Open Source Companies to Watch

This is a good list, the three that I very much like are Untangle, SnapLogic (fyi, I met SnapLogic last year, wrote about it here) and Kickfire.

It’s easy to focus on SaaS companies in the enterprise space, relegating on premise to a wheezing and gasping dinosaur in it’s final days, but the fact remains that [...]

Piling on the VMW Mess Today

Lot’s of commentary today about VMware missing their number and CEO Greene out of the top job. For the record, when I was at SAP Ventures we looked at this deal but passed because of the husband/wife team (generally a big red flag for venture deals). It worked out for Diane and Mendel, and it [...]

Early Adopters’ Secrets For Success With New Tech

The CIO’s role within global 2000 companies has changed in recent years from leading big systems projects, like ERP deployments, to business transformation. The objective for a lot of big companies is to use technology innovations to drive business innovations, not just achieve cost and productivity efficiencies.

“Ten years ago, CIOs spent a lot [...]

The Octopus and ME

Sam Lawrence put up this post on the Anatomy of the Enterprise Octopus and as usual he takes advantage of good graphics to make his point in such a way as to be hard to take issue with. He nails it with the following quote:

Think of this is way more effective baton passing. [...]

Court Finds That “Buy” Means to Buy

The consequences of this ruling are indeed significant, imagine a world where all those unused enterprise software licenses actually have residual value in a secondary market.

Let’s say you didn’t use 30,000 Oracle database seats or 15,000 SAP CRM seats and now you can go out and sell them to another company at a discount. That [...]

HP/EDS Makes Sense

Dennis nicely captured the 3 people that I’ve read on the HP/EDS deal: Tom Foremski, Larry Dignan, and Vinnie Mirchandani:

My take is skewed by experiences I’ve seen in Europe where EDS has been removed or had its contractual relationships significantly cut back as projects have either failed, been ‘botched’ or it’s been forced to bid [...]

Are we headed for a nuclear winter?

Dennis puts up a good post on the intersection of web 2.0 and the enterprise. O’Reilly actually talked about this in his keynote, that the enterprise is one of the 3 big themes he is focusing on, but I have to say that this segment will be a rude awakening for the 99.9% of companies [...]

Woolly Mammoths

My friend Jim Fisher pretty much sums it up insofar as traditional enterprise software sales is concerned. I have often said, and written here, that customers have gotten better at buying software than we have at selling them software, but at the same time question what it is that we replace this system with then [...]

Microsoft Buys Ad Inventory Management Firm Rapt

Congratulations to Tom and the crew, this has been a long time coming. Rapt has been around for the better part of a decade and has it’s roots in enterprise supply chain management (Sun was their first customer), so it’s a great case study about how a management team can repurpose one solution to another [...]

Aberdeen Scrutinized by WSJ

Enterprise software research firm Aberdeen went under the microscope of WSJ columnist Lee Gomes. What follows is a pretty nasty dissection of their business and the indictment that the firm is no longer a research firm, instead being just marketing under a different name.The WSJ article is reg required so I’m not linking to it, [...]

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