Q&A: Richard Lawson on Oracle, SAP and being customer-oriented
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Richard Lawson, the co-founder of Lawson Software, talked about why SAP is the No. 1 ERP software vendor instead of his company, what his firm is doing now and why Oracle's buying spree presents "a huge opportunity."
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The Motley Fool - The Software Bazaar is boisterous again, and the merchants have a new cry. It's SOA (rhymes with Boa) or, in full, service-oriented architecture. Vendors promise flexible, friendly software, and business agility. Is it the new big thing? And what does it mean for customers, and investors in enterprise software and services?
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The Story: With three of the largest competitors in the field taken over by software giants, you?d think that the best days of the business intelligence market were over. You?d be wrong.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    Far from heralding the death of BI, the loss of Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion to SAP, IBM and Oracle may well signal ?a golden age for business intelligence,? says AMR Research analyst John Hagerty.Sure, that?s a brave statement. But the BI market has never been as narrow as many people assumed. There are significant players left, including SAS, SPSS, MicroStrategy, Actuate, and dozens of smaller, often specialized, vendors. ?Go beyond the core tools of reporting and analysis and you?ll see lots of data-mining and statistical tool vendors, as well as industry-specific developers,? says IDC analyst Dan Vesset.The acquisitions of the big guys now creates space for those other companies to flourish, says Rob Tholemeier, a former industry analyst turned private investor. The same thing happened to the database market, he notes: ?There are more database companies around now than when Informix was purchased.? BI, Tholemeier says, is likely to follow the same course. ?Innovation will come from the outside [companies] as the big guys expand their scale and scope,? concurs AMR?s Hagerty. Pricing, of course, is a major concern as markets consolidate. But because the supply of BI software is still ample, given the large number of independents, buyers still have significant leverage, says Vesset ? though that could change further out, he adds. Moreover, it will take the platform vendors some time to integrate their acquisitions, both in terms of code and business process. And while that process plays out, prices aren?t likely to spike.The Bottom Line: As investor Tholmeier puts it, ?Clearing out the old-timers leaves a huge vacuum for the dozens of innovative players ready to strut their stuff. The business intelligence industry is dead. Long live BI.? That change presents both a challenge for IT to understand the new BI, and the opportunity to drive BI?s benefits to a greater portion of the company.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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A day after a PeopleSoft executive vice president said that Oracle and SAP are its only software competitors when dealing with large enterprise companies, more
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SAP aims to have 1,000 customers for its hosted midmarket ERP service, Business ByDesign, before the end of the year. It plans to roll out the service in 20 more countries, including India, in that time.&quot;We will go after the biggest markets first,&quot; said deputy CEO Leo Apotheker. &quot;India is a very important market for a product like&#160;Business ByDesign,&quot; he said.The subscription-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) service launched in September, and is now available in the U.S., France, Germany, the U.K., and China.SAP will launch the service in new countries each quarter. The Indian launch will happen in the second quarter, according to an SAP spokesman.&quot;For the year, we would like to reach 1,000 customers,&quot; said Apotheker. &quot;That&#39;s enough to show we are a true player in this business.&quot;Apotheker declined to say how many seats the 1,000-customer target represents, noting only that Business ByDesign is aimed at customers with between 100 and 700 employees. Business ByDesign costs $149 per user per month in the U.S., with a minimum of 25 users.Business ByDesign is not the only SAP product for small and mid-size companies: there are also Business All-in-One or, for companies with fewer than 100 employees, Business One. Both run on the customer&#39;s own servers.In some regions, the notion of an ERP &quot;service&quot; can be a hard sell for cultural reasons. &quot;China is a market where the pure on-demand model is still viewed with conservatism,&quot; Apotheker said.&quot;Many people have been worried about the potential for cannibalism, but that isn&#39;t happening,&quot; said Apotheker.&quot;Business All in One is very strong, and Business One had a very good year. We grew the number of customers significantly. There are no issues with cannibalization.&quot;With that confidence that it won&#39;t eat its own market share, SAP plans to offer Business ByDesign to smaller subsidiaries of existing Business ByDesign customers, Apotheker said.
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Google Checkout &#038; Customer Ownership Brian Smith at ComparisonEngines has an interesting post (citing research from Piper Jaffray&#8217;s Safa Rashtchy) on retailer fear surrounding Google&#8217;s control of customer data and the customer relationship. (Eric Schmidt in his remarks at SES gave an unsatisfying implied &#8220;trust us&#8221; response regarding Google&#8217;s management of customer data and consumer privacy [...]
