Box Answers IT Concerns–Deeper Security Option Roll Out
Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about Dropbox releasing an entire swathe of new security functionality that sees it firmly mark itself as entering the corporate market and responding to the needs of IT. As I said at the time, Dropbox has long signaled an intention to move up the food chain. In [...]
StitchLabs–Solving SMBs Inventory Woes
Many readers know that outside of technology, I own a business that manufactures apparel and other products and sells them both online and through retail outlets. Having been involved in that business for 17 or so years, I’ve had first-hand experience of just how difficult it is to run a tightly integrated operation with e-commerce, [...]
Top Five Challenges Facing Enterprise Application Developers
Several common themes have emerged from discussions with a broad array of enterprise developers. In this post, I’ll share some of what I’ve been hearing. I would love to get your feedback. 1) Cloud Apps are Hard to Get Right – While abstraction of infrastructure has helped agility and application management, it doesn’t make it [...]
Who is to blame when a SAP Payroll Project Fails
There have been several high profile SAP Payroll failures over the past few years in the United States at places such as the State of California, National Grid, Kentucky Government, City of Portland, LA School District, City of San Diego, California Judicial Council, Marin County and an epic train wreck happening down under at Queensland [...]
Does it matter if you are popular on LinkedIn?
I am sure that some of us have gotten these really cool e-mails from Linkedin lately helping us put some kind of context around our relative popularity on the internet, or at least on the LinkedIn system. The problem is that being popular on LinkedIn does not matter to me at all. Sure the infographic [...]
Dropbox Listens to the Criticism–Starts to Mature Corporate Product
I’ve been a harsh critic of Dropbox in the past – mostly because I feel they lack maturity – both as a company and as a product – and this lack of maturity is a real risk for enterprise customers using their product. It seems Dropbox has been listening to the criticism that myself and [...]
Where is SIRI for the Enterprise?
If you have one of the newer versions of the iphone then you are more than likely familiar with Siri; the “personal assistant” on your phone that you can talk to get help with anything from directions to recipes. Unfortunately the concept is at this point, much more valuable than Siri itself. Now while Siri [...]
Using Elastic Transcoder in Amazon Web Services
If you ever wanted a painless way of transcoding video to some 120 different devices, then the new Elastic Transcoder service from Amazon Web Services is the service you are looking for. This is probably the easiest service to use of all the Amazon Web Services out there. All you have to do is record [...]
Ravello and the Developer’s Application Hypervisor Attract $26M in Funding
While in Israel last week, I took the opportunity to meet with Ravello, a company just coming out of stealth that aims to ease the process of development and deployment of enterprise applications. Founded by the creators of open source hypervisor KVM, Ravello aims to enable the replication of existing applications, with no changes, such [...]
Massive Java Update available you should apply it
And you should do this update; Oracle has finally gotten around to pushing a massive 50 vulnerability fixing update to Java. The bad part is that most of us have decoupled Java from our browsers, and I am wondering if this is too little too late. With Mozilla (Firefox) dropping Java support from its browser [...]
Empathize Not Sympathize
Many enterprise software vendors sympathize. “We know it’s a bad experience” or “We will fix the usability.” One of the reasons the software is not usable is because the makers never had any empathy for the end users who would use it. In many cases the makers didn’t even know who their end users were; [...]
Overcoming the Perils of Licensing with CiRBA
The efficiency that virtualization brings is good and all, but there still exists issues around licensing costs. Essentially having a virtualization product, and making licensing changes to optimize a customer’s costs are two very different things. CiRBA, a provider of capacity control software, aims to help with this problem with
ORMs Suck, I’m Asking & I’m Telling
Here’s a thing that’s come up already. ORMs, or Object Relational Mapper, are a RDBMS based thing for devs that want, in essence a statically typed object to deal with when writing code (yes, I know there’s a ton of other things an ORM can do or be used for, but I’m going with a [...]
SAP and SuccessFactors – Four Key topics I Want to Hear About at HR2013
The 10th Annual SAP HR2013 Conference will be in Las Vegas from February 26 to March 1 and it is regularly considered the premierevent for SAP HCM Professionals, consultants and customers. There are more than 110 in-depth educational sessions, ask the expert workshops, customer workshops, networking events and live demos by SAP and SuccessFactors. I will be attending [...]
SAP Business Suite on HANA, Because Big Data is a Stupid Term
I spent a lot of time last year talking with vendors about big data and it’s ramifications for both the tech industry and the economy at large. Often these conversations centered around one or another vendor’s use of the big data term as the buzzword de jour, regardless of whether anything they do even vaguely [...]
