Sunday, September 26, 2010

Technical Debt: Your Vendor Owes You

Gartner recently set off a new industry debate when it released its piece Measure and Manage Your IT Debt.

Vinnie Mirchandani (@dealarchitect) has a typically pointed, incisive, insightful response, called Gartner's "IT Debt" Scare (I guess you can tell from the title where this piece is going ;-) ).

Both Gartner and Vinnie make excellent points, but I have a somewhat different point of view.

First, Gartner was very creative to once again bring a new perspective to an emerging problem. However, there can be more than one perspective on this issue, as Vinnie's piece points out.

What is Technical Debt?

Technical debt is a term apparently coined by Ward Cunningham in 1992 to describe the shortcuts, compromises, and mistakes made in developing software. For example, many times a software project is on a deadline, and a "good" approach would take too much time or cost too much in resources, so project members take note of the problem and use a quick hack to just get by for now. The quick hack introduces costs later in the project that build up over time if the "technical debt" is not paid off. For some great overviews of technical debt, see here and here, plus the infographic here.

Technical debt is commonly used to describe architectural shortcuts made in software product development in start-ups, but can be applied as a concept (as Gartner has done) to many other related areas - for example, IT lapsed maintenance, deferred maintenance on a home or public utilities, or failure to invest in areas that give a long-term payoff.

Technical debt - TO or BY the software vendors?

Some technical debt has little or nothing to do with enterprise software vendors; it's the same kind of technical debt accrued by large and small software vendors where shortcuts are taken during IT projects.

However, as Gartner positioned this problem (according to other reporters such as Vinnie and Larry Dignan, as I have not read Gartner's article on this topic), at least part of this debt is a debt to enterprise software vendors - forgone upgrades, or even going off maintenance. The theory is that firms will skip an upgrade from time to time (or, worse, a patch), or go off maintenance on enterprise software, creating some amount of technical debt; after all, upgrades get progressively harder to apply as more upgrades are skipped over, and going off maintenance can lead to missed security patches as well as costly "relicensing" fees in the future. One way to look at this technical debt is that it is a technical debt owed to enterprise software vendors.

However, another way to look at this is as technical debt owed BY enterprise software vendors to their customers. After all, if these updates, upgrades, and patches had enough value in them, and cost little enough to apply, then the ROI (benefit/cost ratio) would be sufficient to justify keeping up with the vendor's software releases. The gap between the ROI needed and the actual ROI for each release is a form of technical debt - but its a debt owed by software vendors to their customers.

There are two ways vendors can increase the ROI of these releases - by increasing the numerator (return or benefit) or decreasing the denominator (investment or cost). Simple, right? Increasing the benefit can be accomplished by planning periodic usability or functional updates that can go along with emergency fixes when needed, or by reducing the frequency of patch releases. The cost can be reduced by reducing the frequency of patch releases, creating tools that determine whether a particular release is needed by the customer, by handling the updates on the customer's behalf, by avoiding schema changes, and thoroughly testing every upgrade.

SaaS versus on-premise

Any enterprise software discussion these days has to include a discussion of SaaS (or cloud) versus on-premise deployments. What does the cloud have to with this topic? SaaS-delivered applications change the economics of software in many ways, and technology debt is yet another case of this. SaaS-based applications may not automatically result in greater benefits related to new releases, but they do offer the opportunity to reduce the costs of upgrades - because most of the infrastructure upgrade costs are borne by the vendor, so SaaS vendors have developed techniques and a body of knowledge that minimizes those costs.

Often, this is not the case with on-premise software. Customers have a very diverse landscape of systems, integration points, operating system versions, and set of applied patches; as a result, it just isn't possible for vendors to sufficiently test upgrades for all these permutations. Of course, customers are also responsible for the costs and efforts of each upgrade, not benefiting from the economies of scale when many customers are on identical environments simultaneously upgraded - as in a SaaS deployment.

On-premise software vendors generally do not optimize for low cost of upgrades, at least not to the same extent as SaaS vendors. By definition, on-premise software vendors cannot test every customer's upgrade with every release; in the SaaS world, such testing is standard operating procedure. These days, SaaS vendors even give customers some time to test upgrades before switching over to a new release, allowing customers time to test any custom extensions or integration points, as well as to test new features and develop new work processes to benefit from the new functionality of each release.

