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It’s becoming an almost predictable experience, attending an SAP user conference. First comes the spiritual purge of the pre-briefings leading up to the event. Then the unholy pilgrimage to Orlando, then the aesthetic self-flagellation that comes from slogging through a two or three-day schedule of unrelenting meetings, presentations, and deep-fried finger food. Finally, the cathartic […]

The acquisition of Sybase by SAP has some elements of delicious irony for Sybase watchers. For this is the company that not only shunned SAP and thereby forced itself out of the running as a top enterprise database, but it also the company that helped place Oracle at the number one spot in the SAP […]

SAS Institute put a stake in the sand recently with the announcement of its SAS Social Media Analytics service. It’s an important addition to the social media revolution and our ability to utilize the exaflood of data coming at companies from the many new social media sources now enlightening and bedeviling our businesses. In case […]

The author of the column in the Economist that I cited in my last post has written a kind response, defending his position against my slings and arrows.  On one account he is firmly correct: the article he cited is findable, especially after the correct name of the business journal was published on the Economist’s […]

Sometimes the Economist gets is right, sometimes it gets it wrong. Last week one of the last of the authoritative business magazines put its foot in its mouth with a lightweight and poorly considered column about the value of co-CEOs, with a specific reference to  SAP’s recent appointment of Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe […]

There’s nothing sweeter for a blogger than irony, and the news that Oracle shut down a popular — and perhaps a little too honest — support blog run by an internal Oracle employee provides buckets of blog-worthy irony. Irony is all in the timing, and Oracle couldn’t have picked a worse moment to exercise some […]

In one of life’s little ironies, I was in the airport  last Sunday on my way to Europe– and a series of meetings in Walldorf – when I got a call from SAP. The rest you probably know: the SAP board decided not to renew the contract of Léo Apotheker – who succeeded Henning Kagermann […]

John Schwarz, SAP board member, former head of Business Objects, and one of the leaders of a flying wedge of change that is permeating SAP, knows what he’s talking about when he characterizes the “new” SAP that is emerging from year one of the Léo Apotheker era. So when he offered that the SAP he […]

There’s no more an important and convoluted marketplace than business intelligence and analytics, a hodge-podge of tools, solutions, applications, technology, and other “stuff” that often defies analyst taxonomies and baffles customers. This places an additional burden on trying to sort through the recent coverage about the SAS Institute duking it out with IBM, a recent […]

One of the advantages of a being a relatively ancient industry analyst is the ability to look back on over 25 years of innovation and spot the real paradigm shifts amidst the updates, revisions, and otherwise mundane changes that attempt, but never deliver, something radically new Basking in the nerdacopia that is Microsoft’s Professional Developers […]

The news that the European Commission thinks Oracle should jettison MySQL as part of its deal to acquire Sun is a typical case of bad analysis yielding potentially good results. I have to agree with Oracle’s contention that MySQL + Oracle DBMS does not constitute an unfairly competitive combination, and the EU’s perception to the […]

One of the largely unheralded changes at Oracle this year has been its sudden willingness to partner at a strategic level with other enterprise software companies. This departure from previous strategy has been noted here before, as has its implications for the enterprise software community. (Great if you’re an ISV looking for a strong partner […]

In the aftermath of a relatively decent Q3, all things considered, that nonetheless earned SAP the wrath of the stock market, it’s important to take a look at what SAP, its customers, and its competitors have to look forward to as CEO Léo Apotheker rounds the end of his first full year at the helm. […]

I don’t read a lot of business books, in fact, I read very very few. But this weekend I took some time off from my usual work-avoidance mode to start reading a new book that showed up in my office last week. By the end of the first chapter I knew this was one book […]

As expected, Siemens renewed its maintenance contract with SAP, ending rampant speculation that the German industrial giant and one of SAP’s largest customers was going the third party maintenance route. But if you’re SAP, or any enterprise software company, this is merely a temporary lull in a battle that will inevitably change the enterprise software […]

The lid is finally off on a 12 month-old NDA for Fusion Applications, and in this case the long delay between when analysts were first shown Fusion Apps in the fall of 2008 and when we were given free hand to describe what we’ve seen now looks like a impressively smart move. What was smart […]

Here are the basics: Version 1.0 includes the following modules: Finance Human Capital Management Sales and marketing SCM Project portfolio management Procurement GRC Notably, there is no manufacturing module. So the focus will be on the service industries. Also notable: Each of these individual components will be deployable in a SOA architecture as standalone modules […]

