- #Oracle Fusion Financials The New Standard for Finance
Oracle Fusion Financials is a
modular suite of financial
applications designed to work as
a complete financial solution or as
modular extensions to your
existing financial applications
portfolio. - #SAP calls audible in #Oracle lawsuit; Seeks to 'focus' trial, limit 'media circus'
“The sole remaining liability issue is threatening to overwhelm the case and turn the upcoming trail into a media circus, focused not on the issues actually in dispute, but on the obsession of Oracle and its founder, Larry Ellison, with Hewlett-Packard and whoever may be its CEO.”
# “The point is not whether Mr. Apotheker should testify or whether Oracle has any standing to complain about HP’s decision over its CEO. The point is that Oracle plainly intends to use weeks of trial to harass its competitors.” - #Microsoft giving all 89,000 workers Windows Phone 7 devices
[Expect upsurge in Craigslist and eBay ads to follow ;-) -DBM] - #Microsoft profit jumps 51 percent with record Q1 revenue
Microsoft profit jumped 51 percent year over year and recorded record quarterly revenue during Q1 of its fiscal year 2011, the company said today, killing Wall Street estimates as skepticism surrounded Microsoft's cash cows.
Net income skyrocketed from $3.57 billion in Q1FY10 to $5.41 billion in the quarter ending Sept. 30, launched by strong sales of Windows 7 and Office 2010. The year-ago period, however, was a low point as Microsoft weathered the poor economy.
Earnings per share was 62 cents, eclipsing the Wall Street consensus estimate of 55 cents. And while analysts had expected revenue of $15.8 billion, Microsoft reported $16.2 billion -- up 25 percent over the year-ago period. - #SAP narrows scope of trial, #Oracle seeks delay
"Today, SAP has finally confessed it knew about the theft all along."
SAP said that it decided to refrain from contesting the accusation that it contributed to the infringement of Oracle's intellectual property in a bid to limit the length of the trial and prevent it from turning into a media circus.
"Oracle plainly intends to use weeks of trial to harass its competitors," SAP said in a court filing. - #Oracle-#SAP Case Takes Dramatic Eleventh-hour Turn
The development effectively removes one of SAP's defenses in the trial -- that its executives didn't know its TomorrowNow subsidiary had been stealing Oracle software. It could also reduce the likelihood that SAP executives will have to take the stand, according to one legal observer. - Apotheker's job: restore stability, credibility ( #HP)
There will be no honeymoon period. Apotheker will immediately be faced with critical decisions over which acquisition targets to pursue, and how to tackle emerging threats from Oracle Corp (ORCL.O), Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O).
Stability would be a welcome change for a company that has not seen much of it recently. - #Oracle Claims #Google Copied #Java Code - Not So Fast, Though
[Totally flawed analysis.Regardless of source of code,doesn't absolve Google of liability,AFAIK. -DBM] - #Oracle Seeks Delay in Trial Against #SAP
SAP wrote "we will shortly inform the Court that we are electing not to contest the claim for contributory copyright infringement."
Oracle on Thursday wrote U.S. District Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton, asking for a delay in the beginning of the trial to Thursday, Nov. 4 so that it could "revise its trial plans" in light of what it said was SAP's change of legal strategy.
Oracle said the SAP attorney in the email exchange said SAP will tell the court that "given that an issue of such significance (according to Oracle's public statements) will no longer be disputed" the duration of the trial "should be shortened to no more than 20 hours per side and evidence and argument related solely to contributory infringement should be excluded," changes that Oracle opposes.
Soon afterward, SAP released a letter to the judge confirming that it won't contest Oracle's contributory liability claim and requesting that the trial duration be shortened and start on time. - #HP Claims #Oracle Threat An Attempt To Interfere With New HP CEO's Duties
“Oracle had ample opportunity to question Leo during his sworn deposition in October 2008 and chose not to include him as a trial witness until he was named CEO of HP," said HP. "Given Leo’s limited knowledge of and role in the matter, Oracle’s last-minute effort to require him to appear live at trial is no more than an effort to harass him and interfere with his duties and responsibilities as HP’s CEO.” - An Interview with Bob Muglia - The Man Who Leads #Microsoft Windows #Azure
We interviewed Muglia today over the live stream. We'll come back later with a detailed look at what Muglia said at PDC. But for now, here's our interview with Muglia that we did this afternoon at the Microsoft campus: - #SAP Reports 20% Growth in Software and Software-Related Service Revenues for the Third Quarter
Revenues – Third Quarter 2010
* IFRS software and software-related service revenues were €2.32 billion (2009: €1.94 billion), an increase of 20%. Non-IFRS software and software-related service revenues were €2.35 billion (2009: €1.94 billion), an increase of 21% (13% at constant currencies).
* Excluding the contribution from Sybase, SAP’s business contributed 15 percentage points to the growth of our IFRS and Non-IFRS software and software related service revenues (7 percentage points at constant currencies).
* IFRS software revenues were €656 million (2009: €525 million), an increase of 25% (15% at constant currencies).
* IFRS total revenues were €3.00 billion (2009: €2.51 billion), an increase of 20%. Non-IFRS total revenues were €3.04 billion (2009: €2.51 billion), an increase of 21% (13% at constant currencies) - 82% of IT directors would consider switching vendors for better visibility and influence over product roadmaps ( #SAP)
For many organisations, this lack of visibility is making it difficult for them to plan effectively at a time when the demands on IT to support the business are greater than ever before. - #NetSuite Unveils the Client-Aware #Cloud
NetSuite Ecommerce Platform First to Demonstrate New #Intel Web API - #Salesforce.com Increases Stake In Japanese Unit To 95%
Salesforce bought the stake from SunBridge Corp. and other shareholders. In 2000, Salesforce partnered with SunBridge to create the Japanese subsidiary. Japan is the largest revenue contributor of Salesforce's Asia-Pacific business.
The deal gives Salesforce, which offers business software accessed via the Internet, 95% of Kabushiki Kaisha salesforce.com, its Japanese business. Salesforce said before this transaction, it held 73% of Kabushiki Kaisha salesforce.com. The San Francisco-based company plans on acquiring the rest of the Japanese company in the near term. - #Oracle Makes Strategic Investment in Mellanox Technologies, Ltd.
Oracle and Mellanox have had a long-term strategic partnership that allows Oracle to leverage Mellanox's InfiniBand products to create differentiated Oracle solutions like Exadata and Exalogic. A strong and friendly relationship with Mellanox is critical to Oracle.
Mellanox intends to make Oracle Solaris a core supported operating system platform to help meet increasing customer demand. - #IBM's #Cognos 10: Combining Collaboration, Analytics for Better Business Intelligence
Pushed by the growth of mobile transactions and estimates that the mobile workforce will globally reach 1.19 billion by 2013, IBM has combined the technology of Cognos, a company they acquired in 2007, with Lotus Connections, launched in 2007 at Lotusphere, and is currently in version 2.5.
Added to all that is the statistical engine, which IBM bought during the SPSS acquisition in 2009, which allows users to embed algorithms into their reports from IBM's SPSS software. - Developers starting to ride on #Microsoft's #Azure #cloud
Close to a year after Microsoft cut the ribbon, however, most of the storefronts remain empty. But tech companies say interest is brewing. - #Microsoft Woos Toyota, Duels #Amazon in $10 Billion #Cloud Bet
The automaker is using #Azure to track the 2,000 calls daily that come into the Lexus roadside and crash assistance service. The program took days to implement, compared with weeks for an internal database, said Glen Matejka, a Toyota manager.
3M, whose products range from Post-It notes to flu tests, uses Azure to host a new program, called Visual Attention Service, that lets website designers test which parts of a site catch the human eye. - #Google shuns #Oracle, joins #VMware to offer #Java development tools for #cloud
One of the primary reasons of Google siding with VMware could be Oracle's lawsuit against Google over the use of Java in its Android's Dalvik virtual machine. - #Oracle: #Google 'directly copied' our #Java code
"The infringed elements of Oracle America’s copyrighted work include Java method and class names, definitions, organization, and parameters; the structure, organization and content of Java class libraries; and the content and organization of Java’s documentation," Oracle says.
"In at least several instances, Android computer program code also was directly copied from copyrighted Oracle America code," Oracle alleges. - JCP Exec Quits Over #Oracle's Role in #Java Standards Org ( #OpenSource)
"What that means is that Oracle would like to see the Java community become more commercial, rather than 'academic,'" he said. "In contemporary standards bodies like the JCP, this means emphasizing the business value of a standard or effort, even at the Java SE level, meaning that people like Doug Lea, as he explained very well in his letter, don't really have a place in the JCP." - [Doug Lea announcement that he will not support future #Oracle #Java JCP efforts, taking his ball and going home.-DBM]
Rather than fixing rules or ceasing violations, Oracle now promises to simply disregard them. If they indeed act as they have promised, then the JCP can never again become more than an approval body for Oracle-backed initiatives. (Oracle's choice of timing submission of SE release JSRs forced me to decide not to stand for another term based only on those promises, not on the actual actions.) I urge other EC members to consider whether short term "pragmatism" in voting outweighs such consequences. - Doug Lea leaves the #Oracle #Java JCP
Needless to say, we don't agree with this bleak description of reality. We believe that the JCP is and remains a good organization for ushering the Java standards forward. We agree with the need of continually improving the JCP, and will work on that together with the EC. We also note that the EC contains a diverse set of companies and individuals, many of which are among Oracle's most fierce competitors. We believe that an open, vigorous and sometimes heated debate between conflicting interests and differing opinions is a necessary part of hammering out standards that serve the best interests of Java users, and we are confident that a vast majority of the EC members agree with us on this. - Who's Afraid of the #Microsoft Office 2010 Upgrade? 78% of Enterprises
Eighty-five percent of survey respondents plan to upgrade to Office 2010 eventually, but only 18 percent have plans to deploy broadly in 2010. As of now, only 4 percent have Office 2010 fully deployed in their environments, and 52 percent have not deployed it in any way. The rest are deploying Office 2010 on test machines or on new machines only. - John Chambers and Safra Catz: The Overseas Profits Elephant in the Room ( #Oracle Cisco)
By permitting companies to repatriate foreign earnings at a low tax rate—say, 5%—Congress and the president could create a privately funded stimulus of up to a trillion dollars. They could also raise up to $50 billion in federal tax revenue. That's money the economy would not otherwise receive.
