Salesforce.com Dreamforce 2011: Some insights from The Greatest (Cloud Computing) Show on Earth!

Ringling Brothers bills itself as "The Greatest Show on Earth," but Salesforce.com's Dreamforce 2011 could easily claim the title of "The Greatest Cloud Computing Show on Earth." With over 40,000 attendees, dozens of exhibitors, great concerts and parties, and presentations galore, the event was an unqualified success for Salesforce.com, but it also heralded a real coming of age of enterprise Cloud computing. Why?

1. The show was jam-packed with insight, guidance, case studies, education - and energy! Not only did this show demonstrate conclusively that Salesforce.com has vision (as usual), it also showed that Salesforce.com's ecosystem is moving ahead decisively into the Cloud, across many areas of their businesses. Sure, the keynotes were educational and entertaining, but the proof was elsewhere at the show ...

2. Salesforce.com knows how to throw a party, but they also know how to create a movement. The speakers across the board (from partners and customers) accurately and compellingly presented the Salesforce.com themes of the show - Cloud, mobile, and social. The Developer Zone was hopping with highly effective and productive sessions teaching developers how to become part of the Cloud, mobile, and social revolution - and what developer doesn't want that?

3. The Cloud Expo was hopping with businesses doing business. I visited several dozen ISV booths (like Kenandy, Google, Progress, Jitterbit, BMC Remedy, Informatica, Infor, LinkedIn, Workday, SnapLogic, Appirio, and Persistent Systems), and it was all I could do to get to a company representative. There was so much traffic, interest, business card exchanging, and follow-up meeting scheduling going on that I thought I was at an Oracle or SAP conference in 1993. Here are some photos from different attendees on Flickr that I found showing the mob scene on the show floor - but it wasn't just a mob, it was a mob determined to move their businesses into the Cloud:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adriarichards/5241913777/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/islandgal/5247181522/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mantala/6104550977/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chuckschaeffer/6113830912/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/enzo6034/5250333129/

The vendors I spoke to said that they were very happy with their Salesforce.com relationship, that a very large fraction of their leads came from salespeople at Salesforce.com, and that the show was very much worth the money spent on the booth and related expenses. This is an ecosystem that has the Cloud, mobile, and social religion - because customers are leading the way.

Oh, and Salesforce.com didn't let this event go by without using it to maximize its impact on their top line. Deals were being struck, and you can expect to see the results in Salesforce.com's next quarter numbers.

4. The Salesforce.com team did a great job on the logistics for the show, despite its monumental size and enormous growth over previous shows. Keynotes were delivered well, camera angles were picked intelligently and for maximum visibility, schedules and meals were arranged to maximize traffic in the Cloud Expo, and thousands (seemingly) of developers were given the requisite skills to build their first Cloud, mobile, and social apps.

5. Salesforce.com has so much momentum in Cloud, mobile, and social, that several partners and even competitors arranged events around this show. Of course, there was the predictable Oracle attempts to do some guerilla marketing around the event - not Oracle's greatest and most successful marketing moments. One other competitor hosted an analyst gathering right after Dreamforce, and several partners had similar events before and after the conference.

6. Perhaps lost in all the hoopla were some impressive product announcements, demonstrating that Salesforce.com continues its ambition to lead by example, and to continue innovating to create customer value: Data.com, Chatter Connect, Chatter Approval, Database.com availability, social profiles, touch.salesforce.com, and much more.

Once again, Salesforce.com has put on a great show, but Dreamforce 2011 was much more than that - it may have marked the beginning of an industry-wide movement to the Cloud.

IT Jobs Recovery Continues, Picks Up Steam

There have been a spate of news stories in the IT press covering the state of IT hiring. Once a quarter or so, I look at the job posts in Dice.com across many different keywords - a useful proxy for the IT hiring market at least for the U. S.

Three months ago, IT hiring was definitely picking up across the board. Fast-growing skills included iPad, HTML5, Amazon, Android, Twitter, and Facebook; categories with the greatest number of jobs posted included SQL, Oracle, Java, Windows, Unix, and Linux. Versus last summer, there was about an increase of about 30% in the number of jobs posted. How have things changed in the past three months?