Apparently Marc Benioff scored both a PR coup and some nice/nice points by appearing at Oracle Open World on Tuesday and failing to completely trash talk his competitor. The event seemed to go so well (Benioff was described by one observer as “magnanimous“, not exactly an adjective usually associated with “shoot from the lip” Marc) […]

Yes, it’s true. I just got the invite for next week’s keynote from Salesforce.com’s PR team. And got it confirmed by Oracle. Apparently there  is a booth of massive proportions in the center of the Moscone Center that will be touting the Beni-fits of Salesforce.com as well. It’s one thing to have SAP and IBM […]

Microsoft’s announcement that it was buying the industry-specific products and IP of three of its existing ISV partners reflects an important realization on the part of the mid-market enterprise software leader that partnerships alone cannot generate the industry expertise the Dynamics group needs to compete in today’s market. These acquisitions are evidence of a shift […]

Rumors of the end of the world are pretty commonplace these days, and you don’t have to be following the current debate about healthcare in the US to catch a whiff of Armageddon in our times. The latest inclination that the world is coming to the end has emerged from Germany’s Wirtschaftswoche, a BusinessWeek equivalent […]

I just spent two days having my brain annihilated by information overload at Oracle’s Applications Analyst Summit, and, with 21 pages of notes, it’s going to be hard to sort through everything and come up with a concise post on what we learned. But here goes. The first is that Oracle has been innovating more […]

It’s back, and, as Sandy pointed out in her comment above, the apocalypse did not take place, despite a sense of doom that comes from being disconnected in the 21st century. It will be interesting to see why Gmail went down. It will also be interesting, with this being the latest example of a free […]

Google Error Server Error The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.Please try again in 30 seconds. The above is what I saw, and continue to see, as I try to access my Gmail account. In case you’re wondering what to do next, the answer is nothing. Gmail’s customer service is […]

I spent a lot of analyst capital over the last two years crowing about what I thought, and still think, was a brilliant idea: marrying the Office user experience, primarily Excel and Outlook, to the enterprise software back office. The catalyst for my interest was the myriad conversations with users about how much they hated […]

SAP has spent the last few years discussing, theorizing, and otherwise showing off numerous versions of the same idea: using in-memory databases to replace the “not getting any younger” relational database model. Last week at a conference hosted by SAP to showcase its research work with the academic community, supervisory chair and permanent SAP visionary […]

IDC  just released its latest compilation of rankings in the rancorous business intelligence market, and while the taxonomy is a little confusing, and broad enough for both Oracle and SAP to claim market dominance, there is one hand’s down winner whose mark on the industry can be seen across the breadth of the IDC data: […]

I spoke recently to a supply chain exec as part of a project I am working on, and found him to be one of the more insightful and interesting members of the supply chain brotherhood I’ve run across in quite a while. His name is Anupam Singh, and he’s a member of the supply chain […]

Randall Stross tried to write an interested column in the Sunday New York Times about a real problem — the declining growth of IT spending — but missed an important point. Two, really. The first is that he makes the common, business page mistake of lumping ALL spending related to technology and business into a […]

Maggie Fox, one of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars, raised the issue of sexism in the social media world in a post that rightly takes a speaker’s bureau to task for promoting an all-male list of top social media speakers. As Maggie, as well as friend and colleague Susan Scrupski are two of the more competent […]

Ray Wang is leaving Forrester Research for parts unknown, though I can imagine he won’t be going too far from the industry that has been his life’s work for lo these many years. So, in an effort to make Ray blush, I thought I’d add my kudos to the list of fellow bloggers and analysts […]

As widely reported, Microsoft has begun the process of unveiling details about the pricing and services for its much-anticipated Azure cloud platform. Mary Jo Foley has a pretty complete round-up of the news here. There’s a bit of a debate around whether Azure or Amazon will be the cheaper cloud, but the issue of price […]

Where do I begin with this post? Reuters laid an egg with an article about SAP’s troubled but very much alive and well on-demand ERP offering, Business ByDesign, in so many ways it’s hard to know where to start. So let’s start at the headline (and yes, as a former reporter, I know that headlines […]

The current fad of linking Twitter to the comment page of Facebook has now officially reached the ridiculous phase. My Facebook page is replete with the inanity, irrelevance, and non-sequitors that characterize Tweets, blocking out (unless I care to scroll scroll scroll) comments from friends that are relevant to the friendships I’m trying to cultivate […]

At first blush it looks like Oracle’s deal to buy Sun plants a large, made-in-Redwood Shores boot right in the [name your favorite body part] of IBM. Oracle will now take over the competition with IBM that Sun had waged for so many years, and that this will lead, among other things, to IBM and […]

