Enterprise Headlines and Summaries, June 2011

June has been a busy month in the Enterprise Software and Solutions (http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23EnSW). Headlines and excerpts follow below, but here are some of the highlights of the month of June:

Lots o’ buzz about SAP HANA and how it can transform enterprise software …

Lots o’ legal action around Oracle and frenemies, especially Google and HP. Oracle lawsuit against Google regarding Android taking Java IP is moving along. HP is suing Oracle for failing to support Itanium.

Oracle announces its financial results, and they look good for software and bad for hardware (plus it was the first $10 BILLION quarter for Oracle). Also, Oracle is buying companies again, including Pillar Data Systems, which could be a big boon for Oracle’s storage management business (and for Larry, the main shareholder of Pillar).

Oracle Fusion Applications are coming to market, as evidenced by more stories about customers using Fusion Apps, and by the price list being posted online.

Workday, SuccessFactors, Skype, Sybase, and SAP are good places to work in the Bay Area.

HP is moving aggressively to improve its position in software, and Vertica could be their first breakout hit. HP has reorganized its staff, and hired software big guns like Bob Stutz, to improve its ability to execute in software.

Enterprise projects continue to experience failures. And enterprise software sucks.

Google’s software infrastructure is aging, according to insiders.

SAP is by far the largest enterprise applications vendor, and Oracle is #2 by a long distance. Infor will move into the #3 spot, ahead of Sage, after the Lawson acquisition closes (this month?). Microsoft remains a distant #5 in enterprise applications, but might move into the #4 slot – if Sage gets acquired by Oracle or SAP, as is in the rumor mill. BTW, SAP also leads in business intelligence market share.

IBM has become a centenarian, turning 100 years old on June 16, although its corporate roots go back even further.

Obama’s CIO quit – maybe he thought he was a member of the President’s economic advisory council? 😉

Microsoft makes more steps into its Cloud future with the release of Office 365, and in revealing plans around making Cloud development easier.

If you’re wondering about the image show above, it is titled (appropriately, both for the subject and for describing this past month’s Enterprise Software and Solutions news) “Flaming June” by Lord Frederic Leighton. I first learned of this painting when I saw it on the cover of one of my favorite albums in the late 80s.

Headlines and excerpts:

• The real (potential) impact of #SAP HANA
  Larry wants to sell you Exalogic and Exadata machines, costing millions; Hasso wants to sell you a simple, low-end, commodity device delivering the same benefits. If I were SAP, I’d have sales reps with HANA software installed on their laptops, demonstrating it at every customer interaction, and comparing it (favorably) with Oracle Exadata, and suggesting that customers demand that Oracle sales reps bring in an Exadata box on their next sales call – and not to bother showing up without one. Larry wants to sell you a cloud in a box; SAP will sell you apps on the cloud, or analytics in a box for hundreds or a thousand times lower cost than Oracle’s solution.
  
• #Oracle seeks $2.6 billion in damages from #Google
  In the latest filing in the case between the two California tech giants, Oracle revealed it was seeking $0.9 billion to $1.4 billion upfront from Google for infringing its patents. The Redwood Shores, Calif., tech firm is also seeking 15% of the revenue Google receives from advertising on its mobile operating system.
• #Oracle debuts Exastack partner program for software vendors
  The Oracle Exastack Ready program is open to partners immediately. Guidelines for Oracle Exastack Optimized and Exastack Labs, along with more technical and educational resources, will be available in this fall.
• #Oracle Announces New Oracle Exastack Program for ISV Partners
  Oracle Exastack Program Enables ISV Partners to Leverage a Scalable, Integrated Infrastructure to Deliver their Applications Tuned and Optimized for High-Performance
• Domino Sugar Wins Big With #SAP In #Cloud
  But the apps are now in a multitenant, x86 commodity infrastructure operated by a young, venture-backed, service supplier, Virtustream. The SAP apps are being run there with greater reliability than when Florida Crystals had them in its own data center, says CIO Don Whittington. Furthermore, his reduced IT expense, including the contract with Virtustream, has driven his IT spending down to just one-third of the annual expense that’s typical for the consumer packaged goods industry. “Our peers typically spend 2-2.5% of revenues on IT. We’re well under 1%,” he said in an interview.
• Time Warner Inc. Selects #Workday Human Capital Management and Payroll
  Workday’s multi-tenant SaaS HCM solution will provide Time Warner with a single system to organize its employee data and payroll information. — Since Workday Payroll can be easily configured, Time Warner can meet typical payroll requirements, while easily configuring the solution to address the unique requirements of its divisions. — Time Warner also selected Workday for its user interface, Workday Integration Cloud, and Workday’s solution for the iPad(R). Workday includes capabilities for self-service, integration, and mobile in customers’ regular subscription cost — at no additional fee.
• #SAP Agile Development in Action
  Actual development started in March 2010 and closed in December. The product is estimated for shipping in November, and 30 customers will begin ramp-up in 10 weeks. Customers in the council were also offered to receive an early shipment for what is termed “customer validation,” which would have allowed them to start using the product in August. (Two customers are pursuing that option.) 

  A year and a half may seem like an eternity given the speed of updates in today’s Software as a Service products. But consider how long it took Straubinger’s team to get a product out before. With the waterfall approach, development time plus waiting for the next feedback points from customers in ramp-up meant it took at least three years for a product to be shipped.

• #Oracle Earnings Claims: Hot Trend or Hot Air? ( #SAP)
  Oracle: $580 million (Q4 2011); $359 million (Q2 2011); $355 million (Q3 2011); $212 million (Q1 2011). TOTAL: $1.5 billion. 

  SAP: $774 million (Q4 2010); $383 million (Q2 2010); $360 million (Q3 2010); $304 million (Q1 2011). TOTAL: $1.8 billion.

  Does that look to you like Oracle has “passed” by SAP in the Americas?

• #Oracle boosts storage portfolio with Pillar Data Systems acquisition
  Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison owns the majority of Pillar Data Systems.
• Ballmer suggests nice jump in annual #Microsoft profit
  So, if the numbers hold true, that would mean a 7.9 percent jump in annual operating income for the Redmond-based company, and a 12 percent increase in yearly revenue.
• #SAP Ventures Leads $14M Round In Collaborative Sales Software Developer SAVO
  SAVO’s on-demand, collaborative Sales Enablement software aims to open communication across a company’s sales teams. The software connects sales reps with the best sales materials, insights and expertise across an organization. SAVO promises to helps drive better sales conversations so reps can close more deals.
• #Oracle buying Ellison-backed Pillar Data
  In effect Pillar is being bought by Oracle to replace the LSI and HDS arrays which Oracle previously OEM’d though its Sun acquisition. Pillar will now have its systems sold through the Oracle channel, and we can expect the absorption of Pillar’s channel into the Oracle one.
• #Oracle accuses #HP of hiding #Intel Itanium debacle from public – The Itanic is a sinking ship
  In Oracle’s words, “HP is suing Oracle for telling its customers the truth.”
• #Oracle: Buying Larry’s Loan, An Hilarious Legal Brief, The 10K
  It was a rather busy day in LarryLand: Today Oracle (ORCL) bought a company owned by CEO Larry Ellison, shot some stunning legal arrows at Google (GOOG) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and offered up its 10-K for the fiscal year that ended last month.
• #Oracle Buys CEO Ellison’s Start-Up
  Oracle didn’t provide a value for the acquisition, which it said was negotiated by its independent directors. The business-software giant declined to comment beyond a press release and documents filed with regulators. 

  The move is unusual in a few respects. For one thing, Pillar’s investors, including Mr. Ellison, will get no money up front, but will only be paid in three years if the start-up hits financial targets, according to Oracle’s filing. But if Pillar’s total losses under Oracle exceed its third-year revenue, no money will be paid.

  Mr. Ellison stands to get paid first under the arrangement, up to the $544 million debt plus dividends. Other investors—as well as Mr. Ellison—stand to be paid for their ownership stakes with any remaining payout.

  Oracle said Mr. Ellison recused himself from deliberations. The Oracle directors engaged their own lawyers and solicited financial advice from Perella Weinberg Partners, an investment bank, the company said. Independent members of the bo

• Larry Ellison And I Disagree, And Not Just About The America’s Cup ( #Oracle)
  But without true SaaS, without the ability to keep everyone on the exact same code base, without the many other benefits that only accrue to their customers when a vendor delivers well-done true SaaS, I think Mr. Ellison’s America’s Cup entry has a better chance of beating its competitors than does Fusion HCM when it’s compared, all in on a “rip and replace” basis, to the emerging “fleet” of true SaaS HCM products.
  
• #Oracle Fusion Applications pricing revealed
  In many cases, it appears that Fusion Applications are priced the same as corresponding modules in Oracle’s other ERP suites. For example, Fusion Financials and E-Business Suite Financials are priced the same, at $4,595 per application user license. 

  But a Fusion CRM Base license is priced at $4,910 per user, compared to $3,750 for a Siebel CRM Base license.

  Meanwhile, Oracle has heavily emphasized the fact that Fusion Applications will feature pervasive BI (business intelligence) throughout the user experience, but that feature may have to be purchased separately. A number of Fusion Application categories on the price list include an entry for a “transactional business intelligence” license, priced at $2,000 per user.

  Overall, an extensive pricing comparison is difficult to make, given the different names used for some of the Fusion Applications modules, as well as what appears to be a number of entirely new capabilities.

• Oracle Fusion Applications Global Price List
  [Oracle Fusion Applications: list of applications, prices, minima, and some definitions and terms -DBM]
• #SKYPE SCANDAL: Here’s How Big Bad Private-Equity Firm Silver Lake Sees The Situation
  In private-equity’s view, executives only deserve a piece of the equity pie if they see that mission through, not if they quit in the middle.
• Contract Law – Contracts, Party, Parties, Legal, Agreement, and Terms ( #Skype)
  To discourage the drafting of deliberately ambiguous language, any ambiguous terms in a contract is interpreted in a way that penalizes the party that drafts the document. In other words, if “party X” deceptively drafts a contract with ambiguous language such that the terms of the contract benefit the interests of “party X” over “party Y,” the ambiguous language of the contract will deliberately be interpreted to benefit “party Y.”
• Downgrading #Skype and Silver Lake to ‘Evil’
  Here’s the relevant bit, buried halfway down page 3, at the end of a long clause which seems mainly interested in what happens when there’s an IPO. 

  If, in connection with the termination of a Participant’s Employment, the Ordinary Shares issued to such Participant pursuant to the exercise of the Option or issuable to such Participant pursuant to any portion of the Option that is then vested are to be repurchased, the Participant shall be required to exercise his or her vested Option and any Ordinary Shares issued in connection with such exercise shall be subject to the repurchase and other provisions in the Management Partnership agreement.

  That one sentence, which is borderline unreadable and which makes no sense outside a deep understanding of the Managing Partnership agreement, an entirely separate document, was enough to render Lee’s vested options worthless.