Generally, the jobs picture is very similar to three months ago, with an overall increase in the number of jobs posted of around 6.1% (46.2% vs last April). If these jobs are being filled, this shows a sustained and strong increase in demand for IT skills. Within the overall IT category, this analysis does not cover some areas separately (e.g., desktop support, systems administration, network administration or really many network skills, and database administration), although many of these categories get covered through the occurrence of the relevant keywords. Perhaps I'll add these topics for future analyses.

Overall

This analysis looks at four general areas skills for which IT hires: Database, Applications, Languages, and Platforms.

Database

The skills keywords I look at in the Database category include SQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PL/SQL, MySQL, DB2, Sybase, Hadoop, Informix, NoSQL, and many variants on these terms.

Across the board, there is significant increased demand for all these database skills versus three months ago (+5.1%), and versus a year ago (+34.5). Hadoop and NoSQL were not being tracked in the analyses from a year ago, but the fastest growth in other categories since last year and three months ago has been for MySQL (+52% vs last year, +9% vs 3 months ago). Hadoop and NoSQL demand has grown by 12% and 69% vs 3 months ago.

The weakest demand in this category has been for Informix (-12% vs 3 months ago, +10% since last year) and Sybase (+0.9% vs 3 months ago, -5% since last year).

Although there is rapid growth in demand for skills like Hadoop and NoSQL, the largest demand by far is for more standard skills like SQL, Oracle, and SQL Server.

Skill	Jobs	Growth over 3 months	Growth over 12 months
SQL	23453	5.6%	33.8%
Oracle	16684	4.7%	33.1%
SQL Server	9692	4.6%	34.7%
PL/SQL	3587	4.5%	35.1%
MySQL	3123	9.3%	51.5%
DB2	2564	4.8%	28.5%
Sybase	1314	0.9%	-4.7%
Hadoop	363	12.0%	New comparison
Other NoSQL	245	69.0%	New comparison
Informix	168	-12.0%	9.8%

Applications

The skills I look for in the Applications category include SAP, BASIS, ABAP, Dynamics, Peoplesoft, Siebel, eBusiness Suite, Salesforce.com, and related terms.

Three months ago, this was the category with the strongest recovery versus a year ago. Demand is still strong for applications skills, with the category growing by 4.5% over the past three months, and up 47.4% versus a year ago. The fastest growth in this category is clearly for SAP-related skills. Job posts mentioning SAP are up 8.3% vs three months ago and up 59% over the past year; ABAP and BASIS also had very strong growth, with job posts up around 70% for each skill over the past year. Salesforce.com job posts went up compared with last year (+37%), but were down over the past three months (-3.8%). Oracle's application suites (not including Fusion, for which I have no data) show much more modest growth or shrinkage, with Peoplesoft the lone bright spot (+54% over the past year). Microsoft Dynamics has also shown growth over the past year (+31%), but has declined vs three months ago (-2.9%).

The weakest demand in this category is for Oracle eBusiness Suite, for which demand has declined by 36% over the past three months.

The skills to know in this category, if you want to be employable, are SAP and Microsoft Dynamics, but the latter covers many different applications - SAP is where the job security lies. Of course, job security and overall compensation are not always aligned, but given the rapid growth in the SAP category we can expect very strong salaries there.

Skill	Jobs	Growth over 3 months	Growth over 12 months
SAP	7475	8.3%	58.6%
Dynamics	6653	-2.9%	31.3%
BASIS	3858	18.3%	67.3%
Peoplesoft	2475	6.7%	54.4%
Siebel	1305	-5.0%	13.2%
ABAP	815	1.5%	70.1%
Salesforce.com	714	-3.8%	37.0%
eBusiness	48	-36.0%	New comparison

Languages

The skills included in this category include Java, JavaScript, HTML, XML, C#, C++, Perl, AJAX, PHP, Python, Ruby, COBOL, Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, Assembler, PowerBuilder, and Fortran.

Demand for programming language skills surged, growing 58.5% vs a year ago and 7.4% over the past three months.

