Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-25

• Eclipse Shines a Light on the IDE's Future
  The projects, set to be unveiled during the foundation's annual EclipseCon developer conference this week, include the debut of the Swordfish Enterprise Service Bus, or ESB (define), which is intended to enable more modular service-oriented architecture (define) deployment. While Eclipse is well known for its developer tools like its namesake Eclipse IDE, Swordfish signals that it's aiming to make a name for itself in runtime frameworks as well. Eclipse this week also outlined how it's looking to the future of development itself with the Eclipse 4.0 (E4) platform, which will incorporate a host of changes designed to free the IDE from the desktop.
• Oracle Adds Healthcare Muscle With Relsys Acquisition
  Oracle's days of digesting huge multibillion-dollar acquisitions of suite application providers -- Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and BEA -- appear to be over for a while. Instead, the company is focusing on smaller, one-off plays to build up its toolset in particular functional areas -- such as business intelligence in the case of the Hyperion acquisition. [DBM-Hyperion is evidence that Oracle is focusing on smaller acquisitions?!?]
• Service Cloud Looms Over Call Center Software
  “The low end of the market is green field today. There are few packaged applications for call centers with under 200 seats. We have the same opportunity as with SFA,” the company’s flagship on-demand CRM application. For the time being, Salesforce.com has this market to itself, and gained 56% market share in the call center application market in 2008.
• Salesforce.com Service Turns 10
  Ten years ago March 16, Salesforce.com started its life in a small apartment in San Francisco. The hosted CRM service—which would become a milestone proof point for software as a service—has grown to include the Apex development language, Visualforce, the AppExchange platform and the Force.com “platform as a service.” The following screen shots illustrate the service’s evolution through the last decade.
• Will economic downturn push companies into the cloud?
  At the TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable in Mountain View, Calif., Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, explains why he thinks Microsoft's entry into the business will bring validation to the cloud. Many CTOs, he says, still need to be convinced that using software as a service will save them money and move their companies toward the future. Moderator: Steve Gillmor, editor of TechCrunchIT.
• Outsourcing prices to fall 10 percent
  Gartner expects a price fall in datacenter services of between five and 15 percent. Prices in desktop and helpdesk services will decline by between five and 10 percent, but the fall in network services prices will be bigger, at between 10 and 15 percent. Charges for application hosting services, until now one of the fastest-growing areas, will drop between 10 and 20 percent, the analyst firm said.
• Eclipse Announces Initial Release of Swordfish Enterprise Service Bus
  The Eclipse Foundation is expected to announce on March 23 the first release of Swordfish, a next-generation enterprise service bus (ESB) that provides the flexibility and extensibility required by enterprises to successfully deploy a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy. Swordfish is based on the Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi).
• Sybase Extends Analytics Leadership in High Speed Streaming Data
  Sybase, Inc. (NYSE: SY), an industry leader in delivering enterprise and mobile software, today announced Sybase® CEP, a complex event processing (CEP) technology for performing analytics on high speed streaming data. By integrating Sybase CEP with RAP – The Trading Edition™, Sybase provides a complete platform for trade lifecycle analytics and furthers its leadership in analytics. Sybase CEP extends the Sybase RAP platform’s capability to store and analyze vast amounts of real-time and historical data, by providing real-time intelligence on high speed streaming market and trade data with minimum latency.
• Sybase Looks Fully Valued
  By Cowen & Co. ($31.17, March 24, 2009) WE ARE INITIATING COVERAGE on Sybase (ticker: SY) with a Neutral rating. While we are impressed by the company's recent performance in both its legacy and growth businesses, we are concerned that the stock is fully valued at current levels given that consensus earnings-per-share estimates of $2.20 (down 2%) on sales of $1.15 billion (up 2%) represent what we believe to be best-case-scenario growth assumptions.
• Oracle: Spending Money to Make It
  Oracle built up its presence in the pharmaceutical industry by acquiring Irvine, Calif. company Relsys International for an undisclosed sum. Relsys sells software that helps pharmaceutical and biotech companies comply with drug safety regulations during clinical trials, and it adds to the lineup of products in Oracle’s “health sciences” business unit, created last year. “It’s a smart tuck-in acquisition,” says Stuart Williams, an analyst at consulting company Technology Business Research. “You can’t make the next generation of blockbuster drugs without having all the data pulled together for testing and analysis.” More broadly, pushing deeper into specialized software markets in industries including health care, insurance, and telecom furnishes Oracle with new customers for its broader database and applications software. The company, which is locked in a battle for market share in business software with German maker SAP, has been on an acquisition spree since 2005, snapping nearly 50
• Satyam defers joining dates of 9,000 freshers
  Citing global economic slowdown as one of the reasons, Satyam Computer has deferred the joining dates of 9,000 freshers to whom the company had issued offer letters. “The joining dates of around 9,000 students of the 2007-2008 batch, who were given the offer letters during December 2007 to June 2008, have been deferred,” a company spokesperson said. Satyam HR head Mr S V Krishnan said in an eMail to all the freshers has said this decision was made after careful and extensive deliberations and only after all other practical options were exhausted.
• Satyam founder to undergo lie-detection tests
  The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has sought permission from a local court to run lie-detection tests on B.Ramalinga Raju, founder of fraud-hit Satyam Computer Services Ltd. The CBI, which is investigating India’s biggest corporate swindle, wants to conduct polygraph and brain-mapping tests on Raju, his brother and former Satyam managing director B.Rama Raju and former chief financial officer Srinivas Vadlamani. All three are currently in custody. Polygraph is also known as a lie detector and brain mapping is a neuroscience technique. Both seek to detect whether a person being interrogated is lying. Results of such tests, however, are not admissible as evidence in a court of law but may provide clues to investigators.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-24

