James Governor's Monkchips

IBM, Red Hat adopt “VMware Pattern” for Cloud. Disruption Strategy Emerges

2010-03-17T12:16:35-07:00

IBM this week clarified its plans to handhold enterprises into the cloud, working with Red Hat to bypass VMware with the announcement of Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud.

I have been talking for a while about what I call The VMware Pattern, in posts such as Amazon Web Services: an instance of weakness as strength.

Amazon is the new VMware. The adoption patterns are going to similar. Enterprise will see AWS as a test and development environment first, but over time production workloads will migrate there.

It makes a great deal of sense to encourage its customers to adopt the pattern. That is – start with test, and go from there. Don’t tell the customer to immediately migrate everything to, and run everything on, the cloud. Which would of course be insane. On the contrary recommend a low barrier to entry approach. Production is an end state where the customer finally just says: “remind me again why we aren’t using this flexible infrastructure as a production environment?” That’s the VMware Pattern. Which I may have to rename the AWS pattern…

In the meantime though, according to IBM Research, the average IT department devotes up to 50% of its technology infrastructure to development and test, with up to 90% of that infrastructure remaining idle most of the time.

Sounds like a job for virtualisation… or the cloud.

As Dave Rosenberg points out:

“Testing services are an excellent use-case for cloud services, and a number of start-ups including Sauce Labs and SOASTA have offerings that allow customers to test their applications without having to build a massive test infrastructure.”

HP Mercury has to find the VMware Pattern pretty galling. “What do you mean you don’t plan to buy any test servers”.

VMware may have owned the (x86) virtualisation wave, but with cloud everything is in play again.

For a cloud integration company like Appirio this stuff seems old hat at best. Thus for Balakrishna Narasimh aka appirio_nara:

at #cloudconnect hearing IBM. Feels like 3 years ago – all talk focused on dev and test environments in the cloud

But for the mainstream, for IBM’s customers, its very early days indeed. Cloud is far from mainstream. Public clouds are scary, and full of FUD. Development and test though is a toe in the water, with IBM holding the customers hand, and of course recommending a range of related products and services – step forward Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing v1.0.

Just to show IBM is keeping up with the cool kids, one early customer is Paypal, which according to IBM’s press release is using the offering as the basis for a collaborative environment for its own developers. IBM hosting a developer cloud for PayPal – that’s not bad for a “cloud laggard”. IBM partners for the launch include RightScale (an acknowledged cloud leader, and the aforementioned SOASTA).

For those skeptical of Red Hat’s role in the service, its certainly worth pointing out that Amazon Web Services runs on Red Hat – it makes sense to adopt the same infrastructure as the de facto market leader.

I am quietly impressed.

disclosure: IBM is a client. Amazon, HP, VMware and Red Hat are not.

Share This

A Saint Patrick’s Day special: Further Thoughts on Manuscripts, Marginalia, Mashups and Reading as Writing

2010-03-17T05:48:15-07:00

I wrote a post the other day about Digital Manuscripts, Reading as Writing, and the danger of of “digital rights management” (DRM). The New York Times today provided a lovely follow up in the shape of an article – Turning Green With Literacy – about the Irish role in saving the book after the Roman Empire collapsed.

One of my key arguments for Reading as Writing is the value of shareable marginalia, so I was very taken with the notion of Irish scholars making mashups of manuscripts, adding humour, and light and shade to the canonical texts.

“The Irish fanned out across Europe, salvaging books wherever they could, making copies, reassembling libraries and teaching the newly settled barbarians of the continent to read and write.

But they did more than this: they managed to infuse the emerging medieval world with a playfulness previously unknown. In the margins of the books they copied, the Irish scribes drew little pictures, thickets of plants, flowers, birds and animals. Human faces occasionally peek through the tangle, faces of childlike delight and awe. If you were a scribe copying out some especially ponderous philosophical Greek, the margin in which you could reflect on your own world served as a source of “refreshment, light and peace,” to quote the ancient Latin liturgy. These scribal doodles eventually became elaborate design elements, leading the way to Irish masterpieces like the Book of Kells.

The scribes also contributed jokes, poems and commentary to the works they replicated, saving for us a world of fresh insights. One scribe, tortured by the difficult Greek he was copying, wrote: “There’s an end to that — and seven curses with it!” Another complained of a previous scribe’s sloppiness: “It is easy to spot Gabrial’s work here.” A third, at the bottom of a tear-stained page, tells us how upset he was by the death of Hector on the Plain of Troy. In these comments, sharp and sweet by turns, we come in contact with the sources of Irish literary humor and hear uncanny echoes of Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett.”

