Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-22

• How enterprises can (gently) squeeze their vendors during the recession
  Adobe Systems Inc., IBM, Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. are jacking up audits the most, respondents told Gartner, but so are many other vendors.
• EU and Oracle Should Just Say We Want Sun Dead
  ...makes you wonder whether continental regulators and Larry Ellison have an unquenchable taste for irony or are really interested in seeing Sun dead and buried, given that the review time has just extended another six days to January 27. [If this deal doesn't go through, maybe MySQL will survive but competition will certainly decline in the hardware business as Sun will definitely not survive in any meaningful way.-DBM]
  
• Why Chatter Matters
  I know there are at least two to three years before we actually see this implemented and see more details (Chatter is not expected until late 2010 to begin with). I know that it may not happen (yes, I read the Beta Agreement — sorry, Safe Harbor statement that Marc displayed on screen as well as everybody else). And, yes, I will be disappointed if it does not happen — but even if that is the case, the milk has been spilled. The path to the cloud has been uncovered.
• Measuring Your CAC Effectiveness
  CAC ratio is: [($Total Sales + $Total Marketing)/$First Year Contract Value]. The objective is to make the CAC ratio less than 1 which implies a customer acquisition payback of a year or less. This is the ratio I recommend companies use to measure their sales/marketing effectiveness.
• Intel Capital invests $25 million in tech companies
  Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of the world's largest chip maker, Tuesday detailed seven new investments worth around US$25 million in total, in addition to an investment in U.S. WiMax operator Clearwire.
• Rivals Take Aim at the Software Company SAS
  A TOUR of its carefully tended, 300-acre corporate campus here leaves little doubt why surveys, year after year, rate the SAS Institute, the world’s largest private software company, among the best places to work. There is the subsidized day care and preschool. There are the four company doctors and the dozen nurses who provide free primary care. The recreational amenities include basketball and racquetball courts, a swimming pool, exercise rooms and 40 miles of running and biking trails. There is a meditation garden, as well as on-site haircuts, manicures, and jewelry repair. Employees are encouraged to work 35-hour weeks. Academics have studied the company’s benefit-enhanced corporate culture as a model for nurturing creativity and loyalty among engineers and other workers. Six years ago, in a report on “60 Minutes,” Morley Safer called working at SAS “the good life.” But that good life is under threat today as never before.
• Lawyers ate Oracle’s commitment to Oracle Forms
  The latest version of this reassuringly says about Forms and Reports: “Oracle has no plan to desupport these products. Furthermore, new version of Oracle Forms,Oracle Reports will continue to be released as part of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Forms 11g and Oracle Reports 11g are components of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.” However, the document now starts by saying that “It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.”
• Microsoft extends Dynamics capabilties
  The Sites Service is built on the new Windows Azure cloud platform, and enables users to create and manage sites without having to leave their Dynamics ERP application, said the firm. Advertisement Examples could include landing pages for marketing campaigns, or sites for product registration information and customer feedback, said Microsoft. The new Commerce Service has been built to help integrate ERP with e-commerce systems including storefronts and business-to-consumer marketplaces, in order to enable multi-channel strategies. Finally, the Payment Service enables customers to process payments from a variety of channels including e-commerce, point of sale and call centres, all from within the Dynamics interface.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-21

• Usability in enterprise Apps: Workday 9
  Workday 9 is a great example of a design that is centered on making people very productive in getting work done - exactly what you'd expect from the crew at Workday.
• EU Ombudsman faults EC's Intel antitrust ruling
  The European Ombudsman accused the European Commission on Thursday of "maladministration" during its antitrust investigation of Intel, which resulted in a hefty fine earlier this year, as well as an order to desist from its anti-competitive practices.
• New H-1B hiring bill takes aim at tech firms
  The two lawmakers who successfully added H-1B hiring restrictions to the financial bailout bill earlier this year have introduced legislation that would bar any firm that lays off 50 or more workers from hiring guest workers.
• H-1B Visa Beef May End Up in Supreme Court
  The Programmers Guild and other litigants fighting a 2008 Department of Homeland Security decision to extend from 12 months to 29 months the amount of time mathematics, engineering, science or technology students are allowed to work after graduation under an optional practical training program say it amounts to little more than a back-door attempt to circumvent the H-1B visa cap. H-1B visa opponents have turned to the Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to overturn a 2008 Department of Homeland Security decision that the Programmers Guild, the Immigration Reform Law Institute and others claim is a back-door circumvention of the H-1B visa cap.
• Microsoft Talks Windows Azure, Launches 'Dallas' Data Service
  Microsoft will make its Windows Azure cloud platform available as of Jan. 1, 2010, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie says in a keynote speech at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. The company also announces a data-as-a-service solution code-named Dallas.
• Microsoft settles employee spying case
  The deal closes an unusual case in which Microsoft said that Mullor continued on as CEO of a company called Ancora while working at Microsoft. While Mullor was employed at Microsoft, Ancora accused several computer makers including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba of infringing on a patent. The PC makers asked Microsoft to defend them since the technology was provided by Microsoft.
• Microsoft adds app, data marketplace to Windows Azure
  Azure will also host "an open catalog and marketplace for public and commercial data" codenamed Dallas, Ozzie said. Developers can use the data to build their own services and mashups. Dallas is now in Commercial Technical Preview.
• Google, Bing take bigger bites of search market; Yahoo slips
  While Microsoft Bing and Google inch up, Yahoo looks like lame duck
• Google, Microsoft Bing Are Squeezing Yahoo in Search
  Google paced the market with 65.4 share, up from its 64.9 percent share in September, comScore claimed. Microsoft Bing nearly reached double digits with 9.9 percent, up from its 9.4 percent share in September. Google and Microsoft's collective gain came at the expense of Yahoo, which plummeted to 18 percent in October from the prior month's total of 18.8 percent. That's Yahoo's lowest share ever and its largest month-to-month share decline since August 2008.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-20