• Oozie Proposal ( #Hadoop #BigData #OpenSource)
  Oozie is an extensible, scalable and reliable system to define, manage, schedule, and execute complex Hadoop workloads via web services. More specifically, this includes: 

  XML-based declarative framework to specify a job or a complex workflow of dependent jobs.
  Support different types of job such as Hadoop Map-Reduce, Pipe, Streaming, Pig, Hive and custom java applications.
  Workflow scheduling based on frequency and/or data availability.
  Monitoring capability, automatic retry and failure handing of jobs.
  Extensible and pluggable architecture to allow arbitrary grid programming paradigms.
  Authentication, authorization, and capacity-aware load throttling to allow multi-tenant software as a service.

• The real (potential) impact of #SAP HANA
  Imagine the satisfaction of your BOBJ user community if all or most of their reports and analysis ran instantaneously.
• #Oracle Records First-Ever $10 Billion Quarter
  Oracle’s application software, middleware, and enterprise database business are pulling out of the recession and gaining strength. Total revenues were $10.8 billion in the quarter, up 13% over the same period a year ago. New software license revenue, while not the biggest component of the total, demonstrated the largest growth, up 19% to $3.7 billion. Oracle’s mainstream revenue is its software update and support, which were up 15% and yielded $4 billion. 

  Operating income was up 32% to $4.4 billion, according to generally accepted accounting principles, thanks in part to the completion of the Sun deal last year, which cost Oracle $100 million in closing costs in its fiscal 2010 fourth quarter. Oracles GAAP operating margin was 40%, while GAAP net income was up 36% to $3.2 billion.

  Earnings per share in the quarter were 62 cents, up 34% compared to the same period the year before.

• Larry Ellison of #Oracle Curbs Deal-Making
  “We are able to grow through acquisitions when they are attractively priced and they make sense, and they are by and large not attractively priced now and don’t make sense, so we’re not doing them. If these assets are wildly overpriced, we can’t make a good business case for buying them. Instead we can focus our energies on organic growth.” 

  To cap off Mr. Ellison’s comment, Oracle’s chief financial officer, Safra Catz, chimed in: “Price has been quite ridiculous.”

  Mr. Ellison and Ms. Catz’s reactions are notable — if not troubling for the market — given Oracle’s track record. The company, which focuses on enterprise software, has been one of the most aggressive buyers in the sector. Since 2005, the company has spent billions, picking up more than 70 companies.

• #Microsoft’s New #Cloud Chief Dismisses Sales Scare Talk
  For that matter, use of online apps wasn’t seriously damaging Microsoft’s ability to sell desktop applications, he said. “If you want a pure model, you can use Office 365. Office Web applications are very good. We’re experimenting with HTML 5,” he noted. “But they’re not as good as client Office. People want Office apps” loaded on their desktop, he noted.
• #Microsoft stands to benefit from #OpenSource Mozilla’s anti-enterprise approach
  Mozilla released version 5 of its Firefox browser this week, three months after it shipped Firefox 4 and it plans to continue this pace. The company is planning updates every six weeks and — more importantly — dropping support for older versions when the new ones come out.
• #OpenSource Mozilla to enterprise customers: “Drop dead”
  At that pace, in June 2014, a mere three years from now, Firefox will be on version 29. 

  If you’d prefer to opt out of that breakneck development cycle, Mozilla has some guidance for you: Fuggedaboutit.

• #OpenSource Firefox Rapid Release Process
  I bet someone is probably going to make a nice business out of creating and maintaining a stable branch…
• Understanding the Corporate Impact
  While the rapid release process sounds great, it’s an absolute fail for large deployments of Firefox.
• Eclipse Foundation`s #OpenSource Indigo Release Empowers #Java Developers
  Indigo release include new functionality for Java developers, innovations in modeling technology, and advancements in Eclipse runtime technology. “Features such as Git support, Maven and Hudson integration, a great GUI builder in WindowBuilder, and our new Jubula testing tool will, I am sure, motivate developers to try Indigo.” 

  For instance, Milinkovich cites Google’s WindowBuilder, an Eclipse-based GUI builder, which is now available as an Eclipse open source project, as a boon for Java developers. “Plus they set a land speed record for getting from project to part of the release train.”

  Other key new features for Java developers cited by Milinkovich include: the EGit 1.0 release, which provides support for Java developers using Git for source code management; automated functional GUI testing for Java and HTML applications is included via Jubula; m2eclipse brings tight integration with Maven and the Eclipse workspace, enabling developers to work with Maven projects directly from Ecl

• Understanding the Corporate Impact ( #OpenSource #FAIL!!!)
  Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours. Until we run out of people who don’t have sysadmins and enterprise deployment teams looking out for them, I can’t imagine why we’d focus at all on the kinds of environments you care so much about…As for John’s concern, “By the time I validate Firefox 5, what guarantee would I have that Firefox 5 won’t go EOL when Firefox 6 is released?” 

  He has the opposite of guarantees that won’t happen. He has my promise that it will happen. Firefox 6 will be the EOL of Firefox 5. And Firefox 7 will be the EOL for Firefox 6.

• We Have a Solution to Your #OpenSource Firefox Deployment Problem ( #Microsoft)
  Internet Explorer team’s commitment to, and support for, our corporate customers. Specifically: 

  Enterprises have always been, and will always be, an important focus of ours.
  For corporate customers, we’ll support each version of Internet Explorer as long as the latest version of Windows that it runs on is supported. For example, Windows 7 Enterprise is supported through January 2020. Internet Explorer 9 will therefore also be supported through January 2020.

  John – I think I speak for everyone on the IE team when I say we’d like the opportunity to win back your business. We’ve got a great solution for corporate customers with both IE8 and IE9 (more info on our IE9 solution can be found here), and believe we could help you address the challenges you’re currently facing.

• #Microsoft exploits uproar over #OpenSource Firefox 4’s retirement to beat IE drum
  “I’m basically saying that I don’t care about making Firefox enterprise-friendly,” Dotzler said.
• The Truth About The Skype Execs Who Got Screwed In The #Microsoft Buyout ( #WTF?!?!!!)
  Skype’s stock options contract says that if you leave your vested options become worthless.
• Skype: See no vesting, hear no vesting
  Don’t bother reading it again for clarity. It is intentionally incomprehensible. It also was not something that applied to stock grants for all Skype employees. A source familiar with the situation says that many former eBay employees who remained with Skype have options that more resemble typical Silicon Valley (i.e., vested=yours). Moreover, the majority of Skype employees are in Europe, where the structure also is different. 

  But for U.S.-based employees who joined after Silver Lake and crew took over, you had to “be in it to win it.” In other words, these particular Skype employees wouldn’t get paid until the private equity firms also got paid. It’s kind of like a stock appreciation agreement in option form.

• A Look At #Salesforce.com’s Future World Headquarters
  Thinking big, the company acquired almost 14 acres of undeveloped land in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood where it plans to build a new headquarters campus totaling almost 2 million square feet of office space.
• Throwing Enterprise Software Vendors Under the Bus
  ERP customers love to bash their on-premise vendor’s software. So why do they keep buying it?
• #Oracle Q4 net income rises 36%
  New software license sales, which are considered a key indicator of growth and customers’ attitude toward IT spending, rose 19% to $3.7 billion. 

  Hardware systems products revenue fell 6% to $1.2 billion.

  For the full year, net income jumped 39% to $8.5 billion on $35.6 billion in revenue, a rise of 33%.

• Getting Smart When You are Lucky
  Rule Three. Don’t rest on your laurels. You are not guaranteed future success just because you are currently the market leader. It is never wise to assume that the past is a predictor of the future. The best companies are always looking ahead. A good technology market is never mature. It is always evolving. If the market you have been selling your products in is stagnant, it is time to change your approach.
• #Oracle’s Ellison: We’re #cloud 2.0, multitenancy religion a crock
  We are offering a much higher degree of security, a much higher degree of isolation, when you run on our public cloud, which looks a lot more like Amazon.com, let’s say, than salesforce.com. 

  We think that modern technology has such a huge security advantage that we’ll — salesforce.com will be facing very, very serious competition for when — as Fusion is rolled out this year. And SAP has no answers at all — they’ve got nothing.

• #Oracle’s fourth quarter strong, hardware sales light
  Database growth was strong and CEO Larry Ellison said Oracle was focused on so-called big data crunching. Database and middleware revenue for the fourth quarter was $5.35 billion, up 17 percent from a year ago.
  Applications revenue was $2.34 billion in the fourth quarter, up 18 percent from a year ago. New software license revenue for applications was up 22 percent from a year ago to $1.04 billion.
  35 percent of revenue was new software licenses with 36 percent of sales deriving from support and maintenance.
  Hardware system revenue was 17 percent of sales. Of that sum, 6 percent of revenue came from support.
  Cloud services revenue was $367 million in the fourth quarter.
  In the fourth quarter, Americas revenue was $5.48 billion followed by Europe, Middle East and Africa at $3.56 billion and Asia Pacific at $1.72 billion.
  Oracle ended its fiscal year with 108,429 employees.
• #Oracle Falls After Reporting Unexpected Drop in Hardware Sales
  Hardware sales declined 6 percent to $1.16 billion, Redwood City, California-based Oracle said in a statement yesterday. The company had forecast in March an increase of 6 percent to 12 percent. Shares fell as much as 7.5 percent in extended trading…Hardware gross margin, a measure of profitability, rose to 56 percent in the fourth quarter from 46 percent last year, a sign Oracle is making headway selling higher-margin machines.
• Multiple antitrust probes of #Google reported
  At least three state attorneys general have started antitrust investigations into Google, a source familiar with the matter said. 

  The source declined to elaborate on the details of the investigations by the attorneys general of California, Ohio and New York, as they were still in the early stages.

• Murphy Not Concerned by Drop in #Oracle Hardware Sales
  [This guy knows what he’s talking about because he wrote code in BASIC and Pascal?!? -DBM]
• #Oracle Posts a Profit, Despite Weak Hardware Sales
  Oracle has cast hardware as an important part of its future and the poor showing raised fears that the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun was failing to live up to its billing. 

  Oracle’s shares fell more than 4 percent in after-hours trading. Investors have long been suspicious about Oracle being able to turn around the Sun server business, which struggled before the acquisition was completed in late January.