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This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half. Oracle has begun selling business applications software to small companies in conjunction
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An introduction to data models Interview In the bad old days we used to progress from "current physical" to "current logical" models. We then used to transform the "current logical" to the "new logical" â and about then the deadline cut in and we scurried about hacking the code for the new system which is about as "new physical" as you can get. No wonder the agile people noticed that it made more sense to devote your time and intelligence to the "new physical", which wasn't going to be thrown away soon after you finished.â¦
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Mobie move With Oracle and SAP going at each other last week, Sybase has updated its Unwired Enterprise strategy to help put more SAP business applications into the field.â¦
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Give us our refactoring moment People sometimes do a double take when I talk about analysis, design and agility in the same sentence. And if I mention UML and agility, they spin round several times and fall over. At the expense of inviting a flurry of email replies for posing a rhetorical question, I have to ask: why?â¦
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Jonathan Robie explains the role of XQuery, a query language for XML data, and its importance to IT business users.
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A look at Oracle, ParAccel and Calpont A lot has been happening on the data warehousing front lately. Earlier this summer, Oracle announced its Information Appliance initiative and, in particular, a partnership with PANTA Systems. Then, more recently, ParAccel has announced a product re-positioning, Calpont is finally talking about its entry into the market, and both DATAllegro and Netezza have announced new product releases. In this article I am going to discuss Oracle, ParAccel and Calpont (for reasons which will become obvious) while in the second part I will direct my attention towards DATAllegro and Netezza.â¦
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The Story: What?s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ?liberal.? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ?commercial.?[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    No matter what you call them, open source companies have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business. First it was support, and now it is software access. Say it ain?t so, Linus.MySQL, for example, will charge users of its enterprise edition to use the code, not just for support as has been the traditional open source business model. ?We are looking for ways to extend our offerings in a way that can be monetized,? bluntly says Kaj Arno, the company?s VP for community.Chander Kant, founder of the open source storage software company Zmanda, is likewise frank about the need to drive revenue. Speaking of the open source community as a whole, he says, ?We are not a charity. We need to monetize.?Recognizing that charging to use open source software flies in the face of the original open source premise of freely sharable code open to everyone, Arno is quick to note that the paid version of Workbench has code and features not found in the free version ? and that the free version ?is not crippled.? Arno calls the move an experiment, and acknowledges that MySQL needs to move carefully to avoid upsetting the often quick-tempered open source community.Is this a trend? Red Monk analyst Stephen O?Grady says it is: ?Ultimately when you look at a high-profile firm like MySQL embracing it, it?s difficult to conclude anything else.?InfoWorld blogger (and IBM employee) Savio Rodrigues notes another example. In a recent blog post, he looked at changes to JBoss since it was purchased by Red Hat Software and concluded: ?The Fedora/JBoss subscription is just like the software subscription business model that commercial software vendors have been using for decades.?Does that mean a company that adopts the usage-based pricing model isn?t really open-source? That?s an interesting point, since as Zmanda?s Kant acknowledges, ?the litmus test of open source is control of the code.? Open source software delivered through appliances keeps the access ? and thus control ? away from users, he notes. But code binaries distributed as software remain open to their users ? for now, at least.The Bottom Line: Have MySQL and Red Hat run away from the principles of open source? Who cares. The real point is that the open source business model is evolving away from the ?free? model and toward an alternative development approach for commercial software. If you adopted open source due to its cost, you may not save as much as you thought. If you adopted open source for the access to source code or the community-supported development approach that is supposed to result in better software, it?s not yet clear if the greater commercialization will enhance those aspects or drive away the true believers and make open source no different than the old-fashioned commercial offerings.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Christopher Jones has posted a review of one of the latest PHP-related books published by Packt Publishing - "PHP Oracle Web Development":   Yuli Vasiliev has put a lot of real-world PHP and Oracle experience into his book PHP Oracle Web Development.  The book's reviewer, Arup Nanda, was, amongst other things, Oracle's DBA of the Year in 2003. The result is an excellent book that joins the PHP and Oracle worlds together.   Christopher talks about some of what the book covers (like installation and code snippets) and the book's excellent focus on different topics, giving each it's own full coverage.
