Enterprise Headlines and Highlights, 2012-05-25

Is HANA for everybody yet? Probably not—but from SAP’s messaging and during one-on-one conversations I had at the event, things are now quite clear. Sure it works beautifully on SAP data (and making it the best option for accelerating Business Warehouse—better known as BW—is a given). But to date, many of the most amazing HANA use cases I’ve seen come from outside of SAP ERP data and are focused solely on solving a single business problem as quickly as possible (this is informally known as the “Ricky Bobby Approach”—I wanna go fast!).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

However, this case isn’t over yet. Alsup still needs to rule whether or not APIs are even copyrightable in the first place, and there are inevitably going to be appeals in the future. The court — without the jury as they were dismissed on Wednesday — will resume proceedings next Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The cuts are necessary given HP’s productivity, and most of the savings will go back to R&D. “We are not taking our eye off the ball when it comes to executing against our ongoing priority,” she added.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

There’s no question what the dominant themes were at last week’s Sapphire conference. They were writ large across the Orange County Convention Center and repeated mantra-like from the keynote stage.

Far less time was spent addressing SAP’s core ERP business. In fact, when key executives did discuss “the core” it was to explain how they were not going to change it or disrupt their customer base.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

As a result, Google Inc. faced maximum damages of only $150,000 – not the hundreds of millions of dollars that Oracle Corp. was seeking.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Other Oracle witnesses include company co-President Safra Catz and Chief Architect Edward Screven. Both SAP and Oracle plan to call McDermott.

Ex-SAP and Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker will testify via videotaped deposition in the retrial, according to Oracle’s filing.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Ariba is costing SAP dear. At a 20% premium to its prebid share price—already up 35% this year—SAP’s bid values Ariba at 7.3 times the coming year’s consensus revenue estimates, notes UBS. That is way above the five to six times forward sales paid for other cloud-based acquisitions this year and the 4.8 times’ average at which Ariba’s peers trade. Cost synergies will be limited: SAP has only a small Web-based marketplace of its own and plans to run Ariba as a stand-alone company.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The patent in question covers “communicating multi-part messages between cellular devices using a standardized interface.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Update on SAP´s strategy on Cloud Presentation during SAPPHIRENOW from Sven Denecken (http://twitter.com/!@SDenecken

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Who does SAP view as it’s primary competitors in the cloud? Software vendors are not always willing to be clear on this topic, but an internal memo from the company’s cloud boss, Lars Dalgaard, tells the story:

1 – HCM + Finance with Workday as no. 1 competitor, and Netsuite, Oracle/Taleo, Conqur as secondary (meaning we will likely be able to take business from them)
2- CRM, Procurement, ByD, Social on Demand with Salesforce.com as no.2 primary competitor, and Ariba and Netsuite as secondary competitors for this go to market group

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle if nothing else has been consistent. They’ve been focused on consolidating the past. RightNow is another example. It isn’t growing particularly fast. I assume their strategy is go up against Salesforce. RightNow is a point solution. They can tell more of an on-demand CRM story now. We take more of a suite view.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP’s cloud chief Lars Dalgaard boasted in a memo how SuccessFactors dumped Salesforce.com, Concur, RightNow, Netsuite, OpenAir, Coupa, Avalara and Onbase for SAP’s on demand software.

But here’s the rub: Customers—Ariba, SuccessFactors and SAP—can make similar switches in mere weeks. SAP executives seem to know the cloud game is a bit different. SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott assured that the Ariba merger would “maintain the openness of the business network” while also connecting to competitors such as Microsoft, NetSuite and Oracle. To its credit, SAP plans on operating SuccessFactors and Ariba as mostly independent units.