• Patent Office ruling reduces #Oracle’s #Java #Android case against #Google
  The USPTO has now completed its reexamination of Patent Number 6192476 and dismissed all but four of Oracle’s claims. In the case of the other two patents so far re-examined all the claims subject to re-examination were rejected but some of the claims asserted by Oracle were not subject to re-examination. The current tally is that 92% of the re-examined claims have been thrown out.
• #Oracle v. #Google – Updating the Reexams – UPDATED
  In the three cases where an office action has issued the stats are 66 claims, 16 claims not subject to reexam, 50 claims subject to reexam, 46 claims rejected, and 20 claims surviving. Consistent with reexamination stats that have been produced in academic studies showing 90+% of claims being rejected on reexam, here it is 92%. If that stat holds for the remaining four patents, Oracle will only have about 48 claims out of 168 that survive, and not all of those will be independent claims [NB: A dependent claim that survives is not worth much if its associated independent claim does not survive. The real value in these patents is in their independent claims.]
• Enterprise #Java upgrade geared to PaaS clouds
  Java EE 7 will provide multi-tenancy support as well as the runtime environment for running a Java application in the cloud
• #Oracle’s CEO Discusses Q4 2011 Results – Earnings Call Transcript
  Fusion is being completely rolled out for accounting, for human resources, for sales force automation. It’s something we’ve been working on for 6 years. We’re the only application vendor now that offers the same exact technology as a service, a Software-as-a-Service on our cloud or you can buy the software and put it on your private cloud. And by the way, if you put it on your private cloud, we’ll run it for you, if you want us to, behind your firewall attached to your local area network with all the security inherent in that. We are — our whole approach to kind of, if you will, cloud 2.0 as people say, we’re not building multi-tenancy software. Remember that when I started my little company NetSuite and 6 months later, when Mark Benioff started his company, Salesforce.com, that was over a decade ago when virtualization wasn’t so common for isolating different customers running on the same machine. So cloud 2.0, we used virtualized elastic cloud technology, very different than, let’s
• Abbasi Says #Informatica Positioned for Sustained Growth
  [Video]
• #Informatica Executives Win Stevie Awards In 11th Annual American Business Awards
  Chris Boorman, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of Education and Enablement won the Stevie Award for Marketing Executive of the Year. Mr. Boorman has instituted pioneering programs that have more closely bound Informatica Marketing to Sales, the Informatica website to CRM and Informatica to its customers via online communities and social media marketing. — Stephanie Wakefield, vice president, Investor Relations won the Stevie Award for Communications, Investor Relations or PR Executive of the Year. Ms. Wakefield has helped translate Informatica’s corporate performance into a premium valuation and has been a key driver in Informatica maintaining its high corporate governance ratings as well as retaining and motivating its professional workforce. — Additionally, Tony Young, chief information officer, was recognized as a Finalist in the category of Information Technology Executive of the Year. Mr. Young runs a global IT organization that has equipped Informatica with nu
• #Oracle and #SAP tormentor #RiminiStreet arrives in UK channel ( #3PM)
  Rimini has unveiled its first 11 European partners, including UK outfits Teme and Green Triangle. Partner margins will differ depending on their role, which could vary from acting as a referral agent all the way up to providing local language and first-line support.
• TopWorkplaces – Profile for #SuccessFactors, Inc.
  I love my job because…
  I love selling our solutions and I like the way the company is run.
• TopWorkplaces – Profile for #Sybase, Inc., an #SAP Company
  I love my job because…
  The people are great to work with. My job keeps me busy through out the day. The environment here at Sybase is very positive.
• TopWorkplaces – Profile for #SAP Labs LLC
  I love my job because…
  SAP is a healthy environment to work in that promotes creativity, hard work and problem solving.
• A Review of #Microsoft’s New Mango Phone
  Microsoft has a viable smartphone contender. The bad news is it won’t be available until this fall.
• #Ariba Chairman and CEO Named Among 100 Most Influential People in Finance
  Mr. Calderoni was listed among the “Technocrats” who have driven a revival of business activity through their vision and leadership. Mr. Calderoni was specifically cited for helping Ariba to prosper by moving the company’s collaborative business commerce solutions to the Cloud, growing the number of companies connected to the Ariba Network, and expanding Ariba’s customer base.
• #Ariba 2020 Vision – will procurement survive?
  End users will execute their own bids. Procurement’s role will be to set the automation engines up, then monitor and manage to make sure they continue to run…The spend management function will be very small by 2020
• Spend Management, Invoice Management, Payment Management, and Contract Management Software – #Ariba, Inc.
  Welcome to the Future of Procurement
  Imagine it’s the year 2020. Procurement has evolved so much over the past decade, you barely recognize it. Its functions have been decentralized – or outsourced! – leaving leadership to focus on very different things. Job descriptions have changed dramatically. What’s more, suppliers seem to have infiltrated the organization!
• #SAP HANA Now Generally Available to Customers Worldwide
  First conceived last spring, SAP HANA was delivered to select customers in November 2010 and today is made generally available as promised. SAP HANA has one of the fastest growing sales pipelines for new products in SAP’s history. 

  SAP HANA introduces a new paradigm of real real-time computing, allowing companies to re-think their existing business challenges and tackle entirely new ones. With SAP HANA, customers can approach their business needs in profoundly different ways by using breakthrough analytics, unprecedented new applications and renewed existing SAP solutions.

• #SAP’s McDermott Interview – Video
  Bill McDermott, co-chief executive officer at SAP AG, talks the importance of innovation to the economic recovery. McDermott speaks with Carol Massar and Matt Miller on Bloomberg Television’s “Street Smart”
• The Vertica story (with soundbites!) ( #HP #BigData)
  Vertica says it has a “staggering” pipeline now that it’s been with HP for a few months. I also gather that the post-merger HP/Vertica appliance product line formally rolled out last week.
• Ask HANA Questions, Get Answers – Three SAP Mentors Talk to the #SAP HANA Team
  During this 40 minute podcast, you’ll hear SAP Mentors John Appleby and Ethan Jewett pressing SAP on some of the key HANA questions they have been hearing from SAP customers. I jump in once or twice with thoughts of my own – otherwise, after my intro, this is a free-flowing discussion with SAP’s Jake Klein and Thomas Zurek providing in-depth answers and a good deal of useful context to the HANA discussion. Topics such as the future of BW and data warehousing at SAP, the need for HANA benchmarking, and the reality of current HANA use cases are covered at length. Klein and Zurek acknowledge that HANA is still in a relatively early phase and explain what they are doing to bring SAP customers from Proof of Concept (POC) to Go-Live. 

  With the HANA General Availability announced on June 20, this is a timely podcast. We didn’t get all our HANA questions answered – time ran out on the taping first – but listen in to find out what we did learn.

• JSON Activity Streams Spec Hits Version 1.0
  Activity Streams provides a common protocol for creating and parsing activity streams. The ATOM version was already at 1.0.
• Activity Streams Working Group: JSON Activity Streams 1.0
  In its simplest form, an activity consists of an actor, a verb, an an object, and a target. It tells the story of a person performing an action on or with an object — “Geraldine posted a photo to her album” or “John shared a video”. In most cases these components will be explicit, but they may also be implied. 

  It is a goal of this specification to provide sufficient metadata about an activity such that a consumer of the data can present it to a user in a rich human-friendly format. This may include constructing readable sentences about the activity that occurred, visual representations of the activity, or combining similar activities for display.

• The Woe of Idaho: How Ignoring End-Users Derailed an ERP Implementation ( #ITfail)
  … not enough planning or communication, lack of end-user input, design defects, provider enrollment issues and so forth. But what really stands out is the almost total absence of end-user testing.
• ICANN opens floodgates on Internet-address suffixes
  Websites will soon be able to end with anything from “.shop” to “.canon” after the group that manages Internet addresses approved what it called a historic change in a statement on its website Monday. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which until now allowed 22 suffixes including “.com” and “.org,” will accept requests for almost any word in any language from Jan. 12 to April 12.
• #Intel code guru: Many-core world requires radical rethink
  “‘What if we optimize for data movement, to reduce it, and the heck with the fact that that’ll cause us to do extra computation’,” they proposed. “And they’ve gotten some fantastic speed-ups,” Reinders reports. “And everybody looks at this and thinks, ‘Why didn’t we think of that?’.”
• #Intel Discusses The Future Of Many Integrated Core (MIC) Products
  Knight’s Corner (and future MIC products in general) utilize a CPU based on Intel’s original Pentium architecture (P54C). Modifications include complete cache coherency, x86-64 compatibility, and 512-bit vector support capable of performing 16 single-precision floating point operations simultaneously. 

  One advantage Intel is talking up in a big way is the fact that existing x86 applications will be relatively easy to port to MIC processors. The exact amount of necessary modification will depend on what the program does and how easy it is to parallelize the workload across the 50 chips Knight’s Corner will offer. The company claims that “With greater reuse of parallel processor code, software companies and IT departments benefit from creating and maintaining a single code base binary and not having to retrain developers on proprietary programming models associated with accelerators.”

• OEMs show systems with #Intel MIC chips
  Intel claims it will have an advantage in this space because its MIC chips will use x86 cores. Users will be able to program them more easily than competing GPUs because they will use existing x86 server programming tools, Intel claims.
• Hyper-V 3.0 Confirmed for #Microsoft Windows 8 Client
  I’m able to confirm over a dozen new features for Hyper-V 3.0 They are: 

  Storage
  Virtual Fibre Channel Adapter
  Storage Resource Pools
  New .VHDX virtual hard drive format (Up to 16TB + power failure resiliency)
  Memory/Processor Enhancements
  Support for more than 4 cores! (My machine has 12 cores)
  NUMA – Memory per Node, Cores per Node, Nodes per Processor Socket
  Networking Enhancements
  Hardware Acceleration (Virtual Machine Queue & IPsec Offload)
  Bandwidth Management
  DHCP Guard
  Router Guard
  Monitor Port
  Virtual Switch Extensions
  Network Resource Pools

  This is a huge step forward for Windows 8. I believe it will have a huge impact on a wide array of usage scenarios, the least of which is the potential for self-contained App-V / Windows XP Mode support. Not to mention better Windows Phone 7/7.5/8 Emulator support. But more on that in my next post. In the meantime, I’ll be switching

• New #Microsoft Windows 8 build reveals virtual keyboard, SMS
  Also new to Windows 8, at least as found in the latest build, is some type of per-feature licensing, uncovered by a “Windows enthusiast” on Twitter who examined the code for the latest build, according to tech site Redmond Pie. Though the code didn’t reveal the use for this feature, Redmond Pie speculates that this could let Microsoft offer all users a “barebones” version of Windows and then prompt them to purchase new features as needed.
• #HP upgrades #Vertica analytics platform to keep up with #EMC, #IBM and #Oracle
  Vertica 5.0 is the first upgrade since HP bought the firm in February and has been designed to allow much faster scaling up and down of computing power, using a mix of cloud, virtual and physical resources. Advanced native SQL analytic functions have been added and the platform is now capable analyzing more than a petabyte of data from customers.
• #SAP Labs in Palo Alto Earns Top Workplace Distinction
  The award is based on the results of a survey conducted among employees and designed to measure satisfaction with different aspects of working at SAP. Respondents answered questions across several categories, including pay and benefits, direction, management, career mobility, workplace conditions and execution. The company received especially high marks for compensation and workplace conditions. SAP was also recognized for its commitment to local activities that benefit the community, such as volunteer days.
• #SuccessFactors Named One of the Top Workplaces in 2011 by Bay Area News Group
  “At SuccessFactors we value our people and culture above all else and we believe this comes through in every aspect of our products and how we focus on the success of our customers. People are our competitive advantage and our most precious asset. We want to make every employee in our company, and every company, successful by providing the tools to enhance their professional skill set, advance their career goals and connect with their company and its mission. We truly believe it’s time to love work again and that starts with creating a great work atmosphere that engages and delights the people who live in it each and everyday.”
• Can #Google App Engine compete in the enterprise?
  Time and time again, Google demonstrates that it clearly doesn’t understand the enterprise.
• Rethrick Construction ( #Google)
  Protocol Buffers, BigTable and MapReduce are ancient, creaking dinosaurs compared to MessagePack, JSON, and Hadoop. And new projects like GWT, Closure and MegaStore are sluggish, overengineered Leviathans compared to fast, elegant tools like jQuery and mongoDB. Designed by engineers in a vacuum, rather than by developers who have need of tools.
• The impact of #Google’s aging software infrastructure on App Engine
  Part of this gap between Google and outside technologies is driven by the fact that offering a cloud platform as a service is not core to Google’s business…
  In the case of Google App Engine, a key question to ask is how your enterprise needs will be prioritized against the needs of internal Google developers…With both user groups vying for the next feature on their wish-list to be completed, will Google address the needs of its internal developers or third party enterprise? Keep in mind that revenue from projects that internal developers are working on will far outweigh revenue from third party enterprises through Google App Engine for the foreseeable future.
• Are #Java and .Net becoming legacy platforms?
  For enterprise developers, the unthinkable has happened: They’re working with platforms whose futures seem uncertain. How long will they sit still for it?
• #OpenSource Analytics Options Grow
  A technology called DomainExpert reduces query times, optimizing performance by “adding intelligence about a particular data domain — such as web, financial services or telecom,” according to Infobright. 

