Oracle and salesforce.com, two rivals that have been personally at each other’s throats from time to time, said Tuesday that they’ve cut a comprehensive nine-year partnership involving all three tiers of cloud computing: applications, platform and infrastructure.
Late Monday Oracle and Microsoft, also not the best of friends, said Oracle widgetry would run on Azure. The turnabout should probably worry VMware, Red Hat, SAP and maybe even Amazon.
Salesforce, the SaaS maven, is supposed to standardize on Oracle Linux, Exadata engineered systems, the Oracle Database and the Java middleware platform.
Oracle is supposed to integrate salesforce.com with its Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud, and provide the core technology to power salesforce.com’s applications and platform.
Monthly Archives: June 2013
Are You Using an Older Version of Salesforce.com’s Service?
The answer is – it isn’t possible. “No one’s ever on an old version of Salesforce.com because Salesforce.com is multitenant, that is everybody shares the same servers, so when those servers are upgraded, everybody’s upgraded.”
Naturally, when a perplexed customer asked me whether “Navatar runs on an older version of Salesforce,” I became very curious about what could have prompted that question.
When the customer revealed that a consulting firm had advised him about Navatar being on an older version, the mystery began to unfold. Basically, consultants and systems integrators make money customizing software. Some of them don’t like Navatar’s pre-built software for financial firms (built on the Salesforce platform) since it reduces the hours they can bill to a customer. To steer the customer away from off-the-shelf products, they feed false information so they can make money re-inventing the wheel.
Is Your Cloud Ready for the Enterprise?
Reading my newsfeed this morning I noticed several articles talking about the cloud and the enterprise. There is no doubt that the area is heating up with more and more acquisitions (IBM buys Softlayer), investments (GE invests $105M in Pivotal) and fights over big deals (IBM vs. AWS for the CIA cloud) but the question that comes up is: “Are the cloud platforms ready for the enterprise?”
Being involved with numerous cloud projects I see five areas that enterprises emphasize when they evaluate their options. Those are not too different from the criteria they use for any other software offering but here is the cloud run-down.
The Criminal Justice System and the Cloud
As with other industries, the daily operations of law enforcement and criminal justice organizations rely heavily on obtaining, holding and sharing sensitive data. The FBI’s Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS) is responsible for providing many critical pieces of data that criminal justice organizations and contractors need to conduct business every day – including fingerprint records, sex offender registries and criminal histories.
There are understandably strict regulations and standards for anyone accessing CJIS data and this applies to any cloud application provider or vendor providing products or services related to this data.
The FBI, collectively with other law enforcement officials, published new CJIS standards in order to address how CJIS information is accessed and shared across the country and world. By September 2014 (the extended date), all organizations that access the CJIS database must institute specific standards, including what the FBI calls “Advanced Authentication,” which specifically entails the need for multiple security measures for anyone accessing or administrating CJIS data, even network administrators. Another requirement is to ensure any data moved outside of a secure facility is properly protected at all times.
How to SaaS-Enable Your Application in Six Weeks
The world of software applications and products is moving from on-premise to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Perpetual licence earnings are shrinking, while subscription revenue including SaaS is growing increasingly fast and at a steady pace. According to a recent PWC report, subscription revenue (including SaaS) is set to grow at a 17.5% compounded annual rate, reaching 24% of total software revenue by 2016. Approximately 40% of the turnover of 10 of the top 100 software companies globally is generated by the SaaS service.
Gartner predicts that 77% of companies plan to increase their spending on SaaS in the next two years. So the big question is, how can you (as a software application or product vendor) quickly move to SaaS, test it and ride the wave of opportunity before losing your specific competitive advantage to some of the fast-progressing SaaS vendors like Workday, Oracle, Saleforce.com, SAP, Microsoft, Intuit, and Zuora.
Has Microsoft Ushered in a New Era with the Cloud OS?
Are you still spending millions of dollars on storage? There’s no need to anymore with the Cloud OS from Microsoft. The new platform, based on Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure, is built to empower people-centric IT by managing applications and hardware in the cloud era more cost-effectively than expensive legacy computing equipment.
The Cloud OS is Microsoft’s vision for the future of enterprise IT. Based on Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure, the Cloud OS is a modern platform built to empower people-centric IT by managing applications and hardware in the cloud era.
Cloud and the Value Entitlement Gap
I often get asked the question “what is really being done differently by delivering supply chain management software through the cloud versus deploying it behind the firewall?” It’s a fair and important question. I’ll give my thoughts here in terms of two of the more important dimensions of supply chain management improvement programs:
How fast do I get value?
How can I sustain and increase value over time?
It is along these two dimensions that cloud represents a step improvement from previous generation deployment approaches. It provides the means by which to achieve value faster and, even more important, it provides the means by which to continuously increase value over time.
Self-Service and Managed Service Provider (MSP) Cloud Solutions
Customer self-service is a theme that is spreading across a number of industries. As a result, numerous jobs, including those in IT, are changing or becoming obsolete, while industries are becoming more efficient. Cloud computing is a key technology enabler in making these changes possible. Last week I spoke at the IBM Edge 2013 MSP summit in Las Vegas, where self-service through automation was emphasized at a number of sessions, with the IBM PureSystems family of products as an enabler.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are a segment of the IT ecosystem that needs to pay attention to this trend. It should be an important element that cannot be overlooked while developing their cloud strategy.
Self-Service and Managed Service Provider (MSP) Cloud Solutions
Customer self-service is a theme that is spreading across a number of industries. As a result, numerous jobs, including those in IT, are changing or becoming obsolete, while industries are becoming more efficient. Cloud computing is a key technology enabler in making these changes possible. Last week I spoke at the IBM Edge 2013 MSP summit in Las Vegas, where self-service through automation was emphasized at a number of sessions, with the IBM PureSystems family of products as an enabler.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are a segment of the IT ecosystem that needs to pay attention to this trend. It should be an important element that cannot be overlooked while developing their cloud strategy.
Workday Has Not, Repeat Not, Left Amazon
Last week, on the last day of HP’s Discover conference in Las Vegas, HP software chief Bill Veghte stood on stage and said that Workday, the promising HR SaaS company started by David Duffield, who also started PeopleSoft only to lose it to Oracle’ ravenous appetite for acquisitions, had left Amazon Web Services for HP’s OpenStack-based Public Cloud because enterprise customers need real support and stronger SLAs than Amazon offers.
CRN captured the moment, but didn’t check it out.
Veghte’s statement made tweeters sit up and take note, and Amazon denied it.