On the surface, rolling up cloud players for SAP and Oracle makes perfect sense. But without maintenance and software lock-in, keeping customers may be a bit trickier.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Apparently they have changed religion, borrowing a chapter or two from Larry Ellison’s playbook.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SuccessFactors

2011: 1,578 employees, sales $327.9M – $208K per employee

SAP paid $3.4B — 10.4X revenue or $2.15M per employee

Ariba

2011: 2,432 employees, sales $443.8M – $182K per employee

SAP plans to pay $4.3B – 9.7X revenue or $1.77M per employee

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The sheer volume and velocity displayed at this event show NetSuite becoming a formidable player. Other vendors should envy NetSuite’s R&D capability in doing so much with so few. In a week with so many other vendor conferences, the lack of product news from other vendors was notable.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Yet with Ariba, SAP will clearly be a dominant force for indirect procurement enablement for buyer/supplier connectivity.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP won’t charge you anything for the license, but you will be responsible for operating your own AWS account. Together with our friends at Amazon, we have made three different sizes available for you. To get an idea about associated cost, use the AWS pricing calculator here (pre-configured for 4 hours of daily usage on the smallest available size).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

When reached for comment by TechCrunch, Kleiner Perkins provided the following response:

In response to a discrimination complaint filed in the Superior Court of San Francisco by Ellen Pao, Christina Lee, a Kleiner Perkins spokesperson, stated the Firm regrets that the situation is being litigated publicly and had hoped the two parties could have reached resolution, particularly given Pao’s 7-year history with the firm. Following a thorough independent investigation of the facts, the firm believes the lawsuit is without merit and intends to vigorously defend the matter. The Firm has been a diversity pioneer in its industry and was one of the first venture capital firms to hire women as partners. The number of women partners at the firm is one of the highest within the venture capital arena and the firm has actively supported women in all respects.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

When Pao talked to an outside human resources consultant in August 2009, she was allegedly told that “she would not be successful at KPCB because she complained and that going forward she should drop her complaints, because no one would do anything about them.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP America is looking to develop “the business network of the future” with the acquisition of cloud-based business commerce network Ariba …

[Didn’t SAP criticize Oracle for “consolidating the past” (e.g., Ariba)? http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/26/is-sap-back/2/ -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

All SAP customers will be able to easily connect to the business network through pre-built integration points and drive additional transaction volume and fees.

[This is game-changing. -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Together, SAP and Ariba can deliver a truly end-to-end solution that enables companies to achieve a closed-loop from source-to-pay, regardless of whether they deploy in the cloud, on-premise or through a combination of both.
Ariba’s open network and SAP’s integration expertise will facilitate participation and extend the benefits of business collaboration to all companies, on any system, from any provider.
The Ariba network will benefit from the performance delivered by using SAP’s flagship in-memory platform SAP HANA.
Relationship and transaction information from commerce activity in the Ariba network together with SAP’s leading analytics will provide real-time insights to enable trading partners to discover, connect and collaborate more effectively.
All SAP customers will be able to easily connect to the business network through pre-built integration points.
Through the combination of the business network procurement solutions from Ariba and SAP, organizations can gain 360-degree bus

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Has he talked to many SAP customers and his field about the best of breed positioning he is thinking about? And how many of them have pushed back with “but we bought into SAP’s “suite always wins” mantra 30 years ago”?
Has he talked to SAP’s many SI partners? His biggest cloud cynics are right there in that ecosystem. And at least in the past SAP has not gone to the toilet without their permission.
Has he found the infrastructure talent within SAP to scale the cloud business, and has he got the Board to sign off on a few billion in “hurry-up” data center capex investments?
Can he super-charge the “clock speed” of his non-Silicon Valley development teams to “hurry up” mode?

And one big question for myself:

Why is this any different from the annual “announce, then retract” parade I have seen from Shai, Zencke,Apotheker, Wookey, Snabe, McDermott, Plattner, Sikka?

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

With the addition of Ariba, SAP will acquire the leader in cloud-based collaborative business commerce. The acquisition establishes SAP as the leading business network, adding business-to-business collaboration to its existing solutions. The move positions SAP in a fast-growing segment as buyers and sellers across the globe connect in new ways through the cloud.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Shares of e-commerce software tools vendor Ariba (ARBA) are halted after software giant SAP AG (SAP) said it would purchase the company for $45 a share, or $4.3 billion after factoring in Ariba’s balance sheet.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Hone the product lineup and focus on the winners.
Accelerate the product and development pipeline and win deals.
Tout how SuccessFactors moved all of its infrastructure—Salesforce.com, Concur, RightNow, Netsuite, OpenAir, Coupa, Avalara and Onbase—with SAP on demand software.
Focus on human capital management, finance, CRM and procurement.
Feature a loosely coupled suite that works with SAP on premise software.
Offer Business ByDesign for mid-sized companies and BusinessOne OnDemand for small businesses.
Open up the platform.
Aim to win accounts pronto from Workday, Oracle/Taleo, Salesforce. NetSuite and Ariba were deemed “secondary competitors.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“We currently have 350 unique customers that have purchased HANA, and of those, 142 are live or due to go live in the next couple of weeks.”

