
SAP Briefing – Cloud, Mobility and HCM
I recently had the opportunity to attend a briefing with 16 bloggers at the SAP Labs in Palo Alto. It was a day and a half session covering Cloud, Mobility and HANA although Stacey Fish was kind enough to set up some 1-1 meetings with the SAP HCM team so I swapped them for the […]

New SAP and SuccessFactors Cloud Payroll Offering
SAP and SuccessFactors quietly launched the beta release of cloud payroll for USA, Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, and India for customers using Employee Central last week. I had the opportunity to get a briefing from SAP and SuccessFactors a few weeks ago and thought I would share my thoughts. Overview The […]

Cloud ERP Starts to Break Out–NetSuite Reports Good Numbers
Last week NetSuite reported it’s Q2 revenue and earnings – high level numbers include: Subscription and support revenue was $61.0 million, a 27 percent increase on an annual basis Cash flows from operations were $15.2 million, up by 80 percent from Q2 2011 While the specific numbers themselves are of vague interest, and more so […]

SuccessFactors and Employee Central – Whats New
SuccessFactors follows a quarterly release cycle and their most recent update was released on July 27th. One of the things that struck me at SuccessConnect in San Francisco was the fact that although SuccessFactors is providing information on the updat…

SAP and SuccessFactors – SuccessConnect Conference Recap
I spent last week in San Francisco attending SuccessConnect which is the middle of three SuccessFactors events with the last happening this week in London in which fellow SAP Mentors Luke Marson and Martin Gillet are attending. I started by attending a ½ day analyst event which SuccessFactors did a good job of having high […]

Trash talk and FUD harms the Cloud industry
Over here we are anticipating this year’s Cloud Computing World Forumin London, but over in the US Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder and CEO since 1977, has pivoted his position on the Cloud along with “crossing a line” to trash key competitors. Elsewhere old guard software giants like IBM are mis-communicating the Cloud messages. How does […]

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

Opportunities and Challenges for IT Managers
Recently I was invited by IBM to host a lunch in Auckland that bought together a handful of IT managers from a range of organizations. the aim of the lunch was to have a discussion, in a neutral forum, about the opportunities and challenges that cloud brings to their organizations. the makeup of the participants […]

SAP Assembles Cloud Powerhouse with Ariba, SuccesFactors Acquisitions
Emphasis on “assemble”, as opposed to develop. For years SAP and Oracle fought a religious war of acquire/assemble vs develop in-house. SAP’s view was (even under the current Co-CEOs) that you can only get to a coherent, seamlessly integrated suite by development. Apparently they have changed religion, borrowing a chapter or two from Larry Ellison’s […]

SAP Integration? Not what I had in mind
I couldn’t attend nor even follow the stream at Sapphirenow, but I picked up a few tweets on Integration. Well actually, Seb pointed one out to me. As much as I detest it, I’ll have to base this post on the limited info I retrieved – although I did browse the usual placeholders for SAP […]

NetSuite Welcomes SAP as Customer, even while SAP Swaps it for ByD
NetSuite is no stranger to aggressive marketing, and SAP has clearly been their #1 target for a while starting from pranks like the SAP for the Rest of Us Party during SAPPHIRE 2006 to staging a shootout at the anti-SAP Conference or releasing edgy videos a’la Mac vs Windows and even launching a Business ByNetsuite […]

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,

SAP and SuccessFactors – Key topics I Want to Hear About at SAPPHIRE
Ever since SAP announced they were acquiring SuccessFactors there has been a lot of interest in the marketplace on the impacts to customers, partners and consultants. It appears that due to the timing of the merger SAP will use the upcoming SAPPHIRE/AS…

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 […]