In particular, HTML5 demand really took off, growing 45.2% over the past three months and well over 1000% over the past year (from a very small base). There was such strong demand growth for all skills, that it is more useful in this category to speak about the area of weakest growth - Adobe Flash. Demand for Adobe Flash skills has grown by only 7% vs a year ago. Comparable skills - HTML5 and Microsoft Silverlight - have grown much faster.

Given the large number of jobs requiring Java skills, the growth in demand for Java by more than 33% over the past year is encouraging, and should indicate a recovery in compensation as well.

Skill	Jobs	Growth over 3 months	Growth over 12 months
Java	16152	5.5%	33.4%
HTML	9736	7.3%	57.1%
XML	9651	9.0%	27.0%
JavaScript	9618	5.4%	New comparison
C#	7940	9.7%	37.5%
C++	5987	4.0%	21.3%
Perl	4948	4.0%	25.5%
AJAX	4440	7.1%	36.9%
PHP	3022	10.6%	44.9%
Python	2601	15.8%	59.7%
Ruby	1540	15.8%	95.9%
Silverlight	982	12.6%	New comparison
COBOL	735	6.1%	36.9%
Flash	646	2.2%	7.0%
HTML5	540	45.2%	1488.2%
Assembler	212	12.2%	11.0%
PowerBuilder	155	26.0%	39.6%
FORTRAN	68	1.5%	30.8%

Platforms

Platform skills analyzed in this category include Windows, Unix, Linux, IBM, VMware, Open Source (new), Embedded, Mainframe, Android, Blackberry, Palm, iPhone, iOS, iPad, Azure, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, Facebook, Mac, and Widget. I had an error in the way I was querying Mac jobs, so that has influenced some of the results.

Platform skills are also in great demand, with job posts up 5.8% vs three months ago and up 43.5% over last year. Again, there was very strong growth in demand across nearly all platform skills, with the fastest growth in iPad (-3.7% vs three months ago but up more than 3000% over the past year), Amazon (+12.8% over the past three months and +332% over the past year), and Android (+19.8% vs three months ago, and +270% vs last year).

Over the past year, demand has declined for only one skill (Widgets, -14%), but demand has softened over the past three months for Embedded Systems (-4.6%), iPad (surprisingly -3.5%), Palm (-6.9%), Widgets (-14.9%), and eBay (-3.3%).

Although all platforms are doing well, the top three (Windows, Unix, and Linux) are all showing strong demand and growth; it appears that Linux demand may surpass Unix demand very soon.

Skill	Jobs	Growth over 3 months	Growth over 12 months
Windows	12641	2.3%	28%
Unix	10692	3.9%	21%
Linux	10185	2.1%	32%
IBM	5850	7.4%	77%
VMWare	2609	2.8%	47%
Open Source	1955	New comparison	New comparison
Mainframe	1776	5.8%	32%
Embedded	1652	-4.6%	13%
Android	1170	19.8%	270%
Google	1132	27.0%	35%
Blackberry	1027	7.7%	77%
Amazon	1019	12.8%	332%
iPhone	1013	7.1%	162%
Mac	856	New comparison	New comparison
iOS	832	24.9%	New comparison
Twitter	683	7.4%	141%
Facebook	582	17.6%	135%
iPad	413	-3.5%	3077%
Yahoo	192	14.3%	16%
Palm	162	-6.9%	22%
Widget	149	-14.9%	-14%
Azure	103	80.7%	94%
eBay	88	-3.3%	42%

Surprising Findings

• Big declines in demand for Oracle eBusiness Suite and Oracle Siebel skills.
• Huge increases in demand for Microsoft Azure, SAP Sybase PowerBuilder, and SAP BASIS skills.
• Demand for Microsoft Silverlight developers surpasses demand for Adobe Flash developers!

If you have any skills you'd like to see tracked in these posts, please post a comment and I'll see about including them next time. Thanks!

What can we learn from software development job posts? (Java, SAP, Oracle, SQL, and C#/C++ will get you a job!)

Several months ago, I posted some analysis of IT-related jobs listed on Dice and Monster. At the time, the hot job skills were SQL, Java, and XML. Things haven't changed much since April - although some specific skills have moved down or up on the list.