Many times, software upgrades go along with infrastructure upgrades - the new version may not be available for a particular brand of previously-supported hardware, a previously-supported operating system, or perhaps an outdated database. When this is the case with on-premise software, the customer has to bear the cost of upgrading to new infrastructure, testing other related systems on the new infrastructure, and training employees who manage the infrastructure and the new software. These costs are, again, not borne by the customer in a SaaS environment; the SaaS vendor takes on this burden. Incidentally, this burden is lower for the vendor in the SaaS world, since only one (or two, when multiple versions of applications are supported simultaneously for customers) configuration needs to be supported and tested, and because the SaaS vendor controls the upgrade cycle to minimize costs and disruption.

Do SaaS applications completely eliminate technical debt?

No. But SaaS applications significantly reduce technical debt, primarily by eliminating a backlog of unapplied patches and upgrades, eliminating costly infrastructure upgrades, and eliminating the "death matrix" of supported platforms and infrastructure.


(c) Oracle Corp.

Maybe I'll cover virtualization in a future blog, as virtualization holds some promise as a way for on-premise software vendors to come to grips with some of these problems and alter the economics of upgrades once again. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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Saturday, September 25, 2010

Bill McDermott and Tom Bergeron: Separated at Birth?

This struck me last night while watching re-runs of "America's Funniest Home Videos" - the host, Tom Bergeron, looks an awful lot like SAP's co-CEO Bill McDermott.



McDermott and Bergeron: separated at birth? You be the judge ... ;-)
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Thursday, September 9, 2010

Who will Oracle acquire next? (The answers)

After about a week of voting, readers of this blog have identified the companies they believe Oracle will acquire next. I'll leave the survey open for a while longer, but about 250 people have voted and the results are pretty clear.

Informatica

Overwhelmingly, respondents to this survey believe that Informatica is the company Oracle is most likely to acquire soon. Informatica describes itself this way:
Informatica enables organizations to gain a competitive advantage in today’s global information economy by empowering them to access, integrate and trust all their information assets.
That is to say, Informatica helps companies consolidate and make sense of their data. Informatica is well-known for its Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) tools, but they've expanded their product portfolio and grown their business over the past several years under the remarkable leadership of Oracle alum Sohaib Abbasi. Plenty of Informatica's senior executives and employees have worked at Oracle in the past, and the company's headquarters are even located very close to Oracle in Redwood City.

An acquisition of Informatica could fill a very important hole in Oracle's product line, enabling Oracle to consolidate its position in data warehousing and analytics, one of the hottest growth areas in the database market today. Of course, such a deal would have to pass regulatory approval, and there could certainly be antitrust concerns, but I suspect this deal would get some scrutiny before a quick approval.

Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com, the leading independent CRM company and a leading Cloud platform, is our respondents' second choice for a company Oracle is likely to acquire soon. Salesforce.com is also led by an Oracle alum with a great track record: the inimitable and charismatic Marc Benioff. Marc and his team have played a key role in promoting a major architectural shift, and business model shift, in the IT industry, from "on prem" to SaaS and Cloud. Marc, and many of his team are also Oracle alums, which could help with the integration in a merger with Oracle.

Unfortunately, I think this acquisition is not likely to occur. Salesforce.com is currently valued at about $15 billion, and an acquisition would likely drive this price up to at least $18 billion. It's hard to see how Oracle could make the financials of this deal work. This deal would also likely generate more regulatory scrutiny than an deal for Informatica, but I think this would also get approved under the same theory that led to approval of the acquisitions of Siebel and Peoplesoft.

The Top 10

Of the companies our survey respondents think Oracle will acquire next, most are platform technology companies:

Company Responses
Informatica 66
Salesforce.com 36
VMware 30
TIBCO 27
Red Hat 26
Teradata 26
NetSuite 25
SuccessFactors 19
Taleo 19
Computer Associates 17

Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SuccessFactors, and Taleo are the applications companies that made the "Top 10" list. What do they have in common? Each is a SaaS application. Salesforce.com is a SaaS CRM company (with a growing Cloud platform (PaaS) business); NetSuite is a SaaS ERP suite (with a growing PaaS business); SuccessFactors and Taleo are SaaS human resources businesses. Acquiring any of these companies is likely to help accelerate Oracle's entry into the SaaS business.

The Write-Ins

In addition to the votes for companies named in the survey, respondents were given the option to write in a choice of their own. 18 responses were written in, a fairly high rate (almost 10% of respondents wrote in another choice).

5 of the write-in "ballots" were for Cloudera, the Hadoop company. Hadoop is a leading technology in the area of "Big Data," a topic that has to be on Oracle's mind as it considers opportunities and threats in the future.

