Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-10-27

• Amazon takes MySQL to the cloud; or have they?
  For a starters, it is not really a true cloud service, where we think of it as an infinite resource, we just keeping using it and they will keep billing us. We still can’t run huge monolithic datasets in the cloud and not worry about load balancing, scaling and replication. What Amazon have done here is more akin to the services offered by the likes of RightScale.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
  is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business. Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. You also benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.
• Is Amazon’s MySQL Knock-Off Worth It For Startups?
  The Bottom line: SoftLayer costs 15% less, but lacks the flexibility of AWS.
• Amazon Launches Hosted MySQL Database Cloud Service
  Name Memory Comp Price per hour Small DB Instance 1.7 GB 1 ECU $0.11 USD Large DB Instance 7.5 GB 4 ECUs $0.44 USD Extra Large DB Instance 15 GB 8 ECUs $0.88 USD Double Extra Large DB Instance 34 GB 13 ECUs $1.55 USD Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance 68 GB 26 ECUs $3.10 USD
• Managed MySQL — Amazon RDS
  # I did not see an option to enable SSH connections to MySQL. I think that is required for this to be a great way to run MySQL. # This supports MyISAM and InnoDB. They don’t give you command line access to the machines, so you cannot run myisamchk to recover corrupt MyISAM tables, nor can you run myisampack to compress them. I think it is a good idea to stick with InnoDB and then ask Amazon to upgrade to the InnoDB 1.0.4+ plugin. # This appears to use network attached storage for most data. For example, innodb_data_home_dir=/rdsdbdata/db/innodb. I am not sure whether this buffers data in the OS buffer cache and if it does not, that will hurt MyISAM performance as it does not buffer table data.
• The Google Enterprise Strategy Starts with Google Wave
  They’ve been steadily laying the technology foundation for the enterprise blitzkrieg and expect to start profiting from it next year. Yes, Google Docs has yet to make a huge splash, but the company is betting Google Wave will beachhead the company’s products into the enterprise.
• Q&A: Eric Schmidt wants Google in your office
  We’re trying to build to bring the benefits of the consumer architecture of the Internet to all the people using enterprise services today with the same or better level of security and control.
• Looking At Platforms
  Not eveyone can be a platform, but everyone sure wants to be.
• Choose Your VC Investor Carefully
  Either you’re not a good leader and he shouldn’t be investing at all, or he has no clue what it takes to build a startup.
• IBM’s IOD – Some Highlights for Me
  IBM is firmly focused on ‘decision making’ in the organization, and how such decisions should lead to better business outcomes. This goes to the center of how the firm works.
• MSDN subscribers get Windows Azure perks
  750 hours on Azure a month for the first eight months of Azure’s commercial availability, as well as other freebies including 1,000,000 messages through .Net Services, three 1GB SQL Azure databases, and 7GB in and 14GB out of data transfer bandwidth. After that introductory period, subscribers will still get time and bandwidth on Azure, though markedly less. For a complete breakdown of who gets what, check Microsoft’s own chart here.
• Adobe, Salesforce Put Flash In Cloud
  As of Monday that platform gets additional tooling, Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com. In effect, all the capabilities of the Flash Player will be available as components for user interfaces in the Force.com environment. Applications built there will run on Salesforce.com servers in Salesforce.com data centers — in other words, in the Salesforce.com-branded cloud. They can be linked in that environment to Salesforce.com CRM and other applications and make use of Salesforce.com database services.
