Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-28

• #Oracle’s strategy for GlassFish, #MySQL, OpenOffice & Solaris
  MySQL will continue to receive investment and be managed within the separate open source division at Sun. MySQL will also have a separate sales force. Recall that that GlassFish and WebLogic Server, which compete on paper, but address different use cases, will be sold by the same sales force. More specifically, GlassFish will be sold by the sales team responsible for selling Oracle’s strategic Fusion Middleware suite. And yet, Oracle has decided to put MySQL and Oracle DB into separate the divisions and assign a separate sales team to MySQL. Hopefully this is temporary and MySQL will be managed and sold by the Fusion Middleware division in the near future.
• State of the union at #RedHat – Times are ‘exciting,’ CEO proclaims
  Bilski goes Supreme Red Hat has long worked to address the problem that software patents pose for innovation. In October, we filed an amicus briefUS Supreme Court. In the brief, Red Hat explains the practical problems of software patents to software developers. The brief, filed in the Bilski case, asks the Supreme Court to adopt the lower court’s “machine-or-transformation” test and to make clear that it excludes software from patentability. with the
• New beginnings for #Sun, #MySQL -- and me
  the business will be in good hands under Edward Screven and Ken Jacobs, who was our longtime contact at Oracle managing the InnoDB storage engine. I expect MySQL's growth will accelerate inside of Oracle and will become an even greater competitor to Windows.
• #Oracle Outlines Direct-Sales #Sun Plan
  Oracle and applications is a bit of a sideshow," says Bill McDermott, president and executive board member at SAP, the No. 1 supplier of business applications.
• Latest Legal Battle Leaves America’s Cup Showdown in Doubt
  Alinghi going to court in the U.S. against a U.S. team is like going to complain to your mother-in-law,” he said.
• #Informatica Q4 2009 Earnings Call Transcript
  In Q4 2009, total revenue grew by 21% year-over-year to an all-time record of $150.9 million. License revenue grew by 25% year-over-year last quarter to get another record of $71.6 million. With non-GAAP operating margin up 29% and non-GAAP EPS of 31 cents, we achieved the most profitable quarter today. With a full year 2009, despite the challenges of the great recession, total revenues grew by 10% to an all-time record of $500.7 million and non-GAAP operating margin increased by 280 basis points to 25%. By all these measures, Q4 2009 was our best quarter ever and Cap the best year ever.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-27

• Cloud Computing Forum - Break Through With #Oracle
  [Is Larry attending?-DBM] Take Advantage of Cloud Computing Today Ready to break through the haze around cloud computing? In this full-day event for IT professionals, Oracle experts clarify how organizations can take advantage of enterprise cloud computing. You'll learn the what, why, and how of cloud computing, so you can develop your organization's own cloud strategy and roadmap.
• #Oracles remedial classes
  it was a significant cultural shift for a software company to be presented with a multi-hundred million capex budget for a data center. The biggest capex many software executives have seen is in their office furnishings. Safra Catz, the CFO will have to get used to those capex budgets and those around next generation chips if Sun hardware is to be kept viable
• Run IT As a Business - Why That's a Train Wreck Waiting to Happen
  No one inside your company is your customer. Thinking that they are is the core fallacy of the standard model, and it has caused no end of trouble.
• That Didn't Take Long - AMR's Richardson, Cecere gone after Gartner Acquisition
  Bruce Richardson Named to Executive Spot at Enterprise and Supply Chain Software Provider Infor; Most Thought Employment Contract Would Keep Him at Gartner for Awhile
• #Oracle and #Sun – Quick Analysis
  it’ll be f’ing awesome.
• #Oracle lays out its vision for a Sunny future
  Hoping to be the reincarnation of the 1960s IBM, Oracle officials laid out their ambitions for the newly combined Oracle-Sun with a focus on providing tightly integrated software-hardware stacks it hopes to directly sell and support.
• #Sybase joins in-memory database fray
  Version 15.5 of the Sybase ASE (Adaptive Server Enterprise) has an option to run in-memory databases, said Peter Thawley, a Sybase senior director and architect. Sybase joins other database vendors in offering in-memory capability. Oracle also offers an in-memory database, Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database 11G, from a company it acquired in 2005. IBM also started offering this capability in 2008, with its solidDB, also the result of a company acquisition. The in-memory approach involves placing the entire database within a server's working memory, rather than storing it on disk. This cuts the time it takes to write data to, or read data from, the disk, which typically can take two to four milliseconds. An in-memory write or read can take less than a millisecond. (The changes can then later be committed to disk, or not, as per the administrator's preference).
• #Oracle will boost #MySQL, release Cloud Office suite
  Screven will oversee MySQL, OpenOffice.org and other open-source apps in Oracle's Open-Source Software division.
• Free and Open Source Software from #Oracle
  Everything you need to know about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) from, and for, Oracle—including Oracle's own Linux Projects, hosted here. Read the Oracle+Open Source FAQ for more details. Send any questions or comments to webmaster@oss.oracle.com
• #Oracle lays out plans for #Sun Microsystems virtualization assets
  Oracle will enable management of two disparate virtualization platforms -- Oracle VM running on x86 systems, and Solaris LDoms running on SPARC CMT chips -- from a single console, Oracle Enterprise Manager.
• Don't expect an #Amazon EC2 competitor from #Oracle
  Although Oracle will gain all the technology it needs to launch a public cloud-computing infrastructure service like Amazon's Elastic Compute CloudSun Microsystems, it has "no plans" to do so, Oracle Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven said Wednesday during a company event. Services like EC2 offer pay-as-you-go, on-demand computing resources over the Internet that can scale up and down according to demand. (EC2) with the purchase of

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-26

• Turning a new page…
  Craig Cmehil transitions to the Standards Management and Strategy team, reporting to Claus von Riegen. While Craig will continue to cover TechEd programs such as Demo Jam and Hacker Night, he will put a strong focus on community initiatives such as open source and collaborative business process modeling in order to better utilize and address community momentum in support of SAP’s evolving product strategy.
• Ingres Announces Technology Preview Program for Ingres VectorWise
  Ingres VectorWise is a groundbreaking database technology that delivers the performance needed to conquer today’s data explosion and is the first business software to fully take advantage of advances in modern chip technology. The technology preview program gives Ingres partners and customers an opportunity to access an early version of Ingres VectorWise and test the performance capabilities of the database. Initial results show that Ingres VectorWise achieves more than 10x performance gains. To learn more and apply to be part of the technology preview program, please go to www.ingres.com/vectorwise/preview-program.php.
• VectorWise | Technology Preview Program - Ingres
  How to participate 1. Fill out the application and complete the survey questions for the technology preview program and the opportunity to test Ingres VectorWise. 2. If you are selected, an Ingres representative will be in contact for next steps to download and install Ingres VectorWise. 3. Ingres will work with those selected for testing, assessments, and feedback on the product.
• #Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's Top 10 Reasons For Buying #Sun
  So why indeed did Larry Ellison want Sun so badly? Why was he willing to pay $7.4 billion and put up with the excruciating and endless (if I may mix my continental metaphors) Grand Kabuki theater of the absurd staged by the European Union's anti-capitalism commission? Well I have my theories—10 of them, in fact—and I'd like to share them with you in reverse order, starting with #10 and moving through to my #1 reason. Let me know what you think:
• #RedHat News | #Oracle’s #Java Opportunity
  Oracle was among several leaders asking Sun to make Java and the Java process more open and less prone to self-serving actions by a single vendor. Red Hat supported Oracle’s initiative to make Java inclusive and open then, and we encourage Oracle to fulfill its original proposal now. We believe that an open, independent JCP is critical for the future success of Java.
• The Art of the Cloud Computing Deal
  IT organizations should check for “service evolution clauses” in their outsourcing contracts. These clauses, said Ford, can compel the IT services company to upgrade services to keep pace with evolutions in technology such as cloud computing. That could mean that the IT services company could be obligated to provide a lower-cost set of IT services by taking advantage of cloud computing platforms. Most of these clauses generally state that the IT services company has to provide this evolution for free, but Ford thinks that such a free ride is unlikely. Instead, he thinks customers and their IT services providers will come to terms around some level of switching costs, but the long term savings on the services cost could still make the switch-over to a cloud computing platform compelling.
• #Oracle Sues #RiminiStreet For 'Massive Theft'
  Oracle said Rimini Street is using ill-gotten materials to provide such services. "This case is about massive theft of Oracle's software and related support materials through an illegal business model," Oracle said in court papers filed Monday in federal court in Nevada.
• #Oracle Gets OK from EU on #Sun Aquisition – and Sues #RiminiStreet
  A lot of care is being applied to not infringe on any vendor’s rights when distributing fixes and legal updates. [Helmut, where did you get your law degree?-DBM]