• How to avoid SaaS integration gotchas
  Informatica has a foot in both worlds: It offers both on-premise and IAS. Ron Papas, senior vice president and general manager of Infomatica's On Demand group, says the key advantage to using hosted integration tools is that they facilitate rapid development. That's important because, while on-premise software tends to go through upgrades every 12 to 18 months, SaaS vendors may revise their software three or more times each year. IAS vendors help to ensure that customizations done for customers continue to work.
• Sybase Launches Enterprise-Ready iPhone Solution on the App Store
  Sybase (NYSE:SY), an industry leader in delivering enterprise and mobile software, today announced a new version of iAnywhere® Mobile Office with expanded iPhone support and availability on the iPhone App Store. Sybase’s unique approach for enhanced security and usability make it the first recognized leader in the middleware space to encrypt all data contained within an email and PIM application on an iPhone without compromising user’s personal information. The latest version is intended to strengthen iPhone adoption within enterprises by providing Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange email and PIM data to iPhone users.
• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Talks Cloud Computing, Twitter
  Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff discussed his company’s use of the cloud computing and Software-As-a-Service (SaaS) at a New York conference, demonstrating the new features of its Sales Cloud. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and IBM have also been pushing hard into the cloud-computing space as part of their grand strategies. Saleforce also has a new agreement with Twitter.
• How Do You Spell IPO Now? TECH
  After a decade of being either the first or second-largest source of initial public offerings, technology companies tied at third last year with health-care offerings, according to data from Renaissance Capital's IPOhome.com Web site. This year, they are the only companies registering prospectuses -- there are only three registrations total -- with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
• Intel freezes top salaries, reprices options
  Don't feel too badly for them, though. Total compensation for these five in 2008 came to $12.7m (£8.7m) for Otellini, $2.5m (£1.7m) for Smith, $5.5m (£3.8m) for Bryant, $5.3m (£3.6m) for Maloney, and $4.7m (£3.2m) for Perlmutter - although the latter, as noted in the proxy, is paid in Israeli sheckles, so he has those pesky currency-conversion rates to deal with. The news was somewhat better for the rank-and-file, however. The board of directors is requesting that the stockholders approve an employee stock-option exchange program called, somewhat prosaically, Option Exchange. Under the Option Exchange plan, employees other than the five listed officers will be given the opportunity to exchange their current over-priced stock options (defined as those "with an exercise price above our 52-week high") for a new options that have "approximately the same fair value" as the options they'll now be allowed to dump.
• Salesforce.com touts doubtful Twitter tool
  So, the likely scenario will be for the nasty tweets to be grabbed, filtered and fed into the company's already over-burdened help desk system, which will push the tweeters to online FAQs, e-mail response systems and voicemail hell. The likely result will be more negative tweets about how unresponsive and uncool the experience with the company was, feeding the flamers with fuel instead of putting out the fire. Unless there's an integrated, intelligent automated response system designed specifically for Twitter, this initial move into Customer Tweet Management is likely to be as effective as Sylvester was at catching Tweety Bird.
• Salesforce.com Sees Its Next $1 Billion Market
  According to Dayon, Salesforce.com’s customers are looking to refashion their approaches to customer service because they realize that current call center operations leave a lot to be desired, and that 50% of customer-service related questions have migrated to Google and other community sites. “Soon, two-thirds of those interactions are going to be in the cloud,” Dayon said.
• Red Hat shares jump on Oracle deal rumors
  But a deal now doesn’t make sense, she writes, because of another possible business combination being talked about: IBM’s potential purchase of Sun Microsystems. Both of those companies are major producers of servers that run Red Hat software. Thus, an IBM-Sun deal could change the landscape of the server industry and affect Red Hat’s business.
• More office space, lower leases, in Silicon Valley
  An ugly economy has affected more than Silicon Valley's residential real estate market; it's pummeling the commercial real estate market as well. About 8.7 million square feet of Silicon Valley office space was vacant in the fourth quarter of 2008, or 14.7 percent of the total, according to Cornish & Carey Commercial/Oncor International. That's up from an office vacancy rate of 13.7 percent at the end of the third quarter, and up from 11.9 percent in the final quarter of 2007. As unappealing as the trend may be for landlords, the office vacancy situation is nowhere near as bad as it was following the dot-com bust, said Phil Mahoney, executive vice president of Cornish & Carey, one of the valley's largest commercial real estate brokerages.
• Salesforce.com cloud adds Twitter, stirs privacy concerns
  With today's launch of the Twitter plug-in, Salesforce.com is now stirring further privacy concerns among some observers, who suggest that customer service workers and/or their employers might abuse the new tool by inappropriately infiltrating user conversations.
• What a Sun-IBM merger could mean for Java
  Several pundits have speculated that if IBM controlled Java, the language and platform would be even more open source than it is, and that problems such as product conformance tests for OSS versions of Java would go away. This is probably correct. However, the one thing that will not happen is IBM ceding control of Java to a third party. In other words, while the JCP might be dismantled (though I doubt it), some system will remain in place by which IBM can pursue its agenda in Java.
• Google Apps missing enterprise social-networking revolution
  In fact, some collaboration vendors are already on their second iteration of their enterprise social-networking technologies, giving them microblogging capabilities popularized among consumers by Twitter. With so much activity in this space, Google seems to be trailing and slow on the uptake, as Apps remains a suite centered on e-mail communications and document sharing, devoid of social-networking capabilities. This hasn't gone unnoticed by Apps administrators. "In our domain, we'd definitely find that it'd be beneficial to have some type of interface into social networking," said Douglas Menefee, The Schumacher Group's chief information officer.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-23

• Is Oracle Forking Red Hat Linux?
  Oracle has said the approach means it can work on enhancing Linux without creating its own version of the OS. The only issue, though, is that not everything that Oracle gets into the mainline Linux kernel is actually used by all the distribution vendors, including Red Hat. OCFS One example of how Oracle's supported version of Linux differs from Red Hat has to do with the Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS), which has been part of the mainline Linux kernel since the Linux 2.6.16 release in 2006. Though it's part of the mainline Linux kernel, it is not included in Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, where it would compete against Red Hat's own Global File System (GFS).
• Oracle Releases Multiple Enterprise Linux Security Advisories
  Late yesterday, Oracle Corporation (NasdaqGS: ORCL) announced the release of multiple security updates for it’s Enterprise Linux [OEL] distribution [a variant of the Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) Enterprise Linux distribution]. The full text of each update, including links, MITRE CVE data, et cetera, appears after the jump.
• Friday Rant: SAP -- Pull the Trigger on Ariba
  But now more than ever, an SAP / Ariba deal makes a lot of sense from a solution perspective (I won't get into the financial component of such a transaction in this post). I know SAP is notoriously slow on the deal trigger relative to its US-based competitor, but if they had to make an acquisition happen, I'm sure they could push it through the corporate Bundestag just as fast as Nancy Pelosi can fly halfway around the world -- or to visit her constituents -- on a taxpayer-funded G5 (don’t get me started or diverted on that subject). But seriously, there are a number of reasons that I believe are gelling together for SAP to finally get serious and do something regarding Ariba. Consider both SAP's recent past behavior as well as their current challenges as I shape this argument.
• Oracle Fusion completion date slips
  Vinnie points out that in 2005, Oracle had slotted Fusion to be delivered in 2008. So, there has now been an unacknowledged two year slip in delivery of Fusion. I also recall a post I wrote in January 2006, noting Oracle President Charles Phillips' claim that Oracle was already "half-way to Fusion." So, in one year (Jan. 2005 to Jan 2006) Oracle completed 50% of the work. Assuming now that the 2010 reschedule date is good, it now means that it have taken another four years to complete the second 50%. To me it sounds like the old project management joke about the project that is 90% complete for 90% of the time.
• Oracle Fusion in 2010 - finally?
  In the Oracle earnings call yesterday Larry Ellison said ““…next year we are going to be delivering the next generation Fusion applications, which we have been investing very heavily in over the years…”
• Ellison’s estimated share of Oracle’s new quarterly dividend: $57.5 million
  As recently as August, Oracle said its policy was to “reinvest earnings to fund future growth”, and that it did not anticipate paying a cash dividend “in the foreseeable future.” When Oracle released its third quarter results Wednesday, President Safra Catz said the company “generated $8 billion in free cash flow over the last twelve months and we are running our business at record operating margins,” adding that “this is the right time to declare a dividend for our stockholders.”
• A Software Insider’s Point of View » Event Report: Reflections On Microsoft’s Convergence 2009
  Over 7000 customers, partners, Microsoft staff, and paparazzi made the pilgrimage to New Orleans to hear the latest and greatest from the Microsoft Dynamics team. The great band, surface computing demo, and festivities in New Orleans wiped out most of the gloom and doom of the economic recession and negativity towards continued reckless US government spending. Attendees were upbeat, optimistic, and energetic. One explanation for this sense of “can-do” attitude among attendees can be based on how Microsoft has successfully transformed itself into a value and innovation alternative to the large ERP vendors moving into the small-medium enterprise/business (SME/SMB) space.* Customers such as National Air Cargo state a 25% increase in employee productivity, GFK talks about is 50% less time spent on financial reporting, and Champion posts 60% faster order processing times using Microsoft Dynamics products. Conversations with Rick Harkins and Robert Dills of the Cleveland Red Cross highl
• Salesforce.com Preaches Computing Power for Rent
  Mr. Benioff welcomes such competition, saying that such rivalries only raise the credibility of the business model. “Every time someone buys a server, a switch or a data center, I have failed,” he said.
• Top 10 IT locations
  1. Silicon Valley Shaun Nichols: The unquestioned capital of the IT world, the stretch of land encompassing San Jose and San Mateo county has become home to so many companies that it is now simply referred to as "Silicon Valley." This list of companies headquartered in the Valley is absurd, but let's go ahead and rattle off a few: HP, Sun, Oracle, Apple, Cisco, Google, Yahoo, Intel, McAfee, Symantec, AMD, eBay. The list just goes on and on. The history of Silicon Valley reads much like the history of computing itself. From the garage where Hewlett and Packard first joined up, to the house where two guys named Steve started building computer kits named after a piece of fruit, to the fabled labs at Xerox PARC and even the dormitories at Stanford University that housed the likes of Jerry Yang and Sergey Brin, the area is crawling with high-tech historical landmarks. The reasons put forward for the rise of Silicon Valley are numerous. Some point to the proximity of Stanford and UC Berk
• Satyam's falling revenue is a concern: Murthy
  Potential bidders for acquiring a majority stake in Satyam Computer Services, including iGATE and other MNC firms such as IBM and HP, have chosen to stay away from the bidding war on concerns of Satyam’s falling revenues, dwindling margins, customer attrition and several legal liabilities in the US and India.
• Attrition rate not ‘alarming’ in Satyam despite problems: Karnik
  Officials said the agency has retrieved at least 7,000 fake invoices and forged documents showing fixed deposits and bank balances, and their evaluation shows that the size of the fraud is at least Rs9,600 crore. They said that during the investigation, CBI found that the accused relied heavily on technology to generate nearly 7,000 fake invoices to the tune of Rs4,500 crore and fed the same into Satyam’s books. They said these inflated figures also reflected on the balance sheet in the form of audit reports which helped the company to cheat the public purchasing its shares. The buck did not stop here as the accused also have given false and fabricated statements, found by CBI, about high capital of the company. The accused forged documents and created fake fixed deposit receipts to the tune of Rs3,300 crore, officials said. The fixed deposit receipts were shown by the accused as available deposits by the company, they said, adding that the accused had also allegedly manipulated the ba

