Enterprise Headlines and Highlights, 2012-09-15

VC’s are addicted to finding more Googles and Facebooks. They’re addicted to placing their bets at the last possible minute, after a product was built, after happy customers were had, and after as much momentum has been built as they can possibly get to without a big capital infusion. Ten million users is the new one million users. If VC’s have to bribe their way in at an incredibly late stage (can you say, “Github”), they don’t care. It’s better than actually having to do what the original VC’s did which was to try to understand the markets, technologies, and teams.

I don’t think it’s at all healthy for Silicon Valley that we’ve gone down this path. Apparently the VC’s don’t either, or they wouldn’t be grumbling constantly. Investors can’t be happy given VC returns. Some entrepreneurs may be happy, but I have always hated the idea of technology companies that have to stand on the merits of whether they’re fashionable rather than on whether they’ve built something useful.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Second to Windows Azure was Google Storage at 29%, which offers developers five GB of free storage for an initial project. Amazon Web Services was third at 28%. Evans Data simply aggregated AWS as a whole, rather than divvying up S3 storage or EC2 compute engine.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

As part of the Safety Data Initiative of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the US Department of Transportation, “Safety Datapalooza” highlights innovators from the private, nonprofit and academic sectors who have utilized freely available government data to build products, services and apps that advance public safety in creative and powerful ways. Additionally, several federal agencies will present how they are making safety data transparent and available to the general public. The event takes place at the White House today, September 14.

“SAP makes systems that help the world’s best-run businesses and institutions run better, and increasingly these organizations are looking to connect with their consumers and citizens in new and innovative ways,” said Rishi Diwan, vice president, Product Management, Consumer Applications, SAP. “With Recalls Plus, we wanted to build an app that provides value directly to consumers, enabling them to live better. The White Hous

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Other vendors listed as leaders include Informatica Corp., Harte-Hanks Inc.’s Trillium Software, SAP AG and IBM.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The intent is to enable developers to write an application’s non-UI code, such as data access code or application logic, in Java. Apple has not permitted Java to run on its iOS systems (though Java code can be part of an iOS application build), while Objective-C is Apple’s development language of choice for the devices…”J2ObjC is not a Java emulator but instead converts Java classes to Objective-C classes that directly use the iOS Foundation Framework,” Google engineer Tom Ball said in a blog post. “It supports the full Java 6 language and most of its runtime features that are required by client-side application developers, including exceptions, inner and anonymous classes, generic types, threads, and reflection. JUnit test translation and execution is also supported. J2ObjC can be used with most build tools, including Xcode and Make.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Corporate customers are showing increased interest in cloud solutions for Master Data Management (MDM). Such solutions (MDM-in-the-Cloud) are getting additional interest from buyers. Leading suppliers such as Cognizant, Data Scout, IBM, Informatica, Oracle and Orchestra Networks are among those with MDM-in-the-cloud solutions.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

According to reports, Apple ran though its inventory by 1 a.m. PT, or an hour after its store opened to take pre-sale orders. Meanwhile, some carrier stores were difficult or impossible to reach as they were overwhelmed by customers.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Java EE has always been a food fight that takes a lot of community discussion to settle down. Taking time is not at all a surprise.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

8 server makers — not three — now account for 75 percent of Intel’s server chip revenues…Google is likely the world’s fifth largest server maker.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“The comparisons for Q4 and Q1 will be difficult,” Lederman says. “Analysts are notoriously neurotic.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“I’d like to hear from the audience and our customers on these new apps, because I think many would give us an A.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Hurd showed how a company could save millions of dollars in seconds by using a combination of Oracle products, including Taleo, to produce a graphical cost-comparison tool culled from various data points. Hurd said “around 120 factors” could be included, such as turnover rates, the cost of replacing someone being considered for promotion, employee performance rates, and recruiting metrics.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Java Runtime Environment is full of holes and Oracle’s attempts to shore it up have been ineffective.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Attendance is setting new records despite the rise of webcasts, live blogs and services like Twitter and Facebook that have made it easier to monitor events without actually going to them. “People still like to get together in person,” Mr. Benioff says.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Google is lending its brainpower to the rapidly growing space by releasing a tool called Course Builder, open source software that is designed to let anyone create online education courses.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The new release helps organisation to cleanse, standardise and enrich customer information, eliminate and prevent duplicate, inconsistent data, integrate critical enterprise data, and manage and view account hierarchies.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The Informatica Cloud Connect Conference will be held on Monday, September 17th, from 2:00-7:00 p.m. Pacific Time and the Informatica Cloud Connect Party will directly follow the conference.

Where: The Informatica Cloud Connect Conference and Informatica Cloud Connect Party will be held at Parc 55 Wyndham San Francisco.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Version 6.0 of the lightweight, Java-based framework comes with a revamped AJAX JavaScript library, out-of-the box JQuery integration, and OSGi-compatible packaging, among other improvements.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The product will be called Chatterbox, a name that echoes Salesforce.com’s Chatter collaboration tool. It’s set for discussion during the company’s Dreamforce conference, which starts next week.

Also on deck is Salesforce.com Identity, which, like Okta, provides single sign-on for multiple cloud applications at once. “Our customers have asked us to do the same thing,” Benioff said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“We’re taking a lot of learning from the consumer world where the interaction is intuitive, it’s enjoyable,” he said. “We are asking ourselves, ’Why would that not be the benchmark for business software?’ ”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

A mere $20,000, of course, is chump change to Google. But for an open source project like Eclipse, which develops a Java based software programming environment that supports a number of languages popular among open source programmers, the donation is an important resource that will help the project acquire new hardware for testing, according to the announcement of the award.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

FinancialForce.com competes on the PSA front with the likes of NetSuite’s OpenAir. The various benefits of running on the Force.com platform, such as the ability to exploit its dashboarding, reporting and Chatter collaboration software, give FinancialForce.com the edge, Brennan said. “It comes down to, which cloud do you want to be on?”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

I don’t look at this as a zero-sum game. You innovate, deliver value to customers, and get value back from the world,” Benioff responded.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

There will be a 7 day closure of Howard Street between Third and Fourth streets, from Sat., Sept. 15th at 12:00 PM to Sat., Sept. 22nd at 12:00 PM

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Set to take place in San Francisco from September 18 to 21, the annual cloud computing expo is only getting bigger this time around as CEO Marc Benioff exclaimed to analysts and investors tuning into the call that Salesforce is expecting over 100,000 total attendees.