• Theory of competition fails in open source, elsewhere
  Open source loves a monopoly.
• Apache Mahout Wiki
  Apache Mahout is a new Lucene TLP project to create scalable, machine learning algorithms under the Apache license
• Mmmm. Tasty Kool-Aid. (Why yes, I am at Dreamforce, why do you ask?)
  What flavor, you ask? Innovation. Mmmm. Tasty. Refreshing. And (being cloud-based) less filling.
• Day 2 with Marc Benioff and Salesforce.com at Dreamforce 2009 #df09
  "Traditional platforms are too slow, too complex and too expensive," he said. He rated Sun and Oracle as too expensive, Microsoft's SharePoint as too slow, BEA Weblogic as requiring too many people, and SAP as too complicated, before announcing that Salesforce.com has launched a free edition of Force.com.
• Hadoop at Twitter (part 1): Splittable LZO Compression
  At Twitter we are significantly ramping up usage of Hadoop to help us analyze the massive amounts of data that our platform generates each day. We are happy users of Cloudera’s free distribution of Hadoop; we’re currently running Hadoop 0.20.1 with Pig 0.4. In this first of a small series of posts about our architecture and the open source software we’re working on around it, we’d like to focus on an infrastructure-level solution we use to make our cluster more efficient: splittable LZO for Hadoop. Using LZO compression in Hadoop allows for reduced data size and shorter disk read times, and LZO’s block-based structure allows it to be split into chunks for parallel processing in Hadoop. Taken together, these characteristics make LZO an excellent compression format to use in your cluster.
• SugarCRM Launches Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Against Salesforce.com
  Now, of course, having .com on the end of your name is about as hip as wearing Hammer pants. In a way it's almost embarrassing, like some weird vestigial appendage from that wacky dotcom craze. Advertisement Anyway, the thing is, Benioff is ripe for parody, and now someone has done it—and it just happens to be one of his competitors. SugarCRM, a tiny company that makes the same kind of software that Salesforce.com makes but charges less, decided to have some fun at Benioff's expense and maybe to drum up a little business at the same time. So they created a knock-off of Benioff's book and called it Behind the Smoke Screen: the untold story of how Salesforce.com still manages to sell 1999 technology 10 years later. Where the real book has a glowing blurb from Michael Dell, the parody features one from Kim Jong Il. Inside are six tiny chapters that poke fun of Salesforce.com for using proprietary code (SugarCRM is open source) and relying on stodgy, old Oracle database software (SugarCRM
• Microsoft CEO Ballmer Touts Windows 7 Gains
  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tells his audience at the Microsoft Annual Shareholder Meeting that Windows 7 has been outselling previous versions of Windows, including Windows Vista, by a ratio of 2-to-1. Data from outside analysts suggests that Windows 7 has made steady gains in the PC market since its Oct. 22 release.
• Interop: Microsoft Exec Says 'Google Me'
  The exec told audience members seeking his contact info to "Google (NSDQ: GOOG) me." Yousef Khalidi, distinguished engineer for Microsoft's Azure cloud OS, had just wrapped up a panel discussion on cloud computing when he made the gaffe. Khalidi drew laughs when he quickly corrected himself and advised the audience to "Bing me" instead.
• Salesforce demos Service Cloud 2 #df09
  Marc Benioff and Kraig Swensrud, senior vice president of product marketing, show attendees the company's new customer service software, Service Cloud 2. The new tool helps businesses connect their traditional call center technologies with social media applications through a cloud computing infrastructure.
• IBM Cuts Power Memory Prices to Lure HP, Sun Customers
  IBM is pressing what it sees as an advantage over HP and Sun by cutting prices by as much as 70 percent on memory in its Power systems. The goal is to further tempt customers of Sun’s SPARC systems and HP’s Itanium platform to migrate to IBM’s Power architecture. However, one analyst also said that the Power platform also is competing with less-expensive x86 systems, which are moving deeper into scale-up environments.
• How IBM Brought Analytics to the Cloud
  IBM Smart Analytics Cloud provides easily consumable business intelligence services, systems and software to help customers create an efficient delivery of shared business intelligence services across lines of business and functional organizations, IBM officials said. IBM’s own Analytics Cloud deployment served as the template for this solution offering, which features: · IBM services - enables the client to transform the corporate business intelligence (BI) strategy and achieve rapid return on investment with planning and strategy sessions, installation and implementation of the Smart Analytic cloud solution, as well as optimization of the cloud for the enterprise · IBM Cognos 8 BI - provides the BI capability for the cloud, offering a broad range of business intelligence services, including reports, analysis, dashboards and scorecards to monitor business performance, analyze trends and measure results · IBM System z - supports the foundation for
• Cray Jaguar Takes Top Supercomputer Spot from IBM Roadrunner
  After more than a year as the world’s fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Roadrunner system was knocked down to the second spot by Cray’s Jaguar. Cray’s XT5 system got a boost when the computer maker swapped out the quad-core AMD Opterons for the six-core “Istanbul” chips, ramping up the power to more than 224,000 processing cores. Sun and SGI also were represented in the top 10 of the Top500 list of the fastest systems.
• Hot IT Jobs for 2010 - Careers
  [5 of top 9 are SAP...-DBM] 1. SAP SRM Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 25% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 33.3% 2. Linux Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 11.1% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 42.9% 3. SAP SCM Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 22.2% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 33.3% 4. C++ Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 20% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 0% 5. Microsoft Commerce Server Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 18.2% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 18.2% 6. SAP PM Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 33.3% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 25% 7. Java EE, SE, ME/J2EE Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: -16.7% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: -11.1% 8. SAP SEM Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 9.1% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 0% 9. Netweaver PI Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 10% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 22.2%

