Enterprise Headlines and Highlights, 2012-10-21

There is a real tendency if you already have an on premise solution to:

ensure you don’t cannibalize the revenue coming in from that solution
use the pricing of the existing solution to determine the price of the SaaS version

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

Google doesn’t really care if Android makes it in the enterprise. It’s a consumer platform. The cloud-centric Chrome is its enterprise play.

Let’s recap:

The first Chromebook was released at $349 more than a year ago. The price was good, but not great. But Samsung’s sleek new $249 Chromebook aggressively undercuts the $499 iPad on price the way many observers thought Microsoft needed to do with the Surface RT.

Instead, it’s the new Chromebook that is:

– half the price of the iPad and the Surface RT;

– half to one-third the price of Windows 8 convertible tablets (see my gallery of 17 of them here). Without keyboards, most of these Atom-based ‘tabtops’ or ‘laptablets’ run between $500 and $900;

– one-third to one-fourth the price of Windows 8 ultrabooks, which run between $800 to $1,200.

At these prices, what CIO or IT manager wouldn’t give the Chromebook a serious look?

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

Twenty five percent of the nation’s startups and 52% of those in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants.

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

A data governance initiative must build competencies, assign roles and responsibilities and invest in technologies to enable these core processes no matter the scope and scale of your business objectives. A pilot data governance project focusing on improving the quality or security of a single data item, phone number as an example, should follow the same approach as a holistic data governance function that’s managing all business critical data assets. The difference of course is the level of effort, time, resources and enabling technologies required to effectively deliver business value. The process to validate, cleanse, improve, and monitor the quality of ‘phone number’ in a single application for a single business unit – while far from being a miniscule task -will be significantly less effort than managing hundreds, thousands or more business critical data entities across an entire global enterprise.

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

Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc @Benioff opens Cloudforce New York live from the Javits Center. He shares his insights into how the social revolution is changing business as we know it. He speaks with Martha Poulter, CIO, GE Capital, about how salesforce.com products have transformed the way that GE does business.

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

Google. Microsoft. Facebook. Intel. Hewlett-Packard. What do these companies have in common? All got fabulously rich on business models that thrived on traditional personal computers. All are struggling to adapt to a new world in which mobile devices will dominate. All are getting punished by investors in the meantime.

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

820 venture capital deals raised $6.9 billion during the third quarter, a 32% drop in funding compared with the same period a year earlier.

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

The biggest miss appears to have been from Motorola…Google still missed across the board…Google’s advertising cost per click is falling…Google says it wasn’t planning an early release, which sent the stock cratering…Google is giving up a huge chunk of its gains for the past several weeks.

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

The filing was made under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, which allows companies to file to go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission without disclosing those documents to the public until it nears an IPO.

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

Simmer said the team is due to receive a new wing sail early in the new year. That wing sail, being built in Auckland, New Zealand, was to have been used for a second AC72 catamaran. The platform for the second boat, including the hulls and crossbeams, is being built in San Francisco.

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

Among those that got away: photo-sharing service Instagram, which was sold to Facebook Inc. for $1 billion earlier this year; social scrapbooking site Pinterest Inc.; GitHub Inc., which lets developers write and collaborate on software projects; and Path Inc., a social-networking service.

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

Marketing Cloud ecosystem enables companies to identify sales leads, discover advocates, uncover social influence, track sentiment in multiple languages and more – empowering marketers to make better business decisions based on social media data, Salesforce.com said.

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

@Benioff maintained that Salesforce.com isn’t keen on going further into back-office processes for now. “We integrate with the back-office providers like SAP and Oracle but we want to be that dominant front-office provider, and that’s the piece we’re focused on,” he said.

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

Though the sagging PC sales were expected, some analysts said they were surprised by a step back in growth at other parts of the company, including in the division selling back-office software that runs on server systems. The 8% revenue increase in that division, called Server & Tolls, is a comedown from prior quarters—perhaps a sign businesses have curtailed spending on computer technology.

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

Today there are over half a billion Android devices-half a billion – with 1.3 million more being activated every day. You should all run out and buy the Nexus 7 tablet for $199. It’s had rave reviews and recently won “Gadget of the Year” from T3, the gadget experts. You’ll love the integration with Google Play. It is an amazing device.

This time last year I announced that our run-rate for mobile advertising hit $2.5 billion. That seemed like a pretty big number — even for Google. Now we have built up additional mobile revenue from users paying for content and apps in Google Play. Including these new sources grossed up, I can announce our new run-rate for mobile is now over $8 billion. That’s quite a business.

