Josh Greenbaum
Industry Analyst, Consultant and author, former programmer, systems analyst with 25 years experience. Spent three years in Europe as an industry analyst and as Correspondent for Information Week and other industry publications. Regularly consults with leading public and private enterprise software, database, and infrastructure companies. An award-winning columnist for leading IT and business magazines, Josh is widely quoted in the trade and business press and he blogs at Enterprise Matters.
SAP buys Datango, and the Race to (Finally) Give End User Training its Due Begins
SAP is doing something significant in the acquisition of Datango, the question is whether the market will react accordingly. The move is significant in that Datango offers a new paradigm for enterprise software training, but that significance is temper…
Enterprise Gamification: How Gamification will Make the Social, Collaborative Dream a Reality
I’ve been working in the interactive gaming and gamification industry for over four years now, first as the founder of a now-defunct start-up focused on developing interactive training games, and most recently as a hands-on catalyst for enterprise gamification. It’s been gratifying to see this idea crop up as a topic of considerable interest – [...]
SAP’s M&A Strategy: the Key to a Successful SuccessFactors Acquisition.
As the enterprise software market parses the news that SuccessFactors will become SuccessFactors, an SAP company, the question of how well SAP manages its M&A strategy is coming to the fore. SAP has been buying small and large companies for a while, and though nowhere near as avaricious as Oracle or IBM, there are now three big [...]
The Supply Chain Challenge Never Ends
I spent an extremely entertaining and informative day with Kinaxis at their user conference last month, and it struck me how much supply chain management seems to be stuck in the past, even as it increasingly occupies one of the hottest of hot seats in the corporate world, and even as companies like Kinaxis strive [...]
Boxing with the Cloud
Providing cloud-based storage seems so commodity-like, and so hard to defend as a unique differentiator, that it would seem that Box.net, despite the dynamic vigor of the company and its CEO, Aaron Levie, couldn’t really make a go of it in the market. After all, some very very big companies, like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, [...]
The Closed World of Oracle Open World
Insofar as I characterized Oracle Open World as a communications disaster in my last blog post, I think it’s fair to explain why I feel this way and what it means for Oracle and the market. Oracle Open World is singularly the worst customer event I attend every year, a forced march so large and [...]
The Customer Comes Second…..Oracle’s Software Stack Engineered for Investors
I spent much of last week sorting through the absolutely overwhelming communications disaster called Oracle Open World in search of some clarity on Oracle’s vision for its customers, and have come to the following conclusion: Oracle’s applications customer strategy just isn’t about making things better for its customers. The problem with the Oracle of today [...]
The Mobile Metaphor Rules, for Better and Worse
Every once in a while we analysts have an epiphany that rings a bell on one side of the brain while shouting out a giant “duh” on the other. That’s part of the bipolarity of what we do: sometimes the most startling revelations are the ones you’ve seen a dozen times, until finally that bell [...]
The Innovator’s Challenge: SAP Crosses the Rubicon, but the Empire is Still to be Won
SAP has spent several years and several billion dollars trying to formulate a strategy that propels it ahead of an unprecedented set of market forces, and this year’s TechEd helped set the stage for a 2012 that is poised to be the year SAP finally crosses the innovation Rubicon. Of course, as students of history [...]
On-demand Market Maturity and the User Experience: Salesforce, Workday, and Microsoft Show How to Get it Right
The week before Labor Day was an on-demand trifecta, a perfect storm of theory and practice on what the brave new world of on-demand software and services can and will evolve to in the coming years. It was the week of Dreamforce and the maturation of Chatter, the week that Workday hosted a group of [...]