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-19

• Benioff: Denial of the cloud has destroyed SAP
  By not embracing cloud computing, SAP has destroyed its business. This was the view of Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive of Salesforce.com, who gave a frank and brutal review of the software company. During a press session at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week, Benioff said: “ I think SAP are in a lot of trouble... I would say that their religious and fanatical denial of the cloud may have destroyed their company.” He listed attempts made by the company to join in with cloud computing, but said they never materialised. “SAP remains an innovation-less company,”he added, “but they are very nice people.” Benioff was slightly kinder to other rivals including Microsoft and Oracle – the latter being Benioff's former employer - who have made stronger moves into cloud solutions, saying they were “doing a better job with the cloud than a year ago.”
• SAP CEO: Things Are Starting To Stabilize
  "Things are starting to stabilize...there is more pipeline activity...and we are seeing a gradual volume increase in some areas," Apotheker said, speaking at the Morgan Stanley TMT conference in Barcelona.
• SAP boss predicts ‘wave of growth’
  With an eye towards possible acquisitions, Europe’s biggest software firm SAP is on the verge of a substantial “wave of growth,” company CEO Léo Apotheker said on Tuesday in Berlin.
• Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP
  Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP is a new product planned for availability in the second half of the coming year through a collaboration between Microsoft and SAP. The two companies are essentially pushing forward an already existing joint effort around bridging the office productivity suite and SAP, dating back to 2005. Four years ago, the duo introduced Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP, a step which led to the most recent announcement related to the delivery of Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP. According to the Redmond company, Duet Enterprise is designed to take to the next level the bridge built between Microsoft and SAP solutions. “Duet Enterprise will empower people to blend SAP data and processes with Microsoft SharePoint content and collaboration tools to increase personal and team productivity across the PC, phone and browser,” explained Pascal Gibert, director of Duet product management at Microsoft.
• SAP and Microsoft duet on interoperability
  SAP and Microsoft have teamed up for an enterprise Duet – a new product to link up the companies’ products. Unveiled alongside the release of the SharePoint Server 2010 beta, Duet Enterprise is an extension of a previous system that brought SAP into Microsoft Office.
• Gates silent at Microsoft shareholders meeting
  Gates was there, of course, because he's chairman of the board of directors. But when shareholders stepped up to the microphones to ask questions, it was CEO Steve Ballmer doing most of the answering.
• Google Chrome OS: Ditch Your Hard Drives, the Future Is the Web
  “As of today, the code will be fully open, which means Google developers will be working on the same tree as open developers,” said Pichai.
• Google Says Chrome OS Still a Year Away
  Google Inc. said the first devices running its new Chrome operating system will be available by the end of 2010, as the company gave the first public peek of software that Google hopes will drive usage of Internet applications that include its own services. Chrome OS is expected to initially run on small low-end laptops—known as netbooks—but Google expects the Chrome operating system will run on a broad range of computers over time, said Sundar Pichai, a Google vice president. He said the company is specifying what hardware features, such as chips and wireless cards, devices must have torun the software.
• Google chief engineer on why a new OS | For the Record Podcast
  To find out more, and get a feel how Chrome will affect consumers, I spoke with Matthew Papakipos, Google's chief engineer for Chrome OS.
• Google Chrome OS: Pre-Announcement in Classic Microsoft-style
  Tight integration of the OS and the browser? But wait, wasn’t that Microsoft’s capital crime, in fact didn’t the EU just force Microsoft to ship a browser-less version of Windows 7 to Europe? So Microsoft is Evil Monopolist for doing it but Google isn’t?
• Google Chrome OS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Google Chrome OS is a project by Google Inc. to develop a lightweight computer operating system devoted to using the World Wide Web.[1] Announced on July 7, 2009, it is set to be released during the second half of 2010.[2] The Linux-based operating system will sport a graphical user interface based on Google's Chrome web browser and will run on systems with either x86 or ARM processors,[3] and designed for netbooks. Google released the Google Chrome OS open source project on November 19, 2009 as Chromium OS. Originally it was thought to use a new windowing system, but is now confirmed to be using the X server.[4]
• Chromium OS (The Chromium Projects)
  Chromium OS is an open-source project that aims to build an operating system that provides a fast, simple, and more secure computing experience for people who spend most of their time on the web. Here you can review the project's design docs, obtain the source code, and contribute
• Comfort, trust give Office edge over Google
  The fight for the productivity suite crown steps up in the online realm with the impending launch of Microsoft Office Web Apps, and analysts say the software giant appears to have an edge, over rival Google Apps--thanks to user familiarity and trust of Office products.

Usability in enterprise Apps: Workday 9

Usability in Enterprise Applications

I recently saw a video of Workday 9, and was not impressed with the apparent usability of one of the highly touted features of this release. I tweeted my impression, and got a quick and friendly response from the team at Workday. They didn't complain about my bias or lack of information. Instead, as a great company should, they opened up and accepted the feedback. They offered me (and some Enterprise Irregulars colleagues) a briefing on Workday 9, to bring us up to speed and to get more feedback from us. My comments that follow are based on this briefing.

A Little Background

Workday is a company started by Peoplesoft's founder and some key Peoplesoft employees. Peoplesoft was a ground-breaking company in many ways, and the founders and employees of Workday clearly intend to surpass their previous accomplishments with this new venture. Peoplesoft strove to change the way employers engaged with employees, and they practiced what they preached in their own company.

Workday's product is based on modern technologies, including services-oriented architecture (SOA), Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) delivery model, and Adobe Flex for a rich Internet experience.

The Wheel

My initial critique was based on a feature of Workday 9 called "The Wheel." At least, that's how I had seen it named in a number of blogs and news stories. Essentially, "The Wheel" is the "home page" for users of Workday 9. Here is a picture of "The Wheel."

Many modern applications have adopted a horizontal "tab strip" approach, where each tab represents a type of activity. Clicking on a tab typically brings up a screen with tasks related to the selected activity across the top just below the tab strip, with additional navigation or activities in a panel on the left (or right) of the screen, and with a large, rectangular workspace to the right (or left) of the navigation panel.

This "horizontal tab strip" approach is frequently used because it offers a very straightforward information architecture, and users can quickly and easily become (and remain) productive. This "L-shaped" layout pattern is used in business and consumer applications, including both browser-based and native client applications. Examples of web sites using this pattern in the consumer space include Blogger and Facebook, both with some variations on the theme. In the enterprise world, most portal-style applications use some variation on this pattern - an example from Salesforce.com is also shown here.

Unlike this familiar horizontal layout for the top level navigation, The Wheel is a role-based, circular menu. Activities are represented by icons around the edge of a circle (or ellipse, depending on your window size or aspect ratio). One benefit of an approach like The Wheel is that the user can see more options on one screen than with a horizontal layout. However, "more" is not always equivalent to "better." In this case, having watched the demo, I remain convinced that The Wheel is not an improvement in usability over a tab strip. The drawbacks of The Wheel, from my limited research and discussions with colleagues:

• The Wheel makes it hard to predictably navigate to any particular activity. Humans navigate, particularly on computers, more easily in straight lines than in curves or circles. With a horizontal tab strip, you just keep moving to the right until you find your tab. With today's high resolution and wide-screen displays, this approach can include many tabs! With The Wheel, you'd have to move your mouse or trackball in a circular motion as you browse, and that is a harder motion to make (especially on my cluttered desk).
  
• The Wheel may introduce significant usability problems for users when one or more new options are added to The Wheel, or taken away. All the learned muscle movements will have to be unlearned, because any change in the number of options will result in a new orientation for the other icons. This would not be the case in a tab strip, where you might go further or less far, but you at least don't have to change directions.
• The Wheel uses a lot of screen space for a little functionality. The area between the window's enclosing rectangle and The Wheel - this space is wasted. Similarly, the workspace created inside the wheel also wastes the space between the inscribed rectangle and the enclosing ellipse.

Workday 9 Delivers Great Usability

That said, Workday 9 has delivered some great usability in virtually every other area I saw in the product.

When the user's mouse "hovers" over an icon on the wheel, a window pops up in the center (see the "Inbox" rectangle inside The Wheel in the Workday 9 screen shot above). This working space comes up remarkably quickly, and contains all the tasks and context needed for the user to be productive. This is great design. The same effect could have been accomplished without the ellipsoid Wheel, but enough on that topic!

