Engine Yard Differentiates through Control and Choice
I kind of feel sorry for Engine Yard sometime – once seen as one of the two best-known Platform as a Service offerings (alongside Heroku), the acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce kind of reduced Engine Yard’s visibility. The subsequent release of Cloud Foundry, and the significant uptake it has had in the marketplace have further […]
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 […]
Reflections on BoxWorks
Having had a little while to reflect on a month that saw me attend both DreamForce and BoxWorks, I wanted to get down some thoughts on what is happening with Box, one of Silicon Valley’s current darlings. This is all the more relevant given the slightly uncomfortable position that Box found itself in after DreamWorks […]
Workday Launches Version 18 – Quick Analysis
At the Workday Rising event being held in Las Vegas this week, Workday announced the latest version of its product, on top of which they held an analyst/influcner day that I was following remotely. I’ve got a few thoughts about the analyst day but first a recap of the news.
To a Better Place: When is It Time as CEO/Founder to Move On?
Yesterday it was announced that Shai Agassi, one of the most successful software entrepreneurs/executives of all time, had left Better Place, his latest company and incredibly aggressive plan to make electrification of cars work via replaceable batteries, after 5+ long years. I never met him personally other than a handshake, but he was an electric […]
Salesforce Becomes the First Next Generation Enterprise Platform
Strong words but, as I predicted, the announcements at this years DreamForce point to Salesforce firmly creating for itself the position of first true IT platform of the cloud era – that’s a lofty statement but a justified one I believe. From the release, here are the announcements:
Silicon Angle Interview–What’s New and News in the Cloud
While I was in Las Vegas a few weeks ago I took the opportunity to sit down with Alex Williams, Cloud editor of Silicon Angle, and Stu Miniman from Wikibon, to film a video interview. The interview cam at an interesting time – in the space of 24 hours we’d seen some large Cloud-related announcements […]
SAP, SuccessFactors, Ariba and the Brave new World of Mobile, Social and Cloud
Recently I spent a day in Sydney attending an Analyst day that was held alongside Successfactor’s SuccessConnect user conference [disclosure – Successfactors covered my travel and accommodation to attend the briefing]. Other than a few email and twitter conversations, it was the first deep conversation I’d had with folks from
The Rise of Two Tier ERP and Larry Ellison’s NetSuite Intentions
A few weeks ago I was in San Francisco for a few days for NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference [Disclosure: NetSuite funded my travel and accommodation to attend]. One of the announcements at SuiteWorld was that of CTO Evan Goldberg who talked about “Multi Book Accounting”, as my colleague Phil Wainewright explains; [multi book accounting is] for […]
SuiteWorld-Looking Back, Looking Forwards
Next week sees me winging my way, albeit briefly, to San Francisco to take part in the annual NetSuite user conference, SuiteWorld. It will be the third time I’ve been to the event, and it’s always a great chance to catch up with colleagues, talk with NetSuite customers and partners,
On the Modern (Social) Enterprise with John Wookey
Recently I had the opportunity to spend some time talking with John Wookey, one of the most seasoned software industry execs that folks outside of enterprise land will never have heard of. Wookey has an impressive history – formerly at Oracle, then poached by SAP to run their on-demand efforts
NetSuite and Oracle–Competition or Acquisition?
It’s plainly clear that traditional software vendors can no long rubbish this new breed of Cloud vendors. While once Oracle, Microsoft and SAP could pour scorn at the little pests sniping at their ankles – today we have some impressive vendors waiting in the wings who look increasingly likely to become the mega-vendors of the […]
Salesforce Broadens Both Down and Outwards with Rypple and Site.com
I’m not in San Francisco for Salesforce’s CloudForce event, I decided to come directly home after SXSW instead. Rather I’m watching the live stream – while the beer and party may only be virtual, the stream fidelity is pretty good otherwise. Anyway – two big announcements today, the full integration of Rypple and the launch of […]
The Future of (SAP) HCM Consulting and SuccessFactors – 2012
SAP recently released their first public product roadmap on their acquisition of SuccessFactors and I provided my initial thoughts in an article titled SAP and SuccessFactors Roadmap Analysis. A lot of people have reached out to me worried about the future and trying to understand what this means to the overall SAP consulting market. In an attempt […]
SaaS for Agility, Lightweight as an Enabler
In a recent CloudU report, we talked at length about how an organization should approach a move to the Cloud and which applications they should pick as initial prospects for migrating. In the report we advised organizations to look at applications that; • Have significant interaction with external applications or services • Are
