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The problems of the top tier of the enterprise software market are many, starting with the fact that the industry is now being bifurcated into two warring camps. There’s the born in the cloud vendors like Salesforce.com and Workday, and the moved to the cloud vendors like SAP, Microsoft, Infor, Oracle, and others. There’s also […]

The announcement that activist investor Elliott Management has taken a one percent stake in SAP has widely been seen as something between a potential problem and an outright disaster for the company. These guys play hard and they play for keeps, and anyone dismissing them as a distraction needs their head examined. This is serious […]

SAP’s HANA, which started life as an in-memory, columnar database platform almost ten years ago, has always been a lightning rod for controversy. Maybe it started with the simple fact that, armed with its own database, highly tuned to SAP’s own software needs, SAP was clearly planning on usurping the dominance of the Oracle database […]

Some of you know that in addition to my day job I volunteer as the CTO for US Vote Foundation, a nonpartisan civic tech organization dedicated to ensuring that every citizen is a voter with access to the right information in order to cast their ballot. US Vote recently joined an ad hoc coalition of […]

Like every self-respecting enterprise software analyst, I love tech for tech’s sake but keep the need for real world affirmation as my lodestar for all supposed innovations (such as blockchain, for crying out loud). So when I first saw a HoloLens four years ago I was sorely tempted to beg ,steal, or borrow one, anything […]

Last week’s blog post highlighted the problems legacy ERP vendors have driving upgrades to the cloud. The idea that the best way to sell an ERP upgrade to the cloud is to sell much more than a simple ERP upgrade to the cloud appears to have struck a chord. There’s some consensus that my thesis […]

My erstwhile colleagues and friends Frank Scavo and Holger Mueller have weighed in quite eloquently on how Open Source is eating the world (Holger’s post) and why it’s not eating the ERP world (Frank’s post). I think both of them have raised excellent points and done a highly credible job of making their cases for […]

I think my temperature hit 101 this morning (Fahrenheit, thankfully), and the best I could do was sit on the couch in my home (semi-intelligent in solidarity with my condition) and ponder what to say about blockchain that hasn’t been said before. Well, lots has been said but has anyone actually sung a song about […]

As I tried to bring myself to write my first post of the year, obviously SAP’s Field Kick-off Meeting (aka FKOM), came to mind as a likely topic. It’s a pivotal moment for SAP and the industry, and with so much of SAP’s future riding on 2019, I pondered late into the night trying to […]

One of my favorite aphorisms is the somewhat snarky comment that most industry conferences are about selling tomorrow’s message to yesterday’s audience. Too often the keynote messages start with a nod to innovating a specific line of business product and then quickly go on to describe a brave new world that makes a whole lot […]

One of the things I hate as an analyst is to see good a product development effort lost to the vagaries of management inattention, and my latest candidate is an old favorite, Microsoft LifeCycle Services, or LCS. At the time of its release on 2014 LCS was a truly innovative and forward-looking service that literally […]

I only made it to the first two days of the annual slogfest that comprises SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference and ASUG’s Annual Conference, which meant that the usual four-day forced march was blissfully condensed to a quick two-day trot. But those two days turned out to be enough to get what I think is the big […]

I’m sorting through dozens of pages of notes from last March’s Infor analyst conference, and trying to find the hook for a blog post that will shine that revelatory ray of light on the present and future prospects for enterprise software’s best kept secret. Turns out that’s harder than it may seem. The problem with […]

I was flying home from a meeting last week watching this old, tired media thing called television when an advertising spot caught my eye. The advertiser was Domo, and it showcased a young woman (“I’m not a C-Anything-O” ) in the process of sending her boss an email about using Domo across the company. The […]

Some of the most contentious issues between customer and vendor in the enterprise software market center around software licensing. What to do about the increasing need to provide access to the data and processes in core back office systems to external users and devices has become a major problem for customers and a major headache […]

It’s taken a while, and some prodding, but Microsoft has finally stood up and acknowledged that its Dynamics portfolio of enterprise software products are strategic enough to warrant talking about. I count it as a big positive for the market that the former Lost Colony of Dynamics has been found again. But while the overall […]

Salesforce.com again kicked off the New Year with an Analyst Summit that was good but not great. Which got me thinking about what does make for a great analyst event, assuming of course that the goal is to impart essential information to the analyst community so that we can in turn advise our clients accurately […]

Enterprise software is in a crisis, one that is self-imposed and, frankly, has been a long time coming. Failure to fix the problem will be disastrous, and yet, from where I sit, disaster is exactly where the market is heading. Hyperbole? I don’t think so. Vendors in the cloud need customers to renew, or said […]

You know you’re on to something as a vendor when people show up to a keynote and give your speaker a raucous standing ovation when she walks on to the stage. It’s even more significant when you’re ramping up a populist developer program and your audience of developers act like they’d happily march off a […]

In last week’s post I began a tirade on why the book I want to publish when it’s time to retire, Josh’s Extremely Thin Book of Successful Acquisitions, would really be a very thin book. The subplot? It’s about vendors not being able to leverage the synergies in their portfolios to make acquisitions synergistic. The […]

The problem with acquisitions is that they’re always meant to add revenue and drive synergies with existing lines of business, but all too often the acquisition falls short of its original goals. Some turn out to be bad deals, or even worse: Ask HP about Autonomy (or Compaq, or Palm, or EDS, for that matter). […]

