By Phil Wainewright
PW: Well Rand, of course, we've been having these conversations for more than ten years, since back to the dark old days of SaaS — when it was called ASP, and no one really believed that you could run software and applications in the cloud.
RS: That's right. Well certainly, all of our heads were sort of in the cloud, all the early guys' heads were in the clouds back then. And now, it's kind of funny that we're calling it cloud. As you know, we started talking when [my then company] brought out the first web analytics application, KeyLime Software, that was eventually sold to Yahoo and we were an ASP. We've come a long way since then.
At that point, we were serving a multitenant software product to users, and they could literally flip the switch on. A lot has changed, obviously, the success of Salesforce, Successfactors, Omniture, WebSideStory and others that I've been involved in, in the, quote, ASP or software-as-a-service business for ten years.
So what I wanted to talk about today a little bit was content-as-a-service. A lot of people are talking about platform-as-a-service. I wanted to give some more explanation about what content-as-a-service is.
Yeah, because one of the things I think that is very interesting about InsideView is the way that it is not just a software application, but it's also taking content as well, and delivering content-as-a-service in a way that is timely and relevant for the salesperson. When they need to work out which is the best customer for them to call next, or what should they say when they call the customer, InsideView really pulls information off the web and off social media that people can use, doesn't it?
That's right. What's happening today, unfortunately for the newspapers' sake, is content has become absolutely commoditized. And the content 1.0 vendors — companies like OneSource and Hoover's — who use people to create the editorial, they're going the way of dinosaurs. Facebook, LinkedIn, Zoom Information, InsideView, Jigsaw, we're all able to utilize content-as-a-service to get the rich set of content out there, and to present it to sales and marketing people when they need it — that is at the time of the sale so that they can increase conversion; where they need it, mashed up right into a CRM application; and to provide that relevance in this explosion of content to that end user — that sales and marketing end user — at the right time.
So how does this work? Can you give me a real-life example of how a salesperson might use this?
Yeah. We are involved with a new set of companies. They're really Sales 2.0 companies. And Sales 2.0 companies are bringing more of a science to what was previously sales as more of an art. And let me give you an example. We talked about this explosion of content. And the explosion of content really yields wrong information, a loss of time and a lack of relevance. So if a sales guy wanted to try to reach me, let's say, as a marketing person, one could go to the web and do a basic Google search on me and you will find that I am at five or six different companies.
And so what is the salesperson to do? So what InsideView does is, we use our entity triangulation and our natural language processing to produce a smart record. That smart record takes a look at all of the content that's out there — much of it wrong — takes a look at all that content out there and provides relevance to that content, so that that sales guy knows how to reach me and when I changed from, let's say, one company to another.
Right. Okay. So really what you're doing is — there's still a lot of algorithms and software technology involved there — but you're applying it to the content and then delivering — or filtering the content, really — to deliver useful information to the salesperson.
That's right. If you think back 15 or 20 years, Michael Bloomberg created the Bloomberg terminal. So as the Bloomberg terminals are to traders, SalesView, our application, really is to sales and marketing professionals — where we are aggregating relevant information, putting it in front of those traders — or sales and marketing people and — where those people can get the conversion that they need.
And of course, it's a mash-up isn't it? What you've done is you've taken the software but you're also taking these information and content feeds and mashing up all of that information and intelligence to deliver a result. So that's very much a Web 2.0 concept that you've applied in the product — or the service, rather, I should say — that you're bringing to market.
Yeah, that's right. The term mashup is another one of those terms that people throw around. We have actually two ways that we're mashed up. We bring all of this rich set of content, this information, directly to the users and we're mashed-up in the first way directly in a CRM application. We currently are supporting six CRM applications — we announced NetSuite last week — and they include Salesforce, Sugar, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics and Landslide. So we're mashed-up both physically in the page, right in the middle of that CRM page. But we're also mashed-up in terms of data, so that our data is completely synchronized with the data that you have in your CRM application.
I mean that's great, actually — and that's the thing about SaaS, that we've got to with this SaaS revolution now — that the old way of doing this would be, the software vendor delivers the software package. And it's like a toolkit, where the customer has to engineer all these links into all these information services that they sign up to individually — and then integrated into the other applications they are using on premise — and maybe a year or two later, and coachloads of consultants later, they actually have something that might deliver something like the result they originally envisioned. Whereas here you are, you bring it in and it's already integrated, it already has the stuff there and people can just get on and do the job.
That's right. So we're able to further yield relevance to the content out there — and we're actually looking at the content or the content vendors as almost content cartridges, where we can plug in these content cartridges to our bus that can easily delete and add new content cartridges. And through our APIs, we're also looking — because we have the ability to mash up, because we're a content-as-a-service cloud application — we're looking to push this aggregated content out to other applications, and embed this application in other, let's say, marketing applications or vertical applications — legal applications, financial applications, health applications — where we just show up in those applications as well.
Source:ebizQ.net
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Customer Feedback Drives New Release of Quadrant's IntelliChief
by Alex Woodie
Quadrant Software last week unveiled a new release of its flagship IntelliChief document management and workflow product at the COMMON conference in Reno, Nevada. IntelliChief 2.5 brings a smattering of relatively minor enhancements, such as automatic document matching and performance metrics, which demonstrate that customers are using the product and giving Quadrant feedback on how to make it better.
There are two main paths that product development can take. The first springs from the mind of a single creative individual who is eager to push the latest technologies into his product. This type of development often looks very advanced on paper, but it can also lead to customers asking themselves "How am I going to use this?" and "Do I really need that?"
The second type of development path is marked primarily by customer feedback to the developers. After customers have been using a product for a while, they will say to their vendor, "This is great, but what I really need is this" or "My users could really benefit from that." Sometimes, the features resulting from this development path lack the tech appeal that looks so good in press releases, but which is of dubious value to the majority of customers.
The version 2.5 release of IntelliChief appears to have been driven primarily by this second development paradigm. There aren't a lot of whiz-bang new features that jump out as super incredibly awesome. But taken as a whole, the enhancements show how System i shops are using this Windows-based product, which is only four years old, but which appears to be maturing rapidly, thanks in large part to customer feedback.
One of these customer-driven features is the matching of workflow documents. When a document enters the product's workflow system, with version 2.5, IntelliChief will automatically check to see if there are other documents waiting for a match before they're processed. For example, when an invoice is received, a clerk will typically be required to match that invoice with receiving document, to avoid making payments on products that haven't yet been received.
