Category: Competitors

Great interview with Workday Co-CEO, Aneel Bhusri, who discusses cloud, ERP, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, NetSuite, investing, and other hot topics.

Oracle’s hardware business is struggling, but that hasn’t stopped CEO Larry Ellison from talking trash. Oracle didn’t meet expectations when it revealed second fiscal quarter earnings on Tuesday afternoon. Thus, CEO Larry Ellison and company discussed a few other topics during the company’s quarterly conference call to detract from the negative news.

Cloud computing, which Salesforce.com has been marketing for years, is now seen as such a good idea that I.B.M., SAP, Oracle and others are acquiring their own players. But recently Salesforce has won the sincerest form of flattery known in tech: its competitors are spending billions of dollars to acquire firms that do the sort of thing it does, which is to offer business software as a kind of rental service using a cloud of computers inside the Internet.

I once had an IT manager at a large company tell me that he did not include Microsoft Dynamics GP in their ERP software selection short list because the cost was too low. Huh?! Since when is low cost a bad thing? I am reading an excellent book right now called Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini; he gives some insight into this issue. Cialdini talks about the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person and focuses on six basic categories: consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity.

Ever since Henning Kagermann was at the helm, SAP rarely if ever publicly dissed the competition and especially not Oracle. It was something that distinguished the company in the public domain and was to SAP’s credit. Why? While the antics of Silicon Valley CEOs may be entertaining fodder for media types and insiders, buyers don’t give a crap. If anything they find such things confusing. From my perspective, I’d much rather see a company talk up its own accomplishments with customer case references than have to put up with the childish bickering and sniping that characterizes so many quarterly results calls and,increasingly, customer conferences.

Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker has been removed from his job and the HP board to be replaced by former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, after less than a year in post.

It was assumed that the CRM SaaS market would be a zero sum game. Success of Microsoft would come at the expense of market share leader salesforce.com. However, there is evidence to the contrary. Two specific market events directly go against the prevailing wisdom that Microsoft’s gain would be Salesforce.com’s loss, or vice versa.

There’s news for those of us interested in manufacturing ERP: a new cloud ERP provider is having its coming-out party this week at Dreamforce, the annual user conference of Salesforce.com. Kenandy, which is built entirely on Salesforce.com’s platform, provides core … Continue reading →

HP chief executive Leo Apotheker embarked on an important set of meetings with investors on Monday in London and the US in an attempt to boost the company’s reputation after its controversial decision to abandon the PC market and buy Autonomy at a significant premium.

Unpicking the Autonomy acquisition reveals some interesting nuggets that better explain HP’s decision to acquire. This analysis paints a positive picture so could be wrong. Time will tell.

Two colleagues who work for IBM have expressed experience based opinion on Google Plus. They represent views that are at different ends of the spectrum. One has fallen instantly in love with Google Plus, the other is circumspect. One is deeply engaged with the socialised world, the other is deep into transactional systems. Both are [...] Continue reading →

Oracle has delivered more spectacular results with fourth quarter profits up 36 percent to $3.2 billion

On Tuesday Microsoft launched a SharePoint adoption website for SharePoint 2010.  It takes a similar approach to the SharePoint Buzz Kit they published for 2007, helping internal SharePoint evangelists (often the owners of SharePoint) to set off light bulbs in the heads of potential business users (and turn them into fans). 

Forrester Research’s rankings of the top ERP vendors—by revenue—shows a two-horse race: SAP out in front, Oracle following behind, and the rest of the pack trying to catch the leaders.

When someone says "rapid delivery of BI solutions", SAP BW probably isn't the first thing that pops to mind. In contrast, tools like QlikView have made surprising inroads within traditionally SAP-only organisations on the basis of the perceived speed and agility of delivery. So whats the problem?