple products.”
What does 2013 hold in store for the BI industry?
Business transformation enabled by the cloud. In 2012, Oracle made
clear its intent to be a major supplier of cloud computing, and set out
its credentials and innovation strategy to be a leader in cloud
computing. What excites me is how we will see opportunities for our
customers to use cloud computing to deliver analytics-as-a-service. We
already have customers creating new business models from selling insight
on information they own to third parties – logistics and supply chain
companies, and healthcare informatics companies are good examples. I
expect that to continue.
Secondly, a revolution in customer experience fuelled by customer and
social media analytics. It’s become clear that social media has the
ability to forge new and more immediate relationships with customers.
Today’s business-technology leaders must go well beyond passive
acceptance of social media and become passionate and unconditional
zealots for the social-driven
Microsoft has reached an Orwellian impasse, in which it cannot tell
the truth — even to itself. It is blinded by its own hallucinations
about how the market is operating. The result is that its public
pronouncements entirely lack credibility…
At some point, the accusing finger has to swing back toward Ballmer, who took over as CEO from Gates in 2000…
At this point and at the very least, Gates needs to step in and ask his
friend of many years to step down. I first raised the question of
Ballmer’s tenure 18 months ago. He has had ample opportunity to turn the
ship around and hasn’t done it. If Microsoft is to recover from its
nosedive, it will need to address multiple institutional failures — with
someone else in the driver’s seat.
Microsoft needs to make Azure a more compelling environment for
mission-critical enterprise applications and services while reducing
migration hassles. To its credit, it’s evolving Windows Azure from
platform-as-a-service (PaaS) To infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).
Earlier last year, it added persistent-state virtual machine support to
Azure, allowing it to accommodate a wider variety of software, including
Linux. Microsoft also introduced Hadoop for Azure and support for
MapReduce.
In late December, Microsoft added job scheduler support for Windows
Azure Mobile Services, and improved scaling for Azure website services
and support for SQL Data Sync Services from within the Azure Management
Portal. In 2013, it needs to further its build out of its cloud platform
to keep it competitive with Amazon EC2, IBM’s SmartCloud and other
cloud services.
5. Big Data: When it comes to big data, IT’s latest megatrend,
Microsoft isn’t thought of in the same breath as Oracle, with its
Exadata Mach
What’s selling in Fusion Applications?: Oracle spent years and
billions of dollars to develop its next-generation Fusion Applications,
which can be deployed both on-premises and in Oracle’s cloud.
Oracle has touted that it has 100 Fusion products for sale now,
spread over a number of functional pillars, such as financials, CRM
(customer relationship management) and HCM (human capital management).
On the conference call, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the company is
seeing rapid growth in Fusion across-the-board in CRM and in HCM.”
It’s also beating rival cloud HCM vendor Workday “in the majority of
deals,” Ellison said. Oracle is also having success with Fusion CRM
against Salesforce.com, according to Hurd.
But co-president and CFO Safra Catz said “most of the [Fusion]
pillars are doing very well.” That means some, perhaps ERP (enterprise
resource planning) among them, aren’t catching fire just yet. Oracle is
likely not worried about that, however, given the size of its E-Business
S
So what’s the big theme for 2013?
“Work the way you live.” Consumerization is here. It’s time to really
embrace it. We’re doubling down on the Enterprise. It’s an increasingly
important part of Google, and a place where we plan to invest and to
support our customers.
“SAP has been using social media since before it was even called
that—for many years; and we continue to evolve as new platforms and new
customer needs emerge,” Yolton said.
Linux-based Tizen, supported by other companies such as Intel, has
been around for a while now but has never had a phone of its own.
Samsung’s own Bada OS was folded into it earlier this year, and now
rumors say that a partnership between NTT DoCoMo and Samsung will
produce the first Tizen handset relatively soon, perhaps as early as
this year’s Mobile World Congress.
If you want your CRM system to succeed, then take a deep breath and do these three things.
1. Forget about the B.S. and focus on the reports…
2. Invest in an administrator…
3. Embrace it or suffer.
Of the 11 purchases announced by Oracle this year, all but one have
been for cloud-related companies. Ellison once denounced talk of the
cloud market as “gibberish,” Waters notes. But asked two months ago
whether he had a new appreciation for the business, he said: “I don’t
accept the notion I didn’t get the cloud. I think I invented it.”
All HP has to do is show that it has actually built some marketable
software out of the $10.3 billion acquisition. The question is, where is
that software?
Stanley Morrical isn’t convinced such software exists, so last week
he sued HP in Federal court in San Jose, CA, accusing the company of
fraud. Morrical is not buying HP’s claims that Autonomy executives duped
it into buying the British software maker last year through “serious
accounting improprieties, misrepresentation and disclosure failures.” HP
has asked US and British regulators to investigate for criminality.
[Is it possible to short a private company? -DBM]
Mr. Preston-Werner’s own company is something of a proxy for how he
sees the world. GitHub has no managers among its 140 employees, for
example. “Everyone has management interests,” he said. “People can work
on things that are interesting to them. Companies should exist to
optimize happiness, not money. Profits follow.” He does, however, retain
his own title and decides things like salaries.
Now, for Windows 7 and why it’s great:
Performance over Vista is vastly improved. I’m a serious user of
Nikon Capture NX2, and the performance change change is incredible. For
example, adjusting low-light noise in a complex photo used to take
minutes and it now takes seconds.
The thing is stable and works. Even though the product is beta, it
doesn’t crash. Yes, it’s rough around the edges and some things still
don’t function properly, but in general it’s great.
The support infrastructure is mature. Finding answers to obscure
questions is straightforward because the Windows installed base is so
large. With Google’s help, technical knowledge and assistance are easy
to find.
Mobile cloud computing is a trillion dollar opportunity. Connecting
to new cloud-based services from anywhere, anytime using mobile laptops,
tablets and smart phones. There are numerous opportunities for new
cloud-based services. Additionally, the entire infrastructure technology
stack needs to be re-written, to enable this mobile cloud computing
paradigm.
We are going to see the next generation of multi-billion revenue
franchises created, a continued shifting of profit pools, and the
disruption, and eventual death, of several large publicly-traded legacy
vendors.
1. Hybrid cloud growth
2. Growth of mobile cloud computing
3. Focus on beautiful applications
4. Arrival of social in all cloud solutions
5. Need for the ‘glocal’ cloud
6. Increased importance of cloud security
7. Bring your own cloud (BYOC) boom
8. Rise of the geopolitical cloud
9. Spotlight on the clean cloud
10. Rise of the cloud-based networked enterprise
We’re particularly bullish on the ongoing innovation we’re seeing in a
number of startups and growth-oriented companies focused on Big
Data/analytics, software-defined networking, storage, health-care IT and
the social enterprise. Thanks to the rapid adoption of cloud
technologies and the consumerization of IT, companies continue to
exploit massively disruptive forces that are changing the face of
enterprise technology as we know it today, and their businesses are
growing at a more rapid pace.
Of the more than 20,000 households interviewed, just over half used
wireless (i.e. cellular) phones for all or nearly all phone calls — 35.9
percent were wireless-only, and 15.9 percent had a landline but rarely
used it. That adds up to 51.8 percent of all households, which is less
than 2 percent more than for the same period last year.
Why such a small increase? While younger people are adopting wireless
phones as their only phone in record numbers, older folks are hanging
onto their landlines. The percentage of people going wireless only
steadily decreases as age increases: Only a quarter of those aged 45-64
were totally wireless, and just a tenth of those above age 64. That
said, every age segment saw their wireless-only population increase by
between 1 and 5 percent.
The highest percentage of wireless-only users appears to be among
adults living with unrelated adult roommates — 75.9 percent, almost
three times the proportion of people living only with spouses or other
adult famil
He received 2011 compensation of $378 million, one of the biggest pay
packages on record, boosted by $376.2 million in stock awards that
he’ll get over a decade.
“It pales by comparison because last year’s million-share grant was
highly extraordinary,” said Brian Foley, a compensation expert with
Brian Foley & Co. “There are other executives who remain unnamed at
other companies who would be tempted to go for every last candy in the
dish.”
Synchronoss hopes to dominate the world of cloud mobile content services while increasing its international presence.
“It is extremely disappointing that HP has again failed to provide a
detailed calculation of its $5 billion write-down of Autonomy, or
publish any explanation of the serious allegations it has made against
the former management team, in its annual report filing today,” Lynch
said in an e-mailed statement. “Furthermore, it is now less clear how
much of the $5 billion write-down is in fact being attributed to the
alleged accounting issues, and how much to other changes in business
performance and earnings projections.”
Samsung filed a document in federal court in San Jose, Calif., Dec.
19 indicating that the U.S. Patent Office has declared invalid the
entirety of Apple’s patent. The Samsung document lists portions of the
patent that were struck down on reexamination on the basis that prior
patents covered the same inventions.
An Amazon spokeswoman said in an emailed statement that the problem
was caused by an issue in the company’s load balancing service, which
distributes traffic across its network of servers. Such load balancing
problems at Amazon have stalled Netflix services several times before.
Netflix, which began switching from its own servers to AWS in 2009, has
previously said that while it’s “easy and common to blame the cloud for
outages because it’s outside of our control,” the service has helped
improve the availability of its service.
According to Dines, one way to protect against cloud-based
malfunctions are cloud to cloud continuity services that, in the event
of an outage, allow traffic to be automatically routed onto another
cloud center – either within the same vendor’s network, or to a second
vendor’s cloud center. Dines says this form of disaster recovery is in
its infancy because of the complexity in matching formats between two
discrete virtual server systems. CIOs are also just be
Another challenge for Microsoft – and Rudder – is ensuring that
innovations created under his aegis at Microsoft Research aren’t
squelched because they threaten the revenue streams of existing
businesses. In an email, Cherry said “the real problem is bringing the
innovation to market. It can be argued that many Microsoft innovations
may fail in the market because the company is overly concerned with
minimizing any negative impact innovation might have on the market for
the Windows OS or the Office productivity suite.”
With things heating up in this space, we would not be surprised if
Marketo gets acquired by some company like Salesforce before the ink
dries on Oracle’s Eloqua acquisition.
At CloudBeat, VentureBeat’s recent customer-focused cloud conference,
I caught up with Sanjay Poonen, president and corporate officer at SAP,
who specializes in technology and product innovation. That afternoon,
Poonen was joined on stage by one of the company’s biggest healthcare
customers McKesson to discuss ongoing concerns about the cloud and their
reasons for selecting SAP.
President for Global Solutions at SAP AG, Sanjay Poonen, discusses
cloud expansion and mobile reach. He speaks with Cory Johnson on
Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West.”
“Shai Agassi is a smart man, and I like him and his idea. But
building and operating a company are different things, which require
different skills,” Israel Corporation controlling shareholder Idan Ofer
told China’s “Southern Weekly”, in his first public comments since
firing Better Place’s founder and CEO. “It is ordinary for a founder to
leave management in Israel, and Shai Agassi still owns 10% of Better
Place,” Ofer, who serves as chairman of the electric car company, added.
[Read his comments about Steve Jobs' fair business dealings and honesty ... -DBM]
ORACLE will start to feel the HANA effect
This year, replacements of ORACLE databases with SAP HANA were
immaterial at the scale of ORACLE’s database business. Their strong PR
reactions indicated though, how worried they seem to be. In 2013, they
should feel HANA in the sense that they will have to fight harder, be
more aggressive with discounts and maintenance concessions, as their
customers will bring the HANA card to the negotiation table. Not a lot
of this will make it to the public, but their PR could continue to be a
good indicator.
For the problems that Java has and the security issues that surround
the software, Oracle doesn’t provide nearly enough updates — according
to Sophos, security patches are released only three times a year. The
security updates include the option of disabling the Java web plugin,
which eliminates a lot of the security risks found with Java, and
allowing the user to set security levels.
However good the security updates are, Java is still going to be one
of the primary targets for bad guys, as PC Advisor explained:
That’s because hackers know many people do not keep the Java plug-in
for browsers up to date, leaving old flaws open to exploitation. This
has resulted in a high success rate for attackers. In 2011, an exploit
integrated into the Blackhole toolkit, a hacker favorite, had more than
an 80 percent success rate, according to HP’s security research
division.
You can add the new security updates, but habits aren’t going to change. The bulk of computer users are going to continue
Here’s the list of the first six stores planned by the company in 2013.
The Shops at La Cantera, San Antonio, Texas
Dadeland Mall, Miami, Fla.
Beachwood Place, Beachwood, Ohio
Westfield San Francisco Centre, San Francisco
City Creek Center, Salt Lake City
St. Louis Galleria, St. Louis
Microsoft says it opened 51 stores in 2012, but those included
specialty “popup” stores that were opened for the holidays with a
limited selection of products. Those specialty stores will stay open
into the new year, and in some cases Microsoft is turning them into
permanent full-line retail locations. (The Miami, San Francisco, St.
Louis and Salt Lake City stores above are examples.)
In the last year Google has scored an impressive string of wins,
including at the Swiss drug maker Hoffmann-La Roche, where over 80,000
employees use the package, and at the Interior Department, where 90,000
use it.
One big reason is price. Google charges $50 a year for each person
using its product, a price that has not changed since it made its
commercial debut, even though Google has added features. In 2012, for
example, Google added the ability to work on a computer not connected to
the Internet, as well as security and data management that comply with
more stringent European standards. That made it much easier to sell the
product to multinationals and companies in Europe.
The fact that Microsoft is making these ads at all, though, shows
just how nervous the company is about Google encroaching on its
territory.
Many people want to engage with the Enterprise Irregulars. Here is
the complete membership list, with Twitter names, so you can converse
and share.
Other websites, such as software company Heroku Inc. and social media
app Scope, also reported via Twitter service problems of their own that
were traced to Amazon operations. Scope Chief Executive Amit Kumar said
his engineers devised a way to bypass AWS and restore service. Heroku
couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
The update will feature a large number of enhancements to Chatter,
Salesforce.com’s social collaboration and messaging service, covering
areas such as search, content previewing and general usability.
“The improvements to Chatter are much needed,” said analyst Ray Wang,
CEO of Constellation Research. “The toughest challenge with products
like Chatter and other enterprise social networks is avoiding the social
feed deluge. It’s like being buried by email.”
Another new feature for Salesforce.com will allow salespeople to run forecasts by quarters, according to the notes.
“You can forecast up to 12 months or eight quarters in the future or
past.” Users will also be able to run forecasts using partner
opportunity data.
“Forecasts and partner forecasting helps improve the ability to
handle indirect sales,” Wang said. “This joint forecasting should help
improve coordination and quota assignment.”
Analytics are also getting an update in the Spring ’13, with the ability to now view dashbo
Viewing Your Salesforce World in Microsoft® Outlook®
Available in: Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions
User Permissions Needed
To display the Salesforce Side Panel in Outlook: “Side Panel”
“Email to Salesforce”
AND
“Add Email”
To add Outlook emails to Salesforce:
“Always save email attachments” in your Email to Salesforce
settings
To add email attachments to Salesforce:
When your users select emails in Outlook, they can view contact and lead details in the new Salesforce Side Panel, which is
now generally available. This side panel displays up to a total of four contacts and leads from the From, To, and Cc fields in
your users’ emails.
In addition, your users can:
• See up to a total of four open and past activities and opportunities related to the contacts and leads that appear in the
side panel.
• Manually add emails to either one contact and one account or opportunity, or one lead only.
• See whether Salesforce encounters duplicate contacts or leads, and choose the most ap
Craig Mundie, one of two Microsoft Corp. executives who took over
Bill Gates’ role at the company, has relinquished control of Microsoft’s
large research organization and is to retire from the company in 2014.
Mundie is taking on a new role as a senior adviser to Chief Executive
Steve Ballmer, according to a memo circulated internally this month and
made public Monday.
Eric Rudder, another Microsoft veteran, is taking on responsibility
for Microsoft Research, Trustworthy Computing, and the Technology Policy
Group, which were all run by Mundie.
“Despite the many critics who have forecast our demise, we are
strong, we are excited and we are in a position to demonstrate the next
stage of mobile computing. It’s a great time to be with BlackBerry.”
Microsoft’s Azure Accelerator is back for more — bigger and better
than before. “Bigger,” in the sense that it will be hosting 13 start-ups
working on the Next Big Thing instead of the eleven it hosted in the
first round. And “better,” because the experience garnered in the first
round has made Microsoft Israel smarter about how to help direct, guide,
and develop the raw talent ensconced within Azure’s Herzliya
facilities, said Tzachi (Tzahi (Zack)), Microsoft Israel’s director of
business development.
“Over 300 companies, consisting of 1,000 entrepreneurs, applied to
enter the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure, but we could only
accept 13,” said Weisfeld. Based on the results of the first group,
which began its four-month participation in the first accelerator group
last March, the chosen few have a busy — and enriching — future to look
forward to, with the new program running from December through March.
Workday had the only software that could meet its needs affordably.
Seeking bids would have been a waste of time and money, she said.
Lombard wrote in his letter that the new payroll system was tested on
1,300 employees this year and failed. Some paychecks were issued to the
wrong employees or for the wrong amounts.
Testing began in June, Lombard wrote, and since then “every pay cycle
has experienced problems” despite SAP’s repeated assurances that
improvements were being made. A second trial run, set for September, has
been delayed until at least March.
SAP failed to meet nine of its 44 deadlines in the first eight months
of this year, says the 37-page letter. Lombard demanded that SAP fix
all of the problems identified by the state, including replacing
inexperienced project managers and staff.
“The project … is foundering and is in danger of collapsing,”
administrator Jim Lombard wrote to the contractor, SAP Public Services,
back in the month of October. Lombard said the new system is not capable
of processing “any portion of the state payroll population, let alone
the full population of approximately 240,000 employees.”
Andy Kendzie, a spokesman for SAP, said that the company has been meeting its obligations from the contract with the state.
“Considering the project’s complexity, and the many requirements
involved in payroll processing, there have been some challenges,”
Kendzie said in a statement. “Despite these, SAP remains committed to
the overall success of the project.”
“The anticipated migration of core systems and critical
infrastructure to cloud in the next two years will be complex
undertakings; users will be requiring if not demanding strategic
direction and guidance from providers across a broad range of areas,”
said Tom Lamoureux, Global Advisory Leader, KPMG Technology sector. “The
lines are blurring across the various types of cloud services; users
need and want to understand cloud’s value and immense power much better
than they do.”
Big patent disputes will be as common in 2013 as they were in 2012,
Newman said. “There is really no end in sight,” he said, adding that
there is always going to be a huge amount of innovation in the mobile
industry, and people will keep wanting patent these innovations to
protect them, he said.
The technology sector looks to be in fine shape with the news from
Oracle. In fact, it could be said that Oracle’s health bodes well for
the entire economy. Oracle sells products to businesses that are clearly
spending beyond what it had forecast. Despite the good news, caution is
warranted based on valuation. Analysts expect the company to grow
profits by 10% from the current fiscal year ending May 31, 2013, to the
next.
At current prices, shares trade for 13 times current fiscal year
estimated earnings. There was no indication in the results that current
estimates are too low; thus the gains in Oracle shares after the news
may be of the celebratory sort. Investors tend to bid up shares on
positive operating results. I would use the gains as an opportunity to
take some money off the table here.
Action:
Consider buying Put options on Oracle after the impressive gains for a
one-month trade. Shares are likely to drift lower after the euphoria of
the earnings news fades.
I am questioning whether Oracle’s sales organization — fluent in the
language of IT — can learn the “Eloquese” spoken by marketers and other
business people.
And as I see it, marketing speak is a completely different language
because it describes a unique set of concerns and world views. I imagine
Oracle’s sales folks — with their blue shirts and chinos — suddenly
plunked down in an exotic land of color and spice. Where the Eloquese
speak of beauty, Oracle’s minions talk of middleware. It’s like mixing
oil and water. Or as Strother Martin so famously put it in Cool Hand
Luke: “What we’ve got here, is failure to communicate.”
It’s a fundamental difference that has its roots in Oracle’s
acquisition strategy and has become ingrained in its 18-month sales
cycle, famous hostility to customers, and addiction to support fees.
Here’s what I mean: Back in 2003, Larry Ellison looked at Oracle’s sales
and decided his company was too much of a one-trick company, with its
reliance on database sof
Create a Cloud Decision Framework to keep technology evaluations and
investments aligned with business strategies. Business and application
assessments and the vendor selection process need to take into account
application requirements, role of external cloud resources, and how the
RFI will be structured. These process areas will vary by type of company
– yet concentrating in application requirements goes a long way to
reducing confusion and forcing trade-offs in the middle of a review
cycle. The following is an example of a Cloud Decision Framework:
Salesforce.com will move further into ERP: Even as it reformed its
image from a cloud CRM (customer relationship management) software
vendor into a full-blown platform player and moved into new application
categories, Salesforce.com has yet to make an aggressive push into ERP
(enterprise resource planning) software on its own, preferring instead
to work with partners such as Workday and Infor.
Salesforce.com has taken one small step in the direction of ERP with
the introduction of Work.com, a human resources application for managing
employee performance. But Work.com can easily be added to the edges of a
customer’s software landscape, versus supplanting a rival product.
While it’s not clear Salesforce.com will either develop a robust ERP
suite on its own or acquire a vendor who already has one, in 2013 expect
to see the company make some type of move, even if it’s just a
strengthening of partner relations. ERP simply takes up too much of the
IT budget pie, and Salesforce.com will wan
Sacks – who was earlier chief operating officer at PayPal – is going
to have to be careful about talking business in the yard. His new
neighbors include Microsoft nemesis Larry Ellison.
But perhaps he can carpool when he needs to check in at Microsoft.
Sacks’ house is right next to a $16 million pad acquired in August by
Zynga founder Mark Pincus, who periodically flies to Seattle to visit
his company’s engineering office in Pioneer Square. Pincus bought the
gray Dutch Colonial at right in the Trulia picture above.
Work.com is a social performance management platform that evolved
from a Salesforce.com application previously known as Rypple. When
Work.com was announced in September 2012, CMSWire reported that the
release would focus in three areas:
Alignment: Brings a fragmented workforce together and aligns all
work efforts in a single direction. With Work.com, teams will be managed
in real-time social through ongoing feedback and coaching. Social goals
will also be visible in Chatter, providing transparency across the
entire enterprise.
Motivation: This enables enterprises to acknowledge the work people are
doing on a daily basis. Workers can recognize the efforts of colleagues
using custom badges. The badges become part of their profile, enabling
workers to build up public reputations and identify themselves as
experts.
Performance: Work.com will enable performance reviews based on real work
done rather than assessments by people who are unaware of how an
employee is actually doing
Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) agreed to lease an entire San Francisco
building that’s scheduled to break ground next month in what would be
the first new office high- rise development in the city since 2008.
The deal comprises about 450,000 square feet at Kilroy Realty Corp.’s
planned 350 Mission St. tower in the South of Market neighborhood and
is the city’s largest office lease this year, San Francisco Mayor Edwin
M. Lee said today in a statement. The building is scheduled to break
ground in January, with the company expected to begin occupancy in 2015,
the mayor said.
How does Oracle plan to maintain Eloqua’s domain
expertise after the closing?
The goal of the combination is to retain Eloqua’s domain expertise,
given their solutions complement Oracle’s offerings. Eloqua brings
significant knowledge and capabilities in the area of modern
marketing automation that are focused on the customer buying
experience. Eloqua’s management team and employees are expected
to join Oracle after the transaction closes and continue their focus
facilitating excellence in marketing.
•Creates a comprehensive Customer Experience Cloud that transforms
how customers buy products and services and how organizations market,
sell, service and support them
•Oracle offers best-in-class Sales, Commerce, Service, Content, and Social Clouds
•Eloqua’s modern marketing platform will become the centerpiece of the Oracle Marketing Cloud
•Augmented with Oracle technologies including Analytics and Big Data
•Together, Oracle and Eloqua will deliver exceptional customer experiences that:
•Create brand loyalty and advocacy for a customer’s products and services
•Drive broader purchases and repeat business
•Increase revenue growth by better targeting and more efficient and lower cost selling
•Eloqua’s management team and employees are expected to join Oracle and
continue their focus facilitating excellence in marketing
Where Ryyple was mostly a gamified recognition app, with badges
handed out as rewards, Work.com has been bolstered with private
manager-employee coaching workspaces and a goal-and-reward system that
can be tied to Amazon gift cards.
