The Next Ten Years

A door closed this quarter and another opened.  We’re now oriented on a new computing paradigm that will serve us for the rest of the decade.  There is now broad agreement on the big IT issues of our time and they can be summarized in the Four Big Buzzwords mobile, social, big data (and analytics) [...]

Busy April Brings Opportunities

I read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in college (yes, in Middle English and no, it wasn’t that long ago) and now every April brings me back to the opening verses about spring time and renewal.  This April was especially memorable in our industry and as the month has just passed I wanted to take a moment [...]

Oracle Touts Simplicity, Wants to Be Last One Standing

At Oracle Spring Analyst day last week, Mark Hurd spoke about simplification and about how the industry needs to reduce complexity, a good message.  But he equates simplicity with reducing the number of vendors that a corporation works with — at least in IT.  However,  history shows this is not the path to simplicity.  It’s [...]

Salesforce, the Enterprise Vendor

Salesforce held its winter Cloudforce meeting in San Francisco last week.  For many the meeting seemed like a reiteration of Dreamforce and to be fair there was some overlap but each time they tell the story, the company adds new wrinkles that cause people like me to pay attention. What caught the attention of many [...]

Wall Street Cools on Oracle

News out in the virtual world is that some analysts have trimmed their sails regarding Oracle’s financial picture.  The company missed its revenue forecast last time and today the financial guys are concerned about competition in the database business and lack of strong market support for the company’s hardware. Competition from companies like SAP with [...]

Filling Up The Cloud

Last week Oracle bought the HR SaaS company, Teleo for $1.9 billion, which to me means it’s time to do you-know-what to the fire and call in the dogs.  This hunt is officially over and out. The hunt in question is for legitimacy and primacy of the SaaS and cloud computing model.  Many people would [...]

Substitution and Resilience

I culled two stories from today’s (Thursday) New York Times that illustrate some important points about energy, substitution and resilience.  I think the word resilience will be prominent next year as the economy tries to recover further.  Tired of waiting for full recovery we may very well see more people taking matters into their own [...]

Peak Software?

It is an iron law of physics.  A component of a closed system is limited in size to the size of the closed system.  For instance everything on this planet is bounded by the size of the planet and nothing on this planet can grow forever.  This gets us right into economics because the economy [...]

2011 Say Bye-bye!

Every year around this time I write two columns one on the year that was and another on what I expect the new year to bring.  There is no methodology for this process and I believe this lack of method is important.  I take a blank screen and fill it up with what has been [...]

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 [...]