This is the year of hyping artificial intelligence, machine learning and the internet of things (IoT). Any vendor with any vision, which is everyone, is blanketing customers and partners with pronouncements and keynotes that highlight an increasingly large roster of products, platforms, and technologies loosely organized under the AI/ML/IoT rubric. The result is that these […]

Apparently my blog post last month accusing Microsoft of neglecting its Dynamics product line struck a nerve. The gist of the post was that Dynamics was falling into irrelevance as Microsoft seemed to focus on bigger and better things. The evidence has been pretty definitive – no Dynamics-specific user conferences, analyst events, or, from what […]

Microsoft is emerging as a potent force in the enterprise software market, propelled by Azure and the success of Office 365. The former provides a comprehensive cloud platform and set of services that are, as a platform for enterprise software, second to none. The latter provides an amazing productivity platform and set of services that […]

If you walked away from SAP’s recent SAPPHIRE event scratching your head about which version of S/4 HANA your company should deploy, you’re not alone. There seems to be a fair amount of confusion about the differences between S/4 HANA On-premise/Private Cloud and S/4 HANA Public Cloud. And  that confusion threatens to derail the growing […]

(We’re back, discoursing on the challenges SAP will face as platform proliferation and the shifting of the edge app issue into the hands of the LOB developer influences what vendor’s tools and platform will be used to power its customers’ digital transformations. Where we last left off, I was about to illustrate SAP’s dilemma with […]

Part of the fun and challenge of following SAP is that its present and future are defined by the intersection of its own peculiarities and the peculiarities of the markets it lives in. This interplay means that SAP, like many large software companies, isn’t just a single company with a single overarching strategy: it’s really […]

SAP’s S/4 HANA has been called many things, but to characterize it as the future of SAP is far from hyperbole. SAP has minced no words in affirming that the path from R/2 to R/3 to ECC eventually leads to S/4 HANA. The question is not an “if”, but a “when.” When, however, has been […]

Cloud computing, the artist formerly known as SaaS, has always been a proving ground for dynamic leadership. The standard – brash, outspoken, ubiquitous, successful – was set once upon a time by Marc Benioff, and ever since it’s been easy to measure cloud leadership by what I call the Benioff Scale. On a Benioff Scale […]

As the enterprise software market slowly morphs into the enterprise software and platform market, it’s become necessary to carefully define what it means to be a successful platform vendor. Importantly, that definition has nothing to do with technology – okay, maybe a little – but it does have a whole lot to do with people […]

All the attention on whether Russia or some other nation-state entity is trying to hack the election in November or how organized gangs are flooding PCs with ransomware has obscured that truth about where the real threat to our collective cybersecurity comes from: our employees. Employees come in many shapes and sizes, but when it […]

Le Blueprint, C’est Moi:  the Counter-Customization Revolution comes to SAP Sometimes revolutions start with a shot heard round the world, and sometimes they start with a quiet nudge in a new direction. The latter form of revolution was nudged into being for SAP’s HR customers last April in the form of eight words uttered by […]

If someone were to write the “The Tech Event Manager’s Guide to Engaging a Millennial Audience”, a look at Salesforce.com’s recent TrailheaDX conference would be a great place to start. Similarly, if someone wanted to write the “Platform Vendors’ Guide to Building an Engaged Developer Audience”, that same TrailheaDX conference would also serve as an […]

It’s now standard operating procedure at virtually every conference I attend: the execs on stage are talking about a disrupted digital future and how they can enable it to an audience that’s pretty much focused on how their vendor can help them do a better job today: The future can wait. Informatica’s InformaticaWorld 2016 had […]

The first time I ever attended a user group meeting was way back at the dawn of my career, when I was managing a pioneering print-on-demand/desktop publishing system for a specialty publisher. I went to the meeting to find out if the vendor was ever going to fix the latest version of its software, which […]

SAP’s ginormous SAPPHIRE user conference/sales event kicks off in a couple of weeks, and if you’re in any way involved in the SAP ecosystem, you’ve been caught up in the frothing frenzy that typifies the run-up to gathering over 15,000 souls into that soulless cauldron called Orlando. In case you don’t know the drill, SAP’s […]

As the enterprise software market embraces the concept of digital transformation with typical reckless, feckless abandon, it’s interesting to see how one of the most transformative concepts – business networks – is evolving. What’s clear from a look at two of the most well thought-out strategies, those of Infor (via its GT Nexus acquisition) and […]

The New York Times ran an article recently that made the shocking claim that “Silicon Valley hasn’t saved us from a productivity slowdown.” Reading through the article, and in particular the research by Chad Syverson of the University of Chicago Booth business school on which the NYT article is based, it’s clear the article gets […]

This is era of the cloud platform, aka the re-platforming of the enterprise. Every vendor, whether old guard freshening up for the cloud, or new guard playing defense against the dark arts, has a cloud platform strategy with two purported goals:  offer value to customers and confer an easy way for partners to make up […]

Salesforce.com kicked off the analyst season with the first analyst summit of the year, and aside from inciting back-to-school analogies from an overly-relaxed group of analysts, some clear wins and opportunities, and a few issues, emerged that will both set the bar for the competition and keep Salesforce execs from entertaining any notions of complacency. The […]