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-25

• The Hidden Value In #SaaS Deployments
  Bottom Line For SaaS Vendors - Create Additional Value As An Information Broker The end game for SaaS vendors may not be a re-creation of the on-premise world in the Cloud. In fact, those vendors with a true multi-tenant SaaS model may turn out to find additional revenue streams as information brokers. Expect demand for premium information-on-demand services to begin with benchmarking and evolve to prediction. For example, imagine the benefits gained by organizations who consume the latest buying behavior data from their CRM vendors. Organizations could turn to HCM vendors for geographical salary or hiring trends. Customers of financial vendors could better predict credit risk factors. A key requirement - customers must trust their SaaS vendor’s data ownership and privacy policies before the industry makes this transformation. With acceptance, vendors will have more reasons to move to a SaaS offense.
• My friend Charles
  I personally am angry to see this on billboards and gossip sites. His personal life is not that scandalous especially if many of us had not even heard about it. He deserves our disapproval, but not all this media circus. So, yes, speaking for a friend – I say “back off”. Plenty of challenges that deserve more of our attention.
• Designing applications for cloud deployment
  Cynical version of the first rule: All your cloud boxes are equally unreliable A very healthy way to look at this is that all your cloud applications will run on a bunch of cheap web servers. It’s healthy because planning for that in advance will help you keep your mental health when glitches occur, and it will also force you to design for machine failure upfront making the system more resilient.
• #Google’s founders to give up control
  The sales will reduce their combined voting rights in the company to 48 per cent, from 59 per cent at present, Google said. However, their economic interest will only slip from 18 per cent to 15 per cent.
• Force.com – Evening the score
  The interesting thing about the Force.com platform is that for all the negatives I had about it in my previous post, I can’t deny that it is lightning fast, which for me is it’s saving grace. As an example, we were planning to build a wizards application that would be composed of multiple steps. Our wizard engine would have to save data between each step in the wizard. In our initial prototyping, we felt that we would need to build a caching layer between the wizard engine and the database to keep the application responsive. When we built our prototype wizard engine, we were a bit worried because the Force.com platform doesn’t actually support caching. What we found though, was that the caching layer wasn’t required because we could persist the data direct to the database between steps and the server would still respond in under 200ms which was more than responsive enough for our clients. The next area that we found Force.com provided a decent solution was for the 30 or so admin scree
• Force.com vs .NET
  Force.com platform has been nothing but an earth shattering disappointment when compared to the .Net framework we were initially intending to use. Before I start, I should make it clear that I represent neither Salesforce, the force.com platform or the .Net framework. I have worked with .net for over 6 years on a variety of projects however I’ve only worked with the Force.com platform for the last 6 months. In that time however, I’ve been on 2 Force.com training courses, spent countless hours learning and trawling through the Force.com forums and have worked with various Force.com experts to work on a way to deliver a technical design for our front end application. With that in mind, Here’s the developer level, nuts and bolts, no holds barred comparison between the two.
• #Oracle + #Sun Strategy Update - Financial Analyst Webcast
  Listen via the Internet: An audio broadcast of the breakout session will be available live and via replay at: http://www.oracle.com/investor
• The IT Platform Principle: The First Shall Not Be First
  Out of the 15 platform industries that we studied, 14 of the current leaders began as followers in a market created by a competitor’s platform. In only one market, for integrated business software, was the original platform creator still the leader—SAP AG. Five were fast followers, which we define as the second, third or fourth company to enter a market. The other nine were later followers.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-24

• #Google Founders Plan to Sell Shares
  Under the trading plan, the co-founders would reduce their combined holdings in Google from about 57.7 million common shares, or approximately 18% of outstanding capital stock, to 47.7 million shares, or about 15% of the company, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange filing. Under the stock trading plan, adopted on Nov. 30, 2009, the two would also reduce their combined voting shares from 59% to about 48%, the filing said.
• Overview on Business ByDesign and My Journey at #SAP so far
  There are so many innovations in ByDTM that it would be difficult to say what is its best feature. I will list some of the things that I like about it: * Pattern based development - to maintain uniformity across screens within one application as well as across applications (FIN/SCM/SRM/CRM..) * Workcenter concept - the application areas have been structured in workcenters - which are based on the typical business processes in the day to day work of an organization. E.g. Financials will have workcenters like Cost and Revenue, General Ledger, Inventory Management etc. Similarly, CRM will have workcenters like Sales Orders, Customer Invoicing, Marketing, Product and Service Portfolio etc. * A role based access management system - the workcenters would be assigned to a user based on his/her role in the organization. The data that would be visible in the same workcenter to one user may be different from the data visible to another user who is assigned th
• #SAP's Business ByDesign demo with Rainer Zinow
  Rainer Zinow, senior vice president of SAP Business ByDesign, gives a short introduction to the company's new software as a service (SaaS) ERP application.
• Interview with #SAP Business ByDesign Partner - Bendpak
  Learn how SAP Business ByDesign has helped Bendpak, an automotive service and equipment manufacturer.
• Skullcandy - Recession Buster with #SAP
  Rick Alden's Skullcandy: Recession-buster with the help of SAP. See how innovation is No. 1 at the Utah based headphones company. 300% of growth in the last 4 years speak for themselves.
• Java's future uncertain under #Oracle grip
  "I don't expect Oracle to do anything sinister to Java," Johnson said. "It is not a stupid company.
• #Apple And #Oracle Face Off
  On Wednesday we will gather not to praise #Sun Microsystems, but to bury it.
• 40 Fast Facts about #Oracle
  Oracle has purchased 57 different companies in the last five years.
• #Google's Earnings Soar
  revenue rose 17% in the fourth quarter to $6.67 billion from a year earlier, up from only 7% revenue growth in the third quarter and 3% growth in the second quarter. Meanwhile, Google's profit more than quintupled in the fourth quarter to $1.97 billion, or $6.13 a share, from $382 million, or $1.21 a share, a year ago. During the 2008 quarter, Google took a charge related to investments in AOL Inc. and wireless service provider Clearwire Corp.
• Some Types of Silicon Valley Start-Ups Won't See Venture Capital
  In particular, companies in areas such as networking equipment, telecommunications, semiconductors and alternative fuels may be fresh out of luck, venture capitalists said.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-23