• Instructions
  [Incorporate Twitter in PowerPoint-awesome tools!-DBM]
• SuccessFactors Announces Third Quarter Fiscal 2009 Results
  SuccessFactors’ results for the third quarter fiscal year 2009: — Q3 FY09 Revenue: For the quarter ended September 30, 2009, revenue was $38.7 million, compared to $29.7 million in the quarter ended September 30, 2008, an increase of approximately 30% year-over-year and an increase of 5% sequentially from Q209. — Q3 FY09 Gross Margin: For the quarter ended September 30, 2009, non-GAAP gross margin was 78%, compared to 67% a year ago. Non-GAAP gross margin excludes the effect of approximately $290,000 in stock-based compensation for the quarter ended September 30, 2009. — Q3 FY09 Operating Margin: For the quarter ended September 30, 2009, non-GAAP operating margin was 1%, compared to negative 61% for the quarter ended September 30, 2008. Non-GAAP operating margin excludes the effect of approximately $2.6 million and $2.2 million in stock-based compensation for the quarter ended September 30, 2009 and 2008, respectively. — Q3 FY09 Total Deferred Revenue: Total deferred revenue as of
• SuccessFactors narrows 3Q profit loss
  SuccessFactors lowered its 2009 profit guidance to a loss of 4 cents per share from between 6 cents per share and 7 cents. The outlook excludes an estimated stock-based compensation expense. However, the company raised its revenue guidance for the year to between $150.1 million and $150.6 million, from between $147 million and $148 million. Shares rose 9 cents, to close at $16.38.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-10-26

• SAP Appoints New Head of Global Ecosystem and Partner Group
  In Mecker’s previous position as head of the Global Software and Technology Partner organization at SAP, he was responsible for managing all activities of SAP technology and software partners globally. In addition, he oversaw all business development activity with independent software vendor (ISV) and technology partners, including the global portfolio of third-party solutions driving revenue for SAP and its partners. Mecker has a long and distinguished career in enterprise software. Prior to joining SAP, he served as senior vice president of Global Solutions and Alliances for BearingPoint. Previously, he was CEO at Valdero Corporation (acquired by One Network). Mecker also has extensive prior corporate experience serving as a partner at KPMG Consulting and in various management roles at PeopleSoft and Oracle. Mecker holds a master’s degree in industrial engineering and management from Virginia Tech, in the U.S., and a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Punjab University, India.
• A tribute to Ranjan Das, MD SAP AG
  he 42-year-old was known to be the youngest MNC head in the country. An Assamese by birth, Ranjan grew up in Guwahati. After his 12th standard, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US with a full scholarship, where he obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering. He later went on to attain an MBA from the Harvard Business School. … Ranjan relocated to Mumbai in July 2007 from SAP’s Silicon Valley office in the US to lead the Indian subcontinent region. Under his leadership, the region delivered its best-ever performance in 2007 by doubling software revenue and customer base as well as achieving record customer and employee satisfaction and became the fastest growing region globally for SAP and won the “Region-of-the-year” award.
• MapReduce Online
  Our Hadoop Online Prototype extends the applicability of the model to pipelining behaviors, while preserving the simple programming model and fault tolerance of a full-featured MapReduce framework. This provides significant new functionality, including “early returns” on long-running jobs via online aggregation, and continuous queries over streaming data. We also demonstrate benefits for batch processing: by pipelining both within and across jobs, HOP can reduce the time to job completion.
• Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com
  During my time at Oracle, I also embarked on a self-guided crash course reading the popular books by the 20th-century leadership gurus such as Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins and Dale Carnegie. I sought wisdom from the writings of Martin Luther King Jr., W. Edwards Deming, and I explored traditional spiritual texts about Eastern religion and philosophy. I listened to hundreds of hours of tape recordings by experts in corporate development. All of this was influential to me. But ultimately, you take all this stuff, everything you see, everything you read, everything you learn, and you interpret it and piece it together to help you make sense of things your own way.
• The State of Enterprise Software Adoption
  The C-level blames the IT shop for lack of software success … IT organization 59.2% Software vendors 23.2% User/line management 13.9% Another group 3.7%
• Red Hat investing in EnterpriseDB
  the official announcement is set for release on Tuesday October 27th. The official press release does not disclose the exact amount that Red Hat is investing, but it is part of a $19M series C round of funding. EnterpriseDB is one of the leading commercial backers behind the PostgreSQL(also known as Postgres) database.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-10-25

• Ingres gains geospatial features – and loses its last closed code
  Ingres has announced geospatial support in its open source database, allowing it to be used as part of a Geographic Information System (GIS). Or rather, it’s announced an open source implementation of its geospatial support, since the functions have been there for quite some time. However, until this point, the modules were proprietary — the only part of Ingres that was.
• Who Should Oracle Sell MySQL To?
  There is no question that MySQL brings significant value to its users, but does it carry enough value to whoever owns it to justify its purchase? Or, is this another example of the problems of the commons? For my part, I can see how MySQL might be of more value to Oracle than it is to any other single party. This makes a sale difficult because Oracle wants more than any individual organization is willing to pay. MySQL is almost certainly more valuable to the collective community, but the collective community is not structured to make the purchase.
• Oracle-Sun deal opponents to press case in Silicon Valley
  Florian Mueller, a European Union strategist who’s working with deal opponent and MySQL cofounder Michael “Monty” Widenius, will be in Silicon Valley Monday morning for a press conference to explain the opposition. The next day, he’ll make a similar appearance in New York City.