He added: “We also have a pipeline that is currently at over €1 billion. I can’t say how many of this we expect to close, but we are having good discussions.”

[Weighted amount? -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Internal e-mail from Lars Dalgaard to SAP employees -DBM]
Customers

Not enough.

Sales

Not enough.

– Not on plan for the year in any area of the OD products.

– SuccessFactors an SAP company is 7% ahead of plan, and did about $100M in the last quarter which was 59% growth. .

Expense

Too much for our sales and customer level, we need to start selling a lot more relevant and competitive product.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Salesforce.com plans to add more than 750 new jobs across Europe to meet growing demand for the social enterprise –More than 20,000 customers in Europe choose salesforce.com to transform into social enterprises –More than 14,000 people registered to attend Cloudforce London 2012, Europe’s largest social enterprise event

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Defying doubters and beating Wall Street expectations, Salesforce.com reported that its first-quarter revenue rose 38% from the year-earlier quarter, to $695 million, though it also reported a net loss, due in part to aggressive hiring and increased marketing expenses to support its growth. Salesforce also raised its revenue guidance for the year and reported a growing number of enterprise deals and greater sales diversity.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Among the highlights of the new Linux 3.4 are driver support for several new graphics cards as well as a new security module and numerous key updates to the Btrfs file system.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Lars Dalgaard, Founder and CEO, SuccessFactors, and Member, SAP Executive Board

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP has since replaced Courteau with Geraldine McBride, a 16-year SAP veteran who left the company just last year to join Dell as vice president and global head of its Applications and BPO Services business. At Dell, McBride led more than 15,000 employees in that company’s services business, and she is now the highest-ranking female executive at SAP. That distinction was held for many years by human resources executive and Executive Board member Angelika Dammann, who retired last year.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP HANA for BW becomes generally available on April 10, 2012.
SAP works with HP to run a BW benchmark on HANA released May 16, 2012.
Oracle’s Exadata becomes available September 26, 2008
Oracle publishes any Exadata benchmark… we’re still waiting.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

This book provides readers with either business or technical backgrounds a broad overview of the architecture, tools, capabilities and use cases for SAP® HANATM and shows how it enables organizations to analyze their business operations using huge volumes of detailed information instantly.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Your data is your business and your business is your data.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The results of the benchmark are an impressive 65,990 ad-hoc navigation steps per hour. This equates to roughly 1,000 active BW users (assuming 60 second analyst think time between queries) and 120 concurrent delta loads throughout the hour

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Throughput/hour (ad-hoc navigation steps): 65,990

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Sales people are not lying, they are simply framing the truth in a way that closes the deal and provides a big payday [for the sales person].

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For a company with deeply established on-premise revenue streams and a correspondingly strong on-premise sales culture, the shift to SaaS and cloud has been slow and painful. For this reason, one should congratulate Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Snabe for pushing cloud deep into SAP. For the last several years, they have worked closely with CTO and Executive Board member, Vishal Sikka, to re-build SAP’s innovation culture. The new cloud initiatives are a continuation of those efforts to reinvigorate SAP’s culture.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP Business ByDesign is a beautiful product. I can say this because we use it! All of Successfactors now runs on ByDesign and our other SAP Cloud solutions. My team implemented all components including financials, project management, order processing and purchasing in just 10 weeks for more than 1,800 users. We are our solution’s biggest fans (and critics). We’ll be closing our bookings starting in May with ByDesign. SuccessFactors, Inc. is no longer transacting on any non-SAP Cloud financial solutions, including Netsuite and OpenAir. By June 1, 2012, all access – including SuccessFactors’ foreign subsidiaries – to non-SAP Cloud financial solutions will be terminated.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Facebook Inc. FB -11.31% shares plunged on their second day on the stock market, a black eye for all those involved with the social networking company going public.