The Work.com makeover was announced at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce
event in September, and the debut was promised for Q4. The app is
technically still in preview release, but on Tuesday Salesforce.com
announced in a blog that the integration with the Sales Cloud is ready.
Customers need only contact the company to have the functionality turned
on. The formal general release is expected in early 2013.
Oracle today announced that it has entered into an agreement to
acquire Eloqua, Inc. (NASDAQ: ELOQ), a leading provider of cloud-based
marketing automation and revenue performance management software for
$23.50 per share or approximately $871 million, net of Eloqua’s cash.
Eloqua’s modern marketing cloud delivers best-in-class capabilities to
ensure every component of marketing works harder and more efficiently to
drive revenue.
The combination of Oracle and Eloqua is expected to create a
comprehensive Customer Experience Cloud offering to help companies
transform the way they market, sell, support and serve their customers.
The combined offering is expected to enable organizations to provide a
highly personalized and unified experience across channels, create brand
loyalty through social and online interactions, grow revenue by driving
more qualified leads to sales teams, and provide superior service at
every touchpoint.
Oracle has agreed to acquire Eloqua, a SaaS company that describes
itself as a “provider of cloud-based marketing automation and revenue
performance management software” for B2B marketers. The 13-year-old,
Toronto-based company was acquired for $23.50 per share, or
approximately $871 million.
Oracle is planning to use Eloqua’s assets to build out its
multi-channel customer service and lead generation products, Oracle
indicated in a press statement.
The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of next year
pending regulatory and Eloqua stockholder approval. Eloqua’s board of
directors has already greenlighted the deal.
Adds Leading Modern Marketing Platform to the Oracle Cloud to Help Companies Deliver Exceptional Customer Experiences
2012 – A year full of innovations in cloud, mobile, applications,
analytics, technology and database are helping to fuel growth while SAP
has refocused on the values that have shaped the company 40 years ago.
SAP takes a leap in 2012 with its goal to make the world run better!
Moving a large bank from its existing 20 or 30-year old legacy system
to a new core banking platform is often compared to changing engines on
an airliner flying at 30,000 feet. Volunteer mechanics have been rare.
Add SAP package (aka engine) licensing metrics and the now infamous
‘indirect access’ licensing requirements multiplied across
organizations, with hundreds of authorization roles, thousands of users
and multiple SAP systems, and this undertaking becomes enormous.
AWS, the dominant cloud player, is an overwhelming favorite among
developers, but it’s good to see Windows Azure showing momentum. Of
interest is the lacking presence of OpenStack deployments, with
Rackspace as the exception. It is still early days for services that use
OpenStack and Cloudstack, the Citrix-led open cloud effort operating as
an Apache Software Foundation project.
The integration of Yammer and Microsoft Dynamics CRM is along the
lines of the combination of salesforce.com’s CRM and human capital
management (HCM, i.e., Work.com) solutions with Salesforce Chatter, SAP
Jam and its CRM/HCM/PLM, and Oracle Social Network (OSN) plus Oracle
Fusion CRM and Fusion HCM. But, Microsoft Dynamics CRM comes with the
advantage of being integrated to both Lync and Skype for unified
communications (UC), Lync being the recommendation for intra-enterprise
(federated) scenarios and Skype the recommendation for any kind of
communication (external, consumer, etc.).
Bob Stutz, the new corporate vice president of Microsoft Dynamics
CRM, who was previously at Siebel, pointed out that regardless of the
“social CRM” trend, the general CRM purpose remains to acquire the right
customers, retain the right customers, and grow the share of wallet
(SOW) from existing customers. To that end, Microsoft is enhancing all
the CRM realms: sales force automation (SFA), marketing autom
For the struggling Canadian company, it’s basically now or never.
Google Inc agreed to sell set-top TV box maker Motorola Home to Arris
Group Inc for $2.35 billion in cash and stock, the companies said on
Wednesday.
In redacted post-trial filings made public on Monday — essentially
its final arguments before the judge — Microsoft argued that it should
pay no more than $502,000 per year for Motorola’s H.264 video
compression patent, and no more than $736,000 per year for Motorola’s
802.11 Wi-Fi technology.
Motorola — acquired by Google earlier this year, partly for its
valuable patent portfolio — submitted a far larger valuation. In its
filing, also made public in redacted form on Monday, Motorola said it
was due payment of 2.25 percent of
the selling price of Microsoft products such as the Xbox and Windows 7 operating system that use the patents in question.
Motorola argued that a fair cross-licensing deal would result in net
payments to Motorola which it would be willing to cap somewhere between
$100 million and $125 million per year, solely for the H.264 patent
portfolio.
Patent aggregators sift through the issued patents with an expert
eye, and provide efficient access to the long tail of patents. When tens
of thousands of patents touch a product, hundreds of inventors spread
around the globe deserve to be paid. But in the race to market, product
companies often ignore the long tail; small inventors have very little
power to do anything about this unless they can enlist the help of
patent aggregators.
On Monday, the judge denied Samsung’s request for a retrial seeking
to reduce the US$1.05 billion in damages a jury had awarded Apple in
August for infringement of some of its patents.
Koh also ruled against Apple’s motion for a permanent injunction on some Samsung products that infringed its patents.
The how is a little tricky, but the what – $1 billion in tax dollars
shot to hell – pretty much points to the usual combination of bad
planning, scope creep, cost-overruns, and other classic mistakes that
you’d think would be avoidable in the 21st century.
Indeed, it’s obvious that this was a typical big bang project gone sour… But with a twist.
The twist can be found in the following statement, made in September,
2006 when the award was made: “As a result of this selection, CSC will
use processes within the Oracle 11i product suite to support all
logistics functions including product lifecycle management, advanced
planning and scheduling, repair and maintenance, and distribution and
transportation. The integrated suite (my emphasis) will replace more
than 400 legacy systems.”
But this time, Gary L. Reback and Susan A. Creighton are on opposite sides, Steve Lohr reports on Monday in The New York Times.
The two lawyers, and the positions they have taken, point to some
striking similarities yet also significant differences between the two
high-stakes investigations — and why the pursuit of Google has proved
challenging for antitrust officials.
In 1996, Mr. Reback and Ms. Creighton were partners, representing
Netscape, the pioneering Web browser company. They wrote a 222-page
“white paper,” laying out Microsoft’s campaign to use its dominance of
personal computer software to stifle competition from Netscape, the
Internet insurgent. After Netscape sent the report to the Justice
Department, the head of the antitrust division ordered an investigation.
The company reported a 3% increase in revenue reaching $9.1 billion –
exceeding Street estimates by $900 million. Software licenses and
subscriptions business performed exceptionally well – soaring 17%
year-over-year. This was good enough to exceed management’s most bullish
projections three months ago.
It’s not clear, however, whether those two actions would address a
key issue: Google favoring its own solutions in its search results —
such as content featured in Google+, its social network.
For example, Yelp has been one of the most prominent opponents of
Google, with Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman saying last year that “Google
has acted anti-competitively in at least two key ways: by misusing Yelp
review content in their competing Places product and by favoring their
own competing Places product in search results.”
That’s also a concern of the European Union, which has investigated
similar issues in the travel space, where Expedia and TripAdvisor have
complained about anti-competitive behavior by Google in flight and
travel search results.
Oracle NoSQL Database Release 2.0 include auto-rebalancing,
manageability and application programming interface (API) upgrades that
address practical deployment and administrative concerns. The
auto-rebalancing feature dynamically manages compute and storage
capacity to maintain service levels even as processing demands fluctuate
as the scale and throughput of data and the number of users varies…
On the development front, Oracle has added a C-based API for those
who prefer that language over the existing Java API. A new Large Object
API is aimed at handling images, documents and other large objects. An
automatic serialization API takes advantage of support for Apache Avro
in Release 2.0. A remote procedure call for data serialization, Avro
lets you define a schema (using JSON) for the data contained in a
record’s value. This compact, schema-based data format also eases
integration with Hadoop.
“Folks wanted to spend their budgets, continue to want to spend their
budgets. We are having an absolutely wonderful December so far. What’s
going on in Washington, I don’t know who it’s necessarily influencing
today. But I can tell you, our customers have been spending money with
us even here in December.”
That quote came from Oracle CFO Safra Catz on the company’s earnings
conference call on Tuesday. Catz’s take—and Oracle’s quarter—may be a
good indicator that IT spending is showing some strength in what looked
to be a challenging fourth quarter.
“Calendar 2013 is promising for Oracle thanks to a strong product
cycle, market share gains, and healthy secular trends for cloud spend,”
FBR Capital Markets analysts said.
[If wishes were wings... -DBM]
As usual, Oracle’s hardware sales plummeted during the quarter, down
16% to $1.3 billion. The company has said in the past that this decline
reflects the fact that it is not interested in selling low-margin
commodity servers from its acquired Sun Microsystems business.
Oracle said that sales of its ‘engineered systems’, such as Exadata
and Exalogic, saw 70% quarter-to-quarter growth in bookings. “We sold
more than 700 engineered systems this quarter, including Exadata wins at
China Mobile, Facebook, Samsung, Time Warner Cable; and great Exalogic
wins at Chevron, Vodafone and Wal-Mart,” said co-president Mark Hurd.
Ellison defended the company’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. “Sun
has proven to be one of the most strategic and profitable acquisitions
we have ever made,” Ellison said. “Sun technology enabled Oracle to
become a leader in the highly profitable engineered system segment of
the hardware business.”
The stock jumped 4% Wednesday after the software giant reported that
quarterly earnings grew 23% compared with the prior year. The problem is
that the peppy bottom line figure isn’t the result of a robust top
line—sales increased just 3% from the prior year. Instead, like its big
tech brethren, Oracle is relying on nonoperational items to boost
earnings per share.
First there was the impact of a lower tax rate, which fell to 21%
from 26% a year ago. Also, stock buybacks have reduced Oracle’s share
count 5% over the past year. Last, a footnote to the income statement
disclosed a $145 million benefit from an acquisition. Backing out the
effects of financial engineering and that one-time benefit leaves
Oracle’s earnings per share in the quarter at 45 cents instead of 53
cents, representing far more modest growth of 6% from the prior year.
New and enhanced features in Oracle NoSQL Database 2.0 include:
Better Performance: enterprise-class elasticity with near linear
scalability and under five millisecond latency enables users to
dynamically grow a cluster as their data grows with no interruption in
service. In recent performance tests, Oracle NoSQL Database 2.0
delivered more than a million YCSB operations per second on a 2.4
terabyte database on an 18-node commodity cluster setup. (1)
Automatic Rebalancing: dynamic management of compute and storage
resources to maintain SLAs in response to increased demand and changing
processing requirements;
Enhanced Manageability: a simple, easy to use web console to manage all
aspects of deployment and monitoring, as well as document management and
structured data management in one product;
New APIs: a new C API helps improve developer productivity, a new Large
Object API supports efficient Large Object management, and new automatic
serialization APIs simplify application developmen
To give you examples, we’re beating them in North America, and we’re
almost shutting them out in Europe. So it’s very, very exciting. We’re
also — we also are getting good wins against salesforce with our Fusion
Sales automation product. Mark?
[Examples? -DBM]
French Waterways has standardized on Informatica MDM, an integral
component of the Informatica Platform to consolidate data and maximize
the return on data. In time, more than 3,000 users will have access to
accurate, trusted reference data for accelerated, streamlined
decision-making surrounding Europe’s largest network of inland
waterways.
– French Waterways is responsible for the management, operation,
modernization and development of three areas of operation: Waterways
(6,700 kilometers of navigable waterways and a 40,000 hectare property),
Structural Services (4,000 permanent structures, such as bridges, dams
and locks) and Real Estate (including, for example 1,600 lock houses.)
Life insurer turns to Informatica to help shore up there customer
experience infrastructure with improved master data management,
enterprise data integration and data quality.
Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) today announced that fiscal 2013 Q2
total revenues were up 3% to $9.1 billion. New software licenses and
cloud software subscriptions revenues were up 17% to $2.4 billion.
Software license updates and product support revenues were up 7% to $4.3
billion. Hardware systems products revenues were $734 million. GAAP
operating income was up 12% to $3.5 billion, and GAAP operating margin
was 38%. Non-GAAP operating income was up 9% to $4.3 billion, and
non-GAAP operating margin was 47%. GAAP net income was up 18% to $2.6
billion, while non-GAAP net income was up 12% to $3.1 billion. GAAP
earnings per share were $0.53, up 24% compared to last year while
non-GAAP earnings per share were up 18% to $0.64. GAAP operating cash
flow on a trailing twelve-month basis was $13.5 billion.
Without the impact of the US dollar strengthening compared to foreign
currencies, Oracle’s reported Q2 GAAP earnings per share would have
been $0.01 higher at $0.54, up 26%, and Q2 non
Sun has proven to be one of the most strategic and profitable
acquisitions we have ever made. Sun technology enabled Oracle to become a
leader in the highly profitable engineered system segment of the
hardware business. I believe that products like Exadata and the SPARC
SuperCluster will not only continue to drive improved profitability in
our hardware business, by the end of this fiscal year, they will also
drive growth in our hardware business.
Oracle Corp. said it earned $2.6 billion, or 53 cents per share, in
its fiscal second quarter. That compares with net income of $2.2
billion, or 43 cents per share, a year ago.
If not for charges for past acquisitions and certain other costs,
Oracle said it would have earned 64 cents per share. On that basis,
Oracle topped the average earnings estimate of 61 cents per share among
analysts surveyed by FactSet.
Revenue increased 3 percent from last year to $9.1 billion — about $900 million more than analysts had projected.
Others see troubling signs for Oracle’s business, however.
In a recent report. Jefferies analyst Ross MacMillan noted that while
Oracle’s database business “is doing OK,” he hears some of Oracle’s
potential customers may be looking elsewhere for less-expensive
alternatives.
In another report, tech analyst Rob Enderle said some businesses may
be lured away from Oracle by EMC and IBM, which have been introducing
products “to displace both Oracle hardware and software.”
Before Oracle reported its earnings, it stock price rose 56 cents, or
nearly 2 percent, to close at $32.88 in regular trading. Immediately
following the announcement, it went up another 32 cents in after-hours
trades to $33.20.
Buckle up, CIOs, because money is flowing again in enterprise, with
20-something CEOs soon to be pounding at your door, trying to get you to
try the cloud product that will “revolutionize your enterprise.” The
other half, as we shall see, will try to bypass you entirely.
Check out how SaaS growth stacks up against traditional software
companies, IT distribution companies and IT service specialists in the
chart below.
Based on surveys for corporate technology spending plans for next
year, Murphy now believes Informatica’s business has stabilized and
suspects the company’s revenue could grow slightly faster than
investors’ now-subdued expectations. The average forecast among analysts
polled by FactSet currently calls for Informatica’s 2013 revenue to
increase by 9 percent to $867 million.
Check out the infographic below for all the latest (and exciting)
stats about how women are making strides in the technology field—and why
we need to make sure this trend keeps on going.
Creating customer satisfaction involves a complex chain that includes
product design, manufacturing, marketing, selling, and service. In this
case, three parts of the chain broke down, creating a highly negative
customer experience.
By providing effective management of customer information, Empire
Life is better positioned to deliver on its focus to become a
customer-centric organization that is able to work with its distribution
partners to deliver value-added products and services to customers
throughout their life stages.
The various components of the Informatica Platform will enable Empire
Life to increase the value of its data by ensuring that the information
available to its hundreds of business users is:
Holistic and timely – Informatica PowerCenter Advanced Edition for
enterprise data integration is being implemented to integrate data
across Empire Life back-office systems, CRM systems, call center
technologies and collaborative applications. PowerCenter also delivers
data at virtually any speed, from real-time to batch, to drive
knowledge-based product and marketing decisions and customer
interactions.
Authoritative – Informatica MDM (Master Data Management) for multi-domain master data managemen
It’s no secret a lot of people have been downloading Google Maps for
iOS since the software came out last week, and today Google released the
full numbers.
In its first two days on the App Store, the software was downloaded
more than 10 million times, Jeff Huber, Google’s senior vice president
of Commerce & Local, wrote in a post on Google+ this morning.
Where IT Spending Increases Will Go
• Applications (49%)
• Infrastructure (47%)
• Outsourcing (32%)
Fast PaaS is an important part of Dell’s cloud story. It fits with
the company’s various acquisitions, such as Clarity, as well as
homegrown projects like Project Sputnik:
Clarity offers a container for integrated developer environments
(IDE). An old-school legacy app can be placed in Clarity and delivered
in a container to Fast PaaS. Dell has a reseller relationship with
Salesforce.com so the old-shoool software becomes a new world SaaS.
Project Sputniok is the Liniux laptop for developers that Dell created
with the help of the developer community. It can be configured directly
to the PaaS so developers can use it easily with the other profiles they
create. Ironically, it is the inverse of the solution strategy. The VM
gets all dressed up and the laptop is the blank slate.
Google Inc. is poised to offer voluntary concessions that will end a
20-month U.S. antitrust probe of its business practices without any
enforcement action being taken, two people familiar with the matter
said.
If your kid can score a job at Salesforce.com, tell her/him to take
it – by all accounts it’s a great place to work; and if the company’s
larger-than-life CEO Marc Benioff (he stands 6-foot-5 and weighs in at
about 300 pounds, we’ve read) invites you to a party, do go – it’ll
probably be a humdinger. As is this stock chart, with Salesforce.com
shares up 55% YTD.
Oh, and this: isn’t it sweet the way American companies
(Salesforce.com among them) love to talk about non-GAAP results? Fish
that got away. Putts that rimmed out. Girls we almost dated in college.
It’s fun imagining what might have been. And if you can get your
compensation aligned with non-GAAP results, stripping out the stuff that
makes business so damned hard these days, as Benioff has in part, well,
that’s really great.
The actual archival feature works a lot like Facebook’s, in that you
first have to submit a request to Twitter for your entire archive.
Twitter processes all of your tweets on its side and emails you a
download link when your archive is ready. Download it, and you’ll get a
handy little HTML file of all of the tweets you’ve ever made, organized
in an easily accessible calendar format.
Unavailability of management, auxiliary or administration services, including administration tools,
reporting services, utilities, or other services supporting core transaction processing.
[So, if reporting is down, or you can't administer the environment, that doesn't count ... -DBM]
Due to potential adverse impact on service performance and availability, Customer may not use its own
monitoring or testing tools…to directly or indirectly seek to measure
the availability, performance, or security of any application or feature
of or service component within the services or environment.
[So, if Oracle says it, you can't challenge it ... -DBM]
The scheduled service period for core system maintenance requiring service interruption is on the 1 and 3
Friday of the month and will be scheduled by Oracle between 21:00-06:00 data center local time.
[So, Oracle can take the entire system down for 9 hours twice per
month and that doesn't even count as one second of down time ... -DBM]
“The new leadership has now been in place longer than my 11-month
tenure. But it’s clear that HP still is in search of the right path
forward.”
Clearly, Apotheker doesn’t like getting all the blame for the deal.
Lane was certainly at the table, and lent his support for it. And, for
that matter, so was Whitman.
Consider yourself reminded.
But customers should be mindful of other policies, such as one that
allows Oracle to turn off access to accounts in the event of a dispute
or account violation. “Customers may want to get clarity on the type of
incidents that would result in a temporary turn-off of service,” Wang
said. “Unlike on-premises software, this is a potential concern, so the
process and triggers should be carefully outlined.”
But another analyst took a more critical view of Oracle’s cloud policies.
Oracle’s pledge of 99.5 percent availability “sounds pretty good,
until you understand that it is only measured against planned
availability,” said analyst Frank Scavo, president of IT consulting firm
Strativa. Oracle grants itself a number of exceptions with respect to
“unplanned downtime,” some of which seem overly generous, Scavo noted.
For example, one gives Oracle an exception in the event of the
“unavailability of management, auxiliary or administration services,
including administration tools, reporting se
Prominent futurist and author Ray Kurzweil has accepted a position as
director of engineering at Google, where he plans to work on technology
developments in language processing, machine learning, and other areas.
Mark Penn made a name for himself in Washington by bulldozing enemies
of the Clintons. Now he spends his days trying to do the same to
Google, on behalf of its archrival Microsoft.
“For the same compelling reasons that the court sealed this evidence
for purposes of trial, it would be consistent and appropriate to take
the same approach in connection with the parties’ post-trial
submissions,” the two companies argued in the court filing.
The judge has so far been understanding of the companies’ desire to
keep private details of their patent royalties and future plans,
although that has perplexed some spectators who believe trials in public
courts should be fully open to the public.
SAP launched the Social Sabbatical program, a corporate social
responsibility effort through which high-potential employees spend three
weeks embedded with entrepreneurial companies in Brazil, India and
South Africa helping them solve business challenges.
The program was created to give employees leadership opportunities
while making a tangible social impact, says Brittany Lothe, SAP’s head
of corporate social responsibility. But it also created a unique group
of public ambassadors for the SAP brand.
RBC Capital Markets, which on Thursday initiated coverage of three
firms in those fields — Teradata (TDC), Informatica (INFA) and Tibco
Software (TIBX) — with outperform ratings.
The long calls are looking for INFA to gain roughly 15 percent by
mid-March. Traders could sell those contracts earlier if their premiums
gain with a rally before then, but the calls will expire worthless if
the shares don’t move
Why the dour outlook? Milunovich cited a few reasons.
Supply chain checks show that the manufacturing rate for the iPhone
is dropping to 25 million units for the March quarter. The iPhone 5 is
just now starting to sell in China, but UBS’s Chinese sources don’t
think it will sell as well as the iPhone 4S.
The lower-priced iPad Mini looks to be cannibalizing sales of the larger and more expensive iPad.
And finally, the analyst believes his previous estimates were too
aggressive in light of the lackluster economy in Europe and rougher
competition from other smartphones.
U.S. and dozens of other attendees refused to sign it due to the inclusion of Internet-related provisions.
As reported by the AFP, 89 countries signed the treaty, while 55 – including the U.S. – declined.
When Windows was first created 25 years ago, the assumptions about
the world and what computing could do and how people were going to use
it were completely different. It was at a desk, with a monitor. Before
Windows 8 the goal was to launch into a window, and then you put that
window away and you got another one. But with Windows 8, all the
different things that you might want to do are there at a glance with
the Live Tiles. Instead of having to find many little rocks to look
underneath, you see a kind of dashboard of everything that’s going on
and everything you care about all at once. It puts you closer to what
you’re trying to get done.
Windows 8 is clearly designed with touch in mind, and many new Windows 8 PCs have touch screens. Why is touch so important?
It’s a very natural way to interact. If you get a laptop with a touch
screen, your brain clicks in and you just start touching what makes it
faster for you. You’ll use the mouse and keyboard, but even on the
regular desktop y
“Instead of having to find many little rocks to look underneath, you
see a kind of dashboard of everything that’s going on and everything you
care about all at once,” Larson-Green said. “It puts you closer to what
you’re trying to get done.”
Who gets your vote as best tech CEO of 2012?. Don’t like the nominees? Then feel free to write in your favorite.
Diluted earnings per share were $0.44 on a GAAP-basis, and $0.61 on a non-GAAP basis.
Operating income was $307.8 million and net income was $222.3 million on
a GAAP basis. Operating income was $414.7 million and net income was
$307.9 million on a non-GAAP basis.
Cash flow from operations was $473.7 million.
Deferred revenue grew by $59.3 million to a record $619.6 million.
Adobe added approximately 10,000 Creative Cloud subscriptions per week
during the quarter, versus the addition of 8,000 subscriptions per week
in the third quarter.
In Document Services, which includes the Adobe Acrobat® product family,
Adobe also achieved record revenue of $210.2 million during the quarter.