• US Tour of European Opponent of Oracle Owning Sun’s MySQL
  [Mueller has a financial interest in the outcome-DBM] The activist…wrote a position paper in August for MySQL founder Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius’ new company, Monty Program Ab, which he claims supported the European Commission’s initial investigation. On his tour, he will discuss his view on competition concerns and the proceeding, and possible ways forward.
• Analysis of the “MapReduce Online” paper
  The paper evaluates mainly subproblem (2): every operator in MapReduce is a blocking operator. The main focus of the paper is, in particular, on turning the Map operator from a blocking operator to an operator that can ship query results as they are produced. This technique gets more and more useful the fewer map tasks there are. If there are more nodes than Map tasks (as is the case for every experiment in this paper) then there are entire nodes that have only Reduce tasks assigned to them, and without pipelining, these nodes have to sit around and do nothing until the Map tasks start to finish.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-10-23

• Larry Ellison Doesnt Play Chicken
  The EU officials have not seen a CEO like Ellison. He is willing to use a scorched earth policy to prove his point by using Sun as his current example. Oracle in investing nearly $6 billion net of cash to buy Sun. His actions may seem irrational, but he is not a typical CEO. He afford to appear not to care what it takes to win
• Oracle Fusion in Context
  So, I am not a financial analyst, but my reading of the situation is that Oracle has positioned itself and its business well with Fusion. When delivered in a service mode, the applications will be competitive with other market leaders. The applications ought to find a big market in other nations where software might be too expensive for local tastes. There, at least multi-tenancy should prove to be essential.
• EMC’s Net Falls, But Lifts Outlook
  Mr. Tucci also said he expects IT spending to grow in 2010, though at a slower pace than the period of 2004 to 2007. The economic recovery, he said, will be “slow, but steady.”
• SAP-Siemens: He said, she said
  He hears Siemens got the deal at under euro 20 million a year compared to the euro 35 million they were paying earlier. They also got perks such as MaxAttention, extended maintenance on some Siemens specific enhancements thrown in and also got some shelfware off maintenance.
• How to Succeed as an Early Adopter: Interview with Genentech CIO Todd Pierce
  The rate of innovation at Google is – well I mean, the Oracle, SAP and Microsoft product cycle is five years; Google’s product cycle is five days. It’s incremental. In five days you’re not going to be able to cancel your Microsoft Office license, but in five years, you won’t have Microsoft Office.
• Interim Update #2: Certifying Windows 7 with Oracle E-Business Suite
  Microsoft Windows 7 was officially released today. Here’s a recap of our plans for certifying the Oracle E-Business Suite with Microsoft‘s latest operating system. As always, the answers to these questions may change as we move through the certification cycle. You’re welcome to monitor or subscribe to this blog for later updates.
• SuccessFactors underwriters exercise option
  SuccessFactors Inc., a business-software maker, said Friday that the underwriters of its public offering exercised in full their option to buy an additional 1.8 million shares of the company’s common stock. On Tuesday, the company announced a public follow-on offering of 12 million shares of its common stock at $15.50 per share. With the full exercise of the option to buy additional shares, total gross proceeds of the offering are expected to be about $215 million.
• Informatica Joins Ranks Of Elite Enterprise Software Companies
  So kiss the “quiet” part goodbye. On top of that, stressing that its independent status allows it to avoid industry in-fighting and instead concentrate on tying together customer data no matter how mottled the pedigree, Informatica CEO Sohaib Abbasi also expects the company to exploit aggressively today’s cloud-computing phenomenon by giving CIOs more tools for delivering and presenting high-value and trusted data and information across the enterprise regardless of whether they reside in on-premises legacy apps or in clouds from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) or others.
• Informatica Achieves Top Marks for Customer Loyalty for Data Integration for Fourth Consecutive Year
  Informatica received top marks in Customer Loyalty in the 2009 Data Integration Customer Satisfaction survey conducted by independent research firm TNS, a world leader in market insight and information…Indeed, 86% of Informatica customers surveyed recognize Informatica as the technology leader, and over 90% intend to repurchase more product.