The amount of corporate cash that would come flooding into the country could be larger than the entire federal stimulus package, and it could be used for creating jobs, investing in research, building plants, purchasing equipment, and other uses. It could also provide needed stability for the equity markets because companies would expand their activity in mergers and acquisitions, and would pay dividends or buy back stock. And when markets go up, confidence increases and businesses and consumers begin to spend. - #SAP Carbon Impact in the #Amazon cloud elicits a range of opinions
“We have said that our Business ByDesign customers have specific requirements regarding security, data privacy, regulations and other aspects. So for them, it is very important that we run Business ByDesign on a highly secured private cloud,” Zinow said, adding that Carbon Impact doesn’t have the same security requirements. - #Infor Hires #Oracle's Charles Phillips: What Would Big #ERP Say?
The unpleasant irony, of course, is that Infor is not exactly the "David battling the Goliath" it has made itself out to be. It's got a large installed base chock-full of legacy apps that reminds one of…um, I don't know…let me think…maybe, SAP and Oracle.
Infor is a $2 billion vendor (give or take, Infor's private), with 70,000 customers around the globe and 8,000 employees. And it's positively Oracle-ian in its acquisition appetite: gobbling up dozens of vendors over the years to fill out its technology portfolio and customer base. - Dear #Oracle, Get a Clue ( #Java)
Your customers are nervous and are looking for direction...You have to start participating in these conversations. - Startup Predicts Success With #Cassandra Database( #OpenSource #BigData)
Cassandra has plenty of competition. Besides Oracle–which now controls the open-source database MySQL, as well as its original product line–there are other new-wave entrants sporting names like MongoDB, CouchDB and Voldemort.
Riptano and other Cassandra supporters say it is particularly fast at storing data, and also retrieves it very quickly because of the way it exploits memory chips–reducing the need to fetch data from disk drives. And it’s not just being used by Web companies. - #JDA Jumps on Q3 Beat; Sees ‘10 Sales At High End of Guidance
Software and subscription revenue rose 28%, while maintenance revenue rose 43%. Of course, a good chunk of that year-over-year increase was thanks to the acquisition of i2 software this year. - #JDA Software Announces Third Quarter 2010 Results
JDA reported record total revenues of $158.4 million, a 65 percent increase from $95.9 million of revenue reported in third quarter 2009. Software license and subscription revenues in the third quarter 2010 increased 28 percent to $22.0 million from $17.3 million in third quarter 2009. - Ellison vows evidence will implicate #HP's new CEO ( #Oracle)
"I hope I'm wrong, but my guess is that HP's new chairman, Mr. (Ray) Lane, will keep HP's new CEO, Mr. Apotheker, far far away from the courthouse until this trial is over," Ellison wrote. - #Oracle Issues Statement
Unless, Mr. Lane and the rest of the HP Board of Directors decide to keep their new CEO far, far away from HP Headquarters until that trial is over. If HP keeps Leo Apotheker far from HP headquarters we cannot subpoena him to testify at that trial. - What's next for the post-Ozzie #Microsoft? No one knows.
We sought the opinions of a few analysts, and also a few pioneers in cloud computing -- an area where Microsoft seems behind the curve -- who seemed to agree that the company has some serious catching up to do. - #Infor Appoints Charles Phillips as Chief Executive Officer
Outgoing CEO Jim Schaper to Become Chairman of Infor, Leading Business Applications Company Focused on Mid-Sized Companies - #Infor Appoints Charles Phillips as Chief Executive Officer
At #Oracle, Mr. Phillips led the company's field organization and oversaw revenue growth of nearly 300 percent during his seven-year tenure at the firm. He also played a key role in Oracle's successful acquisition strategy including specific transactions such as BEA Systems, Hyperion Solutions, and Siebel Systems.
"Infor has quietly built the third largest enterprise applications company in the world, with 59 percent compound annual revenue growth over the last seven years, higher margins than eight of the top 10 application companies, and a track record of leading innovation," said Mr. Phillips. "With over 70,000 customers in 125 countries, including divisions of large corporations, Infor is poised for growth as the next generation platform ships in January." Mr. Phillips continued: "The company's laser focus on understanding and automating complex business processes, along with its commitment to constant innovation, has served customers well. I am eager to lead this proven team of - News Analysis: Charles Phillips Takes Over As CEO of #Infor
[A] CEO who can take the company to the next level. The move will be good for customers, partners, and employees.
The Bottom Line: Infor’s Aims To Go Public
All signs indicate that Infor intends to file its initial public offering. With a new product platform arriving in 2011, changes in its R&D organization, and now a new CEO in charge, the mid-market software has many of the pieces needed to launch to the next inflection point. Industry watchers expect Charles Phillips to bring in additional software veterans to drive new product sales and shore up existing partnerships. - Jim Schaper, Infor Chairman, Welcomes Charles Phillips to Infor CEO Post
Infor, the leading provider of business applications to mid-sized companies, today announced that it has named Charles Phillips as chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors. Mr. Phillips has over 20 years of leadership experience in the software industry, most recently as president and director of Oracle Corporation. In this video, Jim Schaper, chairman of Infor, interviews Charles as he prepares for his new role. - Texas Sends #Amazon a $269 Million Sales Tax Bill
The jury's still out on how much money states like Rhode Island and North Carolina (which is thick in litigation with Amazon over this very issue) will get from online sales-tax initiatives. But Texas has issued its own bill to Amazon -- to the tune of $269 million. - #Google 'mortified' that Street View cars scarfed up e-mail, passwords; privacy criticism intensifies
In a statement, a Google spokesperson said the company has never used the information it gathered from Wi-Fi networks for any Google product. - Official #Google Blog: privacy
We believe these changes will significantly improve our internal practices (though no system can of course entirely eliminate human error), and we look forward to seeing the innovative new security and privacy features that Alma and her team develop. That said, we’ll be constantly on the lookout for additional improvements to our procedures as Google grows, and as we branch out into new fields of computer science. - #Google admits Street View cars DID take emails and passwords from computers
Privacy regulators in seven countries analysed the data following complaints about the Street View scheme, and it was their investigations which forced Google's latest admission. - Top U.S. Brands Favored by Democrats and Republicans
#Google is the top brand for Democrats, according to an index incorporating consumer impressions of its quality, its value, their satisfaction with it, its reputation, their willingness to recommend it and their general impression of it. Google doesn't appear in Republicans' top 10. - #Apple joins #Google in counterattack against Paul Allen lawsuit ( #PatentTroll)
The patents were issued between 2000 and 2004 to Internal Research, an Allen-funded Silicon Valley research lab that shut its doors in 2000. The patents were later transferred to Interval Licensing, which Allen also controls. - Dawn of a New Day « Ray Ozzie
But as the PC client and PC-based server have grown from their simple roots over the past 25 years, the PC-centric / server-centric model has accreted simply immense complexity. This is a direct by-product of the PC’s success: how broad and diverse the PC’s ecosystem has become; how complex it’s become to manage the acquisition & lifecycle of our hardware, software, and data artifacts. It’s undeniable that some form of this complexity is readily apparent to most all our customers: your neighbors; any small business owner; the ‘tech’ head of household; enterprise IT.
Success begets product requirements. And even when superhuman engineering and design talent is applied, there are limits to how much you can apply beautiful veneers before inherent complexity is destined to bleed through.
Complexity kills. Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT. Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use. Complexity introduces security challenges. Complexity - Analyst downgrades, Ozzie critique push down #Microsoft shares
Ozzie (gently) took Redmond to task for failing to recognize and capitalize on technology trends that don't include PC operating systems. - #SAP CTO Vishal Sikka sheds more light on River, Gateway
Duet Enterprise is a product we have built with #Microsoft that has the Gateway inside it that has the abilities to connect the world of SharePoint.
SearchSAP.com: Will ECC customers use “the Gateway” as well to connect to SharePoint, etc?
Sikka: Even though in ECC, we have 3,000 enterprise services, the enterprise services are usually large, and they are designed for process consumption, not for UIs. UI are not there, the SAP data protocol in this old data mechanism that Microsoft has, this is not there. People are looking for all kinds of interfaces, this is all the lessons we learned from SOA over the last years. There isn’t a single SOA. We did that. We have 3,000 enterprise services. But those make it possible for us to connect and extend the processes. What about UIs? What about master data? What about lifecycle management? So, the Gateway, think of it as a protocol adapter, that you can attach to a legacy system and have it speak to the world outside. - Laserfiche Files Lawsuit Against #SAP for Trademark Infringement
SAP AG and SAP Global Marketing, Inc. for infringing Laserfiche's Run Smarter(R) trademark.
"We are disappointed that SAP has been using our Run Smarter(R) trademark without permission, and we've been forced to file a lawsuit in response," said Laserfiche Executive Vice President Chris Wacker. - Ex-#Oracle executive becomes chief at Atlanta software maker
"I have spoken to Larry," Phillips said. "He is quite proud to produce another CEO in the industry." - 2011 IT Salaries: Expect Modest Gains
Base compensation for ERP technical developers who tailor ERP software for a specific organization is projected to increase 5.2 percent next year, to a range of $79,250 to $109,500. - Informatica Corporation CEO Discusses Q3 2010 Results - Earnings Call Transcript
The majority of the deals continue to be uncontested by any commercial competitor. The competitors that we have talked about in the past, IBM, competing in 15 to 20% of our deals, our win rate against them, continue to be very high, over 70%. If anything, the larger industry giants are now looking into a much broader technology landscape software companies going into hardware, and other companies responding to that. So we think that will make the competitive environment even better for Informatica. - Analytics, Business Intelligence Draw #IBM to Clarity Acquisition
Privately owned Clarify and its 400 employees will become part of IBM’s growing Business Analytics software portfolio. IBM did not release financial details of the deal.
The company’s Clarity 7 and Clarity FSR products are used primarily by financial departments to perform budgeting, planning, consolidation, and reporting tasks. The Clarity applications also help enterprises track and compile financial information for external and regulatory reporting. - #Apple Drops Pre-installed #Adobe #Flash
Apple Inc on Friday announced that it will no longer pre-install Adobe Systems Inc’s Flash media player on its Mac computers, as the company continues to phase out the software. - #Microsoft's Hyper-V to be compatible with #OpenSource #Cloud project #OpenStack
#Rackspace and NASA started the OpenStack project in July with the goal of making it easier for enterprises to move data and applications from one cloud to another. Rackspace is contributing the code that runs its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers technology and NASA is contributing the software that runs its Nebula cloud platform.
