Oracle IaaS opportunity is much bigger than Amazons
Three things were striking about Larry Ellison’s kickoff keynote at Oracle OpenWorld last night a) he was at his late night host best – I must have been a sight as I burst out in humor every few minutes b) he must have spent the week reading all the press releases Oracle issues during this […]
The Stack Fallacy™: Why Big Companies Keep Failing
Stack Fallacy has caused so many companies to attempt to capture new markets and fail spectacularly. When you see a database company thinking apps are easy, or a VM company thinking big data is easy — they are suffering from Stack Fallacy. Stack Fallacy is the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the […]
Oracle Cloud: If you build it, will they come?
The Coliseum loomed large for me last week at Oracle OpenWorld. I flew into Oakland and took the new people-mover from the airport to the BART station at the venue which Oracle sponsors. So much more appealing and efficient than the previous shuttle buses. The Golden State Warriors who play there were part of the […]
Trust, but verify
There has been plenty of scorn about the scolding Oracle’s CSO delivered to her customers for “reverse engineering’ its code to test for security vulnerabilities. While Oracle, as usual, comes across as the “bad guy”, it is challenge most large software vendors face. Here is the IT reality these days a) Most IT vendors have […]
A Salesforce Bid Is Possible (but smart?)
One billion dollars. Buying Salesforce would take about 60 of these piles. The latest Bloomberg reporting on the possible acquisition of Salesforce has more meat on the bones but still no evidence beyond reports of conversations. But it is completely within the realm of possibility that Salesforce could be bought. The meat on the bones […]
Building the Cult of You
You may have noticed LinkedIn recently made its largest acquisition so far, of Lynda.com for $1.5 billion. If you haven’t heard of Lynda.com, it’s a SaaS / subscription service for training and e-learning. One thing to note is who its co-founder is: Lynda Weinman. The Wall Street Journal called her “the mother of the Internet.” […]
How SAP Missed An Opportunity
Hello, it’s me again. Your Friendly SAP — foe? If you follow me you know that I admire the technical prowess of SAP, but despise about twice as much their marketing “acumen” (there are no other words that are politically correct and fit nicely between quotation marks). I wrote about it in more detail in […]
Danger zone: Enterprise maintenance and support
Recently, a client asked for advice on whether to continue paying on-premise maintenance and support to a major software vendor. Support is a complicated issue for many IT organizations, with the pros and cons generally as follows: Why vendor-supplied enterprise support is valuable Avoiding risk: When the system has problems, you know who to call […]
How Oracle’s Cloud Strategy Is Turning Into A Lesson In Humility
Oracle_Corporation_HQ (Photo credit: Revolweb) In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, humility is defined as the quality or condition of being humble; having modest opinion or estimate of one’s own importance. These are qualities not typically found in enterprise software vendors, Oracle included. On Oracle’s fiscal Q4, 2013 earnings call last week, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that […]
The Oracle Assessment
Oracle is huge. No single assessment does this complex IT provisioner justice. While many of my peers speak of some tech companies in single-word assessments, I struggle with Oracle. And, let me get this out of the way right now, I actually like some of the stuff they’re doing, I question some others and am […]