In summary, here are some conclusions we can draw from this data:

• In almost all job skills, there are more jobs posted now than there were in April or last year in June.
• The most popular skills are Java, SAP, Oracle, SQL, and C#/C++.
• Job posts mentioning specific programming languages and popular applications have experienced the largest increase in jobs posted over this period.
• The biggest jumps (by percentage, sometimes from a small base) were in job posts mentioning Android, Google, Facebook, iPhone, Salesforce.com, and AJAX.
• The biggest drops (by percentage) were in job posts mentioning Fortran, PowerBuilder, and Informix.

Here are the top 20 skills listed in job titles on Dice.com and Monster.com:

Rank	Skill	Total Jobs	Previous rank
1	Java	6316	3
2	SAP	4357	13
3	Oracle	3561	2
4	SQL	2461	1
5	C#	1778	10
6	C++	1319	12
7	Unix	1189	5
8	Linux	1092	6
9	Peoplesoft	955	-
10	Windows	947	4
11	SQL Server	817	8
12	PHP	657	19
13	Embedded	489	-
14	Siebel	405	-
15	PL/SQL	367	17
16	JavaScript	337	-
17	Mainframe	306	-
18	Perl	265	14
19	Salesforce.com	253	-
20	Ruby	240	-

The methodology in the analysis continues to evolve, so the results aren't perfectly comparable.

Some additional findings:

• Language skills showed the largest increase in demand as a category, up 78%. Applicatoins grew 45%, platforms grew 36%, and databases grew 33%.
  
• Database: Given the large base, there was a surprisingly large jump in posts for Oracle jobs (up 34%). SQL Server and MySQL also had large jumps, but from substantially lower bases. If you're going to invest in learning a database, at this point, Oracle is the clear leading choice.
• Applications: Salesforce.com had the largest jump by percentage (up 113%), but from a relatively small base (118). SAP (and related skills of ABAP and BASIS) had a large jump from a large base (up 50%). Siebel also had a big jump in mentions (up 36%).
• Languages: There was a huge increase in job posts for Java skills (up 92% from a large base). Other languages that showed large increases from large bases include C# (up 47%), PHP (up 57%), and C++ (up 28%).
• Platforms: Only in the platforms category was there a lot of change other than just growth. Unix was still the largest platform skill by mention, but Linux passed Windows with 34% growth. There was substantial growth in mentions for Google, Android, iPhone, and AJAX. There was healthy growth for most platforms, with the notable exception of Blackberry-related jobs.
• Skills that are not in high demand or growing: Informix, Sybase, PowerBuilder, Fortran, Blackberry, Palm WebOS, Yahoo, Widgets/Gadgets.
  
• Skills that are surprisingly low in demand: HTML5, Azure, Facebook.
• Overall, there was an increase of 50% in job posts on these two sites.
  

If you have any skills you'd like to see tracked in these posts, please post a comment and I'll see about including them next time. Thanks!

Ranjan Das passed away.

OracAlum, and president of SAP India and Southeast Asia, Ranjan Das passed away yesterday. He was so young and so very talented, and such a great friend to so many. He was just 42 years old, with so many passions. He loved exercising, film, and his family and friends.

A statement was released by SAP that says:

SAP is deeply saddened by the news that our colleague Ranjan Das has passed away suddenly today. This comes as a great shock to all of us within the SAP family and is felt most profoundly by every one of us. We will be sharing more information once we have had the opportunity to further understand the family's wishes. Our deepest sympathies go out to his family, friends and work colleagues," said Geraldine McBride, president for SAP Asia Pacific Japan.

Das (42) had over 15 years of experience in the business software industry, eight of which were spent in SAP. He co-founded SAP xApps, one of the fastest growing businesses for the company. He also played a pivotal role in the early adoption of SAP NetWeaver, Duet, GRC, and e-Sourcing.

I reached out to his wife but have not spoken with her yet. I'm so sorry for the loss, and will miss him terribly. Hug your friends and family today (and everyday).

Software: Maintenance Revenue: High Margin or High Risk?