“The underwriters completely screwed this up,” said Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Securities. “This thing should have been half as big as it was, and it would have closed at $45.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Zynga saw some heavy losses as its stock went down to $7.12, down 14 percent from the beginning of the day. The declines happened so quickly that a trading halt was placed, as is customary for stocks that see rapid fluctuations. These halts are usually placed to allow investors to assess the situation of the stock before resuming trading. However, when the halt was lifted, another one was levied because of how quickly the stock continued to tumble.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Developer licenses for HANA and Neo are now free. That is awesome news – and gratifing to all of us who have made the case with SAP in the past.

Vishal also announced the GA of Visual Intelligence, previously codenamed Hilo. It is a great product – but not the most mature. It hardly had a ramp, which is probably ok since it is a desktop tool. It fills a void in SAP’s portfolio today, and I hope it can match its established competitors some day soon. The only surprise for me was that it did not support Universes in first release. I asked that question to Adam Binnie and Mani Srinivasan – and they assured me that it will get new releases very quickly. Having seen Mani in action over time, I think SAP has a rock star product manager on their staff. His passion for his product is of the highest order of magnitude.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Therefore, at Yale we set out to find a new dimension in this tradeoff space that could allow a system to handle TPC-C at scale without costing $30,000,000. Indeed, we are presenting a paper next week at SIGMOD (see the full paper) that describes a system that can achieve 500,000 ACID-compliant TPC-C New Order transactions per second using commodity hardware in the cloud. The cost to us to run these experiments was less than $300 (of course, this is renting hardware rather than buying, so it’s hard to compare prices — but still — a factor of 100,000 less than $30,000,000 is quite large).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg updated his status to “married” on Saturday.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Calvin
is a practical transaction scheduling and data replication layer that
uses a deterministic ordering guarantee to significantly reduce the
normally prohibitive contention costs associated with distributed
transactions. Unlike previous deterministic database system prototypes,
Calvin supports disk-based storage, scales near-linearly on
a cluster of commodity machines, and has no single point of failure.
By replicating transaction inputs rather than effects, Calvin is
also able to support multiple consistency levels—including Paxosbased
strong consistency across geographically distant replicas—at
no cost to transactional throughput.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Projects like Drizzle (coverage), HandlerSocket, RethinkDB, TokuTek and VoltDB…In addition to the ones mentioned above, Aslett cites the following as NewSQL vendors:

Clustrix
GenieDB
ScalArc
Schooner
ScaleDB
Akiban
CodeFutures
ScaleBase
Translattice
NimbusDB
MySQL Cluster with NDB
JustOne DB

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The need for real-time analytics. Intermixed with a tidal wave of updates is the need for a query capability. For example, a Web property wants to know the number of current users playing its game, or a smartphone user wants to know “What is around me?” These are not the typical BI requests to consolidated data, but rather real-time inquiries to current data. Hence, New OLTP requires a real-time query capability.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

NewSQL is a new database access language. It is easier to learn than SQL, elegant, consistent, and well defined. It is not a extension or subset of SQL, and not a Object database language. It is based on top of the cross database library LDBC.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP seems to understand this issue in the SAP2SAP world, but it is also highlighting its work with partners such as Dell Boomi, IBM Cast Iron, and MuleSoft. This is crucial for orchestrating the wide variety of SaaS applications that enterprises currently use (typically up to 12). We’re not talking about lengthy, complex integration projects but about taking just a few days to configure the links between packaged SaaS applications and the SAP Business Suite, if it’s still close to the packaged standard.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

A recent Forrester study reveals that Millennials view technology as a critical part of their life and work. They are constantly “on,” and connected. They tend to embrace new technologies for socializing and working, and adapt quickly.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Well, today is no exception, at the opening keynote of SuiteWorld, NetSuite’s 3,500-person conference CEO Zach Nelson announced their biggest ever win, a three-letter giant .. drumroll.. no, not IBM, but SAP themselves. Yes, the audience was shocked to learn that SAP renewed a $1M license with NetSuite. The shock turned into laughter when they found out it was via their recent acquisition, SuccessFactors.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP Visual Intelligence, a desktop version of its BusinessObjects Explorer software, enables layered views, queries and report building that SAP intends to be led by business users.