• Informatica Reports Record Third Quarter License Revenues, Total Revenues and Earnings
  Revenues for the third quarter of 2009 were $123.4 million, up eight percent from the $113.8 million recorded in the third quarter of 2008. License revenues for the third quarter were $50.0 million, up nine percent from the $45.8 million recorded in the third quarter of 2008. Income from operations for the third quarter, calculated in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), was $22.3 million, up 26 percent from $17.7 million in the third quarter of 2008. GAAP net income for the third quarter was $16.2 million or $0.17 per diluted share, up 21 percent from $13.4 million or $0.14 per diluted share in the third quarter of 2008. For the three-month periods ended September 30, 2009 and September 30, 2008, earnings per diluted share was calculated on an “if converted” basis, including the add-back of $1.0 million and $1.1 million, respectively, of interest and convertible notes issuance cost amortization, net of income taxes. Non-GAAP income from operations for
• Epicor Software shares rise 10 pct on broker upgrade
  Benchmark Capital upgraded the business-software maker’s stock to ‘buy’ from ‘hold,’ and said it could be a takeout candidate in the near to intermediate term. Epicor, which was the target of a hostile takeover bid from hedge fund Elliott Associates in 2008, had entered into a standstill agreement with Elliott early this year.
• NetSuite OneWorld Helps Boost ABS-CBN Global’s Customer Support and Fulfillment Processes
  NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), a leading vendor of cloud computingbusiness management software suites, announced today that ABS-CBN Global Limited and its worldwide subsidiaries have adopted the NetSuite OneWorld solution to strengthen some of its vital business processes. In particular, the leading global Filipino company has utilized the following NetSuite modules: accounting / ERP, inventory and order management, customer support and customer relationship management (CRM), partner and reseller management, and sales and marketing report generation and analysis. As a result, the company has gained greater flexibility to expand to new regions and modify its product and marketing mix. The NetSuite OneWorld solution also makes it easy for ABS-CBN Global to report results to its parent company which makes use of SAP as its enterprise-wide financial application.
• Sybase CEO John Chen Addresses the Company`s Q3 2009 Financial Results in Video Interview
  Sybase, Inc. (NYSE:SY), an industry leader in delivering enterprise and mobile software, today reported financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2009, reporting record third quarter revenue and earnings, driven by 32% database license growth and 18% messaging growth.Watch the video interview with Sybase Chairman, CEO and President John Chen for insight into Sybase`s Q3 2009 earnings results and his perspective on economic trends impacting the technology sector.
• Sybase Reports Record Third Quarter Revenue and Earnings, Driven by 32% Database License Growth and 18% Messaging Growth
  istorical third quarter records achieved in total revenue, operating income, operating margin, net income, EPS, and cash flow from operations * Database license revenue increased 32% and 35% in constant currency * Messaging services increased 18% and 23% in constant currency * GAAP operating income up 34% to $70.9 million, representing operating margin of 24% * Non-GAAP operating income up 28% to $86.9 million, representing operating margin of 30% * GAAP EPS up 17% to $0.43, non-GAAP EPS up 16% to $0.63 * Cash flow from operations increased 95% to $104.9 million
• Sybase 3Q Earnings Jumps 20% On Higher Rev, Raises 2009 View
  Sybase Inc.‘s (SY) third-quarter profit jumped 20% as the software company reported higher revenue and lower costs, in results that easily topped Wall Street’s expectations. Shares rose 2.2% to $42.15 in premarket trading as the company also raised its full-year targets. The stock is up two-thirds this year. Sybase now sees 2009 non-GAAP earnings of $2.33 to $2.35 a share on revenue of $1.14 billion to $1.15 billion, up from its July view of $2.23 to $2.27 and $1.11 billion to $1.12 billion, respectively. For the fourth quarter, Sybase anticipates a profit of 66 cents to 68 cents on revenue of $305 million to $310 million. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected 66 cents and $303 million.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-10-22

• SharePoint 2010 Conference Review Dashboards, Social and User Configuration
  The main reason SharePoint and other enterprise collaboration vendors are having considerable success is that it’s easier to create high ROI collaborative sites today than any other time in history.
• Oracle: Ellison Reportedly Meets With EUs Kroes On Sun Deal
  The piece says Ellison tried to convince Kroes that the deal did not create any antitrust concerns. The EU is expected to issue a ruling on the pending deal by January 19. In particular, the story said Ellison met with Kroes to discuss Oracles acquisition of MySQL, an open source database softwaredatabase software. business owned by Sun, the leading provider of
• Intel announces Intel® SOA Expressway R2.3 and partnership with Sophos for Highly Regulated, Secure SOA
  Intel SOA Expressway also offers support for XACML based fine grained authorization using Oracle® Entitlements Server as PDP/PAP (Policy Decision Point/Policy Application Point). The implementation has been validated on Oracle Enterprise Linux. Deployment of Intels SOA Expressway security gateway is now the recommended way to apply perimeter security for B2B services deployed on Oracle Fusion Middleware.
