Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-05-09

• Microsoft cuts loose dozens of S’pore staff
  BT understands that dozens of Singapore-based positions were axed this week under the second phase of a plan to cut 5,000 jobs worldwide by June next year. Singapore currently plays host to more than 600 Microsoft employees across three divisions – Microsoft Singapore, Microsoft APAC (Asia-Pacific) Regional HQ and Asia-Pacific Operations Centre. Besides permanent staff, the company hires a sizeable number of contract workers here. Microsoft declined to reveal the number of Singapore employees affected by restructuring, but sources said that this week’s retrenchments – which hit mostly mid-level staff and below – cut across all business units and may have accounted for 5-10 per cent of the overall staff base.
• Sun Faces Suit Over Oracle Deal, Bribery Probe
  Sun Microsystems must be glad the weekend is here. The company disclosed today that it has been slapped with three class-action suits from shareholders looking to block its acquisition by Oracle, which is also named in the lawsuits. Making matters worse, Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) also admitted that it’s investigating possible incidents involving employees bribing foreign officials — a violation of U.S. law.
• Scots economy at risk of fallout from Obama’s plan to reform US tax law
  IT companies such as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Cisco, Oracle and Dell – each with sizeable operations in Scotland – could see their foreign earnings significantly cut. There is a danger that Obama’s plans could lead to US companies scaling back their overseas operations, including those in Scotland, or halting expansion plans. This could wipe billions of future investment from the UK economy.
• Things get hostile in Silicon Valley
  After a hiatus since September, hostile activity has returned to Silicon Valley with Broadcom Corp.’s $764 million bid for storage equipment maker Emulex Corp. Seven of the 10 largest bids for tech companies last year were unsolicited, but six of those bidders walked away, most notably Microsoft Corp., which abandoned its $48 billion offer for Yahoo! Inc. in May 2008. Oracle Corp. was the only pursuer to bag its prey when it bought BEA Systems Inc.
• Trends in SAP Business Warehousing
  The recommendations: If you are a larger user of SAP ERP, who is consolidating onto fewer instances, stay the course. SAP’s Layered Scalable Architecture has been developed and hardened in the molten cauldron of real-world client experience over the past ten years. However, for those enterprises with business intelligence and data warehousing investments that have grown up alongside SAP ERP, it is useful and indeed essential to consider meta-architecture. How do all the pieces fit together in terms of the big picture? In a context of multiple data sources and diverse updates, meta-architecture says which database is the driver (master) and which is the driven (servant). After consideration, pick one and stick to it. If size and scalability become an issue as SAP BI (BW) instances are consolidated, consider the approach of the BI Accelerator as a way of meeting service level agreements (SLAs). If you are a heavy user of Cognos with SAP, understand that SAP “gets” heterogeneous data to t
• Oracle relents (a bit) on hypervisor support policy
  Oracle quietly revised its virtualization support policy last month, and it now will provide best-effort support for E-Business Suite applications running on any x86 hypervisor, including those from VMware, Microsoft, Citrix Systems and other virtualization providers, reported Chris Wolf, a senior analyst at Burton Group, on his blog. For more on virtualization with Oracle and support: Evaluating virtualized databases Oracle licensing, support pose VMware virtualization hurdle According to an Oracle document “Platform Vendor Virtualization Technologies and Oracle E-Business Suite” ( Metalink 794016l.1) the company will support E-Business Suite 11i and R12 on third-party virtualization platforms, although it will not explicitly certify them. Problems isolated to the virtualization layer (i.e., those issues that cannot be replicated on nonvirtualized hardware, must be referred back to a company’s virtualization provider, the document said.
• Supply chain software: NetSuite steps further into manufacturing
  If you’re interested in what’s happening in the market for on-demand enterprise software, also known as cloud computing or Software as a Service, you have to watch NetSuite. As far as I know, they were the first full-blown ERP system designed to be deployed over the Web. What’s more, they have continually added to their functionality for the supply chain. Most recently, they teamed up with RootStock Software, a provider of software for manufacturing systems, to develop a full-fledged MRP solution in an on-demand model, Rootstock MRP for NetSuite.