OpenStack already supports Xen, KVM, QEMU and User Mode Linux Support hypervisors. But without support for Microsoft's Hyper-V, many enterprise customers that run a mix of Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies might struggle to take advantage of OpenStack. - #Microsoft backs NASA's #opensource #cloud kit
Redmond will not actually contribute code to the project. It has partnered with startup Cloud.com on this effort and Cloud.com – the outfit that offers a platform for transforming existing a data center setup into an infrastructure cloud – will handle the bulk of the work. "Microsoft will be providing architectural and technical guidance to Cloud.com," general manager for Microsoft’s open solutions group Ted MacLean tells The Register. - #SAP Seeks Gag Order in #Oracle Case
Mr. Nocera's fiance is the communications director at Boies, Schiller & Flexner, a law firm representing Oracle in the lawsuit.
"The episode involving the New York Times article—coupled with Oracle's counsel's refusal to eschew publicity efforts during trial despite recognizing that jurors may not heed a court instruction not to read press coverage—leads to this motion," SAP's motion says. - #Nokia Swings to Profit, Plans Job Cuts
Chief Executive Stephen Elop, in his first address to investors since replacing Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo last month, said the Finnish company would have to undergo difficult changes to catch up again to rivals such as iPhone maker Apple Inc. and smartphones based on Google Inc.'s Android software. - Vendors That Deliver, Vendors You Can Trust
Tops for Value
These five vendors have the highest ratings for overall value (percent respondents):
WebEx (76 percent)
Juniper Networks (75 percent)
NetApp (72 percent)
Cisco (72 percent)
Seagate (72 percent) - CIOs on Twitter: What R U Waiting For?
Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents say that they use LinkedIn more often than Twitter. Just 1% of CIOs say they are not on LinkedIn. - #OpenERP aims to impress U.S. market ( #OpenSource )
OpenERP charges $39 per user per month for the hosted version of the software. The publisher warranty costs $3,800 per year for an on-site OpenERP implementation with up to 25 users. - Government agencies get green light to use IaaS
U.S. government agencies will soon be able to use infrastructure-as-a-service offerings from companies including AT&T, Amazon Web Services and Verizon.
On Tuesday, the U.S. General Services Administration said it has contracted 11 companies to provide IaaS to federal, state, local and tribal governments. Agencies will be able to buy hosted storage, virtual machines and Web services from the vendors through Apps.gov, a portal where government entities can shop for approved cloud services. - Will #Apple conquer the enterprise? Woz: It can happen - Videos
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak discusses whether Apple's technologies can become standard in the enterprise overtaking the PC. "It can happen, but it's still going to be gradual," Wozniak says. "Everybody sees the writing on the wall." - Ready for a #cloud computing brokerage?
Some entity needs to act as a broker as businesses work various cloud resources whether it be Amazon Web Services or Rackspace or Salesforce.com or any other vendor. - #Microsoft: 240 million licenses of #Windows 7 sold in its first year
Earlier this year, analysts were estimating that Microsoft might hit the 300-million-sold number with Windows 7 licenses by the end of this calendar year. It’s looking possible…. - Celebrating #Microsoft Windows 7 at 1 Year – More than 240 Million Licenses Sold
Windows 7 is the fastest selling operating system in history. As of September, Windows 7 was running on 93% of new consumer PCs and has over 17% global OS market share (according to Net Applications as of October 1st). There is an amazing array of great PCs out on the market today. Six months after launch, 100% (over 18,000) of our OEM partners were selling Windows 7 PCs versus 70% for Windows Vista PCs at a comparable time period. And there is an incredible ecosystem of products – software and hardware – that work great with Windows 7 too. You can check out and discover many of those products at Windows Product Scout which was announced yesterday. - #Apple previews #Mac OS X Lion - Videos
The demo shows a new feature called Mission Control, which combines the Expose, Dashboard, and Spaces applications of OS X with full-screen apps. The new operating system is due to ship in summer 2011. - Traditional databases vs. the threat from in-memory, #NoSQL (#BigData )
Web-scale applications are a good example of the applications requiring more scalability than available today with DBMS models with market penetration. This has required many application developers to look elsewhere (e.g., caching and noSQL) for alternatives. - Enterprise Geeks Exclusive Interview with #SAP CTO Vishal Sikka @vsikka
SAP CTO and Executive Board member Vishal Sikka for an exclusive eGeeks interview. Vishal explains in more detail some of his topics from the keynote and answers some other questions from the egheads. - #Microsoft signs #cloud deals with California, New York City
Like California, DoITT is currently consolidating each agency's IT operations into a centrally managed data center. Formerly, each New York agency procured software on its own, resulting in more than 40 different licenses the city held. - #IBM buys financial software vendor Clarity Systems
Clarity Systems, based in Toronto, has some 600 customers around the world. Its software includes Clarity 7, which provides financial budgeting, planning, forecasting and analysis capabilities. The company also sells Clarity FSR, a product that helps finance departments handle regulatory reporting and filing requirements. - Five more snarky remarks Steve Jobs could have made, if asked
What Steve could have said:
“As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve always hated the way the buying process works in the enterprise because the people who buy the products aren’t the ones who actually use the products. That’s changing. Now, workers are putting pressure on their IT departments and telling them which products to purchase. Some people are even buying their own computers and smartphones when they don’t like the ones they get from the company. And, according to our internal research, when they have a choice, 95.8% of the business workers who actually have any taste choose our products over the competition.” - The supervendor debate: Will there be an IT buyer backlash?
The IT industry is caught in a vortex of supervendors who claim that they can purchase innovation. They claim this is superior to internal R&D. We believe this is not sustainable. Acquiring innovation is one thing. Maintaining it is impossible. Users will not accept architectural mediocrity. This will challenge the business models of supervendors.
* Meanwhile, William Snyder, another Gartner analyst, said vendors are becoming “monolithic” and more likely to manage you than the other way around. “Vendors that are here today are somewhere else tomorrow, and, all too often, these vendors are consumed by a larger vendor with interests that may not be consistent with a customer’s strategic direction,” said Snyder. - #Amazon AWS Free #Cloud Usage Tier
Beginning November 1, new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, AmazonLoad Balancing, and AWS data transfer. AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS. Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic - Silicon Valley 3.0: Bioscience, Clean Tech Remake Economy
Today, less than half of the region's venture capital, which is used to finance start-ups, goes to tech companies—compared with nearly 70% five years ago, according to research firm VentureSource. - Enterprise Software Giant #Oracle Brushes Off Competition From #IBM (#SAP )
“The interesting twist is that for every dollar of license revenue they take away from SAP, it takes away $3 to $5 of integration and consulting business from IBM,” he said. “Thus, IBM is actually the bigger loser as this thing progresses.” - Manhattan Associates Reports Third Quarter Results
# Adjusted diluted earnings per share, a non-GAAP measure, was $0.32 in the third quarter of 2010, compared to $0.43 in the third quarter of 2009.
# The Company reported GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.28 in the third quarter of 2010, compared to $0.50 in the third quarter of 2009.
# Consolidated revenue for the third quarter of 2010 was $74.0 million, compared to $65.3 million in the third quarter of 2009. License revenue was $12.1 million in the third quarter of 2010, compared to $11.4 million in the third quarter of 2009.
# Adjusted operating income, a non-GAAP measure, was $11.0 million in the third quarter of 2010, compared to $13.2 million in the third quarter of 2009.
# GAAP operating income for the third quarter of 2010 was $9.6 million, compared to $11.1 million in the third quarter of 2009.
# Cash flow from operations was $11.5 million in the third quarter of 2010, compared to $15.4 million in the third quarter of 2009. Days Sales Outstanding were 60 days at September - #SaaS on a 'tear' says IDC
Software vendors will be looking at new routes to market: fewer than 20 percent of new software products and under 60 percent of refreshes will be destined for company data centres. The IDC survey found that most SaaS is being delivered to US companies - they currently have 71 percent of the market - but by 2014, it will become more global. - '#Cloud computing gaining traction here'
The deafening hype surrounding cloud computing has yet to become reality. But the technology appears closer to becoming mainstream in Korea, where the acceptance is driven by the government and large corporations, according to an executive of VMware, a major provider of cloud services. - #HP hires #Nokia exec to run mobile software
Hewlett-Packard has hired Ari Jaaksi, a software executive from Nokia, as a Senior Vice President of its new mobile operating system webOS, a spokeswoman for HP said on Friday.
Earlier this month Nokia said Jaaksi, the head of Finnish handset makers key Meego software platform, had decided to leave the company. - The $10bn man: The strange saga of Mark Hurd, #HP and #Oracle
HP is no stranger to controversy at the top. But, although this latest episode has given everyone plenty to read, write and pontificate about, it's difficult to see HP suffering long-term. It is, as Reynolds says, "really strong, and will continue to be so." - #IBM Guns For #Oracle, #HP With #Cloud Platform
IBM has beefed up its CloudBurst line of pre-integrated cloud service delivery platform in a bid to catch up with its chief rivals Oracle and HP, which have recently hit the ground running with all-in-one cloud computing offerings. - Why Couldn't #HP Find A CEO Inside The Company?
He says, "I think the only individual that HP might be at risk of losing would be Bradley. I don't think Ann, VJ, or Donatelli would leave voluntarily. "
(That's Ann Livermore, head of enterprise; Vyomesh Joshi, head of printers; David Donatelli, head of enterprise servers.) - Three questions: Stuart Bladen, #HP Enterprise Services
Most companies still don't want to use the cloud; they're worried about keeping their data somewhere out there. - #HP to cut 1300 jobs
HP has reportedly announced that it would cut a further 1,300 staff in Britain, as part of its redundancies taking place worldwide.
HP said that the job cuts are a part of the company's $1bn restructuring of its services business announced earlier in the year. As part of the overhaul, it plans to axe 9,000 employees from its global workforce. - #Oracle Corp. CEO, 10% Owner Lawrence Joseph Ellison sells 1,000,000 Shares
Lawrence Joseph Ellison sells 1,000,000 shares of ORCL on 10/18/2010 at an average price of $28.97 a share. - #SAP sets release date for HANA, its new in-memory appliance, at TechEd
Those tests include one by a large packaged goods company that had come to SAP looking for a way to process massive amounts of point-of-sale data -- 460 billion records, to be exact -- in an effort to predict demand.