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-22

• IT Employment Decline Moderates in February; Outperforms General Employment Market
  After dropping markedly in December (56,000 jobs or 1.4%) and January (46,000 jobs or 1.15%), the decline in IT employment moderated in February dropping by (17,000 jobs or .43%), according to the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses (NACCB), which tracks monthly IT employment.
• Oracle Corporation F3Q09 (Qtr End 02/28/09) Earnings Call Transcript
  Safra A. Catz Clearly we are extremely pleased with our spectacular Q3 results. We hit the midpoint of our new license guidance, we beat the high end of our total revenue guidance, we beat the high end of our EPS guidance by a full $0.02, and we delivered the highest Q3 operating margins in our history, substantially higher operating margins than our peers. And we grew faster than SAP in every region around the world, clearly taking market share. Our software license updates and product support revenues, which hit $3.0 billion this quarter, are growing nicely off a very large base, and our customer renewal rates and satisfaction levels continue at record highs. This quarter clearly demonstrates the strength of our diversified portfolio products, the breadth of our enormous customer base, and the strength of our operating model. Once again, the only negative story for the quarter was currency, as it was in Q2 and as it will be again in Q4.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-21

• Microsoft Ships Internet Explorer 8 Browser
  Microsoft will release its Internet Explorer 8 browser for download on March 19. Security, ease of use, and improvements in RSS, Cascading Style Sheets and AJAX support are key priorities for Internet Explorer 8, according to Microsoft.
• Will iPhone OS 3 Bring Apple, Enterprise Closer Together?
  The Apple iPhone OS 3.0 will offer 100 new features, some of which will hopefully make the iPhone more enterprise-friendly. Sybase, SAP and Sun Microsystems all recognize the potential value of the iPhone to the enterprise, and Sybase and SAP recently announced a partnership that extends SAP’s Business Suite 7 to the iPhone, as well as to other, more expected, mobile devices. ... eWEEK Labs Senior Analyst Andrew Garcia reported that, for those who look closely, there are small acknowledgements of the enterprise. OS 3.0 includes VPN on Demand; Certificate Revocation; and Media Scrubbing. Though little will be known about these features until 3.0 is released.
• eWEEK Labs Examines IBM, Sun Product Synergies, Overlap
  Enterprise IT managers need to be thinking about the product impact of a possible IBM acquisition of Sun. eWEEK Labs takes a look at the areas of synergy--such as database and operating systems--as well as areas of overlap--such as development. In the end, IBM's services model may be the crux of all product decisions.
• IBM Can Probably Sell Sun Better than Sun Can
  Insiders virtually all agree: An IBM-Sun Microsystems merger might be very good for both companies and their investors. One of the key elements to this possibility is that IBM will have to market and sell Sun's IT infrastructure wares better than Sun can, and most eWEEK sources believe IBM could actually do that.
• SAP, Oracle Scrambling For GRC Dollars
  SAP and Oracle both announced new components for their growing governance, risk and compliance (GRC) technology suit in the past 10 days. GRC applications are typically sold to public and large privately held companies, especially those operating in heavily-regulated industries, and are intended to perform a variety of critical functions including electronic document search and retrieval, ensuring compliance with audit and other financial and industry-specific regulations.
• SAS starts building for the cloud
  SAS, the world's largest vendor of business-intelligence software, is planning to spend $70m (£50m) on a cloud-computing facility to expand its on-demand applications. Operations will be based at its Cary, North Carolina headquarters, the company said on Thursday. SAS is privately held and competes with companies such as IBM, SAP and Oracle. In a statement, SAS's founder and chief executive Jim Goodnight detailed the company's plans for a 38,000-square-foot cloud-computing facility. The cloud centre will have two 10,000-square-foot server farms, with the first one to be completed in 2010 and a second to be built when the first reaches 80 percent capacity, the company said.
• Informatica Shaping Up As Likely Acquisition Target
  Ivan Chong, general manager of Informatica’s data quality business unit, explained that different financial services companies can have up to seven different definitions for “price;” it can mean a stock’s settlement price for one and the closing price for another. ... These kinds of problems can be compounded when newly-merged businesses struggle with reconciling data residing in incompatible data warehouses and applications. ... This kind of technology can be very attractive to technology platform vendors, especially when they’re already likely to have an existing presence in either the acquiring company or the target. It should be no surprise, then, that SAP and Oracle have acquired or built their own data management capabilities in the past several years. And IBM spent approximately $10 billion between 2005 and 2008 in data management-related acquisitions.
• Microsoft's Ballmer slams IBM's potential purchase of Sun Microsystems
  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer doesn't seem to care. Ballmer, who dismisses any new competition, indicated that "Someone must think [an IBM-Sun deal] is a good idea for the rumor to even exist, I don't exactly get it." Well, Steve, if the rumor does end up to be true, Microsoft will see a renewed competitor in the server space. You know, the one where Microsoft recruits billions of dollars per quarter through server software sales? Ballmer also seemed to think Sun's intellectual baggage was too much saying, "You pick up a lot of stuff when you buy Sun ... a deal gives IBM a year or two where all they're doing is digesting it. I relish that year." That year may be soon, and if IBM and Sun Microsystems do combine, that year could even be 2009. [DBM-I'm warming to this acquisition-the more I think about it, the more I think it makes sense for IBM...]
• In Consolidating IT Industry, All Bets Are Off
  Polite vendor execs used to call it "coopetition"--the state of tech industry affairs whereby the fiercest of rivals could be the chummiest of partners depending on the circumstances and the market they're chasing. A more up-to-date and colloquial description of this industry dynamic might be: All bets are off. Some recent evidence:
• Oracle launches intiative to help partners build new business
  Oracle aims to help partners build their businesses with a new initiative that provides sales training and verification of skills. The Oracle Sales Readiness Verification initiative is aimed at helping partners with proven expertise in Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database and Oracle Grid, providing them with sales training and designed to enable them to go to market with the products. The intention is to drive net new licence and services business for partners, the company stated.
• Tech Companies Need a Cash Plan
  That is why more should consider a dividend. Oracle Corp., having led the way on acquisitions, declared its first dividend Wednesday. If Oracle can declare a dividend, Apple and Google should follow.
• Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will reap $230 million a year from company's dividend
  Assuming the dividend and Ellison's holdings — currently 1.15 billion shares, the company reported — remain the same, Ellison stands to reap $230 million from the 5-cent-per-share dividend in the next 12 months. That's in addition to his salary and other perks, which came to nearly $85 million in 2008, according to company filings. Asked to respond to several questions regarding the dividend payout to Ellison, a company spokesperson said: "Oracle shareholders are thrilled and have had an overwhelmingly positive response to our dividend offering."