With IntelliChief 2.5, that matching process will be conducted automatically upon receipt of the invoice, eliminating the need for the clerk to manually match the documents, and also decreasing the possibility that the whole payment process is hung up due to a simple error or oversight. The system can automatically match documents by several variables, including customer number, order number, or vendor number.
IntelliChief 2.5 also gets new performance metrics. With this release, the product gives users the capability to track how various documents are being used within the business, which can give a good indication of how business is going.
Examples of how this feature could be used include: Showing a manager how many invoices have been sent out for voucher versus how many are still waiting for approval; showing a manager how many orders have been fulfilled and how long it took to process them; and showing a manager which accounts payable group is being more productive.
One wouldn't normally expect to find this type of business intelligence (BI) or business performance management (BPM) feature within a content management system like IntelliChief. But when you consider that most businesses are heavily dependent upon paperwork, then you realize that this is actually a very practical way to monitor business activity.
The performance metric functionality is built into IntelliChief's SQL Server database, which means that users won't have to go through the time and expense of building their own BI system or reporting mechanisms to do this. It gives users the capability to write their own reports, or output data into other reporting systems, such as SAP's CrystalReports, according to Quadrant.
Another example of customer-driven enhancements is the new capability to edit forms in IntelliChief's WebForms module, which was introduced last year. In the first release of WebForms, once a comment had been entered, such as for a purchase request or a petty cash request, it was sent to the IntelliChief archive, where it could not be modified. With version 2.5, WebForm entries can be edited and modified before being sent to a manger, thereby increasing the chance that that 50-inch plasma TV gets approved for the break room (or whatever your request may be).
A new notification capability in IntelliChief 2.5 should improve the flow of work in a business. With this release, users can now view notifications of alerts for things such as pending document approvals directly from their main IntelliChief screen, instead of viewing alerts only within their IntelliChief inbox. Users can also see detailed information about the documents from their main screen, and click on a hyperlink to be taken directly to the document.
IntelliChief also received enhancements in the way it handles multiple documents, for viewing and e-mail attachment purposes. When it comes to viewing, users can now view multiple documents on their screens simultaneously, thereby making it easier to verify or match documents. Similarly, IntelliChief supports the capability to group multiple related documents into a single e-mail attachment, instead of requiring a recipient to deal with multiple document attachments. IntelliChief typically saves documents in the PDF format.
This release also brings support for the latest Microsoft server technology, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. It also gains the capability to capture print output from 64-bit versions of Windows Vista.
IntelliChief is composed of six core modules, including ScanChief, PortalChief, WorkflowChief, ViewChief, StorageChief, and Quadrant's Formtastic software, and also works with Quadrant's i5/OS output management software. Pricing for the suite starts at around $50,000. For more information, visit intellichief.quadrantsoftware.com.
Quadrant Software last week unveiled a new release of its flagship IntelliChief document management and workflow product at the COMMON conference in Reno, Nevada. IntelliChief 2.5 brings a smattering of relatively minor enhancements, such as automatic document matching and performance metrics, which demonstrate that customers are using the product and giving Quadrant feedback on how to make it better.
There are two main paths that product development can take. The first springs from the mind of a single creative individual who is eager to push the latest technologies into his product. This type of development often looks very advanced on paper, but it can also lead to customers asking themselves "How am I going to use this?" and "Do I really need that?"
The second type of development path is marked primarily by customer feedback to the developers. After customers have been using a product for a while, they will say to their vendor, "This is great, but what I really need is this" or "My users could really benefit from that." Sometimes, the features resulting from this development path lack the tech appeal that looks so good in press releases, but which is of dubious value to the majority of customers.
The version 2.5 release of IntelliChief appears to have been driven primarily by this second development paradigm. There aren't a lot of whiz-bang new features that jump out as super incredibly awesome. But taken as a whole, the enhancements show how System i shops are using this Windows-based product, which is only four years old, but which appears to be maturing rapidly, thanks in large part to customer feedback.
One of these customer-driven features is the matching of workflow documents. When a document enters the product's workflow system, with version 2.5, IntelliChief will automatically check to see if there are other documents waiting for a match before they're processed. For example, when an invoice is received, a clerk will typically be required to match that invoice with receiving document, to avoid making payments on products that haven't yet been received.
With IntelliChief 2.5, that matching process will be conducted automatically upon receipt of the invoice, eliminating the need for the clerk to manually match the documents, and also decreasing the possibility that the whole payment process is hung up due to a simple error or oversight. The system can automatically match documents by several variables, including customer number, order number, or vendor number.
IntelliChief 2.5 also gets new performance metrics. With this release, the product gives users the capability to track how various documents are being used within the business, which can give a good indication of how business is going.
Examples of how this feature could be used include: Showing a manager how many invoices have been sent out for voucher versus how many are still waiting for approval; showing a manager how many orders have been fulfilled and how long it took to process them; and showing a manager which accounts payable group is being more productive.
One wouldn't normally expect to find this type of business intelligence (BI) or business performance management (BPM) feature within a content management system like IntelliChief. But when you consider that most businesses are heavily dependent upon paperwork, then you realize that this is actually a very practical way to monitor business activity.
The performance metric functionality is built into IntelliChief's SQL Server database, which means that users won't have to go through the time and expense of building their own BI system or reporting mechanisms to do this. It gives users the capability to write their own reports, or output data into other reporting systems, such as SAP's CrystalReports, according to Quadrant.
Another example of customer-driven enhancements is the new capability to edit forms in IntelliChief's WebForms module, which was introduced last year. In the first release of WebForms, once a comment had been entered, such as for a purchase request or a petty cash request, it was sent to the IntelliChief archive, where it could not be modified. With version 2.5, WebForm entries can be edited and modified before being sent to a manger, thereby increasing the chance that that 50-inch plasma TV gets approved for the break room (or whatever your request may be).
A new notification capability in IntelliChief 2.5 should improve the flow of work in a business. With this release, users can now view notifications of alerts for things such as pending document approvals directly from their main IntelliChief screen, instead of viewing alerts only within their IntelliChief inbox. Users can also see detailed information about the documents from their main screen, and click on a hyperlink to be taken directly to the document.
IntelliChief also received enhancements in the way it handles multiple documents, for viewing and e-mail attachment purposes. When it comes to viewing, users can now view multiple documents on their screens simultaneously, thereby making it easier to verify or match documents. Similarly, IntelliChief supports the capability to group multiple related documents into a single e-mail attachment, instead of requiring a recipient to deal with multiple document attachments. IntelliChief typically saves documents in the PDF format.