There were a couple of write-in votes each for Vertica and Jive Software. Vertica is the latest start-up from database legend Michael Stonebraker, creator of Ingres, Postgres, and other technically interesting database companies. Vertica's main product is its columnar database, a technology that could be interesting for certain data management problems (like data warehousing). Jive Software is social software for the enterprise, which could help Oracle build next-generation applications.

Best Answer

The best write-in answer was provided by an anonymous survey respondent whose answer to "Who will Oracle acquire next?" was both funny and prescient. The response, given the day before the official announcement: Mark Hurd.

Oracle Alums

I ran the same survey among a group of relative insiders, the OracAlumni Network. This is a group of 500o+ former Oracle employees, many of whom remain in close contact with Oracle and its market, and who believe that Oracle will acquire next:

Informatica
Salesforce.com
VMware
NetSuite
Red Hat
TIBCO
SuccessFactors
EMC
Symantec
Teradata

Very similar list, particularly at the top end.

Summary

If our survey respondents are any indication, Oracle will continue acquiring companies, and Informatica should be at the top of its shopping list. If you'd like to chime in with your thoughts, visit our continuing survey at http://polldaddy.com/poll/3714778/.

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Friday, September 3, 2010

Who will Oracle acquire next?

Oracle has been very acquisitive in past years. In a recent analysis of Oracle's acquisitions, Stephen Jannise of http://www.softwareadvice.com/ prepared this excellent infographic of Oracle's acquisitions timeline, categories, and size:

I would have put Industry Solutions at the left, to show a real spectrum from industry to application to middleware to database to hardware, but this graphic reveals real insight into Oracle's strategy and focus on acquisitions over the past 5 years. The article also points out some interesting analysis of what characterizes a good deal for Oracle. According to Stephen:

At the highest level, the motivations behind Oracle’s largest acquisitions appear to be the following:

  • Grow market share leadership in key enterprise markets;
  • Expand profitability by consolidating high-margin support revenue; and,
  • Increase strategic relevance by offering a complete technology stack.

This last bullet is something that has played a larger role in really only two of Oracle's acquisitions, both recent, but does two points define a trend? It certainly makes sense and is consistent with speaking points from the company's senior executives.

So, who do you think Oracle will acquire next? Vote in this poll to share your opinion.

After the poll closes, I'll post an analysis of the results here.

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Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Enterprise headlines and excerpts, 2010-08-31

#EnSW (Enterprise Software) News from the past fortnight ...
  • #Cloudera Enterprise Released: Interview with Charles Zedlewski ( #Hadoop )
    Before signing off, we asked Mr. Zedlewski for a preview of what may be coming in advance of Hadoop World in October and he wrapped up with: "our current plan is to do one final Beta update to our distribution for Hadoop, so we'll have a number of significant enhancements to talk about...On the enterprise side, it will be principally a preview."
  • 8 #BigData Deployments In Detail
    Big Data: Fast Querying, Real-Time Insight
    Success in the Big Data era is about more than size. It's about getting insight from these huge data sets more quickly. As explored in our recent cover story, experienced practitioners are taking advantage of in-database analytics processing, breakthrough techniques such as MapReduce and innovative, new environments such as Hadoop to handle big data volumes and new data types with speed and ease.
  • Sizing the data warehousing opportunity — Too much information ( #BI )
    The data warehousing market will see a compound annual growth rate of 11.5% from 2009 through 2013 to reach a total of $13.2bn in revenues.
  • Taking #R to the Limit: Parallelism and #BigData | (Articles about R) ( #OpenSource )
    In a two-part series at the Los Angeles R User Group[*], Ryan Rosario took a look at the many ways you can take the R language to the limits of high-performance computing.
  • #NoSQL Databases - Replica Sets with #MongoDB
    What makes a replica set?

    * A cluster of N servers
    * Any (one) node can be primary
    * Consensus election of primary
    * Automatic failover
    * Automatic recovery
    * All writes to primary
    * Reads can be to primary (default) or a secondary
  • Improving Hotel Search: #Hadoop @ #Orbitz Worldwide « #Cloudera » #Apache Hadoop for the Enterprise
    In the short period of time since our initial deployment we’ve seen Hadoop rapidly adopted as a component in a wide range of applications across the organization due to its power, ease of use, and suitability for solving big data problems.
  • The Need for Speed With #BigData
    Data sets approaching 100 TB exceed the capacity limits that SQL databases can effectively deal with. In addition, many IT organizations also are realizing that they have sets of data that need to be processed at speeds that don’t really require the performance of a SQL database. In those instances, Hadoop offers a low-cost alternative to a SQL database.
  • More on #NoSQL and HVSP (or OLRP)
    Stability and maturity are still issues for many of these products. E.g., HBase isn’t even in Release 1.0 yet. Ditto Cassandra, and surely many of the others. Unsurprisingly, making Cassandra stable is still a challenge.
  • The Seven Secrets of Successful #BigData Scientists
    Compress Everything

