
VMForce – What CIOs and others really need to think about
Salesforce.com and VMWare made an announcement today that could auger big changes for Integrators, Outsourcers, Universities, IT professionals and CIOs. What was the fuss about VMForce?

SaaS best-of-breed vs. SaaS suites: Who’s likely to win?
Bigger software suites are emerging in the SaaS world, much like they did in the on-premise (and office automation) world. Best of breed SaaS applications may soon be operating at a cost disadvantage. Will suites prevail again?
Where next for Shared Services and Operational Excellence?
Are the big gains from ERP, quality programs, shared services and other techniques and technologies losing their ability to deliver big benefits? What else can companies do to further their operational excellence goals?

The Changing Software Partner Ecosystem
Resellers of SMB ERP products and other application software partners are experiencing a changing solutions world. Presenters at the Progress Software Global Partner Conference gave some great insights into these changes.

ERP Rigidity – What Agresso Found Out – Key Factors
When you absolutely must change or upgrade your ERP solution, do you know what sort of risk you put your company in? Why are these systems so hard to change?

The Future of Financial Force.com – How Salesforce.com Benefits, too
Wow – The Financial Force.com product line may have the rosiest future of all the products showcased at the recent Dreamforce.com show in SFO. Read why here.
When the Cloud Meets Agile Development
With new, powerful cloud platforms available, shouldn’t newer software developmental techniques like Agile apply to these environments as well? CA thinks so and has created a new toolset for this.

Dreamforce post#2: Chatter, Events, REA and the Future of Management
Don’t think of Salesforce’s Chatter as bunch of social networking techologies for business people to use. If you do, you’ve missed the real potential for businesses to operate in real-time.

Cloud-to-Cloud Integration – Another Big ERP Challenge!
NetSuite’s new Open Connect integration should make ERP buyers and vendors re-think interfaces and integration across application suites. Everyone needs to re-think what cloud-to-cloud integration, in multi-tenant apps, really means.

Sustainability: Hard for business, harder for ERP vendors
ERP vendors don’t get sustainability. They think it’s about collecting all of a user’s electric and gas bills to determine their carbon footprint. They think it’s a reporting exercise. If they can develop a spreadsheet with more rows and columns than the next ERP vendor, then they have achieved some sort of market leading, product excellence crown of achievement.