Adobe Marketing Cloud achieved record quarterly revenue of $220.4 million, which represents 32 percent year-over-year growth.
Cash is more than king. Cash is blood. Every single dollar matters — so spend your money wisely.
“A CEO told me that SAP has the god-given right to do financials in
the cloud -and this is due the fact that we have the DNA to understand
how finance works and so taking this forward with Financials OnDemand
based on HANA is a natural process for us,” he sys.
SuccessFactors, which is owned by SAP, moved into the building this
week and will eventually have 440 employees deployed in the space. Roy
Ng, vice president of business operations for SuccessFactors, said the
new headquarters represented an “opportunity to embrace all that SAP and
SuccessFactors stands for and build a truly unique space that will
provide a home for collaboration, interactivity and cloud innovation.”
The new space, designed by AI and built out by Myers Development, is
“a place for our global employees and customers to visit and feel at
home and will lay down new roots for future acceleration.”
Oracle wants to make money now.
And it is making money now. Despite all the talk (including my own)
about Oracle being doomed, dooo-o-o-omed, in the cloud era, the
company’s results remain strong. The stock is up almost 35% this year,
and then there’s the 18 cent/share dividend, which will go nowhere but
up. Despite having the boat anchor of the old Sun Microsystems hardware
business stuck to it, and despite being unable to monetize that
company’s open source software, Oracle is still bringing one dollar in
four to the bottom line, and year-over-year revenues are fairly stable.
In the last week, Yahoo has redone its powerful Yahoo Mail, refreshed
its Flickr photo-sharing service and is also set to release a spanking
new homepage design.
It’s part of a series of changes made since new CEO Marissa Mayer
arrived this summer from Google, including detailed employee performance
reviews, free food, new smartphones and a hunt for innovative mobile
properties to scoop up to improve Yahoo’s creaky Silicon Valley
reputation.
Now, according to sources close to the situation, that rejiggering
will extend to Yahoo’s board too, with an effort to add more Internet
savvy members as directors.
That’s actually be an aim for a while, including a board appointment
for longtime entrepreneur Max Levchin, which sources said will occur
soon.
Google Maps appeared on Apple’s app store late Wednesday, less than
four weeks after The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was
putting the finishing touches on the app for Apple devices and was
preparing to submit it to Apple for approval.
“ITR should be a high-level document, and the scope of treaty does not extend to the Internet.”
Thursday when a former private investigator was sentenced to three months in prison for his role in the pretexting scheme.
Since it was founded, Tableau Software has raised $15 million from
New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm where Sandell is also a
general partner. So far, it has used about $1.5 million of that funding
and has had positive cash flow for three years, according to a
spokeswoman for Tableau Software.
“It’s a remarkable story, it’s a rare company,” Sandell said.
That translates to an average wage increase of less than 0.5% a year.
In real terms, IT wages overall have gone up by $1.97 an hour in just
over 10 years, according to the EPI. The Washington-based think tank
gathered data from the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of
households conducted by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor
Statistics.
Data integration software provider Informatica has introduced the new
release of its cloud-based integration and data quality application,
Informatica Cloud Winter 2013.
Powered by integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), the new release
is claimed to deliver enhanced end-user cloud integration features that
extend Informatica Cloud functionality.
Informatica Cloud Winter 2013 will also advance in cloud master data
management (MDM), address validation, deliver cloud integration platform
enhancements, offer expanded availability of Cloud Connectors and Cloud
Integration Templates on the Informatica Marketplace.
The new release introduces an upgraded cloud integration interface to
enhance end-user productivity and enable users to search for relevant
cloud integration tasks from activity logs and execute new task flows
from anywhere within the cloud integration service, the company said.
Couchbase 2.0, which adds document database capability to the leading key-value pair database.
The Microsoft report projects a labor shortage over the next eight
years by incorrectly assuming that only individuals with a bachelor’s
degree in computer science can fill jobs in computer-related
occupations. Data analyzed for this memorandum as well as other studies
show that less than one-fourth to less than one-half of workers in
computing occupations have a computer science degree.
The report and Microsoft officials say a labor shortage already
exists in computer-related occupations, citing as evidence the fact that
the present unemployment rate of workers in those occupations (3.4
percent) is less than the 4 percent unemployment rate that prevails when
the national economy is at full employment (generally understood as a 4
to 5 percent unemployment rate). But Microsoft is misleading when it
uses the 4 percent full-employment unemployment rate for all workers as
the point of reference. Data analyses suggest that for workers in
computer-related occupations—and especially
Asked if Microsoft’s best days were behind it, he said new products
such as the Windows 8 operating system showed promise. “They’re fighting
like hell,” he said. “They have tons of cash, they have really good
management.”
Andreessen, who is on the boards of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and
Facebook, said little about those companies, citing his position as a
director.
IT salaries are (surprise!) stagnant, increasing by just under $2 an
hour over 10 years, Microsoft is lobbying hard for more H-1B visas, and
now IBM, one of the industry’s largest employers, is taking millions of
dollars out of the pockets of its employees by manipulating the schedule
of 401(k) contributions.
Oracle fails to acknowledge or admit that SAP HANA is a completely
new design as opposed to a bolt-on approach. With SAP HANA, data is
completely managed and accessed in RAM consequently doing away with the
requirement of MOLAP, multiple indexes and other tuning features that
Oracle prides itself on.
Furthermore, despite what Oracle may claim, SAP HANA does indeed
handle both unstructured and structured data, as well as utilise
parallel queries for scaling out across server nodes. Oracle presumably
is trying to prevent the market from realising that the TimesTen with
Exalytics package still can’t scale out beyond the 1TB RAM limit, unlike
SAP HANA where each container can store up to 500TB of data all
executable at high speed.
With an aggressive TCO and ROI model compared to a traditional Oracle
deployment, SAP HANA also proves a lot more cost effective. With
pricing based on an incremental of 64GB RAM and the total amount of data
held in memory, licences are fully inclusive of produ
For this reason, ZDNet and I have changed the title of this blog to
Beyond IT Failures, although, in reality, the content shift happened
long ago. Read through past articles on this blog and you will see
extensive discussion of the organizational dynamics that underlie
success and failure. Recent posts included CIO leadership matters,
cloud, and other topics designed to help you achieve success. It’s an
exciting time to talk about IT and the enterprise, and the expanded blog
focus will make this column relevant, useful, and fresh.
I have also started a new website, called mkrigsman.com. Please take a look and sign up for the newsletter.
Larry Ellison gets cloud religion…
SAP admits need for ‘cloud DNA’…
SaaS moves into the back office…
Mobile becomes a must-have…
Oracle’s database dominance at risk?…
Cloud integration market matures…
ERP goes social…
ERP vendors are going all-in with the cloud. Many ERP vendors debuted
product or fleshed out their strategies for software-as-a-service
(SaaS) ERP in 2012, and further developments are set for 2013. While the
focus this year has been on SaaS ERP — and often how a SaaS offering
can live in hybrid harmony with its older sibling, on-premises ERP —
some vendors also revealed their platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) strategies. When it comes to PaaS,
ERP vendors are opening up their own development platform and/or
partnering with vendors like Amazon.com and Microsoft. Cloud-focused
acquisitions also continued in 2012, notably SAP’s purchase of
procurement rival Ariba to help fill out the suppliers pillar of its
four-pillar app cloud — the other three pillars being people (HR), money
(financials), and customers (CRM).
Oracle isn’t alone in pursuing smart meter analytics. IBM and SAP
both have initiatives underway, and both can point to customers with
deployments in place. IBM worked with Washington D.C.’s water utility as
part of its Smarter Cities initiative, and it’s working with Texas
utility Oncor as part of its Smarter Utilities program. SAP is using its
Hana database technology at U.K.-based gas and electric utility
Centrica.
[Very cool! -DBM]
What can SAP Screen Personas do for you?
Improve business user productivity by providing only the essential
screen elements and data to complete business transactions faster and
more accurately through fewer data entry fields.
Increase user satisfaction by automating repetitive tasks and
simplifying complex screens through pre-filled fields and pull-down
menus.
Reduce the cost of personalization by eliminating the need for ABAP programmers or scripting experts.
Decrease training time for SAP users.
“The chatter about enterprise startups is more a function of the fact
that consumer startups look less appealing [to investors] more than
anything else,” said CB Insights’ CEO Anand Sanwal. ”Folk are saying now
that enterprise is the place they should be playing.”
The diificultyof SAP to succinctly express its cloud strategy has
been depicted by influencers, customers and now recently SAP itself.
I’ve also emphasized that SAP’s cloud-related messaging must be
improved.
Richard Campione has joined its board of directors, effective
November 29, 2012. A 30-year technology industry veteran, Campione has
held senior executive titles at C3, Oracle, SAP and Siebel Systems and
is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on cloud
computing.
The chart shows consumer computing devices, rather than total
computing devices — which includes both consumer and commercial. That’s
why Microsoft is shown is having 93 percent in 2000 in the chart, as
opposed to 97 percent.
Microsoft’s total market share for computers including tablets and
smartphones has plummeted from 97% to 20%, and by the end of this year
its market share will be less than half of Google’s, and will trail
Apple’s. So says Goldman Sachs in a recent report.
Mr Schmidt, 57, was offered the job of Treasury or Commerce Secretary
or a new “Secretary of Business” slot, according to the Washington
Examiner.
An anonymous strategist for the Democrats told the newspaper: “Nobody’s better positioned for a Cabinet job, if he wants one.”
Mr Schmidt’s rebuttal was swift, however, as he told the Wall Street
Journal in an interview yesterday: “I said last time and I’ve said again
that Google is my home. I have no interest in working for the federal
government”.
First and foremost, you’re dumping your data onto USB drives, when
are then dropped off at UPS. No kidding — it’s too much data to upload.
“It was shopped to us as well,” he said. But he added that Dell did
not give it much consideration. “Not at that price. That was an
overwhelmingly obvious conclusion that any reasonable person could
draw.”
In remarks made at the time by Grover Dunn, the Air Force director of
transformation, we can see just how unrealistic the project was: “We’ve
never tried to change all the processes, tools and languages of all
250,000 people in our business at once, and that’s essentially what
we’re about to do.”
Signs that such comprehensive change could not, in fact, be done “at
once” were visible last spring…“I am personally appalled at the limited
capabilities that program has produced relative to that amount of
investment.”
With the cancellation of the system last month, a spokeswoman said
that the Air Force would continue to rely on its legacy logistics
systems, some of which have been in use since the 1970s.
THE Defense Department says that the way the system was conceived was
flawed. “We started with a Big Bang approach and put every possible
requirement into the program, which made it very large and very
complex,” says Elizabeth McGrath, the department’s deputy chief
management officer.
The increase in Google’s revenues routed to Bermuda, disclosed in a
Nov. 21 filing by a subsidiary in the Netherlands, could fuel the
outrage spreading across Europe and in the U.S. over corporate tax
dodging. Governments in France, the U.K., Italy and Australia are
probing Google’s tax avoidance as they seek to boost revenue during
economic doldrums.
The software initiative, called the Expeditionary Combat Support
System, was supposed to manage logistics using software from Oracle. In
2006, the Air Force announced that it had awarded a $628 million
contract to the Computer Sciences Corporation to serve as lead system
integrator; its job would be to “configure, deploy and conduct training
and change management activities” before the launch.
Many computer-related patent claims just describe an abstract idea at
a high level of generality and say to perform it on a computer or over
the Internet. Such bare-bones claims grant exclusive rights over the
abstract idea itself, with no limit on how the idea is implemented.
Granting patent protection for such claims would impair, not promote,
innovation by conferring exclusive rights on those who have not
meaningfully innovated, and thereby penalizing those that do later
innovate by blocking or taxing their applications of the abstract idea.
The following pair of quotes is pulled directly from the promotional material on the website of just one prolific patent troll:
“$2 Billion+ cumulative licensing revenue”
“70,000 IP assets acquired and nearly 40,000 in active monetisation programmes”
In fact it is not just legal, patent trolling is an industry on a
colossal scale. According to research recently published by Boston
University School of Law, last year patent trolls won a cool $29
Billion. One of the most worrying findings of research in to patent
trolls is that the mere threat of a suit is enough to put the
frighteners on and make creators pay up:
Just because you take an abstract idea and say you do it “on a
computer” or “over the Internet” doesn’t mean you deserve a patent,
according to an amicus brief filed on Friday by Google, Facebook and six
other tech companies. It asks the courts to reject lawsuits based on
patents for vague concepts instead of specific applications because they
rack up costs and retard innovation.
The amicus curiae brief lets parties outside of a case volunteer
information to help a court make a decision. Also cosigned by Zynga,
Dell, Intuit, Homeaway, Rackspace, and Red Hat, this brief communicates
information to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
regarding the case CLS vs. Alice. CLS claims that Alice’s patents for
the vague idea of financial intermediation implemented with a computer
shouldn’t be valid. However, the courts initially ruled that Alice’s
patents were eligible and could be used to counter-sue CLS for
infringement.
This website is maintained by Dr Mike Lynch on behalf of the former
management team of Autonomy. The site provides relevant information
pertaining to the accusations made by Hewlett Packard (HP) on 20
November 2012 of financial impropriety at Autonomy. The former
management team of Autonomy strongly rejects the accusations made by HP.
Click here for the press release issued by HP.
This site is designed to be a public point of contact for Dr Mike
Lynch and other former managers at Autonomy with the wider world. It
will contain information about Autonomy and any public statements made
on behalf of the former management team related to these issues.
The Autonomy team are committed to providing clear and transparent
information during this process, and would like to see the issue
resolved as quickly as possible.
If you have any questions please use the submission form on the Contact section.
Mike Lynch has created a website called autonomyaccounts.org, at
which he disputes HP’s claims that it discovered accounting
irregularities at Autonomy after it spent $11.1 billion to buy the
British company.
“We remain 100 percent committed to Autonomy’s industry- leading
technology and its employees,” Whitman said at a customer conference in
Frankfurt today. Autonomy’s technology is “incredible” and will help to
spur growth at Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard, she said,
adding that the unit is essential to the company’s progress.
Prices start at $0.04 per hour with a service level agreement (SLA)
of at least 99.95 percent — or fewer than 30 minutes downtime per month.
AWS offers an SLA of 99.95 percent per year but requires very specific
configurations to meet its bar for reimbursement. Gartner analyst Lydia
Leong has said that Amazon’s SLAs are “narrowly defined” and don’t cover
Elastic Block Storage (EBS), which most customers use.
HP’s differentiation from the start has been a relentless focus on
enterprise customers — as opposed to AWS’ passive come-one, come-all
marketing — with an accent on “converged” or “hybrid” offerings that
bridge the private and public cloud. Zorawar “Biri” Singh, senior vice
president and general manager of HP Converged Cloud and Cloud Services,
told InfoWorld that the general availability of HP Cloud Compute “now
allows enterprises to start pulling together … very robust workloads in
full production lifecycles” on HP’s IaaS cloud.
HP’s added new features to its HP CloudSystem, which allows HP
solution providers to build and manage cloud, and extended existing
programs.
For its Cloud Maps program, HP increased the number of templates by
30 percent, adding more than 200 templates to its catalogue with which
partners can add programs such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft
SharePoint to their cloud services offerings for customers.
HP CloudSystem is also offering service lifecycle management as well
as support for KVM virtual machines and bursting capability, or the
ability to tap the full computing capacity of service providers.
Amazon Web Services, which Gartner recently named a market-leader in
infrastructure as a service cloud computing, has the “dubious status of
‘worst SLA (service level agreement) of any major cloud provider’”
analyst Lydia Leong blogged today, but HP’s newly available public cloud
service could be even worse
The most significant difference between the SLAs is that the HP’s SLA
is intended to cover a single-instance failure, where you can’t replace
that single instance; AWS requires that all of your instances in at
least two AZs be unavailable. HP requires that you try to re-launch that
instance in a different AZ, but a failure of that launch attempt in any
of the other AZs in the region will be considered downtime. You do not
need to be running in two AZs all the time in order to get the SLA; for
the purposes of the SLA clause requiring two AZs, the launch attempt
into a second AZ counts.
HP begins counting downtime when, post-instance-failure, you make the
launch API call that is destined to fail — downtime begins to accrue 6
minutes after you make that unsuccessful API call. (To be clear, the
clock starts when you issue the API call, not when the call has actually
failed, from what I understand.) When the downtime clock stops is
unclear, though — it stops when the customer has managed t
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the poster-child for cloud IaaS, but the
AWS SLA also has the dubious status of “worst SLA of any major cloud
IaaS provider”. (It’s notable that, in several major outages, AWS did
voluntary givebacks — for some outages, there were no applicable SLAs.)
HP has just launched its OpenStack-based Public Cloud Compute into
general availability. HP’s SLA is unfortunately arguably even worse.
While there are plenty of platforms available for managing APIs, the
management of data transfers across applications is overly complex.
Start to scale that process across hundreds of applications and it soon
balloons beyond the scope of what the average application development
team can cope with. Add in the fact that no one knows when they might be
asked to integrate one application with another and it becomes pretty
apparent that a more systematic approach to the problem is required.
“Today we are announcing that it has been determined that the
combined company headquarters will be in Scottsdale,” JDA Software said
in an SEC filing. “While the RedPrairie Alpharetta office will no longer
be a headquarters location, the merger will not impact the company’s
commitment to maintaining a strong corporate presence and community
involvement in the Atlanta area, as well as in the locations of the
other main RedPrairie and JDA offices.”
Heroku is adding a number of new aspects to version 2.0 of the marketplace:
Easier Self-Service: A new interface gives developers a simpler way
to manage their add-ons. By packaging the experience, Heroku gives
developers some flexibility to test and market the apps.
Templates: A new set of templates for making new documentation,
embedding it into sales pages, creating branding, visibility into
analytics, etc.
Billing: All aspects of billing are taken care of by Heroku. This
includes failed payments, declined cards, and all the pitfalls and
complexities that go with managing transactions.
Support: Developers get first-level support to help with integration
issues. Developers also get help selling the add-ons with the integrated
platform.
The Heroku Add-Ons Program aims to helps cloud service providers with
key business needs, including full lifecycle billing, full integration
Relevant Products/Services with customer applications, single sign-on
customer log-in, and an integrated end-user support experience. What’s
more, a Heroku sales team sells the platform and add-ons. The second
iteration of Heroku Add-Ons Marketplace offers an updated
developer-facing marketplace and a new service provider management
Relevant Products/Services experience.
That’s the conclusion of a report released Friday by Daniel Ives, an
analyst for FBR Capital Markets. Ives also reiterated his outperform
rating on Salesforce, the leading provider of customer relationship
management software.
Unilever is using HANA in every area of its business. It runs 27TB
regional databases and uses 30GB in-memory HANA systems in each region.
The in-memory database processes 30,000 transactions per minute. In a
proof-of-concept application, HANA enabled Unilever to reduce the time
it takes to process 200 million records from 440 seconds to just 30
seconds, allowing the company to determine the cost of how much a
product costs using pricing information for raw materials.
Enterprise software has always been based on the premise that it has
value to a customer. The value can be quantified and there is a clear
return on investment. Customers have a need that the software addresses.
They implement it on-premises or in the cloud, train people to use it,
maintain and upgrade it. It then becomes an indispensable part of an
organization’s operations. Great value but not sexy.
Compare that to consumer-oriented software, where downloads/sales are
based on fads, impulse, emotion, possibilities and intangibles.
Consumers tend to be fickle, using a game or other apps for a while, and
then move on to the next hot one.
There was a time when enterprise computing was almost exclusively
dominated by Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco. It was a time when on-premise,
Windows-based applications were the de facto standard and there was no
alternative. The enterprise was so entrenched that challenging the
status quo was viewed as suicidal and very stupid. So hardened was the
thinking that most innovation in the enterprise was relegated to mere
feature extensions of existing solutions.
Fast-forward to today and the world of enterprise computing has done a
180. Traditional IT is being blown to bits as cloud infrastructure,
Software-as-a-Service and mobile computing become the new standards. We
are experiencing innovation and usage as never seen before. It is truly a
renaissance of massive scale. Hundreds of billions of dollars are up
for grabs as buyers shift to new architectures and away from old, as new
users and new markets embrace the availability and ease by which they
can consume technology.
In its first quarterly report since becoming a publicly traded
company, Workday had a loss excluding some items of 39 cents a share,
the company said in a statement yesterday. Analysts predicted a loss of
49 cents, the average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Sales in the
quarter ended Oct. 31 doubled to $72.6 million, compared with
projections for $64 million.
Now, according to two sources, Apple and Google’s groups have
hammered out their differences and the two consortia have joined
together to share costs and put in a combined bid of around $800m.
For Stallman, however, the core issue is not advertising, although
that’s certainly unwelcome. The core issue is the exchange of personal
user information … even though Canonical does not send any personal
information to Amazon, running the Amazon search query on its own
servers based on information that it retains.
This should be troubling for Microsoft, which is in a precarious
position with its new operating system and lackluster tablet sales.
Businesses are the backbone of Microsoft’s software empire – without
them, it would be in serious trouble.
With focus we’ll be able to do even more for our business customers.
We’re excited about the opportunity to push Google Apps further so our
customers can do what matters most to them–whether that’s scooping ice
cream, changing the face of healthcare or contributing to lifelong
learning.
Over the past year Google generated around $1 billion from the sale
of Google Apps and separate mapping software to businesses and
governments, said people familiar with the matter. Google said more than
five million businesses use Google Apps, though the vast majority have
fewer than 10 users and thus use the free version. In total, Google has
said more than 40 million people use the free and paid versions of
Google Apps…
Google has made other moves to generate revenue from businesses that
used its services for free. Last year, Google began charging businesses
such as mobile app makers that access Google Maps more than 25,000 times
per day. This year, Google began charging retailers seeking to be
included in its Google Shopping service.
IBM SmartCloud Docs includes Web-based apps for the creation,
editing, and sharing of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The
suite is available for free as part of Big Blue’s SmartCloud Engage
Advanced business networking and collaboration service.
That technology, from Salesforce.com, tracked the 5.7 million
messages– as many as 80,000 per day—received by email, phone and through
the campaign’s website. To sort through the messages and get questions
routed to the right staffer in the campaign’s sprawling organization,
the system automatically created tags from words in the inquiries—like
“polling” or “contribution,” said Vivek Kundra, executive vice president
for emerging markets at Saleforce.com. Kundra previously served as the
first CIO of the federal government, from 2009 to 2011.
SAP offers six business apps for Windows 8 for use on devices of
various form factors focused on enterprise functions such as training,
recruiting and sales. All six of these mobile apps are planned to be
available for download in both the Windows Store and SAP Store. These
mobile apps include:
SAP WorkDeck, developed first for Windows 8, is a new
persona-centric app that offers contextual integration of various
information sources and processes into a role-based view. SAP WorkDeck
allows employees to initiate new requests, oversee upcoming events and
monitor the progress, as well as enables managers to react and process
workflows on-the-go, such as travel, leave and purchasing requests.
SAP Manager Insight…
SAP Learning Assistant…
SAP Interview Assistant…
SAP Customer Financial Fact Sheet…
SAP GRC Policy Survey
$65 million in a new funding round led by Accel Partners, with
support from Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel, and
Meritech Capital Partners. The investment will fund global sales growth
and fuel continued development of its platform for Big Data in support
of its growing enterprise customer base. The company will be expanding
its international presence with the opening of a European headquarters
in the UK, in the first quarter of 2013.
The biggest and best known company in the Hadoop world is Cloudera.
Started in 2008 by a trio of engineers from Facebook, Google and Yahoo
(Jeff Hammerbacher, Christophe Bisciglia and Amr Awadallah) plus CEO
Mike Olson, a former Oracle exec, it has in four years gone from the
start-up that few really understood to the company you have to talk to
if you want to stand a chance wrestling your data challenges to the
ground.
Kuelps joins UBS from SAP, the global leader in business software,
where he has been Head of Global Communications for the past two years.
