Do these terms sound familiar: SaaS, on-premise, off-shoring, on-shoring, the cloud, Big Data, mobile computing? I’m betting that not only have you heard of them, but you’re inundated with them. Customers today are flooded with choices on how they should or shouldn’t operate their enterprise systems. And naturally, the IT vendors in the marketplace are
Read More...When ‘Convenient’ Comes Crashing Down Cloud computing is great – until it’s not. This past week, there was much ado made about Amazon shutting down a customer’s account based on fraud/DRM-related allegations. Problem is, Linn, the affected customer, did nothing wrong. You can read about the ordeal pretty much everywhere, but the site that kicked
Read More...Here’s Stuart Lauchlan, writing for businessCLOUD9: In the increasingly febrile battleground of Cloud HCM (Human Capital Management), Oracle’s racked up a couple of nice deals for its Fusion HCM from existing PeopleSoft users – the kind of wins it needs to stave off competition from Workday and SAP. First up, banking and financial services group
Read More...Dan Tynan, writing for CIO.com: For the past decade, ERP has been the poster child for IT projects that overpromise and underdeliver. It was notorious for painfully complex rollouts that took years to implement, required massive customization, and were often only partially realized. Billions of dollars were spent just trying to get ERP systems to work
Read More...It’s clear that 2011 was the year of the cloud, with many traditional enterprise vendors accepting that the cloud is something they can no longer denigrate or ignore. The ‘cloud’ buzzword has been (sometimes annoyingly) tossed around for upwards of two years, but last year is when it hit critical mass in terms of action,
Read More...My days of selling ‘high tech’ products date back to the mid 80’s. Since some of our blog readers were only 2 years old then, let me detail what our computing world was like. CAD/CAM (computer aided design/computer aided manufacturing) was the product. In order to do a demonstration of our CAD application, we had
Read More...Barb Darrow, GigaOm: Wolf’s numbers show that a select group of SaaS companies saw their values grow 313 percent from January 2009 to October 2011, compared to 154 percent growth for other software companies over the same period. No wonder Oracle shelled out $1.5 billion for RightNow Technologies and Salesforce.com keeps snapping up smaller SaaS players every month. “With
Read More...I missed this a while back, but Vinnie Mirchandani always has interesting takes. Here’s what he saw when he watched Oracle CEO Larry Ellison give his keynote at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld: Larry Ellison could have been somber – if he knew of his friend Steve Jobs dying he did not let on. He could
Read More...Two days ago, Oracle acquired RightNow for $1.5B, and many analysts immediately said the purchase was, for all intents and purposes, missiles aimed at Salesforce.com. But how? What does this mean? How to decipher this? What does the acquisition do for Oracle? Won’t Oracle’s ‘Public Cloud’ be comprised of technologies already in Oracle’s stack? Not exactly. According
Read More...Carolyn Duffy Maran, reporting for NetworkWorld: The outlook for IT budgets is solid, with 83% of survey respondents reporting that their 2011 IT budget was greater than or equal to their 2010 IT budget. This figure compares to 48% reporting stable or growing IT budgets in 2009. Similarly, 85% of IT executives are predicting that
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