• Is the #SAP KPI Program Really Dead?
  [Yes.] SAP is going to work with SUGEN "to evolve" the KPI program into something that can measure Enterprise Support's value "in a way that requires less investment [on the part of customers] and is totally scalable across our entire customer base," Wood said.
• Sohaib Abbasi of #Informatica
  What's happening more recently is the data is getting fragmented to cloud computing vendors. Any customer using Salesforce.com is relying on them to manage information on their behalf. So that trend is fragmenting the data, and making it harder to use for the overall business. The next wave of integration is beyond company boundaries.
• Business must take the lead on carbon management - by Leo Apotheker, #SAP
  businesses could face daily fines of up to $32,500 for non-compliance.
• #Sun CEO's internal memo: Beat #IBM
  Sun is a brand, #Oracle is your company.
• BMW #Oracle USA 17 vs Alinghi 5
  We’ve put together what we’ve found out about the two boats here, if you think that you know more then let us know in the comments and we’ll keep ourselves up-to-date. The biggest differences we’ve seen so far is the interchangeable masts and wing from BMW Oracle, we’ll soon see whether it’s an advantage.
• America's Cup: Exciting morning on the water for BMW #Oracle
  The fast part, I can confirm. Trying to keep up in a 6-metre RIB was more or less impossible with the sea state. What was amazing to me was how stable the USA was in the chop, using her waterline length to slice through the waves like they weren't there.
• Oracle president Charles Phillips' dirty laundry hung up in Times Square
  The one overlooking Times Square stretched three-stories high and featured the married former U.S. Marine captain with YaVaughnie Wilkins, a 41-year-old former journalism student at San Francisco State University whose last address was reportedly a multimillion-dollar faux French chateau on the Peninsula. One Web site described it as the couple's "Hillsborough love nest."
• Will you buy your #Oracle software from Charles Phillips?
  The big question: Does someone’s personal life issues impact whether customers sign up for big enterprise software licenses?
• #Sybase says it continues to assert infringement of patents by #Vertica Systems
  A court ruling that cleared Vertica of patent infringement is to be appealed by Sybase.
• #Sybase's CIO on Cloud Computing, Mobility
  So we haven’t been hit by this downturn in the same way as other companies. We’re all thankful for that and have continued to work toward making it happen. We can’t rest. It’s a renewed effort. We have to think about how to posture ourselves to grow to that $2B mark and beyond—what kinds of information systems and technologies are people going to need, and how can we work with the business to improve their processes and advise them on the right technologies to improve their margins by doing things more efficiently and improve the top line to help bring more business into the company.
• The Grill: John Chen
  The #Sybase chief says he's excited to capture what he predicts will be double-digit growth in data-intensive mobile applications...Two new features -- geolocation and near-field communications -- will generate limitless new data-intensive apps that know where you are, who you are, why you are there. We're very excited. Even if the markets stay bad, we think growth is still going to be in the 10% to 20% range. In a good market, that will be even higher, because in the enterprise alone, adoption will be doubling.
• #Sun-#Oracle Deal Could Shake Up Tech
  The greater strategic value for Oracle, though, comes in Sun's Java, Solaris and MySQL software technology. MySQL, which competes with Microsoft's SQL and IBM's DB2, is one of Sun's brightest rays and was the major bone of contention in the Oracle-Sun deal. Regulators initially voiced concern over Oracle's willingness to maintain MySQL's open-source credentials.
• International Business Machines Corp. Q4 2009 Earnings Call Transcript
  Last week we announced that for the 17th consecutive year we were number one in U.S. patents with over 4,900 in 2009. That is more than the total of Microsoft, HP, Oracle, Apple, Accenture and Google combined and consistent with our shift in business mix, about 70% of our patent portfolio is for software and services. We have complemented our organic investments with acquisitions and one of our primary investment areas is business analytics which provides a solid platform for our Smarter Planet initiatives.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-22

• #SAP – Betting on the Half-Life of the Frictionless On-Demand Platform
  SAP are suggesting that the venerable ERP provider will soon kill off the Frictionless platform in favor of its home-grown Business ByDesign SaaS platform (originally aimed at just the SMB market). [DBM-I heard the same thing.]
• Mistress buys ads revealing affair with Obama adviser
  [#Oracle president Charles Phillips story from NBC]
• James Gosling: on the Java Road
  [R.I.P #Sun Microsystems 1928-2010 The Network IS]
• OK, it's time to look forward...
  Enough of being maudlin, it's time to look forward to being a unified company: #Sun + #Oracle = Snorcle ?
• #Oracle - #Sun Layoff Prediction: Hold Analyst Accountable
  Less quantifiable but no less real is the personal damage he will have done to the approximately 27,000 employees at Sun, who've had to deal with plenty of uncertainty, rumor, and innuendo in the nine months since Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun. If it turns out that Thill's information is wrong, then his decision to launch a media frenzy via his report of imminent mass layoffs will have been the height of irresponsibility for someone responsible for helping manage other people's money.
• Study: SaaS Pricing Is Still Opaque And Freemium Is Rare
  Only 30% Really Want You To Call Them...Only 24% Show Pricing Transparently...Only 6% Have a Freemium Plan
• The Sad Tale Of Charles Phillips
  With a famously stealth succession plan in the event of Mr. Ellison’s departure, disability, or misadventure, it can’t help Charles’ prospects that he’s looking like three kinds of public fool, and that’s before you even get to the morality, parenting, or trust-worthiness issues that his extramarital behavior engenders.
• Scorned Mistress of Married Obama Adviser Posts Billboards Nationwide
  But as every scorned lover knows, looks can be deceiving. This billboard -- which also has gone up in Atlanta and San Francisco -- is the ultimate act of revenge -- a very public retaliation by a dumped mistress aimed at a very wealthy, and married, businessman who is an adviser to President Obama. YaVaughnie Wilkins posted the signs after she learned that her lover, Charles E. Phillips — president and director of the tech conglomerate Oracle Corporation and a member of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board — had reconciled with his wife, the New York Post reported.
• YaVaughnie Wilkins, former mistress of Charles E. Phillips, proclaims love with billboards in New York City, Atlanta and San Francisco
  Phillips who lives with his wife and their son, Chas, in an Upper West SideKaren Phillips' divorce lawyer didn't return calls. Wilkins did not return calls or respond to an e-mail. Oracle also didn't return calls. brownstone, said, "Oh, man," after The Post knocked on his door yesterday. "I'm sorry," he said before closing the door.
• Oracle: Mine is bigger and, um, more integrated
  #Oracle and its #Sun division, which could retain its name and at least some of its identity after the acquisition closes once antitrust regulators in China and Russia give the deal the nod, have a lot of work to do to knock Sun's processor, server, storage, networking, operating system, server virtualization, software development, database, and middleware roadmaps into shape and mesh them with Oracle's own operating system, virtualization, database, middleware, development tool, and application software stacks.
• Vertica Continues to Outperform the Analytic Database Market
  Last year, the analytic database company more than doubled its customer base and reached its 100th customer milestone in record time for a data warehouse vendor. As evidenced by recent analyst reports, Vertica also widened the gap with other emerging vendors in the analytic database market. In addition to signing dozens of new deals with its traditional base of telecommunications and financial companies, Vertica established strongholds with healthcare, retail and Web-based knowledge companies with new customers such as Guess? Inc., Zynga, ForeclosureRadar, Visible Measures and SDI Health.
• 25 top-paying companies - Salesforce.com (2)
  Average total pay: $249,607 For: Senior Account Executive* Best companies rank: 43 Salesforce.com's focus on cloud computing -- its software helps companies manage sales and customer relationships online -- has helped it keep revenue growth sky-high. Sales, which have been increasing about 20% a year, topped $1 billion last year. That leads to lofty pay for employees as well. The San Francisco-based company sets pay levels above market, and every employee is bonus-eligible under a "mahalo plan" (mahalo is Hawaiian for thank you). The more you make, the higher the bonus target: For senior managers, it's 15% of pay, for directors it's 20%. "We have to save the customer from Microsoft, Oracle and SAP," rails CEO Marc Benioff in his 2009 book, "Behind the Cloud." To keep employees motivated for the crusade, the Salesforce gives stock options and restricted stock awards to a wide range of staff, and regularly enhances perks. One recent addition: $5,000 for adoption aid.
• 25 top-paying companies - Adobe Systems (11)
  Average total pay: $153,345 For: Senior Computer Scientist, Software Development* Best companies rank: 42 It was a bad-news, good-news kind of year for the company behind such popular software as Flash, Photoshop and Acrobat. On the bad side, Adobe laid off 680 employees toward the end of 2009. On the good, layoff victims got severance "above industry standards," the company said. Also in the bad column: Total compensation for senior computer scientists fell by $12,000 last year. In the good, the average $153,000 a year they earn is still solid. In fact, Adobe slipped just 1 spot on our top-paying list to 11th place, down from 10th last year.
• 25 top-paying companies - Microsoft (23)
  Average total pay: $120,657 For: Engineering - Software Developmentlargest software company on this list. Microsoft has minted many millionaires -- and a handful of billionaires -- since its founding in 1975. Stock options, the main source of this wealth, were phased out in 2003. But not to worry: 95% of employees now get restricted stock, which they can sell after a vesting period. Engineer in Test* Best companies rank: 51 It's no surprise to find the world's
• 25 top-paying companies - Intel (24)
  Average total pay: $118,295 For: Component Design Engineer* Best companies rank: 98 With "Intel inside" computers everywhere, the chip-maker is able to reward everyone from engineers to administrative staffers well. Company policy is to pay "above market" when it's performing as well as competitors (now), and "well above market" when it's beating them. Bonus time comes not once, but twice a year.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-21