Prior to SAP, Kuelps spent 11 years at Allianz SE, a leading
international financial services company, where he last served as Head
of Communications for Allianz of America. Previous roles included Chief
Operating Officer of Allianz Life Insurance Malaysia as well as
department head and financial spokesperson at Allianz Group
Communications in Munich. Before joining Allianz, Kuelps was Head of
Communications at the German-American Chamber of Commerce in New York.
He holds a German law degree and a Bachelor of Arts from Middlebury
College in the US.
Changing licensing is always a way vendors deal with a revenue problem.”
Microsoft raised only the price of its user CALs, and left the device
CALs alone. Experts like Ullman saw the change as a bid to cash in on
the BYOD (bring your own device) movement to accommodate workers who use
three or four devices to do their jobs. It’s no coincidence, they said,
that the increased revenue will come from the dramatic shift toward
mobile.
Not only are those prices a bit higher than for comparable versions
of Office 2010, but they also cover just one installation; Home and
Student 2010 allowed three, and previously Microsoft discounted
multiple-license purchases of other editions.
If you need Office on only a single PC, an Office 365 subscription
quickly costs more after a year or so. On the other hand, if you use
Office on multiple PCs, you’ll find that Office 365 subscriptions—which
include five Office 2013 installations and start at $100 a year—are
cheaper over several years. The $150 Office 365 Small Business Premium
looks like the best deal for small companies. You’ll have to do the math
for your situation.
The company says that other than poor distribution, other factors
significantly affecting the ability of Microsoft to sell the surface RT
tablet include a high starting price of $499 and mixed reviews. The
distribution system for the tablet doesn’t have a strong retail
presence.
AllThingsD reports that there are only 31 Microsoft stores and 34
small holiday kiosks in the US. Microsoft’s original plan was to
restrict retail sales of the tablet to its own stores, but that plan is
obviously not working out. It remains to be seen if Microsoft will
change its plan and allow retailers such as Best Buy and others put the
tablet in their stores.
Still, it reflects pressure on companies to create even a modest
number of domestic jobs as the unemployment rate hovers near 8 percent
and the economy rebounds from the recession that ended in 2009.
“I don’t think we have a responsibility to create a certain kind of
job,” Cook said. “But I think we do have a responsibility to create
jobs.”
Luna Rossa, the Italian team, contends in its formal protest to an
international jury of sailing experts that Oracle Team USA sent a spy in
an inflatable boat to take pictures of its 72-foot catamaran during
training runs last month on the Hauraki Gulf in New Zealand.
Oracle broke an America’s Cup protocol, Luna Rossa contends, by
coming too close. Oracle admits it sent a man to observe — just as its
competitors sent spies to the San Francisco Bay to watch Oracle’s boat
before it capsized and broke apart in October — but claims it broke no
rules.
Welcome to the intrigue and gamesmanship of the America’s Cup.
IBM plans to continue selling Kenexa’s applications and IT services
on a standalone basis, while progressively bundling and integrating them
with IBM enterprise social and HR software and services.
Kenexa competitors Taleo and SuccessFactors were acquired in the past
year by Oracle and SAP, respectively, as larger vendors try to
capitalize on strong growth for enterprise HR software.
SAP is looking to create internal startups that could result in $200
million in revenue within three to five years, Yotopoulos said. These
businesses are meant to pursue ideas that are either adjacent to a
market SAP is already in, or things that typically “in a large company
go against the grain,” he added.
SAP is also hiring “the best entrepreneurs from inside and outside
the company” to build teams in support of the ideas, he said. “In many
cases, these people have learned the hard way on someone else’s nickel
what works and what doesn’t.”
Each effort is funded much like a typical startup, beginning with a
seed round followed by additional stages, with the primary difference
being that SAP is the sole investor. This provides an advantage, since
the entrepreneurs SAP brings in to run the startups aren’t as distracted
by the need to raise funds.
Not every project makes it, according to Yotopoulos; some are killed “if the market opportunity does not manifest itself.”
About 200 rese
Does the world really need another social network?
Microsoft thinks so. The company on Wednesday opened up registration
for its new project, the aptly named Socl, to users with Microsoft and
Facebook accounts. Socl launched last year but was in beta for Microsoft
employees and college students until Wednesday.
And computer makers have been hampered in introducing tablets by
limits Microsoft imposed on which manufacturers got a crack at
prototypes, and by delays in Intel power-management software.
The holdup is making it harder for personal-computer makers, already
beleaguered by plummeting demand, to challenge Apple and Google Inc.
(GOOG) during the year-end holiday shopping season. While PC variants
running Windows abound, tablets built on ARM Holdings Plc (ARM)
technology-based chips or low-power processors from Intel are scarce.
Oracle is the latest of a string of companies that have moved up
quarterly payouts or issued a special end-of-year payment to protect
investors from potentially having to pay higher taxes on dividend income
starting in January.
Oracle’s accelerated dividend totals 18 cents per share, a payment
that will come in lieu of quarterly dividends that would have been paid
in 2013, the firm said in a statement.
At around $78, shares are trading near an all-time high, prices SAP
hasn’t seen since before the collapse of Internet bubble in 2000.
As costs increase for education and child care and rents begin to
rise again in some markets, single parents can be financially
challenged. Structural shifts in the economy have made transition to the
next job more challenging than expected those seeking employment.
Moreover, most of the grantees have been unsuccessful in securing the
child support they were legally awarded.
To protect the stock price, a bank will place 10 million euros worth of the shares every month until no more are left.
Samsung’s smart TVs get their intelligence from software, and all
that runs in the AWS cloud. “That architecture is not an 19th-century
architecture,” Vogels said. “That architecture is a 21st-century
architecture.”
Andreessen also talked about his “software eats the world” thesis. In
the computer industry the value has migrated from hardware to software.
Software developers have therefore been applying this technology to
older industries that were not technology focused, he said, citing
Border’s decision in 2001 to outsource digital to Amazon and the
eventual bankruptcy of the company.
[Software certainly ate HP 
-DBM]
While a third of executives responding to a recent survey (32%) agree
that the IT department is currently the main driver of cloud adoption,
another 45% report that individual business units are ultimately
responsible for cloud adoption strategies.
The 3 major business drivers for the move to the Cloud:
52%: reduced cost
41%: reduced time to market
39%: operational efficiencies
Software from Retalix, used in more than 70,000 retail locations in
more than 50 countries, will help the U.S. company expand the tools it
offers corporate customers in industries such as finance, travel and
hospitality, NCR said. It will also provide a mix of higher-margin
software and services that can help NCR diversify beyond its roots in
hardware.
Sales at $72.6 million grew 99 percent year on year, and while the
net loss grew to $41.3 million versus $19.7 million a year ago, it was,
at 39 cents per share, a lot better than the 67 cent loss that analysts
had expected.
The percentages were impressive, but the revenue figures underscored
that Workday is a small, seven-year-old company with 356 customers and a
sliver of the markets it serves. Total revenue for the quarter was
$72.6 million while subscription revenue was $51.6 million. Workday is
also far from profitable, reporting a third-quarter operating loss of
$40.9 million, up from an operating loss of $19.4 million in the same
period last year. The non-GAAP net loss for the quarter was $23 million.
Operating cash flow was also negative, but Workday’s balance sheet is
strong, with $797.4 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable
securities on the books at the end of the quarter. The company raised
nearly $685 million of that hoard in its highly successful October
initial public offering. Workday is now pouring that money into growing
the company, and it has already increased its headcount by 75% this
year.
The company says it has 1,800 business customers, up from fewer than 200 in 2008.
“Our focus has been on helping companies get off of Oracle and onto Postgres,” said Ed Boyajian, EnterpriseDB’s chief executive.
Mason replied by stating that “it would be weird if the Board wasn’t discussing whether I’m the right guy for the job.”
“What I can say is, we see increasing pressure from customers in
terms of reducing any kind of costs,” he said. “So of course we have a
higher number of discussions with customers compared to the past
[regarding maintenance fees].”
The CIOs we interviewed demonstrate that IT can use innovation and
new thinking to forge a high-value, strategic role in business. In
higher education, the significant impact of technology demands that
academic, administrative, and technical leaders cooperate as never
before.
To ensure and sustain relevance, CIOs today have little choice but to
reconceive their role as collaborator and innovator. The path forward
consists of communication, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and
relentless dedication to the customer – the hallmarks of strategic
partnership.
Understand ERP software pricing complexities…
Beware of the “best practices” trap. Many ERP vendors tout their
pre-configured industry solutions, suggesting that their software is
designed and built for your industry. While this may be true of niche
providers, larger ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics
simply cannot be everything to everyone. As a result, they counter
these perceived disadvantages by driving home industry “best practices”
sales messaging, which has varying degrees of relevance. In most
industries in which we work – especially the more complex ones such as
food and beverage or aerospace and defense – these best practices are
largely irrelevant, necessitating extensive reconfiguration to meet the
unique needs and complexities of the individual organizations
implementing them.
Realize that quarter-end discounts are overrated…
The Informatica Cloud Winter 2013 update has a newly revamped user
interface and self-service capabilities, new master data management
(MDM) capabilities, and a host of new and updated cloud connectors.
“There’s nothing glamorous about keeping data clean and orderly, and
there’s no sexy payoff that a lot of other things have in an
enterprise,” Rogers said. “These are the types of projects that are
started and get cut real quick because no one understands their impact.”
Amazon Redshift is a massively parallel, fully-managed data warehouse
service, designed for data sets from hundreds of gigabytes to several
petabytes in size, and appropriate for an organization of any size —
from a startup to a multi-national — at a price point that will take you
by surprise. Amazon Redshift is fully managed, so you no longer need to
worry about provisioning hardware, installation, configuration or
patching of system or database software, Because your business is
dependent on your data, Amazon Redshift takes care to protect it by
replicating all data within the cluster as well as in S3.
Amazon Redshift won’t break the bank (or your credit card, since it
is completely pay-as-you-go). We did the math and found that it would
generally cost you between $19,000 and $25,000 per terabyte per year at
list prices to build and run a good-sized data warehouse on your own.
Amazon Redshift, all-in, will cost you less than $1,000 per terabyte per
year. For that price you get all o
A sizable majority of respondents in all regions said they planned to
increase their investments in SaaS. Only small percentages planned to
cut spending on SaaS, according to the report…
Users are also increasingly weighing whether a SaaS vendor also offers
PaaS (platform as a service) capabilities for extending the software and
building new applications, according to Gartner. Fifty-six percent
called PaaS “very important,” another 22 percent termed it a
“requirement,” and 18 percent said it was “somewhat important,” the
report states.
Amazon Redshift is a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale
data warehouse service in the cloud. Amazon Redshift offers you fast
query performance when analyzing virtually any size data set using the
same SQL-based tools and business intelligence applications you use
today. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can launch a
Redshift cluster, starting with a few hundred gigabytes of data and
scaling to a petabyte or more, for under $1,000 per terabyte per year.
Amazon Redshift manages all the work needed to set up, operate, and
scale a data warehouse cluster, from provisioning capacity to monitoring
and backing up the cluster, to applying patches and upgrades. Scaling a
cluster to improve performance or increase capacity is simple and
incurs no downtime. The service continuously monitors the health of the
cluster and automatically replaces any component, if needed. By
automating these labor-intensive tasks, Amazon Redshift enables you to
spend your time focusin
From an enterprise viewpoint this means that data quality should be a
central part of your MDM initiative, and you need to consider it when
evaluating software and planning your project. You need to probe
suppliers on what data quality functionality they provide, how well
integrated it is, and how well it will work on your particular data.
RedShift has been tested on Amazon. Amazon took 2 billion rows of data and ran on Redshift.
Two 16 TB nodes on RedShift cost $3.65 an hour or $32,000 and got faster queries for a tenth of the cost.
Redshift will work with all the current business intelligence tools.
Pricing is 85 cents an hour for 2TB nodes. Annual deals and reserved instances are cheaper.
Companies pay $19,000 to $25,000 a year per TB.
Limited preview starts today with full launch in 2013.
Nokia has filed documents in courts in the United States, the U.K.
and Canada asking them to bar Research In Motion from selling BlackBerry
devices in those countries until RIM agrees to a new licensing
agreement for Nokia-owned patents.
The patents have to do with the 802.11 wireless LAN standard.
“RIM is not entitled to manufacture or sell products compatible with
the WLAN standard without first agreeing with Nokia on the royalty to be
paid for its manufacture and/or sale of subscriber terminals compatible
with such standards,” Nokia said in its filing, according to the IDG
News Service, which reported Nov. 28 that it had obtained a copy of the
filing.
Microsoft has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses. Tami Reller shared
this news with industry and financial analysts, investors and media
today at the Credit Suisse 2012 Annual Technology Conference. Windows 8
is outpacing Windows 7 in terms of upgrades. We built Windows 8 to work
great on existing Windows 7 PCs. And we also set out to make upgrading
from Windows 7 to Windows 8 super easy.
Full year fiscal 2012 GAAP loss per share of $6.41
Full year fiscal 2012 net revenue of $120.4 billion, down 5% from the
prior-year period and down 4% when adjusted for the effects of currency…
Fourth quarter GAAP loss per share of $3.49
Fourth quarter net revenue of $30.0 billion, down 7% from the prior-year
period and down 4% when adjusted for the effects of currency
Cash flow from operations of $4.1 billion, up 69% from the prior-year period
Returned $384 million in cash to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases
Fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2012 results include a non-cash
goodwill and intangible asset impairment charge of $8.8 billion relating
to the Autonomy business within the Software segment
HP has initiated an intense internal investigation into a series of
accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright
misrepresentations that occurred prior to HP’s acquisition of Autonomy.
We believe we have uncovered extensive evidence of a willful effort on
behalf of certain former Autonomy employees to inflate the underlying
financial metrics of the company in order to mislead investors and
potential buyers…
While Dr. Lynch is eager for a debate, we believe the legal process is
the correct method in which to bring out the facts and take action on
behalf of our shareholders. In that setting, we look forward to hearing
Dr. Lynch and other former Autonomy employees answer questions under
penalty of perjury.
Part of the problem is that even if Autonomy had knocked it out of
the park, instead of fouling out, it never would have turned HP around.
Not even close. The fact that it’s now another big HP deal gone bad just
adds to the sense that all we can do is watch a Greek tragedy unfolding
on stage before our eyes.
Whitman’s blame problem starts with the fact that the Autonomy deal
was on the table even before Apotheker showed up, and became a component
in the strategic planning for the company pretty much from day one of
Apotheker’s short reign. Considering the board’s role during the
interregnum between Mark Hurd’s departure and Apotheker’s appointment,
the board, of which Whitman was a member, had to have been considering,
if not vetting, the Autonomy deal during that period. So rather than
blame Apotheker, Whitman has only to look to the HP board – of which she
was a member – to find where the blame game starts, and stops.
Infor’s strategy has been consistent throughout this period, and more
importantly, it is now inarguable that Infor is a single, integrated
ERP vendor and not a group of vendors tied together by a single holding
company. Furthermore, the core elements of the “new Infor” appear to be
working.
On November 21, 2012, Versant entered into an Agreement and Plan of
Merger (the “Actian Merger Agreement”) with Actian Corporation, a
Delaware corporation (“Actian”) and Actian Sub I, Inc. a California
corporation that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Actian (“Merger Sub”).
The Actian Merger Agreement provides for the merger of Merger Sub with
and into Versant (the “Merger”), with Versant continuing as the
surviving corporation of the Merger and becoming a wholly owned
subsidiary of Actian upon consummation of the Merger. The Actian Merger
Agreement was unanimously approved by the Board.
“Versant and Actian have complementary businesses,” said Bernhard
Woebker, Versant’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “We believe we
can leverage our combined strength in managing complex information in
environments that demand high performance to lead in the business
intelligence and analytics market. This merger will also deliver premium
value and liquidity to Versant’s shareholders.”
But how’s this for the height of irony: Autonomy offers eDiscovery
solutions that “help organizations, law firms and legal service
providers better meet client needs without the cumbersome integration
efforts that other vendors face.” Now wouldn’t it be ironic if HP used
those eDiscovery tools to build a case against former Autonomy
executives?
Consider the multiple reports published about Autonomy by accounting
research firm CFRA. Dating back to 2007, these raised questions about
its lack of nonacquisition-driven revenue growth and unsustainable
contributions to cash flow, among other issues. It would be surprising
if no one at H-P doing due diligence on the Autonomy deal was aware of
such concerns. And what of the back-office integration work once the
deal closed? It isn’t uncommon for small software companies to have
funky revenue-recognition policies that need updating. Such issues are
typically discovered immediately by acquiring companies.
Autonomy wasn’t held as a separate entity, mailing in its quarterly
numbers to be consolidated. So H-P should have seen something was amiss
soon after the deal closed in October 2011 and certainly before an
unnamed whistleblower stepped forward after Mr. Lynch was fired May 23.
The deal also calls into question the role of some top executives. For instance, Ms. Whitman noted that H-
Meg Whitman got the CEO job because of an inside coup by HP execs
that ousted the previous CEO, Léo Apotheker, a former software executive
who championed the Autonomy deal.
These execs feared Apotheker’s plan to spin off the hardware business in favor of software.
This lead Whitman to abandon the software strategy, which left Autonomy and Lynch in the lurch.
HP’s convoluted bureaucracy created situations where its own salespeople couldn’t sell Autonomy.
The infamous whistleblower who reportedly alerted HP to Autonomy’s accounting problems couldn’t be the person HP claims.
The fundamental problem is simple—companies frequently seek solutions
to their problems, either product strategy or leadership, from
outside—making acquisitions to acquire new capabilities and, yes,
searching for some form of corporate savior to buttress what seems
missing internally. The temptations and the pitfalls in both moves are
similar. From the outside, technologies and products look glamorous
because their defects and difficulties are much less visible. From the
outside, the new executive looks intriguing and exciting—because the
inevitable human foibles and weaknesses aren’t yet evident, because
scarcity makes things appear more valuable, and because in the
recruiting chase, the excitement builds.
In both instances, there are “matchmakers”—executive search firms in
the case of the external hires and investment bankers for the deals—who
get paid only if the transaction is consummated, and have every economic
interest to not only see the deal close, but close quickly. And
Autonomy isn’t the only black mark on Andreessen’s record since he
joined the HP board in 2009. He was also one of the lead directors
responsible for recruiting Leo Apotheker, whose fear of the looming
appetite of software scared HP into squandering shareholders’ treasure
on Autonomy. Moreover, a majority of HP directors did not actually meet
Apotheker before his appointment. That effectively meant Andreessen was
given extraordinary powers in choosing HP’s leader. By that token, he
arguably bears a larger share of the responsibility for the poor choices
made by his chosen executive.
Along the way, these people say, Autonomy used aggressive accounting
practices to make sure revenue from software licensing kept
growing—thereby boosting the British company’s valuation. The firm
recognized revenue upfront that under U.S. accounting rules would have
been deferred, and struck “round-trip transactions”—deals where Autonomy
agreed to buy a client’s products or services while at the same time
the client purchased Autonomy software, according to these people.
“The rules aren’t that complicated,” said Dan Mahoney of accounting
research business CFRA, who covered Autonomy until it was acquired. He
said that Autonomy had the hallmarks of a company that recognized
revenue too aggressively. He said neither U.S. nor international
accounting rules would allow companies to recognize not-yet collected
revenue from customers that might be at risk not to pay, which he said
appears to be the case in some of Autonomy’s transactions.
A person familiar with H-P’s investigation said the
In short, it’s time for HP to position Autonomy as an acquisition
that’s showing progress — rather than an acquisition that destroyed HP.
“Just to say `we paid too much because of fraud’ doesn’t negate the
fact of inadequate due diligence,” said Williams. “Some responsibility
needs to come back to HP.”
At least one of HP’s board members, McKesson Corp. CEO John
Hammergren, has experience the aftermath of an accounting scandal.
McKesson named Hammergren as its CEO after revealing it had been conned
into buying software maker HBO & Co. for $12 billion in 1999. The
accounting fraud wiped out half of McKesson’s market value. The San
Francisco company has since bounced back under Hammergren, but the
comeback took years to pull off.
Investors are losing hope that HP will rebound because the company
has made so many questionable decisions in the five years since Apple
Inc.’s release of the first iPhone changed the way people use
technology. The upheaval has reduced demand for HP’s PCs and printers.
“I don’t see how anyone could invest in this company any longer,” said ISI Group analyst Brian Marshall, who described HP as “an
Autonomy founder Mike Lynch continued to fight back at allegations
from Hewlett-Packard, sending an open letter Tuesday to H-P’s board.
The company concealed that it had gained control of Autonomy based on
financial statements that were unreliable because of accounting
manipulation, according to the complaint. Hewlett-Packard Chief
Executive Officer Meg Whitman and the company’s former CEO, Leo
Apotheker, are named as defendants, along with Chief Financial Officer
Catherine Lesjak.
[A good read, and many good points made. -DBM]
I utterly reject all allegations of impropriety…
Having no details beyond the limited public information provided last
week, and still with no further contact from you, I am writing today to
ask you, the board of HP, for immediate and specific explanations for
the allegations HP is making. HP should provide me with the interim
report and any other documents which you say you have provided to the
SEC and the SFO so that I can answer whatever is alleged, instead of the
selective disclosure of non-material information via background
discussions with the media.
The apparent failure of due diligence in Hewlett-Packard’s
acquisition of Autonomy brings into question the board’s handling of the
deal, says Tony Sondhi, an accounting expert and founder of investment
advisory firm, A.C. Sondhi & Associates.
Microsoft is changing the way it prices the “user” option when
purchasing client-access licenses (CALs), which will result in higher
prices for some customers.
Three Informatica customers were named Leaders in the 2012 Ventana
Research Leadership Awards and one Informatica product—PowerCenter Big
Data Edition—has won a coveted 2012 Ventana Research Technology
Innovation Award.
“We are passionate about delivering beautiful, robust and reliable
cloud applications that work the way our customers do,” said Lars
Dalgaard, member of the SAP Executive Board. “I announced our cloud
strategy acceleration six months ago and since then the response and
traction we’ve seen in the market has been monumental. SuccessFactors
grew by 92 percent year over year, SAP Business ByDesign subscription
billings at 300 percent year over year, companies are embracing SAP Jam
as a productivity tool with more than 8 million users. And we’re just
getting started. There is so much more to come as we continue to
innovate across our cloud portfolio, applying user and mobile-first
design principles, to meet our customers’ business needs — and most
importantly delight our customers’ end users.”
Windows 8 may—may—be struggling now, but sheer scale means it will be adopted by many more people. Eventually.
Just 4 percent of the respondents have been proactively briefed by SAP about indirect access.
Am I Liable? Even though Blake says there are many SAP customers who
are surprised by indirect access discussions, the survey found that 31
percent of the respondents believed that their contracts specifically
identified liability for indirect access. That surprised him a bit, so
he followed up with several respondents. Some of them, he says, told him
“the definition of ‘use’ [by SAP] is so broad, that I just figured I
was liable.”
Social networks were responsible for 0.81 percent of site traffic,
with Facebook providing 0.68 percent. And Twitter? Within the IBM
study’s margin of error, the social network provided literally 0
percent.
Google is getting better at gadget design faster than Apple is getting better at Internet services.
Now, the Benioffs are giving more money to house homeless families,
and the city is renewing its pledge to continue finding homes for
parents and children, The Chronicle has learned. The original Benioff
donation, made in December 2011, helped house 150 families, and the new
donation is expected to put roofs over the heads of dozens more.
Money for charities
The @Benioffs will give $230,000 to Hamilton Family Center’s First
Avenues program, which offers case management and rental subsidies for
families, including Lord’s. The money will pay for 10 more families to
secure housing. The Benioffs will also give $70,000 to The Chronicle’s
Season of Sharing program, which offers one-time assistance to families
in crisis.
“Some proposals could permit governments to censor legitimate speech – or even allow them to cut off internet access.
“Other proposals would require services like YouTube, Facebook, and
Skype to pay new tolls in order to reach people across borders. This
could limit access to information – particularly in emerging markets.”
Google added that it was concerned that “only governments have a
voice at the ITU” and not companies or others who had a stake in the
net, concluding that the World Conference on International
Telecommunications (Wcit) was “the wrong place” to make decisions about
the internet’s future.