To break that down, Benioff divided that up between 70,000 registered on-premise attendees with an additional 30,000 attending online.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“It was an honor and a privilege to have been part of Heroku and then Salesforce, and I plan on staying close to the team and the growing ecosystem.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Informatica Cloud MDM is a native Force.com solution, which is fully integrated with salesforce.com and deployed in the cloud, with no need to install additional hardware or software. Additionally Informatica Cloud MDM can help organizations:

Increase sales productivity with more complete and accurate account and opportunity data.
Improve customer service and increase cross-sell by understanding all aspects of the customer relationship.
Drive higher marketing return on investment with accurate segmentation and campaign delivery.
Track opportunities through the sales cycle and across territories and divisions.
Manage account hierarchies to gain visibility into the real value of each customer.
Extend customer information with third-party data for additional account insight.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

History of Dreamforce Infographic

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Question: Do PCMag’s editors know where Silicon Valley is??? -DBM]
When confronted, the company acted dumb, blaming it on a “technical error.” This is the classic Silicon Valley shuffle that high-tech companies have been pulling forever. It takes on a lot of different forms but it always boils down to the same truth: whatever you really wanted us to do, we didn’t do and we probably never will do it. But we are smiling!

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

CedarCrestone has downloaded “vast quantities of Oracle support materials,” including the tax and regulatory updates, from Oracle’s site with its partner login credentials, according to the suit.

In addition, CedarCrestone “has used unauthorized copies of entire Oracle software applications,” it adds.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The new EPM OnDemand applications include capabilities for “expense insight,” allowing managers to probe into the details of expenses and fix errors; real-time analysis of profit and loss; and capital project planning, according to a statement.

Many more EPM OnDemand products will be released in coming months, said Bryan Katis, group vice president and general manager for EPM solutions management.

All of the applications will have a “mobile-first” design focus, and are intended to be complementary to SAP’s main EPM portfolio, according to David Williams, EPM solution marketing lead. “We’re using the ‘sun and planets’ metaphor,” he said.

They will also share a common look and feel with SAP’s core EPM software, including the ability for users to work inside a Microsoft Excel interface, Williams said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

It’s a Ponzi scheme that works as long as the stock price goes up, because if it goes down, employees will not accept stock based compensation as salary, which also means the company can no longer add this expense to its artificial cash flow.

An added expense to the shareholder is the dilution that these increasing stock-based compensations are causing. Every quarter, the share count is rising. So the shareholder is fooled in a double manner. By dilution and representing costs as profits.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

But a recent report that police had arrested several big-name venture capitalists for solicitation — by all accounts, a false story on a satirical Web site — seems to have helped chill the scene, at least for now.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Robert Youngjohns will join the HP Software leadership team on September 17th as senior vice president and general manager of the Autonomy/Information Management business unit. He will be tasked with help building up the information management and analytics software that the Autonomy/IM business has developed.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

What Is HANA? “HANA is a technology platform,” Lucas started, “that was built specifically for business applications.” He went on, talking about how HANA delivers services in real-time—mentioning database services, semantic elements, text stores—and then added: “HANA is much, much more than a database.”

But Wait, There’s More! SAP and the HANA leadership team have been on a mission to emphasize that HANA has more to offer than just ultrafast processing speeds. “The reality is,” noted Lucas, “the ROI for something like HANA can be derived from so much more than just speed.

In other words, SAP is showing some of its trump cards right now but not all, as Lucas quipped later in the call. Analytics, BW and BPC on HANA, to name a couple, are today’s table stakes, and Lucas and Vijayasankar talked a lot about these.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Queensland Heath has blamed over half of its recently announced redundancies on the former government’s bungled payroll system.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Everyone knows that I’m biased toward great HRM enterprise software. But great software is never enough to ensure a successful software or other technology-enabled business. Quality leadership, talent at every level, effective organizational culture, adequate investment resources, and many more business elements plus a ton of mazel are also needed to build durably successful businesses. No one was harder on PeopleSoft than I was because I felt it was a technical reincarnation of out-of-date HRM thinking and data design. What pleases me not only about Workday but about some other bright software spots in HR technology is that we’re now reinventing on every level — business model, deployment approach, development methodology, operational technology, user experience, configuration frameworks, applications architecture, object models, and so much more. One of the reasons I love working/talking/visiting/etc. with HRM software vendors is the change to learn more about the topics covered

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[I totally bet they try hard too -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Analytics is hot and Salesforce.com witnessed the demand when it shipped its Analytics Edition last year. Salesforce.com out-of-the-box reporting has matured very well over the years; today, the application provides dashboards that can be emailed on a schedule and it features advanced capabilities like bucketing and cross-filtering.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

INFA, in my opinion, is one of the better companies within the technology, and specifically the software as a service (SAAS) sector. If the company can continue to outpace the competition when it comes to both margins and returns, we could easily see INFA surpass the $43.50/share level. One of the key catalysts for INFA moving forward will be global sales, if either North America or Europe continue to demonstrate economic weakness, we could see B2B spending decrease and directly hinder the growth of INFA in the next 12-24 months.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“We believe HANA faces a multi billion Euro available market, and growth here will be dictated by SAP’s ability to execute and find
compelling use cases,” he adds. “Sybase IQ is another ‘Big Data’ beneficiary, while Sybase ASE has a greenfield opportunity to sell into SAP’s installed base.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

