Joshua Greenbaum

In an industry not known for promoting the shy, quiet types, Tom Siebel stands out. His arrogance and self-assurance have made him the No. 1 software executive people love to hate. His partners live in fear and loathing, his competitors become apoplectic at the mention of his name, and analysts and the press are unanimous […]

It’s always interesting to investigate the truth behind the headlines, and even more interesting when you find out that there is no truth at all behind the curtain. This was my recent experience in looking at a company called Embarcadero Technologies and a headline that read “Informatica shares tumble on worries over outlook.” The Reuters […]

Microsoft made good on its threat to expand its enterprise software offerings with a new customer relationship management product, MSCRM, due out by the end of the year. The target audience for the new product (the small- and medium-sized business market) and the scope of the product (more sales force automation than true customer relationship […]

Software pricing has always reminded me of a black hole, which is hard to see mostly because its gravitational field is so strong that no light can ever escape. Direct observation of a black hole is impossible, and astronomers are left to speculate as to their shape and function based on assorted secondary signals and […]

The enterprise software market is an unforgiving place, littered with the ruins of many a fine company. And while it’s pretty easy to make the transition from hero to goat (ask Ariba, CommerceOne, i2, et. al.), it’s a lot harder to reverse the trend. So when J.D. Edwards posted a turn-around quarter last December, after […]

As befitting a holiday season defined by excessive eating and scarfing antacids by the handful, it’s time to be honest about the application glut that prevents users from getting a real ROI from their software and keeps vendors from delivering continued sales growth. The truth is, most companies have too much, not too little, applications […]

Tom Siebel played coy at his company’s last financial analyst call, but the fix was already in. The once high-flying terror of the CRM market slipped into the enterprise software danger zone last quarter, and Tom was pretending that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. It wasn’t. Meanwhile, SAP’s […]

This column is not about September 11. I had planned to write a column extolling the virtues of Internet-based architectures and how they protect businesses from terrorist attack. I had also planned to write that the enterprise software market would enjoy a boom in sales as soon as everyone realized that putting paper and people […]

PeopleSoft’s got a brand new market. It’s called enterprise service automation, or ESA, and CEO Craig Conway believes his company will take this new market sector by storm. Of course, ESA is so new that most of us don’t know it actually exists. But not to worry, enterprise service automation is real and the demand […]

Microsoft’s enterprise software gang came calling last month. Every year they say they’re serious about the enterprise software market. Every year their PR people scratch me off the “skeptics” list, call, and set up a briefing on the latest initiative, strategy, or project. Every year I disagree that they’re about to take the packaged enterprise […]

One of the more startling innovations that SAP failed to announce at a recent Sapphire user conference came in a presentation that showed the unshowable: a heterogeneous environment that included SAP and, in full, copyrighted glory, the logos of its two archrivals, Oracle and PeopleSoft. The message was almost revolutionary. SAP will actively support integration […]