• HP CEO Flails Cloud with Faulty Firewall Logic
  So when Hurd or any other company bigwig says, ‘We won’t put anything material outside *the* firewall,’ what he actually means is, ‘We won’t put anything material outside *our* firewall.’ It may not be as rigorously tested and continuously validated as a cloud provider’s firewall, but hey, it’s *my* firewall, and if it goes down, well, I only have myself to blame.
• HP’s Hurd: Cloud computing has its limits (especially when you face 1,000 attacks a day)
  HP wouldnt put anything material in nature outside the firewall. The message: The cloud has its place, but theres a vast difference between private and public computing. Hurds talk, a Q&A with Gartner analysts David Cearley and Donna Scott at the IT Symposium, came amid a weak enterprise technology spending forecast for 2010, the integration of EDS and a scrum over the architecture of the next-generation data center. Hurd chose to stand during the interview and dabbled on a white board to make his points.
• Ingres Joins Universities to Support Students in Open Source
  “The collaboration between Ingres and leading universities to help students begin working with open source has offered major benefits to students,” said Greg Wilson, assistant professor of computer science, University of Toronto. “Financial support has allowed us to bring students from different universities in North America together face-to-face and offer them projects and mentors for the students to work with. Furthermore, as an open source company, Ingres gives students the opportunity to not only add to the project, but also to dive in and see how the database really works.”
• Siemens Renews Maintenance Contract with SAP. Now For the Real Issue
  Importantly, when a company signs on with an SAP or Oracle, they do so with multiple goals in mind, only one of which may be lowest cost. Indeed, that goal may be foremost in the CIO or CFOs mind, but for many line of business users, lowest cost is irrelevant to getting the job done. Discussing issues like maintenance costs feed into the needs of the buyer, for whom lowest cost is the goal, but that discussion has little or no relevance to the line of business user, who is looking at his or her P&L and wondering how the hell theyre going to get the job done, software costs be damned.
• mySQL founders fork on the post-Oracle future
  If Europe wants to build a mySQL fork that truly competes with Oracle in the enterprise market, the way forward is to collect the funds needed to make that happen. There is more at stake here than competition in the database market. [I’m sure this prospect would have no one at Oracle quaking in their boots!-DBM]

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-10-20

• SAP Chief Operating Officer Gunst On Temporary Medical Leave
  It wasn’t possible to say how long Gunst will require medical leave, and his responsibilities have been distributed among other executive board members, the spokesman added. He declined to elaborate further.
• Americas` SAP Users` Group`s Interim CEO Accepts Permanent Post
  The Americas` SAP Users` Group (ASUG), the world`s largest customer-run community of SAP professionals, announced today that Bridgette Chambers, who joined the organization as Interim CEO in June 2009, will assume the role of ASUG CEO on a permanent basis effective immediately.
• Mark Your Calendar – R ‘Ray’ Wang to Keynote at Sapience 2009
  Sapience 2009, an independent conference produced by Sapientia GmbH and OnTrack Communications will present viable alternatives to a single-vendor enterprise application suite. The conference explores strategies for moving to a more heterogeneous environment by leveraging existing investments. Featuring best practices from companies who have already started the process, sessions on the legal implications as well as the impact on maintenance contracts, and other key considerations such as augmenting SAP through cloud offerings, the conference is designed for IT executives looking to reduce expenses and their reliance on a SAP as their sole ERP vendor.
• Who is Steve Ballmer?
  At age 8, Ballmer was told by his father that he was headed for Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. He did well in school academically, earning valedictorian honors at Detroit Country Day School. Ballmer also wanted to excel in sports, but ended up being the basketball team’s manager. Today, Ballmer often escapes from the Microsoft campus on time to play basketball with his sons.
• Sun cutting up to 3,000 jobs as awaits Oracle deal
  The layoffs Sun outlined Tuesday in a regulatory filing are the latest in a series of job cuts at the world’s No. 4 server maker. Sun, a dot-com-era star, was banking on the $7.4 billion deal with Oracle as a lifeline after a decade of financial struggles. As delays have mounted, Sun has had to fend for itself, losing ground to rivals, including IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., which have exploited uncertainty about the deal to poach customers.
• Sun Microsystems to Cut 3,000 Jobs
  The hardware and software maker has been reducing its work force over the years because of declining revenues, and additional job cuts have been widely expected to happen after Oracle buys the company. That deal, announced in April, was originally expected to close over the summer. But a review by European regulators has been holding up the transactions.
