Joshua Greenbaum

SAP is hardly known for its revolutionary fervor, but it’s clear that they’re storming the barricades over in Waldorf and Palo Alto. The revolution is being led by the company’s in-memory database technology, and up against the wall, with the thwack of the guillotine ringing in the background, is the relational database, and its main […]

I just watched the Wizard of Oz with my kids, so forgive me if basic struggles of good versus evil are foremost on my mind these days. And long journeys through scary lands populated by evil beings out to harm the innocents of the world. And redemption, though it comes in the end by looking […]

When it comes to betting against Microsoft, I have to admit to having a standard reaction honed over twenty-plus years of following the company: fuggedaboudit. Sure, they’ve stumbled, made bad bets, goofed up, etc. etc. But by and large Microsoft, if given enough time, is a winner at most everything it sets its collective efforts […]

The last time we had a major slump in tech spending was way back in 2002. It was an interesting year to be in the enterprise software market, as report after report showed that IT managers were holding back on technology spending, and thereby punishing an industry that had already seen a large chunk of […]

Larry almost always gets his way, particularly when it comes to buying software companies. So it came to me as no surprise that the BEA deal finally happened; its inevitability was foreordained. But was it a good deal? Some think that Oracle paid too much for what it bought. I think Larry and company will […]

As 2008 gets underway, I thought I’d get started on the doom and gloom prognosticating with a column on the ten things that won’t change about enterprise software, despite every indication that the market would be all the better if they would indeed change, dramatically if possible. I plan on hopefully getting enough of these […]

One of the biggest gotchas in the enterprise software market is the upgrade problem. You buy the software for a chunk of money, implement it for another big chunk, and then, as a reward for spending all that time and money, you get to do an upgrade a couple of years down the road. And […]

One of the subplots that played out in the early days of Oracle’s acquisition spree was the IBM connection: There, inside the customer bases that Oracle acquired from PeopleSoft, JDE Edwards, Retek, Profitlogic, i-Flex, and Siebel was a whole lot of IBM technology: DB2 and Websphere, primarily. Indeed, the IBM factor became part of my […]

If software as a service takes hold in a big way, it will spell the beginning of the end of what has become in many cases a necessary evil that the world of enterprise software may be finally able to do without: the systems integrators and the high-priced, and failure-prone, implementation projects that have been […]

Speculation has been rampant for years, literally, about whether Google would ever make a major play for the enterprise. This issue surfaced earlier in the year with a very unimpressive Google/Salesforce.com alliance, and it came up more recently with respect to Google’s terms of service for its Docs and Spreadsheets, an online service that claims […]

I consider myself pretty well-versed in the ins and outs of upgrading PCs, having been around them ever since I built my first PC (a Heathkit CP/M machine) back in the 1980s. So when someone like me finally concludes that buying a new Vista machine was a mistake, I have to wonder how many other […]

It’s official, Salesforce.com has some competition. Microsoft’s new pricing for its on-demand CRM product is hitting Salesforce.com squarely below the belt. This is a classic “late-to-the-party” ploy that’s been working relatively well for Microsoft since the days of WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and dBase, among others. If you’re Microsoft, you don’t have to get there first […]