Joshua Greenbaum

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 […]

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 […]