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

Windows will now consist of two very different user experiences bound into a single package. The idea is it’s a one-size-fits-all operating system, which can run on everything from older, mouse-driven PCs to touch-controlled tablets without compromise. Everything from a touch-based weather app to mouse-driven Excel will run on it. That’s a big contrast to Apple’s approach, which uses separate operating systems for its iPad tablets and more standard Mac computers.

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

Windows 8 has a new Start screen and features that work well with today’s touch-based user interaction

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

Some 30% of online buyers began researching their last online purchase with Amazon, compared with 13% researching a product on Google, according to a new Forrester survey of nearly 4,000 US respondents.’

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

Trading was halted on Google stock after the price plunged Thursday, following the early release of Q3 earnings reports.

The company’s stock was plunging after it released its third-quarter earnings report early, apparently by mistake.

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

The second paragraph of the press release merely read “Pending Larry quote,” suggesting that space was reserved for comment from CEO Larry Page.

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

“Google continues to rocket forward. Let’s not forget Apple was slammed back in July and they’re doing just fine,” Ken Marlin, an analyst at Marlin & Associates, told FOX Business. “I do think it’s a buying opportunity.”

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

Oracle, like many companies, is sitting on billions in cash right now. Does anything change after the election? Do you see anything loosening up in terms of business?

A: Stability is always good for the economy. I’d have to say hopefully with the election, we gain stability, and the ability to focus on growth in the economy. If that happens, it’s going to be even better. There’s no question to us a growth economy is better than not.

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

Join our webcast for a walkthrough of SAP NetWeaver Cloud’s great features:

Standards-based development and run-time environment, so no lock-in or steep learning curve
Connectivity service that enables native integration with SAP and non SAP systems –
on-premise or cloud-based
Federated identity management across cloud and on-premise applications, via SAP’s ID service (authentication, SSO)
Portal capability for quickly building websites that connect applications, reports and unstructured content from SAP and non-SAP sources

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

[Only 1 Oracle Exalytics job posted on Dice.com – and it is at Oracle -DBM]

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

[Still only 76 SAP HANA jobs posted on Dice.com, mostly with SAP SI’s like IBM and Deloitte -DBM]

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

So this means that Hana on Amazon is geared toward smaller businesses or smaller apps and isn’t really a replacement for buying the Hana appliance, or for using SAP’s new cloud, for a typical enterprise database. As for those other fees, Hana One costs 99 cents an hour, plus another $2.50 per hour for the Amazon hardware that provides 60GB of RAM. That’s a total of $3.49 per hour. Amazon could charge other fees, too, depending on how much data is being used.

To compare, SAP’s entry-level price for Hana for companies that aren’t already using its other business software starts at roughly $52,000.

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

$0.99 per hour.

The service will be offered on AWS in instances with RAM capacities as high as 60GB. Customers will be able to purchase and provision the instances through the AWS Marketplace portal.

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

Starting up an SAP HANA instance on AWS takes only a few minutes, plus some time to download, install and configure SAP HANA Studio. If you have done it before, all those tasks combined will take much less than 30 minutes. And if you have never done it before, we put the required steps at your fingertips at www.cloud.saphana.com.

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

[92 Oracle Exadata jobs posted at Dice.com, across a broad range of employers -DBM]

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

Conventional wisdom tells us that CIOs should focus on “feeds and speeds,” which is another way to describe infrastructure and applications. However, that coventional wisdom is wrong; today’s CIO must become a business leader who stands on equal footing with other C-level counterparts. That’s the best way to avoid Bob Evan’s four threats that lead to CIO suicide.

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

Why might Salesforce be motivated to ditch Oracle? For one, there’s the cost — though Monash speculates that Salesforce has a favorable licensing deal with Oracle. And there’s the apparent hostility between Benioff and Ellison.

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

SAP jumped into the cloud platform-as-a-service market on Tuesday by launching the first in a series of planned cloud-based application services and database services. Announced at the vendor’s annual TechEd conference in Las Vegas, the new services make SAP a more comprehensive cloud player and open up new points of competition with the likes of Oracle and Salesforce.com.

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

Workday has been actively poaching talent from other Bay Area companies with many new recruits going back to their previous employers to lure their former co-workers. According to some industry insiders, Workday has also been offering its employees referral bonuses starting at $5,000 to motivate new talent acquisition. Workday founders Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri have a reputation for being role models with their open and transparent leadership styles; however, Workday is also known to operate like a sweat shop with employees averaging at least 60 hours a week.