    We live in an IO-bound world, where the dominant bottlenecks to data flow are disk read-speed and network bandwidth.
  • What’s New in #Apache #Hadoop 0.21 ( #OpenSource )
    Apache Hadoop 0.21.0 was released on August 23, 2010. The last major release was 0.20.0 in April last year, so it’s not surprising that there are so many changes in this release, given the amount of activity in the Hadoop development community. In fact, there were over 1300 issues fixed in JIRA (Common, HDFS, MapReduce), the issue tracker used for Apache Hadoop development. Bear in mind that the 0.21.0 release, like all dot zero releases, isn’t suitable for production use.
  • Moving from #SQL to #NoSQL
    Interesting to read articles/presentations on NoSQL.

    1. “NoSQL Databases – Part 1 – Landscape” at VineetGupta.com
    2. “Why Digg Digs Cassandra” by Om Malik at Gigaom
    3. “NoSQL at Twitter (NoSQL EU 2010)” by Kwvin Weil at Slideshare
    4. “NoSQL databases” by Marin Dimitrov at Slideshare

    But the sky isn’t always blue, you should read the voices that are against NoSQL also:

    1. I Can’t Wait for NoSQL to Die by Ted Dziupa
    2. NoSQL is Software Darwinism by Jeremy Zawodny
  • #Cassandra Data Model ( #NoSQL )
    The presentation is excellent and will get you think about how to model your application if you choose to use Cassandra.
  • #Neo4j: #NOSQL and the Benefits of Graph Databases
    Emil Eifrem overviews the trends leading to NOSQL (Not Only SQL), and the four emerging NOSQL solutions: key-value stores, plus column, document and graph databases. He also explains the internals of a graph database and an example of using Neo4j - a graph database - in production.
  • Happy Merger Turns Ugly: Minor Ventures Sues #LithiumTechnologies
    In a lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court, Minor Ventures accuses Lithium Technologies of intentional misrepresentation, fraud and fraudulent concealment. The Lithium Technologies stock Minor Ventures received in the transaction was only worth half of what Lithium Technologies supposedly promised it was worth. Like many lawsuits, it reads like a good novel:
  • The VC-free startup
    Market now rewards people who can do stuff.
  • The Multi-tenancy #SaaS Argument – It’s a Vendor, Not a Customer Issue
    #Workday’s rationales about this key piece of SaaS orthodoxy are coming down solidly on the vendor side of the equation, not the user side. While the benefits that multi-tenancy can provide are manifold for the vendor, these rationales don’t hold water on the user side.
  • Understanding The Many Flavors of #Cloud Computing and #SaaS
    Traditional and Cloud based delivery models share 4 key parts (see Figure 1):

    1. Consumption – how users consume the apps and business processes
    2. Creation – what’s required to build apps and business processes
    3. Orchestration – how parts are integrated or pulled from an app server
    4. Infrastructure – where the core guts such as servers, storage, and networks reside
  • An update on #JavaOne ( #Google #Oracle #Java #Android #Lawsuit )
    Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally. This is a painful realization for us, as we've participated in every JavaOne since 2004, and I personally have spoken at all but the first in 1996.

