deal architect

Another Third Party Oracle Maintenance Option

I got an e-mail from Seth Ravin of Rimini this morning saying they were going to start offering PeopleSoft support in addition to existing Siebel support. Seth had started TomorrowNow, which offers third party PeopleSoft support, and then sold it to SAP. SAP announced in last quarter TomorrowNow had signed 27 Oracle customers. Between Rimini, TomorrowNow, NetCustomer and others the choices for PeopleSoft, JDE and Siebel customers keep expanding.

Read story at Techspend.

Milwaukee: Bike and Bishop

My kids recently saw a friend they had not seen in a while. Their reaction - "She shrunk" as they continue their tall march and their friend has stopped.  This weekend, walking down past an Irish pub, a packed Potbelly Sandwich shop and a river towards Lake Michigan I thought I was in Chicago. But the buildings are not that tall and I thought Chicago had shrunk!

No, I am in Milwaukee for a chess tournament with the kids. I have been here a couple of times before, but have not spent much time downtown. It is delightful.

It is also a reflection of the cross-currents we live in.  Home to  Harley-Davidson, it is an icon of American patriotism (a group of dealers and loyal customers proudly wearing every kind of Harley leather jacket, shirt, patch, tattoo outnumbered chess parents 20 to 1 at the bar at the hotel. I talked to a Harley owner from Eindhoven, Holland - another place famous for beer and different kind of bikes). And yet it is the City of Festivals and celebrates more ethnicity than much larger cities. The city famous for Schlitz and other beers, has several large technology firms including GE Healthcare, FiServ, Rockwell Automation, Harley itself. The Pfister Hotel, circa 1893 and the Quadracci Pavilion, circa 2001.

The kids are stressed. It is a national tournament with over 1,400 kids from everywhere. They are too busy to notice the nuances of Art Deco hotel we are staying in built in 1927. I am marveling I can get WI-FI in this structure (now a Hilton).  Fifty years ago, Senator Joseph McCarthy walked the streets around there warning America about a different form of global competition with the Russians.

My kids are worried about another intense competition - the rule book says:  "Individual ties for trophies will be broken by Modified Median, Solkhoff, Sonnenborn-Berger, Kashdan, head-to-head, most blacks and then a coin toss, in that order". A bit more complex than the tie breakers the beloved Packers and Brewers have to endure.

Hopefully, my kids will remember their local peers in the tournament walking around with their Packer cheesehead gear. And MKE airport which welcomes you to push a Polka music button as you ride the escalator. And that it is home to one of the friendliest airlines in the country, Midwest Airlines.

Milwaukee - thank you for encouraging our science and technology younglings, while allowing us to enjoy your varied past.

A Random MRI down Wall Street

Andrew W. Lo, professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering.

Lo, also a partner in the AlphaSimplex hedge fund, combines mathematics, neurology, and psychology to study how markets work.

One of his research projects actually involves putting traders in an magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine and measuring their brain activity. Once a disciple of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis -- the premise that markets operate rationally and efficiently -- Lo wants to replace that model with the biologically driven Adaptive Markets Hypothesis.

Read his interview here.

Is the Enterprise Web 2.0 ready?

Nick Carr recently had a post Is Web 2.0 enterprise-ready?

I think we need to ask as well "Is the Enterprise Web 2.0 ready?"

Read more on TechSpend Blog here.

Update: Om Malik does a good job summarizing a number of web 2.0 perspectives here

SAP: Every Silver Lining has a Cloud

SAP reported strong earnings for Q1. In particular, Jeff Nolan is pleased that Americas revenue for the quarter were higher than worldwide Oracle applications licenses last quarter (its third quarter of the fiscal year, ending February 28). 24 Oracle customers (including Siebel, Peoplesoft, JDE, and Retek customers) committed to replacing their software with offerings from SAP. Additionally, TomorrowNow, a unit of SAP, which offers third party maintenance to PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers signed 27 new accounts.

So, in its battle with Oracle for larger accounts for core ERP functionality, SAP is doing well. But by its own calculations,  SAP has about 21% of the enterprise applications market. By that definition Oracle has less than 20% - so between them they have 40% market share. That leaves large chunks still wide open.

Jason Wood in his analysis says “U.S. license revenue growth was the slowest we've seen since 2004, which is to be expected given the tough comparisons after a blistering 2005.”