Excellent analysis today from Cowen and Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher. I can't find it posted on their site (got it via e-mail), so I'm including the key extract below for those who might be interested. Enjoy!

Software: Maintenance Revenue: High Margin or High Risk?

Consensus View: Applications maintenance, fees for technical support and product update rights, is a $20B annual business with 80%+ margins. Maintenance revenue, which is approximately 50% of total sales for most apps vendors (Oracle, SAP, Lawson and Epicor), is a highly reliable, high margin, recurring revenue stream that provides earnings stability and enables margin expansion even if license sales falter. Companies with a high proportion of maintenance revenue should sell at premium PEs.

• Our View: We believe that application software vendor maintenance fees are at risk. Our research indicates that companies continue to tighten their belts around IT spending, and ERP upgrades are not a priority. This is not a macro issue that we expect to diminish as the economy strengthens. We believe ERP upgrades, the primary motivation to pay maintenance fees, are on the wane because it's a mature market. Vendor investments in R&D are on the decline, innovation is lagging and redeployment costs are multiples of the license fee. As a result, customers are increasingly questioning the value of paying annual maintenance fees of 20% of the cost of the original license for the occasional use of technical support. We believe that as the value proposition around maintenance fees diminishes, there is significant opportunity for third party service providers to offer low cost tech support. While there are only a small number of these third party providers today, we believe that as Apps sales continue to decline, there is a significant over capacity of consultants with ERP expertise looking for opportunities to leverage their skills. We believe these dynamics will result in the creation of a number of businesses designed to chip away at the exorbitant revenues and margins associated with vendor maintenance fees.

Valuations and financials of SaaS vs. traditional enterprise software vendors

Interesting, thoughtful analysis from John Keenan ...

I track the performance of the publicly-traded SaaS vendors and thought you might find it interesting. With the recent IPO of LogMeIn, there are 28 pure-plays. I track the financial performance for the company's last fiscal year and valuation performance on a quarterly basis (I use month ends of February, May, August and November).

Re: the financial performance, the story is growth and cash flow. For the last fiscal year, the SaaS vendors grew 31%, with on-demand revenue up 39%. I also track the 146 publicly-traded software vendors and their figures are total revenue up 16% and license revenue down 6.8% (all their growth is in maintenance and PS). It is clear that users are shifting their spend away from legacy perpetual models to SaaS models.

The 28 SaaS vendors averaged $160M in total revenue (14 were over $100M) and had an average operating loss of ($6.8M) - only 8 the vendors were profitable. However, their free cash flow was very strong and averaged $14.6M - 21 of the vendors were cash flow positive.

Spending on sales & marketing, R&D and G&A averaged 36.5%, 12.9% and 16.5% of revenue respectively.

Finally, while valuations have recovered in the past 6 months - interesting, the aggregate market cap for the 28 vendors is up about 29 % in each of the last 2 quarters - they are down 10% from August 2008 and 26% from the market's peak in October 2007.

Probably the most notable change is the reduction in valuations as a percentage of revenue. In August 2008, the valuations were about 6.1X trailing-twelve-months (TTM) revenue. As of August 2009, it's about 4.2X TTM revenue. In October 2007, it was over 10X TTM revenue.

If you want to follow up on this with the author, please comment here or send him a message to jkeenan with the domain name impacsus.com.

SAP CTO Vishal Sikka named "Corporate Officer"

Vishal Sikka, SAP's CTO, was named a "Corporate Officer" by the SAP Supervisory Board. This is like getting "tenure" in an academic environment, and signals a significant increase in his authority, as well as a recognition of his accomplishments. Vishal really created the centralized architecture function at SAP, and has been very influential in all product groups at SAP. He is the first CTO in SAP's history, and the first person of Indian ethnicity to be appointed to a corporate officer role at SAP (as far as I know). This also creates a very real possibility that Vishal will be appointed to SAP's Supervisory Board (like the Board of Directors in American companies) in the future.

