A Software Insider's Point of View

Oracle Rolls Out A New “Red Stack”
With EU approval out of the way, Oracle finalizes the Sun deal and resumes its quest for the largest share of the IT wallet. Oracle’s 60+ acquisitions follow a concerted strategy and Sun adds key areas such as servers and storage. The stack now comprises Vertical Apps, [...]

(Photos by R Wang & Insider Associates, LLC.   Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.)
Re-innovation Now At The Heart Of SAP’s Focus And Strategy
SAP has faced a rough two years.  From the continuing market pressure on new license revenue, false-start launch of Business By Design (ByD), management restructuring, and issues with [...]

Perspectives 2009 highlights continued market, corporate, and product transformation

(Photos by R Wang & Insider Associates, LLC.   Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.)
Celebrating its 25th anniversary, Epicor hosted over 1500 partner, customer, and employee attendees at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, NV.  Conference highlights include:

Update on Epicor 9 adoption. Epicor has (deployed 11/19/2009 [...]

Oracle’s Fusion Apps Addresses A Broad Set Of Horizontal Modules

Oracle’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Larry Ellison announced the code completion of Fusion Apps in today’s late afternoon keynote.  Though Ellison did not give precise guidance on general availability (GA), he did hint that the product would be available, “sometime in 2010″.  The product currently [...]

Day 1 Brings 40,000 Oracle Faithful Into San Francisco For Red Stack Indoctrination

(Source: R Wang & Software Insider POV, Copyright © 2009  All rights reserved.)
Interesting tidbits from Day 1 include:

Oracle tells SaaS providers they can use a new SaaS/Cloud computing model to purchase a limited number of Oracle products in a “pay as you [...]

Oracle Gets More Serious About Meeting Partner Needs

(Source: R Wang & Software Insider POV, Copyright © 2009  All rights reserved.)
Oracle Open World kicked off today with major announcements that beef up the 21,000 member strong Oracle Partner program.   Throughout the day, Oracle executives kept reminding everyone that path to success would be specialization and [...]

Insight From This Year’s IW 500 Shows Shifting Role Of The CIO And Technology Adoption

(Source: R Wang & Software Insider POV, Copyright © 2009  All rights reserved.)
Lots of lessons learned amidst the celebration of the leading innovators in IT at the Information Week 500.  In conversations with CIOs these past days, a [...]

This post was co-written with Jeremiah Owyang, Partner and Colleague at Altimeter Group

Above: Pictures from Salesforce’s event
Salesforce.com launches a new set of social apps that make CRM connected to the social web. So what does it mean?
Salesforce.com’s Twitter integration and application launch helps brands monitor what’s being said. Yet despite the fanfare, the application lacks [...]

(Photo: Convergence banner in the New Orleans Convention Center.  Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved)

Over 7000 customers, partners, Microsoft staff, and paparazzi made the pilgrimage to New Orleans to hear the latest and greatest from the Microsoft Dynamics team.  The great band, surface computing demo, and festivities in New Orleans wiped out most [...]

(Photo: Main show floor for Dreamforce 2008 at Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA. Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)
Over 9,000 attendees made it to the annual San Francisco pilgrimage to hear the high priest of SaaS kickoff the event.  This year’s theme focused on the future of Cloud Computing, a focus on [...]

Seven Recession-Proof Packaged Apps Strategies
Monday, November 17, 2008, 1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m. Eastern time (19:00-20:00 UK time)
Presented By:
Paul D. Hamerman
Vice President, Principal Analyst
Forrester Research, Inc.
R “Ray” Wang
Vice President, Principal Analyst
Forrester Research, Inc.
Register
Who should attend: Application Development & Program Management professionals
Description:
As the global economy enters into a recession, enterprises must not only respond to this change but [...]

(Photo: The show floor from IBM IOD 2008 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)
IBM’s third annual Information On Demand event emerges as part of the “Must Attend” list of Enterprise Software pow wows.  More than 7000 attendees were treated to 600 technical skill building sessions and 120 [...]

(Photo: Siperian Masters’08 registration area.  Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)
About 200 attendees were present as Ramon Chen, VP of Marketing, kicked off the event to the theme of adventurers and pioneers in MDM at the Bridgewater Marriott (New Jersey).   CEO, Peter Caswell, led the keynote session with a view on where [...]

(Photo: Jim Schaper Conducting the LV Philharmonic.  Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved.)
Inforum’s  attendees were treated to a wonderful pre-keynote string quartet and a booming opening inspirational from both the Las Vegas Philharmonic Orchestra and the rock band Innovation.  As the orchestra took a bow, Infor’s CEO Jim Schaper, emerged from the [...]

Quick thoughts from Scottsdale.  Initiate as many you know is one of the leaders in the customer hubs/MDM market.  At their annual conference, Initiate Exchange, a few key trends emerged from conversations with customers and partners:

Rapid deployment still key to securing buy-in a the business level. The registry style approach lends itself to demonstrating quick [...]

View from the Moscone North to South Above Ground Crosswalk Looking into Moscone West
(Copyrighted 2008. Photo by R Wang. All rights reserved)

In the world of enterprise software, Oracle’s Open World is one of the grand slam must attend events of the year. Day 1 starts with the Oracle Users Forum, a [...]

(Copyrighted 2008. Photo by R Wang. All rights reserved)

New Management Shows Long Term Commitment to Business Solutions Group

Recent Microsoft Business Solutions departures have brought into question whether the Redmond , WA giant is serious about the business applications market. Estimates of year over year growth from 2006 to 2007 have fallen from [...]

(Image courtesy of Sterling Commerce)
Sterling Commerce Pushes Closer to the Perfect OrderSterling treated customers and prospects to a packed agenda of product announcements, customer case studies, and educational sessions at this year’s customer conference. Here are a few quick observations from the event:

Transformation from infrastructure supplier to solution provider near complete. [...]

Given the recent consolidation in the industry and increasing dominance of both Oracle and SAP, I couldn’t help but wonder if supply chain had gone the way of CRM or if it was a specialized field that would continue to stand out like business intelligence. In fact, I normally don’t specialize in supply [...]

I recently moderated a track with a colleague of mine (Rob Karel) at the CDI-MDM conference this March 26h and 27th at the San Francisco Marriott. Though master data management penetration in the enterprise still hovers in the high single digits, its obvious the energy, activity, and investment around MDM continues to [...]