• Sun Microsystems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Regulatory approval has been granted by the United States and the European Union.
• Charles & YaVaughnie: A Selected Gallery - Charles Phillips
  [Doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for interpretation-DBM]
• Are the 'Charles & YaVaughnie' Billboards the Work of a Scorned Mistress? - Charles Phillips
  The mysterious billboards advertise an online photo album which includes eight years worth of romantic pictures, emails, karoake performances, notes, tickets (including to Barack Obama's Inauguration) which seem to document a long-time affair between Charles Philips and YaVaughnie Wilkins.
• #Oracle Exec Admits Relationship With Woman on Billboard
  My divorce proceedings began in 2008. The relationship with Ms. Wilkins has since ended and we both wish each other well
• Internal Memo: #Sun CEO Jon Schwartz to Staff
  Upon change in control, every employee needs to emotionally resign from Sun. Go home, light a candle, and let go of the expectations and assumptions that defined Sun as a workplace. Honor and remember them, but let them go. For those that ultimately won’t become a part of Oracle, this will be the first step in a new adventure. Sun has a tremendous reputation across the planet, well beyond Silicon Valley. It’s a great brand to have on your resume. We’re known as self-starters, capable of ethically managing through complexity and change, for delivering when called upon, and for inventing and building the future. With the world economy stabilizing, I’m very confident you’ll land on your feet. You’re a talented, tenacious group, and there’s always opportunity for great people.
• 2010 Intentions (Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Blog)
  So in 2010, I intend to focus my team and my own work on the following: 1. Transforming Business Models.. 2. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as Infrastructure... 3. The Modern User Experience... 4. Next Generation WCM... 5. Inherent Security and Compliance...
• Vendors: suggestions to maximize briefing value
  I offer my list of five worst practices I wish vendors would curtail:
• #Oracle preparing pink slips ahead of #Sun acquisition
  Oracle will send out three separate e-mails -- the first congratulating the workers who will remain on the payroll, the second notifying workers who've been laid off, and the third offering a select group of employees conditional employment during the transition.
• #Oracle wins #mySQL but opponents do not admit defeat
  Florian Mueller are holding out hope that China or Russia can derail it, as he wrote me this morning Atlanta time: Oracle still needs clearance from the Chinese and Russian antitrust authorities and it’s a matter of respect not to consider this process finished until those major jurisdictions have also taken and announced their decisions.
• Why Hadoop Users Shouldn’t Fear Google’s New MapReduce Patent
  “Like other responsible, innovative companies, Google files patent applications on a variety of technologies it develops. While we do not comment about the use of this or any part of our portfolio, we feel that our behavior to date has been inline with our corporate values and priorities.”
• Google's MapReduce patent: what does it mean for Hadoop?
  Another dimension of this issue is the patent's validity. On one hand, it's unclear if taking age-old principles of functional software development and applying them to a cluster constitutes a patentable innovation. On the other hand, Google's MapReduce paper indisputably popularized the concept and is freely characterized by Hadoop's developers as the inspiration behind their project. This suggests that Google is owed some credit by the industry for advancing distributed computing with its MapReduce paper, a factor that could strengthen the patent.
• Second Chance Gets Grant for Pet Rescue Foundation
  The grant was awarded from Maddie's Fund, The Pet Rescue Foundation, (www.maddiesfund.org) a family foundation funded by Workday and PeopleSoft Founder Dave Duffield and his wife, Cheryl. Maddie's Fund is helping to create a no-kill nation where all healthy and treatable shelter dogs and cats are guaranteed a loving home. Maddie's Fund is named after the family's beloved Miniature Schnauzer.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-20