The origin of the visualization capabilities come from the Polestar search and discovery solution from BusinessObjects, says Mani Gill, VP and GM of BI Solution Management at SAP. SAP acquired BusinessObjects for nearly $7 billion in 2008 and has revamped its information management offerings over the last 16 months. Different from the older solution, Visual Intelligence includes personalized dashboards, custom hierarchies from various desktop and business data sets, dimensional and trellis visuals, and connections to forecasting data, with additional views for mobile devices.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Dalgaard may have a bright future at SAP. He is emblematic of the type of change and innovative ethos SAP needs. But first, he needs to successfully pull off an ambitious cloud strategy for a company that’s still very much focused on milking cash out of on-premise customers. And he needs to stick around in a huge, bureaucratic firm long enough to reap the benefits of what he’s trying to start.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The University of Waterloo once again had the best Canadian showing at the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) finishing in ninth place overall at the University of Warsaw today.

The “Battle of the Brains” contest is sponsored by IBM Corp. and pits the best student computer programmers in the world against each other in a five-hour marathon coding competition. This year, 112 teams of three students each competed to solve a slate of 12 coding problems using C++ and Java languages. The University of Waterloo will take home a bronze medal for its Top 10 showing.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“SAP wants to be the second-largest database company by 2015, and with HANA and Sybase we will do that,” he said.

But to do that, the integrations, partner connections, integrations, and support networks will have to be built. To that end, SAP announced today advanced support for Hadoop environments. This allows for reading from and loading to Hive and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), rapid batch updating, and loading to SAP HANA, SAP Sybase IQ server, and any other data store.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

While he brushed aside questions about whether Business ByDesign would continue to exist as a brand, Dalgaard said it would be a mistake to expect cloud customers to buy into a broad suite of business applications. Cloud software buyers want the applications they buy to work well together, but they often get started by addressing a specific need, he said.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Computer and software company expected to cut 8% of workforce as consumers ditch bulky PCs in favour of tablets

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

TopCoder moving 400,000 developers to IBM SmartCloud
Otrum using SmartCloud to provide analytics to over 500 hotels
Healthcare delivery improving in Haiti using SmartCloud to collaborate with over 200 healthcare professionals from around the world
Ricoh, Neiman Marcus, University of Texas El Paso, Hindustan Motors, Bonduelle and Apave among others, all chose IBM SmatCloud
1 Million application users working in the IBM Cloud
More than $100 billion in commerce transaction, performed annually in the IBM Cloud
4.5 million daily transaction through the IBM Cloud

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The San Francisco-based software provider officially went public Thursday morning, with a $229.5 million offering priced at $17 a share (well above its expected $11 to $13 range). The stock nearly doubled in value after it began trading, reaching $32.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Business ByDesign was launched in September 2007, eyeing a customer potential of 10,000 by 2010. However, the product’s targets were scrapped a little more than six months later due to issues with performance and cost. The package was relaunched in summer 2010, but by the end of 2011 had only attracted about 1,000 customers.

Still, McDermott insisted that the product will remain a cornerstone of SAP’s cloud strategy.

In a bid to broaden the product’s customer potential, the company now also sells Business ByDesign as a solution that allows bigger companies to connect subsidiaries to their SAP system at lower cost.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Antitrust authorities in the U.S. and Europe have already given their blessing to the merger. Chinese authorities cleared the deal with a key condition: That Google keep Android free and available to other device makers for five years. Other conditions applied by the Chinese regulator echo concerns already raised in the U.S. and Europe, including Google’s obligation to fairly license Motorola’s patents.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Oracle BI runs nicely on HANA,” Plattner said, a twinkle in his eye. “[But] it’s not the preferred version from an Oracle perspective.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In this video, Reed shares his thoughts on Business ByDesign, Lars Dalgaard, SuccesFactors, SAP’s plans to offer componentized, “loosely coupled” and integrated applications and SAP’s PaaS offering, the NetWeaver Cloud.