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-20

• IBM and Sun: Is it about the hardware or the software?
  A larger issue is the impact this will have on the $67B enterprise application software market. While many smaller enterprise software vendors might cheer IBM taking ownership of Java, Oracle and SAP may see this as a strategic threat to their middleware and applications businesses. Java became the dominant language for new enterprise applications thanks in part to Sun’s quasi-open source method of controlling Java’s direction, called the Java Community Process. No doubt, IBM would be careful to preserve the appearance of Java as a vendor-neutral standard, but SAP and Oracle may not be willing to tie the future of their billion-dollar applications businesses to a language owned by IBM. Sun wasn’t much of a threat to Oracle or SAP, but IBM is a different matter. SAP and Oracle could attempt to block IBM’s acquisition on anti-trust grounds, or splinter the Java standard by building their own versions.
• Oracle delivers solid third quarter; Strong dollar dings fourth quarter outlook
  # Research and development spending in the third quarter was $677 million, down 1 percent from a year ago. # General and administrative expenses were $192 million, down from $206 million a year ago. # Operating margins were 36 percent in the quarter, up a percentage point. # Oracle ended the quarter with $8.2 billion in cash and $3 billion in marketable securities. # The company ended the quarter with 86,588 employees, down slightly from the prior quarter. # Database revenue is saving the day for Oracle. In the third quarter, new software licenses for database and middleware revenue was $1.12 billion, or down 4 percent from a year ago. Support and license update revenue was up 16 percent to $1.91 billion. # Applications revenue for the third quarter took a hit as new software licenses were $396 million, down from $451 million a year ago.
• From the Oracle's Mouth: Its First Div
  Against the grain of company after company slashing dividends, Oracle announced its first payout ever. The software giant will pay a 5-cent quarterly, for an annual rate of 20 cents, declaring that the dividend policy now will add a new dimension to the way it rewards investors - limited in the past to stock repurchases, acquisitions, and technological improvements. The nickel-a-share will be paid May 8 to stock of record April 8.
• SQL Worm Slams Web
  An Internet worm exploiting vulnerabilities in certain versions of Microsoft SQL Server and MSDE began hammering UDP port 1434 before midnight on Friday, January 24th, 2003. Dubbed Sapphire by some antivirus vendors and Slammer by others, the worm resulted in massive packet loss throughout the web causing severe latency and, in some cases, made certain sites completely inaccessible depending on the ISP being used. Because the worm affected unpatched versions of Microsoft SQL server and desktops with MSDE installed, download servers from Microsoft were temporarily overcome by traffic as administrators flocked to the site to obtain the necessary patches.
• Oracle powering towards Fusion
  Expect to see significant amounts of Oracle marketing and development focus during 2009. With product launches, customer testimonials from early adopter programmes, and a host of other Fusion-related noise. However, care should be taken when setting revenue expectations from these new Fusion products, especially the Fusion applications. New business applications take time to gain market adoption and we don't anticipate the real revenue acceleration to come until 2011 or later. Early success can and will be found by Oracle, but customers will move at their own pace, as is right.
• Why Oracle Dividends Are Good for Tech
  It's definitely news when a company run by an outsized ego like Larry Ellison elects to start offering shareholders dividends. Oracle (ORCL), Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT) and Cisco (CSCO) are a few of the companies floating around with the most cash, according to this recent SA article. But Oracle is only the second of the pack to offer dividends (Microsoft was the first). Let's hope that this will lead to more technology companies issuing dividends in the future, something that would be good not only for investors but for the companies themselves.
• Coke contract and employees move from Satyam to HP
  Apart from bagging the ERP contract from Coca-Cola, HP has also issued offer letters to Satyam employees who were working with the client. Some of these employees will be joining HP next month. It is believed that Satyam had at least 100 employees working on the Coca-Cola project in its Chennai offshore development centre. Most of them were experts in the area of SAP consulting and implementation.
• Satyam Freshers Union wants parties to air job concerns
  Under the banner of Satyam Freshers Union, these students want political parties to air concerns over job losses in their manifestos. “We want political parties to incorporate our concerns in their manifestos. We will approach all parties including the Congress, Telugu Desam, Prajarajyam, Telangana Rashtria Samithi and the Communist Party of India help us get jobs that we were offered a Satyam,” said Satyam Freshers Union convenor Varun Podaralla.
• IBM-Sun deal: Microsoft is in the cross-hairs
  IBM's impending deal to buy Sun is aimed squarely at one of Microsoft's biggest vulnerabilities: In the server market and among developers, where Linux has a big presence, and is about to get much bigger. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the deal could help Microsoft, but the truth is, he's just blowing smoke.
• Oracle's Stimulus Package
  One way to read Oracle’s (ORCL) novel announcement on Wednesday that it will start paying a dividend is that after years of handing out money to shareholders of other companies in the form of acquisitions, it will dole out some to its own investors. Word that the software giant will pay a dividend for the first time comes after a quarter in which Oracle acquired just one company, mValent. It was the lowest quarterly total for the company in recent memory, and compares with the shopping spree in the same quarter last year that saw it take home BEA Systems for $8.5bn, among other deals.
• NetSuite adds cloud product range for coders
  SuiteCloud includes SuiteCloud Developer Network (SDN), a developer program for independent software vendors (ISVs), and SuiteApp.com, an online marketplace where ISVs, customers and other users can look for applications that may suit their business requirements.
• NetSuite rounds out SuiteCloud Ecosystem
  On-demand enterprise applications provider NetSuite today officially launched its SuiteCloud Ecosystem, designed to encourage customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to maximise NetSuite investments, and make the firm the preeminent platform-as-a-service provider. SuiteCloud is a bundle of tools and services which helps businesses to customise and extend their NetSuite implementations with ease, according to the vendor, and allows ISVs to build applications that meet specific business needs on top of a common business suite platform. The latest additions are SuiteCloud Developer Network, a developer programme for ISVs, and SuiteApp.com, an online marketplace where ISVs and customers can find the applications they need.
• NetSuite launches application store
  "SuiteCloud's NS-BOS has a built-in integration advantage over competitors," he said. "NetSuite provides a [SaaS] application foundation that pure platform providers lack and, most importantly, a pool of thousands of customers already committed to it."
• Microsoft preps massive cloud expansion
  "As we move forward in the next couple of months, we will begin running Windows Azure in multiple data centers," Microsoft's James Conrad told Mix attendees. "You will have the ability to run ASP.NET and storage in specific data centers...North American data centers are the start, [and] as we move forward with Azure will make it available in other data centers around the world." The expansion is in addition to the inclusion of business application features from SQL Server plus support for non-Microsoft and .NET programming languages such as PHP on Azure.
• Microsoft opens Azure to PHP developers
  Specific improvements made this week include expanding beyond managed code to native code support; enablement of full trust, which is how most applications or services are written; and offering FastCGI support to allow PHP development. "Basically, the Windows Server team has done a ton of work with FastCGI that allows Windows Server to now support programming languages beyond just .Net and Visual Studio," Ketkar said. Through the FastCGI interface, developers can take existing PHP skills and PHP applications and services and run them on Azure. Developers might also be able to run other languages via FastCGI, said Ketkar. Microsoft, though, has done stress-testing for PHP but not for other languages. "There is no reason that Ruby won't work through that same FastCGI interface," he said. Are you ready for event-driven business? - watch this webcast. Microsoft's vision is to open up the platform to more languages, Ketkar said. Microsoft wants Azure to offer a "frictionless" developmen