Throughout the product, whenever the user is looking at data that can be linked to more detail, the data is a link the user can click to directly navigate to that detail. When looking at an employee in a report, the user can click on the employee's name and navigate to the information in the system this user can see about that employee, along with all the tasks this user can perform on that employee's information, such as giving that employee a raise or updating that employee's skills in the skills database. In the Projects screen shot shown here, you can see that each project name, the project owner, the project category, and even the number of employees working on the project are all links; clicking on the link navigates to the sensible destination to get more data, whether it is the details of the project, or the list of the employees working on the project.

Whenever the user is looking at a table of data in Workday 9, the user can export that data to Excel, sort, filter, and perform other operations on the data. This is extremely useful for status reporting, embedding in presentations, doing "what-if" analysis, and just making the system pleasant to use.

Summary

There are many other examples of great design in the user interface Workday 9. The visual design is good - appealing, speedy, and clear. The information architecture is well thought-out - goal-oriented, providing a reasonable set of appropriate options, and easily learned. The interaction design allows for a high degree of productivity.

A well-designed enterprise application speeds adoption, encourages frequent use, engenders better results with more use by individuals and by the enterprise, and eases the accomplishment of the system's goals. Usability is a key element of good design (along with good functional design), and usability is a quality frequently all too lacking in enterprise software.

Overall, Workday 9 is a great example of a design that is centered on making people very productive in getting work done - exactly what you'd expect from the crew at Workday. Congratulations! My hat is off to you - you've set a bar that will be hard for other enterprise software to exceed (but I plan to do so with my team at C3!).

Disclosures

• I do not work for Workday
• I do not take any money from Workday
• My blog is not ad supported, and contains no ads from Workday
• I do not work for any Workday competitor
• I do not take any money from any Workday competitor
• My blog is not ad supported, and contains no ads from Workday competitors
• I have worked for at least two Workday competitors in the past (SAP and Oracle)
• I admire great design, especially relating to usability, comprehensibility, and user productivity
• I do not now use nor have I ever used Workday software, so my knowledge about Workday's usability, especially prior to the Workday briefing, was admittedly very light
• I am not a user experience expert, just an interested novice
  

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-17

• SAP makes business model more flexible to meet customer needs
  Germany's SAP (SAPG.DE) plans to open up its business model by enabling customers access to any software and offering less restrictive contracts in an effort to address changing customer demands. "We will give our customers the option to decide which software they want to use," Chief Executive Leo Apotheker said on Tuesday. The company also plans to increase the number of global enterprise agreements, which normally run five years, to 600 clients from currently 12.
• Dirty KPIs
  If the goal is to increase satisfaction, we might establish an outcome measure such as “# complaints about street cleanliness reported every quarter” with the target of reducing it by 5% every quarter for two years. If we are hitting the target for the output measure of street miles cleaned but not our target for the outcome measure of complaints, then we’re probably tracking the wrong activity and unlikely to meet our citizen satisfaction objective. Perhaps people care about more than just clean streets.
• Database Technology Roadmap 2009 And Beyond #pdc09
  Yes, you heard right. Oracle 12g is around the corner. There is not much information available on this new release. The only detail that leaked so far is that Oracle 12g won't support raw filesystems anymore. This is bad news for RAC environments. The OCR and the voting disk relay on raw filesystems via CFS like OCFS. The word is that ASM will step in and close the gap in 12g. Also, more emphasis on NFS will be placed as well. Other than that, there's not much information regarding functionality enhancements available. As soon as I get more details I will post it.
• Microsoft: Azure to go live in January, for pay in February #pdc09
  Codenamed "Dallas", the new service gives developers the ability to discover, purchase, and manage data subscriptions within Azure. The technology was showcased by PDC by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. Kundra demonstrated a career-finding application based on Department of Laborspecial education teachers were required in a particular area. Behind the scenes, Dallas itself is built atop Windows Azure and SQL Azure. teaching data stored and catalogued by Dallas that allowed, for example, teachers to find which areas of the country needed more teachers. The application was able to drill down within the dataset, for example to find out exactly what kind of
• Microsoft's Thinking About Azure Platform Evolved #pdc09
  In order to encourage the enterprise’s adoption of Azure, MicrosoftWindows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtual-machine support on Azure, enabling virtualized infrastructure to be moved more rapidly between the cloud and on-premises; Microsoft Pinpoint Marketplace, which will let partners market and sell their applications; and RTM of Windows Identity Foundation, which lets developers provide simplified user access to cloud and on-premises applications. Muglia announced Windows Server AppFabric, the Beta of which will be available for download "shortly." AppFabric is a set of integrated technologies that make it easier for developers to build out and manage middle-tier services built using Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation. In addition, AppFabric will provide easy-to-use database caching. announced several initiatives during Day One of the conference including
• Microsoft adds access controls for SQL Azure online database #pdc09
  Code-named Vidalia, the technology will provide "trustworthy data collaboration for highly-sensitive business data across disparate trust domains," said Microsoft technical fellow Dave Campbell in a talk at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09) in Los Angeles. ... Other features are coming to SQL Azure, which will go into production when Windows Azure does on January 1. In the first half of next year, it will bring a "database clone" feature for administrators, said Tony Petrossian, principal program manager for SQL Azure. By the second half, Microsoft plans to release continuous backup of SQL Azure databases. Users will be able to restore their databases to any point in time, he said.
• Android, Blackberry and iPhone Take Share From Windows Mobile
  Despite the fact that smart phone sales grew by 12 percent over the past year, the share of new devices shipping with Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system have plunged, according to third quarter figures released by Gartner last week. Only 7.9 percent of smart phones sold last quarter were equipped with Windows Mobile, down from 11.1 percent during the same period last year. According to the report, 3.2 million devices were Windows Mobile-based, compared with 4 million last year.
• What's next for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform? #pdc09
  Microsoft’s next Azure steps — which it will be executing largely in parallel — will be to get existing, and typically more complex, line-of-business apps to run on the platform and to make it possible for customers to implement Azure technologies in their own data centers (a k a, to be able to create private clouds).
• Oslo transforms into the underlying application model of the cloud #pdc09
  Microsoft only used the codename Oslo once in the PDC keynotes today, talking about SQL Server Modelling Services with the throwaway reference that "you may have heard this called the Oslo repository ". Is that Oslo disappearing into SQL Server the way WinFS did? No.
• Microsoft’s HPC Hopes at Supercomputing 2009
  Microsoft is making news at the Supercomputing 2009 (SC 09) conference in Portland, Oregon, and not merely for the free cocktails and flight simulatorMicrosoft Office Excel 2010 for the cluster. drawing attendees to its booth. It has announced the availability of betas for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 and distributed
• Microsoft's Ozzie Tips Azure Plans #pdc09
  This keynote was focused on the back end - servers, tools, and cloud computing, though he also talked about the Windows platform as a whole. Ozzie talked about how Windows Azure would look just like Windows Server to .NET developers. He talked how Windows Server and Windows Azure both were manageable through Microsoft System Center; and how developers could use windows services across their own servers, Microsoft's servers, and services offered by partners.
• SugarCRM Meets Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud #pdc09
  For VARs and solutions providers, Azure represents a potential bridge from on-premise Windows servers to cloud-based Windows applications. That bridge will lead to both open source and closed source applications — a smart move by Microsoft. And the Azure cloud could generate recurring revenue for VARs and managed service providers. Separately, Microsoft continues to promote the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) — featuring hosted Exchange, hosted SharePoint and other apps — to VARs and end-customers. But here’s the twist: Microsoft ultimately controls the pricing and product margin of BPOS applications. And Microsoft has already made a big BPOS price cut far sooner than most partners had expected.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-16