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(InfoWorld) - In search of new markets and customers, SAP AG is developing a new breed of hosted, on-demand products and looking at ways to make its complex business software easier to use. Vishal Sikka, SAP's chief software architect, talked about one of the company'sfirst on-demand offerings, its software-as-a-service philosophy, search functionalities in enterprise software, Web service standards and more in an interview. The interview comes ahead ofÂ next week's Cebit trade show where customers will have an opportunity to see a brief 15-minute demonstration of SAP's planned new suite of hosted, on-demand midmarket applications, known internally as A1S. The Walldorf, Germany, vendor hopes to launch the product later this year. IDGNS: What is so different about designing an on-demand product, such as your new CRM offering? Sikka: There are a few things that are fundamentally interesting. One is the better economics you can offer by hosting. This is more a function of how much you can leverage the underlying stack technologies -- the different hardware -- below the application layer. Another aspect is the time to get up and running. This a matter of how closely you can get the software to reflect the way customers do their business. A CRM on-demand solution for an insurance company in the U.S. is very different from a CRM on-demand solution for a company in Thailand. IDGNS: What specifically is so different in the design of an on-demand product? The level of prefiguration, number of functions, ease of use? Sikka: Exactly. What you see in our CRM on-demand offering is a significantly easier product to use through ways such as preconfiguration, fewer functions and taking massive advantage of underlying infrastructure. You'll see us do things that go far beyond Salesforce.com. You'll see us starting to work with some of the "cloud" platforms like Amazon and Google. We haven't yet announced any relationships but you'll start to see us doing things of this sort. IDGNS: What role will the software-as-service model play in SAP software across the board? Sikka: We look at it as another deployment option. When you look at SAP, the breadth of functionalities that we offer across our customers, industries and nationalities is very vast. One size doesn't fit all. We're using a wide variety of deployment options. For a certain class of processes, it is advantageous to offer that software as a service. For other processes, it may be better to offer our software as an on-premise model. IDGNS: Are there any limitations in designing software-as-a-service products? Sikka: You have to look at the trade-off between the ability to customize and share data. IDGNS: Will your vertical applications disappear as you move toward intelligent xApps? Sikka: No. Our xApps augment vertical applications. They give companies the ability to build the last mile; they're more narrowly defined applications that tend to leverage existing applications. IDGNS: What about your proprietary programming language ABAP? Will it fade away soon? Sikka: I want to take this opportunity to demystify something. In the age of the enterprise service-oriented architecture, the whole programming-language debate is a very big red herring. Programming languages are an area of constant innovation. Interestingly, what we find in our world is that applications live a lot longer than programming languages do. For instance, Sabre, the application used for airline reservations, is still written in Cobol, even though the last compiler was written over 20 years ago. IDGNS: So ABAP is here to stay? Sikka: You won't see ABAP going away anytime soon. Why? Because a lot of the application code that our customers use is in ABAP. It has a very, very reliable, high-performance underlying platform that is far better than anything we have seen in the market. You'll see ABAP for a long time, but you'll also see more Java because certain applications are best written in Java. And you'll see us using other languages. We do a lot of work in Microsoft programming models. Our approach toward programming languages is to make the programming language distinction irrelevant. IDGNS: How about enterprise search? Do you have any new developments in the pipeline? Sikka: This is an ongoing development. What you have seen from us so far is early thinking in this area. A lot more is to come. You will see enterprise search evolving around different fronts, such as contextual searching. We own the application so we know who the user is, what the user's role is and what the user is authorized to see. IDGNS: What about the cooperation between Microsoft and SAP? What are next steps with Duet and what are the challenges? Sikka: The challenges are always there when you bring two big companies together, like Microsoft and SAP. We have different development philosophies. Microsoft is much more volume oriented and more consumer focused. But we have a great relationship with them. The Duet product is an example. Over time, you'll see Duet expanding in many interesting ways to cover a much wider set of scenarios. You'll see us bringing it closer to our xApp composition platform, so it will be much easier for customers to add on to it. You'll see us working even more closely with Microsoft moving ahead. IDGNS: What about Muse. Any new developments on the user interface front? Sikka: This is an ongoing effort toward rethinking our UI approach. To understand the overall user experience and direction, you have to step back and look at the context in which customers use SAP applications. This is very broad. There are people who are on the factory floor. There are truck drivers, mobile phone users, notebook users and desktop users. We're reaching out to end-users in whatever context they're in. Duet is example. A lot of work happens inside Microsoft Office. Of course, a big area where SAP users -- whether a payroll clerk or an accounting manager -- spend a lot of time is in front of a SAP screen. We want to expose those users to a rich client. This is what Muse is. IDGNS: How are your efforts moving ahead to create a developer community as passionate as the one driving the development of open-source software? Sikka: Having a passionate developer community is something we're extremely interested in. The SAP ecosystem has been around for a long time. Thousands of companies have developed add-ons and we're encouraging this. Beyond that, we're extremely interested in developing efficiencies. We have distributed labs across the world. We have done a lot of thinking in how to optimize the benefits you get from a distributed, decentralized development network like the one we have. IDGNS: Do different regions bring different expertise to the picture? Sikka: Yes, across the board. We see a lot of Linux expertise in China, a lot of mobile expertise in India and Windows expertise in Israel. I don't want to stereotype areas but you see a natural coalescing of skills in different areas. It makes sense to have development in those areas. Â
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As important as a physical supply chain Readers may recall that I wrote last year about Silver Creek SystemsÂ®. At that time I extolled its capabilities for product data quality (matching, cleansing and classification) through the use of semantically-based content profiling and attribute identification. This is particularly relevant when information comes into the organization in unstructured formats as most conventional data quality tools have historically been limited to support for structured information.â¦
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InfoWorld - Taking a page from major enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP, Microsoft announced this week Business Ready Customer Care, an initiative that includes major enhancements to its maintenance and support program for Microsoft Dynamics, ERP and CRM, applications.