[Summary of some key points:
* ByD will continue, but limited to SME market.
* ByD will be available by component (FI/CO, CRM) – but exactly what/how/when/roadmap seems unclear.
* Sales OnDemand is the strategic SAP cloud CRM offering.
* NetWeaver Cloud is really old River/Neo platform plus perhaps Java NW components? SuccessFactors claims it will migrate to the NW Cloud.
* There will be some kind of ABAP stack PaaS as well.
* A lot of this will not be cleared up for public consumption until SAP TechEd.
– DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

On Thursday, he specified that the jury count could be as low as six for the trial to continue without disruption.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP unveiled SAP Financials OnDemand, which is part of the decoupling of SAP BusinessByDesign, previously a one-size-fits-all cloud-based approach to the major application needs of organizations. This is a step forward, but SAP will need to address the rest of the financial needs of organizations and look at updating the financial management applications that are part of its SAP EPM offering, which include budgeting, planning, analytics and consolidation and reporting.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

A U.S. International Trade Commission judge found that Motorola Mobility infringed a patent covering a program by Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft called ActiveSync, which lets users generate meeting requests among a group. Six other patents weren’t violated, the judge ruled.

The ruling still must be reviewed by President Barack Obama, who can override the order on public policy grounds.

“We hope that now Motorola will be willing to join the vast majority of Android device makers selling phones in the U.S. by taking a license to our patents,” David Howard, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, said in an e-mailed statement.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The company says it is now averaging more than 1 billion [Cloud] transactions per day.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Lars used to seem like a plucky contender, but on the big stage and rampaging around the conference brushing off public relations handler instructions he seemed somewhat brash and aggressive. All sorts of rumors swirl about frictions between the co ceo’s; now we have a powerful board member adding a vibrant impatience for change to exec sessions. There may be too many chiefs and not enough indians..meanwhile the Hasso and Vishal technical show adds another deep dimension to the positioning theater.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The company says it is now averaging more than 1 billion [Cloud] transactions per day.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP unveiled SAP Financials OnDemand, which is part of the decoupling of SAP BusinessByDesign, previously a one-size-fits-all cloud-based approach to the major application needs of organizations. This is a step forward, but SAP will need to address the rest of the financial needs of organizations and look at updating the financial management applications that are part of its SAP EPM offering, which include budgeting, planning, analytics and consolidation and reporting.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

In announcing SuiteCommerce, NetSuite has added a new tier to the conventional ERP wisdom. This has big implications for all businesses. The demand for some of this new commerce approach will not come from you and me but from the devices we use to run our lives. The Internet of things will be much bigger than the Internet of people.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[Note to self: Instant messages are archived … -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Indeed, no one — except maybe @Benioff — quite matches the enthusiasm and passion Dalgaard brings to any conversation about the cloud. He’s an emotional leader, for one. While addressing his employees last December to talk about the upcoming acquisition by SAP, Dalgaard wept. (I was there, and seriously, the guy shed a few tears).

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

During yesterday’s SAPPHIRE keynote, Vishal Sikka proposed 5 criteria that I believe are so helpful when imagineering and then assessing ideas for how to use SAP HANA to create real game changers, that I would like to list them here again – with a bit of wording added by me:

SAP HANA is perfectly suited to solve problems that fulfill multiple of the following criteria

Go deep: Analysis of data in great detail is required
Go broad: Screening of large amounts of data and many types of data is required
In real-time: Answers need to be given based on data that has been created seconds ago
With High-speed: Instantaneous answers make a big difference
Without Pre-fabrication: It is not feasible to pre-think the path and depth of the analyses

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Both HP and Intel agreed that the Xeon processor family is “where we will want to eventually land” for HP’s mission-critical architecture, and Stallard said that HP plans to continue building the capabilities of Xeon and Linux in parallel to the Itanium business, a plan he said “will be much easier to sell to customers in 2013 than in 2010.”

During that meeting, Otellini said in response to a proposal that Intel acts as “HP’s contractor” on the Itanium through 2013 that Intel is not really looking to make money from such an approach, but “very simply he needs to not to lose more money on Itanium.”