SAP is still not showing consistent traction in the SME market (to its credit it has tried and tried for over a decade with varying packages) and will increasingly face more robust SaaS vendor competition from NetSuite and AppExchange. One of these days Microsoft will also have a more coherent message in that market. In a number of verticals like banking, healthcare, mortgage SAP still has little market share. To get traction, maybe they should get dedicated Jeff Nolans for those markets too - not just a focus on Oracle!

The other thing is the TomorrowNow third party maintenance phenomenon is also happening to SAP itself. It is starting to lose maintenance to third parties and in many cases having to discount the maintenance for more mature customers.

Just do not expect SAP to put those in any press release.

Technology Innovation and Earth Day

See how technology is helping spread the green message around the world

AMD announces a green grid with IBM, HP, Sun

President Bush is appropriately in California this weekend - a state which leads the world in "tree huggers", technology and the convergent opportunities in clean technologies.

Kudos to Vinod Khosla (ex Sun, Kleiner Perkins) for raising the awareness around clean energy. Also good to see Google customize its home page around alternative energy sources.

Not just environmentally, but increasingly economically sound. 

It's a small world after all

A handful of global events involving President Bush I was struck by this week.

The first one involved the protest by Wenyi Wang during the Chinese President's visit to the White House. Lord knows our poor President gets heckled everywhere in the world. It's in poor taste when people do it to him or when we do it to visitors. My POV - take away her White House press credentials, but she does not deserve to go to jail. I do admire her guts and hope she starts a blog. It may get censored in China but will allow her to express her views in the West without causing international diplomacy heart attacks.

A couple  more (easier to handle) items reported by the San Jose MercuryNews during President Bush's trip to California this week.

"Also on the panel (that Bush participated in at Cisco was) San Jose State University (computer engineering and math) student Arash Shokouh.... The son of immigrants from Iran, he said during a photo session before the panel that his parents engaged the president in a discussion about Iran and ``expressed their hope things could be solved peacefully.''

"When Bush learned that Marthin De Beer, a Cisco vice president, had become a citizen only a month ago, he insisted the South Africa native pose for pictures with him in front of an American flag."

I know many of us do not like German software or Indian services or Chinese hardware vendors, but overall I am so glad our tech industry is relatively wide open. I hope we can keep it that way. The best and brightest people and products from everywhere. And hopefully more civil to each other than to our politicians.

Lou Dobbs was OK last night

For the first time in a long time I saw Lou Dobbs on CNN for his entire show. Well, all right I was in a hotel with little choice. And he actually was reasonable. He moderated his guest panels well. He did not shout them down. He had a sense of humor about him. Of course, the stories on his show had the Chicken little view of the world. The Mexicans will overrun us, the Chinese will flood our markets with cheap goods, the Arabs will bankrupt us.

Lou, how about an alternative show where you talk about  some hopeful, positive things? People tell me I am hard on the big tech vendors on this blog.  Which is why I post optimistic, innovation stuff on my other blog New Florence, New Renaissance.

Lou has not lost his touch. His choice of topics could be more balanced, less anxious. Heck, I may start to watch him more - even when I am home.

2020 Science

"A scientific revolution is just beginning. It has the potential to create an era of science-based innovation that could completely eclipse the last haf-century of technology-based innovation..."

Compelling 80+ page document which explores everything from molecular machines to future medicine and energy. Sponsored by Microsoft Research, it reflects views of 30 scientists, many from Europe.

"A scientific revolution is just beginning. It has the potential to create an era of science-based innovation that could completely eclipse the last haf-century of technology-based innovation..."

Compelling 80+ page document which explores everything from molecular machines to future medicine and energy. Sponsored by Microsoft Research, it reflects views of 30 scientists, many from Europe.

I say color, you say colour

Serves me right for having a name like mine. My wife jokes if she could have gotten out of bed, she would have rushed and registered our kids with her last name (Newman). I had a client who  introduced me to every one as Mr. Merchandise.

But in recent months as I have blogged more, I have noticed even more variations of my name on the web and in email traffic

Vini, Vinne,Vinney,Vincent

Merchandani, Marchandani, Mirchandi, Mrichandani, AssXXXX

I think I am a poster child for Master Data Management. No wonder that category of tools is starting to heat up.