Congratulations to Vishal! The internal announcement follows:

Dear Colleagues,

I have the pleasure of announcing that the SAP Supervisory Board named Vishal Sikka an SAP Corporate Officer and a member of the SAP Executive Council at the end of July.
This appointment recognizes Vishal's contribution in forming the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (oCTO) as a unit that provides technical leadership to the company and thereby helps SAP secure a competitive advantage in the field of enterprise solutions.

In addition, his appointment recognizes both the role that Vishal has personally played and will continue to play in architecting SAP offerings into Timeless Software, and as a key spokesperson representing SAP as a technology thought leader, both internally and externally.

Vishal will continue to serve as SAP’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and report to me.
Prior to becoming the CTO of SAP in 2007, Vishal was the senior vice president of architecture and chief software architect at SAP, responsible for the road map and direction for the architecture of SAP's products and infrastructure. Before that, he was head of the advanced technology group responsible for strategic innovative projects.

Vishal holds a doctoral degree in computer science from Stanford University in California, and his experience includes research in automatic programming, information and application integration, and artificial intelligence at Stanford, at Xerox Labs in Palo Alto, and at two startup companies.

Please join me in congratulating Vishal!

Best regards,
Léo

Chuck Rozwat's resignation announcement

This is reputed to be the text of the e-mail Chuck Rozwat sent out to the company yesterday (7/14) morning, announcing his departure from Oracle.

Subject: Time for a change
From: Charles Rozwat
To: crozwat_org_ww@oracle.com
CC: [CC list redacted]

It is time for a change. After 15 years at Oracle (following 17 years at Digital Equipment) in software development, I have decided it is time for me to step away from my current role and broaden my knowledge and skills in another dimension. As of August 1st, I will be leaving my current position and taking a 12 month leave of absence to study public policy at Harvard University. Thomas Kurian will be assuming responsibility for overall Product Development.

I will take the next twelve months to gain a perspective different from my years developing software as part of the high tech, private sector world. I have accepted admission to a 1 year Masters program in Public Administration, at the Kennedy School of Government, which I begin this September. This program, designed for established, international leaders from both the public and private sector, will allow me to study a number of the issues that face public/private enterprise at a time when almost every policy area is being reevaluated. I look forward to a year from now, to see how I can add value to Oracle with an additional set of skills and an enhanced perspective.

This has been a long-considered and difficult decision in many respects, but one thing is extremely clear. The future is brighter than ever for Oracle. We are at the beginning of a new product cycle, with major new products and versions in Database 11gR2, FMW 11gR1/2, Enterprise Manager, Exadata V2, our Collaboration and Integration products and all of our Applications, now including Fusion. With the pending acquisition of Sun, we add yet another dimension.

The Oracle leadership team is the strongest it has ever been. I extend my thanks to every member of the Executive Committee and their teams for their support of our product efforts. It is impossible for me to express my gratitude to Larry for what his overall product guidance has meant to the product development organization and also the life changing experience it has been for me to be allowed to be part of his team. I thank Charles and Safra, not only for the skills and success they have brought to their roles, but also the support and direction they have brought to our product efforts.

I thank you for your commitment to our mission and your excellence in building and integrating the greatest software products in the industry. I also thank you for your personal support. Since joining Oracle as the head of our first "major" acquisition, I have been amazed by the talent and dedication of our people. We are the best Software Development organization on the planet. We have delivered the most functional, industry-leading products across all major enterprise software categories. You can be proud that the world runs on the products we have built. The world runs on Oracle.

Chuck

Update on Oracle Applications leadership change

Here is the text of the e-mail sent out at Oracle by Chuck Rozwat announcing Ed's departure. This note confirms Ed's departure at the end of the month, and indicates that the "legacy" ("Applications Unlimited") team will report to Chuck after Ed's departure (although it has been widely rumored that the legacy apps will be reporting to Thomas Kurian).

Ed Abbo will be leaving Oracle as of June 30th. He has decided that his next career objectives can be best met outside of Oracle. Ed’s contributions and presence will be missed.

Some of you may not be aware of this, but Ed has had two separate “tours of duty”. He joined Oracle out of graduate school as part of the winter class of '86, and was part of the team that built Oracle's first internal customer support system. He also worked in Oracle Consulting when it was first established and later in the Sales organization as part of the Strategic accounts team.

