It seems that Siemens, one of SAP’s largest customers, has said enough to bloated maintenance and licensing costs and is pushing back in an effort for to get more favorable support of their enterprise software packages. I’ve heard rumors that Siemens has been paying upwards of $50 million a year in support charges for approximately … Continue reading »
Filed under SAP …
SAP, On-Demand for the Enterprise, and Private Clouds…
The news that SAP is dedicating a lot of its development resources to On-Demand comes as some surprise for a number of reasons. For one, from what I’ve seen, SAP has yet to really make any major splash in terms of products delivered via a SaaS or cloud model, and has yet to really gain … Continue reading »
PaaS, Cloud Computing and Common Sense
I’ve been looking over the data surrounding the closing of business for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider Coghead, and its subsequent selling of assets to SAP. In a lot of ways, both sides of this event come as little surprise. Here’s why: While the cloud concept is going to open a lot of opportunities in general, it … Continue reading »
California’s Failed SAP Implementation: A Lesson In Old-School IT
California’s decision over the weekend to shed a multi-million dollar SAP implementation caught my attention for a number of reasons, mostly because it represented antiquated implementations from years past. Similar to the Shane Co. example that I blogged about a month ago, this is more a reflection on inept decision making and failed business processes … Continue reading »
Shane On You
The money, resources and time invested by businesses for enterprise applications can be staggering. Such is the importance that software plays in the world of corporate America today, and such is the importance in investing those resources wisely and in the right application. So when I came across this PC World article about Shane Co., … Continue reading »
Ingres CEO: Open Source Lookin Good for 09’
Roger Burkhardt, president and CEO of Ingres, outlined some great open source predictions for 2009 in this LinuxWorld.com editorial. In particular, points 3 and 5 really drive home trends already playing out in the market, and that should continue to in 09’. Open source and cloud computing will be a major theme at SugarCon this … Continue reading »
Price Slashing and Commoditization During Tough Economic Times
I read today that SAP might be reversing its decision in June to hike maintenance prices, or at least for customers in certain market segments and geographies. Whether the former or latter takes place, decisions such as these never cease to amaze me. Price commoditization has been a game being played out in the IT … Continue reading »
SAP Now Turning to a Wookey to Head Up On-Demand Offering
I’ve been reading a lot about SAP’s recent hiring of John Wookey, the former Oracle executive that’s now in charge of SAP’s on-demand architecture. My reason for blogging on the topic is partially personnel, as I’ve met John Wookey on a number of occasions while attending Oracle events as an editor at CRM magazine. He’s … Continue reading »
LinkedIn vs. Facebook – Which Deserves More “Social CRM” Consideration?
As we know, there has been a lot of news coming out of CRM vendor’s marketing machines these days around social CRM. Oracle made a lot of noise during its OpenWorld event a few weeks ago. And now both SAP and Salesforce.com are re-upping their social CRM antes. SAP made some financial moves to aid … Continue reading »
A Thought on Oracle’s Price Increases and Salesforce.com’s Margins
Colin brought up some interesting points about vendor lock-in and the recent price increase by Oracle and SAP, etc. There will definitely be a lot of CIO’s forced to re-think their 2009 budgets and strategies… But what I will be more interested in seeing is how this affects the older SaaS providers like Salesforce.com, who … Continue reading »
