
Oracle’s Approach Makes Sense (But It Sucks)
If you follow the conference circuit you’d know that Oracle held its user group conference this past week – Oracle Openworld 2014 was held at the Moscone Center between Sunday afternoon and — well, today officially. First off, I did not attend in person. I watched the keynotes from the comfort of my home office […]
Oracle’s “Modern” Apps
Steve Miranda led an excellent session this morning on Oracle’s growing hortizontal apps empire. Set on a stage with a sweeping view of downtown San Francisco and the Bay it reflected the expansive portfolio it has built and acquired. The session was crisp and covered wide ground in three parts – a) an update on […]

Workdays quiet leadership
In 2009, I wrote a blog about Parker Harris, the co-founder of Salesforce.com titled The Loneliness of a Pioneer. I wrote “..in some ways he wishes the larger vendors would be there today. There are common engineering and plumbing challenges every competitor hits which are useful to share experiences around. It would be good for the […]

Workday: Linking technology design and user experience
Workday is among the most high-profile examples of a new breed of enterprise software, based completely in the cloud. Started by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, who led PeopleSoft prior to the acquisition by Oracle, Workday is now a public company. As part of the CxOTalk series of conversations with innovators, we spoke with Workday’s Chief Technology Officer, Stan […]

I felt a great disturbance in the Force..
We have watched for years as cloud companies target on-premise systems – so Salesforce going after Siebel, Workday after PeopleSoft, Amazon after IBM etc. At the Microsoft Analyst Event yesterday I heard in reverse of back to on-premise examples especially in the banking sector as global regulatory concerns grow around public clouds. Then there are […]

Ellison, Benioff Announcement — Final Thoughts
You know what they say about the third time doing something. They say a lot and some of it is bound to be true even if it only means throwing away the high and low scores and dealing with what’s left like they do in Olympic diving competition. This is the third and final post […]

Silicon Valley Heyday is Far from Over, Mr HootSuite
Silicon valley heydays are over according to Ryan Holmes CEO of HootSuite. I think he is generating good buzz for his company (did you hear how well HootSuite is doing?), his stakeholders and his country but he is plain wrong. Rise of the maple syrup mafia is sweet words but not really true. Not even […]

You Really Don’t Know if Your Market is Too Small For Quite a While
One of the things that causes a lot of anxiety in SaaS is market size. If you’re creating the latest Pinning app, or Social Network, the odds are surely against you. But in consumer internet, often you know if you hit it, however low the odds are, at least the market is huge (or at […]

CEO Interview: Jason Blessing of Plex Software
I have written a number of times about Plex Software. They offer a cloud-based ERP solution that has sold quite well to manufacturers, especially those in the automotive industry. My initial interest in them was due to the size of their product offering (i.e., full ERP) and their multi-tenancy. Recently, the company has undertaken a […]