You can’t have great writing without great reading. As the NYT, points out Irish was the first European vernacular language to be written down. As we establish a language for the digital manuscript we should consider that that the marginalia may indeed be the content. If the web has taught us anything it should be the value of metadata, the Bazaar and Heteroglossia. DRM is designed to prevent playfulness. But the smartest people in publishing realise that the future will be ludic – George Walkley, who runs digital strategy at Hachette recently told me of the importance of making publishing more “ludic” or game-like.

If our digital lives can be as rich and playful as the literature of the Irish we’ll be in fine shape. I can only hope for that on Saint Patrick’s Day.

disclosure: RedMonk has a *lot* of Irish blood.

the image above comes from Leabhar Bhaile an Mhóta.

Share This

Can Paremus Make OSGi Nimble?

2010-03-12T05:45:21-08:00

One of the great unsolved Java problems is a lack of modularity. OSGi is a technology designed to solve the problem. Wikipedia says:

The OSGi framework is a module system and service platform for the Java programming language that implements a complete and dynamic component model, something that does not exist in standalone Java/VM environments. Applications or components (coming in the form of bundles for deployment) can be remotely installed, started, stopped, updated and uninstalled without requiring a reboot; management of Java packages/classes is specified in great detail. Life cycle management is done via APIs which allow for remote downloading of management policies. The service registry allows bundles to detect the addition of new services, or the removal of services, and adapt accordingly.

Cote said OSGi could underpin a Stackless Stack, but I wonder whether we should have called it a VMless VM. OSGi allows for component-based development and production in Javaland. It has been enthusiastically adopted by Java application server and ESB vendors.

But while OSGi solves one problem – a lack of modularity – it creates another – the need to manage dependencies. In order to see OSGi widely adopted by developers and IT organisations the industry needs to solve the dependency management problem. If everything is componentised, runtime management becomes exponentially more complicated.

Dependency management, or lack of it, is a barrier to adoption for OSGi.

My client Paremus has an elegant solution to the problem called Nimble, and I recently shot some video on the subject – talking to Paremus founder and CEO Richard Nicholson and the developer of the tool Robert Dunne.

Lets kick off with a high level overview of Paremus, OSGi and what Nicholson calls The Service Fabric

OK that’s the CEO stuff out of the way. What about the developer’s view, and a demo? Tomcat? Jetty? That’s just configuration decision…

Very cool… As Dunne says “the dependency stuff becomes an advantage”.

Nimble isn’t the only game in town – its worth looking at the Apache Felix Bundle Plugin for Maven. For disclosure sake I should say the Apache Software Foundation is also a client. Another fix, another client – SpringSource implements its own Spring Dynamic Modules Framework. SpringSource Tool Suite version 2.0 packages some tooling for building modules and managing dependencies graphically.

For further context its been a big news week for OSGi – IBM’s WebSphere Application Server v7 is designed to make it easier to use OSGi, in the shape of the snappily named Feature Pack for OSGi Applications and Java Persistence API (JPA) 2.0 Open Beta. Arguably though Lotus has been a more enthusiastic adopter of OSGi.

Paremus Nimble is elegant, and although its free (with the caveat that people that don’t want to pay a nominal fee to use the software will need to regularly re-register to use it), its not open source.

disclosure: seems like everyone is a RedMonk client.

Share This

Reading is Writing: Illuminating The Digital Manuscript

2010-03-10T15:58:55-08:00

Back in 2004 I wrote post called The Death of Consumer Electronics. Wishful thinking of course. My central, hopeful, argument is that we’re actually content creators, not consumers. What exactly do you consume when you take a digital photograph and post it on Flickr? Sure you can sit and watch a TV show or DVD, but… maybe the conversation about the show is as interesting as the show itself. James Stewart, my good friend and co-worker, points out that Stephen B. Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You is out of date because it doesn’t talk specifically to perhaps the most erudite show ever on TV – The Wire.

But what about this reading thing? You sit and read books, don’t you – its a solitary activity. You have voracious readers. The idea of consuming literature must be as old as books itself. But then- there is an other side to the book, the canon, the stories we tell each other.

We like to discuss books. We like to write things in the margin – we even have a name for this activity – marginalia, a practice as old as the Illuminated Manuscript. Most of all though, books help us learn- particularly when we share them.