Using HANA, SAP was able to process that data in seconds, according to Sikka. - #Gartner: #Benioff and the #Cloud (#Salesforce.com )
Regardless of how you feel about Benioff the fact remains that he has been transformative in enterprise software to a degree that few could ever claim, and his view of traditional on premise enterprise software super vendors sums up what many intuitively believe, that the massive and increasingly bolted together vendors are all about the status quo and resisting inevitable shifts. - YouTube - Marc Benioff to tech industry: Work harder to transform faster
#Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff talks about the consumerization of the Internet at the Gartner ITxpo in Orlando. Benioff says the software industry needs to work harder and make transformations faster to keep pace with the changing needs of a younger generation entering the workforce. - What Did Ray Ozzie Do (and Not Do)? That`s the Question (#Microsoft )
Ozzie didn’t want to run Microsoft, and had that been part of the deal when he was hired, my sense is he would have refused the job. - #Oracle wants #LibreOffice members to leave #OpenSource #OpenOffice.org council
Your role in the Document Foundation and LibreOffice makes your role as a representative in the OOo CC untenable and impossible. [I]t causes confusion, it is a plain conflict of interest, as TDF split from OOo," he told TDF members during a council meeting that took place on an IRC channel. "If the TDF members do not disassociate themselves from the [Document Foundation] then they must resign by Tuesday - #Microsoft launches services to compete with #Google Apps
Office 365 is the answer to Google Apps, a Web version of word processing and spreadsheets that Google offers to businesses for $50 per year. Microsoft's new basic service will cost $72 a year. Microsoft said people can start signing up for a free test version, and the service will start selling next year. - #Microsoft announces cloud-based Office 365 software suite
Office 365, which is presently in its closed beta stage, will be available in 'small business' and 'enterprise' flavours at launch, with the former costing $6.00 USD per month, per user, while the latter will cost from as little as $2.00 USD per month, per user, through to $24 USD per month, per user. - #SAP Brings Customers More Choices to Benefit From Virtualization and #Cloud Infrastructures
SAP Details Product Plans for Managing Virtualized and Cloud Infrastructures, Outlines Strategy for Collaboration With Customer and Partners;
New Reference Architectures for Solutions from Dell and IBM Plus Continued Collaboration With Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Means More Choices for Customers to Increase Agility and Reduce Total Cost of Ownership in Private Clouds - #SAP Upping Private #Cloud Ante
Based on SAP's description, the new management platform's features will mostly be aimed at automating otherwise manual tasks, "like on-boarding new users and services, and allocating the infrastructure for it," said Redmonk analyst Michael Coté. "For example, in the retail space, if a new store popped up, you'd have to do provisioning within various SAP systems to set up new employees, track retail, et cetera. In the utopic cloud world, much of that would be self-service automated with 'private cloud' voodoo." - #Oracle #Java Attacks Reach 'Unprecedented' Levels, #Microsoft Reports
Considering that these vulnerabilities all have available updates from Oracle that would prevent these attacks from being successful, this data is a reminder that, in addition to running real-time protection, it is imperative to apply all security updates for software, no matter what your flavor might be," Stewart noted. - Have you checked the #Java? - #Microsoft Malware Protection Center
I have a theory about why almost no one has noticed this sharp rise in attacks on Java. IDS/IPS vendors, who are typically the folks that speak out first about new types of exploitation, have challenges with parsing Java code. Documents, multimedia, JavaScript - getting protection for these issues is challenging to get right. Now, think about incorporating a Java interpreter into an IPS engine? The performance impact on a network IPS could be crippling. So, the people that we expect to notice increases in exploitation might have a hard time seeing this particular spectrum of light. Call it Java-blindness. - #Salesforce.com's Benioff unplugged: Supervendors suck, #Oracle, Zuckerberg as Gates
# Next $1 billion SaaS company? “Cisco is close and then there’s Concur and SuccessFactors,” said Benioff.
# On Google, Benioff said “I love Google. It is doing a world-class job on Android. They are building a large enterprise distribution.”
# On Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, he’s the “next Bill Gates.” - #Microsoft targets #Salesforce.com, #Oracle #CRM with promotional price
This is not the first time Microsoft has targeted its competitors with a pricing promotion. - Tom Cruise Eyed for Role in 'Top Gun' Sequel
David Ellison, the 27-year-old son of #Oracle founder Larry Ellison, a trained aerobatic pilot, is a key driver of the project, according to Vulture.
He recently raised $350 million to finance films and struck a first-look deal with Paramount. The first of their film collaborations will be "Mission: Impossible IV," starring Cruise. - #Oracle Critical Patch Update Advisory - October 2010
Due to the threat posed by a successful attack, Oracle strongly recommends that customers apply CPU fixes as soon as possible. This Critical Patch Update contains 85 new security fixes across all product families listed below. - #Oracle vs. #SAP for procurement: Spend visibility software
SAP, however, comes out slightly ahead at this stage (relative to both Oracle and even perennial best-of-breed vendors in the sector, including Ariba). - As Source for Current #Facebook Employees, #Google Has Big Lead on #Yahoo, #Microsoft, #Oracle
While the data’s not completely clear, it appears that out of 2009 people who have had some role at Facebook, 277 of them have some previous experience at Google, followed by 146 at Yahoo, and 143 at Microsoft. Other tech leaders with a couple dozen or less include, in order, Oracle, eBay, IBM, PayPal, Cisco, and even Stanford University. - #SAP #BusinessObjects Announces 4.0 at ASUG
Business Objects customers griped that that's what they pay the vendor support fees for. Meanwhile, SAP BusinessObjects said its user conference would be folded into Sapphire. But this left some long-time non SAP ERP, Business Objects customers somewhat lost in the shuffle.
ASUG has gradually been transitioning the independent user groups, BOB, and the user-driven conference. Wanting to make this transition to ASUG successful, ASUG has made membership for SAP Business Objects customers free through next year. - New Bachelor of IT course with #SAP-focus to launch
The degree is made up of 16 subject units, ten of whcih are SAP-focused, covering topics from end user benefits through to database design and specialising in a specific application area such as HR, payroll, supply chain and logistics. - #Oracle: no license for #Google #Android's Harmony friend
But a lifelong #Java deal for #IBM? - Is #EMC the Next Step in #Oracle’s Journey to $100B?
Make no mistake; EMC knows how to close big deals, as their revenue number proves. If the goal for Oracle is to reach $100 billion, NetApp wouldn’t help them as effectively. NetApp currently has an $18 billion dollar market cap and just over $4 billion in revenue. - Steve Ballmer E-mail to Employees on Ray Ozzie Transition: Text of an internal #Microsoft e-mail sent by Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer to employees announcing the transition of Ray Ozzie
Ray and I are announcing today Ray’s intention to step down from his role as chief software architect. He will remain with the company as he transitions the teams and ongoing strategic projects within his organization - bringing the great innovations and great innovators he’s assembled into the groups driving our business. Following the natural transition time with his teams but before he retires from Microsoft, Ray will be focusing his efforts in the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments. We have tremendous opportunities in the entertainment space overall, and I’m excited about what we can accomplish. Beyond that, Ray has no plans at this time. While he’ll continue to report to me during the transition, the CSA role was unique and I won’t refill the role after Ray’s departure. We have a strong planning process, strong technical leaders in each business group and strong innovation heading to the market. - Ray Ozzie stepping down from #Microsoft
However, Ozzie's tenure has also been marked by clashes with various product teams over both resources and technical direction. - Ray Ozzie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
He was formerly the Chief Software Architect at #Microsoft. Prior to Microsoft he was best known for his role in creating Lotus Notes. - #IBM Announces Blueworks Live, 'Lite' #SaaS Based #BPM
Simple, Social BPM
What this does will make business processes social, one of the key elements of creating agile BPM’s, and which we looked at last month, but with none of the weight or installation problems that are normally associated with large BPM suite deployments.
When it launches, whether enterprises decide to use it in a public or private cloud, there will be three simple ‘work’ areas:
* Community Area, where process will be identified
* Work area, where users can develop Java-based process apps
* Library, where BPM apps are stored for later use or refinement - Which #cloud is best for ISVs?
Unfortunately, the choice that confronts them is bewildering, with any number of established and start-up vendors and providers touting everything from conventional software platforms to managed hosting to platform-as-a-service. - IT Skills Demand Driving Managed Services, #SAAS, #Cloud Adoption
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which falls under the direction of the U.S. Department of Labor, released data that showed roughly 28,600 technology jobs were gained between June and September--and nearly 70 percent of those jobs (19,500) were in IT services.
What’s driving demand in IT services? A combination of the reluctance to hire significant numbers of full-time employees and an emphasis of renting, leasing or contracting technology work for very specific needs, surmises technology job analysts Foote Partners in an Oct. 12 statement on IT job volatility and analysis of the latest BLS technology job data. - Employees love #Microsoft, but not Steve Ballmer, changes to healthcare plan (#Google #Apple #Oracle )
Just 50 percent of the 1,117 employees who responded to this question were pleased with Ballmer’s performance as the head of their company. Apple’s Steve Jobs had a whopping 97 percent approval rating, Google’s Eric Schmidt 96 percent, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison 78 percent. - #Oracle Business Intelligence Blog: Spatial Data Visualizations in OBIEE 11g
That it is possible to create maps in as little as 15 seconds. Or less. - Larry Ellison: Oracle's Profit #Oracle
Unfortunately, all this attention on Larry Ellison, the public character, masks the incredible skills of Larry Ellison, the incomparable businessman. - Why #Microsoft? Ballmer's reply to underwhelmed college student
See the video below for additional highlights from Ballmer's talk with the UW's Ed Lazowska, including an overview of the company's current business, its reputation as a follower in the industry, and Ballmer's thoughts on Google, startups and innovation. - #SAP Business ByDesign update and SDK
Logic for BYD add-ons is written in two scripting languages called Business Object Description Language (BODL) and Advanced Business Script (I’ve also seen it called ABAPScript during the hands-on workshop). This obviously throws up a few questions. - Enterprise Startups survey
What I want to do is collect the insights, advice and experience of people who have been-there-done-that, or who are in the thick of it right now. - David Packard Medal of Achievement Acceptance Speech (#Salesforce.com )
[Video] - #SAP's McDermott Interview Excerpt - Video (#HP )
Bill McDermott, co-chief executive officer of SAP AG, discusses the appointment of Leo Apotheker as CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co. Apotheker spent most of his career at SAP, the biggest maker of business-management software. - With Léo Apotheker's hire, #HP has a talent retention challenge
If Apotheker is going to be a success as HP's CEO, he'll need this trio that might have wanted his job to stay onboard, and soothing any bruised egos will be his first challenge. Will stock options and salary be enough to curb their ambition? Time will tell. - From Running A Deli To Head Of #SAP
As a teenager I traded in three jobs for one when I bought my first delicatessen business. I was a sophomore in high school. It cost $7,000 with interest. I told the sellers, "If I do well, I'll pay your loan off; if I do badly, you take your store back."