    We understand that this may disappoint and inconvenience many of you, but we look forward to presenting at other venues soon. We’re proud to participate in the open source Java community, and look forward to finding additional ways to engage and contribute.
  • #Google Withdraws from #JavaOne ( #Oracle #Java #Android #Lawsuit )
    I mean, Java - and JavaOne - is larger than just Oracle itself, and it seems rather harsh to just punish the entire Java community because Oracle is being a di is suing Google.
  • #Google Boycotts #JavaOne (#Oracle #Java #Android #Lawsuit)
    I'd like to read: a) Oracle is practically preventing us from speaking - b) Our lawyers told us that it would be risky for the corporate if we speak - c) We're boycotting JavaOne.
  • Let Larry know you care ( #Java )
    I'd appreciate it if you'd wear one, just to let Larry know that you care. Or if you just happen to be wandering the neighborhood (I know that there are lots of Java hackers who work within just a few blocks of Moscone). Or if you will be spending quality time with an Oracle salesperson. Or in any other situation where the spirit moves you. It's a gentle but clear way to express your feelings (well.... the last design on the page isn't all that gentle - but it's more fun).
  • Some more comments... ( #Java )
    Lightning might strike and they might live up to their 2007 commitment to create an independent Java foundation. I'm not holding my breath, but if enough customers rose up in revolt, it could actually happen. But it would require Oracle customers to do this, since the only thing that Oracle pays attention to is money, and that's what customers hand over to Oracle.
  • #Oracle's #Java Commitment
    Here's the wardrobe for you!
  • Massive IT failure in Virginia shuts down agencies
    A hardware failure at Virginia's main data center on Wednesday has left state agencies unable to provide basic services including issuing drivers licenses and welfare payments.
  • I have data
    "When you two have finished arguing your opinions, I actually have data!"
  • Paul Allen Sues #Apple, #Google, Others Over Patents
    Patent litigation in general is on the rise, in what is becoming a lucrative endeavor. Ocean Tomo, a Chicago-based merchant bank that tracks the intellectual-property market, values the licensing market at as much as $500 billion.
  • Paul Allen’s patent suits: Enough is enough
    Interval patented basic operations of web sites that seem pretty obvious — and therefore should not have been granted patents. They govern the navigation of audio visual data on a web site, allow information to be located quickly, and present images to get users’ attention. If Interval Research had never existed, these “inventions” would have happened anyway.
  • Paul Allen Sues Everybody
    Almost every website now uses something similar. If you scroll down past this article you will see other stories listed under “related posts” (wait…please don’t sue us, Mr. Allen!). Two other patents relate to showing info on a Web page, including news and stock quotes.
  • #Groklaw - How You Can Help Patent Attorneys Help Free Software
    Focus, please, also on what he's learned about patents, how to invalidate them in various ways, especially the part about proving non-infringement and why that is easier than proving prior art, and then the part about finding a workaround and then publicizing it. He shows how to read a patent filing document. You guys have been effective already in the past in finding prior art, but he is raising the bar with more techniques.
  • The Top Three hottest new majors for a career in technology
    The following is my list of the Top Three hottest academic areas for a future career in tech:

    Data     Mining/Machine Learning/AI/Natural Language Processing
    All of these fields help us sift through and organize huge amounts of information or data. When you apply your knowledge in these areas to a challenging problem in the online space, you know that you are working at a scale that is just immense. It’s much easier said than done. If you have a passion for this area and have a technical background there are a multitude of open positions that might hold a long-term career for you. With the move to the cloud and the sheer amount of information on the web, this area of expertise will continue to be in great demand. Microsoft has a great need for both people interested in the research space and the applied space which is very refreshing.

    Business Intelligence/Competitive Intelligence
    The ability to see trends, make sense of data to a business audience and help to understand your custome
  • Five analyst relations lessons from #Workday
    I present as lessons to consider:

    1. Compelling story. Interesting content is the foundation for everything else; sparks won’t fly unless you’ve got something worthwhile to say.

    2. Everything on the record. Without exception, Workday presented the entire day on the record for publication and Twittering. Most vendors lack the confidence to discuss their challenges and limitations so openly, which made Workday appear honest and authentic.
  • Rumored #SAP - #RedHat Merger Seen as a Long Shot ( #OpenSource )
    Rumors swirled once again this week regarding a possible takeover of Red Hat, this time by SAP, but a number of industry observers said Thursday that the prospect is unlikely at best.
  • Advice for working with analysts
    Michael uses this presentation to help vendors get the most value from industry analysts. Vendors sometimes find working with analysts challenging, because the relationship involves a high-stakes mix of economics, influence, and ego.
  • #Salesforce.com: Red Flags and Hyperbole
    It feels like this stock belongs to another era; specifically late in 1999 during the Internet Boom. Consider:

    1. Revenue is growing at approximately 25% a year, yet the stock is selling at over 150 times trailing earnings, 90 times this year’s earnings, and over 55 times 2013 earnings

    2. GAAP earnings(without adjustments) are going to be less than 50 cents this year

    3. Attrition continues to be in the teens

    4. Insiders continue to sell like crazy, unloaded another 6.5m last week and again made the top 20 insider selling firms in Barron’s

    5. Operating margins declined for the quarter
  • County will rip and replace ailing #SAP system
    #Deloitte used the project as "a trial-and-error training ground" for inexperienced employees, and the result was a "costly computer system far worse than the legacy systems it was intended to replace," according to the county's complaint...The SAP implementation dates to 2006, but today only 50 percent of the functionality is in place and working properly, according to a county report...No particular software package is currently in mind for the replacement, according to Hill.
  • Lacking #Oracle help, #OpenSolaris group disbands
    Motion concerning dissolution of the OGB