This release also brings support for the latest Microsoft server technology, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. It also gains the capability to capture print output from 64-bit versions of Windows Vista.
IntelliChief is composed of six core modules, including ScanChief, PortalChief, WorkflowChief, ViewChief, StorageChief, and Quadrant's Formtastic software, and also works with Quadrant's i5/OS output management software. Pricing for the suite starts at around $50,000. For more information, visit intellichief.quadrantsoftware.com.
Companies turn to in-house training to supplement employees business degrees with job-specific skills
Canadians attend college or university not only to learn about a certain subject, but also to prepare for the workforce. So why are companies developing in-house training programs for their employees? And why are employees eagerly taking them?
Because as valuable as post-secondary education is, it can never be geared entirely to training individuals for a specific job within a particular organization.
So companies, such as Cognos, Wunderman, Bank of Montreal and Ceridian, have created in-house training programs, which are generally a blend of online and classroom training lasting anywhere from two hours to two days, to ensure employees have the skills to excel in their jobs.
Some courses address technical proficiency. Of course, individuals come to their jobs with a foundation, but sometimes the core skill set needs to be further developed. At Wunderman University, for example, the co-creative director of the advertising agency teaches an "evaluating great creative course," to what the company calls "apprentice-level" employees ( junior copywriters and designers) and more senior "journeyman level" ones as a refresher.
In other cases, employees need to learn a technical skill to carry out a job task, a PowerPoint presentation, for example. That's why Ceridian, a payroll and human resources management services company, has basic desktop user courses online, such as "creating animations in PowerPoint" or "pivet tables in Excel."
While some technical skills, such as the desktop programs, can be learned through standard licensed courses, others require customized classes. "We have a payroll [software] program that our customers use called InSync that employees can't learn elsewhere," says Heather Turnbull-Smith, director of national learning and development at Ceridian.
The customized classes are taught by senior and executive-level staff, who draw examples from the day-to-day business. "In 'how to write a creative brief,' our vice-president of creative direction showed us an example of a brief written for the client Wyeth, and I was able to apply the learning to the client I work with, Microsoft," says Leann Kirwan, account supervisor at Wunderman.
Companies also provide personal skills training because working with others doesn't come naturally to everyone and isn't formally taught in school. Ms. Kirwan found the "communicating for results" course at Wunderman University especially helpful because it taught her how to work with different personalities in the office. "They didn't actually teach these skills in any of my advertising courses at Georgian College," she says. Similarly, Cognos, an Ottawa-based business intelligence and performance management solutions company, offers employees courses on "how to deal with and resolve conflict," and "adapting to change."
And when employees take in-house training together, it improves their ability to function as a team. Frank Ouyang, manager of technical solutions for localization services at Cognos, says, "the opportunity to interact with coworkers during in-house training has benefits beyond networking. I often find we are building and sharing business context with participants [who] work in different functions."
But it's the in-house management training that employers and employees feel is most beneficial. "We were observing that as people were required to take on supervisory roles, most had little prior experience," says John Wright, executive vice-president at advertising agency Wunderman, and "dean" of Toronto's Wunderman University.
Even employees with an advanced degree, such as Mr. Ouyang, who holds a Master's in computer science from Computing Technology Institute, China Academy in Beijing, was keen to take almost 30 in-house management courses including "reaching group agreement" and "leading successful meetings," so he could operate as an effective manager.
"The training courses are about soft skills, which were missing from my university course," Mr. Ouyang says.
Employees could take management training as part of an MBA program or through an external professional development organization, but Jerilyn Pattle, team manager, small business solutions at Ceridian in Winnipeg, argues in-house training is more applicable because it's tailored to her company and industry.
"In our 'manager essentials' course, we're all doing the same job from across the country and so it's easier to think of examples of how we're going to apply the learning."
However, don't assume inhouse training will be a fast-track to the executive suite. First of all, the opportunity to take career development courses is of secondary importance.
"We don't want managers to send employees to courses all over the place; the No. 1 priority is to get employees the skills they need to do their job well," says Ms. Turnbull-Smith.
Also, not all the employees interviewed say that in-house training advanced their careers. Myra Cridland was a senior manager, head office, retail bank division at Bank of Montreal, when she took a specialized three-year BMO-Dalhousie MBA at the $50-million Institute for Learning. Now the vice-president and chief administrative officer of private client group at BMO, she says, "without it [the training], I wouldn't be where I am today."
However, her training experience was unconventional in that it was actually an MBA degree.
Whereas Ceridian's Ms. Pattle, who has had three promotions in six years, says the Business of Administration diploma, the human resources diploma, and the certificate in management, all of which she took at Red River College in Winnipeg, played a more instrumental role in her promotions.
Wunderman's Ms. Kirwan, who was recently promoted, also reports "the courses didn't affect my review." It was her performance on the job that was the biggest factor.
Also when moving companies, the credibility of an employee's in-house training in the eyes of another employer is often tied to the reputation of the company the employee worked for, says Jeremy Miller, partner at LEAPJob, a Toronto-based recruiting company that specializes in sales professionals.
"If it's unbranded training, as a recruiter, you've got to figure out how good the level of knowledge is."
Source:thestarphoenix.com
Because as valuable as post-secondary education is, it can never be geared entirely to training individuals for a specific job within a particular organization.
So companies, such as Cognos, Wunderman, Bank of Montreal and Ceridian, have created in-house training programs, which are generally a blend of online and classroom training lasting anywhere from two hours to two days, to ensure employees have the skills to excel in their jobs.
Some courses address technical proficiency. Of course, individuals come to their jobs with a foundation, but sometimes the core skill set needs to be further developed. At Wunderman University, for example, the co-creative director of the advertising agency teaches an "evaluating great creative course," to what the company calls "apprentice-level" employees ( junior copywriters and designers) and more senior "journeyman level" ones as a refresher.
In other cases, employees need to learn a technical skill to carry out a job task, a PowerPoint presentation, for example. That's why Ceridian, a payroll and human resources management services company, has basic desktop user courses online, such as "creating animations in PowerPoint" or "pivet tables in Excel."
While some technical skills, such as the desktop programs, can be learned through standard licensed courses, others require customized classes. "We have a payroll [software] program that our customers use called InSync that employees can't learn elsewhere," says Heather Turnbull-Smith, director of national learning and development at Ceridian.
