How SAP Missed An Opportunity
Hello, it’s me again. Your Friendly SAP — foe? If you follow me you know that I admire the technical prowess of SAP, but despise about twice as much their marketing “acumen” (there are no other words that are politically correct and fit nicely between quotation marks). I wrote about it in more detail in […]
Danger zone: Enterprise maintenance and support
Recently, a client asked for advice on whether to continue paying on-premise maintenance and support to a major software vendor. Support is a complicated issue for many IT organizations, with the pros and cons generally as follows: Why vendor-supplied enterprise support is valuable Avoiding risk: When the system has problems, you know who to call […]
How Oracle’s Cloud Strategy Is Turning Into A Lesson In Humility
Oracle_Corporation_HQ (Photo credit: Revolweb) In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, humility is defined as the quality or condition of being humble; having modest opinion or estimate of one’s own importance. These are qualities not typically found in enterprise software vendors, Oracle included. On Oracle’s fiscal Q4, 2013 earnings call last week, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that […]
The Oracle Assessment
Oracle is huge. No single assessment does this complex IT provisioner justice. While many of my peers speak of some tech companies in single-word assessments, I struggle with Oracle. And, let me get this out of the way right now, I actually like some of the stuff they’re doing, I question some others and am […]
Intacct’s CEO Robert Reid On Growing A Successful Cloud Business
Selling software to accountants, auditors and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) takes accuracy, precision and software quality to an entirely new dimension. Having worked at a start-up selling hosted accounting and finance applications to small and medium businesses, I’ve seen first-hand how demanding these professionals can be. And rightly so, the system of record they manage […]
The Month IT & ERP Permanently Changed
It’s been a busy month of software events. But, taken together, they point to several major and permanent changes that will shape IT and ERP for decades. This (originally seven part) look at these changes spans hardware, HR software, the ERP leaderboard, changing buyer sophistication and more.
Oracle OpenWorld 2012 So Far
I’ve been at OpenWorld for two days as I file this but so far, I have little CRM oriented material. CRM really kicks in on Wednesday when the company focuses on CX or customer experience the moniker that Oracle has given to much of its CRM focus. CX is good for what Oracle is about […]
OOW Keynote, Larry Ellison
I honestly thought I was going to have to wait longer to hear anyone from Oracle talk about seriously focusing the company’s hardware and software lines on the Cloud. True, they’ve been saying cloud-like things for a couple of years but the pronouncements were features and functions that added something to the cloud discussion without […]
Enterprise Headlines and Highlights, 2012-06-15
Highlights of enterprise software and solutions news from the past two weeks. Acquisitions, lawsuits, IT failures, Oracle’s cloud announcements (yawn!), some humor, and and Larry joins the twitterverse @larryellison (but still just one tweet!). Yammer Agrees to Sell Itself to Microsoft Business-software company Yammer Inc. agreed to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. for $1.2 billion, […]
Inforum: The Enterprise Climbers
Bill Starke’s sculpture in the lobby of the Hyatt in Denver I stayed at this week is a good metaphor for the changing enterprise software industry. In general, everyone treats SAP and Oracle as the pursued, and SaaS vendors as the pursuers. Infor is generally talked about as a list of 70,000 customers on every […]