To grow the business I immediately segmented my market. For high school students, I had "Asteroids" and "Pac-Man" and built a game room and let 40 of them in at a time instead of four, because I trusted them. With senior citizens who didn't want to leave their homes, we did deliveries. It was a success. - On #HP hiring Leo Apotheker as its new CEO, and the Ray Lane Manoeuvre (#SAP )
SAP in its pomp was all about the ecosystem, balancing competing interests. Apotheker was right there – to blame him now for a couple of bad quarters, after a 20 year career kicking ass, seems increasingly short-sighted. Would I have handled increasing maintenance fees for customers to match Oracle’s rates differently? Yes I would, but the decision to tough it out was SAP, not just Apotheker’s. - How Léo Got the Job: Meet the People’s CEO (#HP )
[This article is WAY harsh and over the top.I don't always comment on the news I curate,but I felt I had to this time. -DBM]
Apotheker was full of touchy-feely empathy for the staff, hitting exactly the notes the board wanted to hear, basically casting himself as the People's CEO who's going to bring back the old HP culture - which is hysterically funny considering that the internal survey that SAP did shortly before Apotheker was kicked out found that only half of the company's staff of 50,000 had any confidence in the man, a point that SAP made much of at the time. - Poll finds little support for new #HP CEO
The former #SAP AG chief was backed by only one in five who responded to the most recent Business Pulse survey conducted by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal between Oct. 5 and Oct. 12. - Key success factor for #SaaS suites: functional parity (#NetSuite )
Traditional on-premise vendors beware: the full-suite SaaS providers are catching up quickly. - #EMC Shares Rise On #Oracle Buyout Rumor
Roy said the speculation has been "floating around the Street," and he has gotten calls and e-mails from clients and traders on the rumor, which comes at a time when major tech companies are seen trying to boost their data storage portfolios.
Oracle had no comment, a spokeswoman said. EMC also declined to comment. - I’m back. « Ray Ozzie
Inside a sealed packet I found a wonderful artifact from decades ago – a folder of collaterals from the Windows 1.0 launch event. It was possibly handed to me at that time by Pam Edstrom, whose business card was enclosed. - #Microsoft Windows 1.0 Press Kit
- Pelosi in #Microsoft's House: Speaker visiting Redmond today
Pelosi won't be meeting with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who is speaking on the UW campus at the time of her visit. - #IBM Guns For #Oracle, #HP With #Cloud Platform
The appliance and software stack are designed to automate service delivery within private clouds, IBM's CloudBurst appliances tie together hardware, storage, networking, virtualization and service management software that enable the building of private clouds, cutting gout the need to manually configure cloud computing systems. IBM estimated that CloudBurst can chop a solution provider's or IT staff's labor in integrating systems, provisioning and managing storage by up to 95 percent. - #SAP Appoints New Head of Global Communications
Based in Walldorf, Germany, he will report to SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe. - #IBM joins the OpenJDK community, will help unify #opensource #Java efforts
It became clear to us that first Sun and then Oracle were never planning to make the important test and certification tests for Java, the Java SE TCK, available to Apache. We disagreed with this choice, but it was not ours to make. So rather than continue to drive Harmony as an unofficial and uncertified Java effort, we decided to shift direction and put our efforts into OpenJDK. Our involvement will not be casual as we plan to hold leadership positions and, with the other members of the community, fully expect to have a strong say in how the project is managed and in which technical direction it goes.
We also expect to see some long needed reforms in the JCP, the Java Community Process, to make it more democratic, transparent, and open. IBM and, indeed Oracle, have been lobbying for such transformations for years and we’re pleased to see them happening now. It’s time. Actually, it’s past time.
...
So to summarize my opinions on this: OpenJDK represents the best chance to provide a to - Social and Organic are Not Oxymorons - CIOs Get Ready! (#Salesforce.com )
Fauscette's take is that social computing has begun to take off in the enterprise. While corporations deal with the use and misuse of Facebook and other social sites, businesses are looking for true collaborative solutions. These solutions are emerging now because of the imperative to become more agile and collaborative in the workplace. Fauscette calls these new collaboration frameworks "organic business networks." These networks are defined by being people-centric - similar to Facebook, but they go much further because they are technology enablers that provide scale to corporations in disparate locations. - For #HP Board, a Double Standard
It takes your breath away, really: the same board that viewed Mr. Hurd’s minor expense account shenanigans as intolerable has chosen as its new C.E.O. someone involved — however tangentially — with the most serious business crime you can commit. - #HP Chairman's Letter Blasts New York Times Piece
Mr. Hurd violated the trust of the Board by repeatedly lying to them in the course of an investigation into his conduct. He violated numerous elements of HP’s Standards of Business Conduct and he demonstrated a serious lack of integrity and judgment. - #SAP - #Oracle TomorrowNow hubbub center of #HP - NYT duel over Apotheker
It didn’t even deem him relevant enough to the case to include him on a list of witnesses for trial–until, that is, Mr. Apotheker was named CEO of HP and Oracle had other motives to try to tie him to the case. - Virtual #SAP TechEd 2010
Executive Keynote Featuring Vishal Sikka @vsikka, Member of the SAP Executive Board Leading Technology and Innovation - Cases filed matching "#oracle corporation"
[Lawsuits in which Oracle is a plaintiff, defendent, or party -DBM] - #ERP Rollouts: Why SMBs Say No
* 39% We are too small.
* 34% We have been able to function effectively without it in past.
* 33% We have an internal effort to implement.
* 28% Cost of software and services.
* 21% We can function effectively without it in the foreseeable future.
* 10% Systems are too complicated.
So what has to happen for these respondents to justify an ERP endeavor? According to the survey, the "compelling events" that necessitate an ERP rollout include:
* 44% Availability of low-cost ERP options that minimize risk
* 40% Explosive growth
* 29% Growth beyond a pre-defined threshold
* 27 % Regulatory compliance requirements
* 19% A disastrous event that proves we can't operate effectively - New Release of #SAP NetWeaver® Paves the Way for Future Innovation
# Support for non-disruptive upgrades to SAP® Business Suite software landscapes with pre-validated content for SAP Business Suite 7 and SAP Business Suite 7 Innovations 2010
# Greatly enhanced Java support: Java EE5 certified, Java-only ESB and JMS pub/sub capabilities
# Reusable business rule sets with Microsoft Excel integration
# Enhanced standards support (WS Policy 1.2, SOAP 1.2, WS Trust 1.3, Java SE 6, JSR 168/286, WSRP 1.0, SAML 1.0/2.0)
# Significant enhancements in identity management using SAML 2.0 for identity federation and Web-based single sign-on
# Individual and team productivity enhancements through enterprise workspaces and Duet® Enterprise software - #SAP's NetWeaver Isn't Dead Yet
NetWeaver deployments have been growing more than 20 percent per year during the past four years, SAP said.
The platform "has evolved beyond traditional generic middleware," and will be tied to SAP's three main technology strategies going forward, which include mobile applications, cloud-based software and in-memory computing, the company said. - #Oracle singled out in executive-pay study
Chief Executive Larry Ellison and its freshly recruited president, Mark Hurd, continue to rank among the best paid in the corporate world, according to a recent report by Glass Lewis & Co. - #HP Scandal Sucks in New York Times Columnist Over Conflict of Interest (#Oracle #SAP )
Nocera’s fiancée, Dawn Schneider, is director of communications for Boies, Schiller & Flexner, the law firm that just so happens to represent Oracle in its very same suit against SAP. - Mission Critical (#Oracle )
Now that we have the full hardware and software portfolio in front of us, we can evolve everything from the semiconductor chip design to the system design together with what happens in the entire software stack to create the best-possible applications-to-disk environment,” says Fowler. - #SAP's Strategy For The #CRM Battle
The leader of SAP's CRM strategy explains how the company is competing in a crowded and hyper-competitive market. - #SAP: loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it: Count the cost
No-one believes that implementing SAP will actually help us sell more - it doesn't make the sales process any easier, and is not going to help us win new business. It may help us improve our margins, but that is more of a long term initiative and won't help us deal with more urgent concerns. I may be wrong, but I suspect that we may never see any return on our investment, even if we take a really long term view of 25 years.
So how do we then assess the value of our implementation? I wish I could answer that. Yes it is working and in that we have clearly been more successful than some others. But has the cost been too high? Only time will tell. - #Oracle and #IBM Partner On #Java
Java developers and customers gain stability and confidence that the future of Java remains secure. Rivals can expect an Oracle IBM alliance to drive innovations in web apps, cloud standards, and mobile innovations. - #HP’s Board Gets No Respect
HP had to resort to an outsider, and has done a great disservice to employees and shareholders. Will they, now, really set to work with their new CEO, or will they continue to play the old Board game? - #Oracle and #IBM Collaborate to Accelerate #OpenSource #Java Innovation Through #OpenJDK
Specifically, the companies will collaborate in the OpenJDK community to develop the leading open source Java environment.
With today's news, the two companies will make the OpenJDK community the primary location for open source Java SE development. The Java Community Process (JCP) will continue to be the primary standards body for Java specification work and both companies will work to continue to enhance the JCP.
The collaboration will center on the OpenJDK project, the open source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) specification, the Java Language, the Java Development Kit (JDK), and Java Runtime Environment (JRE).