The customized classes are taught by senior and executive-level staff, who draw examples from the day-to-day business. "In 'how to write a creative brief,' our vice-president of creative direction showed us an example of a brief written for the client Wyeth, and I was able to apply the learning to the client I work with, Microsoft," says Leann Kirwan, account supervisor at Wunderman.
Companies also provide personal skills training because working with others doesn't come naturally to everyone and isn't formally taught in school. Ms. Kirwan found the "communicating for results" course at Wunderman University especially helpful because it taught her how to work with different personalities in the office. "They didn't actually teach these skills in any of my advertising courses at Georgian College," she says. Similarly, Cognos, an Ottawa-based business intelligence and performance management solutions company, offers employees courses on "how to deal with and resolve conflict," and "adapting to change."
And when employees take in-house training together, it improves their ability to function as a team. Frank Ouyang, manager of technical solutions for localization services at Cognos, says, "the opportunity to interact with coworkers during in-house training has benefits beyond networking. I often find we are building and sharing business context with participants [who] work in different functions."
But it's the in-house management training that employers and employees feel is most beneficial. "We were observing that as people were required to take on supervisory roles, most had little prior experience," says John Wright, executive vice-president at advertising agency Wunderman, and "dean" of Toronto's Wunderman University.
Even employees with an advanced degree, such as Mr. Ouyang, who holds a Master's in computer science from Computing Technology Institute, China Academy in Beijing, was keen to take almost 30 in-house management courses including "reaching group agreement" and "leading successful meetings," so he could operate as an effective manager.
"The training courses are about soft skills, which were missing from my university course," Mr. Ouyang says.
Employees could take management training as part of an MBA program or through an external professional development organization, but Jerilyn Pattle, team manager, small business solutions at Ceridian in Winnipeg, argues in-house training is more applicable because it's tailored to her company and industry.
"In our 'manager essentials' course, we're all doing the same job from across the country and so it's easier to think of examples of how we're going to apply the learning."
However, don't assume inhouse training will be a fast-track to the executive suite. First of all, the opportunity to take career development courses is of secondary importance.
"We don't want managers to send employees to courses all over the place; the No. 1 priority is to get employees the skills they need to do their job well," says Ms. Turnbull-Smith.
Also, not all the employees interviewed say that in-house training advanced their careers. Myra Cridland was a senior manager, head office, retail bank division at Bank of Montreal, when she took a specialized three-year BMO-Dalhousie MBA at the $50-million Institute for Learning. Now the vice-president and chief administrative officer of private client group at BMO, she says, "without it [the training], I wouldn't be where I am today."
However, her training experience was unconventional in that it was actually an MBA degree.
Whereas Ceridian's Ms. Pattle, who has had three promotions in six years, says the Business of Administration diploma, the human resources diploma, and the certificate in management, all of which she took at Red River College in Winnipeg, played a more instrumental role in her promotions.
Wunderman's Ms. Kirwan, who was recently promoted, also reports "the courses didn't affect my review." It was her performance on the job that was the biggest factor.
Also when moving companies, the credibility of an employee's in-house training in the eyes of another employer is often tied to the reputation of the company the employee worked for, says Jeremy Miller, partner at LEAPJob, a Toronto-based recruiting company that specializes in sales professionals.
"If it's unbranded training, as a recruiter, you've got to figure out how good the level of knowledge is."
Source:thestarphoenix.com
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
SAP shores up SAP NetWeaver BW with Teradata
NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) will run on Teradata databases, a move that analysts say is great news for SAP NetWeaver BW customers.
The move shores up SAP NetWeaver BW's deficiencies, which include a reputation for slow query responses, limited data volume scalability, and limited visibility into non-SAP data, according to Philip Russom, senior manager of research at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI).
"The new SAP-Teradata combination has great potential for curing these weaknesses," Russom said in an email response. "Thanks to the SAP-Teradata combination, I feel we'll see even more BW implementations in the future."
The Teradata option will appeal to customers that have Teradata already and were forced until now to run SAP NetWeaver BW on a different platform, according to Boris Evelson, principal analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. NetWeaver BW is currently supported only on Oracle, IBM and Microsoft SQL databases. It will also appeal to SAP customers growing through mergers and acquisitions that will need to accommodate larger sets of data, according to Evelson.
But don't expect SAP customers who are running NetWeaver BW on SQL Server to rush to move to Teradata, he said. Teradata is still a very expensive proposition compared with SQL Server.
Before this partnership, if a company ran SAP and Teradata, the data was stored as relational data in Teradata, according to Mark Whitehorn of PenguinSoft Consulting Ltd. A copy -- called a shadow copy -- was extracted and held in SAP. It was then restructured, and SAP analytics ran against that restructured shadow copy, Whitehorn said in an email response.
In the new model, Teradata is the data warehouse layer, above that is SAP NetWeaver BW and NetWeaver BW Accelerator, and above that, the front-end analytical tools, according to Whitehorn. The data is held in Teradata as before, but no shadow copy is produced. So there is only one data warehouse, which is held as relational data in Teradata.
The move enhances the back end of SAP's business intelligence portfolio. While SAP's acquisition of Business Objects gave it a great front end, the back end was still lacking, Evelson said. The data warehouse in SAP NetWeaver BW is more of a departmental data mart, he said -- it never scaled to hundreds of terabytes, it didn't have lots of the infrastructure an enterprise-class data warehouse should have, and it was never very stable.
"If you look at the SAP business intelligence portfolio, it is very heavy on the front end as opposed to the back end," Evelson said. "Now, basing BW on top of Teradata, that's great."
Teradata provides better storage and scalability in the 25 terabyte area, according to Tim Lang, vice president of product management for SAP BusinessObjects.
The new partnership also enhances support for Teradata, Lang said. SAP customers can call their SAP support line if they have issues with Teradata.
"There's a much stronger connection on the support side as well," he said. "There's a lot of advantages we bring together in a joint solution, particularly when talking about very large datasets."
Russom thinks the SAP-Teradata partnership will spur larger SAP BW implementations because of the scalability assured via Teradata. Likewise, improvements to query performance and broader access to enterprise data made possible by this combination will lead to more SAP ERP users adopting "operational business intelligence" and other time-sensitive, data-driven business practices, he said.
