On July 12th, 2010, Infor announced its Infor24 initiative at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC).  Infor24 represents the Alpharetta, GA software titan’s foray to deliver its solution offerings in the cloud and a continued bet on Microsoft for key technologies.  Here’s the first take on the news and from exclusive conversations with Soma Somasundaram, […]

It’s All About The Cloud At WPC10 Attendees at this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2010 in Washington, D.C. already expect Windows Azure development to be a key theme throughout this annual pilgrimage.  Microsoft has made significant investments into the cloud.   Many executives from the Redmond, WA, software giant have publicly stated that 90% […]

SaaS Adoption Surveys Often Overlook Audience Composition Over the past year, analyst firms, tech media, and even mainstream business media have happily showcased positive news about SaaS adoption.  The common theme remains clear – SaaS adoption moves beyond the tipping point in 2010.  Cloud adoption will reach a tipping point in the next 12 months.  […]

Clients Now See Microsoft As The Neutral Vendor, Hence All The Questions Just less than 3 years ago, Microsoft was still perceived as part of the “evil” empire.  Business leaders worried about the complicated and expensive licensing and pricing structures.  IT leaders bemoaned the lock-in and proprietary and often buggy software.  But in a reversal […]

(Credit: R “Ray” Wang, Insider Associates, LLC) Co CEO’s Stabilize The Company Both SAP Co-CEO’s Bill McDermott (Orlando) and Jim Hagemann Snabe (Frankfurt) took stage on May 18, 2010, in a simulcasted keynote.  While Bill highlighted SAP’s future vision and commitment to customers, Jim focused on communicating the SAP product strategy to match the corporate […]

Collaborative Research Process At Work I’m pleased to say, that I’ll be joining fellow Enterprise Irregulars – Michael Cote, Larry Dignan, Michael Krigsman, and Vinnie Mirchandani; SAP Mentors – Dennis Howlett and Jon Reed, along with esteemed journalist Thomas Wailgum from CIO magazine to gauge the sentiment of SAP users.  We may be adding a […]

Move Signal Seriousness To Acquire Key Innovation Driven Technologies SAP announces a $5.8B acquisition of Emeryville, CA, based Sybase.  The acquired entity will remain a stand alone company.  At first customers, prospects, and casual observers will wonder why SAP has agreed to acquire what is perceived as an aging, legacy database company.  However, industry watchers […]

Apps Strategy Options Abound And Organizations Need Accurate Comparison Methodologies Recent inquiries from blog readers and client engagements highlight a growing need to compare the cost of apps strategies.  Common comparison scenarios often include: SaaS versus on-premise Upgrade versus customization Single instance versus two-tier Vendor maintenance versus third party options Custom apps versus packaged apps […]

VMWare and Salesforce.com Battle For The Hearts And Minds Of Cloud-Oriented Java Developers On April 27th, 2010, Salesforce.com, [NYSE: CRM] and VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) formed VMforce, a strategic alliance to create a deployment environment for Java based apps in the cloud.  The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering builds on Java, Spring, VMware vSphere, and Force.com.  Key […]

Demand For Complex Cloud/SaaS Based Integration Continues To Increase Organizations face a deluge of data from more and more new sources, especially in the Cloud.  Existing integration solutions often require expensive custom coding that’s purpose built; but rigid and disposable.  A change in business objects or swap out of new solutions often require brand new […]

Lawson External Cloud Services Represents A Big Step In On Demand ERP Options On March 31, 2010, Lawson Software (Nasdaq: LWSN) announced the Lawson External Cloud Services offering.  The venerable St. Paul, Minnesota vendor plans to deliver the full ERP Suite including Lawson S3, Lawson M3, and Lawson Talent Management via Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud […]

Workday Continues To Pioneer SaaS Success In The Enterprise Founded by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri in March 2005, Workday has grown the company to over 135 customers with 80+ companies in production, 17 enterprise payroll companies, and over 400 employees in 50 countries worldwide.  Key industries include services, technology, financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, and […]

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 […]

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 […]