The nice thing about buzzwords like digital transformation, big data, and innovation is that they are infinitely malleable, imparting permission on vendors and users alike to discuss their specific challenges and opportunities in the context of something bigger than themselves. All a board needs to hear is that someone, somewhere in the company, is focused […]

You’ve got to love a company that brags at its user conference that its motto is Learn, Laugh, Share, Connect. Don’t hear that too often. What you also don’t see very often is the other characteristic that makes the company in question, Kinaxis, unique: it’s a highly profitable, cloud-only company. And when I say profitable, […]

Continued from my last post. (When we last left our tragic hero, Windows Phone, there was no carrier support for the new Lumias that just hit the market, which means…) The only other option for die-hard Windows Phone users in the US, an unlocked phone bought directly from Microsoft, may not work either. Verizon doesn’t […]

Despite the recent hullabaloo about Microsoft’s new hardware offerings, including some new high-end Lumia phones, it’s time to bid farewell to Windows Phone, at least in the US consumer market. While I hate to leave the market up to a duopoly run by Alphabet/Google and Apple, that’s how it’s going to be for the foreseeable […]

At a press/analyst meeting last spring, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was asked whether he had any plans to build out an Amazon AWS-like capability to complement the rest of his cloud strategy. His scoffing reply was right on the money. Competing with AWS and other commodity-level cloud services was “a race to the bottom,” Benioff […]

The rumors keep coming, fueled by highly speculative analysis like this latest stab in the dark from Fortune, that Salesforce.com is for sale. I think the question of whether another publically traded company is going to buy Salesforce.com is settled: I agree with Oracle’s Safra, I agree with SAP’s Bill, as well as pundits far […]

Sometimes covering SAP and its innovations reminds me of what it’s like being the parent of school-aged children. Good parents complain endlessly – typically commensurate with the cost of tuition or property taxes – about curricula, testing, homework, and the like. While all too often forgetting that the one true test of a good school […]

While trying to find the time to write a definitive post on SAPPHIRE, check out this video of myself and my friend and colleague Holger Mueller of Constellation Research in conversation with Chris Karnacus of ASUG News. More to come….

Test driving the HoloLens, Microsoft’s soon-to-be released augmented reality headset, it’s easy to forget the challenges facing Satya Nadella as his first year on the job starts to take shape. Who cares if Windows Phone is dying and the Nokia acquisition is rumored to be destined for a massive write-off? Does it really matter that […]

It’s a given that the marketing messages vendors are pushing today are focused on clouds and new, innovative business processes. Private, public, hybrid, vendor-specific, sovereign, and third party clouds, business networks, process innovation, IoT, and new economy business models: The messaging is pretty consistent whether it’s Microsoft Dynamics talking to its customers at its annual […]

Back in the early stages of the SaaS market, so many months ago, it seemed obvious that the SaaS market would one day undergo a major transformation as the easy wins based on taking on-premise capabilities and flipping them to the cloud – pretty much the business model of Salesforce.com in the early days– gave […]

(Bloggers note: I was informed yesterday that the proper spelling for SAP’s new suite is S/4HANA. I was also told that a large tech manufacturer with a propensity for suing over IP issues owns a trademark for S4. I just checked my budget for protracted lawsuits and decided to go with S/4. Don’t tell Edward Snowden, […]

There’s a lot to unpack from SAP’s S4 HANA announcement of last week, but if I could only highlight the essence of what the announcement means for SAP and its customers, it’s this: SAP needs to make sure every customer understands how the versions of SAP they are running today will lead them to S4 […]

I’ll start by saying that I came home after having watched the Windows 10 launch (on video, not live, more on that later) all excited to show my kids the demos of HoloLens, particularly as I was sure I saw a little Minecraft in there, a serious favorite of the underage crowd in my house. […]

SAP’s annual sales kick-off meeting season, FKOM, is under way, with the North American and European versions kicking off this week. FKOM is where the new strategies, products, alliances, and services are all pressure-tested on the that thin, white-shirted line of sales people who have the unenviable job of syncing the year’s marketing strategy with […]

I think it’s pretty fair to say that counting Microsoft out in a market it has made a commitment to is a classic rookie mistake that serves as the epitaph for too many forgotten companies. If at first you don’t succeed, try try again is a time-honored mantra in Redmond. And it’s pretty evident that […]

There is perhaps no contemporary issue at the intersection of technology and public policy that is more contentious and conflicted than net neutrality. The issue itself has probably accounted for its own increase in Internet traffic over the last couple of years as opinions, jeremiads, official proclamations, and even HBO’s John Oliver, have weighed in […]

Hanging out with Kinaxis, the relatively small and always interesting supply chain vendor from Ottawa, Canada, never fails to be an eye-opening experience. It’s not just that I get to meet with a vendor and a loyal cadre of customers who are collectively pushing the envelope on all things supply chain, it’s that sometimes they’re […]

There’s always a lot to say about Microsoft, and, like any big company, it’s usually a mix of good or bad. Having spent two days last week at the Microsoft Dynamics analyst event, I think that when it comes to the enterprise, most of what there is to say about Microsoft isn’t just good: Microsoft’s […]

It’s hard to slog through mega-conferences like Dreamforce, and not just because 135,000 people are way too much for San Francisco and its Moscone Center to handle. The sheer girth of Salesforce.com is also a factor: the company has become an immensely complicated and multifaceted company, maybe too much so for a single conference. Regardless, […]