  Another new feature, called Rough Query, allows users to dig through especially large data sets faster. “Rather than execute a long-running query to find a specific answer, Rough Query enables a user to narrow down the results in an iterative manner, with sub-second response time, before the full query is run,” the company said.

  Other new capabilities in Infobright 4.0 include a connector to the Hadoop framework for large-scale data processing and a system for loading big data sets rapidly. The latter feature can load data at up to 2TB per hour, according to Infobright.

• HeidiSQL – Free #OpenSource Front-End For #MySQL & MSSQL
  HeidiSQL can connect to multiple databases and besides creating/editing databases, tables, views, stored routines and triggers, it has support for scheduling events (great for regular jobs like backups).
• Forrester Research Reveals #Microsoft Windows XP Still Dominates Business PCs
  According to the report from Forrester, Windows 7 is powering 20.9 % of corporate PCs around the world. While on the other hand Windows XP still continues to dominate this field by powering 60% of all business PCs.
• #HP – #Oracle: It’s war for sure, Miss Scarlett
  According to HP’s complaint, Oracle is telling customers that it won’t fix the bugs, and that the only solution is to upgrade to upcoming new editions of the software or change to current versions that contain the bug fix. Neither option includes software that will run on HP’s Itanium based systems.
  [Isn’t that Oracle’s standard policy for deprecated platforms, like Itanium? -DBM]
• #Salesforce.com’s Chief Scientist on Why Gamification is the Future of Work
  While badges and leaderboards can be effective tools in the modern workplace, Rangaswami warned against “putting the lipstick of gamification on the pig of work.” That is, if the work is not inherently rewarding, you’re not going to be able to fix that by adding a layer of game mechanics on top of it.
• YouTube – Ray Wang – Why Enterprise Software sucks & how disruptive technologies converge to change this
  
• #HP knew All About Itanium End-of-Life Plans Before #Oracle Found Out
  What we know for certain is that Ray Lane and HP’s current board members and Leo Apotheker and HP’s current management team now know full well that Intel has plans in place to end-of-life of the Itanium microprocessor. Knowing this, HP issued numerous public statements in an attempt to mislead and deceive their customers and shareholders into believing that these plans to end-of-life Itanium do not exist. But they do. Intel’s plans to end-of-life Itanium will be revealed in court now that HP has filed this utterly malicious and meritless lawsuit against Oracle.
• #ERP Vendor Rankings: Despite #Cloud Hype, Same Old Story ( #SAP #Oracle #Sage #Infor #Microsoft #Lawson)
  SAP out in front (with more than $16 billion in annual revenues) and Oracle following behind (with approximately $8 billion in ERP revenues).
  SAP: $16538
  Oracle: $7739
  Sage: $2236
  Infor: $1800
  Microsoft: $1300
  Lawson: $745
  Totvs: $664
  Intuit: $611
  Unit4: $611
  Epicor: $414
  IFS: $375
  Exact: $303
  QAD: $220
  Kingdee: $212
  NetSuite: $194
• For #IBM #Cognos, it’s business as usual
  Since Governor Deval Patrick took office in January 2007, state agencies have spent $2.4 million on 13 contracts with Cognos, a Canadian software company whose American headquarters are in Burlington, according to figures provided by the state. 

  The money spent on those contracts represents a fraction of the two software deals, totaling $17.5 million, that are at the center of the case against DiMasi. Prosecutors allege that DiMasi used his influence as speaker in 2006 and 2007 to steer the contracts to Cognos in exchange for cash to fund his lavish lifestyle. Joseph Lally, a former salesman for Cognos, pleaded guilty to giving kickbacks to DiMasi, who has pleaded not guilty to the allegations.

• Steven John on Vendor-Managed Updates ( #Workday #Cloud)
  always on the current release of the software and the latest technology, helping to create and maintain your competitive advantage.
• The IT roles needed for the IT organization of the future
  “It’s a very broad definition of consulting. It’s providing direction, it is providing oversight, it’s providing value,” said Marc Cecere, a principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc.
• 2. #Oracle vs. #HP
  Oracle called the lawsuit “utterly malicious and meritless.”
• S.F. Bay a danger zone for America’s Cup yachts
  These boats are very physical, and everybody involved on the ride is going to get a full whipping.
• #SAP’s McDermott describe company’s business strategy
  “None of us is as smart as all of us and that’s the open ecosystem approach that we have chosen to take,” McDermott said. “So whether it’s a Lockheed Martin or an IBM or many of the other well-known integrators in this town, we’ll partner with anybody if we can make a difference in a mission or an initiative to return value to the U.S. taxpayer.”
• #IBM Readies Data Visualization Play
  IBM Cognos looks poised to disrupt what has largely been a niche market. The company will support visual analysis in both stand-alone deployments and as an extension of the Cognos 10 platform. In-memory database Cognos TM1 will power the new visualization tool. I can’t get into product names, release dates, or pricing due to nondisclosure agreements.
• #Microsoft Refreshes C++ For The #Cloud, Tablets
  Visual Studio 2012, will offer tools that coders can use to write programs that work with a new extension to the C++ language. The extension, C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP), is designed to simplify the process of writing programs for heterogeneous, parallel architectures.
• #Microsoft C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism
  C++ AMP 

  lowers the barrier to entry for heterogeneous hardware programmability and brings performance to the mainstream, without sacrificing developer productivity or solution portability.
  is designed not only to help you address today’s massively parallel hardware (i.e. GPUs and APUs), but it also future proofs your code investments with a forward looking design.
  is part of Visual C++. You don’t need to use a different compiler or learn different syntax.
  is modern C++. Not C or some other derivative.
  is integrated and supported fully in Visual Studio vNext. Editing, building, debugging, profiling and all the other goodness of Visual Studio work well with C++ AMP.
  provides an STL-like library as part of the existing concurrency namespace and delivered in the new amp.h header file.
  makes it extremely easy to work with large multi-dimensional data on heterogeneous hardware; in a manner that exposes parallelization.
  introduces only one core C++ language ex

• #Microsoft C++ AMP keynote is online
  The main reasons we decided to build a new model is that we believe there needs to be a single model that has all of the following attributes: 

  C++, not C: It should leverage C++’s power for strong abstraction without sacrificing performance, not just be a dialect of C.
  Mainstream: It should be programmable by millions of developers, not just by a priesthood. Litmus test: Is the Hello World parallel GPU program a page and half, or a couple of lines?
  Minimal: It adds just one general-purpose language extension that addresses not only the immediate problem (dealing with cores that can’t support full C++) but many others. With the right general-purpose extension, the rest can be done as just a library.
  Portable: It allows shipping a single EXE that can use any combination of GPU vendors’ hardware. The initial implementation uses DirectCompute and supports all devices that are DX11 capable; DirectCompute is just an implementation detail of the first release, and the model c

• Heterogeneous Computing and #Microsoft C++ AMP
  Herb Sutter introduces the AMD Fusion Developer Summit 11 crowd (and the world!) to Microsoft’s view on heterogeneous computing in the concurrency age and introduces one of Microsoft’s upcoming technologies for democratizing GPGPU/APU/Multi-Core/Many-Core programming for native developers: C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism or C++ AMP. Look for C++ AMP and associated tooling in the next version of Visual C++.
• #HP vs. #Oracle – From ugly to uglier as HP takes to the Courts
  HP also seeks: 

  Injunctive relief, including an order prohibiting Oracle from making false and misleading statements regarding the Itanium microprocessor or HP’s Itanium-based servers and remedying the harm caused by Oracle’s conduct.

  Damages and fees and other standard remedies available in cases of this nature.

• Exclusive: #Sage rumoured to be in acquisition talks with #IBM and #SAP
  “We are in a period of reflection at Sage,” he said. “The company is looking to double our customer base in five years, which is quite a challenging path.” 

  “The structure of the organisation holds us back, and we would certainly benefit from more collateral and capital expenditure”.

  The source believes that being acquired by SAP or IBM would help to streamline internal processes and potentially fund a restructure.

• #Salesforce.com’s Benioff Pushes ‘social Enterprises’
  “Salesforce.com was born cloud, but we were reborn social.”
• #Infor Reports 28 Percent Organic License Growth in Fourth Quarter
  Total revenue of $509.8 million for Q4 2011 was 12 percent above Q4 2010 total revenue of $453.7 million. This is the second consecutive quarter of double-digit license growth for Infor and represents continued market share gains in the enterprise applications market.
• Why is #Salesforce.com So Worried about #Microsoft? – Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog
  At Microsoft, we think about this business differently. We give you flexible contract terms, a broad technology solution for the public and private cloud, and a great experience for your end users … all at a much more affordable price.
• Ex-Massachusetts House Speaker Convicted in #IBM #Cognos Bribery Case
  After an six-week trial in federal court, the former Massachusetts Speaker of the House Salvatore F. DiMasi, once one of the state’s most powerful politicians, was convicted Wednesday of trading $17.5 million worth of state contracts for kickbacks from Cognos, the Canadian BI shop that now belongs to IBM. 

  IBM and Cognos were never involved. Between 2005 and 2007, the $65,000 in bribes was secretly funneled to DiMasi by one of Cognos’ local sales VPs Joseph Lally. He turned state’s evidence in return for a lighter sentence.

  After the Boston Globe exposed the conspiracy and forced DiMasi to resign in 2009, IBM returned $13 million of the contract money. It was found that one of the two contracts had skirted bidding rules.