• 3Com Trades: What Is Wrong With This Picture?
  It’s a good thing the SEC is off for Veteran’s Day, or else it would be busy trying to sort through the slew of inside traders. First, 3Com’s stock price has been steadily raising for the past few days — as Dan Frommer points out — for no discernable reason.
• Announcing Sapience 2009: The Open and Independent Event for SAP Users
  The two-day conference will take SAP users on a "journey to independence." "Our goal is to foster an atmosphere where users understand how to leverage market alternatives and how to avoid the negative side effects of the one-stop-shopping paradigm," said Helmuth Guembel, Founder and Managing Partner of Strategy Partners International and Conference Chair. The event features on an exciting mix of speakers: * Analysts ("Ray" Wang, Vinnie Mirchandani, Helmuth Guembel, Neil Herman) who explain backgrounds and trends from both an IT- and financial perspective * ERP-veterans (ex-CEOs from Baan, PeopleSoft, and SAP) who know why and how it all happened and what to expect * Users (all of them CIOs) who found fascinating alternatives to go beyond the limits of classical ERP * Vendors presenting interesting options for cost reduction and showing new ways to extend SAP
• PDC09 Preview: Azure Launch among the Highlights at Microsoft's Developer Conference
  Three screens and a cloud: That's the vision that will be put forth this week by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference as attendees gather in Los Angeles to learn more about the company's developer platform strategy and how to take advantage of the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.
• IBM Launches Business Analytics Cloud
  IBM (NYSE: IBM) on Monday announced plans to deploy an internal cloud computing environment that will make more than a petabyte of information—the equivalent of 100 times the content of the Library of Congress--instantly available to employees under a project called Blue Insight. IBM said it also plans to make the service's architecture, dubbed IBM Smart Analytics Cloud—available to customers.
• Google poised to become your phone company
  Google is set to become your new phone company, perhaps reducing your phone bill to zilch in the process. Seriously.
• Investor Paul Allen Diagnosed With Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma
  Paul Allen, the billionaire investor who co-founded Microsoft Corp., was diagnosed earlier this month with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and is undergoing chemotherapy. Mr. Allen, whose assets include cable provider Charter Communications, professional sports teams and holdings in numerous technology startups, left Microsoft more than 25 years ago after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, from which he recovered. In an email sent Monday afternoon to employees of Vulcan Inc., Mr. Allen's Seattle-based investment firm, Vulcan CEO Jody Allen said Mr. Allen's doctors say he has diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.
• China says Microsoft violated intellectual rights
  [The most egregious case of the pot calling the kettle black!-DBM] A Chinese court has found Microsoft Corp. violated the intellectual property of local company Zhongyi Electronic Ltd., Dow Jones Newswires reported Tuesday, citing a copy of the court's decision. Beijing's No.1 Intermediate People's Court found Microsoft had exceeded the scope of a previous agreement to use and sell font types owned by Zhongyi and ordered the U.S. software giant and its China-based unit to cease immediately selling products that use the fonts, the report said.
• China Court Rules Microsoft Infringed Firm's IPR
  Beijing's No.1 Intermediate People's Court found Microsoft had exceeded the scope of a previous agreement to use and sell fonts owned by Zhongyi, according to the document. It found Microsoft had installed and used the fonts in eight of its operating systems beyond what had been agreed with Zhongyi, and ordered Microsoft and its China-based unit to immediately stop producing and selling those operating systems.
• The convenient fiction that Microsoft is evil
  It's a convenient fiction that Microsoft is the source of all evil in the technology world, particularly for a vocal minority within the open-source community.
• Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Thanks Microsoft, Hello Google
  That fast decisive action was refreshing, and such a contrast to the slow, secretive, bureaucracy at Microsoft. That speed and decisiveness also reflects different approaches to hiring great people, building great products and serving customers well. I have always admired Google. I am excited to now be part of the team. My job at Google will be helping developers (and startups) build great products and services using Google technology and platforms. Google is building world class products for companies of all sizes, but especially the enterprise market. I will be part of the team to make that happen.
• Top 10 emerging enterprise technologies - Page 1
  5. NoSQL databases Data is flowing everywhere like never before. And the days when "SQL" and "database" were interchangeable are fading fast, in part because old-fashioned relational databases can't handle the flood of data from Web 2.0 apps. ... Sure, you can make anything fit into a relational database with enough work, but that means you're paying for all of the sophisticated locking and rollback mechanisms developed for the accounting department to keep track of money. Unless the problem requires all of the sophistication and assurance of a top-of-the-line database, there's no need to invest in that overhead, or suffer its performance consequences. The solution? Relax the strictures and come up with a new approach: NoSQL. Basic NoSQL databases are simple key/value pairs that bind together a key with a pile of attributes. There's no table filled with blank columns and no problem adding new ad hoc tags or values to each item. Transactions are optional.
• Hadoop ported to R (and it's trivial)
  There's been a lot of buzz recently around the MapReduce algorithm and its famous open-source implementation, Hadoop. It's the go-to algorithm for performing any kind of analytical computation on very large data sets. But what is, the MapReduce algorithm, exactly? Well, if you're an R programmer, you've probably been using it routinely without even knowing it. As a functional language, R has a whole class of functions -- the "apply" functions -- designed to evaluate a function over a series of data values (the "map" step) and collate and condense the results (the "reduce" step). In fact, you can almost boil it down to a single line of R code: sapply(map(data), reduce)