The company should be in a celebratory mood. It just launched its new
PC and mobile operating systems and for the first time started selling
its own computer hardware — the Surface Windows RT tablet. Its hardware
partners are coming out with all sorts of new PCs featuring Microsoft
Windows 8 and Microsoft finally has a tablet device to compete with
Apple’s iPad and the myriad Android tablets.
But things aren’t going well for the software behemoth that was once so dominant that a court declared it to be a monopoly.
Last week, CNET News reported that “Windows 8 got pummeled” by
analysts, including Chris Whitmore from Deutsche Bank, who wrote that
Windows 8 “will have a more muted impact than prior cycles for a several
reasons.” In addition to economic factors beyond Microsoft’s control,
he cited mixed reviews, a lack of enterprise interest in the new
operating system and confusion around the two flavors of Windows 8 —
Windows RT for tablets and Windows Pro for PCs and some tablets.
SAP is considering a listing in China to give the world’s biggest
business software firm the option of tapping financial resources in one
of its fastest growing markets.
“We are looking into the possibility of a third listing,” a spokesman said.
SAP will have to wait until China has finalized plans to set up an international board in Shanghai to attract foreign listings.
China has been talking about the launch of an international board on
the Shanghai Stock Exchange. It was about to kick off the new board in
the second half of last year but the move was delayed by the euro zone
debt crisis.
SAP is already listed in Germany and New York.
Microsoft’s proposal has sparked concerns — both old and new — about
the visa program that has allowed companies to recruit hundreds of
thousands of well-educated foreign nationals to fill U.S. jobs.
Researchers claim that some companies use the visas to bypass older,
more expensive American job seekers. And some economists question
contentions by Microsoft and other technology firms about a dearth of
domestic high-tech talent.
But most troubling to critics is the fact many employers need not
prove they are unable to find qualified Americans before turning to
foreign hires.
The biggest companies already deploy workloads beyond test-and-dev on
AWS. The question is: can AWS sustain that momentum as new options come
online?
However, there is a great deal of risk for Oracle on this path—it could be seen as fraud, and it certainly erodes trust.
NAD found that, even accounting for a sophisticated target audience, a
consumer would be reasonable to take away the message that all Oracle
Exadata systems run five times as fast as all IBM’s Power computer
products.
NAD noted in its decision that the fact that the claim was made in the
context of a contest announcement did not excuse the advertiser from its
obligation to provide substantiation.
Oliver speaks a lot of sense and talks in a very succinct way – the video repays a couple of viewings.
Using your brains to think of an idea and your skills to implement it? That’s the old model.
Judge Grewal entered his order, which allows Samsung’s counsel (but
not Samsung’s internal decision-makers) to see the entire agreement
including license fees, while expressing skepticism of Samsung’s theory
that “the financial terms are probative of arguments Samsung raises in
its opposition to Apple’s permanent injunction motion” because “to the
degree Apple prevails on the contrary argument,9 the licensing fees with
HTC are relevant to the degree of consumer demand for Apple’s patented
features” and “a royalty is a more suitable alternative to a permanent
injunction”. So the hearing allowed Samsung to make an argument —
ultimately the outcome-determinative one for the grant of this motion —
specific to the license fee information that it had not made in its
motion. This was the last opportunity Samsung’s lawyers had to make this
argument before the motion would have been dismissed as moot, but they
seized it.
Meg Whitman: While HP’s announcement bore little good news for the
company’s bottom line, there’s a chance it could end up helping CEO Meg
Whitman’s image.
“The silver lining here could be her willingness to take a very
realistic but also gutsy stand, and call a spade a spade here,” said
analyst Charles King, president of Pund-IT. “I think that will improve
her image or at least provide some cover for the additional time and
effort she needs to put into the company.”
“Most of the issues confronting HP happened way before her watch,”
King added. “She has the unenviable job of cleaning out the stables.”
The average large company has six different systems holding
supposedly “master” data about customer, nine in the case of product
data, and 13% of survey respondents had over 100 such sources.
When companies agree to have their patented technology incorporated
into a standard, they’re required to license the technology to others on
reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms.
As evident by its enormous P/E ratio of 73, the company understands
enormous growth expectations exist. Still, despite constant competitive
pressure from rivals such as Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, Salesforce.com
seems committed to turn doubters into believers. On the heels of another
earnings beat, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s time for investors to
change their view on the company. Said differently, why fight a moving
train?
CEO Mike Lynch, wouldn’t call it “shopping around” because it would
have been illegal to “shop around” a U.K.-based company under that
country’s securities laws without disclosing the fact to shareholders.
Software developers participated in a daylong Windows Azure Developer
Camp at the Microsoft campus here, one of 23 simultaneous workshops
held across the United States Nov. 12, to spur the development of
applications that run in the Azure cloud environment.
Also new in SharePoint is an improved user interface, which addressed
another shortcoming in earlier versions relating to how documents could
be shared. Microsoft increased by a factor of four the number of
engineers assigned to working on the user interface for SharePoint 2013,
from the previous version, said Jeff Teper, a corporate vice president
for Microsoft. SharePoint 2013 “is not a minor ‘dot’ release,” Teper
said in a keynote address at the user conference.
“In terms of those two companies, it’s not that we don’t see them,”
Benioff clarified. However, he argued that “they have not provided the
next-generation vision for customer-based systems” on how to connect
with customers, employees, investors, and products.
The social enterprise giant reported a third quarter net loss of $220
million, or $1.55 per share (statement). Non-GAAP earnings were 33
cents a share on a revenue of $788 million, up 35 percent annually.
it was a great quarter. as you can see. 788 million is up 35%. jim,
you know we have been on that talking about the 30% plus both quarters,
it is an awesome time to deliver a quarter like that. all of these other
things and here we are delivering this great number. 1.29 billion
really great. how are you with the operating cash flow for this quarter?
well, you can see, we have delivered more than $100 million, this is
our 5th consecutive quarter withbrating cash flow in excess of $100
million. we are in a market share game. cloud computing and mobil,
nothing is getting our customers faster results or delivery. we are
absolutely the leader in the area. most people are trying to back away
from europe. why bother? you can see europe had a great quarter. these
customers in europe are under tremendousir res. they have to turn to
vend dors like us that can deliver solutions right now.
Quarterly Revenue of $788 Million, up 35% Year-Over-Year
• Deferred Revenue of $1.29 Billion, up 41% Year-Over-Year
• Unbilled Deferred Revenue Increases to Approximately $3 Billion
• Raises FY13 Revenue Guidance to $3.041 – $3.046 Billion
• Initiates FY14 Revenue Guidance of $3.80 – $3.85 Billion
Freiburg will return to Microsoft Office because of severe compatibility problems found with the open-source alternative
[Now what does Freiburg actually mean? -DBM]
When these customers informed SAP of their intentions to cancel
maintenance, SAP initially offered modest discounts, only to follow up
with significantly larger discounts when the customers pushed back.
Given that there was executive level engagement in these discounts, we
infer that senior management at SAP is aware of the issue. If SAP
institutionalizes discounts on maintenance renewals, it will put
significant pressure on its margin profile.
Business software provider Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N) beat Wall
Street expectations for the third quarter and maintained its earnings
outlook for the rest of its fiscal year despite the cloudy macroeconomic
outlook.
Quattrone, who founded boutique Qatalyst Partners after years of
fighting regulatory charges, was Autonomy’s lead banker during its sales
process. The deal is the second-biggest Qatalyst has advised on, behind
only Motorola Mobility’s $12.9 billion sale to Google.
$584 in revenue — a 36 percent year-over-year increase.
The bulk of that money came from the company’s subscription and
support services, which accounted for $549 million. The remainder of the
company’s revenue came from its professional services and other
sources, and totaled $35 million.
Autonomy, as HP tells it, was selling some hardware at a loss. During
a period of about eight quarters prior to HP’s acquisition, Autonomy
sold some hardware products that had a very low margin or on which it
may have even taken a loss. It then allegedly turned around and booked
those hardware sales as high-margin software sales. At least some
portion of the cost on these products, Whitman said, was booked as a
marketing expense, not as cost of goods sold.
There’s a second piece of the puzzle, where HP says that Autonomy was
selling software to value-added resellers — the middlemen in so many
technology transactions — in which there are ultimately no end users.
That, too, inflated apparent revenue.
Third, there were some long-term hosting deals — essentially,
Autonomy hosting applications for its customers on a subscription basis —
that were converted to short-term licensing deals. Future revenue for
software subscriptions — that should have been deferred or recorded as
coming in the
“It seems very late in the day that HP would find accounting irregularities,” he said….
“The board relied on audited financials — audited by Deloitte — not
Brand X accounting firm but Deloitte,” Whitman said today on a
conference call with investors. “The CEO at the time and the head of
strategy who led this deal are both gone — Leo Apotheker and Shane
Robison.”
For the sake of its board, shareholders, and the rest of the
industry, HP should reveal exactly who conducted its research on
Autonomy and how and why they managed to miss this “fraud”–as well as
why it went undiscovered after the acquisition for so long.
HP has referred this matter to the US Securities and Exchange
Commission’s Enforcement Division and the UK’s Serious Fraud Office for
civil and criminal investigation. In addition, HP is preparing to seek
redress against various parties in the appropriate civil courts to
recoup what it can for its shareholders. The company intends to
aggressively pursue this matter in the months to come.
The only concept I have of it is that it does seem to be coincident
with them releasing the worst set of results in their 70 year company
history.
Lynch said the mismanagement came after HP took over the company.
Oracle Corp. has joined BSA as a global advocacy member to help advance policies that promote technology innovation.
Twitter hasn’t released an official Twitter client in the Windows
Store yet, but it remains one of the most popular apps on other
platforms. The fact that Twitter hasn’t released an official modern UI
style app shows that big app developers are still not allocating the
same resources to Windows Store apps. According to the company, it’s a
work in progress:
Current Evaluation – 3
Evaluation Explanation – Restructured program is being closely monitored
[If this is a "3," then I'd hate to see a "2!" -DBM]
[This is from a year ago. The project was a massive failure then, and
yet it kept going for a year despite severe financial constraints on
the government. -DBM]
The project that Oracle win in 2005 was initially scoped at $88.5
million and was to replace over 240 legacy systems and more than 500
interfaces.
The final cost of the ECSS to taxpayers will be somewhere between $3
billion to $5.2 billion, according to a U.S. Government Accountability
Office (GAO). The decision to whether the Oracle systems, which is being
installed by CSC, will be scrapped, modified or shelved will be made by
the end of the year.
Underway since 2005, the ECSS program was supposed to save billions
of dollars by streamlining supply chain management and providing an
integrated approach for buying, moving and managing equipment. But the
service fired the lead contractor, Computer Sciences Corp., in March.
The next month, Air Force Controller Jamie Morin told a Senate
subcommittee that he was “personally appalled” by how little the Air
Force had gotten for its investment. In an interview afterward, Morin
described the system’s capability as “negligible”.
Continuing the program would have cost an estimated $1.1 billion for
about one-quarter of the original scope, with fielding delayed until
2020, added Gulick.
Oracle won the contract in 2005 over competing vendors like SAP.
Sources tell me that Computer Sciences Corporation was the system
integrator. IBM has not yet responded with a comment or confirmation.
“Everybody blames each other, and nobody takes credit,” said Wang. He
told me that projects like these can goes wrong on all levels: Vendors
promise more than they can deliver, system integraters aren’t always
cooperative, and clients don’t document as thoroughly as they should.
The system includes Click Commerce’s Service Parts Planning and
Optimization solution, Oracle’s Enterprise Resource Planning software
and IFS’ Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul solution.
ECSS will replace and perform the functions of more than 700 logistics
systems currently used by the Air Force. The new software will allow
commanders at all levels in the logistics chain to automate the process
of gathering and interpreting logistics data, and help them to make
effective decisions. The system will support the entire Air Force –
providing a single, easy-to-use interface for as many as 250,000 users.
As ever more companies withdraw from chip manufacturing, Intel
manages to keep turning the crank profitably. During Otellini’s reign,
Intel has so far generated $107 billion in cash from operations and paid
dividends of $23.5 billion.
But Intel also has failed to come to terms with a powerful force in
the processor world — the rise of mobile devices using low-power ARM
processors. These are the chips that power every iPhone and iPad, almost
every Android device, and the new Microsoft Surface tablet.
It’s an embarrassing absence for Intel. The company has gained a tiny
foothold with its Medfield generation of processors, which are used for
example in Motorola Razr i phone and some other products. But mostly,
Intel is conspicuous in this market by its absence from a market that is
both large and fast-growing.
Cisco said that it wanted to acquire Meraki because the IT industry
is increasingly moving toward the “mobile-cloud era.” By adding Meraki’s
Wi-Fi and cloud-networking know-how to Cisco’s software-focused
offerings, the company believes that it will be able to simply IT
operations for its customers. Cisco also pointed to the possible bonus
of generating new revenue opportunities with its other partners.
40 years with the company.
Intel Corp. said Monday that its board will look at company
executives as well as external candidates to replace Otellini. He has
been head of Intel for eight years.
Awarded “Epic Status” in every Major Category including: Application
Retirement, Database Manageability, Operational/Cost Savings and
Performance Archiving by Constellation Research
A month after Oracle Racing’s custom-made USA 17 cartwheeled into the
bay and hurled its hot shot crew into the cold Bay waters and crumpled
the sail structure, Ellison’s sailing syndicate is racing against the
clock to perform repairs and be ready to compete by next summer’s
America’s Cup finals in the bay.
Torvalds can say what he wants because — unlike most of the world’s
best-known software developers — he doesn’t work for a big technology
company with a public relations department. If he worked for IBM or Red
Hat, he’d probably be clamped down. But Torvalds is a free operator, his
salary paid by the non-profit Linux Foundation. So whenever he needs a
break from code-wrangling the Linux project, he fires away on Google+.
It’s the same honest attitude that turned Linux into such a success
story.
Quoting Oracle database executive Andy Mendelsohn, the piece points
out that Oracle’s in-memory database is TimesTen, which runs inside the
Exalytics appliance (along with an in-memory version of the Essbase
database). That box is a sort of analytics turbocharger, and it’s
plugged into yet another box, Exadata, which runs on Oracle Database.
But here was Evans, protesting that Microsoft was disingenuous in
suggesting that Oracle is “forcing customers to buy, learn, and manage a
separate solution.”
If Oracle Database had in-memory capabilities, you wouldn’t need a
separate Exalytics box. But Mendelsohn acknowledges that Oracle Database
is limited to “some in-memory database features.” He doesn’t say how or
when, but Mendelsohn promises that Oracle “plans to continue to enhance
Oracle Database in-memory capabilities.”
So on Microsoft’s side it’s true we have only a beta product and
fuzzy delivery date, but on Oracle’s side we have a “yeah, we’re going
to do that, too” promise by one ex
Google tops the list of average base salaries for software engineers,
with No. 2 Facebook trailing slightly behind. Apple, eBay and Zynga
were also in the top five, according to Glassdoor, which analyzed pay
rates for software engineers based on anonymous salary data from recent
and current employees at 15 tech companies provided voluntarily.
Big Data is smoking hot. Today, 10gen the company behind the
commercialization of MongoDB, announced a strategic investment from
Intel Capital and Red Hat. MongoDB is part of the database wars we are
seeing in the Big Data space. SiliconANGLE and Wikibon have released
research that show that Mongo is growing more popular than Hadoop. See
our TrendConnect research at the bottom of this post for that data.
“In our enterprise accounts, the bulk of the implementations are done
by partners,” says Ross Piper, senior vice president for enterprise
strategy and alliances at Salesforce.com.
We talked about his regrets (none), his optimism about the future of
technology, his take on the Scott Forstall saga and, most interestingly,
his “worry” that Microsoft has become a more innovative company than
Apple.
Some 20 startups have inked commercial deals with SAP that will see
them run production applications with the HANA in-memory database on
Amazon Web Services, SAP announced Thursday during the Tech Ed and
Sapphire conferences in Madrid.
In addition, 153 startups are now part of a special program SAP
launched six months ago in hopes of quickly creating a partner ecosystem
for HANA, which became generally available last year and has since
become a central focus of the vendor’s technical and product road maps.
Those 153 companies were culled from more than 800 in 17 countries
which expressed interest in the program, according to SAP. A majority
are from what SAP called “non-traditional markets.” One is Better Food, a
provider of “sustainable and safe food management services across the
value chain,” according to a statement.
“I’d hardly call Surface competition,” Bradley said in an interview
with CITEworld. He listed several reasons, “One, very limited
distribution. It tends to be slow and a little kludgey as you use it ….
It’s expensive. Holistically, the press has made a bigger deal out of
Surface than what the world has chosen to believe.”
These Windows Store app labs are designed to provide a boost to the
development process, whether a developer needs help bringing their ideas
together to form the beginnings of an app or simply wants to test their
app on a range of Windows 8 equipment. Each app lab will last for four
hours and will be taking place in a variety of locations around the
globe, including New York, London, Paris, and Shanghai.
The new offerings build on software IBM attained in its acquisition
of Worklight—a privately held Israeli-based provider of mobile software
for smartphones and tablets—earlier this year and also taps some of
IBM’s Tivoli technology and other products. The move is strategic as it
targets a growing opportunity that is expected to drive $130 billion in
revenue by 2015, said Mike Riegel, vice president of IBM Mobile
Enterprise and WebSphere.
The application aims to allow banks to apply different stress
scenarios, such as adjusted run-off rates and bond haircuts, to gain a
deeper understanding of how market volatility can impact liquidity
positions.
Another is the SAP Accelerated Trade Promotion Planning app, which aims
to allow consumer packaged goods companies to customise trade
promotions. It is intended to help analyse massive volumes of
promotion-related data in real time to instantly test new scenarios for
individual promotions and make adjustments on the fly.
SAP POS Data Management is intended to allow retailers to screen
billions of records to better predict likely stock levels by applying
predictive algorithms to sales data or detect fraudulent activities at
the point of sale using the SAP Loss Prevention Analytics for Retail
application.
Other apps are designed for common challenges in the telecoms, high tech
& manufacturing industries, while others tackle more generic
business challenges like process management.
The stock, once up 74 percent on the year, is still up 30 percent for 2012. That’s why Wall Street is getting out while it can.
“Someone yelled fire in the theater where the hedge funds were safely
booking their year-end profits—and as traders do, they will trample you
trying to be first to get to the exit,” said David Greenberg of
Greenberg Capital.
$10 million Series A round from Battery Ventures and Ignition
Partners, as well as Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective and Amplify
Partners. Co-founders Todd Papaioannou, Jonathan Gray and Nitin Motgi
began building Continuuity in late 2011, and closed a $2.5 million seed
round in January 2012.
The cash infusion will help Palo Alto, Calif.-based Continuuity
further develop technology that abstracts the complexity of building and
deploying Hadoop applications and also opens Hadoop up to entirely new
types of workloads. Although Continuuity’s AppFabric is built atop
Hadoop and a collection of related technologies, it lets developers
build what might be called big data applications, generally, rather than
just Hadoop (read “inherently limited MapReduce“) applications. Taking
advantage of YARN and HBase, for example, the company was able to build
out methods for processing stream data in real time and elastically
scaling a Hadoop cluster even while jobs are running.
U.S. semiconductor company to eliminate around 5 percent of workforce
in a bid to cut costs and focus investments on its embedded systems.
Titan is powered by 560,640 processors, which is actually less than
the 1,572,864 cores that power Sequoia. Titan was turned on at the end
of October at the U.S Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab in
Tennessee.
One of the six apps announced Tuesday was built first for Windows 8.
Called SAP WorkDeck, the app integrates various information sources and
work processes into a single view to allow workers to initiate new work
requests and monitor the process of the work. Managers will be able to
use the app to respond to and oversee workflows from a mobile device,
such as travel, leave and purchase requests, SAP said.
All six apps take advantage of the touchscreen capability of Windows 8
in tablets and other devices, including the Snap dual-screen mode. Once
available, they can be downloaded from the Windows Store for a trial
evaluation before a purchase.
In addition to the six apps, SAP also announced an SAP Mobile
Platform to support creation and deployment of custom apps in HTML5 and
JavaScript using Visual Studio for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.
“Any platform takes a good amount of effort to develop for, but it
takes a lot of maintenance to keep your app up and working well as the
platform evolves,” he says. “Each platform is a moving target. Any
platform we choose to develop for we have to know that we’re ready to
not only build it once but to continue to invest in it.”
This is why part of Microsoft’s focus is on middleware.
Cross-platform tools offered by companies like Marmalade and Unity make
it cheaper to bring an iOS app to the Windows Phone platform. Companies
don’t necessarily have to hire a separate team dedicated solely to
Windows platforms if they are interested in building a new app.
New features in SPS5 include a “read-optimized column store” for OLAP
(online analytic processing) as well as a “write-optimized row store”
for OLTP (online transaction processing) applications, SAP said.
The update also includes improved text analytics, allowing companies
to analyze text-based data from social media and other sources in 31
languages, new library functions for predictive analytics, and
application server features for deploying applications from HANA.
In addition, SPS5 focuses on larger-scale HANA deployments, with
features such as “hot and warm standby servers,” as well as tie-ins to
third-party backup tools for disaster tolerance and failover
capabilities.
Oracle has taken a “strategic” minority stake in Engine Yard, a San
Francisco supplier of platform-as-a-service (PaaS), where developers
build applications in a tools-rich, online environment.
Julie Larson-Green will be promoted to lead all Windows software and
hardware engineering. Tami Reller retains her roles as chief financial
officer and chief marketing officer and will assume responsibility for
the business of Windows. Both executives will report directly to
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Workday does 3 releases a year, and even more impressive is what Dave
Duffield describes as “the force of one” – having all customers on the
same release is much more empowering. SaaS/Cloud vendors have
dramatically shrunk the announcement/availability/customer acceptance
cycle.
It is also an existential threat to on-premise models. In on-premise
world, there is often a 3-4 year gap between product announcement and
availability, then another 4-5 years till the last customer goes on that
release. That is an eternity compared to SaaS world
announcement/availability/acceptance cycle.
McAfee is a prime suspect in the murder of American expatriate
Gregory Faull, who was gunned down Saturday night at his home in San
Pedro Town on the island of Ambergris Caye.
Details remain sketchy so far, but residents say that Faull was a
well-liked builder who hailed originally from Florida. The two men had
been at odds for some time. Last Wednesday, Faull filed a formal
complaint against McAfee with the mayor’s office, asserting that McAfee
had fired off guns and exhibited “roguish behavior.” Their final
disagreement apparently involved dogs.
SaaS and cloud-based business application services will grow from $13.4B in 2011 to $32.2B in 2016, CAGR of 19.1%…
IDC reports that enterprise cloud application revenues reached $22.9B in
2011 and is projected reach $67.3B by 2016, CAGR of 24%…
11% of companies are transformational, early adopters of cloud
computing, attaining 44% adoption (as defined by % of MIPS) in 2010,
growing to 49% in 2013…
Gartner is predicting IaaS, cloud management & security devices, and
PaaS are growing from $7.6B in 2011 to $35.5B in 2016, CAGR of 36%…
The global PaaS market is growing from $900M in 2011 to $2.9B in 2016, 26.6% CAGR…
In 2011, the worldwide enterprise application software market generated
$115.1B in revenue, and is projected to grow to $157.6B by 2016, 6.5%
CAGR in the forecast period…
Transportation, insurance, banking and securities, and communications,
media and services (CM&S); and manufacturing providing g the
greatest growth opportunities through 2016…
Innovatio’s tactics, Cisco argues in its lawsuit, are “misleading,
fraudulent and unlawful.” It says they effectively amount to an
extortion scheme, and therefore violate federal antiracketeering laws.
Separately, Cisco claims that Ottawa-based Mosaid Technologies Inc.
violated the same laws by allegedly paying witnesses for testimony and
documents in order “to overcome fatal shortcomings” in
patent-infringement claims it filed against Cisco in 2011 at the U.S.
International Trade Commission.