The news that Meg Whitman is finally pulling the plug on the Sisyphian task of trying to resurrect HP has profound implications for the future of Oracle, and not just because the mess that Whitman was unable to unravel was an HP made functionally unmanageable by a previous HP CEO: Mark Hurd, now co-CEO of […]

It’s year four in the Charles Phillips era at Infor, and the more things change the more they remain the same. The changes are impressive – new functionality across a wide swath of its legacy product lines, a new release of Infor XI, its next generation suite, a focus on industry-specific clouds that is such […]

The fundamental problems plaguing Oracle won’t go away with Larry moving into an executive chairman role, this is more lipstick on a pig than a serious attempt to get the company back on course. The problem is that shuffling the deck chairs does nothing for dealing with the company’s three fundamental problems. Until these are […]

SuccessFactors’ user conference, SuccessConnect, has come and gone, and the four questions I posed in my previous post about the challenges facing SuccessFactors and SAP were largely answered. But, as in any good dialectic, one good answer is just the starting point for another good question….. I’ll start with the Workday question/answer in this post, […]

I’m heading to the SuccessFactors user conference, SuccessConnect, in Las Vegas this week and, as a prelude to the conference, here’s some of the questions I’m looking to have answered during the course of the conference. What are you going to do to blunt the market impact of Workday and start earning the revenues and […]

I’ve followed the enterprise software market for decades now, and the sad/ironic/bitter truth is that, when it comes to the large enterprise, all the great technology and marketing prowess goes to the field to die. It’s the same story in the midmarket: the best strategy, technology, and products don’t mean a thing if the channel […]

Can the Internet of Highly Insecure Things Be Trusted to Run the One True Network? As the dust settles on the recent changes at SAP, and with SAPPHIRE looming large, it’s worth taking a look at what I think will be one of the most interesting, ambitious, and potentially lucrative bets SAP has made in […]

With so much digital ink spilled, much of it hyperbolically, over the management changes at SAP, and with the prospect of more to come, I’ve decided to weigh in on where SAP is today and where it’s heading. If you don’t want to read the whole post, here’s the take home message: plus ça change, […]

It’s hard to find a set of topics more relevant to the interplay of technology and society than security and privacy. From Glenn Greenwald’s new book on NSA leaker Edward Snowden to the recent finding of a European Union court that Google has to drastically alter the persistence of user data in its services, the […]

It’s almost ironic that using a Windows 8 phone is actually a major geek credential – albeit geek more in the mold of driving a DeLorean than tooling around in a state of the art Tesla. But as a Windows 8 phone user for the past five months, I can say that no one notices […]

There are many nerdy little corners of enterprise software that don’t get the big buzz effect of overly hyped concepts like “social” and “mobile”, but never let inattention lure you into complacency. There are many factors that lead to project success or failure, and some of the more nerdy are in fact much more relevant […]

The ascendency of Satya Nadella to the top spot at Microsoft is welcome news to a wide range of internal and external stakeholders. He’s an insider who knows not just where the skeletons are buried, but, more importantly, where the gemstones are buried too. One of those gemstones is Microsoft Dynamics, and as a result […]

Where we last left off, I was admonishing the SAP field to greater glory around the theme of customer success. Here’s the rest of my letter to the SAP field: Sell Value, Not Platforms: Now I’m going probably get yelled again by some of your execs, but trust me, there are going to be very […]

I’ve realized recently that despite everything we analysts do and say about enterprise software company strategies, new products and technologies, trends, and all the other coins of the analyst realm, what matters most is how the sales force sells. If the field sales force can’t get in front of the right influencer at the right […]

“Victory has many fathers. Defeat is an orphan”.                                            President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, on the Bay of Pigs Fiasco It’s great line, and one that popular culture has changed to success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. JFK’s line is a stirring example of a leader taking ultimate responsibility for what happened under […]

It’s becoming the latest trend in enterprise software company evolution. After years of merger and acquisition, in which dozens of products and thousands of customers were dumped helter-skelter into a single corporate bucket, yet another agglomeration of disparate products, services, and technologies is trying to rationalize its offerings. This time the company is OpenText, and […]

Achieving economies of scale is one of the axioms of modern business, a driver for mergers and acquisitions across all industries. This relatively simple concept helped drive a huge swath of industrial companies to impressive degrees of success: in many many cases, buying at massive scale, building at massive scale, and delivering at massive scale […]

Last summer’s reorganization at Microsoft didn’t look good for Microsoft Dynamics, at least on paper. The enterprise software group was barely mentioned in outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer’s letter to his staff, and the position of Dynamics head Kirill Tatarinov looked uncomfortably tenuous in a reorg that seemed to all but shout that Dynamics would be […]

The renaissance of Infor continues apace, with more customers, more partners, more products, more cloud functionality, more go-lives. Pretty much by every measure, the company CEO Charles Phillips calls “the world’s largest startup” continues to improve its market profile across the board. With one important exception that in the end will become the ultimate measure […]

SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann-Snabe has resigned, and is likely to move up to the Supervisory Board. President and corporate officer Sanjay Poonen has also resigned, off to parts unknown, and SuccessFactors founder Lars Dalgaard resigned June 1. Ariba CEO Bob Calderoni has taken over as SAP’s cloud leader. And Vishal Sikka recently added leadership of […]