The partnership also heightens the speculation that SAP is interested in acquiring Teradata -- a rumor that surfaced earlier this year, according to Madan Sheina, principal analyst with London-based Ovum Research.
The acquisition would be a wise move on SAP's part, Evelson believes. As consolidation in the industry continues to lead the news of the day (e.g., Oracle's recent Sun acquisition ), partnering with companies will become increasingly difficult.
"I think [buying Teradata] would make a lot of sense," Evelson said. "The major piece SAP is missing is really an enterprise-class data warehouse."
But Sheina said that the Teradata-SAP partnership also underscores something that is becoming a competitive advantage for SAP -- its continued emphasis on platform neutrality.
"SAP is perhaps unique among the big four BI plays in that it is agnostic about which database platform to do data warehousing on," Sheina said in an email response. "Such an option also gives SAP an opportunity to earn revenue for itself rather than [its] biggest applications [and BI] rival."
The move shores up SAP NetWeaver BW's deficiencies, which include a reputation for slow query responses, limited data volume scalability, and limited visibility into non-SAP data, according to Philip Russom, senior manager of research at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI).
"The new SAP-Teradata combination has great potential for curing these weaknesses," Russom said in an email response. "Thanks to the SAP-Teradata combination, I feel we'll see even more BW implementations in the future."
The Teradata option will appeal to customers that have Teradata already and were forced until now to run SAP NetWeaver BW on a different platform, according to Boris Evelson, principal analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. NetWeaver BW is currently supported only on Oracle, IBM and Microsoft SQL databases. It will also appeal to SAP customers growing through mergers and acquisitions that will need to accommodate larger sets of data, according to Evelson.
But don't expect SAP customers who are running NetWeaver BW on SQL Server to rush to move to Teradata, he said. Teradata is still a very expensive proposition compared with SQL Server.
Before this partnership, if a company ran SAP and Teradata, the data was stored as relational data in Teradata, according to Mark Whitehorn of PenguinSoft Consulting Ltd. A copy -- called a shadow copy -- was extracted and held in SAP. It was then restructured, and SAP analytics ran against that restructured shadow copy, Whitehorn said in an email response.
In the new model, Teradata is the data warehouse layer, above that is SAP NetWeaver BW and NetWeaver BW Accelerator, and above that, the front-end analytical tools, according to Whitehorn. The data is held in Teradata as before, but no shadow copy is produced. So there is only one data warehouse, which is held as relational data in Teradata.
The move enhances the back end of SAP's business intelligence portfolio. While SAP's acquisition of Business Objects gave it a great front end, the back end was still lacking, Evelson said. The data warehouse in SAP NetWeaver BW is more of a departmental data mart, he said -- it never scaled to hundreds of terabytes, it didn't have lots of the infrastructure an enterprise-class data warehouse should have, and it was never very stable.
"If you look at the SAP business intelligence portfolio, it is very heavy on the front end as opposed to the back end," Evelson said. "Now, basing BW on top of Teradata, that's great."
Teradata provides better storage and scalability in the 25 terabyte area, according to Tim Lang, vice president of product management for SAP BusinessObjects.
The new partnership also enhances support for Teradata, Lang said. SAP customers can call their SAP support line if they have issues with Teradata.
"There's a much stronger connection on the support side as well," he said. "There's a lot of advantages we bring together in a joint solution, particularly when talking about very large datasets."
Russom thinks the SAP-Teradata partnership will spur larger SAP BW implementations because of the scalability assured via Teradata. Likewise, improvements to query performance and broader access to enterprise data made possible by this combination will lead to more SAP ERP users adopting "operational business intelligence" and other time-sensitive, data-driven business practices, he said.
The partnership also heightens the speculation that SAP is interested in acquiring Teradata -- a rumor that surfaced earlier this year, according to Madan Sheina, principal analyst with London-based Ovum Research.
The acquisition would be a wise move on SAP's part, Evelson believes. As consolidation in the industry continues to lead the news of the day (e.g., Oracle's recent Sun acquisition ), partnering with companies will become increasingly difficult.
"I think [buying Teradata] would make a lot of sense," Evelson said. "The major piece SAP is missing is really an enterprise-class data warehouse."
But Sheina said that the Teradata-SAP partnership also underscores something that is becoming a competitive advantage for SAP -- its continued emphasis on platform neutrality.
"SAP is perhaps unique among the big four BI plays in that it is agnostic about which database platform to do data warehousing on," Sheina said in an email response. "Such an option also gives SAP an opportunity to earn revenue for itself rather than [its] biggest applications [and BI] rival."
Monday, April 27, 2009
Let the IT Land Grab Begin
With Oracle ready to annex Sun Microsystems, there may finally exist a true, full and global counterweight to IBM's hegemony. Who else loses? Microsoft, SAP and Cisco -- and maybe even Amazon. If HP plays along and aligns with Sun and Oracle, together they could create a full-service IT powerhouse.
The reported acquisition of Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) More about Sun Microsystems by Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) More about Oracle makes a ton more sense than IBM's (NYSE: IBM) More about IBM earlier failed bid. This new compact, if it succeeds, will bring as good an end to an independent Sun as the pioneering (yet long flagging) IT vendor could have hoped for at this sorry stage in its history.
However, there are much larger implications in Oracle's latest super-grab than Sun's demise and assimilation. Among them is the fact that IBM now -- for the first time, really -- has a true, full and global counterweight to its role and influence. Oracle plus Sun aligned with HP (NYSE: HPQ) More about Hewlett-Packard (which I fully expect) meets and begins to beat IBM at all the important full-service IT games.
This is truly healthy for IT and the global IT marketplace. IBM's earlier purported bid for Sun always smelled bad to me. It was, it turned out, mostly a red herring. Perhaps Oracle needed the IBM roller coaster ride to focus its intentions. Nonetheless, the outcome is optimal. It bodes well for cloud computing too, as Oracle just about overnight becomes a cloud force to reckon with. I always thought Larry Ellison was just biding time on this one. The recession has hastened the timetable.
Hello, Losers
Other than IBM's unassailed hegemony, the other losers in this are Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) More about Microsoft (actually possibly creeping to irrelevancy faster than anyone could have imagined three years ago), SAP (NYSE: SAP) More about SAP AG and Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) More about Cisco Systems. Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) More about Amazon.com may also be getting more competition soon on the Platform as a Service front. Using Sun's cloud investments, implementations and plans, Ellison can also quickly forge together his own counterweight to Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) More about Salesforce.com. No need to buy it now (for a while).
