Workday interview: Insights from a deep enterprise cloudist
Great interview with Workday Co-CEO, Aneel Bhusri, who discusses cloud, ERP, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, NetSuite, investing, and other hot topics.
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 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 [...]
Oracle OpenWorld Dispatch 1: Overload, Openness, Fragmentation, Glimpses of Some Solid Applications
I spent two completely scheduled days at Oracle OpenWorld this week (apologies to everyone else I know in the area who I did not have a chance to visit, but I can’t recall packing so many things into 48 hours before). Even though I’ll …
Oracle Fusion gets its due
by Oracle_Photos_Screenshots Larry Ellison could have been somber – if he knew of his friend Steve Jobs dying he did not let on. He could have been pissy about the Marc Benioff incident in the morning. He could have been lethargic – the Infosys session that preceded his put the lady sitting next to me [...]
CRM Idol 2011: The Reviews Continue to Roll #4A
The first round of CRM Idol 2011 – The Americas is now officially over with the EMEA competition looming. We have completed the demos/reviews of 39 companies for the Americas (we lost one due to personal reasons at the last minute) and about 25 of the reviews are completed and published. You’ve seen 14 of [...]
NorthgateArinso – More than you might suspect….
Dr Pepper (full disclosure – my favorite beverage) had an ad campaign for years claiming their carbonated drink was “so misunderstood“. Over the years, I’ve encountered a number of technology and services firms whose reputation or brand stood for one thing but the company was actually something else altogether. NorthgateArinso (NGA) is somewhat in that camp. [...]
ERP, 20 years ago: the move to go global
ERP in 1991 was a markedly different world than it is today. The sector was undergoing a change that would usher in a new group of software market leaders and send another group to the scrap heap. The shift at that time was to move from green-screen to Unix/Client Server solutions and some newcomers, like [...]
Enterprise Headlines and Excerpts, 1-15 April 2011
Tax day. Meh. Some highlights of the first half of April: Marin County tries using racketeering charges against Deloitte and SAP. Do Marin County residents realize their paid employees are wasting their money this way? And after wasting so much money with an ill-advised ERP project?!? Larry Page takes over CEO role at Google, shakes [...]