If you were still wondering what Oracle was going to do with its newly acquired MySQL database (other than write-off the ridiculous $1 billion that Sun paid for the open source leader), the answer just arrived in my email inbox: Oracle plans to trash-talk MySQL to death. In case it needed to be made any […]

Bear with me while I brag a little. Way back in 2003, as Oracle was just winding down a hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, I wrote a column that predicted two things: Oracle would buy a major IT services company (Cap Gemini was my favorite pick), and Oracle would buy Sun. Not the Sun of 2003, […]

There’s a debate raging again in the on-demand, software-as-a-service market that bears some curmudgeonly commentary. The essence of the debate — which I contend seriously needs to be upgraded to reflect the real future of SaaS –is whether multi-tenancy or single-tenancy is the true path to enlightenment in SaaS. My curmudgeonly comment is this: Neither […]

Michael Doane,  the man who wrote the SAP Blue Book and knows more about what happens when SAP gets implemented than anyone outside of SAP (and many inside) has an intriguing idea. How about giving those SAP customers who are well-advanced in their ability to support themselves a break on their Enterprise Support costs? This […]

My colleague from the old days (the 80’s, you whippersnappers) Loring Wirbel posted a chart on his blog this week that is such a perfect indictment of the evil of Twitter that I have to alert my loyal readers (all 12 of you, and that doesn’t include mom) to this incontrovertible fact: the growth of […]

Microsoft is following SAP’s much-discussed decision to can its European Sapphire event with a similar decision to do away with the Microsoft Convergence Conference in Vienna this year. Like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics will be hosting a series of local events across Europe, keyed to local interests and languages, and designed to be much more accessible […]

I woke up this morning to see the fulminations of an entire industry focused on an Open Cloud Manifesto that wins, on face value at least, the oxymoron award of the year. It’s not open, it’s as much a manifesto as this blog post is a ham sandwich, and its impact on the future of […]

Sitting in the SAP Insider GRC conference this week has been instructive in terms of understanding what’s next in the world of governance, risk and compliance, a market segment that, at least at SAP, is outpacing the growth of the overall enterprise software industry in a significant way. Many think the big issue in the […]

In my attempt to accumulate real-world statistics that highlight how enterprise software contributes directly to our economy and our society — especially in terms that non-techies and non-enterprisers can understand, I am grateful to COBOL giant Micro Focus and their PR firm for the following brilliant examples of what a little enterprise software can do […]

After I wrote the previous post lambasting Microsoft Dynamics for not being forthcoming with hard data about how its business is doing, I began a mind-numbing series of meetings with various members of the Dynamics team. Towards the end of the day the issue of how much Dynamics contributes to the larger Microsoft revenue picture […]

I’m sitting in the press conference at Microsoft’s Convergence conference, and I’m reminded of the one reason I hate trying to cover the Dynamics part of Microsoft: They won’t answer a host of questions about their business that virtually every other company will answer. Which means as an analyst I can’t compare apples to apples, […]

If conference attendance were a good way to judge the prospects of a vendor in this down market, then Microsoft’s Dynamics business group would have some serious trouble on its hands. Attendance at its big Convergence user group meeting is down 25 percent from last year, bucking a growth trend that has characterized most big […]

I’ve been on Craiglist’s case before, as I think the man (Craig Newmark) and his largely free listing service are out of synch with a basic moral imperative about supporting honest businesses and limiting the impact of those that chose to be dishonest. So it was with some real sadness that I read that over […]

One of my kids’ favorite books is the Lorax, by Dr. Suess, in which the politically radical Dr. Suess (who actively campaigned against fascism during World War II, well-before the U.S. entered the war) showed his environmentalist chops in a way to make any lover of The Cat in the Hat or Horton Hatches an […]

The question of who innovates in our industry and whether customers are getting enough to justify their maintenance fees is the story that just won’t die. Fellow EI Dennis Howlett took his knowledge of baseball on the road with a scorecard approach to the debate that has been rolling about the EI crowd, including Vinnie […]

In addition to my post on Oracle and Innovation from yesterday, my colleague Dennis Howlett has also weighed in on this issue, first by citing Vinnie’s post and then adding his own perspective as well. Meanwhile, as a backdrop to the public debate we’re waging, the Enterprise Irregulars have been batting around this issue amongst […]

My friend and colleague Vinnie “the Deal” Mirchandani took aim at a lackluster PR release by Oracle as emblematic that Oracle has lost the art of software innovation, in favor the art of acquisition. That’s a rough synopsis, read the full post and Karen Tillman’s well-tempered responses here. As someone who tries to keep a […]