• #HP Girds for Battle: The Executive Shuffle
  Bill Veghte will now report to the office of the CEO. Bill, who was one of the most well-regarded Microsoft executives, is missioned with building HP’s software unit and to reverse Mark Hurd’s starvation of software. In order to better position against both Oracle and IBM, HP needs massive additional strength here and this unit moves from non-strategic under Hurd to most strategic under Apotheker and thus now reports into the chief executive’s office.
• America’s Cup Field Of Competitors Announced
  Representatives of teams from China, Italy, New Zealand, South Korea, Sweden and France, which has two teams, joined the U.S. team, Oracle Racing, at a news conference at the Ferry Building this morning. A ninth team that will contend will be announced next week in Europe.
• #Google pans #Oracle damages argument: #Java was fragmented well before #Android
  Google, however, said that the lawsuit should revolve around the Android software, which happens to be free.
• #Google Inc.’s Brief in Support of Daubert Motion ( #Oracle #Java #Android)
  Google’s advertising business is not the accused product. The accused product is the Android platform software, which Google does not sell and from which it earns no direct revenue. The value of the Android software and of Google’s ads are entirely separate: the software provides for certain phone functionality, whether or not the user is viewing ads, and Google’s ads are viewable on any software and are not uniquely enabled by Android
• Company shares its #SAP support staff with others to cut IT costs
  “Part of it is the economy, and part of it is a good idea of leveraging resources,” O’Dell said.
• For a pioneer of technology, 100 years of “Think” ( #IBM)
  IBM dates to June 16, 1911, when three companies that made scales, punch-clocks for work and other machines merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Co. The modern-day name followed in 1924.
• As Fed CIO Kundra Departs, Will Progress Stall?
  Kundra will resign in August for a fellowship at Harvard University, where he will study the implications of digital media and technology for governance, and work with Harvard on research in the areas of cloud computing, open data, and open government. In a statement, Obama administration budget director Jack Lew said that the administration would continue down the path of IT reform that Kundra has helped clear.
• Obama’s CIO quits
  While there was progress, “I don’t think anyone can declare success on any one of those right now,” he said.
• #Oracle, #Cisco May Benefit As Smart-Grid Costs Soar
  The risk of cyberattacks is higher, as is the need for reliability. An increasingly digital society boosts demand. So does the proliferation of solar and wind systems feeding their intermittent power, which needs to be managed, into the grid.
• #Oracle Racing unleash, and capsize, catamaran in San Francisco
  “Everyone’s wearing helmets for a reason, there’s a significant amount of risk,” said Spithill. 

  “They’re the fastest boats out there at the moment, and to get the most out of them you have to push.”

• YouTube – High Five!
  Going extreme with the AC45 in San Francisco Bay!
• #HP, #Microsoft take joint aim at #Oracle
  But if you are at HP’s big user conference this week and interested in talking to Oracle, you won’t find the company listed as an exhibitor on the expo floor. 

  But a couple of HP attendees did report seeing a truck with Oracle advertising on it outside the conference. And Oracle is nonetheless on the agenda at the conference. On Wednesday, one conference session was titled “Oracle database migrations to Microsoft SQL Server with HP services.”

• #Oracle Exadata Gains Certification for #SAP Applications
  The SAP certification was valid as of Friday and applies to products that are based on NetWeaver 7.x and certified for Oracle database 11g Release 2, according to SAP’s website.
• #Oracle Exadata for #SAP Customers Now Available
  Because all database machines
  are the same, their characteristics and operations are
  well known and understood by Oracle field engineers
  and support. Individual customers will not need to
  diagnose and resolve unique issues that only occur on
  their configuration. Performance tuning and stress
  testing performed at Oracle on an exact replica of the
  customer’s configuration ensure better performance
  and higher quality.
  The powerful servers within the Exadata Database
  Machine (up to 64 cores and 2 TB RAM) allow
  customers to move multiple small databases to a
  single server for enhanced management and resource
  sharing. This can even be supported by a new feature
  called Oracle instance caging which can dedicate
  processors to specific instances (a solution that prevents
  one instance from “hogging” the processors).
  – Large databases can be spread over several RAC
  nodes.
  – Exadata is suitable for any kind of load, OLTP,
  OLAP or a combination of both.
• Vendors Converge On Packaged #Cloud
  #HP and #Oracle extend their converged infrastructure products but smaller packages are also appearing 

  Top-tier data centre systems makers continue to roll out prepackaged hardware-and-software offerings as they look to grow their capabilities in the increasingly competitive converged infrastructure space.

• #Oracle lawsuit highlights #cloud security and liability concerns
  One of the New Jersey college’s claims is that Oracle hedged on providing a hosted data center environment in which Montclair could convert its financial data to ready it for PeopleSoft applications. According to Montclair, Oracle wanted the university to sign an amendment that would excuse Oracle from legal liability if Oracle wasn’t able to keep Montclair’s financial data confidential. 

  “Oracle’s proposed amendment was inconsistent with Oracle’s obligation to maintain the University’s data confidential under the terms of the parties’ existing agreement …” the lawsuit reads. As a result, the university bought more server hardware to do the data conversion in-house, a measure that cost it time and money.

• YouTube – Raw Video: America’s Cup Catamaran Capsizes
  Four-time America’s Cup champion Russell Coutts, the CEO of Oracle Racing, capsized his 45-foot catamaran on the San Francisco Bay during a practice race. (June. 14)
• Gates Foundation forms alliance against smoking in China
  Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and chairman of Microsoft, and Robin Li, chairman and chief executive officer of Baidu Inc., formed a strategic alliance on June 11 in Beijing to promote healthy lifestyles and create a smoke-free environment both in China and around the world.
• Gates outs Facebook founder’s engagement
  “His fiancée, Priscilla, thought about education, and he gave money to Newark,” the loose-lipped Gates said. 

  Facebook officials declined to comment yesterday.

• #Oracle gains while chip sell-off weighs techs Tech Stocks
  Analysts from Citigroup and Lazard Capital Markets issued reports before the opening bell, predicting strong results for Oracle when the company posts results for its fiscal fourth quarter on June 23. Joel Fishbein of Lazard said channel checks have indicated a strong period for the company “including database, Exadata, and applications.” 

  Walter Pritchard of Citi said his research indicates that the Exadata and business intelligence businesses “continue to drive growth at Oracle,” with Exadata in particular seeing strong growth.

  “Recent data points suggesting a slowdown in hardware are dated, limited in geography, and ignore the broader SPARC picture that includes share gains for Fujitsu, Oracle’s hardware partner,” Pritchard wrote.

• #Oracle: Citi, Lazard See Hardware Biz Under-Appreciated
  Citigroup’s Walter Pritchard this morning writes that the company’s “Exadata” dedicated hardware for massive database sifting is “seeing tremendous growth, with a very large deal in the tens of boxes signed last quarter,” and that some market data that may have suggested a slowdown in Oracle’s hardware business is not accurate and is “dated.”
  …
  Exalogic v1, which was shipped in December, should not have much of an impact this fiscal year, as the Oracle sales force is busy selling Exadata. Oracle has made great strides in transitioning to a direct hardware sales model and hardware sales should continue to stabilize as reseller agreements are almost undone by now. We believe that the large market opportunity for Exadata leaves plenty of opportunity for Oracle, despite potential disruption from emerging technologies such as that of Fusion-IO (FIO). Our Exadata market opportunity analysis only accounts for 15% penetration, which we believe is realistic in the short term.
• #SAP on #Oracle Database
  Oracle Exadata Now Certified by SAP New! 

  All SAP products based on SAP NetWeaver 7.x that are also certified for Oracle Database 11g Release 2 can now be used with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. For more information, see SAP Note 1590515 and the Oracle white paper.
  10 Jun 2011
  Oracle Linux 5 Certified by SAP New!

  Unicode versions of SAP products based on SAP NetWeaver 7.0x are now certified for Oracle Linux 5 (as of Update 5) on x86_64 platforms using Oracle Database 11g Release 2.
  For more information, see SAP Notes 1565179 and 1567511.
  04 Apr 2011
  ASM and ACFS Now Certified for SAP

  As of Oracle Grid 11.2.0.2 and Oracle RDBMS 11.2.0.2, both Automatic Storage Management (ASM)
  and Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System (ACFS) are now certified for SAP kernels 6.40_EX2 and higher on all
  UNIX and Linux platforms.
  This certification applies both to Oracle Single Instance and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).

• America’s Cup sailing goes extreme
  “The crunch and crash and excitement — sailing has never had that,” said Dave Santori, rear commodore of the Golden Gate Yacht Club, Ellison’s home club. “It was big amounts of boredom to panic. Now, from the time the race starts to the end, it’s all going to be excitement.”
• #HP reshuffles executives, prompts departures
  Hewlett-Packard today made some seismic level changes to its top management that included the exit of its CIO, Randy Mott, who is leaving “effective immediately.” 

  Another major change was the exit of Ann Livermore, an HP employee since 1982, as head of HP’s Enterprise Business. But Livermore, who has been on the short-list of potential CEOs of the company, will continue to work for HP as a member of its board, the company said.

  The organization changes also point to the people who will form the core of CEO Leo Apotheker’s leadership team at HP.

  Dave Donatelli, executive vice president of enterprise servers, storage, networking and technology services, and Bill Veghte, executive vice president, software, who both reported to Livermore, will now report directly to Apotheker, HP said. Jan Zadak, executive vice president of global sales, will also report directly to the CEO.

• #HP Announces Organizational Changes
  New structure aligns HP to better capitalize on strategic market opportunities
  Livermore joins board of directors
  Donatelli, Veghte, Zadak to report directly to HP CEO Apotheker
• Gartner Search Analytics Shows Spike in Platform as a Service ( #PaaS) Inquiries in 2011
  #Cloud Middleware Services including Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are still unknown to many Gartner IT user clients…
  When Gartner IT users search for PaaS on the website and throughout online research, the four most common secondary terms are IaaS and SaaS (7.05%), Magic Quadrant (6.12%) and cloud (5.72%)…
  The top three vendors that Gartner IT users search for are Microsoft (18%), Amazon (13%) and Tata (11%).
• Google Trends: iaas
  [Trending up sharply from tiny base -DBM]
• Google Trends: saas
  [Flat trend – but plenty of industry coverage and a nice-sized base -DBM]
• Google Trends: #cloud
  [Trending up strongly -DBM]
• #SAP Ranked Leader in Business Intelligence Tools Market, Outpaces Market Growth for Financial Performance and Strategy Management Applications ( #BI)
  The two IDC analyses – “Worldwide Business Intelligence Tools 2010 Vendor Shares”1 and “Worldwide Financial Performance and Strategy Management Applications 2010 Vendor Shares”2 – found that SAP leads the worldwide BI market with revenues of $1,866.4 million and a 21 percent market share, while revenue for FPSM was $629 million constituting a 24.9 percent market share. From 2009 to 2010 SAP outperformed the worldwide market growth in each category: for BI tools SAP grew by 19.9 percent compared to the total market growth of 11.4 percent, and for FPSM applications it grew by 17.5 percent compared to the total market growth of 9.2 percent.
• Converting my lessons learned from #SAP Sapphire into compelling future architectures
  Focus on customer-facing micro-applications – preferably mobile – that use data from OnPremise environments (either via Gateway or HANA in the Cloud) that are hosted on the OnDemand Edge PaaS environment.
• #ERP: Long, difficult, expensive. Is cloud ERP’s next big thing? ( #NetSuite)
  “I do think we are hitting a tipping point for complex businesses turning to the cloud,” he said, claiming that companies’ experience of using software as a service in non-mission-critical areas like salesforce automation and HR had “led them to believe this is a better way of running their business”.
• HRM Software/Services Q1 Vendor Briefings — It’s A Wrap!
  If it s not true SaaS, if you don’t have something hot under the covers, and if you don’t have a huge installed base a la SAP/Oracle/PeopleSoft, then the influencers, including the traditional analyst firms but excepting the pay-for-play false analysts, aren’t going to be very interested or supportive.
• #Workday Blog: Five Reasons Why #SaaS Updates Are Better Than #ERP Software Upgrades
  The widely known (among IT shops) but not widely reported story of on-premise ERP software is that major upgrades resemble re-implementations in terms of their cost and complexity. After trying to address the issue with technology and tools, ERP software vendors have resorted to lengthening release support windows and doing less frequent major releases. Customers have resorted to negotiating for even longer support windows and skipping major releases.
• #Oracle Exadata notes
  A couple of existing Oracle users — one rather well-known — recently told me that Oracle won’t let them text Exadata except on Oracle premises. In one case, this is a deal-breaker keeping Exadata from being considered for a purchase, and Oracle still won’t budge.
• Why #HP webOS is a Challenge to iOS and Android in the Business World
  Other factors in play that help tip things in HP’s favor: 

  An open app environment. Enyo is a framework for webOS 3.0. It allows the developer to take code and condense it. The framework still executes and does so more efficiently. It’s easier for developers.
  Developers can create cross-platform apps. Enyo is again the magic sauce. It allows for the app to work across different screen resolutions, laptop, smartphone or tablet.
  webOS runs Citrix Receiver, allowing for a secure, virtualized mobile desktop.
  webOS will be added to all HP, PCs, laptops and printers.
  Enyo can be used in WebKit.
  An independent software vendor network that includes SAP and Microsoft.
  webOs has a connected component. You can touch a Palm Pre smartphone to the Touhpad or vice versa. That’s a compelling seamless capability.

