Has IBM Changed its Partner Strategy? The Hunt for OEMs

Partners are getting more and more important to the major software players. IBM announced a very interesting relationship with Kana, a $60 million solution provider of multi-channel customer service software. This is indeed a growing area in the market. Kana sells its software to about 60% of the Fortune 100. [...]

Packaging SOA: What serves the customer?

I was talking to a CIO the other day about the whole area of Service Oriented Architectures. It was one of those interesting probing discussions around key players, emerging technologies and the like. One of the interesting topics that came up was around packaged software. This CIO was confused about a major [...]

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 [...]

What’s SAP’s Plan: Innovation, SOA, and Winning?

I am back from SAP’s annual industry influencer conference. When I attend one of these meetings I typically take lots of notes on my laptop so that after the fact I can go back and make sense of what the executives actually said. It is a fascinating process. When I take these [...]

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 [...]

SAP’s Journey: SOA By Design?

I am attending SAP’s “Industry Influencer” conference this week. It is clearly an interesting time for SAP. The company’s platform is evolving both in scope, architecture, and markets. SAP is a company that likes control and likes to control its own world and the world of its customers. The message was clear. [...]

SOA and Unintended Market Consequences

Now, I have been around the software world for longer than I would like to admit (I would be giving away my age if I told you). I have watched many trends come and go. The one consistent pattern that I see is the slow progression over the last 20 years towards distributed computing. [...]

The Future of Enterprise Software: who gets the power?

I recently attended an industry conference called Software 2007 and was struck by the different approaches articulated and advocated by three very different industry leaders. What stood out from the conference and from the discussions by the leaders of these three companies were the dramatic changes happening [...]

How does SAP turn 250 million lines of code into modular services?

I didn’t attend the SAP Sapphire conference this year. I simply had too much going on so I gave myself a pass. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention. I am thinking about the fact that SAP’s application environment has more than 250 million lines of code. I would guess [...]