Three words were missing from Steve Ballmer’s memo to his employees last week that, on face value, looked ominous for Microsoft Dynamics. The first two words were business process, and the third was industry (okay, he said the word once, but in reference to Microsoft’s industry sector). And as I read and re-read the memo, […]

I have to admit I’ve been chuckling at the degree of shock and dismay at the revelation that the NSA, in the name of security and anti-terrorism, has been monitoring all manner of cell phone and web-based electronic data. And going to a lot of trouble to do so, using court orders and a lot […]

I don’t usually like to admit I was wrong, but my love affair with Microsoft’s Windows 8 strategy is over. While I still think the basic strategy is a sound one for the enterprise – a single code base for building touch-enabled apps that can live on phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and anything else Windows […]

If you’ve been following SAP over the last two years the products and services unveiled in Orlando last week wouldn’t have been too much of a surprise: HANA, cloud, mobile, social, and services all showed up at SAPPHIRE in their latest and greatest evolutionary glory. If you weren’t expecting most of the principle announcements at […]

If you count the hum of engaged customers as a sign of success, then Infor’s recent Inforum user conference was a major high-point for the come-back enterprise software vendor. The customers, all 6000 of them, were definitely there to praise Infor, not to bury it. But the real issue for Infor will be to do […]

The concept of citizen engagement and its ability to promote a more civil and rational society isn’t just a good idea. Taking the gains in enterprise software with respect to people engagement, back office transaction processing, and the cloud, and applying them to the interplay between citizens and their governments, has enormous potential to dramatically […]

Microsoft Dynamics has many ambitions, many of them warranted, to become a force for innovation and change in the broad enterprise software market. And Dynamics has a problem, or really a set of problems, that in essence originate from a single source: the rest of Microsoft. As Dynamics performs yeoman’s service defining, or at least […]

Some things are just too good to be true, and Microsoft’s vision for Lync 2013 – its desktop unified communications product – is a good case in point. It’s almost a shame, because rationalizing the many different channels of communication that business users have access to – email, chat, social, video conference, voice – under […]

There’s never enough solid competition in the enterprise software market, and it’s been tempting to see the top tier of the market as a three-horse race, with SAP and Oracle the dominant players, and Microsoft,  in the form of Dynamics AX, moving fast to catch up, particularly in the large enterprise. It’s looking like that’s […]

I’ve been saying for a while that the so-called mobile market isn’t really about mobility at all, but about touch and better user experiences. And with the advent of Windows 8, whether Microsoft really knocks it out of the park or not, the hybrid desktop/mobile experience is going to redefine enterprise software – not mobile […]

The ability of Microsoft to ride the consumer/IT juggernaut to glory rests on a large combination of factors, but two of the most important are the success of Windows 8 and Office 365. And while Microsoft is generally to be credited for doing better than expected in both domains, there are serious flaws and omissions […]

The United States Air Force recently announced that the $1 billion you were hoping would be spent on something useful (or not at all) has been lost forever to Oracle and Computer Sciences Corp. in the wake of a failed attempt to upgrade the Air Force’s back office. While there are usually as many reasons […]

Jeff Immelt of GE has the biggest calling card I’ve ever seen, and he wasn’t adverse to flaunting it on stage late last month at GE Software’s coming out party. Flanked by a 12 foot tall GEnx jet aircraft engine, Immelt took to the stage to make clear that GE’s next big bet would be […]

The latest debacle at Hewlett-Packard involving the allegations of accounting wrong-doing at Autonomy make for a particularly sticky wicket for CEO Meg Whitman. While there have been some attempts to blame her predecessor, Léo Apotheker, for the decision to buy Autonomy, it’s impossible for Whitman to avoid taking ultimate responsibility for the deal. And when […]

The backstory to the launch of Windows 8, Windows 8 Phone, the Surface and all the other recent announcements from Microsoft is more than just a little interesting for Microsoft Dynamics, the enterprise software sub-division of Microsoft and one of the smallest pieces in the software and hardware company’s vast portfolio. Indeed, the backstory for […]

Last year, when I attended Box.com’s BoxWorks conference for the first time, I was struck by the outrageous coolness emanating from founder and CEO Aaron Levie, as he stood on stage and ripped into Microsoft SharePoint as the embodiment of all that was evil and useless. It made for great theatre, and outrageous coolness not […]

Several months into my experiment with Windows 8 on a Samsung Slate tablet, I now have answers to three important questions about the past, present and future of tablet computing, the so-called post-PC era. They’re questions worth asking, as the answers spell trouble for Apple and Android, and provide evidence of a new lease on […]

I was finally enlightened as to why I find Oracle’s annual customer event, Oracle Open World, to be an increasingly frustrating and largely unfulfilling experience. For the last few years I have been laboring under the misperception that one of the goals of this event was to inform the influencers about key Oracle technology and […]

Do all companies build refrigerators when their product sets get too complex? That was the question I was asking myself as I sat in the audience during the partner keynote at Dreamforce last week, as a slide showing off the different parts of the company’s SaaS platform hove into view. Memories of SAP’s NetWeaver danced […]

It’s a sad day when the bar is set so low that a company’s most successful endeavor in recent memory involves a new slogan and ad campaign tied to the Olympics, and the best news to date is that it won a lawsuit it should never have had to engage in. Such is the state […]