    Whereas Oracle has continued ignore requests to appoint a liaison to work with the OGB concerning the future of OpenSolaris development and our community, and

    Whereas Oracle distributed an e-mail to its employees on August 13, 2010, that set forth Oracle's decision to unilaterally terminate the development partnership between Oracle and the OpenSolaris Community, and

    Whereas, without the continued support and participation of Oracle in the open development of OpenSolaris, the OGB and the community Sun/Oracle created to support the open Solaris development partnership have no meaning, and

    Whereas the desire and enthusiasm for continuing open development of the OpenSolaris code base has clearly passed out of Oracle's (and thus this community's) hands into other communities,

    Be it Resolved that the OpenSolaris Governing Board hereby collectively resigns, noting that under the terms of the OpenSolaris Charter section 1.1 (and Constitution 1.3.5
  • #Intel CEO: U.S. faces looming tech decline
    "I think this group does not understand what it takes to create jobs. And I think they're flummoxed by their experiment in Keynesian economics not working."
  • Unclear future for #Oracle's #Beehive after initial buzz
    "Given that in the past two years Oracle has gone from painting a 40 foot tall bee on the steps of the Moscone Center to dedicating one half of one session to Beehive, is there something we should know about the future of this product?" one asked in a post to an official Oracle forum earlier this month.
  • The #Workday architecture — a new kind of #OLTP software stack ( #MySQL #NoSQL )
    Workday’s database is append-only. This is exploited for effective dating (pretty heavily, it seems, perhaps because that’s a useful concept in human resources) and snapshotted reporting.
  • The Hidden Roadmap Details from #SAP / #Sybase Media Day
    SAP/Sybase convergence: Besides the announced, heavily-anticipated porting of Sybase’s Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database to support SAP’s Business Suite, the companies plan to roll out in-memory-enabled Enterprise Process Management (EPM) applications and “extreme OLTP [OnLine Transaction Processing]” in the next 9-18 months, wrote Forrester analyst Paul Hamerman, who attended the afternoon roadmap sessions.
  • #NetSuite Named Best Cloud Application at UK Cloud Computing World Series Awards
    The Cloud Computing World Series Awards are designed to showcase the full cloud computing supply chain, including vendors, suppliers, integrators and end-users to offer a complete view of the industry. Hundreds of entries were received for this year's awards, with a shortlist of three decided upon for each category by an independent panel of judges, including leading journalists and analysts from the IT community. For more information on the awards, please visit: http://cloudwf.com/awards.
  • #SAP Confronts The Real-Time Culture Wars
    "Two hours ago, I spoke to the CIO of one of our very largest customers," Sikka said in a phone conversation this week, "and we were talking about the massive decision they have coming up on data warehousing and how they store data. They generate 400 billion records of information every year, but don't have any way to ask questions about that data—not exotic and complicated questions, but just valuable ones."
  • Newly combined #SAP and #Sybase could mean big trouble for #Oracle
    Technology professionals can expect SAP Business Suite and other SAP offerings to be fully ported, certified and optimized to run on Sybase database management system (DBMS) software by the middle of 2011, SAP and Sybase officials said yesterday.
  • #HP To Invest US$1 Billion To Transform Enterprise Services Business
    During this multi-year transformation and investment, HP plans to consolidate Enterprise Services' commercial data centers, management platforms, and networks tools.

    It will also enhance applications to create a more scalable modernised and automated IT infrastructure that will enable clients to respond to rapidly changing business conditions, he told Bernama on Saturday.
  • #HP Posts Hurd’s Last Quarter
    Mark Hurd “left HP in great shape.”
  • #HP, #Dell Shares Sink as Tech Spending Jitters Persist
    On Thursday, HP and Dell reported strong demand from commercial customers for technology hardware, along with some signs of weakness in their consumer businesses.

    Despite largely upbeat commentary about enterprise spending, investors remained jittery about the broader economy and demand for technology products. Wall Street analysts lowered price targets on HP and Dell to reflect a broader contraction in valuations in the sector.
  • #HP after Hurd: 'We're looking forward, not back'
    "When you have a winning strategy I don't see the motivation to change it, and that's what we have here," she said during a brief conference call after the financial results were released.

