Oracle’s Sun Deal and the IBM Factor: The Future May Not Be What It Appears (Especially for SAP)

At first blush it looks like Oracle’s deal to buy Sun plants a large, made-in-Redwood Shores boot right in the [name your favorite body part] of IBM. Oracle will now take over the competition with IBM that Sun had waged for so many years, and that this will lead, among other things, to IBM and [...]

Bye-bye MySQL, Bye-bye: Buried Alive By Oracle

If you were still wondering what Oracle was going to do with its newly acquired MySQL database (other than write-off the ridiculous $1 billion that Sun paid for the open source leader), the answer just arrived in my email inbox: Oracle plans to trash-talk MySQL to death.
In case it needed to be made any clearer, [...]

What’s Oracle Up To: First Enterprise Software, Then Sun. Next Stop: Computer Services (and a Faceoff with IBM)

Bear with me while I brag a little. Way back in 2003, as Oracle was just winding down a hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, I wrote a column that predicted two things: Oracle would buy a major IT services company (Cap Gemini was my favorite pick), and Oracle would buy Sun. Not the Sun of 2003, [...]

Multi-Tenant vs. Single-Tenant: SaaS Debate 1.0 Needs an Upgrade

There’s a debate raging again in the on-demand, software-as-a-service market that bears some curmudgeonly commentary. The essence of the debate — which I contend seriously needs to be upgraded to reflect the real future of SaaS –is whether multi-tenancy or single-tenancy is the true path to enlightenment in SaaS. My curmudgeonly comment is this: Neither [...]

Rewarding Those Who Help Themselves: A Modest Proposal for a Tiered SAP Support System

Michael Doane,  the man who wrote the SAP Blue Book and knows more about what happens when SAP gets implemented than anyone outside of SAP (and many inside) has an intriguing idea. How about giving those SAP customers who are well-advanced in their ability to support themselves a break on their Enterprise Support costs? This [...]

Twitter Killed The Global Economy! News at 11

My colleague from the old days (the 80’s, you whippersnappers) Loring Wirbel posted a chart on his blog this week that is such a perfect indictment of the evil of Twitter that I have to alert my loyal readers (all 12 of you, and that doesn’t include mom) to this incontrovertible fact: the growth of [...]

The End of Pan-European Conferences? Microsoft Convergence Vienna Bites the Dust

Microsoft is following SAP’s much-discussed decision to can its European Sapphire event with a similar decision to do away with the Microsoft Convergence Conference in Vienna this year. Like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics will be hosting a series of local events across Europe, keyed to local interests and languages, and designed to be much more accessible [...]