• #Microsoft loses Word #patent appeal
  The Supreme Court upheld a patent infringement verdict that will cost Microsoft Corp. $300 million and already has forced changes in its Word software.
• #Oracle whips out private #cloud with blades
  Oracle did not provide specific configuration and pricing information for its Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, but it did give out this pretty picture in a “solution brief” (PDF):
• ACCELERATING #Oracle ENTERPRISE #CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE DEPLOYMENTS
  The largest cost drivers in a typical virtualized x86 infrastructure from HP are often software
  licensing and support costs for RHEL and vSphere. On a ten-blade configuration with
  networking, these two costs can represent as much as 37% of the three-year total cost of
  ownership. Hardware acquisition costs are only 35%, while facilities, deployment, and system
  maintenance costs are just 9%. Oracle’s system-based Premier Support plan dramatically
  reduces the cost with fully integrated, single-price support for system hardware, firmware,
  operating system, and virtualization software, with no additional costs for software licenses
  and support. Oracle Support includes on-site support with a two-hour response time and a
  unified, custom support platform with single point of accountability across the Oracle stack.
• Severn Trent denies #SAP system caused water shortage ( #ITfail)
  Trade union GMB said that the introduction of a £70 million SAP system in June 2010 “had led to complete confusion in the scheduling of repair work and dealing with leaks” which led to “massive losses of water from the reservoirs.” 

  It warned that certain areas in the Midlands, including Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire, could face a hosepipe ban in two weeks’ time.

  Gary Smith, GMB national secretary, said “Introducing the SAP system has led to water draining out of the reservoirs as the delay in fixing the leaks stretched out to 30 days compared with the target of three days. The management will blame the weather and will seek to divert attention from their own mismanagement that will lead to a hosepipe ban in two weeks unless we get heavy rain.”

• #HP Demands #Oracle Reverse Course on Itanium Support
  HP demands that Oracle honor confidential contractual obligations made between them, and return to developing software that works with Intel’s server chip, and for which HP is essentially the only significant vendor.
• #HP Threatens Legal Action Against #Oracle On Itanium
  It was intended to put Oracle on notice that HP has legal rights that it expects to be honored.
• Spanish #ERP company flexes #OpenSource muscle
  How do you compete with giants like Oracle and SAP? What are the biggest challenges?
  Juvara: We provide better software to begin with. For our customers, it’s lower risk and cost, and they can evaluate it first. Our software is more productive. It’s easier to adapt to customer business requirements and grow with the customer. It doesn’t lock you into a single best practice solution that might or might not be suitable for you. So on the product side, we believe we have competitive advantages. 

  The big challenges in our industry are marketing and sales. We get a huge amount of traffic and attention because we are open source. But it’s very difficult to get people to engage with us on a commercial basis. We attract a huge amount of people interested in free software at zero cost, but those are not necessarily our ideal users to begin with. Organizations looking for free software at zero cost are in many cases sole proprietorships with just the owner as the employee who is looking for a wa

• A Look at #HP’s Discover Conference: The Future Gets Closer
  HP showed off its growing analytics chops in a couple of ways. The 60-day old Vertica acquisition got some front and center action at Discover, and, while it’s clear that Vertica is going to butt heads with other similar advanced analytics platforms (SAP’s Hana being the best example) there’s plenty of runway in the big data market for Vertica and Hana to make a go of it. HP also showcased its IT Performance suite, and demoed an analytics dashboard with over 50 KPIs on IT performance that demoed extremely well (and kudos to software exec Marge Breya for doing a live demo, something that HP isn’t exactly famous for doing.) More importantly, the analytics platform and its KPIs represent a jumping off point for a broad range of KPI-driven analytics from HP in coming months.
• A Chat With #SAP’s Bill McDermott
  McDermott is determined that SAP will not become what he called a “commodity player” in IT, and will instead focus on delivering real value to its customers through software, not hardware or services, as some rivals have. 

  “Software is the brain; it’s where the high value is,” he said. “It’s about value engineering. If I can lower your IT spend by 40%, would you give me a higher percentage of your remaining budget?”

• ORCLville: Here We Go! ( #Oracle Fusion Apps)
  Learned on June 7 that Fusion Apps will be under “controlled availability” for the foreseeable future (based on the context of the update, I take that to mean around the end of the calendar year). As I understand it, Controlled Availability (“CA”) is different from General Availability (“GA”) in that CA allows Oracle to advise customers as part of the buying process in order to help maximize the chances for customer success with the product.
• No Need To Wait Any Longer ( #Oracle Fusion Apps)
  The EAP program is basically full, they have a great number of customers ranging from live to just starting CRP, and they are confident that the product is ready for the market. Controlled Availability means the product can be sold but before the contract is signed development need to assess that the customer has the best chance of success. They want to make sure they have the skills, or a trained Systems Integrator that gives them the best opportunity for success. If a small IT shop comes along, never implemented EBS, no FMW skills and says, ‘we want Fusion Apps and we want to do it ourselves’, it is unlikely they will be approved. However if a large organisation with great inhouse skills and track record comes along, or with a partner already trained then they probably will be approved. 

  Controlled availability is not unique to Fusion Apps, it is a standard policy used in many products.

  When asked how many customers have been turned down in either EAP or Controlled Availability, the

• OHUG Global Conference 2011 Monday Keynote ( #Oracle Fusion Apps)
  Join this keynote to explore the new era of HR applications and understand your choices for SaaS deployment from the world’s leader in HCM applications, featuring special guests Kathleen Souhrada and Jay Fogarty from the Principal Financial Group.
• One Financial Analyst’s Bearish View on #SAP and #Oracle
  Too much legacy software in a saturated market. Too much reliance on maintenance fees. And very little “next-gen software” in the product mix.
• #Oracle #Java Critical Patch Update
  Due to the threat posed by a successful attack, Oracle strongly recommends that customers apply CPU fixes as soon as possible. Until you apply the CPU fixes, it may be possible to reduce the risk of successful attack by restricting network protocols required by an attack. For attacks that require certain privileges or access to certain packages, removing the privileges or the ability to access the packages from unprivileged users may help reduce the risk of successful attack. Both approaches may break application functionality, so Oracle strongly recommends that customers test changes on non-production systems. Neither approach should be considered a long-term solution as neither corrects the underlying problem.
• Outsourced IT Jobs Return Home- Re-Employment in 2011
  This infographic has pulled in data about the IT bounce-back into graphical form- making it straight forward and visually stunning to review upcoming IT areas, the highest paying careers, and more. Many thanks to Modis, the Information Technology marketplace, for the data and IG below.
• #Lawson Shareholders Sue to Block #Infor Sale
  Lawson and Infor officials violated state law and U.S. securities rules by reaching an agreement, announced in March, to sell Lawson “at an unfair price of $11.25 per share via an unfair process,” according to the lawsuit by shareholders Marcia Green and Austen Swaim. At that price, Infor would buy Lawson for roughly US$1.8 billion.
• Executive Profiles: Disruptive Tech Leaders In #Cloud Computing – Peter Lorenz, #SAP AG
  1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Cloud Computing is changing the world for your customers. 

  Peter Lorenz (PL): We impact two types of customers. For our existing customers, we’re delivering a new level of flexibility, elasticity, and TCO (Total Cost of Onwership). They get a new feeling. They don’t (have to) wait to get on. (A) new breed of applications now emerge that wouldn’t have been available to customers in the past. They can access mobility in the cloud, experience different applications, consume new breeds of applications.

  For new customers, especially in small-medium-enterprises (SME), they get something you never could have gotten before for that price. Also they require minimal IT staff (i.e. 1 person) for this cost and price/value point. They also gain lower hurdles of adoption.

  What’s the “ah hah” moment? We’re delivering a co-innovation model and we have open conversations creating the experience part. It’s non-transactional between us and not the data st

• #HP Letter To #Oracle Hints Of Legal Action Over Itanium
  [Speaking of clumsy, this lawsuit appears to be a clumsy publicity stunt. What legal obligations by Oracle? -DBM]
  Apotheker called Oracle’s Itanium decision “a rather clumsy attempt by Oracle to try and prop up a failing and deteriorating Sun server business.”
• #HP, #Oracle rivalry escalates with demand letter
  “Further, we believe that this is an unlawful attempt to force customers from HP Itanium platforms to Oracle’s own platforms,” said HP
• #HP Escalates Fight With #Oracle Over Itanium
  Mr. Wohl declined to make a copy of the letter available or comment on the exact nature of any agreement that may spell out obligations of the companies.
• #Oracle’s #Java JDeveloper Update Embraces Modularity
  Among other enhancements, JDeveloper 11g Release 2 (R2) comes with new support for JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0, as well as improved support for RESTful Web Services, the Maven repository for Java projects, and the Java-based Hudson continuous integration (CI) server.
• #Java SE 7 gets thumbs-up from standards committee ( #Google #IBM #RedHat #VMware)
  Java Platform, SE (Standard Edition) 7 has been passed this week by the JCP Executive Committee for SE/EE (Enterprise Edition), by a vote of 13 in favor and 1 — Google — against. Oracle, IBM, VMware, Red Hat, and Fujitsu are among the affirmative votes, and two committee members — Credit Suisse and Java architect Werner Keil — did not vote. Specifically, committee members voted on Java Specification Request 336, which pertains to the Java upgrade. Voting on the public review ballot for Java SE 7 finished up earlier this week after beginning on May 31. Java SE 7 still faces another vote on a final approval ballot.
• #SAP Ranked Leader in Business Intelligence Tools Market, Outpaces Market Growth for Financial Performance and Strategy Management Applications
  The two IDC analyses – “Worldwide Business Intelligence Tools 2010 Vendor Shares”(1) and “Worldwide Financial Performance and Strategy Management Applications 2010 Vendor Shares”(2) – found that SAP leads the worldwide BI market with revenues of $1,866.4 million and a 21 percent market share, while revenue for FPSM was $629 million constituting a 24.9 percent market share. From 2009 to 2010 SAP outperformed the worldwide market growth in each category: for BI tools SAP grew by 19.9 percent compared to the total market growth of 11.4 percent, and for FPSM applications it grew by 17.5 percent compared to the total market growth of 9.2 percent.
• Analysis: Crunching #BigData more than a byte-sized bet ( #TIBCO #Informatica #Salesforce.com #IBM #Cloudera #Splunk)
  Tibco Software and Informatica, bigger names including Salesforce.com Inc and IBM, and private firms such as Cloudera and Splunk are looking to cash in on this data tsunami — betting on the potential returns from scouring and analyzing the data, and so helping customers improve their businesses.
• #Microsoft’s Kurt DelBene: On a roll with Office 2010; looking ahead to #cloud
  The opportunity for small and medium business is capability they could never have otherwise. A 50-person shop is not one that would run Exchange today or Sharepoint and Lync. What we are delivering is a set of features — to have rich calendaring, where you can invite people to a meeting and book a conference room, or [hold] online meetings that are well integrated in with your desktop. Those are all capabilities small businesses need as much as big businesses. 

