With the Sun deal, Oracle now has a hardware business, a cloud computing/data center business and a firmer hold on the DBMS market due to Sun’s ownership of MySQL.
The Oracle portal strategy gets a little murkier with the acquisition. Oracle now has it's own legacy portal, the Aqualogic portal acquired from BEA and the Sun web portal. It's anyone's guess which one get the R&D buck from Oracle.
In the deal Oracle acquires all of Sun’s JAVA intellectual property and that has to have IBM a bit scrambling to assess the impact; not because of Oracle controlling the Java standard, but because Oracle will have a stronger hold on the evolution of the Java application server market. This ought to enable Oracle to compete more aggressively with IBM and MQ everything.
Sun/Oracle may consider bundling hardware & software. For example selling massively scalable database appliances that could compete with IBM, Netezza and other DBMS appliance vendors.
Oracle might decide to leverage the Sun Data Center / Cloud Computing solutions to create appliance bundles delivering Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft or Seibel on a software as service or as a rack based all-in-one solution.
Lastly, the acquisition lays the foundation for an Oracle cloud computing infrastructure that positions it to compete with Microsoft, not only on the .Net versus Java front, but with Microsoft, Google, Amazon EC2, Salesforce.com et al.
Moreover, it leaves IBM struggling to figure our how they'll play in the cloud; perhaps forcing them to acquire EMC and it's child company VMware.
It's no surprise that Microsoft has its eye on the cloud. Cloud computing, that is.
What is surprising is the news that the Microsoft planns to build 20 datacenters at a cost of about $1 billion each in hopes of dominating the cloud.
Now that's chump change compared to the TARP, but in a more rational world $20 billion is still real money, and there aren't that many techs out their with pockets that deep. Google is in that financial league, and it's clear that Microsoft is hoping to "out Google" Google.
"Google has done a great job of hyping its prowess. But we're neck and neck with them," Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft's vice president for Global Foundation Service, told Burrows.
I'm not so sure about neck and neck Maybe from a technology perspective, but Google seems way ahead in the mindshare game. Microsoft, the organization, is not structured efficiently to dominate the architecture of the cloud. There are several negatives that Microsoft will need to overcome.
You've automated your business processes and invested in CRM, ERP and other operational systems. Yet, you feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of data residing within these systems. Isn’t it time to monetize your operational investments and transform this data into a strategic asset that your key stakeholders can leverage?
Review this presentation to discover how to use your data as a competitive weapon and facilitate companywide adoption of cutting edge tools and techniques. Learn how other organizations have successfully capitalized on Business Intelligence to identify and achieve corporate objectives while overcoming the three key informational challenges surrounding: data integrity and trust, consolidation and automation of performance metrics and user adoption of business intelligence technology.
This presentation was delivered on March 6th, 2008 at the Holiday Inn, Harrisburg Pennsylvania. The conference was Sponsored by Business Objects and Collective Intelligence Inc.
Tiny fuel cell might replace batteries in laptop computers, portable electronics from PhysOrg.com
If you're frustrated by frequently losing battery power in your laptop computer, digital camera or portable music player, then take heart: A better source of "juice" is in the works. Chemists at Arizona State University in Tempe have created a tiny hydrogen-gas generator that they say can be developed into a compact fuel cell package that can power these and other electronic devices -- from three to five times longer than conventional batteries of the same size and weight.
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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., announced that it has developed the industry’s first 40-nanometer (nm) memory device. The new 32 Gigabit (Gb) NAND flash device is the first memory to incorporate a Charge Trap Flash (CTF) architecture, a revolutionary new approach to further increase manufacturing efficiency while greatly improving performance.
The new CTF-based NAND flash memory increases the reliability of the memory by sharply reducing inter-cell noise levels. Its surprisingly simple structure also enables higher scalability which will eventually improve manufacturing process technology from 40 nm to 30 and even 20nm.
I’ve been browsing the CRM space lately and was surprised at the number of ‘software as service’ (SAS) startups.
The SAS-CRM vendors are beginning to move into the verticals. There is CiviCRM for non-profits and politicos. Sugar-CRM aims to lower the cost of CRM by delivering a widely deployed, open source solution for the mid-market. Microsoft has produced a viable solution with Microsoft Dynamics 3.0. Of course there is the big gorilla, Salesforce.com, which has the most mature SAS CRM platform.
Vendors like LinkedIn, Ryze, Friendster and firms like Plaxo have functionality that rests on the periphery of CRM. These folks manage and mine the interconnected web of connections contained within the CRM adding value to data collected via sales and marketing activities. MovingOn is experimenting with CRM integration by providing Salesforce.com functionality within the blogging network.
All of the firms mentioned share one thing in common; each provides a web service framework so that it can be easily integrated with other services and functions. Web services are, of course, a trademark of Web 2.0.
