Oracle's Larry Ellison
scored
the big bucks in 2007 among tech CEOs,
Forbes tells us. Oh, and don't
be surprised if you see Steve Jobs on the streets of Cupertino with a tin cup
and a sleepy dog. The poor man's
practically
broke.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/06/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
There's a whole Q&A about it that's more interesting and informative than
anything we could say. Check it out
here.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/01/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
It'll be a short-ish RCPU today, as we're kind of swamped with pesky magazine
stuff. Darn print model! Won't it die already? (Just kidding...especially you
print advertisers. It was only a joke, really. We
love print.)
Anyway, SAP got
a bit of a spanking after its quarterly earnings announcement this week.
Among other factors, part of what dragged SAP down was weakness in its Business
ByDesign product, the German vendor's enterprise SaaS offering. Quoth the article
linked above:
""It is expected to take around 12 months to 18 months longer
than the original 2010 target to reach the SAP Business ByDesign $1 billion
(640 million euros) revenue and 10,000 customer potential,' the company said
in a statement."
Oops. Maybe that SaaS revolution isn't quite here yet, or isn't quite happening
as quickly as SAP expected. Or maybe the problem is with Business ByDesign itself
(although we don't know what that problem would be) or with how SAP is marketing
and selling it.
We kind of suspect the former -- SaaS gets lots of ink and bandwidth (including
here), but outside of the Salesforce.com and maybe NetSuite customer bases,
there doesn't seem to be a super-rapid uptake of it right now, especially in
enterprise software. RCP the magazine (hooray, print!) actually wrote
about this not long ago.
Still, as Warren Wilson, research director at analyst firm Ovum Summit, said
in a recent newsletter, it's not time for SAP to panic. Here, we quote directly:
"Business ByDesign's early results are disappointing, but perhaps
not surprising given the scale of the undertaking in both technical and business-model
terms...But Business ByDesign is a long-term, strategic bet, and SAP can afford
to take some time to get it right...The slow launch isn't good news, but it's
way too soon to worry."
We could hardly have said it better ourselves...so we're not going to try.
We'll only add that SaaS investments for vendors, partners and even customers
are in the early stages, and while we (and everybody else) expect them to grow,
the SaaS revolution might be more like an evolution. Or, we could have just
said this: Print's not dead, and neither is on-premises software. Not by a long
shot.
What's your take on SaaS uptake? Send it to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/01/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
"SA," in this case, meaning Software Assurance, not South American,
South African or Stunningly Awesome. Microsoft has acquired some IP from partner
Covast as part of this deal. Check out the details
here.
Posted by Lee Pender on 05/01/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
If you're one of those vendors that make extensions for Systems Center so that
the Microsoft management suite can monitor more than just Windows, you'll have
some new competition soon...from Microsoft.
System Center isn't just for Windows anymore, Microsoft revealed
this week. By the second quarter of next year -- yes, that's a year from
now, when Operations Manager SP1 comes out -- it'll manage Linux and Unix environments,
as well as VMware's ESX Server virtualization application. It'll also interoperate
with other management platforms such as HP's OpenView and IBM's Tivoli suite.
The forthcoming management extensions are available in beta now.
"We believe that customers want System Center to be their enterprise console,"
Larry Orecklin, general manager of server infrastructure marketing at Microsoft,
told RCPU in a recent phone chat. "It absolutely was driven by customers
-- more and more, System Center has become the standard for managing Windows
environments. Customers really liked the ease of use, the knowledge out of the
box and what they were able to do in a cost-effective way. It's been the No.
1 request to take advantage of those capabilities people have developed in managing
Windows and expand that to the rest of their infrastructure."
There's also a bit of an open source angle here, as Microsoft is using open
source network management protocols Web Services for Management and OpenPegasus
to develop its Linux and Unix management capabilities. Redmond also has a seat
on the OpenPegasus steering committee, Orecklin said. He said that Microsoft's
OpenPegasus participation is one of a growing number of signs that the company
is serious about working with the open source community.
"I'd call it a maturing," Orecklin said. "It's not what you
would have expected from Microsoft three or four years ago."
No, but things have changed since then, right? Whatever reason Microsoft has
for embracing open source -- and, in this case, there seems to be an entirely
practical one -- and whatever skepticism might exist in the open source community,
this opening of System Center makes total sense and should be a revenue producer
for partners. And, for those partners who might be threatened competitively
by the new System Center capabilities -- well, surely you had to see it coming.
What's your take on the new System Center capabilities? How will you sell them
to your customers? Chime in at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/30/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
The company has
new
products and a renewed focus on SMBs.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/30/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
We've
told
you in the past in
RCP the magazine about Microsoft Financing and
what it can do for partners, especially those that work with SMBs. Well, FYI,
there's a new wrinkle in Microsoft's financing story. Redmond now has an
independent
financial-services group deciding who's going to get the cash.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/30/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments
The non-news news of the day is that Microsoft
still
doesn't own Yahoo. We'll keep you posted on other things that aren't happening.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/29/2008 at 1:22 PM0 comments
The PC makers are finding ways to
keep
selling XP, and, yes, we'll use any excuse we can to work an upside-down
exclamation point into RCPU.
Posted by Lee Pender on 04/29/2008 at 1:21 PM0 comments