• Teradata: We still rule over Oracle, IBM in analytics
  Darryl McDonald, chief marketing officer at Teradata, which is hosting its annual Partners conference in Washington this week, claimed that Oracle’s alleged customer wins have been mostly confined to “uncontested” situations, such as customers running the Oracle database on Hewlett-Packard servers that are being switched or upgraded to the Exadata appliance.
• Challenges Await Head of New SAP User Group
  Interim CEO Bridgette Chambers will take leadership of ASUG, which represents about 70,000 individuals at 2,000 member companies. Chambers assumes the role previously held by Steve Strout, who was ousted by ASUG’s board in November 2008 for undisclosed reasons. Like Strout before her, a key issue before Chambers is SAP’s controversial decision to move all customers to a fuller-featured but pricier Enterprise Support service.
• #OOW09 Video: Oracle ADF: Oracle Fusion Applications Teams’ Best Practices
  Steve Muench session – Oracle ADF: Oracle Fusion Applications Teams’ Best Practices. You can download slides from Steve Muench blog. Thanks to Justin Kestelyn and his approval to post those videos.
• Integrate Oracle Business Rules with Siebel CRM/SOA Suite 11g
  Oracle Business Rules (OBR) is a component of both SOA Suite and BPM Suite and offers seamless integration with BPEL processes in SOA applications via rules and decision tables. This integration is achieved via the use of JDeveloper as the single tool for modeling business terms, rules and processes. A business rule has an IF part and a THEN part. The IF part tests one or more business terms. If the tests pass, one or more actions are performed in the THEN part, such as adding or changing business terms. For instance, assume there exists a rule that computes the discount percentage based on the account type. Using OBR Designer, you can model this rule as shown:
• Oracle vs. SAP: Like Mac vs. PC, Without the Funny Ads
  (Think: Mac vs. PC; I’ll let you figure out who’s who.) SAP and Oracle both sell Big Boy software, of course. But that’s about where the similarities end. In my experiences in watching and dealing with them, the differences are stark, obvious and intentional: How they each treat customers, partners and the media; how they refer to the other; their marketing tactics; their CEOs; and the company culture as evidenced at their corporate get-togethers, such as the OpenWorld show and SAP’s annual Sapphire show (last year held in Orlando). Just look at this year’s OpenWorld and Sapphire conferences. Here’s your sizzle at OpenWorld: Larry Ellison’s constant thrashing of IBM and grandiose stage theatrics; Aerosmith in concert (leading with “Eat the Rich,” by the way); and a glitzy appearance by California’s Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger. Your razzle-dazzle at Sapphire: Hmmm…a rather dry keynote by CEO Leo Apotheker titled “Seeing Your Way Clear in the New Reality.”
• Fusion – Further reflections
  I remain skeptical about the impact Fusion Applications will have on the JDE customer set over the next 3 to 5 years. At the same time, I am excited to see Oracle introducing a new generation of applications and see no reason why it won’t be successful.
• AT&T Packages Enterprise Mobile Apps
  [AT&T competing in the mobile enterprise apps space?!?-DBM] For these “repeatable” use cases, AT&T can build ready-made applications, he said. A MEAP pharmaceutical sales application has been available for several months already. On Monday, the carrier introduced AT&T MEAP: Merchandising for the Consumer Goods Industry and AT&T MEAP: Maintenance and Repair for Hospitality. Both are hosted by AT&T and designed to run on Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices. The iPhone isn’t often used by workers in these fields, Glubochansky said.
• Oracle Enterprise Manager Minds The Data
  A car rental chain is using Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g to monitor 400 database systems, taking the burden off its DBAs.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-10-21

• 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. 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).
• Gartner: ‘Worst year ever’ for IT spending
  Silicon Valley no longer in the driver’s seat At the Gartner Symposium/ITExpo 2009 in Orlando, Fla., Peter Sondergaard, a senior vice president of research at Gartner, says 2009 was the worst spending cycle ever. He adds that Silicon Valley will no longer be in charge of the rebound and emerging regions will drive IT spending and how it’s deployed.
• Gartner Magic Quadrant lawsuit: Sour grapes or real gripes?
  The lawsuit raises important issues about the role of industry analysts in the enterprise software ecosystem. Analysts help technology buyers and sellers understand the market environment in which both groups operate. This intelligence helps technology vendors determine the strategies and features that are important to buyers. Likewise, analysts guide enterprise buyers through the challenging process of procuring large, expensive systems. When this system works properly, analysts provide a valuable service.