My good friend and colleague Vinnie Mirchandani asked me yesterday in the middle of twenty project deadlines if I would write a guest post on how technology has impacted my hobbies. As I pondered the request, and looked at one of the other guest posts, I realized that, however high-tech my work day is, my […]

Two communications satellites collided in geosynchronous orbit two days ago, and, while no one is expecting an interstellar solar array to crash into your backyard as a result, the impact of this collision can and should be heard across the business world, especially as we all ponder a brave new world replete with seemingly infinite […]

I’m increasingly hearing from companies that use enterprise software that the majority of their users will soon be “casual users” of any one enterprise software product. This is creating an enormous disconnect across the different constituencies that have been traditionally served, or underserved, by enterprise software. This disconnect between customer or buyer (usually the CIO), […]

SAP batted first this week in a game I hope will go not just into multiple innings, but will end up in a major playoff series as well. The game is about defining the real impact of enterprise software, and how a vendor join the league is the following: define how much your software contributes […]

Back in 1997, the late, not-so-great Sapphire Europe was being held in Amsterdam amidst huge turmoil in Europe, particularly France. At issue was the economic direction of Europe in the face of the coming of the Euro currency zone, and what economic model countries should adopt to meet those challenges. France’s center-right government had just […]

SAP caught a little heat from the blogosphere about plans to replace its flagship European Sapphire customer event with a series of smaller, local events across Europe. Opinions ranged from “sends the wrong message” to “good riddance”, with a mistaken tendency towards the former message. I beg to differ. First, as a veteran of the […]

If you’re interested in hearing more about Shane’s problems and how to avoid them (including making sure you know who to blame when things go south), you might want to tune in to an upcoming Webcast from Panorama Consulting. While I don’t know how detailed the Lessons Learned From Shane Webcast will be, judging from […]

According to Crossderry Blog, Shane Co. has issued a statement (not a press release as I earlier reported) stating the obvious regarding its failed SAP implementation: the cost overruns and other problems were the fault of unnamed systems integration partners. The statement further says that SAP Services rode to the rescue, got the system going, […]

Steve Jobs just wants to be left alone, and I don’t blame him. Facing down an organ transplant can be daunting, scary, all-consuming, and, perhaps most importantly, time-consuming. As I have some personal experience in the transplant business — mostly of the bone marrow kind, but I know a fair amount about what happens in […]

Along with “my hard drive ate my homework”, the digital age has spawned a countless number of ways in which personal responsibility — or any responsibility at all — can be dumped on someone or something else. One of the more common excuses to emerge from the garbage pit of blame is the perennial “my […]

One of the great evils of the Internet is anonymity, which has become the true last refuge of the scoundrel. The cloak of anonymity that free email services such as Gmail provide offers a protective cover that allows these scoundrels to plague free commerce sites like Ebay and Craigslist with fraudulent offerings, and haunt the […]

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the pending data revolution in the enterprise, and I finally hit on the solution to a problem that has frankly bedeviled the industry for years, and is only getting worse. The problem is this: as more and more data are accumulated across the extended, networked supply […]

My last post helped define an important dichotomy in the current debate on the future of the economy between those who think Detroit should be rescued, and those who don’t. Fueling the don’t-rescue group is a set of sentiments that can be summed up in the following way: Detroit makes cars no one wants to […]

Two enduring concepts have crept into my thinking in the last few weeks, as the economy continues to lurch about with no apparent direction and no visibility into what the future may hold. The first concept comes from an absolutely brilliant movie about racism in France, La Haine. The movie features a memorable “joke” that […]

I don’t usually plug my own work, but I just wrote a piece for Datamation.com on what enterprise software vendors should say to their customers as the current recession/depression swallows up the global economy. Basically, the gist of the column is that this is the moment to inaugurate a shift in how vendors interact with […]

I just received a rather interesting email about a new study by NETCompetition.org, one of the groups that fights for net neutrality and other largely worthwhile causes. The study, authored by NETCompetition chairman Scott Cleland, claims that Google sucked up almost 17 percent of the total consumer Internet bandwidth in 2008, while effectively paying for […]

I was sitting in the lobby at a client site waiting for our meeting to begin, when my compulsive need to check email yielded a frightening result: my client had just emailed me to ask if I was still coming to the meeting? There I was, $500 in expenses and a day spent traveling, and […]

Well, that experiment is over. Actually, it lasted a lot longer than I thought it would. The upshot of what was my first foray into the blogosphere was that my blog never got the traffic that ZDNet wanted for the basic, entry level pittance they were paying me. No matter that the people reading it […]