• Forrester: Tech Downturn 'Unofficially Over'
  The U.S. IT market will grow by 6.6% as high-tech spending rebounds in 2010, according to Forrester Research's latest estimates.
• Oracle + Sun Strategy Update Webcast
  Don't miss this opportunity to learn more about how this powerful combination will transform the IT industry. Register today for this live Webcast.
• #Oracle may get EU approval on #Sun this week: source
  A person close to Oracle, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter, said on Wednesday that the software maker expected to win European clearance by the end of this week.
• #Sun-#Oracle: Death by Bureaucracy
  The combination of Sun and Oracle (Snorkel), is increasingly looking like the company that can never be. After it finally appeared to get through EU approvals, now Russia is threatening to block the merger (China may follow), due to their inability to distance themselves from MySQL, which has likely added billions to the cost of this merger and effectively taken billions from the value of the merged company. Here in California, where both companies are located and where we may shortly need snorkels to breathe, it was being reported (mis-reported?) that Oracle will have to lay off around 50 percent of the remaining Sun employees if the merger goes through, creating serious doubts about what will be left if this increasingly troubled merger goes through.
• An Introduction to Domain Driven Design
  Domain-driven design consists of a set of patterns for building enterprise applications from the domain model out. In your software career you may well have encountered many of these ideas already, especially if you are a seasoned developer in an OO language. But applying them together will allow you to build systems that genuinely meet the needs of the business.
• Rating ERP Vendor Names: Good, Bad and the Ugly
  Which software vendors have good brand names--and which vendors should have spent some more time considering the alternatives.
• #Sage Launches Major #ERP Upgrade
  In its ERP X3 v6 release, Sage taps Web 2.0, SaaS technologies to bring global, mid-market customers an ERP system said to be robust and agile.
• #Intuit and #Microsoft Join Forces to Deliver Web Applications to Millions of Small Businesses: Companies expand cloud opportunity for developers and channel partners.
  The two companies plan to integrate the capabilities of their cloud services platforms — the Intuit Partner Platform and Windows Azure platform — to enable developers and channel partners to deliver solutions to the millions of employees within businesses that use QuickBooks® financial software. In addition, the two companies will provide small businesses with Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity applications via the Intuit App Center.
• 2010 Prediction: The Year #ERP (#SAP, #Oracle, and #Infor) Get Spend Management Right
  In a matter of quarters, both SAP and Oracle have gotten flexible-deployment religion. No longer must an organization tie a back-end upgrade or deployment to an ERP procurement-technology investment. Both providers now offer a range of deployment options that mimic the deployment flexibility of best-of-breed vendors. Now, this is not to say the situation is perfect. In the case of core P2P, users will sacrifice functional and integration capabilities if they're running a new version of the hosted application with an older back end in SAP's case (and Oracle still pushes installed in core P2P areas); but it's a better situation than before. Moreover, through BPO relationships in the sector, SAP -- among others -- is becoming significantly more flexible on pricing, allowing users to now pay for applications over several years in a model that looks like traditional SaaS (even if many of its deployments are really single tenant hosted models). I was on the phone with someone this week who m
• Larry Ellison to Unveil #Oracle + #Sun Strategy at Company Event on January 27th
  Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today that it will host a live event for customers, partners, press and analysts on January 27, 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM PT, at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, along with executives from Oracle and Sun, will outline the strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps, and how customers will benefit from having all components - hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications - engineered to work together. The event will be broadcast globally. Details are available at www.oracle.com/sun.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-19

• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Technology Day - San Francisco
  Oracle solutions experts will discuss how to: * Consolidate on low-cost servers and storage grids * Compress data for reduced storage and faster performance * Control costs throughout the data center
• The Death of Enterprise Software Innovation?
  I believe that #SAP might benefit by experimenting with this modified spin-in approach. Certainly, its efforts with a SaaS-based model have been met with fits and starts. The modified spin-in model I'm suggesting might be better for SAP to leverage the SaaS business model which is clearly hostile to its existing business.
• The SUGEN Numbers #SAP
  All the benefit was achieved by massive improvements in only two out of the six areas: storage utilization and number of failed changes. (A “failed change,” is an attempt to install a patch which fails.) In all the other areas that were measured, the average improvement was very small. Both of these measure appear to me to be one-time-only improvements. Take, for instance, storage utilization. If you have one of those awful Windows machines, and your disk is sluggish, you can run a utility that compacts your disk and frees up disk space. You’ll show massive improvement in storage utilization. But running this utility once is not the sort of thing that justifies a permanent yearly increase in maintenance costs. Yes, you can do it next year, but it won’t show the same level of improvement, because you gained most of the benefit the first time you did it. The same thing goes for reducing failed changes. Changes in process (and use of the Solution Manager, or Sol Man) can reduce this numb
• Salesforce.com Announces Closing of $575 Million Offering of 0.75% Convertible Senior Notes Due 2015
  funding possible investments in, or acquisitions of, complementary businesses, joint ventures, services or technologies, working capital and capital expenditures.
• IBM's Project Vulcan Is Google Wave Meets Facebook Meets BI
  Project Vulcan is IBM's stab at integrating its Lotus messaging and collaboration suites with CRM and ERP business applications, and providing reports on the data with its own Cognos business analytics. The kicker is that IBM is striving to do this from a single platform, blending on-premises applications with cloud computing apps and extending these to the mobile enterprise. Piece of cake, right? Vulcan, which IBM will open to developers through its new LotusLive Labs in the second half of 2010, is evolving.
• Bill Gates joins Twitter
  The "@BillGates" account existed before, but it wasn't actually Gates or anyone on his staff doing the posts. Now, though, the account is held by Gates and is also one of the pages that Twitter lists as a "verified account."
• Bill Gates (BillGates) on Twitter
  Bio: Sharing cool things I'm learning through my foundation work and other interests...
• Bill Gates Rejoins Facebook, Gives Twitter A Try Too
  A few hours ago, Gates launched both a new Facebook Page and a Twitter account
• #Microsoft #SQLServer 2008 R2 gets an official date
  Today, SQL Server 2008 R2 received an official release date. It will be listed on Microsoft’s May price list, and will be available by May 2010. SQL Server 2008 R2 showcases Microsoft’s continued commitment to business intelligence and mission-critical workloads. Since we made this release available as a Community Technology Preview (CTP) in August 2009, it has been well-received by the community with more than 150,000 downloads. Key customer benefits include: · A trusted and scalable platform with high availability, Master Data Services supporting data consistency across heterogeneous systems, StreamInsight enabling high-scale complex event processing, and support for high scale applications with up to 256 logical processors. · IT and developer efficiency through central management of multiple database applications, instances or servers, accelerating the development and deployment of applications and providing improved support for virtualization and Live Migration
• #Microsoft confirms May date for next #SQLServer
  The date slipped out when partner Unisys published a white paper highlighting the results of a 96-core Unisys ES7000 system running SQL Server 2008 R2 under tests from the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). A Microsoft blog then said the server would be available on May 6.
• #Amdocs Connects Dots for the Connected World
  Vendor’s Latest Release Focuses on Supporting the Mass-Connectivity Needs of the Near Future
• #Amdocs Announces CES 8: New Product Portfolio Enables Service Providers to Play a Larger Role in the Connected World
  Amdocs (NYSE: DOX), the leading provider of customer experience systems, today unveiled Amdocs CES 8, the industry's most advanced product portfolio designed to enable service providers to run leaner today, while preparing them to lead in the connected world where it's predicted that by 2017 more than seven trillion devices will require support, bandwidth and new business models. Amdocs CES 8 helps service providers evolve and expand quickly by exposing network, IT and data assets to a growing ecosystem of content and developer partners. The portfolio drives personalized and simple customer experiences by concealing the complexities of new applications and devices from the end user, all while ensuring that service providers can run lean and agile operations with the industry's most advanced technology that lowers cost and improves efficiency.
• Oracle sail in Spain despite Alinghi America's Cup row
  America's Cup challengers Oracle sailed their trimaran "USA" for the first time in Valencia on Tuesday despite doubt over the planned duel with Alinghi.
• Sail Dispute Could Delay America’s Cup
  The Golden Gate Yacht Club, where BMW Oracle is based, said Alinghi turned down another offer Sunday to settle a dispute over the Swiss team’s sails. The dispute threatens to delay the Feb. 8 start date. Alinghi had refused to sign an agreement following talks in Singapore witnessed by the International Sailing Federation.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-17