There are now more than 500 total customers for HANA, which was released about a year go, and SAP is “closing in on 600 who have purchased it,” said Steve Lucas, global executive vice president and general manager, SAP database and technology. About 100 are in full production scenarios while another 200 projects are ongoing, according to Lucas.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Cloud computing king, Salesforce.com tops FORBES list of the most innovative companies in the world for another year, which also makes it the most innovative company in America. The company maintains its edge by having a clear innovation strategy. Read the complete list to see what CEO Marc Benioff has to say about innovation.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Larry’s Two Companies Working Together to Help Global Customers Succeed
Oracle OpenWorld Executive Solution Session with Zach Nelson]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Innovation is a continuum. You have to think about how the world is evolving and transforming. Are you part of the continuum?”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Platform Share:
Google Android: 52.2%
Apple: 33.4%
RIM: 9.5%
Microsoft: 3.6%
Symbian: 0.8%

Top OEMs:
Samsung: 25.6%
LG: 18.4%
Apple: 16.3%
Motorola: 11.2%
HTC: 6.4%
-DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Implementing BW on HANA becomes a no-brainer for most organising who try to build a business case in this way.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The judge dismissed Montclair’s allegations on grounds they failed to “state a claim,” or provide sufficient facts upon which the court could grant relief under existing law. But Wolfson’s opinion preserved Montclair’s breach of contract claims against Oracle.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Fearless Feedback was really hated around the place. If someone had Fearless Feedback, we’d listen, but then afterwards I’d have this uncontrollable urge to punch them in the face. We all found it much more effective to get Fearless Feedback from the managers, which was more like feared feedback.”
“Sounds perfectly normal, until you watch the videos and think ‘who the fuck talks like that?!’”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The federal judge in Oracle v. Google has given up on trying to find any more paid journalists, bloggers, and similar commentators in the case while also ordering Oracle to hand some money over to Google.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Seriously, when was the last time you went to a website that required the Java Runtime Environment to be installed for core functionality?

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Pursuant to the stipulation by both parties, Judge Hamilton ordered payment of $306 million to Oracle as relief. The judge also noted in the Aug. 3 judgment that the parties had agreed that Oracle was paid $120 million in legal fees by SAP.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Experts say yes.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

NetSuite views commerce, and therefore the customer orders, as the very lifeblood of a business. As a result it closely guards the development of applications that directly manage those customer orders. But it also recognizes the diversity of sources of customer orders. Long gone are the days when only traditional paper-based purchase orders were converted to sales orders and long gone are the days when consumer purchases were only transacted in a physical store. The world of commerce today is much more diverse.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

So in many ways the competition has caught up to Workday.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“It’s not that young people wanted to live in Mountain View in the past,” Mr. Suster blogged. “In fact, so many did not that companies like Google & Yahoo had free buses with Wi-Fi from San Francisco to their Palo Alto and Sunnyvale headquarters.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The project, which began in 2008, aimed to roll 120 legacy systems onto one SAP platform. It was divided into three phases in the business, with the first two phases upgrading finance and human resources back-office systems, CCA’s call centre, equipment service, warehousing, payroll, supply chain management, and demand planning systems. Phase three involved getting New Zealand’s systems on board, and in the first half of 2012, this project was completed.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

U.S. business software maker Oracle has launched an appeal on a five-year long court case that could see SAP pay millions more in damages over copyright infringement.

On Monday, a spokesman for SAP confirmed a report in the German daily Mannheimer Morgen to this effect, adding that “in the worst case the appeal could take two years,” adding SAP was disappointed that Oracle continued to drag out the process.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

I just wish some cloud pundits stop saying SaaS companies somehow always do “pay by drink” and “no lock-in like legacy vendors” . There is plenty of lock-in for SaaS players, and I never really understood why some pundits try to portray otherwise. Customers are not stupid – they know how economics work for vendors, and they factor it into buying decisions.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

If you haven’t registered yet, be sure to use our partner promo code for a discount: ECMINFMTCA. There are also free keynote passes available.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The upcoming IPO could also enrich Workday’s more than 1,400 employees through the stock options that they have received as part of compensation packages.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Ellison clearly is taking the company seriously. He has mentioned Workday six times on Oracle’s past two earnings conference calls, by bragging about winning deals against his relatively little rival, or talking trash about why Workday’s products will stumble technologically. Observes Materne: “Ellison has been talking about them like they’re a $10 billion company,” when in fact Workday’s revenue this year may be $338 million, a fraction of Oracle’s projected $39 billion.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Apple, in yesterday’s filing, alleges Samsung continues to “flood the market with copycat products.” The maker of the iPhone has made similar allegations in the follow-on case before. In yesterday’s filing, Apple said Samsung has sold infringing products through August, including its “current flagship device, the Galaxy S III” smartphone.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

We have therefore proposed to the Java EE 7 Expert Group that we adjust our course of action — namely, stick to our current target release dates, and defer the remaining aspects of our agenda for PaaS enablement and multi-tenancy support to Java EE 8.

[So: from Q4 to “Spring” (aka Q2 following year) to half the features won’t be there but we still need to stick to the delayed schedule. Not good -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

There won’t be another PeopleSoft situation..
Employees’ pay is tied to customer satisfaction…
Customers can’t cancel early…
Workday’s intimate ties to its most prominent reference customer…
Workday’s financial battle against Oracle and SAP has a long way to go

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

If the new Lumia phones do not appeal to consumers when they are unveiled next Wednesday, it could mean the end for Nokia, and a serious blow to Microsoft’s attempts to regain its footing in the mobile market, analysts and investors said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

McDermott says he got a call from Hasso Plattner, who asked him to be the co-CEO of the company. So he asked who the co- would be. He called up Jim. He was flying to Hawaii that day for a sales recognition event. He says he had a long conversation with Snabe from outside a hotel on the big island of Hawaii, standing near a dumpster surrounded by a swarm of bees.
Anyway, he says there was a lack of connection between R&D and the value chain. The company needed leadership, a vision, a strategy, he says. McDermott says they spent two weeks recasting the company’s strategy.
McDermott says they try to focus on “keeping the main thing the main thing.” At SAP that’s being the market leader in business software and analytics. They targeted “innovation without disruption.” He says they could have tried a different strategy.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle broke out of its regular four-month patching cycle on Thursday to release Java 7 Update 7, an emergency security update that addressed three vulnerabilities, including two that were being exploited by attackers to infect computers with malware since last week.