“When someone runs a racket, we’re going to make them liable for racketeering,” said Mark Chandler, Cisco’s general counsel.
Apple’s settlement with HTC comes as its bigger fight with Samsung
gets increasingly bitter, meaning that a more conclusive settlement
between smartphone makers still looks some way off.
The company’s downtown Salt Lake City facility is expected to add 500
new employees over the 15-year lifetime of the project. Earlier this
year, an agreement for 250 new employees was announced. Today, the
company has more than 1,500 employees worldwide.
According to the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, all of
the 500 new positions will pay a minimum of 125 percent of Salt Lake
County’s average yearly wage including benefits, totaling more than $719
million. Workday will also pay over $54 million in new state taxes over
the life of the agreement.
The office’s Board of Directors approved an $8.4 million economic
development tax increment financing post-performance refundable tax
credit, or 25 percent of the new state tax revenue, which will be paid
by the company over the 15-year life of the agreement.
QlikTech: “It wasn’t about taxes,” Bjork began, adding that it was
largely a coincidence that he chose Radnor over Philly when deciding on a
new headquarters for his Swedish company. Radnor also seemed more
convenient for international visitors, he said, though he bemoaned the
fact that the Main Line lacks a great hotel.
Chris Ross is now leading worldwide sales, as well as continuing to
lead sales in Europe and the Middle East (EMEA), while Louise Lautin
leads worldwide marketing.
The impact of cloud on IT budgets will also vary by company size —
large enterprises are likely to replace some of their spending on
traditional IT services with public cloud spending. However, as public
cloud services are also being adopted by small and midsize businesses —
previously not the target market for most IT services companies – there
are new spending opportunities developing in the SME sector.
The company has updated its Cloud SQL service, increasing the maximum
size of databases tenfold and the maximum size of instances fourfold.
Users can also now choose whether they want their database stored in a
US or EU datacentre.
Aneel announced two new offerings, “New Workday Recruiting
Application To Transform Talent Acquisition” and “Workday Unveils Big
Data Analytics For HR and Finance”:
He had a Top 10 list why Workday went IPO which included a reference to “if Anderson Cooper can come out, so can we”
He teased his co-founder Aneel Bhusri about bragging about product
features, and that he could do better with contract closings and invited
the CIO of City of Orlando to sign her contract on stage.
He gave his CFO palpitations with frequent teasing on forward looking
stuff and a guessing game on the + in a slide which showed 350+
customers. After the Orlando signing his slide changed to 351+ customers
He presented a photo gallery which showcased his family members and pets as fans of various Workday customer products.
In a dig at Oracle, he quipped “I love walking all over on Fusion” and pointed to the brand of shoes he was wearing
He periodically had slides with SAP and Oracle characters peeping in the conference room
He tossed Cloud Cakes (a Twinkie like product of one of his customers,
McKee) with gusto into the crowd, then wondered if he had adequate legal
protection
[Executive keynotes - video]
The CIO of Global Functions at HP Scott Spradley stood up and told
the story at Workday Rising earlier this week of how Co-Founder David
Duffield will tell you “what you need to hear” not always what you “want
to hear” and in 2009 asked Workday “do you want HP as a customer” and
heard “We want you as a customer but not right now as we want to wait
until we are able to give you the best experience possible”. He went on
to tell the story of how this reinforced the trust he had in Workday and
HP recently became a new customer and the largest one ever with over
300,000 employees. If SAP has a similar customer story it would great if
we could hear it on stage at Sapphire Orlando, as it was very
compelling.
IBM also violated its contract with Avantor by staffing the project
with “incompetent and reckless consultants” who made “numerous design,
configuration and programming errors,” it states.
In addition, IBM “intentionally or recklessly failed” to tell Avantor
about risks to the project and charged toward a go-live date, the suit
alleges.
“To conceal the Systems defects and functional gaps, IBM ignored the
results of its own pre-go-live tests, conducted inadequate and truncated
testing and instead recommended that Avantor proceed with the go-live
as scheduled even though Avantor had repeatedly emphasized to IBM that
meeting a projected go-live date was far less important than having a
fully functional System that would not disrupt Avantors ability to
service its customers,” the suit states.
It’s actually a precautionary tale to avoid SAP like the plague. Here’s why.
He’s the man who reopened the community pool.
Through that modest act, Ellison has already won over some of the
island’s 3,200 residents, who were used to living under the tighter
purse strings of Lanai’s last owner, fellow billionaire David Murdock.
“Murdock was shutting the money off and cutting costs,” said Lanai
resident Pat Reilly, 72, who spent 31 years as a counselor at Lanai High
and Elementary School. “With the sale, the faucet came back on.”
As part of that commitment, in instances when we believe an account
may have been compromised, we reset the password and send an email
letting the account owner know this has happened along with information
about creating a new password. This is a routine part of our processes
to protect our users.
In this case, we unintentionally reset passwords of a larger number
of accounts, beyond those that we believed to have been compromised. We
apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused.
Throughout the day, people sent more than 31 million election-related
Tweets (which contained certain key terms and relevant hashtags). And
as results rolled in, we tracked the surge in election-related Tweets at
327,452 Tweets per minute (TPM). These numbers reflect the largest
election-related Twitter conversation during our 6 years of existence,
though they don’t capture the total volume of all Tweets yesterday.
As an engineering team, we keep an eye on all of the activity across
the platform –– in particular, on the number of Tweets per second (TPS).
Last night, Twitter averaged about 9,965 TPS from 8:11pm to 9:11pm PT,
with a one-second peak of 15,107 TPS at 8:20pm PT and a one-minute peak
of 874,560 TPM. Seeing a sustained peak over the course of an entire
event is a change from the way people have previously turned to Twitter
during live events.
For Microsoft, their product stars seem to have aligned at roughly the same time this month:
- Search engine Bing reached a two-year high in consumer perception.
- The Windows brand is at its highest perception point since the introduction of Windows 7 in October 2009.
- Microsoft is getting its best perception marks of the year from tablet owners.
Jimmy Kimmel and his writers are doing some very nice work with Apple
the last couple months. The intro here has a bit more bite than you
normally get from network TV: “Anyone standing in line for an iPad mini
in New York or New Jersey this week should be punched in the throat.”
The center is to house an advanced technology laboratory, a research
and development platform for the company’s Bing search engine, as well
as a business incubator aimed at promoting local Internet technology
startups.
It will be housed in an abandoned 18th century building, once Rio’s
first gas factory, in the city’s downtown port, a now shabby district
undergoing a vast makeover ahead of the 2016 Olympic Games.
Germany accounts for over 48 percent of Europe’s software revenue,
according to the Truffle list, bringing in €18.1bn of the continent’s
€37.2bn software revenues last year. However, SAP remains Europe’s 100lb
gorilla, accounting for €14bn of software revenues in 2011.
The company dwarfs its nearest rival in Europe: France’s Dassault
Systemes, the second biggest software company in the continent,
accounted for €1.8bn of revenue in 2011 – almost one-tenth that of SAP.
Germany’s second biggest software company, banking software firm Wincor
Nixdorf, brought in €1.7bn, and secured fourth place on the list, behind
the UK’s Sage.
In Microsoft’s other two announcements, the company released Service
Pack 1 (SP1) for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and it announced that the
next release of the Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW)
will debut in the first half of 2013. With that, PDW will move from SQL
Server 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012, and it will also gain a new feature
called PolyBase, which will support federated querying against the SQL
Server 2012 relational database as well as data in Microsoft’s
just-released Hadoop platform, Microsoft HDInsight Server for Windows.
Here are the main points:
High performance, in memory OLTP engine.
Full ACID support.
T-SQL compiled to native code.
Enables massive improvement in performance. This will allow you to
onramp existing apps to give you integrated performance for data
loading, updating. And reading throughput is increased comparing best
cases, due to the lack of latching and locking contention on the table.
And you’ll straight away almost a 10X performance increase. I haven’t changed the app.
TED KUMMERT: Haven’t changed the hardware either.
SHAWN BICE: All I did — I didn’t change the app and I didn’t change
the hardware. In fact, if I expand this diagnostic window, you’ll see
that we’re using more of the CPU and latches are gone. (Cheers,
applause.) Love this stuff. All right. Let me hide this window and I’m
going to stop this because the story gets better. Want to see it?
In-memory database for OLTP (Project
“Hekaton”): This high performance memory-
optimized online transactional processing
(OLTP) engine is integrated into SQL Server. It
is a full relational database management
system (RDBMS) with full ACID (atomicity,
consistency, isolation, durability) support and
memory-optimized indexes for high per-
formance. This in-memory database will offer
customers up to 50 times the improvement in
performance and the opportunity to take
advantage of existing investments in SQL
Server. Customers like Edgenet are already
seeing performance gains of up to 25 times in
early trials of project Hekaton.
The new database is codenamed “Hekaton,” and will be available in
“the next major release of SQL Server,” Ted Kummert, vice president of
Microsoft’s Business Platform Division, told attendees at Microsoft’s
database conference taking place in Seattle this week.
Between October 1997 and February 2004, 28 requests for an evaluation
version of CocoBase were received from email addresses connected with
Oracle domain names, the complaint states. From September 1997 to June
2003, Thought also received 118 evaluation copy requests from email
addresses with domain names associated with Sun Microsystems, it adds.
On May 2, 2002, Thought founder Ward Mullins emailed Oracle
middleware executive Ted Farrell, the complaint states. Mullins
“identified certain technologies covered by Thought’s current and
then-pending patent rights so that Oracle would not ‘accidentally
violate [Thought's] intellectual property.’”
Rory McInerney, vice president of Intel’s architecture group said
that future Itanium chips would be built using some of the key features
found in the company’s more widely used Xeon server processors. He did
not say when future chips would be released.
Instantis, which counts big names like Abbott Laboratories, Credit
Suisse Group AG and Xerox Corp. among its biggest customers, sells
project portfolio management software–tools that help IT help desks and
product managers track their progress on projects. CA Inc. offers
similar products for its IT customers.
Prior to the release of Workday 18, we were invited to Workday’s
Pleasanton headquarters as part of a representative group of the
customer base to learn about what’s new and provide feedback, a
gathering Workday hosts for every one of its updates. We were also given
a “sandbox” copy of our production system, including all of our data,
to experience some of the new look-and-feel changes in Workday 18.
Workday talked us through changes, and explained the reasons for them.
We got to hear from product teams on product direction.
It’s important that software providers gather knowledge and expertise
from their customers. Most traditional enterprise software vendors have
user groups, but I’ve not had a similar experience to the Workday
community when working with the on-premise software industry. To see
fairly immediately how our team has influenced the design of a product
is a unique experience–enough to make me want to stand up and clap.
Gone are the days when marketing was the creative engine that focused
on brand imaging and creativity. That world has disappeared – replaced
by science, analytics and razor-sharp execution of programs to engage in
what IDC call digital and interpersonal dialogs.
Thomas Langenbach, a top executive at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, could
face five years in state prison if convicted, said Santa Clara County
Deputy District Attorney Paola Estanislao.
Estanislao said Langenbach turned down an offer for a less severe
sentence. If he had pleaded guilty to two of the felony counts, he
would’ve received just eight months in county jail, three years of
formal probation and paid restitution for the other thefts, she said.
Shares of Workday Inc. edged up Tuesday morning as three of the main
underwriters of its initial public offering last month assigned neutral
ratings to the stock just ahead of the company’s Workday Rising
conference for customers, partners and employees.
To be sure, Salesforce.com already has a broad partner program, with
2,300 people attending its partner day at its Dreamforce event in San
Francisco in September. And in April, Salesforce.com unveiled a program
to train 1,000 partners and integrators to use its cloud-based
applications in the government sector.
The ragtag group of sailors and crew members are building a tiny
model of their wrecked sailboat to participate in Saturday’s Red Bull
Flugtag in San Francisco, a silly event in which 33 teams will compete
to see how far they can launch eclectic flying devices into the water
from a 30-foot-tall platform.
we expect Workday to enjoy a decade long run of Oracle/SAP
replacements…Workday differs from its SaaS peer group because it is
exclusively a big deal business; Workday’s ASP is approximately $480K
and growing. While the company is and will continue to operate at
significant losses in the near term, the compounding effect of large
deals in a subscription model will enable the company to be profitable
at a $1.5B rev run rate and still enjoy strong growth rates.
After spending time with the new Windows touch UI, Windows 8 on
tablet, and Windows Phone 8, I now see that the company really does have
a unified strategy going forward and that, thankfully, mobile is a key
part. This is critical to Microsoft’s future since mobile is where the
growth will be for the next seven years. And whether Microsoft likes it
or not, PC sales will remain steady and possibly decline over that time
period, thus seriously impacting its earning potential with traditional
products.
Infor offers an attractive option for firms that prioritize functionality over technology and choice over uniformity.
Workday version 18 features a beefed-up financial management
component that includes improved global tax and payment capabilities;
more detailed reporting functionality; and a “project scenario planning”
feature that uses Workday’s human-resources software along with the
financials module, allowing managers to “allocate resources seamlessly
across projects with details that include cost, worker availability,
skills, and experience,” according to a statement.
Workday 18 also features grants management and fund accounting for government bodies and educational institutions, Workday said.
Other new features in the update focus on human resources
capabilities, such as a new employee profile system and the ability to
punch in and out of work from mobile devices and web browsers.
Workday has also made additions at the platform level, with custom
field management tools that make it easy for customers to configure the
software to their liking, according to a statement.
The second [area] is retail and banking, where we sell a mobile
solution that touches the consumer. For instance, we sell a mobile
banking solution in significant parts of Asia to banks. Take one of our
large banks we’re working with in Bangladesh called Dutch-Bangla Bank.
They have a couple of million users today but they plan to get mobile
banking to half the population of Bangladesh. That’s 80 million people.
Those 80 million people have never seen an ATM card, don’t know what a
bank looks like, but they all have a phone. Now they can get their
account balance, maybe use SMS to do a micropayment.
SAP and Ariba will terminate the current network fee structure that
charges a percentage of transactional value to suppliers by 2015 and
replace it with flat connectivity charges (either annual subscriptions
for basic connectivity or per-document pricing). Curious to learn more
about the thought process behind this prediction? We hope you find the
snippet below piques your interest in Spend Matters PRO.
[Under SAP] Supplier-focused business models will be given equal or
greater weight – A major element of Ariba’s turnaround, furthered by the
acquisition of Quadrem, was shifting the cost equation from buyers to
suppliers for transactional procurement activity. By making suppliers
pay more for transactional network fees, Ariba could effectively charge
less for buyers and still maintain an attractive gross margin that was
in line with smaller, best of breed competitors (like Coupa, that would
often cost more than Ariba in subscription-fees after changing the
business model).
Ariba, it is hoped, will turn a business marketplaces into a kind of
corporate social network. The equivalent of status updates on Facebook
will be awareness of goods that are available, the status of payments or
of products in transit.
There are, of course, no guarantees this will come true, but it is an interesting idea.
“Our first rule is to not hire anyone who’s not brilliant at what
they do,” he says, chuckling at the obvious. “Our second rule is don’t
hire anyone you can’t have dinner with.” The premise is that if you
can’t enjoy sharing a meal, you won’t enjoy sitting across the big,
square table sitting out in the open that serves as a multi-person desk
for Phillips and his executive team. “Anyone can walk up and talk to us
any time,” he says. Rather than an intrusion on his workflow, Phillips
insists these interruptions make him more productive.
The round, led by Sunstone Capital, brings the total amount raised by
Neo Technology to more than $24 million. The investment will be used to
fuel product development, meet the needs of Neo’s rapidly expanding
customer base, and to further deliver on the company’s vision for mass
adoption of graph databases. All of Neo Technology’s current
institutional investors, including Fidelity Growth Partners Europe and
Conor Venture Partners, are participating above pro rata in this round.
The programming language Java, which started life with such promise
in 1995, has mutated into a computer monster. Like Frankenstein’s
creation, it needs to be killed to spare us any more misery.
SurfCast, based in Portland, Maine, has no products on the market but
does claim ownership of four patents. That should sound familiar. The
four patents — 6,724,403; 7,028,264; 7,376,907 and 7,987,431 – all cover
a “System and method for simultaneous display of multiple information
sources.” Ironically, all four patents cite prior Microsoft patents in
their filing as prior art.
Google made what has become a common request for a tech company
fighting for billions of dollars: a public court proceeding conducted
largely in secret.
The new SAP Jam application lets employees connect with fellow
workers and collaborate around business processes, content and data. It
combines what SAP described as “the best parts” of the Jam product
SuccessFactors developed prior to the acquisition, with added
capabilities and components from SAP StreamWork — a social networking
product SAP developed earlier.
Hurd promised that Oracle (with Ellison’s blessing) would seize the
microprocessor lead from IBM over the coming year, thanks to its
investment and commitment in the business. “We have lots of money.
Because we have an owner that counts it,” he joked, drawing chuckles
from the audience.
Play with it for a few minutes and it becomes obvious the two
companies have exercised their many powers to get everything right.
Billings, or the amount invoiced to customers, rose 23 percent for
the third quarter ending in September compared with a year ago, and are
up 54 percent over the first nine months of this year, according to the
company. It plans to announce those results next week.
SugarCRM has raised a total of $79 million from New Enterprise
Associates, Silicon Valley Bank, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and others,
including a $33 million round in April.
The company has an unorthodox business model for CRM software, which
lets companies’ sales teams track leads and deals. About 800,000 users
run a free, open-source version of the product and nearly 200,000 pay
for versions that cost $30 to $100 per user each month, Augustin said.
At issue is U.S. Patent 6,724,403, titled “System and Method for
Simultaneous Display of Multiple Information Sources,” which SurfCast
was awarded in 2004.
Developers are now crafting applications for BlackBerry 10, and RIM’s
enterprise teams have started presenting BB10 devices and services to
business customers.
“Our engineers are fully mobilized to ensure that BlackBerry 10 launches flawlessly in the first quarter of 2013,” Heins said.
This may be RIM’s last chance to impress. In July, the company had to
fend off rumors that it was falling into a “death spiral,” as Heins put
it. The Ontario-based company announced brutally low financial results
this summer, and has already pushed back the rollout of BlackBerry 10
from late 2012 to early 2013.
The management shakeup, Cook’s biggest since becoming CEO last year,
also brings new responsibilities for Jony Ive, Apple’s design whiz; Eddy
Cue, who runs Apple’s online services; Bob Mansfield, who retired this
year but is returning to focus on “future products”; and Craig
Federighi, who is now in charge of the Mac operating system.
Separately, early reviews for Apple’s long-awaited iPad mini have started to trickle out.
The 7.9-inch tablet computer, which begins shipping Friday, has
largely received solid marks, although complaints about its non-retina
display quality (the iPad mini features the same display as the iPad 2)
and high price have kept it from receiving glowing reviews.
“By pricing the mini so high, Apple allows the $200 class of 7-inch
Android tablets and readers to live (Google Nexus, Kindle Fire HD, Nook
HD). Those tablets also, by the way, have high-definition screens (1,280
by 800 pixels), which the mini doesn’t,” wrote David Pogue of the New
York Times.
“I’ve a
“I always thought about this like marrying off your daughter. You
know it’s the right thing to do, you just want to hold on a little more —
but it’s time to move on to other challenges.”
If you’re an Office 365 Enterprise customer, the latest wave of
“Office 15″ features are starting to roll out, as well. The
aforementioned spokesperson noted that Microsoft has started rolling out
new capabilities to Office 365 Enterprise users via Microsoft’s regular
service updates. These updates will occur starting in late October and
continue through general availability (early 2013, according to
Microsoft).
StreamWork was released a couple of years ago with much fanfare but
never seemed to gain much market traction. While existing StreamWork
customers will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future, SAP
isn’t going to conduct new development on a standalone version, said
Sameer Patel, global vice president and general manager, social software
solutions.
“SAP Jam is the go-forward platform,” he said. “We’re basically
building everything on the Jam foundation.” SAP has “re-created
StreamWork elements” on Jam, Patel added.
IT projects, in total, had a cost overrun of $66 billion, more than
the GDP of Luxembourg. We also found that the longer a project is
scheduled to last, the more likely it is that it will run over time and
budget, with every additional year spent on the project increasing cost
overruns by 15 percent.
Collaborative business processes are supported via integrations with
SuccessFactors Business Execution (BizX) Suite, the on-premise SAP®
Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application, the mobile
client for the SAP® Financials OnDemand solution and the SAP® Sales
OnDemand solution for social onboarding or learning, collaborative
opportunity or service request management, and social customer or
partner engagement.
Informatica continues to innovate. For example, Informatica Data
Controls provides a framework for developing MDM-based applets that can
be embedded in existing applications. Informatica MDM is available in
the cloud through partners in an IaaS deployment, and a multitenant SaaS
deployment option in the public cloud is planned for 2013 — although
for salesforce.com users the strategy now is to offer Informatica Cloud
MDM based on the Data Scout acquisition. In the social networking area
Informatica MDM 9.5 provides a prebuilt connector to Facebook which
invokes a Facebook application, allowing the enrichment of internal
master data with social data. Additionally, Informatica 9.5 provides
location-based master data access functions on tablets and other mobile
devices, and in the big data area there are plans to release a matching
capability for Hadoop within the Informatica MDM product at end 2012.
The longer term road map includes a facility called Semantic Master that
creates a best
SAP announced today that it is offering new packages that integrate
Hadoop software with its analytics and database technologies, including
its much-touted HANA in-memory platform and Sybase IQ server, a columnar
database and enterprise data warehouse.
SAP also announced packages integrating Hadoop and SAP Data
Integrator and across the SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence (BI)
suite.
The vulnerabilities exist in versions 15.0.3 and later. According to
database security firm Application Security, just two of the 12 flaws
the company reported to Sybase earlier this year have been truly fixed.
Many of the bugs are privilege escalation issues, while others allow
attackers to execute arbitrary code. The most serious of the bugs, CR
694649, has a severity rating of 8.3 on a 10.0 scale.
Under pressure from the U.S. government, Huawei will miss the Windows
Phone 8 launch today. Facing setbacks, Chinese smartphones makers could
turn to developing their own mobile operation systems.
For the Washington DC strategists, the question of who captures
Silicon Valley depends in large part on who moves first: the Republicans
on social issues, or the Democrats on fiscal issues. But in Silicon
Valley, the question is how entrepreneurs can make government work
better, be it through Republican or Democratic candidates. Entrepreneurs
after all tend to see ourselves not as pawns to be captured in a
political game but as kings and king-makers. The only party a hacker can
belong to for long is no party at all.
A lock-up period that had prevented such sales expired on Monday.
U.S. stock markets opened on Wednesday for the first time since
Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast, so that’s when employees could
start selling.
Every time you build an application — NoSQL or otherwise — that
stores data redundantly with other applications over other data stores,
you’re making your MDM problem bigger.
With your unyielding support and commitment, we built a highly
ethical, disciplined and responsible enterprise. I have such fond
memories of our journey and of the relationships we’ve developed along
the way. Today, I find myself faced with complex emotions, i.e., pride
and joy for what we have accomplished and sadness for the ending of our
journey together. In closing, I wish you all continued success.
M.S.R. owes its increased prominence as much to the transformation of
the computing industry as to its own hard work. The explosion of data
from sensors, connected devices and powerful cloud computing centers has
created the Big Data industry. Computers are needed to find patterns in
the mountains of data produced each day.
How many times can people hear about small and nice and powerful the
iPad Mini is until they realise it’s neither as small as the iPod Touch
nor as nice as the iPhone 5, nor as powerful as the full-sized iPad? If
Apple commercials told the truth, this hilarious ‘banned’ iPad Mini
parody video would be what we would get to see on TV instead of
manicured fingers swiping and tapping over hipster music. It’s
hilarious.