The wikipedia definition of marginalia talks of smart students buying previously annotated books. The most famous recent example of a book made more valuable by marginalia is the spell book Slughorn gives to Harry Potter, annotated by the eponymous Half Blood Prince. The spells in this “edited” book work better than the official text book. Lucky the book didn’t have any DRM eh?

That’s my big problem with most current efforts in digital publishing- they don’t learn from the web. We can bookmark a link on the web but why can’t we bookmark a digital book?

Its not enough to view source, you need to be able to share it and mark it up. What the hell good is XML if its just for layout?

If we go back to Joshua Schachter’s original reason for creating del.icio.us, it was to scratch an itch, to allow personal marginalia on the web. But the service really came into its own as a social tool. The real value is found in sharing links. But media companies hate sharing. Hate it. File sharers are pirates, right?

If you talk to Adobe, Apple, or Microsoft they are generally most concerned with “Digital Rights Holders”…. for that read Big Media.One of the things that concerns me and folks like Twitter’s Alex Payne is that the iPad is seemingly about passive consumption, not realisation, not sharing.

The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing. It is a digital consumption machine.

Where am I going with this? Well for one thing, I was fair amazed to come across some news from Macmillan this week: Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally.

Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.

Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.

While many publishers have offered customized print textbooks for years — allowing instructors to reorder chapters or insert third-party content from other publications or their own writing — DynamicBooks gives instructors the power to alter individual sentences and paragraphs without consulting the original authors or publisher.

I believe this is the future of digital publishing. Learn from open source. The idea of content lock down just makes no sense. Paper books don’t have DRM. You can share them, write on them, cut bits out for your scrapbook and so on. But imagine if you could do all that digitally…

Why shouldn’t books be a little more like Wikipedia and a bit less like a copy-protected CD?

It might seem like the editable, annotable, shareable book is a pirate’s charter, but publishers have little choice but to adapt.

I spent some time earlier this week with George Walkley, who runs digital strategy for the world’s second largest publisher – Hachette. He is super smart, a digital native, but also very much a book nerd. At Hachette academic book publishing is a market with no growth left in it… but publications for digital white boards is a growing, profitable market – and indeed revenues have now surpassed those of traditional text books.

The magic spell for profitable publishing is going to be in annotation and sharing, not the romantic, isolated book reading of the garret. The annotation could be worth more than the content if we have the right digital book telemetry. What the hell good is a manuscript that you can’t share or illuminate?

The image from above is by Anastasia Crimca, a Moldavian, and one of the originators of the illuminated manuscript. I learned about him when I worked as a researcher on the Macmillan Dictionary of Art and Architecture.

Share This

RedMonk As a Pilotage Company

2010-03-04T11:11:54-08:00

From Wikipedia:

“A pilot is a mariner who guides ships through dangerous or congested waters, such as harbours or river mouths. However, the pilot is only an advisor, as the master remains in legal, overriding command of the vessel.

Pilotage is one of the oldest, least-known professions, and yet it is one of the most important in maritime safety. The economic and environmental risk from today’s large cargo ships makes the role of the pilot essential.”

I had just finished a call with a client today, first day back from my vacation, when it struck me that often RedMonk is tasked with helping to steer a big ship in a different direction. Not easy- but often essential in business. I tweeted accordingly:

redmonk as a pilotage company. we can steer ships large and small into port. we know the local waters and can help avoid obstacles.

The Wikipedia definition, frankly adds a lot to the thought… “the pilot is only an advisor”. We can’t of course make our clients take our advice, but that doesn’t lessen its value.

I also really love the painting I found on Flickr… Waterfront Scene, 1934, oil on canvas by Pino Janni, so redolent of hard work and long days. RedMonk identifies and works with practitioners, the makers and doers. We spend as much time with with longshoremen as ship’s captains – which gives our advice a solid grounding in practice.

Share This

Just another Oracle Sunrise, Or, A Consolidation Sketch

2010-02-19T09:51:09-08:00

Everyone else seems to have gone with the Sunset, so I figured why not call out Sunrise instead… while some Sun technology is going to get nuked, and some people too, there are still plenty of solid assets to consider when parsing what Oracle is going to do.

One advantage of being a couple of days late, unlike my real time colleagues, is that the picture became a little clearer- certainly in terms of what Oracle is prepared to kill. As developer advocates, RedMonk can’t help be a little disappointed that Oracle is evidently laser focused on on traditional purchasing behaviours rather than adoption-centric IT. But then we knew and expected some of our friends would take a hit. And this is no time for sentiment.