Java 7 Update 7 also patched a “security-in-depth issue” which, according to Oracle, was not directly exploitable, but could have been used to aggravate the impact of other vulnerabilities.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Replacing Oracle? -DBM]
Workday, based in Pleasanton, California, would replace parts of Google’s home-grown human resources software for tens of thousands of its employees, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. The world’s largest Internet search engine has hired Deloitte LLP to help integrate Workday’s software, they said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Amazon next week will announce two 7-inch Kindle Fire models, one with new hardware and the other an updated version of the original, CNET has learned. That’s counter to rumors it would launch a larger version.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The company claims that Oracle Secure Global Desktop supports the broadest range of applications, including Web-based applications and standard Windows, Linux, UNIX, System i and System z applications. Is it worth considering? Yes, if you use Oracle products.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Her comments are sure to slap a lot of palms onto foreheads among the Java community, since a year ago Oracle was crowing that Java EE 7 would be “the best application server built for the cloud,” and that adding cloudy features to the platform was central to its strategy.

DeMichiel admitted that the lumbering, often near-glacial pace of the Java EE development effort must take at least part of the blame for its failure to produce timely support for cloudy enterprise Java apps.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Its upcoming T5 processor is a 28-nanometer shrink of the T4 shown at last year’s Hot Chips. When Oracle went from the T3 to the T4, it halved the core count from 16 to eight in order to focus instead on improving each core’s single-thread performance. The T5 will be back to 16 cores, each running at up to 3.6GHz, compared with 3GHz on the T4.

One of Oracle’s goals for the T5 was to put the chips in as many as eight sockets per server with “close to linear scaling,” Oracle’s Sebastian Turullols said at Hot Chips.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Our user experience hasn’t always been gorgeous,” McDermott said during the talk, which was moderated by the business-book author Geoffrey Moore.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

So while investors salivate about Workday’s IPO, I think customers owe Dave and Aneel and Stan and the entire team at Workday an even bigger hug. Workday has saved them over a billion so far, and yes, that gift will keep on giving, till on-premise vendors knock some sense into their hosting and application management partners to move to shared service models.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The markets for HCM and financial management applications are highly competitive, with relatively low barriers to entry for some applications or services. Our primary competitors are Oracle Corporation (Oracle) and SAP AG (SAP), well-established providers of HCM and financial management applications, which have long-standing relationships with many customers. Some customers may be hesitant to adopt cloud-based applications such as ours and prefer to upgrade the more familiar applications offered by these vendors that are deployed on-premise. Oracle and SAP are larger and have greater name recognition, much longer operating histories, larger marketing budgets and significantly greater resources than we do. These vendors, as well as other competitors, could offer HCM and financial management applications on a standalone basis at a low price or bundled as part of a larger product sale. In order to take advantage of customer demand for cloud-based applications, legacy vendors are expanding

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Assume that with anyone who uses our software there’s going to be a licensing fee,” says Joe LaRosa, head of global pricing at SAP. “What the exact fee is is something customers need to address with their account executive.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Workday brought in $134.4 million in revenue (an increase of 98 percent year-over-year), with a net loss of $79.6 million.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The company, backed by Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, was said to have confidentially filed for an IPO in July under the new “JOBS” Act, which lets companies keep financial details contained in IPO documents private for longer.

In a preliminary prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, the company listed Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs & Co as lead underwriters to the offering.

The filing did not reveal how many shares the company planned to sell or their expected price.

Workday intends to list its Class A common stock under the symbol “WDAY”, but did not reveal the exchange on which it will list the shares.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The two companies are keeping the lines of communication open at a high level against the backdrop of Apple’s decisive legal victory in a patent infringement case against Samsung, which uses Google’s Android software.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

He says Box tries to “fight the man” by making software from a consumer standpoint so it can easily be downloaded to any device and remain secure.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

This feature, which will be available in pilot form, “enables you to easily integrate a third-party application in Salesforce,” according to the notes.

It provides “a set of tools and JavaScript APIs (application programming interfaces) that you can use to expose an application as a canvas app,” the notes add. “This means you can take your new or existing applications and make them available to your users as part of their Salesforce experience.”

Third-party applications written in any language can be exposed as canvas apps, according to the notes. “The only requirement is that the app has a secure URL (HTTPS).”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Product Preview: Workday Time Tracking

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Somewhat flawed, somewhat slanted, but interesting nonetheless qualitatively… -DBM]
This startling figure shows that real operating cash flow (as adjusted above) has in fact declined in 2012.

But what I find even more of a concern is a look at some of the return metrics at Salesforce.com. They reveal a trend toward a broken business model.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle and Taleo Integration Plans

• Unified Profile that has Candidate, Employee and External Content

– Taleo, Fusion and External (LI/ FB)

• Recruiting to HR (Fusion, PeopleSoft and E-Business Suite)

–
–
–
–
–

Requisition Creation against open jobs/ positions in Fusion
Profile Synchronization for Jobs/ Positions
Search across external and internal candidate pools
Hire to Onboard to Employee Creation
Candidate Communication using OSN

• Superset Performance Product that has the best of Fusion and Taleo

– Performance, Goals, Talent Review, Succession, Career and Development Plans

• Learning

– Learning Paths/ Certifications/ Courses within Employee Profile
– Learning Integration to Fusion Performance, Goals and Succession
– Social Learning through OSN

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For example, on full HCM Suite deals, partners should lead with Fusion HCM, according to the document.

“Net-new” deals for performance management, which covers areas such as employee reviews, would involve Fusion Performance Management added onto a Fusion, PeopleSoft or E-Business Suite core HCM application, according to the document. One exception would be with sales to Taleo Recruiting customers; in that case, Taleo Performance management would be the add-on.