• Mark Logic CEO Blog: Gartner Sued Over Magic Quadrant for Alleged Damages of $132M plus Punitives of $1.3B
  Gartner’s basic assessments of ZL—that it has a good product but needs to expand its sales and marketing—but ZL challenges its placement on the Magic Quadrant Report because Gartner uses a “misguided analytical model” that gives “undue weight to sales and marketing.” [Anyone remember when Oracle went to war with Gartner?-DBM]
• IT pros weigh Gartner Magic Quadrant lawsuit
  End users aren’t as frustrated by Gartner’s research, but said they use the Magic Quadrant report sparingly, usually during early research in vendor selection. Several IT professionals said they took the findings with a grain of salt and assume that top-ranked vendors were also Gartner clients.
• SAP India head dies after heart attack
  Ranjan was a health freak. He ate right, jogged and worked out daily. He had no bad habits like drinking or smoking. He was very ambitious, and always believed that four hours of sleep were enough for him to be fit and fresh. He was a bundle of energy. He even ran the Chennai marathon a couple of months ago. His demise is such a shock to all who knew him,” said a source who knew him closely.
• Panaya Announces a Relief Program for SAP Customers Challenged by Support Package Stack 16
  SPS 16 contains 14,861 individual correction notes, representing an 80% increase over SPS 15, which had 8,237 notes. This in turn translates into increased effort and risk during implementation. Panaya ran its patent-pending analysis using a cloud-based virtual supercomputer and found that for over 90% of SAP customers, only 2% of the corrective notes will impact functions that are currently in production use. Since customers are currently unable to determine upfront which notes will impact their specific environment, they need to make substantial investment in comprehensive testing of the new Support Package. “Given the estimated 100,000 SAP ERP system installations currently in production, multiplied by 73 days required to implement a single support package, we’re talking about an investment of 7.3 million working days, several times a year. With the current economy, that seems like an awful waste,” explained Amit Bendov, Panaya’s Chief Marketing Officer. “The Panaya Relief Program a
• SAP, Siemens Ink New Support Pact
  SAP said Wednesday that Siemens has signed a three-year renewal of its software maintenance agreement, an announcement that would seem to quell widespread speculation that the global engineering and electronics company was considering dumping vendor-provided support in favor of lower-cost alternatives.
• Alinghi threatens to sue Oracle
  Oracle has charged that the choice of Ras al-Kaimah violates the Deed of Gift, the 19th century rules that govern the oldest competition in international sport, which “prohibits racing in the Northern Hemisphere between November 1 and May 1″.
• EU warns Oracle over Sun takeover
  Oracle has so far failed to produce evidence to ease concerns that its purchase of Sun Microsystems would be anti-competitive, the EU has said. Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said she was “disappointed” by the lack of proposals to placate EU worries.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-10-19

• Teradata unveils cloud strategy, answer for Oracle’s Exadata machine
  Teradata has a multi-pronged strategy that includes an internal cloud offering for customers—housed in the vendor’s data center—and a public rollout with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
• Google Takes Enterprise Promotion Campaign Global
  “The idea behind ‘Going Google‘ is that companies switch to Google AppsYahoo‘s Zimbra also compete. Meanwhile, IBM and Microsoft are busy re-tooling their on-premise software to work on the cloud as well. Google, like other SaaS vendors, also faces skepticism over the security, privacy and reliability of Web-hosted applications, which reside, along with their data, at external data centers beyond the control of an enterprise’s IT managers. Still, Google maintains that it is making steady progress at winning over large corporations. Some recent large deployments of Google Apps Premier, which costs US$50 per user per year, include 20,000 users at Motorola, 35,000 users at Rentokil Initial and 7,000 users at Konica Minolta. and it’s a real transformational change,” said Tom Oliveri, Google’s enterprise marketing director. Of course, Google isn’t alone in the SaaS market for collaboration and communication software, where Zoho and
• An Arrest and an Earnings Puzzle at I.B.M.
  The slip in I.B.M. shares was far more attributable to its third-quarter results, announced after the market closed on Thursday. The company reported better-than-expected profits, up 14 percent, and revenue a bit below Wall Street estimates.
• Microsoft Moves Visual Studio Towards The Cloud
  Microsoft is making it much easier for developers to build on the Azure cloud with these new tools. The specific Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio let developers build ASP.NET web applications and services that are hosted in Azure’s cloud services operating system. The tools also includes a SDK environment, and a simulated cloud environment that runs on the developer?s machine, so developers can test and debug their applications locally. Microsoft is also upgrading its .NET Framework 4, which will let developers experience smaller deployments with an 81 percent reduction in the framework size when using the Client Profile. Other benefits include additional support for industry standards, inclusion of the Dynamic Language Runtime for more language choice, new support for high-performance middle-tier applications (including parallel programming, workflow and service-oriented applications) and backward compatibility through side-by-side installation with .NET Framework 3.5.
