This Forbes article by Dan Woods brings up some interesting points about the increasingly elastic definition of cloud computing. First, it continues to drive the notion that private clouds are going to be a large portion of cloud-based deployments. However, Woods argues that some private clouds may be appliance-based. This goes against some definitions around … Continue reading »
Tagged with Oracle …
M&A Activity Blurring the Lines Between Software and Hardware
Plenty throughout the industry have talked about how cloud computing is blurring the lines between hardware and software. Traditional providers such as Cisco are in a perfect position to begin offering cloud computing services if and when they choose. But you’re starting to see M&A activity reflect the blurring boundaries between hardware and software as … Continue reading »
A History Lesson in CRM
I couldn’t resist commenting on Martin’s blog post below, in addition to the linked comments made by Josh Weinberger and Jill Dyche over on the destinationcrm.com blog. I’ve always been a big history buff, mostly because it provides perspective on what’s happening today and what we can expect in the immediate future, whether it be … 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 »
Holland Open and Looking Forward to OpenWorld
I just got back from what seems like much more than a two week road trip. Met a lot of great customers and partners, and had some very insigthful conversations along the way. I gave a talk about multi-tenancy and vendor lock-in at the Holland Open Software Conference in Amsterdam in Friday. I wasn’t sure … Continue reading »
On Oracle, Integration, and Modern Applications…
I was going to simply make this a comment on Colin’s last post, but I think it deserves its own space, lest it get lost beneath Colin’s fine prose. I think that Oracle is doing the right thing by allowing their customers to integrate between the many versions of their vast CRM portfolio. After all, … Continue reading »
Prebuilt Integrations: Undermining the Flexibility of IT Departments Everywhere
I saw that Oracle has announced a series of prebuilt integrations linking its Oracle CRM On-Demand products with Siebel CRM solutions via its Application Integration Architecture and Oracle Fusion Middleware. I have a lot of respect for Oracle and what they’ve accomplished, as I covered them extensively for many years as a journalist, and while … 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 »
Acquisitions + Price Commoditization = Vendor Lock-In
After a one-week hiatus during which Martin and I where attending SugarCRM’s biannual Sales Bootcamp, I’m happy to say we’re back to blogging. I’ll start with a Wall Street Journal article from last week that our VP of marketing pointed out and that highlighted a number of marketplace conditions we’re seeing here at SugarCRM, and … Continue reading »
Gas Isn’t the Only Thing Increasing in Price…
I read over the weekend that Oracle, paying scant attention to the tough economic climate, has jacked up its product prices by upwards of 20 percent. BEA customers really took it on the chin, with price increases nudging 50 percent….ouch! While understand these increases get offset by discounting, that discounting makes it all the more … Continue reading »
