Software analyst Josh Greenbaum's opinions on enterprise software have annoyed enough vendors that he now checks under the hood of his PC every morning before he boots up.
I’ve been sitting on the sidelines watching the hype-fest around the Salesforce.com/Google “alliance”, trying to stifle a yawn at what I keep thinking will have to be a massively underwhelming deal once the truth is out.
Want to know where the entire enterprise software industry will be looking in mid-Nov.? It’s easy: Oracle’s OpenWorld user conference.
Some say imitation is the highest form of flattery, but that’s only for those who forget that a good rebuttal – or attempted rebuttal – is quite flattering as well. Jason Wood, a fellow Enterprise Irregular and blogger, has done me the courtesy of a well-written blog that attempts to refute my previous post on Salesforce.
It’s finally time to call a spade a spade, or in this case, a soon-to-be has-been a has-been. Of course, doing so after the fact sounds too spiteful, so I’m going to do it well ahead of the curve.
The rumor du jour hit the Reuters wire early this morning, and it's a doozie: SAP's shares are up in recent trading because Oracle has bought some eight percent of the company. Considering April Fool's Day is come and gone, one has to assume that this was reported not for its humor value but for some other purpose -- maybe even as a piece of legitimate news.
Here’s the skinny on Oracle’s acquisition of Agile: PLM is a three-letter acronym that has never lived up to its reputation as hot number either across the enterprise or in the eyes of the investment community. That hasn’t stopped companies like Siemens from recently paying a pretty euro to buy up Agile competitor UGS, but Siemens somewhat anomalous bid belies the fact that Agile, and others like it, have failed to live up to their promised hype.
Attending Microsoft’s first Business Intelligence Conference has been an illuminating experience, mostly for how Microsoft’s major strengths in BI are becoming its major weaknesses. The issue is one that I’ve ranted about in the past, and it’s an industry-wide problem, not just Microsoft’s.
SAP has fired back at Oracle, in rather short order, with the acquisition of OutlookSoft, a corporate performance management vendor based in Stamford, Conn. It looks like short order of course, as Oracle announced its Hyperion acquisition a scant two months ago.
The eternal quest to come up with a definitive timeline, much less a definition, for Oracle's Fusion Applications may have just gotten a little easier. Step one was Oracle's release of its Application Integration Architecture, formerly known as Project X, which provides the glueware that can link different processes in the vast Oracle portfolio into well-orchestrated, super processes that span the different product families.
Outside the SAP user conference in Atlanta, the cameras were rolling. Looking for sound bites were Oracle operatives, trying to get SAP customers to say – on camera and with SAPPHIRE logos as a backdrop – that SAP’s software was expensive, hard to deploy, and helped make the world safe for global terrorism and $400 haircuts.