• Oracle to 'rely heavily' on Sun workers, staff told
  "Oracle has asked me to assure Sun employees that this report is absolutely untrue," Brian Sutphin, executive vice president of corporate developmentoperating profit from Sun in the first year after the deal closes. and alliances at Sun, said in the memo. Oracle, the second-biggest software maker, aims to squeeze $1.5 billion in
• #SAP Revenues Drop In Q4, 2009
  Revenue declined in the single-digit percentage range in most regions for both the quarter and full year. Margins offered a ray of hope, eking out a 0.1% gain that beat company estimates and Wall Street expectations. But the results stood in contrast to gains recently reported by SAP rival Oracle. SAP's software and software-related service revenues for the quarter ended December 31 were approximately $3.6 billion (2.5 billion Euros), a decline of about 4% from same-quarter 2008 revenues of $3.8 billion (2.6 billion Euros - all figures are U.S. GAAP). Quarterly margins declined approximately 4% to 32.8% from 36.6% in 2008. For the full fiscal year, SAP's total revenues declined approximately 8% to $15.3 billion (10.6 billion Euros) from $16.6 billion (11.5 billion Euros) in 2008, slightly ahead of company and Wall Street expectations. Software and service revenues declined 5% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, held steady in the Americas and declined 1% in the Asia/Pacific region
• Choosing Standard or Enterprise support more difficult for #SAP customers with no KPIs
  "The KPI program is more important than ever. Understanding value in the face of options becomes critical," said Bridgette Chambers, CEO of ASUG. "If those KPI programs are interrupted or supported with any less zeal, then I think that it's a loss, and I would urge SAP to consider the importance of them."
• Now Russia Threatens to Hold Up Oracle-Sun Deal
  Russia's Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) Wednesday decided to kick off an investigation and seek more information about the deal from both Sun and Oracle as well as anybody else who wants to put his two cents in.
• Maison Fleury: Save #MySQL?
  MYSQL WAS SOLD FOR $1B FOR GADSAKES!!! IT WAS SOLD! IT'S OVER! At least for the corporate part. Of course, Monty is free to fork mySQL and rename it. If he is unhappy he should. But boy! doing a public campaign trying to block the acquisition, will only add to the public fire of EU scrutiny, possibly shutting down the acquisition and will only hurt SUN and SUN employees.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-16

• #Oracle and #SAP Are Big: Too Big for Their Own Good?
  SAP and Oracle could, internally, be dealing with a unique, festering problem that may be overwhelming executives: Are the companies too big to manage?
• The Changing Analyst Tide -- Turning to Consultants and SIs For Advice
  publishing- and advisory-led models are becoming less relevant when it comes to how decisions are actually made in the field. Increasingly, companies are coming to prioritize true in-depth knowledge that can only be had from those who work with the tools on a regular basis (versus those who pontificate about them). Granted, it can be helpful to have a more macro-level view about how specific solutions can fit into a specific technology portfolio, and how a vendor stacks up against the competition, but I believe that traditional industry-analyst models will become less relevant when it comes to selecting, deploying, integrating, and managing an increasingly complex and interconnected set of third- party (and internal) technologies and content.
• #SAP’s “U-Turn” on Maintenance
  It’s a choice. But is it really the sort of choice customers want? And is offering this choice really an example of a commitment to customer satisfaction?
• #IBM 2010: Customers in Revolt
  BM hopes to reduce its labor costs and one way to do this is by choosing remote locations like Dubuque with few locals who could qualify to be IBM techs or engineers. Experienced IBMers being downsized in places like New York won’t move to Dubuque, so they can be replaced with cheaper (and younger) labor. Dubuque’s lack of native talent means IBM can staff the centers with mostly foreign H1-B personnel, again so they can pay them less and have no long-term benefits exposure.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-15

• #SAP Budges: Tiered Support Model offered and Lower Prices for Enterprise Support
  some software vendors that supply add-ons to SAP reportedly have been pressed by customers to reduce their maintenance bills and are quietly cursing SAP for putting this topic on the agenda. I can very well imagine Oracle being forced to take corrective actions, too – Larry certainly would have liked SAP to stay with the increase to 22%.
• Software Delivery Models in the Era of Cloud Computing
  [Must-read for software vendors-DBM] Increasingly, software companies are facing a dilemma as to the best delivery model for their business and many are opting for a "multi-delivery" model or multi-modal software delivery. A typical scenario is the vendor will offer the software both for installation on-premise and as an on-demand service. Wordpress and Atlassian were early pioneers of this approach, with the latter offering products such as JIRA, Confluence and Crucible for both download and as a hosted solution. And on the big vendor front, Microsoft is pursuing a Software+Services strategy. Another common approach is offering the software for installation on-premise and as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), and often with a corresponding pay-per-use pricing model. GigaSpaces is one company pursuing such a strategy, as are larger vendors such as Red Hat.
• #SAP Blows Huge Opportunity With Timid Support Changes
  SAP missed a golden opportunity to establish itself as the clear market leader over Oracle as SAP chose to make only minimal changes in its support pricing. Yes, SAP deserves some credit for offering its customers and prospects a second option for support and maintenance—any alternative, however humble, is far more than Oracle's one-size-fits-all approach. But after all the melodrama of the past several months—user-group revolts over SAP's earlier plan for monolithic price increases, followed by peace talks that promised KPI-driven price changes to be announced in December, followed by a postponement for a month so that SAP could reconsider its reconsiderations—it's hard not to feel underwhelmed by SAP's new plan.
• #SAP Revenues Decline for Q4 and 2009
  Results beat expectations but sales slip. Board members shift focus to solutions and innovation.
• Linux Foundation helps #Linux job hunters
  "the new Linux.com Jobs Board will provide employers and job seekers with an important online forum in which anyone can find the best and brightest Linux talent or the ideal job opportunity." In the press release, Jim Zemlin, the Foundation's director, is quoted, "Linux's increasing use across industries is building high demand for Linux jobs despite national unemployment stats. Linux.com reaches millions of Linux professionals from all over the world. By providing a Jobs Board feature on the popular community site, we can bring together employers, recruiters and job seekers to lay the intellectual foundation for tomorrow's IT industry."
• #MySQL co-founder doubts #Oracle support
  “If I was Oracle, I would aim MySQL even more at the web sector, where Oracle doesn’t really have anything. So more development, more uses and they don’t really lose any revenue. I wouldn’t aim it at the enterprise sector where Oracle already is,” he told CBR.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2010-01-14

