A Software Insider's Point of View

PEOPLE WHISPERS: MOVES, PROMOTIONS, AND MILESTONES*
As always, thanks for your emails and alerts. If you’ve got a change or know of a promotion, keep dropping me a line! If you need a referral, and we’ve worked together in the past, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via Linked In.
Paul Alessi is now a Buyer [...]

Apps Users Seek Third Party Maintenance For Cost, Value, and Service
Updated surveys from inquiries, client conversations, and user group meetings show a 113.8% increase in interest in third party maintenance (3PM) services from Q3 2009 to Q1 2010 (see Figure 1).  Key factors stem from (see Figure 2.):

Continuing cost pressures. Budgets continue to be at [...]

Chatter Represents SFDC’s Unified Move Into Social

Announced at the 2009 Dreamforce conference, Chatter represents both a collaboration application and platform.  Software built on the Force.com platform will gain the collaboration capabilities.   Solutions in AppExchange will be able to use profiles, real time streams, and other API’s.   With a 100 customers testing out user experience, [...]

IBM Adds A Leading Customer Data Integration/MDM Pioneer To Its Master Information Management Arsenal

With arguably 10 master information management acquisitions since 2003, IBM continues to push towards its goal of adaptive master data management (MDM) (see Figure 1).  The recent acquisition of Initiate Systems comes after the heals of Oracle’s purchase of SilverCreek Systems in [...]

Informatica Enters The Battle For Master Data Management Dominance

As with any best of breed market, only a few will survive and even fewer will succeed.  Despite a leading offering, Siperian’s faced a rocky financial situation over the past 12 months.  Many suitors pursued Siperian but in the end Informatica’s $130M acquisition of Siperian took one [...]

(Pictures For Now, More Analysis Later)

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(Photos: Copyright © 2010 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.)
Keynote Highlights Integration of IBM’s Full Set of Assets
Users Treated To Preview of Project Vulcan
The Bottom Line - Convergence of Emerging Technologies May Begin With Lotus
Copyright © 2010 R Wang and Insider [...]

High Cost Of Ownership And Changing Requirements Drive SAP Users To Seek Optimization Solutions

As users await SAP to regain its mojo (see Dennis Howlett’s post) and implement it’s “Voice of the Customer” strategy in 2010, users must continue to reduce their cost of ownership and complexity. In addition, rapidly changing business requirements require some users to seek SaaS alternatives, additional point solutions, and extensions.
Consequently, vendors providing SAP optimization and extension solutions represent one of the fastest growing parts of the $78.7B (2009 Altimeter Group estimate), 850,000 SAP service partner and developer ecosystem. SAP users already embrace many of the solutions from vendors on this inaugural SAP Optimization List as part of their business value oriented apps strategy. The living list covers seven areas including:

1. application extension and usability;
2. application life cycle management;
3. archiving, storage, and test data management;
4. license management and optimization;
5. Microsoft Office integration;
6. third party maintenance; and
7. virtualization

Keep In Mind Basic Rules Still Apply Regardless Of Deployment Option

The proliferation of SaaS solutions provides organizations with a myriad of sorely needed point and disruptive solutions.  Good news - business users can rapidly procure and deploy, while innovating with minimal budget and IT team constraints.  Bad news - users must depend more on their [...]

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 [...]

PEOPLE WHISPERS: MOVES, PROMOTIONS, AND MILESTONES*
Congratulations to all!  Good to see that the job scenarios have improved as a number of individuals made organizational changes and promotions.  As always, thanks for your emails and alerts. If you’ve got a change or know of a promotion, keep dropping me a line! If you [...]

Potential Announcement of * Siemens cancellation represents a shift in mood by one of SAP’s most loyal customers
What’s been rumored for the past few months has now publicly been confirmed discussed.  Golem.de (Babelfish Translation in English) *Wiwo.de,(Wirtschaftswoche the German equivalent of BusinessWeek) (Babelfish Translation in English) reports that Siemens says SAP Tschüß (i.e. ciao, cheers, [...]

Title: Vendor Event: IBM Information On Demand (IOD) 2009
Location: The Mandalay Bay Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada
Link out: Click here
Start Date: 2009-10-25
End Date: 2009-10-29
Description:
Register for THE event that will help you drive an information-led transformation of your business
Whether you’re a business or IT professional, you need to be at the premier event that delivers the [...]

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g launch starts countdown to 100 days of innovation until Oracle Open World
In short, Oracle is putting forth a suite of middleware solutions that not only enable developers and software publishers to build their future solutions, but also deliver the middleware tools that will serve as the foundation for its go forward [...]

CORPORATE WHISPERS AND MONTHLY MARKET TRENDS*
Starting this month, we’ll be splitting the trends in Corporate Whispers from the People Whispers series.  Catch the latest monthly random thoughts, trend points, and corporate trends.  Hearing from twitterati, software execs, and industry experts about:
User trends

Recent win by SUSEN Software over SAP enhances validity of the used software [...]

PEOPLE WHISPERS: MOVES, PROMOTIONS, AND MILESTONES*
Starting this month, we’ll be splitting the trends in Corporate Whispers from the People Whispers series.  Catch the latest monthly random thoughts, trend points, and corporate trends here.   For the latest on career moves, promotions, and milestones, stay tuned here.
Congratulations to all!  Thanks for your emails and alerts.  If [...]

Oracle announces a $7.4B deal for SUN just a few weeks after the IBM deal fell through.  If completed, Oracle will control a significant major open source alternative and a nice piece of the high end computing business.  These open source components have been viewed as the alternative to the dominance of the Big 4 [...]

Blogosphere highlights broken software vendor business models
What a crazy few days in the blogosphere!  Economic pressures force clients to become more attuned to the business models of software vendors.  Vendors have amped up sales tactics as they face earnings pressures.  Fellow colleagues in the analyst/blogger/media world have responded in full force to the observations we [...]

PEOPLE WHISPERS: MOVES, PROMOTIONS, AND MILESTONES*
Congratulations to all!  Thanks for your emails and alerts.  If you’ve got a change or know of a promotion, keep dropping me a line!  If you need a referral, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via Linked In.
Richard Barnett joins Fine Solutions as a Vice President for Business [...]

PEOPLE WHISPERS: MOVES, PROMOTIONS, AND MILESTONES*
Congratulations to all!  Thanks for your emails and alerts.  If you’ve got a change or know of a promotion, keep dropping me a line!  If you need a referral, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via Linked In.

Nigel Alcock is now the new Sales Director for the UK [...]

Almost every inquiry over the past 3 months has ended up with at least one question about what vendors are doing to help their clients amidst an economic recession.  As blogged in the October 12, 2008 posting on “5 Steps to Restoring Trust in the Vendor - Customer Relationship” the issue of credibility and trust [...]

(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 [...]

Continued economic slow down, credit crisis, and diminished IPO market create the perfect storm for the Big 4 or as fellow blogger Josh Greenbaum likes to call it, MISO (ie. Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle).  Here are four trends at work that shape the thinking on why 2009 will be another year of continued [...]

Emerging SaaS platform wars akin to on-premise middleware wars
With consolidation in the middleware market fairly under way, adoption of SaaS platforms (i.e. PaaS) by solution partners represents the next land grab in the enterprise software space. Current key players include industry leaders and specialists such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Magic [...]

Vendor Financing Options Provide a Key Weapon in Battle for Tech Spending
On June 28th, 2008, Infor and IBM Global Financing (IGF) announced a worldwide customer financing program for Infor customers. With the worsening global crunch on credit, this program provides Infor’s customers with:

Access to a line of credit for key tech investments. Similar [...]