In the case of “full talent suite” deals, Taleo Performance Suite is positioned first, according to the document. “Deal MUST include all Talent modules (Recruiting, Learning, Performance and Compensation),” it adds. However, it’s “OK to lead with Fusion Performance in a full suite case if install base is Fusion HCM, or E-Business Suite HCM, or PeopleSoft HCM.”

Finally, a “full suite play” should involve Fusion HCM, Performance, and Compensation along with Taleo Recruiting and Taleo Learn, according to the document.

The docum

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The companies’ U.S. hiring plans are overshadowed by growth at home. Tata Consultancy plans to hire 50,000 employees this fiscal year in India, adding to the company’s total global workforce of 240,000.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

He said the council had no choice but to upgrade its IT systems, a move expected to save ratepayers $450 million.
[So, are they going to give that $450M back to ratepayers somehow? If not, it isn’t actually saving ratepayers anything … -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The distribution on CAC remained the same with companies spending anywhere from $0.5-3 for $1 of ACV. However, the results were more statistically significant this year. However, this year the cost to upsell to existing customers went down ($0.18 vs $0.28 in 2011) as did the cost to renew ($0.09 vs $0.16 in 2011). The CAC associated with field sales went down ($0.83 vs $1 in 2011) which I think is a function of the longer contracts that companies are able to sign through the use of field sales teams. The CAC associated with internet sales is the highest and has more than doubled from last year (median of $1.06 vs $0.45 in 2011). Finally, the percent of ACV associated with upsells is lower in 2012 than it was in 2011. This could be because more of the companies surveyed in 2012 are younger and are not as far along in their implementations with newly-signed customers to have the opportunity to upsell them, since of the companies that reported over $60M in annual revenue 40% of lice

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The End Game Is Driving Business Value Through Outcomes

The move to engagement platforms is not about a technology shift but a business value shift to achieving outcomes. Sophisticated organizations now buy business value through SLA’s. The solution provider who can deliver outcomes will win in the shift to engagement platforms regardless of whether its software, services, or delivery models. Thus, the business challenges will focus on engagement for:

The Future of Work
Next Generation Customer
Matrix Commerce
Data to Decisions
Digital Marketing Transformation

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Robert Enslin, President of Global Customer Operations at SAP, says the company’s cloud software strategy and big data offerings are propelling the stock.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Savitt will leave as chief executive officer of Lockerz to join Yahoo next month, reporting to Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer, who arrived in July from Google Inc. Savitt previously was marketing chief at teen-apparel chain American Eagle and worked at Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo said in a statement.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Maybe I’m naive, but I assumed that Oracle would have pre-integrated these connections. Note how Oracle repeatedly says “you need.” A customer—or prospective one—could easily flip that and say “no Oracle you need…” After all, the cloud is just supposed to work right? This post—and the integration it describes—looks painful. My key takeaways are the following:

You have to do the integration work here.
“Expecting the SaaS application to always be available at the time of occurrence of business events in the Oracle E-Business Suite application is not realistic.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In this ideal datacentre, everything – compute, storage, networking – runs as a service that can be managed by the same software platform. This is a top down model of datacentre administration, where the IT manager does not need to worry about a facility’s underlying hardware, but instead focuses on the technologies they are delivering to end users.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Unless the Galaxy S3 is hit, the patent loss to Samsung is manageable. Android will continue its March unless Apple finds a way to stop it in emerging markets like China.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Despite submitting a new, longer list, the search giant still insists that it never paid anyone for coverage of the trial.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“He yelled out,” Coutts said. “I think he was expecting me to come back, but there was no way I was coming back.”

A committee boat quickly fished Johnson out of the water. It was the first time he has been in a sailboat. “It was incredible,” he said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Kenexa, a leading provider of recruiting and talent management solutions, brings a unique combination of Cloud-based technology and consulting services that integrates both people and processes, providing solutions to engage a smarter, more effective workforce across their most critical business functions.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

IBM says Kenexa will allow it to create “smarter workforce” tools to boost customer service, foster internal innovation and expert discovery. Sound familiar? Oracle, SAP and Salesforce have similar plans.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Sure, the company doesn’t have every feature of all these companies products, nor does Workday offer a robust applicant tracking system, a learning management system, a recognition and rewards system, or many other HR applications. And for now the company has an open API and middleware framework that lets Workday partner with many incumbent HR software companies to implement a “platform as a service” solution.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

@Benioff also mentioned that clothier Burberry has inked a Social Enterprise License Agreement with Salesforce.com. This license model, first announced last year, gives companies the ability to “acquire all of our products in one concept: sales, service, marketing, platform all as one unit,” Benioff said. At Dreamforce, Salesforce.com will reveal how many such license deals it has landed, and showgoers “will be impressed,” he added.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Who you follow on Twitter says a lot about you, it’s the kind of demographic data that’s could actually be insanely valuable. Dustin Curtis explains the reasoning behind why this follow graph is so important. Compare it to who you friend on Facebook, for example. I’m friends with old high school classmates with whom I have little in common and I’m frankly much less likely to follow a brand page on Facebook than I am a Twitter account: the barrier is lower. I’m also constantly tweaking who I do and don’t follow on Twitter, providing the company with near real-time analytics on what my interests are on any given day. With Facebook, it’s more about aggregation of friends than day-to-day culling. Twitter’s follow graph contains the kind of information that Twitter could use to help advertisers better target me and it could potentially have “great value” if Twitter could find a way to fully monetize it.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The jury found that Samsung infringed on patents for ’381 “bounce back” scrolling functionality on all devices.

On the ’915 patent, relating to one finger to scroll, two to pinch and zoom navigation, all but three Samsung devices (Ace, Intercept and Replenish) infringed.