Dell Software last week held what it promised was the first of many media days intended to describe to analysts and the press how the erstwhile PC and server vendor plans to become a software powerhouse.  Breaking the historical mold is a common theme these days, with software companies like Oracle and Microsoft  looking for […]

I spent last week at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference with 16,000 of the company’s 460,000 partners, and Windows 8 was at the top of the agenda for the company and the attendees. As I’ve written before, my recent experience using a Samsung Series 7 running Windows 8 has convinced me this is a potential game-changing […]

I’ve spent the last few days test-driving a Samsung Slate PC running Windows 8, quite similar to the Surface Pro tablet that Microsoft announced this week, and it’s clear to me that the concept of a tablet that can run both the new Metro interface as well as older Windows 7-style applications is a winner. […]

As the rumors continue to swirl about Microsoft’s possible acquisition of Yammer, and what that means for Microsoft Dynamics and its social computing strategy, I must confess a bit of bewilderment. While social is hot, and cool, and trendy (can you guess how lukewarm I am about this corner of the market?), and has been […]

Microsoft’s TechEd conference this week showcased more than just Windows 8 and its amazingly well-designed Metro touch-based user interface. It also heralded what may prove to be a tectonic shift in the strategic position of Microsoft in the enterprise. And with that shift may come an equal, and opposite, shift in the fortunes of Google […]

Oracle has some seriously significant things to say to its customers about the cloud, enterprise software, engineered systems, and the rest of the company’s strategic portfolio. And if it approached the task a little more seriously, I think the company would start winning not just in the eyes and wallets of its customers, but also […]

One of the most amazing cross-country flights I ever took found me over the center of the country at night, flying through an unbelievable electric storm, with an almost constant arcing of lightning illuminating vast canyons and mountains of clouds. As the pilot maneuvered us through this unforgettable vision of nature’s wonder, he came on […]

The marketing frenzy behind SAP’s HANA in-memory database has engendered a counter-frenzy over the total number of HANA deployments to date. With all the muscle that SAP has been putting behind its new Oracle-killer, the question of whether customers are voting with their dollars has become a key issue. Like many of my fellow analysts, […]

SAP has been trying hard to demonstrate the business case for its in-memory, RDBMS-killer – HANA – and one of the key issues has been proving both HANA’s scalability and its appropriateness for serving as an analytical platform for large SAP transactional systems. The case for both of these proof points seems to have been […]

One of the many interesting milestones that came out of Microsoft’s recent Convergence conference was the “announcement” that Microsoft has successfully weaned itself from its massive Siebel CRM deployment, in favor of the home team, Dynamics CRM.  It was an interesting comment on the viability and scalability of Dynamics CRM that is worth exploring, particularly […]

I saw something cool this week at Microsoft’s Convergence user conference that made me convinced that anyone who thinks Microsoft isn’t a player against Apple’s IOS and Google’s Android needs to think twice. Make that three times. A little face time with Windows 8 running on a Samsung tablet and a Lenovo laptop/tablet hybrid made […]

The future of the enterprise seems to be very much up for grabs: just as Salesforce.com proposed the end of software, and then became very much a software company, Zuora’s CEO Tien Tzuo recently authored  a much referenced article on end of ERP, despite the fact that Zuora is very much a player in enabling […]

CRM has lots of proponents these days, and lots of momentum in the market, mostly for all the right reasons. But one reason in particular, specific to the public sector, and dramatically, almost radically important in its potential impact, is now beginning to take on a new focus. If you’re wondering why Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Oracle, […]

Nothing succeeds like success, the old saw goes, but there’s a dark side to the kind of success that SAP has been enjoying for the past year. Success of SAP’s magnitude is hard to achieve, but, more importantly, it’s even harder to maintain. And as I look at SAP’s recent financials, and its growing market […]

SAP is doing something significant in the acquisition of Datango, the question is whether the market will react accordingly. The move is significant in that Datango offers a new paradigm for enterprise software training, but that significance is tempered by the sorry state of training content and the unfortunately legitimate attitude of many a CIO […]

I’ve been working in the interactive gaming and gamification industry for over four years now, first as the founder of a now-defunct start-up focused on developing interactive training games, and most recently as a hands-on catalyst for enterprise gamification. It’s been gratifying to see this idea crop up as a topic of considerable interest – […]

This is a story of a credit card fraud that happened to my wife and I just before the holidays. It’s an amazing one that apparently involves insiders working at Chase.com and UPS, but the fraud is only half the story. The other half is about incompetence, poor call center training, broken security processes, and […]

I was finally able to listen to the Oracle Q2 call, and the picture looks pretty bad for Oracle, while looking much better for the rest of the enterprise software market, which is completely undeserving of the collateral damage that Wall Street visited on their share prices following the Oracle debacle. The key takeaways were […]

As an industry analyst, I’m used to be being slotted, even though my goal has always been to cover as broad a swath of the enterprise software market as possible, based on the assumption that customers and users need help understanding the full context behind their enterprise software decisions, and not just listen to a […]

Over the ten years in which Microsoft has struggled to find a place for its Dynamics enterprise software products inside the company, the question of whether Microsoft should jettison the business  unit altogether has surfaced more than once. And on the face of it, it’s hard not to ask the question. Despite the annoying secrecy […]