Oracle and IBM will support the recently announced OpenJDK development roadmap, which accelerates the availability of Java SE across the open source community. - #SAP and #Sybase Reach Key Milestones in Mobility and On-Demand Plans
SAP announced joint leadership and aligned resources across development and go-to-market to further drive the business across all on-demand applications. Under this setup, Peter Lorenz, SAP corporate officer and executive vice president, will lead a dedicated development unit responsible for all on-demand applications. Doug Merritt, executive vice president of on-demand solutions, will lead all global go-to-market efforts across the on-demand portfolio in close collaboration with regional teams as well as the SAP ecosystem. Jointly, Lorenz and Merritt will be responsible for taking innovation to the market faster to support customers' growth strategies. - Official #Google Blog: What we’re driving at
So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research. - #NoSQL overview
So should you adopt NoSQL technology? Key considerations include:
* Immaturity. The very term “NoSQL” has only been around since 2009. Most NoSQL “products” are open source projects backed by a company of fewer than 20 employees.
* Open source. Many NoSQL adopters are constrained, by money or ideology, to avoid closed-source products. Conversely, it is difficult to deal with NoSQL products’ immaturity unless you’re comfortable with the rough-and-tumble of open source software development.
* Internet orientation. A large fraction of initial NoSQL implementations are for web or other internet (e.g., mobile application) projects.
* Schema mutability. If you like the idea of being able to have different schemas for different parts of the same “table,” NoSQL may be for you. If you like the database reusability guarantees of the relational model, NoSQL may be a poor fit.
* Project size. For a large (and suitable) project, the advantages of NoSQL technology may be large e - Andreessen joins in $6.3M funding for Redwood City startup Proferi
Ben Horowitz, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz along with Netscape Communications co-founder Marc Andreessen, will join Proferi's board of directors -- as will Greylock partner Aneel Bhusri, also a PeopleSoft veteran. - #Microsoft Readies New Phone Launch With AT&T
Microsoft Corp is set to unveil a new line of phones running its Windows software on Monday, as it attempts to pull back market share from Apple Inc's iPhone and Google Inc's Android system in the fast-growing market for multi-featured 'smartphones'. - #HP, #Oracle Lead $50 Billion Acquisition Spree Tearing Down Tech Barriers
The companies are using purchases to become one-stop providers of products from computers to software to networking gear, rather than focusing on a niche. A plunge in computing- industry stocks earlier this week, spurred by concerns that demand is slowing, makes some targets more affordable. - Why smack talking works for #Oracle’s Larry Ellison
Ellison, you see, manages to be best at taking “a relatively boring database company, [and] focusing on the most exciting things,” says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. Benioff is a former Oracle executive and current Ellison target. - #SAP, #Sybase Form 'Application Mobilization Unit'
[Didn't SAP say Sybase would remain independent? -DBM]
Announced this week is the creation of a new mobile business unit, which is designed to provide a veneer of what the companies call "joint leadership and aligned resources" to sit over their back end application development technologies. - #Microsoft mulls possible acquisition of #Adobe Systems
Narayen, "played down the prospect that the informal takeover suggestion would lead to a deal between the two companies". - #Salesforce.com to Adopt REST APIs - What is the Significance?
Designed for the Force.com platform, the new API is a departure for Salesforce.com, which has historically provided SOAP as a means for integrating the SaaS provider's technology with third-party applications. - #Sun shops eye #Oracle support moves warily
“Sun had a great engineering mandate but that mandate needs to be funded with profit. When we don’t care about profit, we’re poor and can’t fund anything! Sun guys that are still at Oracle are sick and tired of not having profit.” - #MySQL price hikes reveal depth of #Oracle's wallet love
We're being told that there will be changes to MySQL's pricing and possibly pricing model soon and wanted to let you know. We have not had a price increase for over 6 years but there will be an increase in the next price list that will be available soon. We've been expecting the increase for the past couple of months but I'm told it the new price list will be released soon.
For those of you using Basic and Silver support we're being told those options will no longer be available. If you wish to continue with Basic or Silver you will need to sign a multi-year agreement and you would be able to keep using Basic or Silver for up to another 3 years.
If you are considering purchasing additional licenses for MySQL support subscription, please let me know, because you can save money if you do it before the changes take place, some time in the next month or two. You can also sign multi-year agreements and lock down current prices for up to 3 years.
You can receive up to a 30% discount for a - Will Web-scale Servers Find a Role in the Enterprise?
"The big processors are like taking a spaceship to the grocery store for most problems today," says Andrew Feldman, SeaMicro's CEO. "What you really need is a Prius." - Why relational databases make sense for #BigData (#NoSQL )
Even for the types of relatively simple queries that are likely to be practical on huge data stores, writing an SQL query is typically simpler and faster than writing an algorithm to compute the desired answer, as is often necessary for data stores that do not include a query language. - How Companies Are Using #Hadoop
eHarmony uses Hadoop to decide who you should date next and so they’ve got their database of all these people and information about them and they run a Hadoop job every night to tell you who they think you should date today. - #Google spits back at #Oracle's #Android suit (#Java #Dalvik )
Google filed an answer to the suit, arguing that Oracle's patents should be declared invalid. "Google specifically denies that Google has infringed or is liable for infringement of any valid and enforceable patents of Oracle," the filing says. "Google further specifically denies that Oracle is entitled to any relief whatsoever of any kind against Google as a result of any act of Google or any person or entity acting on behalf of Google." - #ORACLE AMERICA, INC. Plaintiff, v. #GOOGLE INC. Defendant (#Java #Android #Dalvik )
GOOGLE INC.’S ANSWER TO PLAINTIFF’S COMPLAINT FOR
PATENT AND COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT AND COUNTERCLAIMS - #Google Answers #Oracle, Counterclaims, and Moves to Dismiss Copyright Infringement Claim
I pick up from the tone that Google is mad, not worried about the outcome, and that it intends to fight to the death on Claim VIII. I might be reading too much into it, but I don't think so. The lawyers take their stance based on what the client has told them it wants and based on what they expect will be the outcome. Usually at this point in litigation, the filings are fairly bland, though. Both sides try to reveal as little as possible, because discovery is coming and they don't want to help the other side at all or get stuck in something they said too soon, knowing that cases morph as more information gets known. Here, the language is stronger than that, and I believe it indicates that Google believes that this motion has a good shot at being granted, or rather that it believes that it *should* be granted. It's pretty hard to predict what a judge will or won't do, particularly at the beginning, but Google isn't afraid. That's what I see. - #Oracle's Larry Ellison Beats Up on His Rivals—Again
Ellison, the world's sixth-richest man, wears his corporate strategy on the sleeves of his tailored Italian suits. Think of his colorful outbursts as a map of Oracle's ambitions. Next year, Oracle plans to deliver a suite of business applications called Fusion to replace an aging collection of software it owns from acquisitions of PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and other companies. That will put Oracle into closer competition with Salesforce.com, whose online software helps companies manage customer relationships over the Web. - #Oracle Prefers Its Chip Companies Fabless
My point really was that we are interested in buying intellectual property of all kinds,” Ellison said. “We are an IP creator and IP buyer, as opposed to trying to expand our business by buying a lot of services companies….So insofar as semiconductors represent intellectual property, we would be interested in certain semiconductor companies. Most of our acquisitions and the bulk of our strategy are in creating and acquiring intellectual property, including chips. - Stealth Company PROFERI Raises $6.3 Million in Series A Funding
PROFERI (www.proferi.com), the cloud-based enterprise performance managementWorkday and Founder and former Chairman of PeopleSoft. Aneel Bhusri, Co-CEO at Workday and partner at Greylock, and Ben Horowitz, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, have joined the board of directors. company, today announced that it has raised $6.3 million in Series A financing. Greylock Partners led the round and was joined by Andreessen Horowitz and Dave Duffield, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of - Re-imagining Enterprise Applications in the #Cloud
Christian throws out the old data models, databases, and data restrictions. He then ejects the scale restrictions, broken user interaction paradigms, and performance bottlenecks. Rather than defining their business by their data model, customers define their business by the real people and processes that they use. And the resulting applications perform 1000X faster than their communist, excuse me, enterprise software counterparts. - #Oracle exec outlines Fusion Apps pricing model
Kurian alluded briefly to potential costs for middleware and packaged content, including certain BI capabilities. More details weren't immediately available Thursday. - Why #Oracle's CEO Should be Fired and its Board Sued by Shareholders
[Poorly argued,weak facts,preposterous conclusions.-DBM] - #RIM signs up partners for business 'super apps'
The Beam platform will include APIs, libraries and server software for enterprise developers. These tools will make it easy to push data and alerts, transfer files efficiently and query a BlackBerry for geo-location, presence, camera, device types and other data. In addition, Beam will make it easier for RIM applications to work with IBM WebSphere, Oracle Fusion and SAP Sybase's mobile platforms. - Business Intelligence and the Kung Fu Dragons of Wudang
Finally #Oracle is now heading towards, probably in R12.1.4 to embedding the BI content directly into Oracle ERP screens. (The technology to do this by embedding into Java screens – not hanging a BIEE screen of an ERP menu by the way – was released as part of 12.1.2). If you also look at the new Fusion Apps, embedded dashboards are now an integral part of each module. According to Oracle at Open World 2010, there will be “hundreds of pre-built embedded analytics in (Fusion V1) or as they put it another way “Analytics are always available in Fusion Apps”. - #Oracle Fusion Applications Overview
Please join Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, as he provides an update on Oracle's application software portfolio, including Oracle Fusion Applications. Following a brief presentation, a question & answer session will be held with Adam Holt from Morgan Stanley.