For Apple’s ’163 patent (tap to zoom) all Samsung devices except Captivate, Indulge, Intercept, Nexus S 4G, Transform and Vibrant infringed.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Instant gratification infographics, cuteness, comics, and pop culture get liked on Facebook.
APIs, datasets, visualizations related to techie sites (Delicious, foursquare, Twitter, LinkedIn), and picture-less articles get tweeted instead.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

By revamping its logo, Microsoft is trying to signal that it has changed its thinking and its products to cater to people who are interacting with technology much differently than just a decade ago, let alone a quarter century.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Zing™ is a 100% Java-compatible JVM based on Oracle HotSpot. Zing is optimized for Linux deployments and designed for enterprise applications and workloads that require large memory, high transaction rates, low latency, consistent response times and high sustained throughput, Zing is the only JVM that can elastically grow its application memory heap based on real-time demand and still guarantee response times.

At its core, Zing uses the Azul C4 (Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector) which eliminates “stop-the-world” pauses which limit the scalability of all traditional JVMs. Zing also includes a management and monitoring platform with a zero-overhead, always-on visibility tool called Zing Vision and the Zing Resource Controller management tool.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Innovation is a challenge within a big company,” he admitted.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP HANA database differs from disk-based relational database engines, with respect to the lifecycle of database inserts. As the paper summarizes, it “aims at illustrating how the SAP HANA database is able to efficiently work in analytical as well as transactional workload environments.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Salesforce hasn’t chosen a specific location yet, according to Schmitt. But public agency correspondence reviewed by The Oregonian suggests that the company is likely to pick a site in Washington County, where real estate prices are cheaper than in Portland.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

New features include R ports for the Solaris and AIX OSes, adding to existing support for Linux and Windows environments, Oracle said. Oracle has also extended R support to its TimesTen in-memory database.

In addition, Oracle will deliver an open-source distribution of R that can work with the Sunperf, MKL and ACML math libraries, which are provided by Oracle, Intel and AMD, respectively. This will allow R “to run extremely fast on all compatible hardware,” Oracle said in a statement.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“For an Oracle customer who is considering the product, the integrated capture with the Oracle database is a huge win,” said Brad Adelberg, Oracle vice president of development, of the new version of GoldenGate.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

With reserved instances, companies pay a reservation fee for an instance up front and a much lower hourly rate for use of that instance.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

But then it updated its third-quarter guidance saying it would lose between 26 cents and 27 cents a share, on revenue between $773 million and $777 million and hit non-GAAP earnings of 31 or 32 cents per share. Analysts were looking for 34 cents on $771 million in revenue.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Will Salesforce have to acquire an email marketing and lead generation partner? The company to data has focused its marketing cloud on social and Benioff nearly declared e-mail pitches as dead. However, email marketing can be effective. Benioff indicated that Salesforce’s marketing cloud could add email at some point—most likely via acquisition.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Now I’m not saying that we won’t include at some point e-mail and lead nurturing into our marketing cloud…We’re expecting to reach over 100,000 total attendees [at Dreamforce], 70,000 registered on-premise attendees and over 30,000 attending online.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The home team, ORACLE TEAM USA, put on a show for its fans in San Francisco on Thursday, grabbing the top two spots in the first race and leading the fleet racing standings at the AC World Series San Francisco at the end of the day two.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The downbeat sentiment was largely attributed to the company’s guidance for the upcoming period ending in October. Excluding certain items, the company stated that it expected earnings in a range of $0.31 to $0.32, which falls short of the average expectation of $0.34 by analysts. The lowered guidance has largely been attributed to increased competition as companies like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP AG (SAP) move more aggressively into this cloud computing model.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Photos of America’s Cup warm up races in San Francisco Bay -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

However, the hearing was so short that Judge William Alsup even said to Google lead attorney Robert Van Nest, “Thank you for your brevity.”

Basically, nothing new was decided and relatively nothing new was said by either party.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

On a conference call with analysts, Benioff was his usual perky self. He noted:

Service cloud has hit a $500 million annual revenue run rate.
Developers have coded more than 300,000 applications on Force.com.
Nestle has rolled out Salesforce to 300,000 employees.
Salesforce is near its first 1 billion transaction day.
Salesforce has $500 million annual revenue run rates in Europe and Asia.
And not too surprisingly, Benioff touted Dreamforce and added it will be the largest enterprise software powwows ever with Richard Branson, Virgin Chairman, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt and even Tony Robbins. What will Robbins do? He will “run an entire day focused on how to transform yourself into the next generation social enterprise,” said Benioff.

By the numbers:

In the second quarter, subscription and support revenue was up 35 percent from a year ago. Services revenue was up 20 percent. The bulk of Salesforce’s revenue is subscription and support.
Deferred revenue in

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

i think it’s terrific. enterprise software as a service play that’s the king of the cloud. it’s got amazing software, fantastic management. this stock has been a terrific long-term performer but it’s been stalled and it’s down over the last 12 months including an after hours drubbing despite blow away operating and sales. let’s talk to the founder, chairman and ceo to find out more about the quarter and where the company is headed.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

He said: “At Dreamforce we”ll be announcing Work.com. We’ll also have Aneel Bhusri, the CEO of Workday, and you’ll see how we’re working with them… You’ll see Workday’s integration with Chatter.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For the current quarter, Salesforce said it sees adjusted earnings of 31 cents to 32 cents a share, below the estimate of 34 cents a share from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. The company also said it sees third-quarter revenue of between $773 million to $777 million, above analysts’ estimated $771 million.

The company also raised its full-year view and now expects earnings of $1.48 to $1.51 a share and revenue of about $3.03 billion to $3.04 billion. Its earlier estimates called for earnings of $1.45 a share to $1.49 a share on revenue of between $2.99 billion to $3.03 billion.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The problems stem from communication issues between the software’s student financials and financial aid modules, said Casey Hanson, director of new media and communications for WSU Information Services, in an interview Thursday.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The Bottom Line: Give Notice, Leave Your Options Open.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Samsung did score a minor victory during the day, however, when it came to the question of “adverse inference.” Back in July, Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal ruled that the jury in the trial should be told that Samsung had improperly handled evidence. Judge Koh, while agreeing with Judge Grewal’s order, also felt that Apple hadn’t been as rigorous as it could have been in preserving evidence on its side, either. (Apple had been successful in establishing August 10, 2010 as the starting date for the conflict between the two companies, but internally Apple hadn’t warned employees that litigation was a possibility — and that they should preserve all documentation — until the following year.)