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

A nearly $8 million, 72-foot catamaran used by the Oracle Team USA, the defending America’s Cup champion, capsized during practice near the Golden Gate Bridge Tuesday and was severely damaged. There were no injuries but the $2 million wing of the new ship was was “damaged beyond recognition,” team officials said.

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

So, at some point, maybe in 2013, Virgin’s seatback video screen will greet you by name and know your Elevate status when you sit down on your flight. It will offer you food and drink based on what you’ve ordered on previous flights.

If your flight is delayed, it will push information to your seatback regarding connecting flight information or changes– and provide you with alternatives before you land. It will also provide access to your Elevate account.

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

64 GB with Black Touch Cover

Pre-order now for delivery by 10/26

$699.00
32 GB with Black Touch Cover

Pre-order now for delivery by 10/26

$599.00
32 GB without Black Touch Cover

Order now for shipment within 3 weeks

$499.00

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

What is the strategy for growth at Oracle?

A: We’ve got a fairly simple strategy. Offer customers best-of-breed technology at every level. Second, integrate those technologies into engineered systems where we do the work for the customer, make it simpler. Third, we are moving our application suite to the cloud with what we call fusion cloud applications. And fourth, we are focused on industries. That strategy manifests a whole suite of products that we’ve announced over the past, you know, year and a half, two years. As part of that strategy, we’re spending $5 billion of R&D this year and rolling products out into that strategy. And we think it’s going to the core of this trend you see in IT, which is how do I just make things simpler? How do I make it easier? How do I modernize it, standardize my IT infrastructure?

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

“The first two SDKs available are for Java and PHP. The Rackspace Cloud SDK for Java leverages the popular jclouds open-source library. It has full support for OpenStack Nova (Rackspace Cloud Servers) and OpenStack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files),” the company announced. “The Rackspace Cloud SDK for PHP uses the Rackspace-developed php-opencloud library, which supports Nova, Swift, Rackspace Cloud Networks (preview access), and Rackspace Cloud Databases. “

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

The first Surface tablet, Microsoft’s dramatic foray into the hardware business, is available for pre-order starting today. It will be available for purchase in stores starting Oct. 26.

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

European regulators did not explicitly call Google’s policy illegal but identified a range of shortcomings that they said could undermine user privacy and confidence in the company. The regulators made numerous recommendations that would allow Google to improve compliance. “As data protection regulators, we expect that Google takes the necessary steps to improve information and clarify the combination of data, and more generally ensure compliance with data protection laws and principles,” the letter said.

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

“As a high-tech entrepreneur and someone who has actually used Google’s advertising tools to grow my businesses, I encourage the Commission to tread carefully and not undertake action that would compromise the important service provided by Google, reduce Google’s ability to rapidly innovate and improve its products, or make search engine results less useful for consumers or businesses,” he wrote.

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

Much as Salesforce might like to move off Oracle altogether, for cost as much as bragging rights, completely junking Oracle is probably not an option anytime soon. It is not clear that Postgres could operate at anything like the scale of Salesforce. Even if it could, Salesforce would have to spend a lot of time assuring customers that their data would not be affected. Given the marketing zeal of Salesforce, in fact, it would probably make a case that life was becoming even more fabulous.

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

Responsibilities:
* Design and implement major pieces of the salesforce.com core database infrastructure
* Formulate, implement, and evaluate algorithms and database techniques to support service scalability and stability

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

“Oracle’s products are a mishmash” of different kinds of software, Mr. Bhusri said. “It’s the same for SAP.”

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

Holy crap.

Workday is off to a spectacular public market debut. After coming public Friday at $28 a share, the provider of cloud-based HR software rallied 74% on the first day of trading – and today is up another 8%. The stock lately is trading at $52.67, up another $3.98.

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

WDAY is significantly trailing CRM@7 years. WDAY’s revenues are 43% of CRM@7’s revenues (134m vs. 310m), yet Workday’s costs are 73% of CRM@7’s (213m vs. 290m). That’s a big discrepancy. Where are these costs coming from?

Well, Workday had 1096 employees to CRM@7’s 1304 (i.e. Workday had 84% of CRM@7’s number of employees to produce 43% of their revenue, yet still incur 73% of their costs). That means WDAY saw $122k rev per employee vs. CRM@7’s $238k rev per employee, so nearly a 2x favor to CRM@7.

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