    HP's revenue for the quarter increased 11 percent from a year earlier to US$30.7 billion, the company said in a statement. Net profit was $1.8 billion, or $0.75 per share, up from $1.7 billion, or $0.69 per share, in the third quarter last year.
  • #OpenSource Developers unhappy over #Oracle #Google #Android #Java suit
    A leader in the Linux space echoed similar sentiments. "Oracle has significantly undermined its relationship with the open source and developer community," says Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux distributor Canonical. "That may or may not have an immediate impact on its bottom line, but it's going to present real challenges for the pace of adoption of key Oracle technologies like Java and MySQL, which have traditionally been led from the bottom up. Developers have been the drivers of adoption of open source platforms, and they will avoid platforms that look like patent traps."
  • #Oracle is improving #MySQL
    I continue to see signs that Oracle’s next release of MySQL will not only include much of the unreleased good work that’s been done over the last few years, but will add a lot of new features and fixes as well.
  • #OpenSolaris scrapped: Will #Oracle pay a price for being SCOracle? ( #Google #Android #Java )
    Perens says Google violated its Sun patent grant by not including AWT or Swing. SiliconANGLE agrees Oracle may have a case. (But if the invention isn’t tied to a specific machine, Groklaw notes, the patent may be tossed.

    Joel West adds that even if Google re-engineered Java in a clean room, the patent argument is compelling, and Java was never more than “semi-open.”
  • #Oracle v. #Google #Java #Android Lawsuit - Rationale Becoming More Clear
    Android is missing AWT and Swing, as Google created its own user-interface toolkit. So, Android would not conform with Java Standard Edition nor Java Micro Edition, which both require AWT. Google loses Sun's patent grant through non-compliance with its requirements to follow the Java standard.
  • What Is the Future of #Linux Development? - Too Hard for Noobs?
    "I don't think that we have any lack of interesting technical challenges moving forward," Ts'o said. "There is the concern that we don't have any loyal opposition to challenge us, the way that we did when Sun was funding Solaris to the same degree it used too."
  • Monty's #MariaDB extends the #MySQL #opensource database
    "Be responsive to the community and treat them well and have good documentation."...A focus on community is what MariaDB is all about, Widenuis said he is now following a hacking business model. It's not a company that is being built to be sold, it's democratic and employees are all shareholders.
  • #Ingres CEO unfazed by #Oracle's #OpenSource #MySQL play
    Oracle is already starting to up the MySQL prices and if they raise them too much someone else can move in and offer support for it. There are big issues around prices getting jacked up around monopolies."
  • #SAP / #Sybase – The Real Attraction
    Business analytics:...Sadly, a demo of this failed to launch.
  • #Satyam founder gets bail as case drags on
    Raju has been in jail since January last year. He has been receiving treatment recently for what his doctors say is hepatitis C. Nine other executives charged in the case are also out on bail.
  • Raju & co. retract all charges in #Satyam case
    Ramaligna Raju on Monday completed the process of retraction of his January 2009 confession by labelling all charges levelled against him by the CBI as false. Nine other accused followed suit.
  • #IBM Breaks Double Digit Performance Barrier With 10 Million Transactions Per Minute
    IBM achieved the industry's highest ever TPC-C (transaction processing) benchmark result using a Power Systems configuration with DB2, hitting 10,366,254 tpmC,(1). The IBM result delivered the follow breakthrough results including:

    * Performance more than 2.5 times better than HP's best result(2), 69% greater performance per core, and 2.1 times better price/performance
    * Performance more than 35% better than Oracle's best result(3), 2.7 times better performance per core, 41% better price performance, and 35% better energy efficiency per transaction
  • Handicapping #HP CEO Candidates
    Marc Benioff, #Salesforce.com’s (CRM) CEO who has transformed the software industry by leading the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) charge and evangelizing about the added business benefits of moving to a broader array of cloud computing alternatives. If Salesforce.com isn’t going to be acquired by Oracle (ORCL) and Benioff made CEO under Larry Ellison, he would be a great candidate to push HP’s legacy software business into the new world of SaaS and its hardware business into the cloud.
  • #SAP and #Sybase Combine Forces to Unwire the Enterprise
    # Within the next nine months, the companies will bring together technologies to deliver a leading mobile platform for business that is based on open standards, runs on all major mobile operating systems, and manages and supports all major device types. With this platform, customers and partners can build new mobile experiences on top of existing applications, such as SAP® Business Suite software. In addition, SAP will showcase mobile experiences for all products, including both SAP Business Suite and SAP® Business ByDesign™, similar to what is available for mobile sales for customer relationship management (CRM) today.
    # SAP and Sybase will present the industry’s broadest solution portfolio for EIM by porting, certifying and optimizing SAP Business Suite and other solutions onto Sybase data management servers – bringing customers a greater choice of database platforms for their SAP applications.
    # The companies will offer customers a complete and optimized high-performance business an
  • #Yahoo talks social graphs, data analytics and #Hadoop
    We are making a bet on Hadoop on the grid technology, and we have the largest grid clusters in production today on the internet running Hadoop. We — our intent, our data warehousing problem is of larger scale than what you can solve with a traditional data warehousing technology, like a Teradata or others. We’re talking about warehouses in the tens of petabytes range and growing. So, that amount of raw data, you cannot put into an Oracle system or a Greenplum appliance. So, we’re definitely adopting the grid. We have many systems today in production running on Hadoop and over time, our basic technology stack is going to be Hadoop for the raw event level data and the data processing.