While Judge Koh declined to decide upon the issue when it was first brought up, at the end of the day Apple attorney Michael Jacobs asked Koh for “guidance” on her final decision. She told him that she was prepared to tell the jury that both sides had shown neglect. Apple and Samsung agreed that if some

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

A new time tracking application. A simplified user experience. And more mobile and global.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Flawed analysis: says Oracle’s maintenance is services, but IBM’s is software?!? -DBM]

As you can see, Software is now the biggest contributor to IBM’s profit. And it is expected to grow to more than 50% of profit over the next few years:

IBM segment profit

How does IBM’s software businesses compare to those at other big software and IT companies?

It’s in the big leagues.

IBM generated about $25 billion of software revenue last year.

IBM operating margin

Oracle, meanwhile, known as a software company, generated only $26 billion–and the majority of that was for updated licenses and “support,” which is also known as “services.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Salesforce.com is receiving state tax credits worth about $10.4 million over 10 years to expand its operations in Chicago, with plans to create 200 new jobs and move into a new River North office.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Gov. Pat Quinn issued a joint announcement about Salesforce.com, which is headquartered in San Francisco and provides a number of cloud-based software applications to help companies manage sales, customer relationships and employee collaboration. The technology company has leased more than 100,000 square feet at 111. W. Illinois St., where it will base its corporate sales office for the Midwest. World Business Chicago, the city’s non-profit economic development arm, worked with Salesforce.com over the last year, according to a press release.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Mr. Andreessen, who sits on the boards of Hewlett-Packard and eBay, also had plenty of criticism for Mr. Sacks’s big incumbents, pointing out that first, there are only a “few competent incumbents.” Many, he argued, are prone to the pitfalls of incumbency, including placing a higher priority on “stability over change” and losing talent to nimble young start-ups.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Unless you’re smoking crack, you know these witnesses aren’t going to be called.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“In the Court’s view, Google has failed to comply with the August 7 order,” he wrote.

“Please simply do your best but the impossible is not required,” Alsup wrote. “Oracle managed to do it. Google can do it too by listing all commenters known by Google to have received payments as consultants, contractors, vendors, or employees.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Social media is still in a nascent stage. It is still evolving and there are certainly missteps along the way. However, businesses are embracing collaboration across the enterprise. The principles of social media are evolving to allow companies to interact directly with their customers or across their organizations in an open and meaningful way. The problem with the “social is dead for business” thinking is caused by not understanding its value. As if the current market valuation of Groupon was the only litmus test needed for success.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For both proponents and critics of India’s patent laws, the supreme court’s interpretation will set an important precedent. Foreign drug companies see India as a growing market, but perhaps more importantly as a potential model for other developing countries’ patent regulations. If the court rules in favor of Novartis’ claim, aid groups worry it will set off numerous new patent claims making it impossible for India to produce cheap generics of all sorts. But the court is unlikely to lower the standard thereby granting Novartis a patent, says Shamnad Bhasheer. The Indian laws were designed specifically to favor public health interests, and the court would likely only lower the standard if it believed that innovation, particularly by Indian companies, was being stifled.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“How many [viable] ideas like that are left?” Sacks, who was a TechCrunch50 winner, asks?

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle’s boat has hundreds of sensors embedded throughout its hulls, in the underwater fins and up the length of the mast. They’re connected by wire to a server in a waterproof box in one of the hulls. The server uses a single wireless access point to distribute data to computerized “wrist watches” and other devices worn by the crew. The others teams in the race are expected to employ a similar set-up.

The computer tells the crews the optimal moment to tack or jibe, or when to trim the sails to increase their speed. It does this by looking at measurements including the “bend, twist and rake” of the mast, which helps it to calculate the “true” wind from the apparent wind experienced on the moving boat.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The event will be September 17-19, 2012, in Chicago, and will kick off with an opening keynote by Django co-creator Jacob Kaplan-Moss on what led the Django open source community to designate PostgreSQL as its default database. It will mark the first time the Django Project publicly addressed its support for PostgreSQL.

The Postgres Open conference was established last year by a group of major contributors within the Postgres Community. Selena Deckelmann, an independent database consultant who helped launch the event, said the goal was to spur greater dialogue among business users of Postgres. The event provides a venue for business executives, database administrators and developers to exchange experiences and best practices for using Postgres to support business objectives.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Red Hat Inc. launched its own distribution of OpenStack this week. Rackspace launched public cloud services based on the open source cloud software stack earlier this month, and other companies with OpenStack offerings on the market include Hewlett-Packard Co., Canonical’s Ubuntu, Dell Inc., Piston Cloud Computing and Nebula.

OpenStack isn’t just a package like other open source tools, said Lydia Leong, research vice president at Gartner Inc., based in Stamford, Conn. It’s an entire framework, which means it will be more difficult to keep the different components in lockstep with one another. Also, any given OpenStack product could theoretically contain whatever combination of those components its creator feels like including, along with proprietary extensions.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Tips for #Dreamforce (also good for other #EnSW conferences) http://dlvr.it/223GCM #DF12 #DF12Tips

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

I don’t think so.

Is Oracle damaging MySQL by taking the wrong steps? Probably so.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The new Itanium NonStop servers arrive just a week after HP emerged triumphant in the first phase of a legal battle against Oracle, over Itanium software support.

“The NS2100 doesn’t replace any server, but extends the NonStop portfolio to more customers, and is targeted at financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, and healthcare industries, and emerging markets,” Mark Pollans, Worldwide NonStop Product Manager at HP, told ServerWatch. “Think of any markets NonStop is currently serving, but in smaller countries, operations and businesses.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Gram will leverage “the core strengths” of those products, with the end goal of building “a technology that will unleash the freedom of the web.” Again, we can only speculate as to what that means, but it seems to us that webOS will be playing a smaller role in the overall mission of Gram.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Gram is a new company. We are in stealth mode on our product offering.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Solomon declined to elaborate on the unique technology HP’s Windows 8 tablet will contain, but he did paint it as a product that is tailor-made for the channel. Judging from his characterization, it appears that HP will target vertical markets in its initial Windows 8 tablet push.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

HP this week announced two enhancements to its Flex Fabric data center networking strategy that will put it on firmer footing against rival Cisco and extend its push into the private cloud.