Open source in general, too, may take a hit, as I don't expect Unbreakable Linux to remain Oracle's point on the operating system arrow. Solaris will be the prime Oracle OS for performance, meaning Oracle's channel pipeline to Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) More about Red Hat will shrink. MySQL will be a means and not an end for Oracle, which would, of course, prefer an Oracle 11g cloud.
Suffice to say that whatever momentum Sun had behind open source More about open source everywhere will be muted to open source sometimes as a ramp to other Oracle stuff, or to grow the community and keep developers happy.
Like IBM, Oracle will have little interest or need for open source middleware or service-oriented architecture (SOA) components. Further, given Oracle's early and deep interest in Eclipse and OSGi, the Java More about Java tools will stay free and open (with a lot of Oracle wizards embedded across the database and other middleware). The tussle for influence between Oracle and IBM in Eclipse and the Java Community Process (JCP) will be great fun to watch in coming years. Again, this is healthy. (Good thing Sun opened this up, eh?)
No other company has shown an ability to merge and integrate at the massive scale and complexity that Oracle has. Its acquisition spree that began five years ago is unprecedented in its scope and level of success. We have no reason to suspect that the way it handles Sun will be any different.
As for the Winners
Winners on the deal include Java itself in the fullest and broadest sense. Oracle and IBM are the premier Java vendors, and the might of IBM (and its customers and developers) in the market will force Oracle to keep Java open and vibrant, while Oracle's penchant for control and commercial success will keep Java safe and singular. I expect the old BEA (Nasdaq: BEAS) More about BEA Systems WebLogic implementations now at Oracle to gather some minor bundles from Sun's software portfolio, but Sun's enterprise software stack (for all intents and purposes) is history. I can't see Glass Fish or Net Beans going anywhere but bye-bye. Same with the Sun SOA stuff.
Most interesting will be the way that Oracle matches the Sun assets against HP's burgeoning partnership with Oracle. Will HP perhaps buy Sun's hardware, storage and integrated circuits intellectual property outright after the Oracle acquisition is final? I'd bet on it.
The Exadata announcement last fall is a good example of what to expect. Business intelligence is the killer enterprise application of the day (era), and Oracle and HP aim to win. Coupling Oracle BI and business applications is something special ... better potentially than what IBM and SAP can do. Should we expect from this Oracle-Sun merger some more love or more between IBM and SAP. Oh, yeah!
We should expect to see a major go-to-market push by HP and Oracle, with all kinds of appliances and solutions portfolios. Both Oracle's and HP's love of virtualization allow all kinds of neat packaging. Expect some of the industry's premier on-premises cloud solutions ASAP.
Indeed, we now have a land grab race for the modernized data center/private cloud between Oracle/Sun/HP and IBM. What's more, HP with all the old DEC stuff, plus Sun's Unix, may keep Unix alive and well while keeping IBM at bay with its everything mainframe lust.
On the blue sky front, consider if Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) More about Apple and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) More about Google get closer to the Oracle-Sun-HP trifecta? Wow. Cloud city.
Larry Ellison correctly predicted a few years ago that only a few IT companies would remain. Maybe we should just remove the "IT" and keep it at only a few companies will remain -- and Oracle will be one of them.
Talk about pure irony. It was when Oracle turned its back on Sun four years ago with the Unbreakable Linux and Java process business (Eclipse over NetBeans, OSGi support, etc.) that Sun's nosedive deepened. In a sense, you could say that Oracle pushed Sun off a cliff in slow motion, only to catch the pieces at fire sale prices.
The reported acquisition of Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) More about Sun Microsystems by Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) More about Oracle makes a ton more sense than IBM's (NYSE: IBM) More about IBM earlier failed bid. This new compact, if it succeeds, will bring as good an end to an independent Sun as the pioneering (yet long flagging) IT vendor could have hoped for at this sorry stage in its history.
However, there are much larger implications in Oracle's latest super-grab than Sun's demise and assimilation. Among them is the fact that IBM now -- for the first time, really -- has a true, full and global counterweight to its role and influence. Oracle plus Sun aligned with HP (NYSE: HPQ) More about Hewlett-Packard (which I fully expect) meets and begins to beat IBM at all the important full-service IT games.
This is truly healthy for IT and the global IT marketplace. IBM's earlier purported bid for Sun always smelled bad to me. It was, it turned out, mostly a red herring. Perhaps Oracle needed the IBM roller coaster ride to focus its intentions. Nonetheless, the outcome is optimal. It bodes well for cloud computing too, as Oracle just about overnight becomes a cloud force to reckon with. I always thought Larry Ellison was just biding time on this one. The recession has hastened the timetable.
Hello, Losers
Other than IBM's unassailed hegemony, the other losers in this are Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) More about Microsoft (actually possibly creeping to irrelevancy faster than anyone could have imagined three years ago), SAP (NYSE: SAP) More about SAP AG and Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) More about Cisco Systems. Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) More about Amazon.com may also be getting more competition soon on the Platform as a Service front. Using Sun's cloud investments, implementations and plans, Ellison can also quickly forge together his own counterweight to Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) More about Salesforce.com. No need to buy it now (for a while).
Open source in general, too, may take a hit, as I don't expect Unbreakable Linux to remain Oracle's point on the operating system arrow. Solaris will be the prime Oracle OS for performance, meaning Oracle's channel pipeline to Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) More about Red Hat will shrink. MySQL will be a means and not an end for Oracle, which would, of course, prefer an Oracle 11g cloud.
Suffice to say that whatever momentum Sun had behind open source More about open source everywhere will be muted to open source sometimes as a ramp to other Oracle stuff, or to grow the community and keep developers happy.
Like IBM, Oracle will have little interest or need for open source middleware or service-oriented architecture (SOA) components. Further, given Oracle's early and deep interest in Eclipse and OSGi, the Java More about Java tools will stay free and open (with a lot of Oracle wizards embedded across the database and other middleware). The tussle for influence between Oracle and IBM in Eclipse and the Java Community Process (JCP) will be great fun to watch in coming years. Again, this is healthy. (Good thing Sun opened this up, eh?)
No other company has shown an ability to merge and integrate at the massive scale and complexity that Oracle has. Its acquisition spree that began five years ago is unprecedented in its scope and level of success. We have no reason to suspect that the way it handles Sun will be any different.