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-19

• Sun Micro takes on Amazon in cloud computing
  The Sun Cloud services, which mirror ones that Amazon has offered for three years, will initially be targeted at students, computer programmers and start-ups that cannot afford to buy their own servers and storage equipment.
• SAP Goes Head-to-Head with Oracle over Supply-Chain Solutions
  SAP announced the newest version of its SAP BusinessObjects Global Trade Services Application, integrated along with the SAP BusinessObjects Risk Management application, designed to automate regulatory compliance across the supply chain. This is the latest in new products that SAP has rolled out in 2009 and comes weeks after Oracle announced its own SAAS application for streamlining supply-chain management.
• As Goes Oracle, Technology Follows
  Oracle (ORCL) reports earnings this week, among the most anticipated earnings events in the tech sector. And that's not just because Larry Ellison watching is so much fun. Rather, it's because the database and enterprise software giant is the rarest of birds, a tech bellwether that has remained relatively unscathed by the economic fallout from the Great Recession that has hammered makers of cell phones, PCs, telecom equipment and LCD TVs. Thus far, Oracle has managed to avoid major retrenchments in sales and has continued to boost profitability. Will Larry's streak continue? It's a critical question not just for Oracle but also for the rest of the sector.
• IBM buying Sun Microsystems makes no sense, it's a red herring
  So, does IBM need chip architectures from Sun? Nope, has their own. Access to markets from Sun’s long-underperforming sales force? Nope. Unix? IBM has one. Linux? IBM was there first. Engineering skills? Nope. Storage technology? Nope. Head-start on cloud implementations? Nope. Java license access or synergy? Nope, too late. Sun’s deep and wide professional services presence worldwide? Nope. Ha! Let’s see … hardware, software, technology, sales, cloud, labor, market reach … none makes sense for IBM to buy Sun — at any price. IBM does just fine by continuing to watch the sun set on Sun. Same for Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, HP.
• Serena Makes Good on Promise: Dumps Microsoft Exchange for Google Gmail
  Why did Serena get rid of Microsoft Exchange? Two reasons, Bonvanie said. "The first is purely economic—we believe we can save the company $1 million in three years." Serena's second reason for the migration has to do with the company's focus on moving its customers to the cloud. "We want to put our company into the cloud as well," Bonvanie said. "And we want to put all of our applications into the cloud. Mail is just one. ... You know how much we've been on the SAAS [software-as-a-service] train. The Google experience is an example of putting the end user in the driver's seat because there are very few examples of applications that are as personal or affect people as much as e-mail."
• UPDATE: Oracle Expected To Post Modest Gains For Trying Period
  While Wall Street is generally confident that Oracle can rely on a steady stream of software maintenance revenue from existing customers, the company's ability to sell new software licenses amid the downturn has been questioned.
• If IBM and Sun merge, watch out Oracle and SAP
  Michael Cote, an analyst at RedMonk, pointed out that IBM controlling Java "could be something people who depend on Java will freak out about." AMR's Finely added, "If IBM enforces control over the Java Community Process the way Microsoft controls .Net, and WebSphere becomes perceived as better middleware because of it, then IBM gets an inherent advantage. Plus, it could de-stabilize the foundations of Oracle and SAP's products because Oracle's Fusion and SAP's NetWeaver are both tightly wedded to Java."
• Free Software Suits Self-Employed Workers
  Zoho offers 19 online business tools including Zoho Mail and Zoho Writer, which shouldn't be confused with Zoho Docs, which manages documents. There's software for managing projects, tracking sales, Web conferencing and more. With this level of ambition, it's not surprising that the products are thin. I haven't felt compelled to switch to Zoho products even though they compete with everything from Excel to NetSuite(N Quote - Cramer on N - Stock Picks).

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-18

• Gartner Tips on Cutting Software Costs
  here are a lot of factors in software licensing that can come under dispute: * Oracle's (and many other vendors') definition of "named user" includes non-human processes that interact with the database, not just the people who are running applications. This became a huge issue a few years back when enterprise systems started being connected in some way to the Internet: Is the Internet gateway process a single user, or do all potential users have to have individual licenses? * Virtualization and multi-core issues need to be addressed; in many cases, hardware partitioning is not adequately covered in license contracts, and you need to ensure that you're not paying for the maximum potential capacity of the underlying hardware, not what you're actually using. * Make sure that you have the right to change the platform (including hardware or underlying database) without onerous fees. * Watch out for license minimums embedded within the contract, or cases where upgrading to a
• Indian IT Group Frets over H-1B Reforms
  NASSCOM, an Indian IT outsourcing trade group, takes to Capitol Hill to lobby against potential legislation aimed at reforming the H-1B visa process. While high-tech industries favor an expansion of the program that allows highly trained foreign workers to fill existing IT vacancies, recent scandals in the H-1B visa program have raised lawmakers' ire and a call for reform.
• Congratulations Marc… The next $billion will be harder
  Still, even with those advantages, he needs a lot of luck and a good economy. Much of his success has been due to the company’s strong momentum. I would hate to see him stumble and end up like Siebel or PeopleSoft as a trophy on Larry’s wall.
• SaaS Business Profile: Workday
  First, low cost of ownership and fast time to value are huge right now. Companies that are using on-premise applications are looking to get out from under the maintenance burden and many are turning to SaaS. And, since SaaS can be implemented quickly, many Workday customers are measuring fast returns. Second, customers are looking for innovation. As I mentioned earlier, most on-premise software was built in the 80s and 90s. Workday is new - built from the ground-up on modern Web-based technologies. We’ve incorporated search, links and tags throughout the application, making it intuitive for the user. And, by the nature of the SaaS model, the product is always getting better. Finally, and we take this very seriously, we are committed to being a trusted partner. Our customers are our most valued and important partners, and in fact, our product is a direct reflection of their feedback. Workday has recently achieved a 100 percent customer satisfaction rating, and we attribute
• Has SAP hog tied itself on maintenance?
  In other words, Run SAP and Solution Manager are the twin pillars upon which SAP is hoping to persuade its customers to pony up a 29% cost increase in maintenance support costs. Jon explained that while SAP is bundling these with some 16 best practices they require customers to incur further costs in implementation and learning. In his view, this hog ties SAP because:
• It’s The Relationship, Stupid! - Stop Commoditizing The Client Facing Workforce (Part 1)
  The bottom line for vendors - place value on your staff who manage client facing relationships Consequently, vendors must look at other metrics other than overall labor costs. One approach - start by conducting a relationship audit. Identify high revenue customers and partners and the client facing employees that serve these stakeholders. Determine revenue per employee and profit per employee. Quantify their relationship value with clients. Focus on retention strategies, not replacement strategies. Then work with these clients to identify win-win strategies to solidify long term value.
• Snapshots In Enterprise 2.0 UX/UI - Lawson Smart Office
  Part 4: Lawson Software Brings The “Process of Me” To Life Introduced almost a year ago at Lawson’s CUE event on March 18, 2008, Lawson Smart Office brings an optional rich internet user experience for Lawson customers. Lawson Smart Office builds on top of the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation and delivers an information workplace front end to Lawson’s collection of applications. Similar to the Apple’s OS X and Windows 7 experience, the Lawson “Canvas” allows users to engage in quick task switching, active drag and drop, translucent floating windows, flow documents for help file creation, 3D navigation, VisualBrushes for task bar previews, and highly interactive side bars that work with the Lawson applications. Almost 9000 meta driven screens work with a back end Java Services Layer that communicates with .NET, Java, main-frame, and other legacy environments. Key feature allow users to:
• Q&A: 10 questions with Salesforce's Marc Benioff
  Do you worry about someone doing the same to you? Benioff: In our industry, lack of focus on the customer, complacency, and failure to innovate are the mortal sins. We work very hard to make sure that doesn't happen to us.
• It feels like an AON ago
  Here is yet another reminder of the short attention span in our industry: in this week of all-Cisco-all-the-time coverage and commentary, induced by the Unified Computing announcement, not one article or blog posting mentioned AON (Application Oriented Networking). Remember AON, introduced by Cisco in 2005? If not you’re not alone. At least according to Technorati and Google News who don’t find a single mention of it in the Unified Computing coverage (until Technorati re-indexes this blog, at which point this entry will ironically make a liar of itself…). If Cisco is not going to tell us how AON relates to Unified Computing it would be nice if some of the trade publications and analysts who covered AON at the time made an effort to update those of us who can’t remember the neighbor’s name but never forget an acronym. Wasn’t AON Cisco’s first attempt to move from the network layer to the application layer, which is what Unified Computing is also about? Is this the second step? A reset?

