Over here we are anticipating this year's Cloud Computing World Forum in London, but over in the US Larry Ellison, Oracle's founder and CEO since 1977, has pivoted his position on the Cloud along with "crossing a line" to trash key competitors.  Elsewhere old guard software giants like IBM are mis-communicating the Cloud messages.  How does this help the the industry, the typical buyer in an SME, or the average CIO in a larger enterprise?  Actually this noise generated by the old guard of IT is significant in positioning the current status of the Cloud landscape, but what we really need is some clarity of vision on the Cloud topic from the big players rather than messaging crafted at protection of their existing customer base and revenue streams.

Last Wednesday Larry announced what the Oracle press release claimed as "the "industry’s broadest and most advanced Cloud strategy", although on  ... Read the article

Tuesday's announcement from SAP ended months of discussion on who will buy cloud collaborative commerce vendor Ariba. As I've said a few times, most of the larger pure-play cloud vendors are getting a look by traditional large software application vendors, who need to quickly build out a cloud application portfolio. The offer, $4.3B, represents a significant premium of 106X trailing 12 month Ebitda, dwarfing the industry median for software acquisitions from 2002 to today of 16X. The price represents a 20% premium on Ariba's closing price on 5/21 but is considerably less than the 52% premium it paid for SuccessFactors last Fall.

Even though SAP executives have consistently derided Oracle ... Read the article

I spent the past week in San Francisco attending Netsuite's annual user conference, SuiteWorld. As with most software conferences there was the usual barrage of announcements including new features, new partners and refined strategies. Of course SAP also held its Sapphire conference at the same time, so you may have had a hard time making it through all the announcement noise to see what was important from Netsuite (I'll leave the SAP Sapphire commentary at this point to my colleagues).

In the Cloud ERP arena Netsuite, the first full SaaS ERP system, continues to raise the competitive bar and deliver key functionality to its rapidly growing customer base. Last year at its first SuiteWorld conference Netsuite articulated a strategy that focused on several vertical variants and... Read the article

It's a statement that I hear often lately, as more traditional software vendors start to invest in cloud computing, that they're "late to the cloud". Of course many of those who are saying it are "pure play" SaaS vendors that are no doubt starting to feel some competitive pressure as more vendors start selling SaaS applications. I also hear it from colleagues and I suppose that it is a true statement of fact but to me there's a little more to the story than that. I think the bigger question might be whether being late to the cloud is "bad".

The general perception is that being early to market with a product gives the vendor first mover advantage and lets them capture market share and mind share before any competitors get into the game. There's certainly a lot of ... Read the article

Want users to use your cloud-based web site?  Follow these guidelines, so that users can sign up easily and use it.  Sadly, there are soooo many ways that web sites can do this wrong.  The result is a bewildering variety of inconsistent and sometimes incomprehensible mechanisms that unnecessarily annoy the very users you are trying to attract. Heed these guidelines carefully!

As a technology analyst my job requires me to sign up for and access hundreds of different web based applications, most of them cloud based.  Those that perform right are a pleasure.  Most, however violate one or more of these guidelines.  As far as I can tell, this comes from a failure to think through all the consequences of the design.  After a particularly egregious example this morning I compiled this “Bill of Rights” that a user should enjoy in order to...

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One of the big issues for a buyer today considering Cloud Computing is how do you choose a good Cloud provider from a bad one?  Who do you trust?  Maybe the Cloud Topic needs some standards?  Well actually there are so many standards bodies and vendor groups that the picture is confused - something that I try to demystify with my companyand with the various cloud groups that I'm involved with.  If you type "cloud standards" in to Google, you'll find an alphabet soup of acronyms, and even the first entry in the list - a "Wiki site for Cloud Standards Coordination" - initially looks promising, but doesn't yet mention some of the key organizations that have something worthwhile to contribute ... Read the article

There's a lot of pressure for change in the world of enterprise software, and many would argue that it's much needed change. The growing availability of everything "as-a-service" is changing the way companies buy and consume software. In fact the Internet has impacted the way almost everything is distributed in some way. The more everything is connected the easier distribution becomes. Underneath this distribution shift though, several other things are also changing about the way software is being implemented or upgraded and the way it is being designed and built. I noticed a trend a few years ago,  just before the ... Read the article

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Can you help me out with a messy research-related question?

What are the best ways to set boundaries around subsets of an “extended organization”, and then give these subsets names so that they are easy to talk about?

The problem seems on the surface looks like a question of semantics (i.e., what to call it). But it’s more than that, since the terms of expression need to be founded on some kind of principle of composition. I need help with both the semantics and the principle(s).

When we’re talking about a network of coordinated, interdependent economic actors, how do we decide which of these actors should be...  Read the article

A couple of recent events and some commentary around them got me thinking about the current state of business, the pressure to change and how companies respond to the need to change. Change impacts people and organizations in many different ways, depending on how the person or organization is "wired". Some resistance is natural but sometimes, at least at the strategic level, companies have to face the fact that they must change to stay healthy. That applies to people too I guess, but that's altogether  a different subject.

If you've heard me speak on social business you probably...

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