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-15

• Economist Debates: Cloud Computing
  Marc Benioff Chairman & CEO, salesforce.com I am pleased to find that my opponent and I are in mostly violent agreement about cloud computing. That is good news for customers, who are eager to leave behind the high costs and punishing complexity of client server systems.
• Gates: Apple is 'a force in doing good things'
  Then he tossed garlands of roses and pearls of praise at the Apple co-founder.
• AMD settlement expected to hit Intel's net profit in Q4
  The legal settlement between Intel and AMD also includes a five-year cross-license agreement and ends all claims of breach of contract from a previous license agreement, the two companies said Thursday. They also agreed to a set of business practice provisions as part of the settlement.
• Legal Disputes Settled, Intel, AMD Look to Future
  The agreement that ended the bitter and costly legal battle between AMD and Intel gives both companies the chance to focus on their future plans, according to analysts. It also gives OEMs like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM greater freedom in deciding which chips to put into their products. However, while the legal battle with AMD may be all but over, Intel still has regulators to deal with.
• Microsoft Defends 'Oslo' Move to SQL Server
  Since announcing its plans to fold its modeling technology, up to now known by the code name Oslo, into its SQL Server platform, Microsoft has been taking flak from developers complaining of a letdown by the software giant regarding the future of its modeling strategy. Indeed, developers commenting on the Microsoft blog post explaining the company's decision expressed views ranging from disappointment to feeling that Microsoft's move was "lame." Essentially, the primary complaints centered around Microsoft's decision to land the modeling technology in SQL Server, which many developers said they viewed as limited in scope. The other major concern was about the future of Microsoft's DSL (domain-specific language) technology as it relates to the "M" modeling language that is part of Oslo—now known as SQL Server Modeling.
• On DSLs and a few other things…
  # The fact that these technologies are part of SQL Server does not mean that they are not available in Visual Studio or part of the .NET Framework – they are absolutely deeply integrated with both VS and .NET. # SQL Server, of all the Microsoft products, is the most obvious and logical place for these technologies to be located. # We remain committed to the core DSL capabilities of the “M” language.
• From “Oslo” to SQL Server Modeling
  # “M” is a highly productive, developer friendly, textual language for defining schemas, queries, values, functions and DSLs for SQL Server databases # “Quadrant” is a customizable tool for interacting with large datasets stored in SQL Server databases # “Repository” is a SQL Server role for the the secure sharing of models between applications and systems
• Do you have what it takes to join Yahoo!'s US Hadoop Team?
  I'm Mark Tsimelzon, a recent addition to the Hadoop team. I'm Director of Engineering at Yahoo!, managing MapReduce and a bunch of projects with cute animal names that build database abstractions on top of Apache Hadoop. Having spent most of my career in various startups, I was not sure what I was getting myself into when I joined Yahoo!. To my amazement, what I discovered here was not so different from a startup. The Hadoop team at Yahoo! is filled with extremely smart, hard-working people, who care deeply about their job, Yahoo!, and Open Source. The team moves as fast as any startup does, even though the scale of the problems it solves would make any startup founder deeply envious.
• IBM Launches Cloud Platform for Developers
  One of these is IBM Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing, which the release said features "a set of ready-to-use application lifecycle management tools for developing and testing in the IBM Cloud, and [uses] infrastructure management capabilities to help enterprises build software applications in the cloud. With these new services, clients can lower costs and respond [more quickly] to organizational demands. For example, organizations can reduce the time it takes to provision a test environment from weeks to hours, and in some cases even minutes." Secondly, IBM has introduced its IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud as "a free public cloud beta for software development that provides [computing] and storage as a service." Both it and Rational Software Delivery Services "help application developers and testers speed the development and delivery of software applications," the release said.
• Intel: EC And Cuomo Still Loom
  "While it pains me to write a check at any time, in this case I think it made a practical settlement."
• Microsoft Bing Wields Wolfram Alpha vs. Google in Data Duel
  Microsoft Nov. 11 inked a deal with Wolfram Alpha to begin offering computational search. Google does not do this, but a company engineer hinted that it is heading there. Right around the time Bing unveiled its deal with Wolfram Alpha, Google added World Bank data to its search service. Users can search for such topics as electricity consumption per capita, or carbon dioxide emissions per capita for certain countries. When is Google going to start calculating equations itself, rather than just surfacing the data from other sources? Google's Ola Rosling responds...
• Google Storage Price Cut Shows Cloud is Competitive, Maturing
  Google slashed the costs of hosted storage for its Picasa and Gmail applications, offering 20 gigabytes (GB) of storage for $5 per year, or twice as much for one quarter of the previous price. Will users begin entrusting more e-mail and photos to Google server farms? It's hard to say, but certainly cutting storage costs for its Picasa photo-sharing and Gmail applications is a sign the cloud computing market is maturing. Was the cost cut a competitive gesture? Google's cut came one days after Cisco Nov. 9 launched its Cisco WebEx Mail hosted e-mail app for $3.50 per user per month with 5 GB of storage.
• SAP plans to raise licensing fees
  "SAP's older customers will be especially affected -- that means the most loyal," Andreas Oczko, deputy head of the German SAP client advocacy group DSAG told the magazine.
• SAP's Spread Out Payment Plan Is Good But Not Enough
  The ERP business has become a buyers' market and is likely to stay this way. SAP could be on the verge of capitalizing on that.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-14