As for the Winners
Winners on the deal include Java itself in the fullest and broadest sense. Oracle and IBM are the premier Java vendors, and the might of IBM (and its customers and developers) in the market will force Oracle to keep Java open and vibrant, while Oracle's penchant for control and commercial success will keep Java safe and singular. I expect the old BEA (Nasdaq: BEAS) More about BEA Systems WebLogic implementations now at Oracle to gather some minor bundles from Sun's software portfolio, but Sun's enterprise software stack (for all intents and purposes) is history. I can't see Glass Fish or Net Beans going anywhere but bye-bye. Same with the Sun SOA stuff.
Most interesting will be the way that Oracle matches the Sun assets against HP's burgeoning partnership with Oracle. Will HP perhaps buy Sun's hardware, storage and integrated circuits intellectual property outright after the Oracle acquisition is final? I'd bet on it.
The Exadata announcement last fall is a good example of what to expect. Business intelligence is the killer enterprise application of the day (era), and Oracle and HP aim to win. Coupling Oracle BI and business applications is something special ... better potentially than what IBM and SAP can do. Should we expect from this Oracle-Sun merger some more love or more between IBM and SAP. Oh, yeah!
We should expect to see a major go-to-market push by HP and Oracle, with all kinds of appliances and solutions portfolios. Both Oracle's and HP's love of virtualization allow all kinds of neat packaging. Expect some of the industry's premier on-premises cloud solutions ASAP.
Indeed, we now have a land grab race for the modernized data center/private cloud between Oracle/Sun/HP and IBM. What's more, HP with all the old DEC stuff, plus Sun's Unix, may keep Unix alive and well while keeping IBM at bay with its everything mainframe lust.
On the blue sky front, consider if Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) More about Apple and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) More about Google get closer to the Oracle-Sun-HP trifecta? Wow. Cloud city.
Larry Ellison correctly predicted a few years ago that only a few IT companies would remain. Maybe we should just remove the "IT" and keep it at only a few companies will remain -- and Oracle will be one of them.
Talk about pure irony. It was when Oracle turned its back on Sun four years ago with the Unbreakable Linux and Java process business (Eclipse over NetBeans, OSGi support, etc.) that Sun's nosedive deepened. In a sense, you could say that Oracle pushed Sun off a cliff in slow motion, only to catch the pieces at fire sale prices.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Microsoft sales fall 6 percent from a year ago
As analysts predicted it might, Microsoft on Thursday reported the company's first ever year-over-year sales decline for the quarter ended March 31.
The software maker said fiscal third-quarter sales totaled $13.65 billion, down 6 percent compared with $14.45 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Its per-share earnings were 33 cents per share, although that included severance and investment impairment charges that reduced earnings by 6 cents per share.
Analysts had been projecting sales of $14.15 billion and per-share earnings of 39 cents, down from 47 cents a year ago, according to Reuters Estimates.
Microsoft had said in January that the crystal ball for the company was cloudy and at the time announced its first companywide layoffs, with plans to chop 5,000 jobs over an 18-month period.
"While market conditions remained weak during the quarter, I was pleased with the organization's ability to offset revenue pressures with the swift implementation of cost-savings initiatives," Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said in a statement.
The company noted that software sales to large businesses were stable during the quarter, but that weakness in server and PC sales hit its Windows, server and Office units.
Whereas Intel and EMC have been somewhat optimistic that things may have reached bottom last quarter, Microsoft's comments were less hopeful.
"We expect the weakness to continue through at least the next quarter," Liddell said.
The company didn't have much to say on several closely watched topics. The company did not give a specific sales or earnings outlook for the coming quarter, instead only noting what it expects as far as its operating expenses.
As for Windows 7, Microsoft just noted that it "remains on track for a fiscal year 2010 launch." That's even less specific than its usual comment, which is that it should ship within three years from general availability of Windows Vista, meaning by January. The software maker has been pushing to have Windows 7 out in time to be on PCs by this year's holiday season, with recent indications that the company is still aiming for that goal.
Shares closed Thursday at $18.92, up 14 cents. In after-hours trading, investors sent Microsoft shares higher. The stock was trading recently at $19.85, up 93 cents, or nearly 5 percent.
The PowerPoint slides that Microsoft put out to accompany its earnings report offered a few more nuggets. The company saw its online advertising revenue decline 16 percent, causing that unit to fall below what analysts were expecting.
PC unit sales were down 7 percent to 9 percent during the quarter, but the industry's revenue dropped more than that as Netbooks continued to make up a larger slice of sales--a trend that hurts both the PC makers and Microsoft. Microsoft sold 1.7 million Xbox 360s during the quarter, up 30 percent from a year ago and helping push that unit back into the red.
Here's a look at how each of Microsoft's individual units did during the quarter, in terms of both revenue and operating income.
Source:Cnet News
The software maker said fiscal third-quarter sales totaled $13.65 billion, down 6 percent compared with $14.45 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Its per-share earnings were 33 cents per share, although that included severance and investment impairment charges that reduced earnings by 6 cents per share.
Analysts had been projecting sales of $14.15 billion and per-share earnings of 39 cents, down from 47 cents a year ago, according to Reuters Estimates.
Microsoft had said in January that the crystal ball for the company was cloudy and at the time announced its first companywide layoffs, with plans to chop 5,000 jobs over an 18-month period.
"While market conditions remained weak during the quarter, I was pleased with the organization's ability to offset revenue pressures with the swift implementation of cost-savings initiatives," Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said in a statement.
The company noted that software sales to large businesses were stable during the quarter, but that weakness in server and PC sales hit its Windows, server and Office units.
Whereas Intel and EMC have been somewhat optimistic that things may have reached bottom last quarter, Microsoft's comments were less hopeful.
"We expect the weakness to continue through at least the next quarter," Liddell said.
The company didn't have much to say on several closely watched topics. The company did not give a specific sales or earnings outlook for the coming quarter, instead only noting what it expects as far as its operating expenses.
As for Windows 7, Microsoft just noted that it "remains on track for a fiscal year 2010 launch." That's even less specific than its usual comment, which is that it should ship within three years from general availability of Windows Vista, meaning by January. The software maker has been pushing to have Windows 7 out in time to be on PCs by this year's holiday season, with recent indications that the company is still aiming for that goal.
Shares closed Thursday at $18.92, up 14 cents. In after-hours trading, investors sent Microsoft shares higher. The stock was trading recently at $19.85, up 93 cents, or nearly 5 percent.
