Joshua Greenbaum

Some acronyms never die, even if in many ways their time has come and gone. CRM – or customer relationship management – is one such dinosaur. To be sure, working more closely with customers is something that every company wants to do more of, and lots of software and services are being bought with that […]

I got a call on the way to a recent Oracle Fusion briefing from Oracle analyst relations. SAP had apparently put out a bulletin in advance of the Oracle event that, in addition to offering pre-emptive rebuttals of what Oracle was going to say, offered me up as an independent analyst ready to talk, to […]

To say that SAP and Oracle are locked in an increasingly bitter competition is, at a minimum, the understatement of the year. How each company is dealing with the opportunity to snipe and swipe at each other says a lot about their relative strengths as their competition continues to heat up. And based on what […]

Two recent news items, however apparently disconnected, highlight an interesting turnaround for the otherwise dowdy database market. On the same day that Microsoft announced a newly enhanced SQL Server database — with the clear intention of challenging Oracle and IBM in the high-end of the market — Computer Associates announced it was spinning off majority […]

I have to admit I like Marc Benioff, the CEO and clown prince of Salesforce.com. His marketing prowess has always been second to none, and his largesse has landed me more than one spectacular meal and some interesting conversation. But I’m beginning to think he’s reached a new low in his quest to dramatically change […]

The status of CRM legend Siebel has been the enduring question of the post-Oracle-acquisition-of-PeopleSoft era. I’ve been asked it a hundred times, and have tried to answer it at least that many. So now we know: Siebel is finished, relegated to that increasingly large industry sector known as “Oracle-bait.” I have to admit I never […]

There’s an interesting subtext to this year’s spate of acquisitions by Oracle, a subtext that will shortly move front-and-center in the software industry. The subtext is the IBM connection, and in a fascinating case of opportunity creating strange bedfellows, Big Blue’s latest romance is with none other than archrival Oracle. This isn’t yet a taking-a-trip-to-the-altar […]

Oracle’s recent acquisition of ProfitLogic, coming on the heals of what looks like a turnaround quarter for its applications business, reveals a lot about not just where the company is heading in the key retail sector but how it plans to tackle other strategic industries as well. First, dial back to May, when Oracle announced […]

The process-oriented enterprise – where work is accomplished not by using large monolithic applications like CRM but by moving through focused “processes” like order to cash – is turning into the next battleground in the never-ending struggle to define, redefine, and define yet again the role of the CIO. Pity the CIO, whose job security […]

Spring is in the air, and that means it’s time for my annual IBM column, in which I state that IBM needs to figure out what role it really wants to play in the enterprise software market. Is IBM a counter-revolutionary force, turning back the clock to the glorious days when all software was custom-built […]