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-17 (part 2)

• ‘Only 10-11 serious contenders seen bidding for Satyam’
  Mr P.K. Agarwal, President (Research) of Bonanza Portfolio, felt that the bidding process was not transparent. “It is a shot in the darkness. In the absence of restated figures, how can one really assess the health of the company? The average investor is kept in the dark and is completely clueless on what is happening. How can that be a transparent process,” he said. “It will be difficult to analyse the status of the company in the absence of any knowledge of the financials or liabilities,” he added.
• `TCS, Infosys, Wipro sales to drop'
  Organic revenue may decline as much as 20 per cent for the year starting April 1, the analysts wrote in a March 11 report. “We expect the coming quarters to bring further erosion of demand for Indian IT vendors’ services,” the analysts wrote. “It is too early to look for a revival.” Customers from Citigroup Inc to Boeing Co are among companies that are facing slowing earnings growth amid the financial crisis and global recession.
• Satyam gets 'adequate bid response'
  The Economic Times said almost 130 companies had expressed interest in buying Satyam, including multinationals IBM, Fidelity Investments and buyout specialist KKR. A Satyam spokeswoman declined to confirm the reports.
• Enterprise Server Segment Takes a Beating
  The latest data from Gartner Inc. and IDC paints a dismal picture of IT spending in general and the server market in particular. Both market watchers see server sales plummeting -- even as IDC revised its global IT spending forecast (yet again) down to 0.5 percent growth. According to Gartner, Q4 server unit shipments dipped by double digits, plunging 11.7 percent from their year-ago total; server revenues plummeted by 15.1 percent on a year-over-year basis. IDC's numbers tell a largely similar story, with global unit shipments of servers down by a near-identical 12.0 percent and server revenues off by 14 percent.
• How Much Does Each 20+ Notable Tech Companies Earns A Second?
  16. Oracle Corporation - Earnings Per Second: $710.76 Annual Revenue: $22.43 billion
• Why Tech Won't Lead The Next Bull Market
  The problem is that the current crop of publicly traded tech companies is getting long in the tooth, and the companies at the cutting edge of tech aren't public, nor are they likely to be anytime soon. When Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Apple, Oracle and Yahoo all came public it was a long, long time before they were household names. But they were mostly legitimate businesses, with sales and profits early on (Yahoo not so much). This is the opposite of the current situation in tech. In the Internet sector, for example, Facebook is arguably the one unalloyed post-Google hit. But despite its ubiquity, it's not obvious that it's going to be a great business. By the time Facebook goes public, if it eventually does, it may have already taken a down VC round, while fending off scrappier, upstarts.
• As Growth Slows, Ex-Allies Square Off in a Tech Turf War
  Since Cisco's core networking markets began slowing in 2005, it has taken on the likes of H-P, Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. It is also picking new fights as it expands into home electronics and entertainment systems for sports stadiums. Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers says the company expects to deploy its hoard of cash during the economic downturn to expand further into areas where it hasn't historically competed. In February, the San Jose, Calif., company took on $4 billion in debt in part to add to its war chest for acquisitions. "The fact that we have $29.5 billion gives us a huge competitive advantage," Mr. Chambers said in an interview just before raising that capital. "Cash is king, queen and the royal family." Cisco's new rivalry with H-P provides a particularly good window into the industry's latest offensives. As Cisco moves onto H-P's territory, H-P is stepping up its own investments in networking gear that competes with Cisco's.
• JDA to Buy Back Shares as Retailers Hope for an Uptick in 2009
  JDA, whose specialty remains software used by retail store chains (with some supply chain expertise for process manufacturing thanks to the 2006 acquisition of Manugistics), also lost two big-name retail customers over the last few months: Circuit City and Mervyn's, both of which declared bankruptcy and shut down operations. Both Circuit City and Mervyn's were also sizable AS/400 shops, and had been featured in JDA marketing materials over the years. While things likely will get worse before they get better, JDA CEO Hamish Brewer and CFO Kristen Magnuson didn't have the luxury of waiting for the economy to improve; they felt the need to make the JDA's stock more attractive to investors in the short term. To that end, the company announced a one-year plan to buy back up to $30 million worth of stock on the open market.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-17

• ‘Only 10-11 serious contenders seen bidding for Satyam’
  Mr P.K. Agarwal, President (Research) of Bonanza Portfolio, felt that the bidding process was not transparent. “It is a shot in the darkness. In the absence of restated figures, how can one really assess the health of the company? The average investor is kept in the dark and is completely clueless on what is happening. How can that be a transparent process,” he said. “It will be difficult to analyse the status of the company in the absence of any knowledge of the financials or liabilities,” he added.
• `TCS, Infosys, Wipro sales to drop'
  Organic revenue may decline as much as 20 per cent for the year starting April 1, the analysts wrote in a March 11 report. “We expect the coming quarters to bring further erosion of demand for Indian IT vendors’ services,” the analysts wrote. “It is too early to look for a revival.” Customers from Citigroup Inc to Boeing Co are among companies that are facing slowing earnings growth amid the financial crisis and global recession.
• Satyam gets 'adequate bid response'
  The Economic Times said almost 130 companies had expressed interest in buying Satyam, including multinationals IBM, Fidelity Investments and buyout specialist KKR. A Satyam spokeswoman declined to confirm the reports.
• Enterprise Server Segment Takes a Beating
  The latest data from Gartner Inc. and IDC paints a dismal picture of IT spending in general and the server market in particular. Both market watchers see server sales plummeting -- even as IDC revised its global IT spending forecast (yet again) down to 0.5 percent growth. According to Gartner, Q4 server unit shipments dipped by double digits, plunging 11.7 percent from their year-ago total; server revenues plummeted by 15.1 percent on a year-over-year basis. IDC's numbers tell a largely similar story, with global unit shipments of servers down by a near-identical 12.0 percent and server revenues off by 14 percent.
• How Much Does Each 20+ Notable Tech Companies Earns A Second?
  16. Oracle Corporation - Earnings Per Second: $710.76 Annual Revenue: $22.43 billion
• Why Tech Won't Lead The Next Bull Market
  The problem is that the current crop of publicly traded tech companies is getting long in the tooth, and the companies at the cutting edge of tech aren't public, nor are they likely to be anytime soon. When Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Apple, Oracle and Yahoo all came public it was a long, long time before they were household names. But they were mostly legitimate businesses, with sales and profits early on (Yahoo not so much). This is the opposite of the current situation in tech. In the Internet sector, for example, Facebook is arguably the one unalloyed post-Google hit. But despite its ubiquity, it's not obvious that it's going to be a great business. By the time Facebook goes public, if it eventually does, it may have already taken a down VC round, while fending off scrappier, upstarts.
• As Growth Slows, Ex-Allies Square Off in a Tech Turf War
  Since Cisco's core networking markets began slowing in 2005, it has taken on the likes of H-P, Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. It is also picking new fights as it expands into home electronics and entertainment systems for sports stadiums. Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers says the company expects to deploy its hoard of cash during the economic downturn to expand further into areas where it hasn't historically competed. In February, the San Jose, Calif., company took on $4 billion in debt in part to add to its war chest for acquisitions. "The fact that we have $29.5 billion gives us a huge competitive advantage," Mr. Chambers said in an interview just before raising that capital. "Cash is king, queen and the royal family." Cisco's new rivalry with H-P provides a particularly good window into the industry's latest offensives. As Cisco moves onto H-P's territory, H-P is stepping up its own investments in networking gear that competes with Cisco's.
• JDA to Buy Back Shares as Retailers Hope for an Uptick in 2009
  JDA, whose specialty remains software used by retail store chains (with some supply chain expertise for process manufacturing thanks to the 2006 acquisition of Manugistics), also lost two big-name retail customers over the last few months: Circuit City and Mervyn's, both of which declared bankruptcy and shut down operations. Both Circuit City and Mervyn's were also sizable AS/400 shops, and had been featured in JDA marketing materials over the years. While things likely will get worse before they get better, JDA CEO Hamish Brewer and CFO Kristen Magnuson didn't have the luxury of waiting for the economy to improve; they felt the need to make the JDA's stock more attractive to investors in the short term. To that end, the company announced a one-year plan to buy back up to $30 million worth of stock on the open market.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-15 (part 2)