As the enterprise software market parses the news that SuccessFactors will become SuccessFactors, an SAP company, the question of how well SAP manages its M&A strategy is coming to the fore. SAP has been buying small and large companies for a while, and though nowhere near as avaricious as Oracle or IBM, there are now […]

I spent an extremely entertaining and informative day with Kinaxis at their user conference last month, and it struck me how much supply chain management seems to be stuck in the past, even as it increasingly occupies one of the hottest of hot seats in the corporate world, and even as companies like Kinaxis strive […]

Providing cloud-based storage seems so commodity-like, and so hard to defend as a unique differentiator, that it would seem that Box.net, despite the dynamic vigor of the company and its CEO, Aaron Levie, couldn’t really make a go of it in the market. After all, some very very big companies, like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, […]

Insofar as I characterized Oracle Open World as a communications disaster in my last blog post, I think it’s fair to explain why I feel this way and what it means for Oracle and the market. Oracle Open World is singularly the worst customer event I attend every year, a forced march so large and […]

I spent much of last week sorting through the absolutely overwhelming communications disaster called Oracle Open World in search of some clarity on Oracle’s vision for its customers, and have come to the following conclusion: Oracle’s applications customer strategy just isn’t about making things better for its customers. The problem with the Oracle of today […]

Every once in a while we analysts have an epiphany that rings a bell on one side of the brain while shouting out a giant “duh” on the other. That’s part of the bipolarity of what we do: sometimes the most startling revelations are the ones you’ve seen a dozen times, until finally that bell […]

[This page is under construction. This is the most recent blog post from  ematters.wordpress.com. The entire blog will be migrated into this spot before we go live.] SAP has spent several years and several billion dollars trying to formulate a strategy that propels it ahead of an unprecedented set of market forces, and this year’s […]

SAP has spent several years and several billion dollars trying to formulate a strategy that propels it ahead of an unprecedented set of market forces, and this year’s TechEd helped set the stage for a 2012 that is poised to be the year SAP finally crosses the innovation Rubicon. Of course, as students of history […]

The week before Labor Day was an on-demand trifecta, a perfect storm of theory and practice on what the brave new world of on-demand software and services can and will evolve to in the coming years. It was the week of Dreamforce and the maturation of Chatter, the week that Workday hosted a group of […]

Hewlett-Packard followed up its “demand letter” of last week with a lawsuit seeking a halt to Oracle’s de-support of HP’s Itanium-based servers, injunctive relief against more mudslinging, and unspecified damages. The suit, filed in Superior Court in Santa Clara, California, is the latest in a nine-month battle that has transformed the two former partners into […]

The show was relatively modest for the number one technology vendor, but it’s safe to say that Hewlett-Packard’s recent Discover user conference met its most important goal: showcasing the continuing evolution of a new strategy around its key enterprise and consumer markets that played to the strengths of the company’s current capabilities and aligned well […]

Following a grueling three days at SAP’s Sapphire user conference, a few lucky analysts got to travel to New York and spend a day and a half with an even luckier set of analysts (you could tell who they were because their brains were still functioning) listening to presentations about  how well the combined companies […]

Coming down from the dais after a panel discussion on mobility, I was approached by an attendee with the following story. He was on the IT staff at a Fortune 500 company that was a wall-to-wall Oracle shop, and his boss, the CIO, had sent him to Sapphire with the following mission: make sure that […]

It’s been a little more than a month since HP’s new CEO, Léo Apotheker, stood up in front of financial and industry analysts and laid bare his plans for the new HP he inherited from the muck and mire of Mark Hurd’s untimely departure. In that month the economy has continued its recovery, and HP’s […]

I’ve just come back the Microsoft Dynamics’ Convergence conference, where the news about Dynamics’ progress in the enterprise software space can be summed up in the following manner: The company’s two flagship products, AX and Dynamics CRM, have reached a functional level that basically places them on par with the best of their respective categories. […]

During his keynote at this week’s Convergence customer showcase, Microsoft Dynamics chief Kirill Tatarinov demoed the use of Microsoft’s Kinect interactive gaming system as an interface to the company’s AX ERP system. It was a relatively lackluster demo as far as Kinect goes – no wild gyrations, or dislocating motions, no funky music or funky […]

The old canard the SAP is not an innovator took another hit this week with the partial unveiling of a new set of applications built to run on top of SAP’s Hana in-memory database system. The new apps, due out in a set of rolling releases this year, fill an important gap in SAP’s Hana […]

More proof that SAP is serious about making a break from its on-premise past and in the process challenge on-demand titan Salesforce.com came last week in the form of a preview look at SAP Sales On-demand. The preview, granted to a group of industry analysts in Boston, proved that SAP isn’t afraid to be innovative […]

I went to a preview showing of a new SAP product last week, and had about the most fun I’ve had an analyst event since….well, if I had more fun than I had at last week’s event, I can’t remember. In the process I got to see the product up close and personal, and it […]

There’s lots of speculation floating around about why Bob Muglia, head of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business, is leaving this summer.  I agree with my colleague Mary Jo Foley that is wasn’t because Muglia wasn’t all-in on software&services, he seemed to actually get it.  But I do think there may be a reason that is […]