ING’s decision to deploy Oracle Fusion HCM was driven by its ongoing
desire to strengthen HR’s role in driving the business. Oracle’s
long-time PeopleSoft HCM customer evaluated the HCM market segment
before selecting Oracle Fusion HCM to help strengthen its leadership
position as an employer of choice and to continue using leading HR tools
to maintain its position as one of the top employers in the
Netherlands. ING will deploy Oracle Fusion HCM, working closely with
NorthgateArinso, a Gold-level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork, who will
be providing the hosting services, and Oracle Consulting Services. The
financial services firm will deploy the full suite of Oracle Fusion
Global Human Resources and Talent Management solutions, including Oracle
Fusion Goal Management, Oracle Fusion OTBI, Oracle Fusion Workforce
Compensation, Oracle Fusion Benefits, and Oracle Fusion Performance
Management. Additionally, ING Bank Netherlands will deploy Oracle Fusion
Financials, taking advantage of Ora
In this case, all the devices being announced today run Android 4.2,
the next version of Jelly Bean. Android 4.2 isn’t a complete overhaul of
the software, but adds such features as a new keyboard, wireless video
streaming services, a 360-degree photo feature, and a new Google Now
service.
With its minimalist design built around a set of online services, the
device epitomizes the way we’re using computers mostly as consoles to
stay connected to our personal collections of people, programs and
media.
You can do this on a PC or phone, but many prefer a slim tablet that
starts right up and runs a full day without recharging. Until recently
the best option was an Apple iPad, but most every major tech company
offers models in different sizes.
After a few days with Microsoft’s Surface, I think it’s a decent
alternative, especially for people who haven’t yet added a tablet to
their computing mix or have yet to strongly embrace the online realms of
Apple, Google or Amazon.com.
Release 11.1 increases the performance, availability and I/O
throughput of the new Oracle Database technology, optimises Oracle
Database performance and enables Oracle Database administrators to
identify I/O outliers and isolate network or storage bottlenecks, the
company said.
The optimised shared memory interface between the Oracle Database and
Oracle Solaris 11.1 provides 8x faster database startup and shutdown,
as well as online resizing of the Oracle Database System Global Area
(SGA).
Solaris 11.1 includes a new Oracle Solaris DTrace plug-in for Oracle
Java Mission Control to enable customers to profile Java applications on
Oracle Solaris production systems.
It also includes new cloud management features that will maximise
network resource utilization and manage bandwidth in cloud environments,
while the the built-in memory predictor monitors application memory use
and provides optimised memory page sizes and resource location to speed
overall application performance.
Release
The phone survey of nearly 1,200 adults in the U.S. found 52 percent
hadn’t even heard of Windows 8 leading up to Friday’s release of the
redesigned software.
Among the people who knew something about the new operating system,
61 percent had little or no interest in buying a new laptop or desktop
computer running on Windows 8, according to the poll. And only about a
third of people who’ve heard about the new system believe it will be an
improvement (35 percent).
For as concerned as I am about Tim Cook’s ability to lead Apple in a
post-Steve Jobs world (or a post-iPod, -iPhone and -iPad world), I’m
equally as excited by this we can’t call it predictable, but hardly
surprising move.
Let’s not mince words.
Cook pulled a power play.
Earlier this year, Fortune referred to Forstall as Apple’s
‘CEO-in-Waiting.’ That doesn’t bode well for inter-office dynamics,
particularly if Forstall believes his own press clippings (according to
more than a few accounts, he does). And, for as secure as he probably is
as CEO, Forstall’s “title” likely didn’t sit well with Cook.
However, the latest layoffs were tiny, affecting perhaps 50
employees, and seem to be directed mostly at salespeople absorbed when
Oracle bought Sun, our sources tell us.
Scott Forstall, the brilliant, but polarizing SVP who leads iOS, is
out. As is John Browett who took over Apple’s retail operations earlier
this year.
Forstall’s responsibilities are going to be split amongst three long time Apple execs.
Jony Ive, who leads hardware design, will lead Human Interface across the company.
Eddy Cue, who leads Internet services, will take over Siri and Maps.
Craig Federighi, who runs OSX, will also lead iOS development.
Not to be outdone by last week’s news of Apple’s upcoming iPad Mini,
Microsoft and Google unleashed new mobile devices on Monday in what has
becoming an increasingly crowded battle of wireless gadgets.
Steve Ballmer and Uncle Fester: separated at birth? You be the judge …
Take a look at OpenOffice and LibreOffice’s plans for their next
versions. You’ll find the same laundry list of features: better Office
2007-2013 OpenXML format support, and versions for tablets and the
cloud.
In the meantime, after years of resistance, Microsoft says it’s
finally supporting Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 with read, edit and
save support in Office 2013. This means that there will finally be a
single, high-end format that MS-Office, OpenOffice, and LibreOffice will
all fully support. If Microsoft delivers, this could make both
LibreOffice and OpenOffice much more attractive to end-users.
I have a modest proposal: Instead of wasting time and energy on
duplicating work why doesn’t Apache join up with LibreOffice’s parent
organization The Document Foundation and work together on a single
open-source office suite? And, in particular why not work together on
ODF and OpenXML support? Wouldn’t that be best for all
OpenOffice/LibreOffice developers and users? I think so.
AX 2012 R2 localizes the ERP applications for 36 country
localizations by including specific regulatory requirements in various
countries and localities. The update adds 11 new localizations for large
countries such as Japan, India, Brazil, Russia and China, but also
smaller countries such as the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia,
Lithuania, and Poland.
Also new in AX 2012 R2 is a “talent management” system for matching
the skills of job candidates to open positions within an organization.
Microsoft added that customers in the U.S. can also now bring payroll
processing in house where they can exercise better control of this
sensitive data than with a third-party payroll processing company.
Besides specific new features for different industry siloes, R2 also
adds tools to gauge business performance using Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs) and other benchmarking capabilities for deeper
analysis to deliver actionable business insights, wrote Kees Hertogh,
director of Microsoft Dyn
Right now, SAP charges 7.5 percent of a Customer OnDemand
subscription for the new cloud integration option, with a minimum
pricing “floor” of A!2000 per month, according to a presentation slide.
Pricing for adding it to other cloud apps is expected to take a similar
approach.
The cloud integration service will be offered in stand-alone form in
the second half of next year, according to the presentation.
Still, with this video we get some solid evidence of the Nexus 10′s
existence, along with a glimpse at that snazzy 2560 x 1600 display. From
a display standpoint, the Nexus 10 certainly looks like an excellent
tablet, and rumors have been suggesting that it has some solid innards
to go along with that beautiful screen. We’ve been hearing that the
Nexus 10 will be sporting a dual-core Samsung Exynos 5250 processor
clocked at 1.7GHz, 2GB of RAM, a five-megapixel rear camera, and 16GB of
internal storage. The source of this leak also confirmed that the Nexus
10 will have GPS, so we’ve got that to look forward to as well.
Google’s episode supposedly resulted in somebody’s employment
termination, and the Big G police came knocking to track down the lost
device. It essentially confirms that investors will see a new Nexus
flagship smartphone on Monday — about time, since the last one (the
Galaxy Nexus) was released last December.
But, on the night of Sept. 20, Google wasn’t fighting the internet.
It was up against a bartender, and Brian Katz, global investigations and
intelligence manager at Google (according to his LinkedIn profile —
“Google does not discuss the actions of its security team,” a
representative says) was headed to the 500 Club.
I have no doubt it would surprise many customers to learn that they
have to make an additional investment of 40-50k€ (or more), plus ongoing
support and maintenance, to enable bi-directional integration between
two companies under the same umbrella that has claimed for years that
Integration is their DNA. A few weeks ago the story was even worse as
SAP had ALSO planned to charge additional licenses for NW PI to
SuccessFactors but they recently changed course and do NOT plan to
charge SAP ERP customers who have a run-time license of NetWeaver any
additional cost to use NetWeaver PI OnPremise to connect and get
bi-directional integration with SuccessFactors.
“It’s our ambition to grow with double-digit numbers for a very long
time to come,” Euro am Sonntag quoted McDermott as saying in an
interview published on Sunday.
Even if Oracle Team USA’s USA-17 had not capsized on Tuesday, the
team would have needed to seriously considered their options in
modifying USA-17 to take the larger volume, or bigger foils used by the
New Zealanders.
Putting new foils/daggerboards into an AC72 is not a simple task and
would have required a substantial rebuild, both in fitting the foiling
mechanism, making the daggerboard cavity bigger, fitting a ‘V’ foil
similar to the NZers, and ensuring that the platform was structurally
strong enough to handle the new foil system.
Despite every single Surface variant selling out during its pre-order
stages in several regions including the U.S. and UK, Apple CEO Tim Cook
has labelled the device as a “compromised” and “confusing product”.
“In principle, we support ‘Do Not Track’ (DNT). Unfortunately,
because discussions have not yet resulted in a final standard for how to
implement DNT, the current DNT signal can easily be abused,” reads a
Friday post in Yahoo’s Policy blog.
[Yes, it can be abused easily by NOT FOLLOWING THE DNT REQUESTS OF THE USERS -DBM]
Google has (wisely) decided to cancel its big Monday press event. It
was originally scheduled to be held at Pier 36 in the city, which isn’t
the best of places to hang out when the city’s even considering shutting
down its mass transit system due to flooding.
According to The Verge’s T.C. Sottek, Google’s event location has now
been designated an evacuation zone by the city, which rules any kind of
product launches right out. The company hasn’t indicated when or where
it plans to reschedule its event, which also now leaves the fun
situation of Microsoft and Google butting heads with competing Monday
press events resolved: Microsoft gets Monday to itself when hosting its
press event from the pretty, lacking-severe-weather location of San
Francisco, California.
In this cheat sheet I’ll show you how to get the most out of the new
Start screen and its apps, the Desktop, the new Charms bar, Internet
Explorer 10 and plenty more. I’ve also provided quick reference charts
listing useful touch-screen gestures and keyboard shortcuts.
Mahaney was only indirectly involved in the incident involving the
Facebook research, according to the settlement agreement by
Massachusetts regulators released on Friday. But the actions of the
junior analyst who worked for him provide an unusual glimpse into the
type of behind-the-scenes information trading that regulators are
attempting to rein in.
While the Massachusetts regulators did not identify any of the
individuals by name, Reuters has learned that the incident involved
TechCrunch reporters Josh Constine and Kim-Mai Cutler as well as Citi
junior analyst Eric Jacobs.
The 11 quarters of growth coincide with the co-CEO era of Bill
McDermott and Jim Hagemann-Snabe. They launched the in-memory (Hana),
mobile, and cloud strategy that make up SAP’s innovation story, and
McDermott and Hagemann-Snabe said on Wednesday that these three areas
are responsible for half of SAP’s growth in the more recent quarter.
Where do things stand where new products vs. core apps revenue are
concerned? Software and support revenue accounted for 3.13 billion Euros
($4.04 billion) in revenue out of total of 3.95 billion Euros ($5.10
billion) in revenue reported in the third quarter ended Sept. 30. So
software and support represents about 80% of revenue whereas the 63
million Euros ($81 million) in cloud subscription and support revenue
represents about 1.6% of the total (with services revenue making up the
difference).
3mm-thick keyboard is far from unusable and beats a virtual keyboard any day.
And besides, for a few bucks more you can get the other Surface
keyboard that Microsoft is selling, which is a real keyboard —
responsive and easy to use.
And as I’ve been saying for a while now, as an interface, I like Windows 8 and its dual personality.
For Microsoft, one of the more encouraging signs (I saw) was the
intensity of interest. Customers had lots of questions about Surface and
some sat there for 30 minutes or even an hour kicking the tires (or, in
this case, pounding on the 3mm keyboard).
SAP failures are rarely about the software…
SAP failures typically begin early in the sales cycle…
But those hoping for a mea culpa from Cupertino shouldn’t hold their
breath. Apple goes on to toot its own horn and highlight the parts of
the judge’s ruling that criticize Samsung’s tablets – particularly that
bit about how the Galaxy Tab lineup is “not as cool” as the iPad.
“They do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design. They are not as cool.”
But if the state were to take the millions of dollars it annually
spends on such givebacks — among them a much-publicized tax credit for
the film industry — and plow it into tax reform, Pennsylvania could
lower its corporate net income tax from the current 9.99 percent to 8.39
percent, Benefield said.
Such a reduction would move the state from the second-highest
corporate tax rate in the country to the 15th highest, Benefield noted.
“My biggest concern is that people are going to get these tablets,
realize their limitations and then return them in droves,” he said. He
said that the biggest challenge for Microsoft is explaining the
difference between Windows 8 and Windows RT to consumers “because they
are very different.”
Gartner’s top predictions for IT organizations include the following:
Through 2015, 90% of enterprises will bypass broad-scale deployment of Windows 8.
Windows 8 is Microsoft’s attempt to bring the touch interface to its
flagship product to counter gains by Apple in rapid-growth markets.
Microsoft had to make this change to modernize its offering, and its
approach is to push IT organizations to this new interface as quickly as
possible. However, most enterprises and their trusted management
vendors are not yet prepared for this change, and Gartner predicts that
enterprises will want to wait for more stability before proceeding.
While Microsoft as a technology company can make these changes at a more
advanced pace, the preponderance of the customer base cannot move so
quickly. The market will take time to mature, and most enterprises will
sit on the sideline for now.
1. Mobile Devices Battles
2. Mobile Applications & HTML5
3. Personal Cloud
4. Internet of Things
5. Hybrid IT & Cloud Computing
6. Strategic Big Data
7. Actionable Analytics
8. Mainstream In-Memory Computing
9. Integrated Ecosystems
10. Enterprise Apps Stores
PAUL CEGLIA, the defendant, willfully and knowingly, having devised
and intending to devise a scheme and artifice to defraud, and for
obtaining money and property by means of false and fraudulent pretenses,
representations and promises, for the purpose of executing such scheme
and artifice and attempting so to do, would and did place and caused to
be placed in a post office and authorized depository for mail matter,
matters and things to be sent and delivered by the Postal Service, and
would and did deposit and cause to be deposited matters and things to be
sent and delivered by private and commercial interstate carriers, and
would and did take and receive and cause to be taken and received
therefrom, such …
This is a complex sell, and the staff in this particular store didn’t
seem to be up to it. We assume that the Times Square staff would be as
well trained on this as anyone, given that they operate in walking
distance of the Apple Mecca on Fifth Avenue. But they just didn’t seem
to have a well rehearsed set of talking points to explain what is a
admittedly a tricky proposition: this is just like the Windows you know
and love, but it’s not the full Windows you can load your games and
software onto. If you want that, a full version called Surface Pro is
coming at a later date that can’t yet be revealed. This one is called
Windows 8 RT, and the RT doesn’t stand for anything (seriously) and
there’s also a regular Windows 8 (without the RT) available available
right now, just over there in the other part of the store, running on
regular laptops that also have touchscreens, but not on these laptops
with these touchscreens, because they are running on a different kind of
chip, called ARM. What
His alleged crime: doctoring, fabricating and destroying evidence to
support his claims. The feds described his lawsuit as a multi-billion
dollar scheme to defraud Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg.
[President of HP? -DBM]
Cisco CEO John Chambers was his usual, cautiously confident self, and
Oracle president Mark Hurd exuded confidence that Oracle’s new strategy
has finally come together, and CRN’s news editor Steve Burke was
exasperated by the waste behind the American Recovery and Re-investment
Act money that went to technology companies (some of whom will
thoroughly surprise you).
NetSuite posted a loss of $8 million, or 11 cents per share, compared
with a loss of $6.9 million, or 10 cents per share, in the same quarter
last year. Excluding one-time charges, the company posted an adjusted
profit of 8 cents per share for the recent quarter.
Revenue rose 31 percent to $79.8 million.
Apple chief executive Tim Cook panned the new rival offerings in a call with analysts and investors.
Cook said Apple made “hard choices” when creating the iPad so that it
didn’t try to do too many things. “I suppose you can design a car that
can fly and that floats, but I don’t think it would do all those things
very well,” Cook said.
So of the 25 million tablets shipped, Android accounted for about 41 percent of them, while 57 percent were iOS.
Worth noting is that Apple’s 14 million units shipped were all one or
two models: the 3rd-generaion iPad and the cheaper iPad 2. Android, on
the other hand, is a wilderness of sizes, brands, and prices. The Kindle
Fire has been calculated to be the single most popular Android tablet,
and other standouts, like the Nook and Nexus 7, have also moved quite a
few units. But there are hundreds of smaller brands and cheaper devices
that also contribute to the total.
Apple’s new iPad Mini, unveiled Tuesday, might give a boost to sales,
and the next year may also see Microsoft’s new tablet, the Surface, in
the mix. Pre-orders for the least expensive Surface sold out recently.
And, Google, too, may yet have a surprise up its sleeve: An event on the
Monday promises new tablets and possibly an updated operating system.
Samsung Electronics announced a profit of 8.12 trillion won ($7.4
billion) in the third quarter, nearly double last year’s figure, as
strong sales of high-end TVs and Galaxy smartphones more than offset
reduced orders for chips and screens from Apple. Meanwhile, arch rival
Apple Inc, also had a good quarter, reporting earnings that met
expectations after the bell. The stock fell 1.5 percent in extended
trade.
Amazon shares fell $5.57, or 2.4%, to close at $222.92 before the
company released its results. At one point in after-hours trading,
Amazon shares fell an additional $2.48.
The Seattle company posted a loss of $274 million, or 60 cents a
share, much more than the 8-cents-a-share loss that analysts in a
Thomson Reuters survey had anticipated. In last year’s third quarter,
Amazon earned $63 million, or 14 cents a share.
Sales for the quarter rose 27% to $13.8 billion. Analysts had expected $13.9 billion.
Looking ahead, Amazon said fourth-quarter results that include the
crucial holiday shopping season could range from a $490-million loss to a
$310-million profit.
Lower-than-expected profit and disappointing iPad sales capped off a
rocky month on Wall Street for Apple, which has seen its shares fall 13%
since the release of the iPhone 5 on Sept. 21. The stock was so
volatile that trading in Apple shares had to be temporarily halted right
before the company released its earnings Thursday.
Apple’s announcement on Tuesday may disrupt the market as much as its
own profit margins. How the technology giant will pull this off and
still generate a profit out of the smaller tablet business — including
its ‘original’ iPad business — remains unclear. It’s worth taking a look
at the winners and losers.
Indeed, this is where the real advantage of Windows 8 lies: it
enables an existing desktop experience (and the megatons of enterprise
software based on that experience) to live another day in a hybrid
tablet, while enabling a new generation of software based on multi-touch
creation and consumption to redefine the enterprise software
experience.
Sit back, relax, and in a few weeks I’m sure you’ll be loving the
whole Windows 8 groove. And definitely, definitely don’t downgrade if
you buy a new machine with Windows 8 pre-installed. You’ll be missing
out on a fantastic operating system.
Earnings per share for the quarter were €0.70 (65 cents), down 2.3%
year over year on constant currency, and 6.7% below the Zacks Consensus
Estimate.
Whitman said the smartphone is the main Internet access device in
many countries. “I don’t know how we can be HP without having the full
range of devices,” she said.
Any serious and knowledgeable observer of the IT market has to debunk
the half-truths, falsehoods, misleading statements and myths contained
in Oracle’s claims.
SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott tells CNBC’s US “Squawk Box” SAP had record
software earnings in Q3. Big Data and strong innovation drive profit.
McDermott optimistic on Europe. Watch it here.
NetSuite Inc. on Thursday reported a third-quarter loss of $7.98
million, or 11 cents a share, compared with a loss of $6.93 million, or
10 cents a share. Revenue was $79.79 million, up from $60.96 million.
Adjusted profit was 8 cents a share. Analysts were expecting a profit of
6 cents a share, on revenue of $78.04 million, according to a consensus
survey by FactSet.
Record Q3 Revenue of $79.8 Million, a 31% Year-over-Year Increase
Non-GAAP Net Income Grows 49% Year-over-Year
Operating Cash Flows of $15.2 Million, a 61% Increase Year-over-Year
The company said earnings per share on a non-GAAP basis were 8 cents,
beating the consensus view of 6 cents. Sales were $79.8 million versus
an expected $78 million, and rose 31 percent over the year-ago quarter.
The company earlier this month announced a two-tier version of its suite
of business applications, aimed at larger customers.
Presenters: Will Poweel and Nic Doodson, Keytree Store Trek is a
personalized virtual shopping experience, allowing you to shop in your
own home with the familiarity of a supermarket and an experience that is
tailored to you in full 3D. You can see live products in complete
aisles of products, compare sizes, see offers, and peruse the market.
Prepare for a whole new way of shopping, powered by SAP HANA and SAP
NetWeaver Cloud.
In addition, the company announced a partnership with bwin.party, an
international gaming operator that will enable real money casino games
like poker, slots, and roulette in the U.K. That opens up a potentially
lucrative new revenue stream for Zynga.
At Radian6, Salesforce.com is reported to be laying off “less than
100 people.” And at Buddy Media, the company amended its 8-K, which
shows $20 million in net losses for the first six months of the year.
But margins are likely to be under pressure. Cloud computing isn’t
yet profitable for the industry because it demands large upfront
investments and a critical mass of users. SAP reckons it needs around €2
billion in cloud revenues to make an operating profit, which it expects
to achieve by 2015. In the near term, the acquisitions are weighing on
margins; SuccessFactors shaved one percentage point off operating profit
margins in the third quarter. And with more new products to sell, SAP
added 6,800 staff in the first nine months of the year. The pace of
hiring slowed in the third quarter, but operating expenses were still
20% higher year-on-year.
Jim Hagemann Snabe, Co-CEO of the German software company SAP, talks
to CNBC about their positive earnings after an eleventh quarter of
double digit growth and the strategy that is driving their growth.
[pp.38 on are very interesting... -DBM
I think that this is one of the most unbelievable, unforgivable debacles ever
seen in the area of IT and government contracting in the history of Australia. A contract which started
out at $6 million has grown into a monolith potentially approaching $1.25 billion or more. As I have
indicated previously, that is like paying $400 for a Mars Bar or $7 million for a base model Commodore.
IBM had been paid a total of $21 million as of March 2010. A KPMG
audit later revealed that the bungled implementation would cost a total
of $1.25 billion to fix in the seven years to 2017.
The National Football League and SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced a
new multiyear marketing sponsorship that will make SAP the Official
Cloud Software Solutions, Business Software and Business Analytics
Software Sponsor of the NFL. The sponsorship will allow SAP to redefine
the fan experience with innovative technology for the most passionate
fan base in all of sports.
The NFL will utilize cloud solutions from SAP to support the
continued innovation and enhancement of NFL.com’s Fantasy Football
platform. Through the implementation of on-demand SAP® solutions, SAP
and the NFL will team up to deepen the NFL.com Fantasy Football
experience, providing fans with enhanced analytics and functionality
within the game.
Software revenue grew 17 percent to A!1 billion, while software and
software-related service revenue was up 19 percent to A!3.2 billion.
Profit was however down 51 percent to A!618 million from the same quarter a year earlier
SAP HANA revenue was €83 million ($107m), keeping the company on
track to reach full-year expectations of approximately €320 million
($415m). Mobile revenue tells the same story — the firm expect to reach a
revenue of €220 million ($285m) by the end of the fiscal year, and
revenue has currently reached €48 million ($62m).
Microsoft this week is launching its new Xbox Smart Glass app, which
will tie together Xbox content with tablets, PCs, and phones, the
company announced.
Redmond plans to release Xbox SmartGlass alongside Windows 8 and its
Surface tablets this Friday, Oct. 26. The free SmartGlass app will
initially be released for Windows 8 and Windows RT devices, though
support for Windows Phone 8, iOS, and Android devices is also on tap.
The app essentially turns your tablet, PC, or phone into a “smart second
screen” for your Xbox 360.
“Your phone and tablet will become the best remote controls in your
house,” Yusuf Mehdi, chief marketing officer for Microsoft’s interactive
entertainment division, wrote in a blog post Monday. “Use the touch
screen on your smartphone or tablet to control your Xbox 360, and use
your devices to pause, rewind or advance entertainment.”
“Mobile problem? What mobile problem?”