    That said Oracle will be used for high throughput and fast query performance. At the dashboard level, Burke said it will use MicroStrategy for analytics.
  • #AsterData Introduces Free, Downloadable #MapReduce Development Environment to Ease Development of Rich Analytic Applications
    Aster Data Developer Express, a point-and-click visual development environment introduced earlier this year, is now downloadable from Aster Data's web site, http://www.asterdata.com/, and is also listed in the Eclipse Marketplace web site. Aster Data Developer Express, an integrated development environment (IDE), significantly eases the development and deployment of MapReduce-enabled analytic applications. The IDE has been proven to make it tremendously easy for developers and analysts to build, test, and with one click deploy rich analytic applications that leverage large volumes of data. Now, any developer or analyst that is familiar with the Java programming language can complete a rich analytic application in under an hour using the simple yet powerful Aster Data Developer Express environment in Eclipse. Aster Data Developer Express delivers both rapid development and local testing of advanced analytic applications for any project, regardless of size.
  • Order re Motions For Partial Summary Judgment, ORACLE v SAP
    the court hereby GRANTS the motions in part and DENIES them in part.
  • #SAP execs outline plans for #Sybase
    SAP executives Thursday outlined the company's strategy for the recently acquired Sybase, which includes the creation of a mobile platform that can run on-premises or in the cloud, connects to every application and is compatible with "all major" mobile operating systems and devices.
  • #SAP - #Sybase will deliver combined mobile development platform in nine months
    Despite his being “underwhelmed” by the presentation, he applauded SAP for acquiring Sybase and its focus on the mobile enterprise market, which he said is very much in its infancy.
  • #Salesforce.com raises full year outlook
    Fiscal Q2 EPS, excluding items, 29 cents, beats street

    * Fiscal Q2 rev $394 mln beats Street view $384.8 mln

    * Company raises full-year outlook

    * Shares rise 7.9 percent after hours
  • #Salesforce.com 2Q Net Down 30%; Shares Up On Strong Outlook
    Salesforce.com Inc. beat expectations for its second quarter and boosted guidance for the year Thursday, sending shares higher after hours.

    Profit for the maker of customer-relationship-management software slid 30% on higher expenses, but analysts attributed that to increased spending on marketing and the company's own sales force.

    The San Francisco company also raised its earnings target for the year by 2 cents from May's reduced view to $1.15 to $1.17 a share, while boosting its revenue forecast to $1.6 billion from $1.55 billion to $1.56 billion.

    Salesforce forecast a third-quarter profit of 30 cents to 31 cents a share on revenue of $408 million to $410 million. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters predicted 29 cents and $394 million, respectively.
  • #SAP and #Sybase CEOs to Discuss the Road Ahead via Press Conference in Boston and Frankfurt
    At a special event on Thursday, August 19, 2010, company leaders from SAP and Sybase will come together for the first time to share the go-forward strategy and joint product direction for the newly combined companies.

    In Boston, SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott, Sybase CEO John Chen and SAP Executive Board Member Vishal Sikka will unveil planned co-innovations in mobility, analytics and information management technologies – and will discuss the future of an unwired enterprise where mobility is the new desktop.

    SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe will join the proceedings through a link to a concurrent event in Frankfurt, Germany.
  • #Adobe chief Shantanu Narayen believes he doesn't need #Apple or the #iPad
    They've chosen to keep their system closed and we'd rather work with partners who are interested in working with us.
  • #Oracle Suit Against #Google #Android Part of Anti- #OpenSource Drive
    [The worst sort of drivel and facile sloganeering-DBM]
    It is, in a word, corporate warfare at its worst.
  • #HP Board Felt Hurd Settlement With Contractor Impeded Probe
    The board spent the next 24 hours tying up loose ends. Those included unanimously voting out the CEO. The board wanted to avoid drawing the situation out any longer, and they negotiated a severance package.
  • Next Gen Enterprise: Enterprise headlines and excerpts, 2010-08-15
    Enterprise news and excerpts for 2010-08-15.
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