Joshua Greenbaum

One of the more significant non-events just happened – Google’s lukewarm embrace of Salesforce.com – and there’s a lot of speculation about what Google in the enterprise software market would mean. So let’s talk about what Google is really up to first: A clearer understanding of Google’s role in the overall economy will shed some […]

One of the truisms of technology marketing is the mid-market company. Another great truism is that mid-market companies represent this huge untapped source of income, if only vendors could figure out how to reach these elusive technology buyers. Like the blind men circling the proverbial elephant, software companies have been trying to define something they […]

Way back in the summer of 2001, I wrote about something I called the “Plattner Index.” The Plattner Index went like this: “While a lot of software companies are closely associated with their founders or chief executives, few are as joined at the hip as SAP and founder Hasso Plattner. So in many ways the […]

It’s quiz time: Name a company that has strategic agreements with arch-rivals SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. A company that leads the charge for business-process modeling, service-oriented architectures, and, in a nutshell, the future of enterprise software. Oh, and by the way, name the company that does all this while producing software that you can find […]

Oracle has been getting a lot of attaboys for its recent Applications Unlimited show in New York, from both the financial analysts and industry analysts. Much of the credit comes from pushing a vertical industry strategy that targets a set of verticals that have come to Oracle through its acquisitions. So kudos all around, and […]

What if I invented a new software trend, called it Software as a Service Architecture 2.0, and claimed that it was going to change everything? SAP would be dead and gone in a heartbeat. Oracle and its Fusion applications too. Salesforce.com, IBM and Microsoft all goners… I wish I could say that I’d be laughed […]

Sometimes it’s too easy to pick on Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, particularly when it comes to enterprise applications. The two companies seem destined to never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and so it was with their latest joint announcement. Microsoft, HP in Big Business Hookup, the headline screamed, highlighting a new joint services offering […]

Anyone who caught Oracle apps boss John Wookey’s keynote at Open World last month couldn’t help notice that his demo very quickly moved from showcasing a new standalone Fusion applet to a screen that showed the same applet embedded in Outlook. This was no accident – not that once-a-year conference demos are ever accidents. But […]

IBM has always – meaning in the last six years or so – eschewed a direct role as a competitor in the enterprise applications market, following some disastrous acquisitions and other painful learning experiences. But, as the market matures and competition for IT dollars heats up, what IBM will and won’t do to compete with […]

Lost in the media feeding-frenzy about “pretexting” and other I-Spy shenanigans that have encircled Hewlett-Packard recently is the real question: five years after the now disgraced Carly Fiorina first proposed the acquisition of Compaq, is HP any better off now than it was before the merger battle began? If you’ve read my musings on Sun […]

To say that Oracle has sent the market – and its customers – conflicting information about its plans for Fusion Applications is being a little charitable. It’s been incredibly difficult to track the shifting sands of Oracle’s strategy over the last three years, and, if you’ve been a little confused up till now, you’ve had […]

Microsoft was in a quiet period prior to releasing its numbers, and Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, was trying manfully not to violate SEC regulation FD – the one that makes it a crime to give financial information to some, but not all, interested parties. Standing in front of thousands of Dynamics resellers at Microsoft’s […]