• #SAP Revives Two-Tier Maintenance Options
  reintroducing their Standard Support offering. Customers now gain choice with a 2-tier maintenance offering. Here are the details between standard support and enterprise support. * Standard Support Offering reintroduces at 18%. Customers seeking core bug fixes, support packages, risk mitigation, and related new functionality will have choice in staying on standard support. The program is designed for customers who seek to keep their systems up and running. Customers with CPI clauses in their contracts will want to take note - the first set of consumer price index (CPI) price increases will begin January 1st, 2012. * Enterprise Support remains at 22%. SAP will continue to offer Enterprise Support at 22% for new customers and a ramp up for existing customers (see Figure 1). Enterprise support includes features such as best practices for IT operations, proactive monitoring and reporting, and transparency for business process performance. Customers who choose to go with Enter
• #SAP’s Tiered Support Announcement Diffuses a Contentious Issue
  The bottom line is that the tiered SAP support offering benefits customers because it offers some choice based on support needs. It may also encourage other packaged application vendors to offer more support level tiers, which were more common a few years ago than they are today. Ultimately, customers would benefit most from unbundled, a la carte support pricing, but this is not likely to happen since customers are likely to gravitate toward lower-priced offerings and vendors will not put these revenue streams at risk. On-premise packaged application customers should go with the most cost-effective support offering, keeping in mind the business context of the application and the associated risks of business disruption.
• 2010: The Year to Crystallize Cloud Strategy
  All of the significant trends which have shaped the software industry over the past decade are being drawn up into the move to cloud computing. As we look toward the software business in 2010, it is critical to take full stock of the current state of the cloud, the current vendor moves and what software companies must do this year in order to compete in the cloud computing era.
• Why Lean And Agile Go Together
  most advanced practitioners of Agile now use more vocabulary from Lean manufacturing than from Agile. In essence, as a practical matter, good ideas from Agile are being absorbed into a new approach to software development that is more Lean than anything else. Someone else can name this phenomenon, but Lean and Agile are merging.
• Microsoft Executive Veghte to Leave the Company
  Veghte, who serves as senior vice president of Windows, has been with Microsoft for 19 years. He'll leave the company at the end of the month, according to a note that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent to employees. The letter is posted on the company's Web site.
• Mr. Ballmer goes to Washington
  In an interview with CNBC, Ballmer said his group of executives talked about patent reform, IT spending, online transparency and accessibility, and bringing the public sector up to speed with the technology used in the private sector. I listened in, via WhiteHouse.gov, to some of the discussion. It was all very high-level – no specifics.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Launch Date
  Short but sweet, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will launch on Monday, 12 April 2010.
• Product Management/Product Marketing Templates & Toolkit
  Designed for Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers, the toolkit contains over 35 best practices templates, samples, examples, resources and tools (>4MB of content) for the most common documents that Product Management and Product Marketing professionals need to deliver.
• #Hadoop Tutorial Series, Issue #4: To Use Or Not To Use A Combiner
  Simply speaking a combiner can be considered as a “mini reducer” that will be applied potentially several times still during the map phase before to send the new (hopefully reduced) set of key/value pairs to the reducer(s). This is why a combiner must implement the Reducer interface (or extend the Reducer class as of hadoop 0.20).
• How #Hadoop startup Cloudera is evolving
  Cloudera counts 30 customers today, most of them in government, financial services and retail, said Olson. They include LinkedIn, eHarmony, JP Morgan Chase, and many of the other companies that presented at the inaugural HadoopWorld conference last fall. Cloudera, which has raised $11 million via two rounds of venture funding , plans to double its 27-employee headcount this year to help turn on mainstream enterprises to NoSQL alternatives such as Hadoop and its progenitor, MapReduce.
• Vertica Prevails in Sybase Patent Lawsuit
  Sybase has admitted that under the claim construction order issued by the Court on November 9, 2009, "Vertica does not infringe Claims 1-15 of U.S. Patent No. 5,794,229." Sybase further acknowledged that because the Court ruled that all the remaining claims in the patent (claims 16-24) were invalid, "Sybase cannot prevail on those claims." "We have stated from the start that this lawsuit was without merit and we prevailed," said Ralph Breslauer, CEO, Vertica Systems. "In our opinion this lawsuit was an unsuccessful attempt to distract the market from Vertica establishing itself as the new leader in columnar, MPP databases."
• SAP Business ByDesign Coming to Market At Last?
  After two years of fits, starts and disappointments, Business ByDesign, the company’s full suite of enterprise applications re-architected for the cloud, is expected to finally make its way to the general marketplace and into the hands of SAP’s midmarket channel partners.
• SAP Caves to Customer Pricing Demand, May Limit Revenue Growth
  It potentially means less revenue for SAP on the support and maintenance side, if more of their customers opt for the lower level, which I believe most will,” said Michael Nemeroff, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities in New York. “It’s good for the customer, not good for SAP in the near term.” [DBM-If most will opt for the lower tier, it means they were not getting value from the more expensive option!]
• Oracle May Cut Half of Sun Workers, UBS Analyst Says
  Oracle Corp. may fire as much as half of Sun Microsystems Inc.’s employees, or almost 13,800 people, when the $7.4 billion acquisition closes in the next few weeks, an analyst at UBS AG said.[DBM-Not to mention how many Oracle employees, particularly VPs in Thomas Kurian's group, will be laid off ...]
• Uncertainty still dogs America's Cup
  The break up of talks in Singapore on Thursday, aimed at resolving a number of key issues but ending without agreement and producing more rancour between the teams, is the latest blow to an event dogged by legal battles since Alinghi retained the trophy by beating Team New Zealand in Valencia in 2007.
• GetApp.com | New To GetApp
  Application Providers Receive qualified traffic and sales leads. Get both hassles free and cost efficiently * Include your applications for Free in our directories * Reach out to new global audiences of Business and IT users * Receive high-quality traffic with good conversion rates * Allow users to review your products and stay independent from other vendors * Leverage a free professional marketing channel * Manage your portfolio of applications from a simple control panel * For even greater impact, upgrade to our Premium Services
• HP loses massive DWP contract
  The Department of Work and Pensions today confirmed to The Register it had appointed Fujitsu Services as the preferred bidder to take over its huge desktop contract from 31 August.
• Facebook joins Apache Foundation
  Facebook has three infrastructure projects currently active in the Apache Software Foundation (ASF): Thrift, Hive and Cassandra. "It would not have been possible to build Facebook without open source infrastructure that came before us, so it is good for us to take these infrastructure technologies and share them," says David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook. Recordon joined Facebook five months ago to run its open source and Web standards programs.
• IBM to Open Up Patent Processes, Software to Customers
  IBM, which once again was the top patent producer in the industry in 2009, is now ready to share its IP processes and software with customers. IBM will help customers learn how to identify inventions that could be patented, apply for patents, license their IP and manage their portfolios. IBM also will license its in-house IP management software to customers.
• Microsoft strikes back at Google on new cloud storage limits
  In a very uncharacteristic move, Microsoft is sending out notes to reporters and bloggers on January 12, reminding them that Google’s just-announced 1 GB Google Docs storage limit limit pales in comparison to what the Softies already are offering with Windows Live. (I say “uncharacteristic” here because most teams at Microsoft are not willing to comment officially on policies/products from their competitors.) From an e-mail I received today from a Windows Live spokesperson: “Just a friendly reminder that Windows Live has been offering its more than 450 million customers 25GB of cloud-based storage space for free through Windows Live SkyDrive since 2008. For more than a year now, Windows Live customers have been able to upload many different types of files to the cloud – including large graphic files, MP3s, PDFs, videos, and more – allowing them to access to their files and information anywhere and everywhere they have access to the Web.”
• Microsoft, HP to expand partnership
  The four will take questions about "new, significant investments the two companies are making to help customers and partners prepare for the future of business computing."
• Overview of Performance Tuning Tools in Oracle Fusion Middleware
  Oracle Fusion Middleware comes with a great toolset for investigating suspicious application behavior.