Exhibit A- Kenai getting whacked. Kenai was an interesting project, which offered instant deploy from Netbeans to a Cloud infrastructure. It was well liked by developers. Unlike the “winner” Java.net.

Mainframe Envy

Larry Ellison, like Bill Gates, has a bad case of mainframe envy. Both of these guys see IBM System/360 as the good times, the industry’s utopia. Larry made this point abundantly clear in a quote called out by both of my colleagues:

“Our vision for the year of 2010 is the same as IBM’s for 1960″.

Total integration, or world domination?

Cote mentions “one throat to choke”. But never mind Too Big Too Fail… What about Too Big To Choke?

Clearly Oracle is in an amazing position now in terms of its assets and account control. Ellison always wanted to take IBM on head to head, but may even have an advantage over its East Coast Competitor- if business application market share can be converted into stack marketshare – for example if Oracle can persuade customers to swap out their WebSphere application servers in favour of WebLogic. Oracle is making customers, let alone competitors, nervous by dint of sheer scale though, which could lead to an unwillingness to put any more eggs in the Redwood City basket. Oracle will also be trying to persuade customers to kick out EMC storage hardware and storage management software, and Dell, HP and IBM servers and storage too. Serious margin maths- Oracle will be calculating what competitors share can be eroded. My money is on EMC as an obvious target.

Customers – I would say don’t make any hasty choices. Oracle still has plenty of decisions to make, and has shown a fairly pragmatic approach to its application customers’ middleware choices. Use open source as your “Amdahl Mug” when you’re negotiating with the New Stack players. Open Source is a personal trainer for proprietary.

disclosure: IBM and Dell are clients. EMC, HP and Oracle are not.

Share This

Can IBM POWER 7 hit the C-spot?

2010-02-18T04:10:23-08:00

I attended a briefing last week in London with Rod Adkins, SVP IBM Systems and Technology Group, and Robert LeBlanc, who runs IBM’s middleware business. The subject at hand was the new POWER7 chip.

If you’re not a hardcore IBM server customer you’ve possibly never heard of POWER. It runs IBM’s mainframes, Unix boxes and the i (otherwise known as the most successful midrange platform and channel play in IBM history- the warhorse i like to still call the AS/400)

If you’re a hardcore gamer though you likely use POWER every day: Big Blue provides the silicon for XBox 360, Playstation3 and Nintendo Gamecube.

The question for POWER though is whether IBM can drive volume success with the chip in the mainstream IT market, which means database workloads. To win IBM needs to beat Oracle, which currently dominates the market sweet spot for mid to high end online transaction processing (OLTP) and decision support systems (DSS), a position it massively buttressed by expanding its application portfolio with numerous acquisitions. IBM DB2 has failed to take share from Oracle in the midrange Linux and Unix markets. That is IBM’s problem in a nutshell.

IBM maintains its high end market share leadership with DB2, CICS and IMS, but in IT volume is usually the charm. If IBM is right that Big Data and next generation analytics will be a bigger market than ERP it could be in a chance of some volume success. Clearly Big Data is a market, and systems inflexion point. Running smart grids, improving healthcare, instrumenting and monitoring a Smarter Planet.

But to win with POWER IBM will need to POWER the cloud, not just servers. The cloud will underpin Big Data, alongside the wave of 8 way Nehalem boards from Intel. That is – there is a double transition at work.

A few words on Fashion, a Lesson from History

Anyone that thought Oracle wasn’t serious about the Cloud because Larry Ellison dissed it just doesn’t know Oracle. I have been watching Oracle for 15 years now, so I have a number of Larry Ellison fashion t-shirts. Indeed Ellison is the Yves Saint Laurent of the tech world- never missing a trend. He talks it like Chanel, as if one little black dress would get you through life, but he sure knows how to play to industry hemlines.

I remember Ellison panning the notion of Grid Computing when everyone else started hyping it up. Same language – “its just fashion”. Then Oracle went ahead and called its next database Oracle 11g.

While IBM was architecting systems for customers that scaled to thousands of processors, Oracle, quite simply owned grid with that one little g. You see – not many people needed real grid computing. But they wanted 2 and 4 way clusters running Oracle RAC. And the g meant they could feel like they were doing that grid thing.

A couple of seasons before Ellison had dismissed the Internet, and then rolled out the Oracle 9i database. “i” is for Internet. See a pattern emerging? Oracle was always going to make a play for cloud marketing dominance, whether or not this was a tech “revolution” or not.