Date: Thursday, October 7, 2010
Time: 9:00 a.m. PT - #Oracle Buys Passlogix
Adds Enterprise Single Sign-on and Network Authentication Capabilities to Oracle Identity Management Suite - #Oracle Buys Passlogix
Expected Benefits for Customers
Supports single sign-on and sign-off to any application
Supports multi-level authentication to any application
Securely bridges between any form of user-authentication, application authentication, credential type, and identity and access management solutions
Does not require additional hardware or infrastructure to deploy
Does not require modifications to applications - Welcome to the Software Hairball Institute! (#Humor )
A common business affliction in which software applications like ERP and CRM are strung together in a tangled integration that functions so poorly it chokes the organization it was intended to help. - Why #Microsoft Is Playing Hardball with #Motorola
In his opinion, the spat is likely to be the end result of ongoing, and now failed, licensing negotiations between Microsoft and Motorola - the sort of thing he's seen a lot of in his time as a litigator. - #Microsoft, #Oracle, #Apple Show Competition Through Litigation Is Back
An early example of this is the sad story of a company that probably no one remembers except for those of us who were around this business in the early 1980s: Ashton-Tate, which developed the first really useful database software for small computers, called dBASE. It sold very well, and provided customers with a level of functionality and ease of use that simply wasn't available until then. About the time that Windows started to become popular, other companies started to create database software that also performed useful functions. - #OpenSource #Hadoop used to calculate Pi's two quadrillionth bit@ #Yahoo
- Web 3.0 Smartups: Moving Beyond the Relational Database (#NoSQL #BigData #OpenSource )
Instead of using its existing MySQL database to power its new search feature, Facebook created Cassandra. It accrued a significant performance boost (see slide 21). With one of its 50GB data stores, what used to take MySQL roughly a third of a second to write or read a data element, Cassandra sliced the write time by a factor or 2,500 and the read time by a factor of 22. In both cases, that is a significant gain in performance. - CTO @Padmasree Warrior To Lead #Cisco Enterprise, Commercial and Small Biz Development Team
We are excited to announce that our Chief Technical Officer, Padmasree Warrior, will add the duties of being SVP/GM of our Enterprise, Commercial and Small Business Development Group. This is the heart of Cisco’s business and we are fortunate to have the talent of an (ahem) warrior take over this industry leading team of over 10,000 world-class engineering talent. - It’s Not Just About Social Apps: #Hadoop is for the Enterprise Too (#OpenSource #BigData )
OpenLogic uses Hadoop and HBase to power our OLEX open source scanning solution. OLEX is used by large enterprises to identify the open source they are using and ensure compliance with open source policies and licenses.
Hadoop and HBase are fast, accurate, and highly scalable, but it does take some tuning to get the most from your implementation. I'll share lessons learned from OpenLogic's experiences. I'll also talk about why public clouds aren't a panacea for every problem and how open source technologies are being used to power "the cloud". - It’s the End of the World As We Know It (#NoSQL Edition)
Stonebraker deserves credit for anticipating the NoSQL boom 3 years in advance. Especially the replication and memory-only components. - Poyomi’s architecture: .NET meets #NoSQL and AMQP
Our company’s primary development platform is .NET 3.5 with C#, which might have had a reputation as being a bit of Microsoft-centric when it comes to interfacing with database engines, but lately this isn’t the case anymore. For Poyomi, we use two “next generation” backend products: CouchDB key/value database and RabbitMQ message queuing server. - #Google Percolator – global search jolt sans #MapReduce comedown (#BigData #NoSQL )
Designed by Google and, until now, jealously guarded by Google, Percolator is a platform for "incremental processing" — a means of continually updating the company's epic search index without reprocessing the entire thing from scratch. - Silicon Valley #NOSQL Meetup Group (palo alto)
A NOSQL Evening in Palo Alto
Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 6:00PM
Confirmed Panel Participants, by alphabetical order
- 10gen: Roger Bodamer — SVP, Products and Engineering
- Basho: Andy Gross — Vice President of Engineering
- Cloudant: Mike Miller — Co-Founder and Chief Scientist
- Cloudera
- GoGrid: Paul Lancaster
- InfiniteGraph: Darren Wood — Lead Architect
- NorthScale: James Phillips — Co-Founder and Senior Vice President, Products
- Riptano: Jonathan Ellis — Founder
- Scality: Erik Julin — Architect - #Hadoop World PROGRAM GUIDE
- 10 things you Need to Know About #NoSQL Databases
Lack of Expertise
The very newness of NoSQL means there are not a lot of developers and administrators who know the technology – making it difficult for companies to find people with appropriate expertise. In contrast, the RDBMS world has thousands of very qualified people.
Compatibility Issues
Unlike relational databases, NoSQL databases share little in the way of standards. Each NoSQL database has its own API, unique query interfaces, and peculiarities. This lack of standards means it’s impossible to simply switch from one vendor to another, if you become unhappy with the service. - Adapting your data model for #OpenSource #Cassandra (#NoSQL )
# The goal is to scale
# ColumnFamilies != Relational tables
# Trade-offs: you win some, you lose some
# Know your application
# Queries first
# Denormalization is OK
# Cassandra was built for this - Concurrency Revolution From a Hardware Perspective
Some of the point solutions to achieve concurrency in applications are:
* Thread Pools and Worklists: Thread Pools and Work Queues approach is a reasonable solution for coarse-grained concurrency which includes server applications with medium-weight requests like Database, File and Web Servers. This library support was added in JDK 5.
* Fork/Join: The Fork/Join technique is used for recursive decomposition. This is a good approach for lightweight CPU-bound problems that fit in memory, but not so good for I/O bound operations. Fork/join framework is already available in OpenJDK project and will be part of JDK 7 Release.
* Map/Reduce: Map/Reduce approach is used to decompose the data queries across a cluster. It was designed for very large input data sets (usually distributed) and the framework handles the concerns like distribution, reliability, and scheduling. Open-source implementations like Hadoop are available for Map/Reduce.
* Actors: In Actors computing model, the - #HP names former #SAP boss Apotheker CEO: The Léo Way
True to this outlook, he will move to Silicon Valley, but keep his home in Paris - #HP's New CEO, Chairman Eager to Start
Ray Lane, a former president and COO at Oracle, who was named HP’s non-executive chairman of the board today. Lane is currently a managing partner at VC powerhouse Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
He has, of course, tangled with rambunctious Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, but noted that the database giant was “one of many great partners and also tough competitors.”
Lane said he had been asked to be on the board of HP many times and decided to finally jump when he was approached last week.
“I’ve thought long and hard over the years about joining the board,” said Lane. “And I thought it was time.”
He said that he and Apotheker have known each other since 1992 and that they have had a “mutual respect,” despite often being business rivals.
Lane said he would focus on being a board member and will not be involved in any day-to-day management at HP. - Survey: #Hadoop is Great, but Challenges Remain: #Cloud #OpenSource #BigData
# The top three reasons for using Hadoop are data mining for business intelligence (19 percent), lowering the cost of data analysis (15 percent) and performing log analysis (13 percent), although uses like ETL (11 percent), scientific research (10 percent) and better utilizing unstructured data (9 percent) aren’t far behind. The longer organizations use Hadoop, the more valuable they find it and the more uses they find for it.
# The number of Hadoop developers looks to rise by between 50 and 60 percent within the next year.
# Java is the dominant language (86 percent), with Pig and Hive sharing the No. 2 spot at 44 percent each (multiple responses were allowed).
# The steep learning curve (44 percent) and hiring qualified people (34 percent) top the list of general challenges, while debugging Hadoop jobs (63 percent) and monitoring Hadoop jobs (47 percent) top the list of programming challenges. Seventy percent of respondents feel that these challenges will have a major-to-moderate eff - A Study of #Hadoop Developers (#OpenSource #BigData )
Primary Reasons for Using Hadoop…
Top Three Reasons:
• “mine data for improved business intelligence”
• “reducing cost of data analysis”
• “log analysis”
Despite Challenges:
• “steep learning curve”
• “hiring qualified people”
• “availability of appropriate products and tools”
• “having enough information on how to get started” - The SMAQ stack for big data (#MapReduce #OpenSource #BigData )
Storage, MapReduce and Query (SMAQ). SMAQ systems are typically open source, distributed, and run on commodity hardware. - #NetSuite Releases OneWorld 2010 with #Google Apps Integration
NetSuite released its OneWorld on-demand enterprise resource management package on Sept. 30 with a streamlined user interface and integration with Google Apps. - Oh Thank God #Oracle Has a New Rivalry
The two men teaming up to run HP are two men burned by Ellison, Leo Apotheker who was CEO of SAP in the years Oracle unquestionably trounced it and Ray Lane, one of Ellison’s many heir apparents over the years, who went to Kleiner Perkins to reinvent himself as a VC…to let’s just say mixed reviews. I’m not saying they’re going to go in everyday and whiteboard out how to take Oracle down, but these are two men who’d love to best Ellison at something. - #Oracle fury at #HP choice of chief
Much of this industrial espionage and intellectual property theft occurred while Léo was CEO of SAP,” Mr Ellison wrote in an e-mail to the Financial Times. - Apotheker vs. Hurd: Who Makes More Money?
Contract length:
Apotheker: four years...
Annual base salary:
Apotheker: $1.2 million...
Annual bonus:
Apotheker: target of 200% of base salary, up to 500% of base salary – for first year...
Signing bonus
Apotheker: $4 million; 80,000 restricted shares (worth $3.4 million at H-P Thursday’s closing stock price); 120,000 performance restricted units tied to H-P’s financial performance and shareholder returns...
Long-term stock grants:
Apotheker: 76,000 restricted shares plus 608,000 performance restricted units in two tranches...
Make whole benefits
Apotheker: $1.7 million...
Relocation benefits:
Apotheker: $2.9 million...
Paid vacation days:
Apotheker: No less than 25 days a year - #HP LÉO APOTHEKER EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENT
Base Salary. As of the Effective Date, and until October 31, 2012, the Company will pay Executive an annual salary of $1,200,000 as compensation for his services (such annual salary, as is then effective, to be referred to herein as “Base Salary”). The Base Salary will be paid periodically in accordance with the Company’s normal payroll practices and be subject to the usual, required withholdings. Executive’s annual salary beginning November 1, 2012, and thereafter, will be $1,200,000 and will be subject to review by the HR/Compensation Committee of the Board, or any successor thereto (the “Committee”) not less than annually, and adjustments will be made in the discretion of the Committee. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Base Salary will not be reduced other than (i) pursuant to a reduction that also is applied to substantially all other executive officers of the Company in a substantially similar manner and proportion or (ii) to give effect to the Committee’s policy, as publish - #SAP’s Stock Is Stuck If It Keeps On Bungling Software-As-A-Service
Competitors are happy to eat SAP's lunch...
SAP Market Share expected to decline...
We currently expect SAP’s share of the global ERP market to decline from around 26% in 2009 to around 24% by the end of our forecast period. - Six Ways That #Salesforce.com Uses Chatter
Here are a half dozen of them.