Third Quarter 2012 Software Revenue Increased 17% to €1,026 Million (12% at Constant Currencies)
Third Quarter 2012 Non-IFRS Software and Software-Related Service
Revenue Increased 19% to €3.21 Billion (13% at Constant Currencies)
Triple-Digit Growth in Key Innovation Areas: Cloud, SAP HANA, Mobile
Third Quarter 2012 Non-IFRS Operating Profit Increased 10% to €1.24 Billion (4% at Constant Currencies)
Year-over-Year Comparison of 2012 Third Quarter IFRS Operating Profit
and Operating Margin Impacted by Profit in Q3 2011 of €723 Million From
the Reduction in the TomorrowNow Litigation Provision
SAP Refines Full-Year Revenue Guidance and Includes the Expected Results of Ariba
In June 2010, Workday entered into a lease agreement with Lake Tahoe
Land Company, an equipment leasing business owned by David Duffield. The
contract provides for equipment financing credit for purchases of
information technology and related equipment for use in Workday’s
business operations. To date, Workday has borrowings outstanding of $3.8
million (the percentage rate of the loan hasn’t been disclosed). Though
not detailed, the wording of the documents also suggests that Workday
is paying rent on space for unspecified office properties, too (lowned
by Duffield?).
• In January 2009, Workday entered into a consulting agreement with
Nevada Pacific Consulting that employs the latter company to “provide
finance and administrative services to us on a part-time, as needed
basis.” As of January 31, 2012, Workday had paid a total of $114,000 in
consulting fees. The owner of Nevada Pacific – one David Duffield.
• Duffield’s son Michael works as a general manager on Education & Government
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Customer Data
Solutions has affirmed that Informatica offers a leading approach
enabling customers to achieve the many benefits of customer master data
management.
Pincus said the cuts would accompany a regime of “more stringent
budget and resource allocation around new games and partner projects,”
hinting at a fundamental change for a company that was known for
expanding aggressively through hires and acquisition deals before it
went public to fanfare last December.
With its HD display, sleek Android software and extremely affordable
price tag, the Nexus 7 poses one of the biggest threats, in terms of
sales, to Apple’s new smaller tablet this holiday season.
SAP buyers need to know the following:
You can squeeze SAP with alternatives. Investigate Oracle, custom
development, third party maintenance and SaaS as options instead of SAP.
“Using SaaS providers of services, particularly in the areas of HCM and
CRM but also increasingly even in finance, can be effective;
reinventing the homemade solutions, especially using offshore resources,
and looking at third-party support options, such as Rimini Street, all
provide good leverage,” said Neapolitan.
SAP pricing is different based on region. List prices vary around the
world. Europe is the least expensive option for SAP buyers. SAP happens
to be based in Germany.
Discounting is more aggressive today than it has been in the
past—especially for those large transactions that make or break a
quarter.
SAP customers are struggling to justify the enterprise support offering. Standard support may be a better option.
License capabilities not products so there’s not product bundling
The bill would allow employers that hire 250 new workers to keep 95
percent of the workers’ state income taxes, money that would otherwise
be sent to the state treasury.
Supporters say the program would stimulate job creation, while
critics say it would unfairly penalize existing companies that are not
expanding and create border wars between states.
Microsoft just completed its makeover of Office Web Apps, adding
improved touch support for phones and tablets and a modern sheen to
complement the upcoming Windows 8.
IBM has added new capabilities to Hadoop and Cognos, and has started a cloud analysis service as well
According to Oracle president Mark Hurd, the number of devices
supplying data back to businesses and enterprises will boom to 50
billion by the end of the decade.
Hurd told The Times of London (paywalled): “Data is growing
exponentially — in some cases, by 35 to 40 per cent a year. This is
causing big problems for our customers and tremendous economic pressure.
Most of our customers are trying to innovate while cutting costs.”
Hurd said that the world was “drowning” in vast amounts of data —
which has grown eightfold in the past seven years — and companies are
running out of space to store it all. With more than nine billion
existing devices connected to the Internet, end businesses are
struggling to cope with storing the vast amounts of data they collect.
In this interview with Data Informed Staff Writer Ian B. Murphy,
Moore discusses why MDM is key for creating insight from enterprise
data, how to get a MDM project off the ground and what obstacles to
avoid to ensure success. (Podcast running time: 17:09.)
Microsoft’s initial stock of Surface RT devices has sold out in the
United States. The 32GB base model, at $499, sold out earlier in the
week, but all stock has now been depleted with a wait time of within
three weeks rather than a guaranteed October 26th delivery. Alongside
the sell out, a number of UK readers are reporting that Microsoft has
delayed the release of Surface by a week.
One of the main issues is that during jury selection Hogan was asked
if he’d been involved in any lawsuits. He did mention one, but failed to
disclose a breach of contract case from 1993 between him and his former
employer, Seagate. Last year, Samsung became the single largest direct
shareholder of Seagate. According to Samsung’s legal team, that fact —
along with the strong feelings about patent rights that Hogan expressed
to this publication and others — indicate that he could have been biased
against the company.
A source with knowledge of Google’s plans has told The Next Web that
the search giant has been distributing a video recorded at one of its
weekly all-hands “TGIF” meetings on its internal network, which details
the devices that will be unveiled at its hastily arranged October 29
event (which we will also be attending).
Surface is going to make some kind of history for Microsoft, one way or another.
So while Microsoft will capture (or, perhaps the more accurate word
is retain) significant market share with its move to Windows 8, its days
of being the dominant operating system of the computing world have come
to a close.
“You will see a very active acquisition and merger environment in
this market,” Drakos said. “It’s a great time for new [social] tools
from new combinations of vendors and offerings.”
IBM has seen business get tougher as September started. Some big
software deals in the emerging markets that Big Blue is so enamored of
are slipping into later this year, and the launch of new System z
mainframes and the impending launch of Power7+ systems (and the
confusion around where and when they would come out) didn’t help IBM’s
hardware sales do as well as they might have had the timing been
different. But the timing wasn’t different, and in the quarter the
company’s revenues were off 5.4 percent to $24.75 billion and net income
actually fell by four-tenths of a percent to $3.82 billion.
Both numbers were lower than what Wall Street had been expecting,
which is why IBM’s shares are off 5.6 percent and down below $200 a pop
as we go to press. Wall Street doesn’t like surprises, but in a jittery
global economy with an election in the United States causing a certain
amount of deer-in-the-headlights, plus a new CEO at the helm at Big
Blue, there was bound to be some trouble.
IBM’s
The weakness, particularly in the global services units, appears to
be company-specific, rather than a malaise afflicting the whole sector,
Bernstein Research’s senior analyst argued. At the end of the day, this
will benefit “transformation-oriented” firms like Accenture, which will
manage to escape secular challenges such as maturing markets and
increased competition.
The risk is that cloud computing threatens to undermine the business
of selling traditional software programs and related consulting services
that help companies to run finance, human resources and supply chains.
Instead of buying those expensive programs and paying companies like IBM
to install, run and connect them with other systems, many customers are
increasingly choosing the cheaper option of renting software from cloud
computing providers like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and upstarts like
Workday, which just held a very successful public offering.
Hiring John Swainson, who ran IBM’s middleware business as WebSphere
was born and became a force and then CA Technologies as it was seeking
to redeem itself, was the first step. In June, Dell was able to convince
Don Ferguson, who was chief architect for IBM’s Software Group and an
IBM Fellow and who did stints at Microsoft and CA for a few years, to
become CTO for Dell’s Software Group.
Pioneering developer of mobile software management solutions set to
be multinational technology corporation’s 12th acquisition in Israel,
its second acquisition in Israeli mobile market
Marius, I recently noticed John setting some aggressive goals for
himself in the software business. I’m curious if you’ve got goals of
your own that you’d like to share?
Swainson: I said two things: My short term goal is $2 billion in
revenue by 2016. Today, we’re at about a billion and a half. That will
be our run rate at year end. That’s not highly unrealistic. The
longer-term goal, and I don’t have a time frame on it, is to reach the
$5 billion range. If you calibrate the business versus the other pieces
of Dell, to balance things out, it should be about a $4 billion or $5
billion business, something like that.
Dell Enterprise Solutions president Marius Haas stressed the need for
intuitive products that cut down on data center complexity while
providing scalability and affordability. Noting the $12.7 billion Dell
has spent in acquisition investments, Hass announced the company’s
proposed answer to these needs: the Active Systems platform, a suite of
converged infrastructure platforms designed to simplify deployment of
virtual desktop infrastructures and private cloud deployments.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s new development strategy has raised tensions
by requiring chip makers to pick a couple of computer or mobile-device
makers as lead partners. The idea, used by Google, is to ensure hardware
and software work well together.
But chip-company executives have said they hate picking a few favored partners from among their customers.
In addition, Microsoft blindsided computer makers in June with plans for its own competing Surface tablet
Few of them have publicly criticized Microsoft, but people who speak
to the companies regularly use words like “dumbfounded” to describe
their reaction.
Essentially, Microsoft gets paid regardless of what version of Windows many big customers actually use.
And Windows is also declining in financial importance for Microsoft,
although the sales of PCs often determine the strength of Microsoft’s
earnings. Five years ago, it accounted for almost 30 percent of
Microsoft’s sales. Last year it was 25 percent.
Microsoft’s success in selling to businesses, in the short term at
least, depends less on Windows than on its Office products and its
fast-growing server and tools division.
[Sound like any EnSW vendors you know?]
However, “the caution, maybe, is to understand it’s still a new
product,” he added. There are frequent patching cycles and when SAP
finds new bugs that means the school has to arrange for time to apply
them and perform testing…
It’s wise to contract with SAP for consulting help on a HANA project at
this stage, according to early customers. In addition, it’s possible to
get direct feedback from SAP’s product development team when issues crop
up, users said. That may be harder to obtain over time if HANA sales
ramp up as much as SAP hopes they will.
As he’s climbed the corporate ladder, Sinofsky has become one of the
most polarizing figures at Microsoft. CNET interviewed 15 current and
former Microsoft executives and executives at companies that partner
with Microsoft, all of whom have worked directly with Sinofsky. Most
requested anonymity because they feared potential repercussions. They
paint a picture of an executive who is incredibly smart and passionately
driven to ship quality software on time. But some also say Sinofsky can
create a toxic work environment that has chased talented employees away
from a maturing company that’s in desperate need of innovative
thinking. Yet Sinofsky has appeared to have consistently had the support
of Gates and Ballmer.
Google and Microsoft are going to be squaring off with competing product announcements on October 29.
Chrome OS also has all its usual built-in benefits. There’s no need
to ever update any applications because everything is based on the
cloud. The operating system itself, unless you go out of your way to
stop it, automatically updates it. You also don’t need to customize it.
Once you’re signed into Google, it automatically syncs all of your
Chrome bookmarks, settings, extensions and applications. Share it with a
friend? No problem, they login to their Google account and they get all
their Chrome settings, apps, and so on.
Apple has removed its homegrown browser plugin for Java from OS X
with the Java 2012-006 1.0 update, and is encouraging users who need
Java in web browsers to download the Oracle JVM directly.
This is a notable change, but not surprising: Apple deprecated its
own JVM exactly two years ago (“deprecated” = developer jargon meaning
“We don’t plan to work on this any more, and you should not count on it
being around for all that much longer”). Oracle is now offering a v7 OS X
build that’s comparable with the Java packages for other operating
systems.
There is a real tendency if you already have an on premise solution to:
ensure you don’t cannibalize the revenue coming in from that solution
use the pricing of the existing solution to determine the price of the SaaS version
Google doesn’t really care if Android makes it in the enterprise.
It’s a consumer platform. The cloud-centric Chrome is its enterprise
play.
Let’s recap:
The first Chromebook was released at $349 more than a year ago. The
price was good, but not great. But Samsung’s sleek new $249 Chromebook
aggressively undercuts the $499 iPad on price the way many observers
thought Microsoft needed to do with the Surface RT.
Instead, it’s the new Chromebook that is:
- half the price of the iPad and the Surface RT;
- half to one-third the price of Windows 8 convertible tablets (see
my gallery of 17 of them here). Without keyboards, most of these
Atom-based ‘tabtops’ or ‘laptablets’ run between $500 and $900;
- one-third to one-fourth the price of Windows 8 ultrabooks, which run between $800 to $1,200.
At these prices, what CIO or IT manager wouldn’t give the Chromebook a serious look?
Twenty five percent of the nation’s startups and 52% of those in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants.
A data governance initiative must build competencies, assign roles
and responsibilities and invest in technologies to enable these core
processes no matter the scope and scale of your business objectives. A
pilot data governance project focusing on improving the quality or
security of a single data item, phone number as an example, should
follow the same approach as a holistic data governance function that’s
managing all business critical data assets. The difference of course is
the level of effort, time, resources and enabling technologies required
to effectively deliver business value. The process to validate, cleanse,
improve, and monitor the quality of ‘phone number’ in a single
application for a single business unit – while far from being a
miniscule task -will be significantly less effort than managing
hundreds, thousands or more business critical data entities across an
entire global enterprise.
Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc @Benioff opens Cloudforce New
York live from the Javits Center. He shares his insights into how the
social revolution is changing business as we know it. He speaks with
Martha Poulter, CIO, GE Capital, about how salesforce.com products have
transformed the way that GE does business.
Google. Microsoft. Facebook. Intel. Hewlett-Packard. What do these
companies have in common? All got fabulously rich on business models
that thrived on traditional personal computers. All are struggling to
adapt to a new world in which mobile devices will dominate. All are
getting punished by investors in the meantime.
@Benioff maintained that Salesforce.com isn’t keen on going further
into back-office processes for now. “We integrate with the back-office
providers like SAP and Oracle but we want to be that dominant
front-office provider, and that’s the piece we’re focused on,” he said.
Marketing Cloud ecosystem enables companies to identify sales leads,
discover advocates, uncover social influence, track sentiment in
multiple languages and more – empowering marketers to make better
business decisions based on social media data, Salesforce.com said.
Among those that got away: photo-sharing service Instagram, which was
sold to Facebook Inc. for $1 billion earlier this year; social
scrapbooking site Pinterest Inc.; GitHub Inc., which lets developers
write and collaborate on software projects; and Path Inc., a
social-networking service.
Simmer said the team is due to receive a new wing sail early in the
new year. That wing sail, being built in Auckland, New Zealand, was to
have been used for a second AC72 catamaran. The platform for the second
boat, including the hulls and crossbeams, is being built in San
Francisco.
The filing was made under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act,
which allows companies to file to go public with the Securities and
Exchange Commission without disclosing those documents to the public
until it nears an IPO.
The biggest miss appears to have been from Motorola…Google still
missed across the board…Google’s advertising cost per click is
falling…Google says it wasn’t planning an early release, which sent the
stock cratering…Google is giving up a huge chunk of its gains for the
past several weeks.
820 venture capital deals raised $6.9 billion during the third
quarter, a 32% drop in funding compared with the same period a year
earlier.
Windows 8 has a new Start screen and features that work well with today’s touch-based user interaction
Windows will now consist of two very different user experiences bound
into a single package. The idea is it’s a one-size-fits-all operating
system, which can run on everything from older, mouse-driven PCs to
touch-controlled tablets without compromise. Everything from a
touch-based weather app to mouse-driven Excel will run on it. That’s a
big contrast to Apple’s approach, which uses separate operating systems
for its iPad tablets and more standard Mac computers.
Today there are over half a billion Android devices-half a billion –
with 1.3 million more being activated every day. You should all run out
and buy the Nexus 7 tablet for $199. It’s had rave reviews and recently
won “Gadget of the Year” from T3, the gadget experts. You’ll love the
integration with Google Play. It is an amazing device.
This time last year I announced that our run-rate for mobile
advertising hit $2.5 billion. That seemed like a pretty big number —
even for Google. Now we have built up additional mobile revenue from
users paying for content and apps in Google Play. Including these new
sources grossed up, I can announce our new run-rate for mobile is now
over $8 billion. That’s quite a business.
Though the sagging PC sales were expected, some analysts said they
were surprised by a step back in growth at other parts of the company,
including in the division selling back-office software that runs on
server systems. The 8% revenue increase in that division, called Server
& Tolls, is a comedown from prior quarters—perhaps a sign businesses
have curtailed spending on computer technology.
Some 30% of online buyers began researching their last online
purchase with Amazon, compared with 13% researching a product on Google,
according to a new Forrester survey of nearly 4,000 US respondents.’
The second paragraph of the press release merely read “Pending Larry
quote,” suggesting that space was reserved for comment from CEO Larry
Page.
Trading was halted on Google stock after the price plunged Thursday, following the early release of Q3 earnings reports.
The company’s stock was plunging after it released its third-quarter earnings report early, apparently by mistake.
“Google continues to rocket forward. Let’s not forget Apple was
slammed back in July and they’re doing just fine,” Ken Marlin, an
analyst at Marlin & Associates, told FOX Business. “I do think it’s a
buying opportunity.”
Join our webcast for a walkthrough of SAP NetWeaver Cloud’s great features:
Standards-based development and run-time environment, so no lock-in or steep learning curve
Connectivity service that enables native integration with SAP and non SAP systems –
on-premise or cloud-based
Federated identity management across cloud and on-premise applications, via SAP’s ID service (authentication, SSO)
Portal capability for quickly building websites that connect
applications, reports and unstructured content from SAP and non-SAP
sources
Oracle, like many companies, is sitting on billions in cash right
now. Does anything change after the election? Do you see anything
loosening up in terms of business?
A: Stability is always good for the economy. I’d have to say
hopefully with the election, we gain stability, and the ability to focus
on growth in the economy. If that happens, it’s going to be even
better. There’s no question to us a growth economy is better than not.
Conventional wisdom tells us that CIOs should focus on “feeds and
speeds,” which is another way to describe infrastructure and
applications. However, that coventional wisdom is wrong; today’s CIO
must become a business leader who stands on equal footing with other
C-level counterparts. That’s the best way to avoid Bob Evan’s four
threats that lead to CIO suicide.
[92 Oracle Exadata jobs posted at Dice.com, across a broad range of employers -DBM]
Starting up an SAP HANA instance on AWS takes only a few minutes,
plus some time to download, install and configure SAP HANA Studio. If
you have done it before, all those tasks combined will take much less
than 30 minutes. And if you have never done it before, we put the
required steps at your fingertips at www.cloud.saphana.com.
$0.99 per hour.
The service will be offered on AWS in instances with RAM capacities
as high as 60GB. Customers will be able to purchase and provision the
instances through the AWS Marketplace portal.
So this means that Hana on Amazon is geared toward smaller businesses
or smaller apps and isn’t really a replacement for buying the Hana
appliance, or for using SAP’s new cloud, for a typical enterprise
database. As for those other fees, Hana One costs 99 cents an hour, plus
another $2.50 per hour for the Amazon hardware that provides 60GB of
RAM. That’s a total of $3.49 per hour. Amazon could charge other fees,
too, depending on how much data is being used.
To compare, SAP’s entry-level price for Hana for companies that
aren’t already using its other business software starts at roughly
$52,000.
[Still only 76 SAP HANA jobs posted on Dice.com, mostly with SAP SI's like IBM and Deloitte -DBM]
[Only 1 Oracle Exalytics job posted on Dice.com - and it is at Oracle -DBM]
Why might Salesforce be motivated to ditch Oracle? For one, there’s
the cost — though Monash speculates that Salesforce has a favorable
licensing deal with Oracle. And there’s the apparent hostility between
Benioff and Ellison.
SAP jumped into the cloud platform-as-a-service market on Tuesday by
launching the first in a series of planned cloud-based application
services and database services. Announced at the vendor’s annual TechEd
conference in Las Vegas, the new services make SAP a more comprehensive
cloud player and open up new points of competition with the likes of
Oracle and Salesforce.com.
Workday has been actively poaching talent from other Bay Area
companies with many new recruits going back to their previous employers
to lure their former co-workers. According to some industry insiders,
Workday has also been offering its employees referral bonuses starting
at $5,000 to motivate new talent acquisition. Workday founders Dave
Duffield and Aneel Bhusri have a reputation for being role models with
their open and transparent leadership styles; however, Workday is also
known to operate like a sweat shop with employees averaging at least 60
hours a week.
A nearly $8 million, 72-foot catamaran used by the Oracle Team USA,
the defending America’s Cup champion, capsized during practice near the
Golden Gate Bridge Tuesday and was severely damaged. There were no
injuries but the $2 million wing of the new ship was was “damaged beyond
recognition,” team officials said.
So, at some point, maybe in 2013, Virgin’s seatback video screen will
greet you by name and know your Elevate status when you sit down on
your flight. It will offer you food and drink based on what you’ve
ordered on previous flights.
If your flight is delayed, it will push information to your seatback
regarding connecting flight information or changes– and provide you with
alternatives before you land. It will also provide access to your
Elevate account.
“The first two SDKs available are for Java and PHP. The Rackspace
Cloud SDK for Java leverages the popular jclouds open-source library. It
has full support for OpenStack Nova (Rackspace Cloud Servers) and
OpenStack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files),” the company announced. “The
Rackspace Cloud SDK for PHP uses the Rackspace-developed php-opencloud
library, which supports Nova, Swift, Rackspace Cloud Networks (preview
access), and Rackspace Cloud Databases. “
What is the strategy for growth at Oracle?
A: We’ve got a fairly simple strategy. Offer customers best-of-breed
technology at every level. Second, integrate those technologies into
engineered systems where we do the work for the customer, make it
simpler. Third, we are moving our application suite to the cloud with
what we call fusion cloud applications. And fourth, we are focused on
industries. That strategy manifests a whole suite of products that we’ve
announced over the past, you know, year and a half, two years. As part
of that strategy, we’re spending $5 billion of R&D this year and
rolling products out into that strategy. And we think it’s going to the
core of this trend you see in IT, which is how do I just make things
simpler? How do I make it easier? How do I modernize it, standardize my
IT infrastructure?
64 GB with Black Touch Cover
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The first Surface tablet, Microsoft’s dramatic foray into the
hardware business, is available for pre-order starting today. It will be
available for purchase in stores starting Oct. 26.
“As a high-tech entrepreneur and someone who has actually used
Google’s advertising tools to grow my businesses, I encourage the
Commission to tread carefully and not undertake action that would
compromise the important service provided by Google, reduce Google’s
ability to rapidly innovate and improve its products, or make search
engine results less useful for consumers or businesses,” he wrote.
European regulators did not explicitly call Google’s policy illegal
but identified a range of shortcomings that they said could undermine
user privacy and confidence in the company. The regulators made numerous
recommendations that would allow Google to improve compliance. “As data
protection regulators, we expect that Google takes the necessary steps
to improve information and clarify the combination of data, and more
generally ensure compliance with data protection laws and principles,”
the letter said.
Responsibilities:
* Design and implement major pieces of the salesforce.com core database infrastructure
* Formulate, implement, and evaluate algorithms and database techniques to support service scalability and stability
Much as Salesforce might like to move off Oracle altogether, for cost
as much as bragging rights, completely junking Oracle is probably not
an option anytime soon. It is not clear that Postgres could operate at
anything like the scale of Salesforce. Even if it could, Salesforce
would have to spend a lot of time assuring customers that their data
would not be affected. Given the marketing zeal of Salesforce, in fact,
it would probably make a case that life was becoming even more fabulous.
Holy crap.
Workday is off to a spectacular public market debut. After coming
public Friday at $28 a share, the provider of cloud-based HR software
rallied 74% on the first day of trading – and today is up another 8%.
The stock lately is trading at $52.67, up another $3.98.
“Oracle’s products are a mishmash” of different kinds of software, Mr. Bhusri said. “It’s the same for SAP.”
WDAY is significantly trailing CRM@7 years. WDAY’s revenues are 43%
of CRM@7’s revenues (134m vs. 310m), yet Workday’s costs are 73% of
CRM@7’s (213m vs. 290m). That’s a big discrepancy. Where are these costs
coming from?
Well, Workday had 1096 employees to CRM@7’s 1304 (i.e. Workday had
84% of CRM@7’s number of employees to produce 43% of their revenue, yet
still incur 73% of their costs). That means WDAY saw $122k rev per
employee vs. CRM@7’s $238k rev per employee, so nearly a 2x favor to
CRM@7.