Larry Ellison makes no bones about it, he’s willing and able to compete to the death, or at least to the near death, with any and all who stand in his way. So, despite the billions of dollars in joints sales between Oracle and SAP, HP, and IBM, Ellison has been directly, and at times, […]

While the reigning crown prince of on-demand held court at Dreamforce last week, a pretender to the throne threw down the gauntlet and made its first full-court, concerted press into the future perfect of the enterprise software market. Day two of SAP’s analyst summit was an all-day marathon of product roadmaps, demos, and discussions that […]

Benoit Mandelbrot passed away this weekend, one of the giants of mathematics and computer sciences. I ran across his work back when I was studying computer science in the early 1980s,  and it was a revelation. His ability to provoke the analytical side of the brain with provocative articles like “How long is the coast […]

I like Joe Nocera, and usually think he hits the nail on the head. But his Saturday column about HP’s new CEO, Léo Apotheker, and his role in the lawsuit between Oracle and Léo’s former company, SAP, over SAP’s TomorrowNow acquisition, swings and misses by a country mile. The problems in Joe’s main thesis, that […]

In the populist vein sweeping the land, the issue of Wall Street compensation is always a good fuel for the flame. The Huffington Post recently ran a post along those lines that has as its main proposition the notion that Larry Ellison is overpaid and should be canned by his board. It’s one of these […]

It looks like HP really wants to be a player in the enterprise software market after all,  and avoid the fate of Sun and others before it. The appointment of Léo Apotheker to the top spot fills a desperate void in HP’s strategy that may really signal the turn-around of a once great company into […]

It’s tough being an apps guy at Oracle Open World, actually it’s tough being anyone at OOW. The biggest tech event in North America (not the world, however, despite Oracle’s claims: that distinction goes to CEBIT, which numbers its attendees in the hundreds of thousands) is just too gargantuan to make sense any more. There […]

The HP Way died a miserable death on the altars of Oracle Open World last night, in an auto-da-fe of medieval proportions. It’s as if Larry Ellison’s Sun Tzu alter-ego had scripted it personally – no need to say anything, just let HP be HP and make the company’s growing irrelevance so stark and obvious […]

I’ve been toying with this idea for a while, and I think it’s starting to stick. More and more I’m seeing that the most critical business problems to be tackled today in the enterprise center around enabling and improving the myriad relationships — inside the firewall, outside the firewall, and all points in between — […]

It’s open season in the punditocracy on Oracle, as the move to put Mark Hurd in Oracle’s corner and jettison Charles Phillips makes a helluva welcome-back-to-work present for anyone who actually took Labor Day off from their daily labors. What’s obvious from where I sit is that Oracle is now more firmly a hardware company […]

Fellow Enterprise Irregular Phil Wainright has commented on my recent post regarding multi-tenancy with a well-considered rebuttal that I believe deserves its own rebuttal in turn. Here it is: As someone old enough to remember the DEC Rainbow and other also-rans, I enjoyed the trip down memory lane. However, at the risk of further disrupting […]

I am sitting in Workday’s 2010 Technology Summit hearing the pitch about the supremacy of multi-tenancy, and despite their best efforts, 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 […]

I had to be asked twice (first time I was on vacation), but this piece of link love is worth passing on.  Stephen Jannise of Distribution Software Advice has created a graphical chart of the Oracle M&A binge of the last few years, starting of course with the PeopleSoft acquisition of 2003-2005 (yes, it took […]

A blogger I honestly have never heard of in my 25+ year in high tech has used his 30+ year in high tech to claim that “tech journalist” Bob Evans is recirculating a “meme” that Bob is writing because he is both lazy and ill-informed about the historical revenue split between new license revenues and […]

It’s tough being SAP’s forthcoming Business ByDesign in an unforgiving market. Having been launched and then pulled back, re-designed and then offered back to a market that is a little more jaded, a lot more cautious, and desperately trying to sort out what’s happening in this global recession, the ByD team is facing an almost […]

As I sat through an overview of one of the latest collaboration tools on the market, a product called Spaces from nGenera, I began to have a deja-vu all over again moment. The discussion centered around the unique value proposition that nGenera was putting forth in the product, and, while the arguments behind them were […]

It’s cloud’s illusions I recall, I really don’t know clouds at all….. One of the primary devils in the details with cloud computing will always be found in the chase for margins, and this is becoming abundantly clear for Microsoft’s market-leading partner ecosystem, gathered this week in Washington, DC. for their Worldwide Partner Conference. Chief […]

Big company battles, like real-world battles between countries, often center around obscure points of friction. The Austro-Prussian war had its Schleswig-Holstein, the Vietnam war had the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and enterprise software has application lifecycle management. ALM today is a relatively obscure point of friction between giants that holds the promise of igniting global […]

My friend and colleague Susan Scrupski is here at Sapphire harassing me to become a Twit, as SAP c0-CEO Jim Snabe accidently (on-purpose?) called members of the Twittersphere in his Day 1 Keynote. I refuse. Too terse for me. Can’t make it without 1200 words. Decided to try. Here goes. Probably some longer than 140 […]

I just got a copy of a brief Microsoft filed in the U.S. District in Seattle alleging that Salesforce.com infringed on nine of Microsoft’s patents. It’s not clear at this writing how valid a case Microsoft has, nor has there been any official response from Salesforce.com posted on the company’s website. So a full analysis […]