• Microsoft Convergence 2009: Hybrid Technology
  Microsoft and its larger SI partners plan to put some serious weight behind xRM in the coming months. But wait, what’s xRM? xRM describes applications built on Dynamics CRM that don’t use the CRM application functionality. xRM (the “x” implies it can be used to underpin a variety of industry or use-specific applications) has tight integration with the Microsoft stack — .NET, SQL, et al — and will also, along with the Dynamics CRM app, likely be available as a cloud-based resource via Azure. ... Who will they compete with? Salesforce.com’s Force platform, which also aims to provide developer resources on the cloud for non-CRM, industry-specific applications. IBM’s cloud initiatives. Probably Google Apps, SAP (who purchased Coghead to get into the platform space), Oracle, and possibly Amazon. There are also a small handful of other vendors that see the future in cloud-based applications.
• #4 Lawrence Ellison - The World's Billionaires 2009 - Forbes.com
  Net Worth:$22.5 bil Fortune:self made Source:Oracle Age:64 Country Of Citizenship:United States Residence:Redwood City, California Industry:Software Education:University of Illinois, Drop Out, Marital Status:married, 2 children Database titan continues to engulf the competition; Oracle has racked up 49 acquisitions in the past 4 years. Bought BEA Systems for $8.5 billion last year. Still sitting on $7 billion in cash. Revenues up 11% to $10.9 billion in the six months ended November 30; profits also up 11% to $2.4 billion. Stock down 25% in past 12 months. Invested $125 million in Web software outfit Netsuite; took public in 2007, stock has fallen 80% since. His shares still worth $300 million. Chicago native studied physics at U. of Chicago, didn't graduate. Started Oracle in 1977. Public 1986, a day before Microsoft. Owns 453-foot Rising Sun; built a smaller leisure boat because superyacht is hard to park. Squabbling in court with Swiss boating billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli over te
• Amazon tweaks EC2 pricing; Takes next step in its enterprise evolution
  Amazon on Thursday announced reserved pricing for its EC2 instances (blog, statement). Simply put, customers can reserve instances for one-year and three-year terms as if they owned the hardware. Enterprises can guarantee they have an EC2 instance for computing power they know they’ll use and buy on the spot market to account for spikes at the usual Amazon rate. Under Amazon’s model, customers only pay for the computing power they use even if instances are reserved.
• Satyam Customers Mull Exit Strategies
  Increasingly nervous Satyam customers are looking for alternatives in case the scandal-scarred outsourcer is unable to restore internal stability or find a buyer with pockets deep enough to see the Indian company through its current crisis.
• Compiere Releases Enterprise-Class ERP Solution on Amazon’s Cloud
  Compiere announced immediate availability of Compiere Cloud Edition ERP software on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Compiere Cloud Edition is a business application that automates processes from Accounting, to Purchasing, Order Fulfillment, Manufacturing, Warehousing and CRM. Compiere's Cloud Edition is delivered with a complete technology stack, certified by Compiere, comprised of an operating system, application server, and database that can be deployed on Amazon EC2 in a matter of minutes.
• IT Job Prospects for Q2 2009 - Careers
  Net expecting to add staff: 2% Net for first quarter: 8%

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-15

• Microsoft Convergence 2009: Hybrid Technology
  Microsoft and its larger SI partners plan to put some serious weight behind xRM in the coming months. But wait, what’s xRM? xRM describes applications built on Dynamics CRM that don’t use the CRM application functionality. xRM (the “x” implies it can be used to underpin a variety of industry or use-specific applications) has tight integration with the Microsoft stack — .NET, SQL, et al — and will also, along with the Dynamics CRM app, likely be available as a cloud-based resource via Azure. ... Who will they compete with? Salesforce.com’s Force platform, which also aims to provide developer resources on the cloud for non-CRM, industry-specific applications. IBM’s cloud initiatives. Probably Google Apps, SAP (who purchased Coghead to get into the platform space), Oracle, and possibly Amazon. There are also a small handful of other vendors that see the future in cloud-based applications.
• #4 Lawrence Ellison - The World's Billionaires 2009 - Forbes.com
  Net Worth:$22.5 bil Fortune:self made Source:Oracle Age:64 Country Of Citizenship:United States Residence:Redwood City, California Industry:Software Education:University of Illinois, Drop Out, Marital Status:married, 2 children Database titan continues to engulf the competition; Oracle has racked up 49 acquisitions in the past 4 years. Bought BEA Systems for $8.5 billion last year. Still sitting on $7 billion in cash. Revenues up 11% to $10.9 billion in the six months ended November 30; profits also up 11% to $2.4 billion. Stock down 25% in past 12 months. Invested $125 million in Web software outfit Netsuite; took public in 2007, stock has fallen 80% since. His shares still worth $300 million. Chicago native studied physics at U. of Chicago, didn't graduate. Started Oracle in 1977. Public 1986, a day before Microsoft. Owns 453-foot Rising Sun; built a smaller leisure boat because superyacht is hard to park. Squabbling in court with Swiss boating billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli over te
• Amazon tweaks EC2 pricing; Takes next step in its enterprise evolution
  Amazon on Thursday announced reserved pricing for its EC2 instances (blog, statement). Simply put, customers can reserve instances for one-year and three-year terms as if they owned the hardware. Enterprises can guarantee they have an EC2 instance for computing power they know they’ll use and buy on the spot market to account for spikes at the usual Amazon rate. Under Amazon’s model, customers only pay for the computing power they use even if instances are reserved.
• Satyam Customers Mull Exit Strategies
  Increasingly nervous Satyam customers are looking for alternatives in case the scandal-scarred outsourcer is unable to restore internal stability or find a buyer with pockets deep enough to see the Indian company through its current crisis.
• Compiere Releases Enterprise-Class ERP Solution on Amazon’s Cloud
  Compiere announced immediate availability of Compiere Cloud Edition ERP software on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Compiere Cloud Edition is a business application that automates processes from Accounting, to Purchasing, Order Fulfillment, Manufacturing, Warehousing and CRM. Compiere's Cloud Edition is delivered with a complete technology stack, certified by Compiere, comprised of an operating system, application server, and database that can be deployed on Amazon EC2 in a matter of minutes.
• IT Job Prospects for Q2 2009 - Careers
  Net expecting to add staff: 2% Net for first quarter: 8%