Yesterday, Oracle announced their intention to rip out the IBM back end powering Siebel on Demand (SOS). Many analysts cautioned against customers choosing SOD for this reason. This decision will impact customers because SOD relies on IBM technology to provide:
- Database: SOD has been designed and tuned to run on IBM DB2 for performance and scale
- WebSphere: migration will require porting to Fusion middleware
- Search: IBM was deeply involved with the development of this intellectual property, which Oracle will have to re-write
- Hosting: Siebel once claimed having “secure web hosting leader” IBM as their hosting partner was best for customers, now Oracle is a “cheaper” strategy per Phillips?
It looks like an additional opportunity for Salesforce.com to increase on-demand CRM market share. Remember that the on-demand CRM space is the heart of Business Web 2.0.
It is hard to deny the momentum attained by the various open source communities throughout the world. And so it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that an enterprise web portal is available via an open-source license. That product is called JAHIA and is under the control and management of jahia.org.
We've built several web portals using Jahia in the last year. After quite a bit of research we determined that the Jahia product is currently the most powerful and affordable integrated midrange Java Content Management and Corporate Portal Server on the market. That's right...it isn't free; however the source code is delivered with the product.
I've always admired Steve Jobs. He's one part visionary, two parts rebel. In his commencement speach to the students of Stanford he tells three stories from his life. He speaks from his past, connects the dots to the present and then speaks from his heart. His perspective is refreshing and makes many of us nostalgic for the early days of personal computing.
Read the Commencement Speach Here
Microsoft Corp. has recently provided some insight into it next generation of Office. Code-named Office 12 the newest upgrade will emphasize collaboration, information discovery and content management. Since its March acquisition of Groove Networks
Microsoft has focused on on peer-to-peer aspects of Collaborative Business Intelligence.
Open Source has acquired a significant amount of market share within the application server, database and operating systems markets. Companies like Red Hat, Novell, MySQL and JBOSS are building business models around open sourced software. Is Business Intelligence the next stop?
Recently, two startup companies announced their openware for reporting and data-analysis, while a business intelligence heavyweight claimed it will begin shipping with the MySQL open-source database.
Oracle ADF Faces is a collection of user interface components based on the new JavaServer Faces JSR (JSR-127) specification. The Oracle ADF Faces Components provide various user-interface components with built-in functionality - such as data tables, hierarchical tables, and color and date pickers - that can be customized and re-used in web based applications.
ADF Faces also includes framework features that are quite useful:
- File upload support is integrated at a component level.
- Client-side validation is automatically derived from Validators and Converters for an improved user experience.
- A pageFlow scope makes it easier to pass values from one page to another.
- A new hybrid state saving strategy gives developers the best of both client and server-side state saving.
ADF Faces promotes a consistent look and feel for applications, allowing developers to focus more on user interface interaction rather than look and feel compliance. The components support multi-language and translation implementation as well as accessibility features. ADF Faces Components use Partial Page Rendering (PPR) which offers superior runtime interactivity. PPR allow the browser to just render a piece of a page instead of the entire page.
The intention with this early access release is to give developers/architects an opportunity to evaluate JSF and Oracle's JSF component offering.
Part I of the Cluetrain Manifesto Revisited takes a quick look back at the affect that book had on conversational marketing. Part II examines the underlying themes of the cluetrain and looks for evidence that the conversation really exists.
In April, 1999 Chris Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger wrote “the cluetrain manifesto”, the book that announced the emergence of conversational marketing to the people of earth. The authors maintained that “a powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”
In this second article in the JSF for nonbelievers series, Rick Hightower walks you through the six phases of the JSF request processing lifecycle. He explains what happens in each phase and how the phases interconnect, then he uses an example application to demonstrate the lifecycle in action. Along the way, he demonstrates how to work with some of the built-in JSF components briefly touched on in Part 1. He also incorporate Struts Tiles into your JSF development, and shows how to combine JSF and JavaScript for immediate event handling.
THE VISION OF MULTICHANNEL CRM is of a business where every channel touchpoint is enabled with common customer information and is able to receive and process response data from customers. Supposedly, this results in increased customer acquisition, satisfaction, wallet share and retention - the multichannel value proposition. While there is empirical evidence that this is true, there has been little theoretical backing to validate it so that multichannel CRM success can be understood andrepeatable.
This article examines a different theoretical basis for the multichannel value proposition and look at examples from business and the natural sciences that provide both strategic guidance and a metaphor to understand why multichannel CRM really works.
The Systems Integration 2005 Conference, held on March 17, 2005 attracted 74 attendees from over 50 different Central Pennsylvania companies. The conference focused on systems integration best practices and highlighted presentations on SOA, ETL, Composite Applications, Web Services and Customer Relationship Management. Get a more in-depth look at the conference, downoload copies of the presentations and access white papers authored by industry experts.