1. 'Exploding Connections': Benioff isn't the only one getting in touch with more employees as a result of Chatter. Daniels said Chatter has led to "crowdsourcing from everyone in the company." Questions asked to one employee are often answered by several, with each providing a unique perspective.
2. Tracking Deals in Real-time: Employees update deal status on Chatter so those interested know instantly when a deal has closed. "The data has been brought to life," said Daniels.
3. Discovering Competitors' Weaknesses: Salesforce.com employees debate the merits of competitive offerings like Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 on Chatter, pointing out weak features that could be used to marketing advantage.
4. Sharing Content for Customer Meetings: Sales reps share presentations before customer meetings to get feedback and avoid overlap, thanks to Chatter's absence of file size limits. Employees also share similar product use cases from other customers to make a s - #Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.0 Unveiled
Oracle VM Server for SPARC, which was earlier known as Logical Domains, is pre-installed on Oracle's SPARC T-Series servers; it is a server virtualization solution which allows up to 128 virtual servers on one system by taking benefit of the enormous thread scale offered by SPARC T-Series servers, which include the new SPARC T3 servers, allowing the organizations to be benefitted from the increased flexibility and improved server utilization. - Business Process Management for #Oracle users now includes BPMN 2.0
The software includes a native implementation of BPMN 2.0 and a browser-based Process Composer for process modeling. BPMN 2.0 tools are integrated with BPEL tools, which Oracle has been producing for some time now. BPMN 2.0 is a standard for process modeling carried forward by the Object Management Group (OMG). - How to get bought by #Google, #Facebook
Don't e-mail Steve Ballmer directly, don't tell wild stories about how great your company is, don't use the press to start a bidding war and don't sign perpetual contracts with customers. - #Microsoft Aims for Client-Cluster-#Cloud Unification in Technical Computing
The thrust of Microsoft's new vision is to converge the software environment for clients, clusters and clouds so that HPC-style applications can run across all three platforms with minimal fuss for developers and end users. Between the parallel support in Visual Studio, .NET, Parallel LINQ, Dryad, HPC server and Windows Azure, the company has built an impressive portfolio of software for scale-out applications. At the center of the technical computing strategy is Microsoft's HPC server, currently Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, that can hook into the desktop today and will be able to extend into the company's Azure cloud in the very near future. - #Microsoft exec: We 'get' the #cloud
Microsoft has already achieved that happy end state with Exchange [5] and SharePoint [6], which the company has made available by subscription as software-as-a-service offerings for two years. When you think about it, it doesn't matter so much where "services" like this live -- in a customer data center or on the servers maintained by Microsoft or one of its partners. What matters is that the overhead drops to the level yearned for by Muglia's CIO friend.
That's one of the guiding principles behind the forthcoming Windows Azure Appliance [7], Microsoft's development platform as a service (PaaS), packaged for easy deployment and maintenance across multiple servers. Microsoft partners such as Dell and HP will sell the hardware with the Azure platform preinstalled. Whether in a box or offered as a service over the Internet, it's all about driving down those operational costs: - A Look Into How The #Microsoft #Cloud Is Taking Shape
One of the most interesting products in the Microsoft pipeline is Windows Small Business Server Code Name "Aurora" which is Microsoft's belated attempt to make sense of what sort of server a small business actually needs in the cloud era. - #Microsoft Releases Service Pack 2 for #SQLServer 2008
The main improvements in SQL Server 2008 SP2 include integration of reporting services with SharePoint products, plus a couple of management improvements, according to Microsoft's announcement.
Report servers in SQL Server 2008 SP2 now integrate with SharePoint 2010 products. They also integrate with SharePoint 2007 products via an add-in, Microsoft's announcement explained. IT pros typically use reporting services tools in SQL Server to generate reports from "relational, multidimensional, or XML-based data sources," according to a Microsoft TechNet library description.
Microsoft also beefed up instance management with SP2 using the SQL Server Utility, which "models an organization's SQL Server-related entities in a unified view," according to an MSDN library description. - Internal #Microsoft emails show that most 'Live Spaces' blogs were dead
#Wordpress isn't getting 30m Live Spaces users - think of a much smaller number. No, smaller than that. And Microsoft isn't getting Wordpress to shift to Azure either. - #Microsoft: Windows Live Spaces already dead, #WordPress will only get 1% of 30M users
"The net is: 300k sites are expected to migrate of the 30M 'blogs' -- most are dead. Wordpress is adding somewhere in the order of zero servers to handle this capacity. This was a 'who has the best online service for blogging for our customers' and had nothing to do with technology." - Inside IE 9: The Chrome Effect -- #Microsoft vs. #Google
For this release, Microsoft has stayed on the cutting edge and kept current with developing specs from standards bodies. The IE 9 beta was devised based on hundreds of tests that Microsoft's Internet Explorer team wrote to clarify the ambiguities of developing standards. Those tests address developing specs such as HTML 5, SVG 1.1, CSS 3.0, ECMAScript 5 and DOM L2 and L3. A lead product manager for Google's Chrome browser team even heaped praise on Microsoft effort to stick to standards, according to a Financial Times report. - Léo Apotheker's Ascension (#HP )
My guess is that between the enterprise application play that HP can execute on with Léo at the helm and their infrastructure software with things such as HP OpenView, Léo can leverage both to be the glue that keeps HP humming. I know a lot of you application types forget about plumbing. But every house needs it and HP's got it. Its good plumbing too. It gives both IBM Tivoli and CA's Infrastructure management solutions a run for their money. How he combines both application and infrastructure management into a unified software solution (talk about an uber suite) and how Léo can manage the hardware and consumer spaces will be an interesting challenge for him. The other challenge will be developing rapport and trust with the engineering teams at HP. An area where I believe Léo got some serious schooling while at SAP. - Larry Ellison ‘Speechless’ Over New CEO of #HP
[I]nstead they pick a guy who was recently fired because he did such a bad job of running SAP - Why #SaaS and #Cloud Enterprise Applications Are Ensuring a Bright Future For Big #ERP Systems
“Big” ERP’s crisis of flexibility, cost, and overhead. Many journalists and analysts have covered in great detail the troubles with large, on-premise ERP systems: they can be cumbersome, cost too much, and create an IT overhead burden on the organization. Especially in this economy, companies are risk adverse and are less likely to bite off more than they can chew. Therefore, many companies are addressing this crisis by looking at smaller SaaS and cloud point solutions that they can implement in smaller chunks as their IT budgets and risk appetites allow. This leads us to the bottom of the graphic: the movement toward SaaS, cloud, and best of breed solutions.
The SaaS crisis of control, standardization, and integration. Moving clockwise from the bottom of the graphic, you see that eventually organizations using SaaS point solutions will face a crisis of flexibility, standardization, and integration. Companies grow, acquire other companies, expand into new territories, and globalize th - New #HP Leadership Indicates Interest In Enterprise Software
Apotheker and Lane bring software vision and leadership. Léo bring global software experience, effective salesmanship, and a highly strategic point of view. Ray Lane brings Silicon Valley credibility, long term vision, and wisdom sorely needed to the board. HP needs to make acquisitions in software to take this to the next level. Time is not on HP’s side. The core printer and ink business can be vulnerable and must be defended while making the play for enterprise software. - Ellison on #HP CEO Choice: I’m Speechless. Insiders: We Wish.
“Larry should have stopped at ‘I’m speechless,’” one told me. “He’s spent $42 billion on acquisitions to still be No. 2 in software.” - #SAP Torn Between the Old World and the New
15 percent of customers are still running R/3 4.6c.
SAP can't force them upgrade. But SAP can't ditch them, especially when there's serious maintenance dollars to be made off the laggards. (Just ask third-party support providers.)
The complicated dilemma facing SAP is no different than Oracle's or any other ERP or CRM vendors' current task: bringing enough of the base forward on lucrative upgrades while mollifying (and milking) the legion of legacy customers who like what they already have.
This can give any vendor a bit of an identity crisis. - #SAP extends support and maintenance on R/3 4.6c
With the timeline increase, prices changes are as follows:
• SAP Enterprise Support customers: Extended maintenance for SAP R/3 4.6c is included in SAP Enterprise Support services.
• SAP Standard Support customers: Extended maintenance for SAP R/3 4.6C at an additional fee of 6% per year, up from 4%.
With this change, support for all older releases -- 4.7 and ERP 2004 -- will end in March, 2013. All SAP software releases go through a seven year cycle of mainstream maintenance, at list price, followed by a two year period of extended maintenance at an increased list price. - Sohaib Abbasi doubled #Informatica’s revenues in five years - How to create a vision and strategy to grow your business
When he took over Informatica Corp. (NASDAQ: INFA) as chairman and CEO in July 2004, the data integration company was on its way to finishing the year with $219.7 million in total revenue and a net loss of $104.4 million.
“At the time, Informatica was pursuing two distinctly different market options — data warehousing and, the second one, analytic applications and business intelligence,” Abbasi says. - Tech giants back #Microsoft in changing patent litigation
The "preponderance of evidence" standard, as Corporate Council writer Joe Mullin wrote, is akin to "more likely than not."
Such a change would make it easier for companies like Microsoft to argue the invalidity of a patent and, hence, make it easier for them to win a patent-infringement lawsuit against them. It potentially would save such companies millions of dollars a year on legal fees and damages awards, and would cut down on the number of frivolous lawsuits levels against them. - Léo Apotheker Named CEO and President of #HP
The Board also elected Ray Lane, Managing Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as a new member of the Board and designated him as non-executive Chairman. Both elections are effective November 1. - #HP Joins the Enterprise Software Market: Léo Apotheker Becomes CEO
For those who disparage Léo’s rocky tenure at SAP, remember that, had 2008 finished the way it started for SAP, Léo would have been seen as one of the most successful CEOs in the company’s history. The company’s first-half numbers were incredible — revenues were up almost 20% over the previous year — and while they have been lost in the swamp of the last two years, those numbers reflect a lot of what is possible for HP with Léo at the helm.
And for those who worry that Leo doesn’t get hardware, I wouldn’t worry about that. HP has plenty of people who do. The problem has never been that HP doesn’t know the hardware business, it’s that HP doesn’t know what to do with all that knowledge. Insofar as I was already thinking that a focus on the enterprise software market is one of the things HP should be doing, I have to concur with the HP board’s choice on this.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Enterprise headlines and excerpts, 2010-10
October news from the Enterprise Software and Solutions world - LONG
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