Time for Oracle Nation?
I have analyzed Oracle applications business since the early 90s – first at PwC, then Gartner, now at Deal Architect. I have long been a Larry Ellison admirer, much less so of his company’s applications. It has been a perennial, promising, second ranked “Avis” in the applications market. The problem is their “we try harder” […]
Control your own destiny when it comes to EOL of your packages
A recent Rimini Street survey says that in spite of the announced 2025 end of life for core applications in SAP Business Suite 7 ERP product and older versions, “Of the IT leaders surveyed, two-thirds state they either have no plans to migrate to S/4HANA (35%) or are undecided about moving to S/4HANA (32%) ” IDC, on […]
The Oracle Enigma
Rimini Street recently conducted a survey of Oracle customers. Oracle and Rimini have long been in litigation, so I would read the results with a nuanced viewpoint, but it does not paint the picture of a very happy Oracle Nation. As an analyst, I am particularly interested in products and competitive positioning. One of the more […]
Workday: The Power of Focus
kept thinking of Southwest Airlines while I was at the Workday Innovation Summit in CA last week. I had read this tribute to the legendary founder, Herb Kelleher on the flight over and it reminded me how revered he was – like Dave Duffield of Workday is in HCM circles. Then, a walk down memory lane took […]
Drama in enterprise computing
Ray Lane, a top-notch tech executive and investor over decades, said this about my new book “Don’t be fooled by the title—the book is not just about SAP. It’s about drama in enterprise computing.” I then used “drama” in the title of my recent ZDNet guest column. Drama? That’s what you get in Augusta in April. Isn’t […]
Rob Enslin, turnaround artist
SAP briefed me, under NDA, on Friday night about Rob Enslin leaving. At that time, I was also staring at a fairly hostile email from another vendor exec in response to a request they become more open in their analyst relations. The stark contrast made me appreciate even more how Rob and others at SAP have […]
The coming Enterprise Software Hurricane
In interviewing SAP customers for the upcoming book, I ended up classifying them broadly into four groups. I termed the first three: a) Risk-takers who are trying out new Leonardo ML or IoT projects, developing new functionality with its Cloud Platform, moving to S/4HANA in the cloud; b) Modernizers who are moving to S/4 on […]
Polishing brand ERP
Kudos to Cindy Jutras for her study “Real Facts About ERP Implementation”. Her survey showed that two-thirds of respondents graded their ERP implementation as “successful” or “very successful.” The survey found 31% thought their ERP project was at least a partial success, while 2% thought they were “not very successful.” Only one out of 315 thought their […]
Time for more vertical integration in enterprise software
As SaaS vendors took off in the early 2000s, I was encouraged by their business model. They had collapsed software, hosting, application management and upgrades into one contract. But in recent years I have seen a reversal and a lot of fragmentation. So, vendors are leveraging AWS or Azure for their infrastructure. Is that showing […]
Software Maintenance "Empty Calories"
At a conference in 2006, I presented a Top 10 list of technology expenses which to me represented “empty calories”. Top of that list was Software Maintenance with the likes of Oracle, IBM and SAP Unbelievably, in the dozen years since, a vast majority of on-prem customers have not moved to the cloud and the value […]