The PowerPoint slides that Microsoft put out to accompany its earnings report offered a few more nuggets. The company saw its online advertising revenue decline 16 percent, causing that unit to fall below what analysts were expecting.
PC unit sales were down 7 percent to 9 percent during the quarter, but the industry's revenue dropped more than that as Netbooks continued to make up a larger slice of sales--a trend that hurts both the PC makers and Microsoft. Microsoft sold 1.7 million Xbox 360s during the quarter, up 30 percent from a year ago and helping push that unit back into the red.
Here's a look at how each of Microsoft's individual units did during the quarter, in terms of both revenue and operating income.
Source:Cnet News
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Voracious Oracle Gobbles Up Sun
Oracle's corporate org chart is starting to look like one of those maps of the Roman Empire or of Alexander the Great's conquests or something. It already covers great swaths of the technology industry, and it just keeps spreading in every direction.
Consider for a second this paragraph, courtesy of Bloomberg:
"Oracle is entering new markets as it seeks to reach $50 billion in revenue by 2012. The purchase is Oracle's third-largest after its $10.3 billion takeover of PeopleSoft Inc. in 2005 and the $8.5 billion purchase of BEA Systems Inc. last year. Oracle has spent almost $34.5 billion on purchases since 2005 to buy 52 companies, making it the most acquisitive software company in the world."
"The purchase" mentioned in that paragraph, of course, is Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, revealed yesterday. Oracle, once mostly a database vendor, is all over the enterprise technology map now, so to speak. Enterprise applications (ERP and CRM), business intelligence, storage, database technologies, severs -- you name it, and Oracle's probably trying to sell it to corporate customers, or will be soon enough.
Yes, the Sun purchase would make Oracle a hardware company by delivering to Larry Ellison's empire Sun's server lines, which are already home to lots of Oracle databases in enterprises worldwide. (Intriguingly, there is some speculation that Oracle didn't want the hardware business and won't keep it. The talk is that Oracle just wanted Sun's software business but had to take the hardware as part of the deal. For now, though, Oracle appears to be soaking in the entirety of Sun's operations, and Ellison is talking about keeping everything for himself.)
The acquisition announcement had jaws dropping all over the industry. Steve Ballmer said he was "very surprised" and needed to think about the whole thing, a rare moment in which the Microsoft CEO seems to have been caught off guard. Some analysts expressed shock, while others took an approach that might be described, if we want to be cliché (and we do), as "cautiously optimistic."
For Microsoft partners, it's hard to say exactly how an Oracle-Sun marriage will play out. HP and IBM will more likely be concerned by the massive shift in the competitive landscape at the outset of the deal than will Redmond.
But a stronger Oracle with a more diverse product offering (to say the least) could speed the spread of Linux-based servers in the enterprise, given that Oracle as a company is kind of a Linux fan and definitely not so much a fan of Microsoft. Of course, buying Sun would make Oracle a major factor in the Unix operating system game. Everything considered, an Oracle-Sun combo probably doesn't offer many positives for Microsoft partners, unless the two companies stumble over each other in the integration process.
Which, if history is any indicator, they probably won't. Ellison and his troops have been amazingly adept at swallowing companies and making them productive parts of the Oracle empire. Despite an economic downturn and loads of purchases in recent years, Oracle has just kept rolling along earnings-wise, beating the Street again with its latest quarterly report.
Oracle-Sun is another mega-deal that signals that the age of city-states is long over in the technology industry, and the age of empires has well set in. The thing about empires is that they usually end up collapsing under their own weight (right, Wall Street?). Thus far, Oracle has avoided that fate. It probably will with the Sun buyout, too. The question now is: Where will Larry Ellison go next?
Source:rcpmag.com
Consider for a second this paragraph, courtesy of Bloomberg:
"Oracle is entering new markets as it seeks to reach $50 billion in revenue by 2012. The purchase is Oracle's third-largest after its $10.3 billion takeover of PeopleSoft Inc. in 2005 and the $8.5 billion purchase of BEA Systems Inc. last year. Oracle has spent almost $34.5 billion on purchases since 2005 to buy 52 companies, making it the most acquisitive software company in the world."
"The purchase" mentioned in that paragraph, of course, is Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, revealed yesterday. Oracle, once mostly a database vendor, is all over the enterprise technology map now, so to speak. Enterprise applications (ERP and CRM), business intelligence, storage, database technologies, severs -- you name it, and Oracle's probably trying to sell it to corporate customers, or will be soon enough.
Yes, the Sun purchase would make Oracle a hardware company by delivering to Larry Ellison's empire Sun's server lines, which are already home to lots of Oracle databases in enterprises worldwide. (Intriguingly, there is some speculation that Oracle didn't want the hardware business and won't keep it. The talk is that Oracle just wanted Sun's software business but had to take the hardware as part of the deal. For now, though, Oracle appears to be soaking in the entirety of Sun's operations, and Ellison is talking about keeping everything for himself.)
The acquisition announcement had jaws dropping all over the industry. Steve Ballmer said he was "very surprised" and needed to think about the whole thing, a rare moment in which the Microsoft CEO seems to have been caught off guard. Some analysts expressed shock, while others took an approach that might be described, if we want to be cliché (and we do), as "cautiously optimistic."
For Microsoft partners, it's hard to say exactly how an Oracle-Sun marriage will play out. HP and IBM will more likely be concerned by the massive shift in the competitive landscape at the outset of the deal than will Redmond.
But a stronger Oracle with a more diverse product offering (to say the least) could speed the spread of Linux-based servers in the enterprise, given that Oracle as a company is kind of a Linux fan and definitely not so much a fan of Microsoft. Of course, buying Sun would make Oracle a major factor in the Unix operating system game. Everything considered, an Oracle-Sun combo probably doesn't offer many positives for Microsoft partners, unless the two companies stumble over each other in the integration process.
Which, if history is any indicator, they probably won't. Ellison and his troops have been amazingly adept at swallowing companies and making them productive parts of the Oracle empire. Despite an economic downturn and loads of purchases in recent years, Oracle has just kept rolling along earnings-wise, beating the Street again with its latest quarterly report.
Oracle-Sun is another mega-deal that signals that the age of city-states is long over in the technology industry, and the age of empires has well set in. The thing about empires is that they usually end up collapsing under their own weight (right, Wall Street?). Thus far, Oracle has avoided that fate. It probably will with the Sun buyout, too. The question now is: Where will Larry Ellison go next?
Source:rcpmag.com
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