Think Bigger

I spent the best part of last week cruising up and down Silicon Valley checking in with customers and would be clients.  The consensus from this non-scientific survey is that business is better than OK and most people are expecting this year to be the best in a while.  Of course there is a cloud—literal [...]

Getting the Skinny on the Big Four

On an otherwise slow news week there was a story emanating from a Gartner analyst, Dennis Gaughan, at a recent Gartner talk in Australia that I found interesting on Business Insider. The headline told the story, as good headlines often do.  “What Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP Don’t Tell Customers” identifies, in Gaughan’s opinion, the [...]

Oracle and ATG Redux

One of the more interesting developments of the last week has been the announced acquisition of ATG (Art Technology Group) by Oracle Corporation.  ATG is one of the leading suppliers of ecommerce solutions and Oracle liked their stuff well enough to plunk down a cool billion bucks for the logo. I thought it was a [...]

Oracle to Buy ATG

Analysis The news is that Oracle is buying independent ecommerce software provider, ATG (Art Technology Group) of Cambridge, MA for $1 billion.  I think it’s a good move for both companies. ATG is known as a premium provider of ecommerce solutions at a relatively affordable price with more pre-built solutions that its larger competitors who [...]

IBM, Cast Iron tie the knot

IBM bought Cast Iron Systems for what looks like an undisclosed amount of cash today.  That’s big news if you are an AppExchange product vendor specializing in integrating with legacy systems like ERP and some CRM.  Cast Iron has been the g-to company for effecting these integrations and grew prosperous doing them. That IBM saw [...]

EU gets it — finally

Approves Oracle’s acquisition of Sun The bureaucrats in the EU finally stopped looking through the wrong end of the telescope long enough to approve Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems. The deal had been held up for months while the EU tried to decide if the acquisition, which included MySQL, a database product bought by Sun [...]