• Ellison and Oracle may have met their match in Europe
  I couldn't be sure whether that was fog rolling past Oracle's shimmering Redwood City towers last week or steam coming out of the ears of Larry Ellison when he learned the European Union had officially objected to his purchase of Sun Microsystems. We can be certain that Mr. E was mightily ticked off at those bureaucrats across the pond. A news release from Oracle contained some unusually impolitic remarks — yes, even for Ellison — about how the Europeans don't really understand open source. He's in a fighting mood. The gauntlet has been thrown down. It. Is. On.
• EU 'optimistic' Oracle will see reason on MySQL
  One of those "complainers" is probably SAP - Oracle's biggest Java and business applications rival. The plodding enterprise resource planning giant has started to shout about Oracle taking control of Java through the Java Community Process (JCP) rather than Oracle's ownership of MySQL, though. Kroes was speaking after the EU Competition Commission this week listed its objections to Oracle's acquisition. In an official statement of objections, the EU said it was concerned about the impact on the competition by the enterprise-database giant owning the open-source MySQL.
• Should Oracle Dump Europe Before MySQL?
  But all that said, Oracle has to stay in Europe. "You can't make the choice if you're a large multinational company servicing large multinational companies to not serve in Europe. It's not a decision you can make," concluded Adrian.
• Why Oracle Should Leave Europe: A Look at the Numbers
  It’s just that the over-regulated EU is an increasingly bad place to sell enterprise software and IT. Look at the numbers.
• MySQL + Novell??
  MySQL co-developer Monty Widenius, said to have the business sense of a child by MySQL's old management, and his hired help Florian Mueller, who made a killing on his MySQL stock when Sun lost its mind and bid a billion dollars for the Scandinavian company, paying 20 times revenues, are now insisting that Oracle should be made to divest MySQL so it can take over a fading Sun.
• Health Care IT Gets Personal
  Duke used IBM Cognos to sift through information on the more than 20 million patients in its Oracle-based clinical data repository and in an hour was able to identify about 120,000 of them with risk factors, such as age, pregnancy, respiratory, and other conditions that made them vulnerable to complications from Swine flu. And now that the H1N1 vaccine is available, Duke is letting those patients know that they're first in line to get it.
• Salesforce.com Earns Four Market Leader Awards From Independent IT Analyst, Inc.
  The Sales Cloud ranks among top offerings for 'Highest Customer Satisfaction,' 'Best User Interface,' 'Most on Time on Budget Implementations' and 'Best Reports and Dashboards'
• Summit: Tony Young, Informatica CIO interview
  So in terms of the unstructured world side, what we have done internally is try to consolidate all the technology we use. For example, we use Yammer internally, which is a kind of Twitter tool but it keeps tweets private. Also Sharepoint allows people to build their own Facebook internally, as we don’t want all their corporate posts consumed by the general Facebook. These tools train people that there is content not appropriate for external use but which can still be shared internally. We are trying to encourage people to keep information inside the company. It is not a good idea for employees to be tweeting about where they are going and which customers they are visiting.
• Salesforce.com Unveils Additional Details of Dreamforce 2009, The Cloud Computing
  During the morning keynote on November 18th, Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com will be joined by special guest Jason Goldman, Director of Products at Twitter. And in the November 19th morning keynote, Benioff will be joined by Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer at Adobe Systems Incorporated and Dave Girouard, president of enterprise at Google. As previously announced, the afternoon keynote on November 19th will feature former Secretary of State General Colin Powell (ret.).
• Dreamforce 09 : The Cloud Computing Event of the Year
  At salesforce.com’s seventh annual user and developer conference, you’ll join 12,000 customers, partners, and employees for four days focused on your success: Maximize your investment in salesforce.com and learn from the best how to use the cloud to stay ahead of the competition.
• Summit: Salesforce.com on SaaS and information overload
  Salesforce.com executive Ariel Kelman sits down with V3.co.uk to discuss the challenges and oppurtunities web services can present to IT managers looking to deal with information overload.
• A CNET Conversation with Eric Schmidt
  CNET's Tom Krazit and Molly Wood sit down with Google CEO Eric Schmidt to discuss the future of Android, the Chrome OS, the problem of real-time search indexing, and more.
• Google Executive Says Companies Can Get Rid of Microsoft Office...Next Year
  The Google executive in charge of Google Enterprise is talking smack about Microsoft Office, saying that firms will be able to get rid of the software suite in one year's time. Man, those are some fighting words. The remarks came from Dave Girouard, president of Google's enterprise division, in an interview with ZDNet Asia.
• Oracle Announces Application Integration Architecture Release 2.5
  Oracle has announced Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Release 2.5 with 10 new cross-industry Process Integration Packs (PIPs) and six new industry-specific PIPs, together with a growing library of more than 1,000 enterprise services and 100 enterprise objects. Oracle AIA Release 2.5 further extends the breadth and depth of support across industries. It introduces PIPs for manufacturing (for example, Variant Management – Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Integration to Oracle Product Data Hub), utilities, retail and health sciences industries.
• Oracle Fusion Middleware Documentation Library
  Administration Guides

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-13

• What does “Do More with Less” really mean for SAP?
  There is nothing “less” about SAP. Maintenance costs are “more”, you need to buy “more” modules to satisfy the same business problem, implementations take “more” time, you need “more” hardware to run each upgrade, you need “more” consulting time for business process reengineering … So shouldn’t the paper be titled “Do Less with More”? Just try running a Google search on “SAP overrun cost” and see the results. Or “SAP maintenance costs”. Or, I thought, perhaps the paper is referring to the fact that SAP is getting “less” license revenue, so the paper is about SAP becoming more efficient itself? That just didn’t compute, so I knew I had to read the paper. Well, I think I found my answer. Buried in the paper is the following statement: “Management by spreadsheet is a reality, and it’s not going away any time soon”. So finally, the admission that the functionality provided by SAP is simply not good enough so everyone has to resort to spreadsheets to get anything done. And in a paper
• Leo's Letter to Larry: SAP 'Olive Branch' to Oracle Turns into a PR Nightmare
  But a second, more personalized letter, which, while it could have been created with the purest of intentions, could also leave the company fully exposed to unseemly ethical questions? That seems desperate, foolish and out of character for the German software giant.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-12

• Applied Materials to cut up to 1,500 job, 12% of workforce
  [These new cuts are in addition to the 1800 positions cut in the past year-DBM] In October 2008, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company had announced plans to eliminate 1,800 positions to cut costs by $400 million annually. That measure coupled with other cutbacks resulted in savings of $460 million for fiscal 2009, the company said in a statement.
• Who is trying to sabotage the Oracle/Sun merger?
  [Finally, the press covers"the rest of the story"-DBM] If, on the other hand, you mistrust Oracle so much that you honestly believe it would kill the proverbial golden goose just out of spite, so be it. But when you root against Oracle, make sure you know just what -- and who -- you're rooting for. Open source isn't the whole story.
• SAP Issues Statement Challenging WSJ Piece Over Oracle-Sun Merger Concerns
  We communicated our concerns to both Oracle and Sun at the working level as far back as the end of July 2009. Since there was no response, our CEO Leo Apotheker took the initiative and wrote to both Oracle and Sun CEOs in the middle of September to voice our concerns again, offer a dialogue and attempt to clarify the issues. We have not heard back from Oracle, but instead found Leo Apotheker’s letter leaked to the press last week. This is both telling and disappointing as it demonstrates that there is no real interest by Oracle to listen and explain how it wants to ensure the required level of customer choice in the database market as well as open access to Java.
• Samsung's Swelling Size Brings New Challenges
  Samsung Electronics Co. has closed in on Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's largest technology company by revenue, a surprising development for a firm still perceived by many people as an also-ran to Japanese electronics companies.
• Oracle Technology Network Developer Day in New Jersey, USA
  You are invited to participate in Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Developer Day, a free, practical workshop that will give you an idea of how to create rich Ajax-enabled Web user interfaces and Java EE SOA-based services with ease.
• Open Source Software Ready for Big Business
  At Sleepy Cat, we were proud to be an open source company. At Cloudera, I think of us as an enterprise software company that happens to be built on open source software.
• SAP intros solution to integrate contact center, back office
  Business Communication Management (BCM) offering, enabling firms to integrate contact centers with other back office applications and a host of other connectivity points. BCM, SAP executives said, provides a backbone for business process applications to communicate with each other, especially when interfacing with customers. "BCM integrates separate office telephony, contact center, mobile telephony and the IT system into one end-to-end solution," explained Kay Kretschmer, director for business development of BCM, SAP Asia Pacific and Japan.
• Next Gen BI Is Here Today
  BI trends under 4 categories: Automation, Unification, Pervasiveness and No Borders / No Limitations. Here’s my take on what they are:
• EU and Competition in Technology
  What I do not like is a seeming pattern of focus on US companies. While her office has moved against European telcos to cap mobile calling charges, I don’t see that office focused enough on European vendors like SAP or Deutsche Telecom. They need as much scrutiny as the large US vendors.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-11

