Joshua Greenbaum

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 […]

The enterprise software market of the past few years has seen lots of friendly mergers and one impressively hostile takeover. So perhaps it makes some sense that it’s now witness to an entirely new category of takeover attempt that can best be characterized as weird. What’s weirder is that the company in play, Onyx Software, […]

The hottest rumor in recent weeks among analysts was that Oracle’s head of analyst relations had lost her head in a power struggle. The rumor reached escape velocity, coincidently, on the same day that Oracle experienced a major outage of its voice mail system. So a call to this person’s phone yielded a cryptic “your […]

SAP’s recent acquisition of compliance management vendor Virsa wasn’t just a strategic move for the enterprise software leader. It was an event that echoed across the entire software industry for one simple reason: It turned SAP into the venture capitalists’ very best friend. Why? Every VC wants his or her portfolio company to be the […]

What’s the hottest trend in the all-too-trendoid on-demand market? It turns out, once you look carefully at the model, pure-play on-demand is just a little too restrictive for many customers. These customers see on-demand as a nice stop-gap measure for solving an immediate cash flow or time-to-solution problem, but sometimes a mix of on-demand and […]