My Impressions of IBM’s SOA Impact Conference

Last week I attending IBM’s Impact conference which Sandy Carter, VP of SOA for IBM contends is the largest SOA conference in the world. With more than 6,000 attendees all focused on SOA, I think she might be right. So, it is interesting to listen to see what the key messages and issues. [...]

Is HP ready to rock and roll with its investments in software, hardware, and services?

Every year for the past 20 years I have attended HP’s annual analyst meeting. The first one I attended was quite small with a couple dozen analysts with all the focus on hardware. Having spent so much time with HP over these years I am in a unique position to give a point [...]

Top 10 Predictions: Innovation, ROI, Cloud Computing and more…

I love the end of the year. I get to sneak out of the office for a few days and stay off of airplanes. I also have a chance to look ahead to the new year. I like making predictions. Sometimes, I am years ahead of the market; other times I am able to hit [...]

Should the SaaS customer beware and be educated?

I had a long talk the other day with a customer who had just decided to implement SAP’s Business by Design hosted solution. The company (it wouldn’t be fair to him to name the company) is about $150 million in revenue and made the decision to move away from a home grew, inefficient system [...]

EMC’s Innovation Journey: from storage to information centric computing

Today I am at EMC’s annual analyst meeting. Just like IBM, EMC’s theme is innovation. EMC is on an interesting journey from its roots in storage managment. EMC has been on a journey for a number of years with acquisitions in information and content management (Documentum and eRoom) and security (RSA, Verid), management [...]

And the winner is Cognos

This has certainly turned into an exciting M&A season. First SAP announces that it will buy Business Objects and now IBM announces that it will buy Cognos. I am actually not surprised. While Cognos does sell traditional business intelligence tools (i.e., reporting tools), it has expanded over the years to offer a wide [...]

Five things I learned at IBM’s Software Group Industry Analyst Meeting

Every year at about this time I attend IBM Software Group IT Industry Analyst meeting. This meeting is attended by about 90 industry analysts and about three times that number of IBM software group leaders, managers, and support staff. It is quite the event! While I can’t possibly talk about everything I [...]

Can you measure and monitor your user experience?

Since the web has increasingly become the platform for interacting with customers, partners, and the like — the notion of managing the online experience has skyrocketed. The term “user experience” is confusing. I have traditionally thought about this in terms of how the user interacts with software.  But I am finding that the [...]

Five cool things about Master Data Management

Ok, so you never thought that Master Data Management (MDM) was cool. Well I just returned from IBM’s Information On Demand conference and found that IBM has gotten MDM fever in a big way. In fact, they were handling out cool MDM buttons. Now, MDM has been around for a long time. Customers are [...]

Will Oracle win BEA? And what next?

It has been quite a week. First, SAP sets its sights on Business Objects and now for about the same amount of money, Oracle is ready to swallow BEA. Indeed, it looks like the world of enterprise software is continuing to consolidate. So, what do I think? I actually think that Oracle’s decision [...]