HP’s Multitenant Device Context (MDC) software partitions a single switch into multiple virtual switches, ensuring separation between groups such as different tenants. The company’s Ethernet Virtual Interconnect (EVI) extends Layer 2 networking over the WAN and competes with Cisco’s Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) and Virtual Device Context on the Nexus 7000. EVI and MDC combined form the framework for HP’s cloud networking and will be available free as a software upgrade in the fourth quarter for HP’s FlexFabric A12500 switches. Since EVI and MDC are included with the A12500 software, HP claims its core switch with Layer 2 extensions costs just 56% of Cisco’s Nexus 7000 with similar capabilities.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Dell has won cautiously upbeat reviews for an aggressive bid to reinvent itself from a vendor of commodity products, led by PCs, to a stronger competitor in higher-margin equipment and services used in the data centers and other corporate applications.

But it’s been a tough strategic switch for Dell…
Analysts say Dell could show some improvement in the corporate IT market, especially with servers based on Intel Corp.’s INTC -0.38% new Romley processor.

“We expect Dell to continue losing share in the PC market, while its sales of enterprise solutions will take time to ramp up,” Lamba wrote. “Our checks indicate that there was strong momentum behind Romley-based servers among small and medium-sized businesses during the quarter, which should help partially offset the slowdown in PCs.”

The second half of the year is expected to be a critical period for the PC industry in general with the roll-out of Windows 8, Microsoft Corp.’s MSFT -0.52% new PC operating system.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

At the moment, Burson is handling enterprise business and software; Porter is working on marcomms and product publicity, including work on the PC and printer divisions; and Edelman is the lead agency on corporate communications functions, such as crisis, employee engagement, and government relations.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Kerala has finalised the master plan for its biggest information technology park, Technocity, where software majors like Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys are setting up their new campuses.
Technocity, spread across 450 acres on either side of the national highway on the outskirts of the capital city, will offer state-of-art infrastructure facilities for intending investors.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“It’s not a serious offence, but it is a failure that exposes a lack of proper governance, which I would presume [HP] would immediately attend to,” he told ZDNet Australia.

Both parties have failed to demonstrate an adequate amount of governance, but HP is likely mainly at fault, Hansell said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Our new Mobility Global Business Unit initially will focus on consumer tablets and will expand to additional segments and categories where we believe we can offer differentiated value to our customers,” the memo reads.

[Reminds me of that Charlie Sheen “Anger Management” commercial: “Hey, everyone deserves a 24th chance!” -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

On the legal front, Nayyar said, the company has settled some claims while one matter was awaiting judicial decision.

“We have also issued a bank guarantee in favour of the Income Tax Department, while vigorously contesting its claim to levy tax on fictitious income,” he said.

The country’s biggest ever accounting fraud came to light at the erstwhile Satyam in 2009 after its then Chairman and founder B Ramalinga Raju admitted to inflating cash and bank balances, non-existent accrued interest, understating liabilities and overstating debtors position at the company.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

MOVES is based on Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM, and provides a 360-degree view of citizen relationships and consolidated view of all business functions. “Right now, most DMVs have implemented software in a siloed way depending on the type of license. This focuses solely on process without factoring in the customer or the amount of time involved,” he says.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Dell, which was best known for its hardware, is transforming itself into a full-fledged IT solutions company. That’s where the services leg — which is an over $8-billion business for Dell — becomes critical.

The applications and BPO business of the company which Vaswani manages came to Dell from the Perot acquisition. The thrust here is on the mid-market. The strategy is to “design the product to address the mid-market and extend it to address the enterprise”, says Vaswani. The focus is three verticals: health care, BFSI and retail & manufacturing. Mobility and cloud being other areas of major interest.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

There were “data sovereignty” concerns that had to be addressed—in essence, the personal data on Australian citizens had to be stored on Aussie soil and not in Germany (or in any other country), even though SAP data centers’ possess internationally recognized regulatory compliance certifications, Kennedy points out.

“Concerns in relation to offshore holding and processing of our data were assessed and managed as part of our overall risk based evaluation,” he notes. “Data contained within the ERP system is not classified or protected, and the most sensitive information was identified as staff payroll and HR related data.”

Therefore, payroll and HR data will stay within the borders of New South Wales, Kennedy notes, with only a subset of that data passed to the foreign data center to enable integration of the entire system.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Waste Management had been seeking more than $1 billion in damages from SAP, but the parties entered mediation in March 2010 and soon reached an agreement for the $80 million, according to SAP’s complaint against Swiss Re, which was filed last month in a Delaware court. The action was removed last week by Swiss Re to U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“The August 7 order was not limited to authors ‘paid . . . to report or comment’ or to ‘quid pro quo’ situations,” Alsup wrote in an order filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. “Rather, the order was designed to bring to light authors whose statements about the issues in the case might have been influenced by the receipt of money from Google or Oracle.”

“For example, Oracle has disclosed that it retained a blogger as a consultant,” Alsup added, referring to Florian Mueller , a frequent commenter on patent and open-source software issues. “Even though the payment was for consulting work, the payment might have influenced the blogger’s reports on issues in the civil action.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Palmer failed to prove his claims against Infosys—including breach of contract and fraudulent misrepresentation—under Alabama state law and therefore had no right to recover damages from the $6 billion outsourcing provider.

Palmer claimed he was harassed, threatened and eventually sidelined when he filed an internal whistleblower claim that indicating that Infosys was misusing U.S. work visas. Specifically, the judge noted that as an at-will employment, “absent a contract providing otherwise, [an] employee may be demoted, denied a promotion, or otherwise adversely treated for any reason, good or bad, or even for no reason at all.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)