• Apotheker weighs in on climate change debate
  Following the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen late last year, SAP AG CEO and member of the CNBC Carbon Council Leo Apotheker expressed his concern at the lack of a clear result from the conference. Apotheker made the appearance on CNBC in both Europe and the US in December, offering a line of action following Copenhagen.
• IBM Reorganizes Software Group
  The new Solutions and Middleware units will be headed by Mike Rhodin and Robert LeBlanc, respectively, both of whom have been promoted to senior vice president. Rhodin is a former Lotus executive and most recently led an integrated operating team. Reporting to him will be Rob Ashe, general manager, business analytics (which includes Cognos and SPSS); Alistair Rennie, general manager, Lotus; and a yet-to-be-named general manager for Industry Solutions, which includes industry frameworks and enterprise content management.
• Salesforce.com Spring '10 Release Notes
  Summary of Spring '10 Features and Impact on Salesforce.com Users Spring '10 has features that immediately impact all users after the release. You may want to communicate these changes to your users beforehand so they are prepared. Other features require direct action by an administrator before users can benefit from the new functionality. The following table summarizes the Spring '10 features and whether they will have an immediate impact on users. Review the feature details for the applicable Salesforce.com Editions.
• With NetWeaver PI's future unclear, don't use it for strategic projects, Gartner says
  A number of factors -- the most recent of which is SAP's SOALogix acquisition -- have Gartner believing that SAP will "drastically" redefine its middleware strategy this year and may even relegate the current NetWeaver PI technology to legacy status.
• The End of Traditional Software Licensing? Not So Fast
  There's no doubt that cloud computing and SaaS pricing agreements offer much more financial incentives for customers right now. But once the economy rebounds, rest assured that traditional, on-premise software vendors will return to the way it's always been: licensing agreements heavily tilted in their favor; end-of-quarter manic deal-making with with substantial "too good to be true" discounts; hefty maintenance and support fees; and irksome threats of software audits.
• Early #Azure adopter sees financial benefits of cloud computing
  The migration, though, has not been without difficulty. "The biggest issue that we've run into is with the table storage itself," said Naylor. "They probably shouldn't have used the term table. It's not a table in the traditional sense of the relational database table."
• Outsourcing Advisors: 6 Tips for Selecting the Right One
  Given that IT outsourcing transactions are complex and vendors are savvy at setting them up to their advantage, solid sourcing advice from a third party can help to level the inherently uneven playing field, particularly for less experienced IT services buyers.
• Salesforce.com Plans $500 Million Note Offering
  Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) plans to offer $500 million of five-year convertible notes, with proceeds earmarked for general corporate purposes. Some of the proceeds from the offering will cover the cost of a hedging transaction aimed at reducing potential share dilution from the offering. Shares of the software company were down 4.6% at $70.30 in after-hours trading. The stock, which hit a 52-week high last week, is up more than double over the past year.
• Callidus Software Acquires ActekSoft
  Through the acquisition, Callidus Software extends its footprint to provide the most comprehensive offering of on-demand and on-premise sales lifecycle management solutions in the insurance and financial services industries. These solutions optimize agent capacity planning, selection and on-boarding, licensing and appointment management, and pay for performance, giving customers the ability to align their sales force and channels with their business objectives and consistently and reliably execute on sales results.
• SFDC Acquisiton Spree?
  Sales Comp would mean either public Callidus (market cap circa $100M) or private Xactly. Social Software? Lithium or Jive could be interesting and should be well within that price range. So my bet is either RNOW, or preparing to go on a spree that will involve multiple little guys. With $500M they could buy a Social player, a Marketing Automation player, and a Sales Comp player, all of which would be highly complementary to their CRM core.
• Oracle Business Intelligence Symposium
  Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) allows decision makers a consistent vision of the company, delivering business information in depth, the ability to make decisions based on facts, and a modeling capability to assess, test and decide on their action next best option. Attend Oracle Business Intelligence Symposium and learn how you can use BI to gain power through knowledge.
• Wrokday Idol | ERP K.O.
  Contestants battle to be chosen as the new lead singer for the new Workday band, Wrokday. [OK, it's cute for about 30 seconds, then it gets painfully repetitive...-DBM]
• Official Google Enterprise Blog: Store and share files in the cloud with Google Docs
  Over the next couple of weeks, we are rolling out the ability for Google Apps users to easily upload and securely share any type of file internally and externally using Google Docs. You get 1 GB of storage per user, and you can upload files up to 250 MB in size. Now accessing your work files doesn't require a connection to your internal office network. Nor do you need to email files to yourself, carry around a thumbdrive, or use a company network drive – you can access your files using Google Docs from any web-enabled computer. Combined with shared folders in Google Docs, the upload feature is a great way to collaborate on files with coworkers and external parties. Instead of using cumbersome email attachments, you can upload files to a folder and share it with coworkers, who can then access and edit the files from a single place. You can even have your sales team securely share contracts with external clients for review.
• Pick a Role Model, Google!
  Google doesn't even have a phone number for tech support. The online support forums are swimming in diatribes about the lack of a personal touch for a product that surely deserves one. If you buy an Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone, you can go to the Apple store in your neighborhood mall and talk to a Genius about any issues you might have. Buy a Nexus One, and you're shuffled into an online troubleshooting tool or a bunch of anonymous email addresses. Or you can go bother hardware maker HTC or service provider T-Mobile instead. No phone lines, no instant chat sessions, no personal touch at all.
• Official Google Blog: A new approach to China
  We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.
• Revealing Google’s Stealth Social Network Play
  Google isn’t going after a frontal, brute force assault on Facebook and the other social networks — it simply can’t win at that game on a global basis. Instead Google is pursuing a softer approach, a zen-like attach much like water flowing around a rock. It is using its strengths — ubiquity and open platforms — to put “social” into every corner of the Web. This is the stealth threat — that today’s social networks won’t really be losing share to the “Google network”, but rather, that they will become slowly less relevant as EVERYTHING gets social thanks to advances by Google. Their end goal? Google’s social network is designed to exist everywhere –not be centralized in any one location. By the way, two can play at this game and we see Microsoft making similar moves in the future.
• VMware to Acquire Zimbra
  This acquisition will further VMware’s mission of taking complexity out of the datacenter, desktop, application development and core IT services, and delivering a fundamentally more efficient and new approach to IT.
• 2020 Vision: Why you won't recognize the 'Net in 10 years
  Imagine there's no latency, no spam or phishing, a community of trust. Imagine all the people, able to get online.
• Wipro and Oracle launch Process Integration Pack
  The Oracle AIA PIP integrates Oracle Retail Merchandise Operations Management and the Oracle E-Business Suite Financials using Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) to offer customers a pre-configured, supportable and upgradeable integration of the retail merchandising execution applications with the financial operation control applications, a Wipro statement said.
• Jaspersoft 3.7 reaches high into enterprise, and Oracle's backyard
  The enterprise edition offers many of the same functions in more expensive proprietary BI platforms, such as “in-memory analysis capabilities and more to solve enterprise-class BI problems for organizations of all sizes,” the company said. The JasperSoft 3.7 platform, available today, now comes in three editions: community, professional and enterprise. The new enterprise addition offers advanced, scalable features including OLAP, data integration, audit logging and multi-tenancy capabilities, the company said. The core 3.7 platform upgrade also offers new search capabilities, FLASH-based interactive chart design and new management features. Here’s the drill down, as provided by Jaspersoft:
• Open-source BI specialist gets in-memory boost
  The company has announced version 3.7 of its BI suite, which enhances querying of in-memory data. In-memory can be used to quickly serve up frequently accessed data. It's seen as an alternative to disk-based memory in very large and frequently accessed systems. Introduced a year ago with version 3.5, the in-memory capabilities in JasperSoft 3.7 now provide slicing, pivoting, drill through, partial pivoting, and sorts all through the interface.