  For a small, medium business it’s an order of magnitude of improvement without an increase in IT complexity. They can scale up as they grow. They don’t have to think, “Do I have to add servers?” To add 10 to 25 people, they just go to the website and add people.

• A rocket scientist couldn’t make sense of #Microsoft’s Software Assurance
  The upgrade program, for which Microsoft charges $29 annually for desktop software over three years, is obtusely complex. Many stated benefits have a pleasing marketing ring to them but often turn out to be nothing useful at all. The saying “The devil is in the details” aptly applies to Software Assurance.
• #HP Services Expansion Triggers Hiring Spree
  Hewlett-Packard is loading up on specialized consulting and sales talent as it prepares to take on incumbents like Accenture and Cap Gemini in high-growth, high-margin services areas like application modernization, mobility enablement, and industry-specific solutions. 

  “We need to hire some additional resources,” HP executive VP Ann Livermore said in an interview Tuesday. “Our investments are going to be in sales people, delivery people, and in some cases around software development and intellectual capital development.” Livermore wasn’t specific about numbers, but said the company’s recruiting efforts range from senior managers to consultants with specialized knowledge in areas HP is targeting.

• #Apple’s spaceship will become Valley icon
  Architectural rendering of the new Apple headquarters.
• #Microsoft to launch #cloud-based ‘Office 365’ on June 28
  Microsoft is apparently planning to release the cloud-based version of its productivity platform before the end of this month.
  
• Yacht-loving #Oracle founder branches out
  According to local estate agents, Mr Ellison, the fifth-richest man in the world, is “considering” paying up to $US20m for a 22-room mansion next door owned by socialite Dodie Rosekrans, who died in November.
• America’s Cup champion #ORACLE Racing to light up the Bay
  Next week, ORACLE Racing returns to its homewaters of San Francisco Bay for the first time since winning the America’s Cup in February 2010 

  Throughout the month of June ORACLE Racing will be training in two of the AC45 wingsail catamarans that will be used in the America’s Cup World Series through 2012.

• Tech Jobs – #Oracle Cultivating top talent
  Currently, the centres support: telemarketing reps transitioning to sales roles; inside sales reps transitioning to field sales roles; and individual contributors transitioning to manager positions.
• A joint venture company set up with computer giant #IBM to save Somerset County Council millions of pounds failed to meet some of its #SAP contract targets, and may never reach them a report reveals ( #ITfail)
  But the report reveals that when a review of its effectiveness was completed a year ago performance was “substantially” under target. Southwest One had delivered savings of only £2 million of the £45 million at that time predicted as the 10-year saving on procurement. 

  That figure has now risen to £6 million, with a further £60 million in line to be delivered ahead of an eventual total savings target of more than £150 million over the next seven years.

  The review also identified insufficiently clear plans to identify future procurement savings. The three councillors who conducted the review admitted financial measures and projections were so complex it was difficult to have a clear view of the situation.

• #Informatica 9.1 Platform For #BigData Empowers The Data-centric Enterprise
  “Building on nearly two decades of innovation and leadership, Informatica 9.1 helps organizations realize the promise of Big Data,” said Girish Pancha, general manager, Data Integration Business, Informatica. “Big Data is the confluence of three technology trends: Big Transaction Data, representing massive growth in transaction data volumes; Big Interaction Data, fueled by explosive growth in interaction data from social media and sensor technologies; and Big Data Processing, with highly scalable processing using Hadoop open source technology. With well-differentiated support for all three Big Data trends, Informatica 9.1 uniquely delivers a unified data integration platform to empower the data-centric enterprise.” 

  Informatica 9.1 for Big Data empowers the data-centric enterprise by providing four critical capabilities:

  Big Data integration.
  Authoritative and trustworthy data.
  Self-service.
  Adaptive Data Services.

• #Salesforce.com Irons it Out: 21st Century Social Enterprise Certified
  Tien Tzuo, told me at breakfast in Shanghai that salesforce.com wasn’t trying to be just a CRM company, but instead, wanted to be the business web – the platform upon which all companies ran all their applications. Far from just CRM.
• To Meet Rapidly Increasing Demand for In-Memory Computing, #SAP Appoints Christoph Kollatz Executive Vice President, SAP HANA
  “SAP HANA is in the market and we are seeing strong adoption from customers,” said Dr. Sikka. “From a product and technology standpoint, SAP HANA is transforming the SAP product portfolio, opening up new markets for SAP and renewing our existing solutions. Christoph’s background as a former CEO-level customer of SAP as well as his strong management and operational background will enable us to massively scale the adoption of SAP HANA and meet the strong demand we are seeing.”
• The Latest Nextgen #ERP Trends
  [Missing third-party maintenance -DBM]
  Companies are becoming creative in the way they utilize SaaS and cloud computing technology. Because of the flexible delivery model, agility, and scalability of SaaS and cloud ERP solutions, companies can enhance functionality to existing systems, complement on-premise solutions, and unify siloed systems. Eval-Source has identified four emerging trends for ERP cloud computing and SaaS technology. The four trends discussed in this article are two-tiered systems, hybrid systems, unification of disparate systems, and business agility.
• #Groupon’s Global Rocket ( #NetSuite)
  Groupon had implemented NetSuite in 26 countries in under 3 months.
• #OpenSource #EnterpriseDB responds
  We provide them that path, and now we are proud to be partnering with HP to provide that path to HP’s customers. Finally, have you noticed over the last decade the price of hardware (even big hardware) has decreased basically at a Moore’s law pace? I’d ask your readers how much their Oracle costs have decreased over the last ten years–especially the last few as we’ve navigated through a financial crisis not seen in over 70 years. There are alternatives, and we are enthusiastic about our future.
• Resellers and customers frustrated by botched #Oracle #Sun deliveries
  According to sources at several large dealers, four to six week lead times are unreliable, and deliveries are being made to the wrong addresses by the freight forwarding company. Two months can elapse from the first product arriving and complete fulfillment of an order.
• Startup Genome Report 01
  1. Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet…4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance…5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with
• Sinking #Sun scuppers #Oracle server figures
  The US behemoth saw revenues plummet by almost 20 per cent to $241m, pushing down its market share from 9.5 per cent a year ago to 6.9 per cent, while the total market climbed 10.8 per cent to $3,5bn.
• #SAP Completes $750M Issue Of US Private Placement Notes
  The transaction enhances the group’s financial flexibility by broadening its investor base and extending its overall maturity profile. Proceeds will be used to refinance existing group financial debt. 

  – A group of 16 institutional investors participated in two tranches, a $600 million tranche with a five year maturity and a $150 million tranche with a seven year maturity. The interest rates on the notes in both tranches were below 3.5%.

• Despite #Oracle’s Antics, #OpenSource LibreOffice Gets a Big Update
  1. Updates to Calc…
  2. UI Improvements…
  3. Support for Unity…
  4. Linux Performance…
  5. A Smaller Windows Installer…
  6. Parallel Installations on Linux…
  7. Better Code…
• Compatibilty wars – can #OpenSource #EnterpriseDB take on #Oracle and win?
  Now is the time for EnterpriseDB to publicize success stories to encourage the consideration of the approach they suggest, moving from Oracle’s database server to EntepriseDB’s PostgreSQL-based product. All it would take to dash EnterpriseDB’s hopes is the emergence of a few horror stories about migration failures.
• #SAP Co-CEO Sees Opportunity For Stronger Ties With #HP
  [Expect an HANA appliance announcement next week from SAP and HP… -DBM]
  Such a partnership would come as SAP looks to succeed in new growth areas, including the rollout of its HANA system, which allows corporate employees the ability to access a company’s vast database using the memory on their own computers. 

  SAP has a pipeline of a $100 million or more in orders for its HANA system, McDermott said. He added he sees it as a multibillion-dollar opportunity for the company.

• #Salesforce.com Summer ‘11 Tweaks Chatter, Attempts File Collaboration
  Salesforce Summer ‘11 became available on June 3. The revised Chatter module is included in all paid editions as well as the no-cost, standalone edition of Chatter that can be used in organizations that subscribe to paid Salesforce editions. Summer ‘11 also made revisions to the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Jigsaw and Force.com SAAS (software-as-a-service) offerings, along with underlying changes to analytical processes many of these components use. Existing customers will see the updates roll out over the coming weeks.
• #Salesforce.Com Achieves GSA Moderate Level Authority
  The certification is based on testing performed against the NIST 800-53 Rev. 3 moderate baseline requirements consistent with FISMA requirements, the company clarified in a press release. With this, Salsforce.com hopes to bring the same customer success to the public sector that it has been delivering to the private sector for the last 12 years. 

  Salesforce.com (News – Alert) has received the Authority to Operate at the moderate level baseline for the Force.com platform, Salesforce CRM, Salesforce Chatter, and supporting infrastructure. The certification implies that government customers will now be able to leverage salesforce.com’s cloud computing services to address even more of their IT needs, all without any hardware or software.

• #Microsoft’s Challenge: Replacing Gates, Not Ballmer
  “They neither got Steve to step into the quarterback role, nor did they supplement him when Gates stepped out.”
• #Google to Kill Support for Aging Browsers
  [Too early to kill off support for FF3.5 and IE7…not the right call for an enterprise software company… -DBM]
  Google will pull the plug on three aging web browsers, including Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and Apple Safari 3, two months from now.
• #OpenSource #Patents: #Google #Android dispute: #Microsoft thumps #Motorola 17-5 in ITC patent claim construction
  FINAL SCORE:
  Microsoft 17, Motorola 5
• Down To Business: No One Wins An #ITfail #ERP Lawsuit
  They’ve been operational and public relations disasters over the years not only for the likes of Oracle and SAP, but also for Nike, Hershey, Waste Management, and scores of other companies, which at one time or another blamed severe financial shortfalls on their failed enterprise software implementations. 

  Most (though not all) of them could have been avoided with an exhaustive vetting of the contract terms and their myriad deliverables. The onus is on both vendor and customer to get on the same page from the beginning of these long-term engagements. (The Montclair State one was supposed to last 25 months.)

• #ADP wants more than your payroll
  ADP, properly called Automatic Data Processing, sees itself as one of the original cloud providers, before that term became popularized. It stopped selling on-premise software about a decade ago and provides its outsourced services from two data centers in the U.S. 

  Payroll still accounts for about 60 percent of its business, but in recent years it has built out a suite of services that include human resources, recruiting and talent management, background checks and benefits administration.