In November of 2009, Fink, responding to an inquiry about what would happen if HP declined to pay Intel $88 million for developing the Itanium processor, wrote, “Simple. They (meaning Intel) shut down Poulson and Kittson development and exit Itanium and have a round of high-fives.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Keith Block, executive vice president of Oracle North America, wrote in a February 28, 2010, instant message conversation, “we are going to fuck hp. …i am a man on a mission on this (sic)”

Block, in another instant message conversation with a different Oracle executive on July 28, 2011, talked about the difficulty of selling Sun hardware.

“we bought a dog,” Block wrote, referring to Sun hardware. “mark (hurd) wants us to sell the dog. … nobody talks about sun. … even the sun customers. … it’s dead dead dead. (sic)”

Block later in the conversation continued, “nobody wants to sell sun. … it baaaallllloooooooows (blows). … pigwith lipstick. … at best. (sic)”

Tim Kelly, vice president of sales strategy and business development at Oracle, wrote in a March 27, 2011 email that he laughed at a sentence in new Oracle marketing material which asked customers if they need help migrating from HP.

“I laugh at the first sentence ‘Do you need to evolve your existing HP infrastructu

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

For the quarter, the cloud-based software provider reported revenue of $695 million, up 38% from a year ago, and ahead of the Street consensus at $678.21 million. Adjusted EPS of 37 cents a share topped the Street at 34 cents.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Oracle VM Server for x86 Release 3.1, the latest release of Oracle’s server virtualization solution designed to support rapid application deployment and simplify data center management from applications to disk. — Enhanced user interface is designed to significantly simplify ease of use for virtualization administrators and help reduce deployment times. — Key new capabilities improve storage availability and backup support and hardware compatibility.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

At first, it looked like they were just being tripped up by technical terminology with different interpretations.

Now, it looks like the trial could lose another juror too.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Salesforce.com Inc.’s (CRM) swung to a fiscal first-quarter loss as operating costs and stock-based expenses jumped, although the company’s top-line growth and quarterly billings easily exceeded expectations.

Shares jumped 7.6% to $144 after hours as the company’s adjusted earnings and sales beat its expectations and as the company raised its full-year view.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

But with HANA, the university was able to use real-time replication right from SAP systems that collect this data, via HANA-ready feeds.

“We saw the opportunity to transform how our business intelligence teams work,” said Kullen.

Instead of manually aggregating data and running batch processes, the university’s approximately 14-member BI team has morphed from being “back office plumbers” to serving as “advisors and model builders for our users,” said Kullen.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

IBM offers SmartCloud Enterprise in its data centers as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). It also offers SmartCloud Enterprise Plus in North America and Europe, with plans to make it available in Asia in the third quarter. Enterprise Plus is also IaaS, with options to establish a more of a private cloud setting within the IBM SmartCloud, including use of dedicated, instead of multi-tenant, servers.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP and Intel announced that they themselves have brought the architecture to the extreme with a 100-terabyte system running on Intel Xeon E7 servers that will serve as the foundation of what they described as a petabyte-scale cloud platform.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“Intel dropped a bomb on us last night,” reads an Aug. 30, 2007 e-mail from Martin Fink, the head of HP’s high-end server business, indicating that Intel had threatened to cancel development of “Poulsen,” a future version of Itanium.

Oracle posted the emails and other documents just after Bloomberg BusinessWeek published a story covering these same documents, which were turned up as part of the court case.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The 5.1 release includes vFabric SQLFire, an in-memory, distributed database system based on GemFire, the memory caching system VMware acquired with Gemstone. The use of an in-memory database system enhances an application’s ability to scale up to meet traffic. It eliminates the delays associated with seeks for data on disks. Instead, all the data has been loaded into memory and is retrieved at RAM operational speeds…

The 5.1 release includes an addition, Application Director, which allows the creation of application templates that specify what components need to be deployed with the application. It’s not unusual for a Web application to require a Web server, an application server, and a database server to be deployed with it. Application Director can assemble the specifications of each into one template, then all the parts can be automatically assembled and deployed and the template saved as a model for future use. Even when apps are built quickly, it can still be lengthy process t

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

GM said today that it was still going to have a Facebook page and everything, but it wasn’t going to be buy any more ads because they just aren’t shifting enough cars. It reportedly spent $10m on the site last year, contributing towards Facebook’s $3.7bn ad revenue in 2011…