He joined Siebel Systems in early 1994 where he held a number of positions leading to CTO and head of engineering, where he was at the time of the Siebel acquisition in late 2005. Ed led the effort to secure Oracle’s clear leadership in the CRM market through the Siebel Product Line and the fast growing CRM On Demand business. In 2007, he was asked to take on the additional responsibility to run the Applications Unlimited group. During this time, Ed has been the “face” of Oracle Applications to our customers, analysts and press, delivered on the Applications Unlimited commitment to continued product releases and innovation across Oracle's Application product lines, and established a strong organization and leadership team that will ensure our continued success.

Please join me in thanking Ed for his significant contributions to Oracle, and in wishing him good fortune in his future endeavors.

As of July 1, I will be directly managing the Applications Unlimited Group.

Chuck

Good luck to Ed (and Thomas, and Chuck, and all the team)!

Ed Abbo is leaving Oracle

News has broken that Ed Abbo will be leaving Oracle at the end of this month. The "legacy" applications will be organizationally under Thomas Kurian, who already has the Fusion (and other) Middleware products, BI, Fusion Applications, and Tools, and who will doubtless get some of the pieces acquired from Sun.

Ed was a greatly respected professional, and will surely be missed at Oracle and by Oracle's customers. Obviously, Thomas also is very successful, so it seems likely he will do a great job with his new responsibilities.

Predictions and info for Oracle Fusion Middleware launch, July 1

I saw some interesting tweets and have been hearing other rumors and facts regarding Oracle Fusion Middleware and Applications, and Oracle's upcoming announcement on July 1. Here is what I was able to glean and infer based on this information.

First, my predictions:

• Oracle will explicitly or implicitly reveal its plans (and post-merger org structure) for Java in the post-Sun-acquisition period for Fusion Middleware at the Fusion Middleware (FMW) launch on July 1.
• Oracle will deprecate Eclipse (which they don't control) quickly, trying to move Java developers to JDeveloper (which they control). JDeveloper will have tight links to FMW components as well as generic Java, which Oracle will tout as benefits. My $0.02: this is a futile and silly effort, as Eclipse is so much more than just a Java development environment, with an ecosystem that creates enormous value around it. Oracle should come to some "understanding" with IBM and just adopt Eclipse.
• Oracle will show a lot about how Fusion Apps will adopt FMW on July 1 (especially the Java Platform and WebCenter). This is likely to be a real game-changer. I am not certain that other ERP vendors will be able to deliver anything like the compelling user experience, social capabilities, and productivity which will be available with Oracle's new Fusion Applications. Of course, many application customers will stick with their legacy apps, but new implementations (and license purchases) will likely lean heavily towards Oracle Fusion Applications when they are available for financials/HR, which I predict will be around the end of this year. Incidentally, I heard that something like 1000 applications staff from the "legacy" apps at Oracle had been moved several (6 to 9) months ago to Thomas Kurian's group to work on beefing up the functionality in the Fusion Applications.
• There will be no major pricing changes with the new middleware (as compared to today's pricing). However, customers probably will have to buy new licenses as this will be viewed as new products rather than upgrades.
• There will be a new advanced rules engine included in FMW.
• WebCenter and Portal will be upgraded significantly and well-integrated.
  

Conceptual architecture diagram of Oracle's product offerings (click on it for a larger version):



Presenters at this event:

• Hasan Rizvi: Senior Vice President, Fusion Middleware
• Dave Shaffer: Vice President, Oracle Integration
  
• Duncan Mills: Senior Director, Product Management, Tools
  
• Margaret Lee: Director, Product Management, Tools and Middleware (?)
  
• Ted Farrell: Chief Architect & SVP, Tools & Middleware
• Sue Harper: Senior Principal Product Manager, SQL Developer
• Christina Kolotouros: Director, Product Management, WebCenter and Portal
  
• Forest Yin: Director, Product Management, Identity Management products
• Mike Lehman: Senior Director, Product Management, Java Platform

If you have any additional information or rumors or inferences to share, please twitter me or leave a comment on this blog.