  “Our goal is to be a cradle-to-grave employer services company,” Capone said.

• Is REST Successful in the Enterprise?
  Some might prematurely conclude that REST has won based on Programmable Web data: 73% of the APIs are RESTful. But Steve Jones, a SOA practitioner, draws attention that those APIs are used by front-end systems doing data aggregation and not by the majority of enterprise systems, and REST is not yet ready for the enterprise.
• #HP plans to license webOS to other companies, manufacturers
  WebOS could be adopted by a number of “small to medium businesses,” Apotheker noted, giving the examples of appliance makers, enterprises, and SMBs. Apotheker said he thought webOS is a uniquely outstanding operating system, and that “there’s no reason to believe that the only hardware that can run it is HP’s.”
• US Supremes add ‘willful blindness’ to #patent law
  [Once again, the courts are legislating from the bench. If legislators want “willful blindness” to be part of a law, they can write it into the law. How can America’s Constitution be protected if the Supreme Court routinely violates it? -DBM]
  The doctrine of willful blindness is well established in criminal law. Many criminal statutes require proof that a defendant acted knowingly or willfully, and courts applying the doctrine of willful blindness hold that defendants cannot escape the reach of these statutes by deliberately shielding themselves from clear evidence of critical facts that are strongly suggested by the circumstances. The traditional rationale for this doctrine is that defendants who behave in this manner are just as culpable as those who have actual knowledge.
• Is #Dell the World’s Most Social Company? (Scorecard)
  Dell seems to embody what Social Business pundits call the Social Enterprise. Starting with their CEO and CMO, the company is executing on a strategy to train Dell employees on social strategy while working externally to create brand advocates. The result will be a powerful platform of people that are socially enabled to promote and support the Dell brand through their own social networks. 

  For me, that’s a differentiator few competitors will be able to overcome.

  Of course, companies like Microsoft, IBM, Google, Best Buy, Disney, SAP and Zappos are all legitimate contenders for the world’s leading social companies (look for more on this later), but so far Dell seems to stand at or near the top of the list. So if they are not the world’s most social company, they are pretty close to the top.

• A Very Different #HP: Léo Apotheker At D9 (Video) – AllThingsD
  In the video below, Apotheker talks about Windows, webOS and HP’s play for an end-to-end ecosystem.
• Groupon files for #BUBBLE public offering
  Groupon Inc. filed Thursday for an initial public offering, saying it plans to raise up to $750 million. The number of shares being sold and their pricing wasn’t disclosed. The $750 million figure is a pale reflection of the estimates for Groupon’s full valuation, which some reports have put at $15 billion to $20 billion.
• Gmail Hack Targeted White House
  [For all the naive folk who wonder why Obama shouldn’t use an iPhone … -DBM]
• #Oracle Lobs $5.3 Million Countersuit At University ( #ITfail)
  Oracle in its response asked Judge Freda Wilson to dismiss the claims of “gross professional negligence” and “legal fraud.” It has denied the other charges. 

  Oracle in turn said in its filing that, as issues arose, it became clear that university officials “did not adequately understand the technology and the steps necessary to complete the project.” It has filed a counterclaim for $5.3 million that it says it is still owed for work done. As opposed to working out the problems of the contract, it says the university “embarked on a misguided ruse which, unfortunately, is costing taxpayers of N.J. millions of dollars.”

• Just In: Larry Ellison Says No, He’s Not Buying Palazzo Rosekrans
  “All of the newspaper stories reporting that I am buying the house next-door to my San Francisco home for $40 million are untrue,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “No one has ever offered to sell me the house next-door for $40 million or any other price. If someone does offer to sell me the house next-door for $40 million or an amount anywhere near $40 million I will not buy it.”
• #RIM #BlackBerry #Java SDK v7.0 Hits Beta
  RIM is making much of the SDK’s suitability to the needs of developers interested in gaming, augmented reality, and Near Field Communication (NFC) applications.
• #Oracle drops #OpenSource OpenOffice on Apache, shuns forkers
  #IBM is emerging as Oracle’s go-to power partner on open source and Java. This is creating an inescapable sense that the duo are turning open-source projects into corporate incubators they can either ordain or sideline to suit their objectives. 

  Last year, IBM walked out of Project Harmony and joined the rival OpenJDK from Oracle. IBM had been Harmony’s biggest single backer, joining the project back in the mid 2000s.

• Larry Ellison Tree Fight: #Oracle CEO Settles Longstanding Lawsuit
  Meanwhile, San Francisco’s Real Estate Blog “Curbed” reported this week that Ellison agreed to purchase the home directly next to his for $40 million. The 22-bedroom home, owned by a family called the Rosekrans, will provide him with a clear view of the Bay. 

  Ellison, who according to Forbes is the fifth richest person in the world, tried to buy the von Bothmers’ home on two separate occasions but they turned down his $15 million offer.

• Former #Oracle / #Peoplesoft Executive Launches Technology Executive Timesharing Business
  The Technology Gurus, a boutique technology company with offices in Silicon Valley and San Diego now offers technology management services to small or medium-sized technology companies on a timesharing basis where a qualified associate serves as a company’s chief technology officer on a part time basis. The pay-by-the-hours-needed model allows a hi-tech firm to run operations at a considerably lower cost. 

  The Technology Gurus is founded by Mr. Yashpal Talreja, who has served in executive or senior management roles at Oracle, Peoplesoft, Amazon.com and several startups such as Televoke and MessageGate. Mr. Talreja is also the founder of the Lean Agile Group and chairs the SDSIC Steering Committee for Health and Medical Information Systems. Mr. Talreja has a master’s degree in computer engineering from the University of California, Davis, and has a patent in mobile and Internet payments.

• The Technology Gurus – Home
  Engage on of our experienced executives on a “time shared” basis will give you the resource you need to grow revenues without putting undue strain on finances. You will have the top-notch technology management capabilities of an experienced technology executive available to your company without the overheads such as payroll taxes, insurance costs and both on-boarding and severance benefits that must be borne in the traditional technology executive search and engagement.
• When it’s still best (on not) to use a relational DBMS ( #NoSQL)
  # Data re-use may not arise when applications are self-contained and rapidly-changing.
  # Sometimes you don’t need to normalize your data.
  # It’s not obvious that the relational approach to separation of concerns is the best one. Perhaps you’d be better off with the people who understand a specific application best being responsible for all the decisions connected with it.
  # As for that maturity and momentum: 

  * People don’t actually learn much SQL in school.
  * Are any of the mature relational DBMS what you really want?
  * Is any of that packaged software out there really helpful for your specific problem?

• Steve Jobs to headline #Apple WWDC keynote, iOS 5 and iCloud inbound
  Apple has confirmed that CEO Steve Jobs, backed by his team of execs, will headline the keynote speech at WWDC this year. 

  Apple has also listed what’s on the agenda:

  * Mac OS X 10.7 ’Lion’
  * iOS 5
  * iCloud

• #Nokia: 2011 going from bad to worse; #Microsoft Windows Phone 7 device in Q4
  Conditions have unraveled for Nokia so quickly that the company said it can’t give 2011 forecasts. 

  These phones aren’t selling.

  The problem: Nokia is in limbo as it tries to sell Symbian based devices ahead of Windows Phone 7 devices in late 2011 and early 2012. Nokia confirmed that it will ship a Windows Phone 7 device in the fourth quarter. What’s unknown is whether that device will be enough to salvage 2011 and give Nokia some confidence about 2012. In any case, Nokia is betting everything on Windows Phone. In the meantime, the company needs to sell you a few Symbian devices.

• Osborne effect
  The Osborne effect is a term referring to the unintended consequence of the announcement of a future product ahead of its availability and its impact upon the sales of the current product. 

  Pre-announcement is done for several reasons: to reassure current customers that there is improvement or lower cost coming, to increase the interest of the media and investors in the company’s future prospects, and to intimidate or confuse competitors. When done correctly the sales or cash flow impact to the company is minimal as the revenue drop for the current product is replaced by orders or completed sales of the new product as it becomes available.

• Qld Health payroll bungle ‘to cost millions’ ( #ITfail)
  Government is not chasing amounts under $200 which amounts to $1.6 million.
• #Oracle Says #ERP #ITfail Software Woes Are School’s Own Fault
  “When issues arose during the course of the project, it became clear that MSU’s leadership did not adequately understand the technology and the steps necessary to complete the project,” it states. “Instead of cooperating with Oracle and resolving issues through discussions and collaboration, MSU’s project leadership, motivated by their own agenda and fearful of being blamed for delays, escalated manageable differences into major disputes.” 

  Montclair’s failings “created a vacuum for outside consultants to exercise perverse influence over its direction,” the filing adds. “Indeed, at the point when MSU decided to terminate the contract with Oracle and refused to pay amounts owed, a lawyer from Illinois was, in large part, running the project for MSU, and continued to profit from promoting a dispute with Oracle at taxpayer expense.”

• #VMware acquires #Socialcast
  Today, I am pleased to announce that Socialcast has been acquired by VMware.
• #Microsoft joins #patent review group to avoid costly litigation
  Microsoft has become the first member of a crowdsourcing service designed to challenge and invalidate specious software patents sometimes used in expensive lawsuits brought by so-called patent trolls. 

  Litigation Avoidance is a paid service created by Article One Partners, a global online community of 1 million scientists and technologists. The organization uses crowdsourcing, a social media technique involving massive collaboration over the Web, to compare notes and find evidence about patents, with the goal of identifying “prior art,” or a previous discovery, that could help nullify a patent that has been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

• Spending on new software projects rises, Forrester says
  For the first time, companies around the world are planning to spend as much on new software projects as they do maintaining existing systems, according to a new report from Forrester Research.
• Indian Workers Returning Home
  U.S. companies may face a serious case of brain drain as the majority of technology professionals from India plan to return home, according to a recent survey from Corp-Corp.com, a tech-job portal
• IT Professionals in High Demand: Report
  There are more technology job openings in a single day on Dice’s career site than there are computer science grads ready to join American businesses, according to a report from Dice Holdings, which runs a career site for technology and engineering professionals. In California, that ratio is 3-to-1, the company noted, and the number of computer-related bachelor’s degrees conferred has plummeted in nearly every state, creating a pipeline problem that leads from corporate America through college campuses to primary schools nationwide.
• IT Systems Failures Cost Businesses 127 Million Lost Person-Hours: Survey
  [That’s a lot more downtime than most Cloud vendors… -DBM]
  Among the findings, the survey revealed each business suffers an average of 14 hours of downtime per year, during which employees are only able to work at 63 percent of their usual productivity. After systems are back up and running, organizations lose an average of nine additional hours per year to the time it takes to recover data. During these times, employee productivity only climbs to 70 percent.
• #Microsoft formalizes #cloud computing enterprise licensing
  Microsoft applications bought through volume licensing agreements — such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Microsoft Lync Server, System Center and Dynamics CRM — can now move to dynamic virtual environments like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud if enterprises purchase Software Assurance (SA) for those licenses.
• #Apple makes you rich, #Google #Android leaves you…bored
  Smartphone developers: You won’t yet get rich quick on Google’s Android Market, step away from fragmentation land and get yourself started on Apple’s [AAPL] iOS