Wordstream agrees with a Webtrends report that puts the Facebook click-through-rate (ad clicks versus impressions) at just 0.05 per cent, half the average for banner ads and ten times less than Google Display, which has a 0.4 per cent CTR.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Native Hadoop support for data discovery, data integration and data cleansing. — Natural language processing (NLP) on Hadoop for enhanced social data processing and analytics. — Social data identification and resolution on Hadoop to correlate entities and enrich master data.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

[SAP] plans to announce a new addition to its six-member executive board in the coming month.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Regardless of the legal outcome, the documents show that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison retains a remarkable knack for dragging opponents through the muck…

In the years that followed, Itanium became an industry laughingstock, even as its backers poured more than $15 billion into the chip. New versions tended to arrive late and slower than expected, and software makers took their time updating applications for it. SGI, one of the Itanium converts, went bankrupt and abandoned the chip. Most others decided that Intel’s regular Xeon chips, which were advancing at a quicker clip, were the better long-term bet. Critics dubbed the chip “Itanic,” and HP ended up as the only major Itanium backer…

The bottom line: New court documents suggest HP hid the murky future of a high-end server line from important customers and partners.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“We felt that with the transformation that we have, the right thing for us is to add external DNA into managing our people agenda, so we may be looking externally,” co-Chief Executive Officer Jim Hagemann Snabe said yesterday in an interview at the Sapphire conference in Orlando, Florida.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The fashion house started using SAP about six years ago, globally. It decided early on to set itself up as one global enterprise, eventually in 80 countries. “What we didn’t want was a different platform in every country,” Ahrendts said.

It just finished implementing China — it took six months and a thousand people.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“We’ve thrown all the other guys out, and we’re loving it,” Dalgaard said. “And for the first time, clean, consistent data across the suite.”

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

The new SAP mobile apps provide real-time mobile access to human resources, sustainability, finance, sales and mobile commerce functions.

This includes updated versions of existing SAP mobile apps available on more mobile platforms, including Android and RIM BlackBerry.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

People: SAP has added its global payroll software as a cloud-based offering integrated with SuccessFactors’ core human resources solution, Employee Central.
Money: SAP announced the planned availability of the SAP Financials OnDemand solution, targeted for large enterprise customers to manage their core financials as well as order-to-cash and invoice-to-pay processes. It is planned to be integrated with SuccessFactors’ core HR solution Employee Central. In addition, SAP intends to deliver a new release of the SAP Travel OnDemand solution with additional integration and mobile capabilities, including the ability to capture and process expenses directly from a mobile device.
Customers: The SAP Sales OnDemand solution, with new innovations now released quarterly, delivers new marketing and social selling capabilities, new configurability and customization tools, and new integration to on-premises SAP Business Suite software, including the SAP CRM application. SAP is now broadening its por

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

“The cloud is a completely new paradigm.”
[New?!? -DBM]

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

According to NetSuite, several hundred SuccessFactors users are still accessing the system, so it seems the transition is still in progress. The love isn’t flowing the other way, for it transpires that NetSuite shut off its SuccessFactors instance within a week of it being acquired by SAP.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

SAP also announced a new SAP Financials OnDemand application, primarily for larger corporations needing to combine their core financials with the management of order-to-cash and invoice-to-pay processes. At the same time, SAP said it is rolling out an improved version of SAP Sales OnDemand updated with selling features, as well as tools that allow for integration with the SAP Business Suite, including SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

SAP also announced the general availability of SAP Social Customer Engagement OnDemand, which helps companies communicate with customers over social media channels as a part of their marketing efforts.

Despite the progress with SAP’s cloud strategy, it also announced that it would be taking a different approach with Business ByDesign, with Dalgaard announcing it would be offering Business ByDesign as an entire on-demand suite as in the past, but that customers could also soon deploy segmented portions of the application.

While some may again

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)

Today, Heroku is still arguably the PaaS king, but it’s operating on a slightly larger stage. It’s now part of the Salesforce.com family and, according to former Heroku CEO and current Salesforce.com VP of Platforms Byron Sebastian, is hosting more than 1.5 million applications — an increase of approximately 15x in less than 18 months.

(Curated by Dennis Moore. Read the complete article here)