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-14

• Microsoft Convergence 2009: Hybrid Technology
  Microsoft and its larger SI partners plan to put some serious weight behind xRM in the coming months. But wait, what’s xRM? xRM describes applications built on Dynamics CRM that don’t use the CRM application functionality. xRM (the “x” implies it can be used to underpin a variety of industry or use-specific applications) has tight integration with the Microsoft stack — .NET, SQL, et al — and will also, along with the Dynamics CRM app, likely be available as a cloud-based resource via Azure. ... Who will they compete with? Salesforce.com’s Force platform, which also aims to provide developer resources on the cloud for non-CRM, industry-specific applications. IBM’s cloud initiatives. Probably Google Apps, SAP (who purchased Coghead to get into the platform space), Oracle, and possibly Amazon. There are also a small handful of other vendors that see the future in cloud-based applications.
• #4 Lawrence Ellison - The World's Billionaires 2009 - Forbes.com
  Net Worth:$22.5 bil Fortune:self made Source:Oracle Age:64 Country Of Citizenship:United States Residence:Redwood City, California Industry:Software Education:University of Illinois, Drop Out, Marital Status:married, 2 children Database titan continues to engulf the competition; Oracle has racked up 49 acquisitions in the past 4 years. Bought BEA Systems for $8.5 billion last year. Still sitting on $7 billion in cash. Revenues up 11% to $10.9 billion in the six months ended November 30; profits also up 11% to $2.4 billion. Stock down 25% in past 12 months. Invested $125 million in Web software outfit Netsuite; took public in 2007, stock has fallen 80% since. His shares still worth $300 million. Chicago native studied physics at U. of Chicago, didn't graduate. Started Oracle in 1977. Public 1986, a day before Microsoft. Owns 453-foot Rising Sun; built a smaller leisure boat because superyacht is hard to park. Squabbling in court with Swiss boating billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli over te
• Amazon tweaks EC2 pricing; Takes next step in its enterprise evolution
  Amazon on Thursday announced reserved pricing for its EC2 instances (blog, statement). Simply put, customers can reserve instances for one-year and three-year terms as if they owned the hardware. Enterprises can guarantee they have an EC2 instance for computing power they know they’ll use and buy on the spot market to account for spikes at the usual Amazon rate. Under Amazon’s model, customers only pay for the computing power they use even if instances are reserved.
• Satyam Customers Mull Exit Strategies
  Increasingly nervous Satyam customers are looking for alternatives in case the scandal-scarred outsourcer is unable to restore internal stability or find a buyer with pockets deep enough to see the Indian company through its current crisis.
• Compiere Releases Enterprise-Class ERP Solution on Amazon’s Cloud
  Compiere announced immediate availability of Compiere Cloud Edition ERP software on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Compiere Cloud Edition is a business application that automates processes from Accounting, to Purchasing, Order Fulfillment, Manufacturing, Warehousing and CRM. Compiere's Cloud Edition is delivered with a complete technology stack, certified by Compiere, comprised of an operating system, application server, and database that can be deployed on Amazon EC2 in a matter of minutes.
• IT Job Prospects for Q2 2009 - Careers
  Net expecting to add staff: 2% Net for first quarter: 8%

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-03-12

• Jonathan Schwartz's Blog
  I was stunned. I asked, "why?" He responded, "Oracle is our global standard, and with 20,000 developers, people need to follow the rules." I said we had a very good relationship with Oracle, and started talking about how fast Oracle runs against our new Open Storage products. Until he interrupted me, "...but my ban failed." What? "We hire lots of people out of college every year, and they all come in knowing MySQL. All my prototypes are written to MySQL, and now I have a big base of MySQL apps I don't want to port, and a bunch of MySQL programmers I don't want to retrain. So I'd like a commercial relationship."
• Oracle's Golden Goose, Maintenance Revenue, Contains Flight Risk
  To understand why Oracle Corp.'s (ORCL) business of selling long-term maintenance contracts may face pressure in the future, consider the decision Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co. recently made. Rusty Gaston, the chief information officer of the Santa Fe, N.M.-based unit of Reynolds American Inc. (RAI), switched the company's service contract for Oracle software to Rimini Street, a third-party support company that says it charges half of what Oracle does. "We were paying higher fees," Gaston said of the Oracle contract. "And getting no more for it."
• The Life You Can Save
  Less heartening, however, are the statistics on how the superwealthy spend their billions. While Singer praises Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, he decries the “moral depravity” of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who not only lags in charitable giving, but embraces a lifestyle that wreaks disproportionate havoc on our environment. In a single hour, Ellison’s $200 million yacht burns as much diesel fuel as does a Volkswagen Jetta in seven years and emits as much nitrogen oxide in that hour as the car emits over 20 years.
• Is Ingres leading an open source 'apps stack'?
  With the announcement of an ECM appliance barely a year after its declaration of an integrated business intelligence (BI) solution, open source database vendor Ingres appears to be creating, through partnerships, an alternative 'one-stop shop' for enterprise applications. While the likes of IBM and Oracle may not have to worry yet, given these cost-conscious times, Microsoft - whose price-point is closest to open source - and smaller ISVs need to take note.
• Infy to hire 20k engg grads at over 8% higher salary
  India’s second-largest software company Infosys will be inducting almost 20,000 engineering graduates this year at over 8.3 % higher salary from what was offered last year, even as the company seeks to cope with a lower demand for software services in its top export markets such as the US and Europe. At a time when other industry rivals such as TCS, Wipro and HCL Technologies are deferring the joining dates for new hires, Infosys is holding on to its commitment and that too at better salary levels than last year.
• Protectionism threatens India's IT sector
  India’s money-spinning information technology sector may be staring at its worst nightmare as several European countries, taking their cue from the United States, consider adopting protectionist policies that could deal a serious blow to the industry. Succumbing to mounting job losses and pressure from taxpayers, several Western and European nations are looking to adopt stringent protectionist measures to save their local businesses and jobs. Experts say that in a bid to generate jobs, the United States and the United Kingdom are resorting to protectionist policies on the issue of outsourcing, and many more European nations could adopt even stricter protectionist measures.
• Shrinking onsite staff hits IT cos' margins
  Global customers of IT firms are increasingly looking at an `out-of-sight' arrangement rather than the traditional `on-site' model in their effort to reduce costs. Buyers today are keen to maintain a lean onsite that is, bare minimum support staff from vendors at their premises as onsite billing rates are significantly higher than offshore rates. The per hour offshore charges range between $18 and $40 while the onsite rates range from $60 to $150.
• Tech job postings fall 40 percent in March
  Tech job postings fell 40.4 percent in March over year ago figures, with most of the decline coming from full-time positions, according to a report released Tuesday by tech career site Dice.com. Dice, which collects its figures at the start of each month, noted tech job postings fell to 54,301 in March, down from 91,080 a year earlier. The decline in job postings comes at a time when the nation's unemployment rate has worsened, reaching 8.1 percent in February. According to the Dice report, full-time job postings dropped 44.2 percent to 35,570 in March and contract positions fell 35.6 percent to 23,545. Job postings, on a sequential basis (or month over month) also declined further, dropping 5.3 percent during March from February.
• UPDATE: SAP, Sybase To Deliver Mobile Enterprise Programs
  Office software companies SAP AG (SAP) and Sybase Inc. (SY) on Wednesday unveiled a partnership to deliver mobile enterprise programs to workers on the go. The German software giant will make its SAP Business Suite available to the Apple Inc. (AAPL) iPhone, Research in Motion Ltd. (RIMM) Blackberrys and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Windows Mobile phones and other devices using Sybase's mobile application platform. The move underscores the increasing importance of bringing programs routinely used on a computer to smartphones.
• SAP Announces Sybase Partnership, Mobile Business Suite 7
  SAP has partnered with Sybase, a creator of enterprise and mobile software, to deliver mobile solutions for the SAP Business Suite. Once integrated with the Sybase mobile enterprise application platform, the SAP Business Suite can be run on the Apple iPhone, Microsoft Windows Mobile, BlackBerry smartphones and other mobile devices.
• SAP to offer corporate apps on iPhone
  Sybase, which provides database software to large companies, already sells programs that let users access corporate applications and information on their mobile devices. But now it says it will work closely with SAP to customize the software.
• SAP, Sybase, mobile apps: shrug?
  Then there’s the question of pricing. Executives would not be drawn other than to say ‘reasonable.’ If we’re talking about iPhone apps then they’d better be free or close to it. Oracle has had Oracle Business Approvals for Managers on the Appstore, since October of last year. SAP’s version looks remarkably similar. The Oracle app is free though it requires the licensing of the Business Approvals Connector server app at a pre-discount price of $8,750 for the minimum of 25 users.