• Why Are Indian IT Firms So Shy to Buy?
  Outsourcing giants like Infosys, TCS, and Wipro have global ambitions and tons of cash, but they're averse to making big acquisitions. That could soon change
• Spotlight turns to SAP in Oracle, Sun debacle
  German software giant SAP AG publicly confirmed its "concerns" about archrival Oracle Corp.'s pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. on Wednesday, and addressed speculation that the company's CEO indirectly offered to facilitate winning clearance for the merger from European regulators.
• SAP: Outreach to Oracle About Java, Not Help With Sun Deal
  SAP said Wednesday it contacted Oracle and its CEO, Larry Ellison, in recent months over concerns about the future of the Java programming language and competition in the database market, not to offer help facilitating Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems, which is being held up by a European antitrust review.
• SAP slams Oracle Sun's control of Java
  Sikka has also called on Oracle to open source the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and put it under an independent board with a license that's friendly to closed-source companies like SAP.
• Oracle-Sun Microsystems deal delays take toll
  The longer this Oracle-Sun Microsystems deal stretches out, the worse it is for Sun partners. Many of these VARs see the situation as an ordeal that offers no best option. They were not crazy about the prospect of Oracle ownership, having survived rocky relationships with the database kingpin in the past. But even most of those partners preferred that scenario to a buyout by IBM, which they thought would endanger Sun's Solaris and Sparc legacies. Now that the European Commission has expressed its view that Oracle ownership of MySQL is not good for database competition, the partners fear an even longer, drawn out dispute during which loyal Sun customers may opt for alternative hardware providers. Few doubt that the deal will get done, citing a "What Larry wants, Larry gets" philosophy. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's acquisitive nature, after all, brought PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and BEA Systems into the fold over the past few years. The question is timing. The EC has until mid-January
• Oracle Support Portal Woes Could Erode Users' Trust
  "The support desk is the day-to-day face of the vendor to the customer," said Frank Scavo, managing partner of the IT consulting firm Strativa, via e-mail. "So when customers think about their Oracle relationship, the first thing that comes to mind is their experience in dealing with support."
• EU Kroes: US DOJs Oracle/Sun Statement Unusual
  Oracle can take us to a point where we can take a "satisfactory" decision, Kroes added. [The "satisfactory" decision where mySQL is stolen from Sun's shareholders?-DBM]
• H-P to Acquire 3Com for $2.7 Billion - WSJ.com
  David Donatelli, H-P's executive vice president in charge of the division that sells computers and networking gear to big customers, said 3Com has a better set of networking products for large corporate clients than H-P currently sells and a market share of more than 30% in the China networking market. With the deal, Mr. Donatelli said, "we get industry-leading products." The 3Com deal is the latest step in a march toward tech-industry consolidation by behemoths like H-P, Cisco, Dell Inc. and Oracle Corp. In the past, these companies largely stuck to their own niches, with Cisco specializing in networking gear, Dell in personal computers, Oracle in enterprise software, and H-P in PCs and printers.
• Informatica 9: Another Step Toward Next-Era Data Integration
  To better support business-IT collaboration, Informatica 9 introduces new browser-based analyst tools, auto-specification capabilities and a common metadata repository that lets analyst and developers share specifications and implementation assets. The idea is to eliminate the delays and miscommunications inherent in data integration projects when business and IT project leaders attempt to communicate though e-mail messages, spreadsheets and meetings. "Informatica 9 helps business managers, analysts and IT to work together more effectively through shared metadata," says Judy Ko, Informatica's vice president of product marketing. "The tools are designed and purpose-built for each type of user, but they share common data rules and data profiles, so there's no loss of information as they work together on integration projects."
• Oracle's Ellison takes on EU trust-buster
  Like GE and Microsoft, Oracle is trying to maximise pressure on Brussels, saying it will "vigorously oppose the Commission's Statement of Objections" and warning that Sun is losing $100 million a month because of uncertainty about its future. If Oracle can't win EU clearance within a couple of months, the deal may no longer be attractive since Sun has been haemorrhaging revenue in the last two quarters as customers wait to see whether it will be bought.
• Europe’s Challenge to Oracle Deal Has Deep Roots
  A person close to Oracle, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the company was surprised by what he said was the commission’s switch from an earlier focus on Java software, which Sun also owns, to MySQL.
• When a merger softens competition: the Oracle-Sun Case
  A merger reduces competition if it leads direct competitors to increase prices or reduce innovation without attracting endogenous entry. This is what is expected in the market for enterprise database systems if the merger between Oracle and Sun goes through. The European Commission is correctly investigating on the anti-competitive effects of this merger
• No Boost in PC Sales After Windows 7
  According to DigiTimes, a Taiwanese-based electronics news site, the release of the new OS in late October didn’t translate into “strong” demand for PCs and hardware that came loaded with the system. The story also notes that a PC sales upswing is unlikely for 2009, “due to most Windows Vista users not needing to replace their PCs in order to upgrade to Windows 7.”
• Let MySQL Go: Oracle, Open Source, and the EU
  But, don’t forget, this doesn’t actually mean that MySQL has to die: it’s an open source database, which means there are no end of suckers – oops, I mean dedicated database experts – willing to work for free to better a product that drives a significant, VC-funded or publicly-traded company-based service and maintenance business. There will always be open sourcers willing to help make for-profit companies successful, and MySQL, even if it is totally neglected by Oracle, will likely still progress through a reasonable innovation cycle. Even if Oracle could manage to kill MySQL, there’s plenty of other open source DBMSes to take its place. Ingres and PostgreSQL, among many others. So, open source will continue to thrive, the for-profit service and support vendors for open source will continue to make suckers – I mean heroes – out of the free labor they derive from the open source movement, and not much will change, except the names of the contenders for top open source database.