• Rimini Street Announces Delivery of 2009-E Tax and Regulatory Updates
  The 2009-E update contains hundreds of updates, including local tax and garnishment modifications, unemployed wage base changes and assorted regulatory updates. In California alone, there were 20 critical changes, including new withholding tables from the California Employment Development Department posted on October 1, 2009, to be effective November 1, 2009. Rimini Street’s proactive tax and regulatory team quickly identified, scoped, coded, tested, and packaged these changes for inclusion in the tax and regulatory update being delivered today. This 2009-E update also included guidance on preparing for 2009 year end processing for U.S. and Canada.
• Technology Needs to Be Lean and Mean
  Typically, Rymer explained, packaged apps have been anti-lean for multiple reasons: * They’re locked down because the vendor controls the parameters of the application; * They’re inflexible, and therefore expensive to upgrade and customize; * They’re bloated with more functions than customers need, and constantly expanding with more; and * They’re targeted to the general user, which takes away from the advantages of a tailored user interface.
• Gartner Eases Forecast for IT Decline
  The company also gave its first forecast for 2010, projecting a 3.3% rebound after falling 5.2% this year. Gartner in July projected a 6% drop for 2009 to $3.2 trillion, much worse than it forecast earlier in the year. “While the IT industry will return to growth in 2010, the market will not recover to 2008 revenue levels before 2012,” Gartner research chief Peter Sondergaard said Monday. “2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk and growth.” He noted more than half of chief information officiers won’t see their IT budgets grow next year. “It will only slowly improve in 2011,” added Mr. Sondergaard.
• Brain drain: why many of our best and brightest are going home
  While on the surface, it may appear to some that having foreign-born talent leaving the country frees up employment for domestic workers, the opposite may occur. There may be a diminishing of opportunities as a result of a reverse brain drain. Wadhwa points to statistics that show that more than 52% of Silicon Valley’s startups during the recent tech boom were started by foreign-born entrepreneurs. In addition, he adds, “foreign-national researchers have contributed to more than 25% of our global patents… foreign-born workers comprise almost a quarter of all the U.S. science and engineering workforce and 47% of science and engineering workers who have PhDs.”
• Ray Wang Workday Rising Keynote 2009
• Oracle Opens the Kimono — A Crack
  Dozens of questions remain. And continuing the policy of limited communication on Fusion, Oracle made no executives available after Larry’s speech to answer any of them.
• Oracle OpenWorld as Soap Opera
  “What’s the difference between Windows and viruses? Viruses keep getting better.”

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).

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-10-18

• Oracle Uses OpenWorld to Reassure Skeptics but Concerns Remain — Visual Studio Magazine
  Ovum senior analyst Tony Baer worries that taking on Sun‘s hardware business could prove to be an unproductive distraction for Oracle. “There’s some concern out there that Oracle will lose its focus. I mean, [Oracle CEO] Larry Ellison spent three-quarters of his keynote [on Thursday] talking about hardware benchmarks,” Baer said.
• Larry Ellison Struts His Wealth Before Peons
  His first words? “It’s a great boat, you should get one.”
• Schwarzenegger At Oracle OpenWorld Jokes About ‘Why I’m Studly,’ No ‘Action’ From Wife #OOW09
  Read a transcript of his speech and watch ha video of it below:
• America’s Cup: No way to force US team to Gulf
  The Swiss defenders of the America’s Cup say they are willing to race other teams next year if the U.S.-based challenger refuses to compete in the Gulf because of security fears. The president of the Alinghi team, Ernesto Bertarelli, says there is no way to force challenger BMW Oracle Racing to race in the February showdown off Ras al-Khaimah, about 60 miles northeast of Dubai. BMW Oracle has filed a suit in New York to reject the venue on security grounds.
• Oracle to roll out huge patch update
  The firm’s quarterly Critical Patch Update, set for 20 October, will contain fixes for problems across “hundreds of products”, according to a pre-release announcement. Advertisement The product which gets the most attention, as usual, is the Oracle Database, which has 16 new fixes, inbcluding six for vulnerabilities which could be remotely exploited without the need for authentication.
• SAP Labs China Business Review
  [Interesting training presentation for new employees of SAP Labs China from 2004/2005-DBM]