IBM needs to be careful not to confuse technical ambition, and the needs of a tiny percentage of the market, with the cloud C-spot.

POWERing the Cloud

What do Oracle and IBM both agree on? There is nothing new in IT. Ellison is even saying that with its acquisition of Sun his firm ready to deliver a promise like IBM System 360 mainframe.

But if IBM really wants to play in the Cloud sweetspot or C-spot its going to need to win more Web workloads. IBM should therefore worry less about SuSE and more about Ubuntu. What runs the Cloud? Ubuntu. What is the fastest growing OS for MySQL? Ubuntu. That’s the growth play. And Ubuntu can beat Solaris in volume – something no other IBM OS can claim. Hadoop on Ubuntu on POWER – that’s a Big Data play.

Virtualisation is somewhat of a wild card here, but unless we start to see Linux, Windows, and Solaris running as guests on IBM POWER-based servers, IBM’s play will be limited. VMware is currently better positioned here.

Weird Runnings.

Finally, I just want to talk some interesting installed base dynamics, namely that more IBM middleware runs on Solaris than any other OS. That’s right – Oracle servers and customers run the most IBM middleware. Like BEA (now Oracle), IBM knows hows to make money from Java. But the account management issues get more and more interesting. Oracle already supports many PeopleSoft customers running on Mainframe DB2 so all this is nothing new, but it should be remembered the next time someone from Oracle starts talking about cleaning and simplifying their stack.

In IBM’s favour will be intensifying competition between Oracle, Dell, and HP. In Oracle’s favour- account control.

I maintain that IBM blundered in not acquiring Sun, but now the bed is made. If IBM is to really hurt Oracle it must focus on volume, not the needs of a few global companies. It needs to nail the c-spot.

[update: please see the comments below for clarification on POWER family vs POWER chip. Thanks to Derek and Gordon Haff for reminding me not to let a good line obscure the bits. Also – I need to follow up with some comments on the other leg of IBM’s POWER systems strategy – appliances)

disclosure: Canonical, Dell and IBM are clients.

Share This

Pancake Day and Black History

2010-02-16T05:39:44-08:00

I saw a Facebook update that really caught my attention just now. We don’t hear enough about black inventors, so thanks to Zena, the Cookie Princess, for today’s “Black History Fact”.

No matter how you like your pancakes, you have all of these African-American inventors to thank for helping you enjoy them: Norbert Rillieux – Sugar Refinement/1843; Thomas Carrington – Stove/1876; George Washington Carver – Peanut Butter/1880; Willie Johnson – Egg Beater/…1884; John Standard – Refrigerator/1891 and John White – Lemon Squeezer/1891. Bon Appetit!

Being myself a native of New Orleans the story of Norbert Rillieux is particularly noteworthy. Black people from my hometown didn’t just invent jazz. The picture above meanwhile is from John T White’s patented lemon squeezer.

For Americans wondering what Pancake Day is, its a Shrove Tuesday tradition, to use all up all the sugar, fat and eggs in the house before fasting.

Zena Marten, a friend of mine, is the founder of Cookieluscious, which bakes amazing American cookies from the heart of Primrose Hill, north London.

Share This

Leo’s Sustainable Legacy: thoughts on SAP’s CEO changes.

2010-02-11T04:24:58-08:00

Sunday night about 7pm I checked my phone and the chatter was already in full effect – SAP CEO Leo Apotheker had agreed to leave the company. The hardest working man in the analyst business, Ray Wang, already had first take post online a couple of hours later. Ray is awesome, but I am sure glad I’m not married to him! Dude- it was Sunday!

Make no mistake. For an organisation such as SAP that prides itself on a consensus management style in the German style this was a sudden and brutal change. Chairman, SAP founder and hefty shareholder Hasso Plattner (10.5% of the company’s shares) was taking responsibility. Indeed- he is arguably effectively the new CEO in anything with name, with new “Co-CEOs” Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe effectively both reporting to him.

Having said that SAP is a consensus organisation, its worth noting that in a recent employee satisfaction survey Leo performed poorly. Apotheker had made problems for himself by trying to tough out justifiable customer unhappiness about maintenance fee hikes rather than take a more emollient line. Lose the customers, lose the employees and there is indeed consensus – and the consensus said its time for change.

We’re so conditioned to the American cult of the CEO that from a governance perspective the changes look even more surprising. You mean that the Board actually does something? Its not just a rubber stamp for CEO decisions? SAP just showed us Board level activism in action. Of course the other way to look at it is a Chairman with more power than usual flexing his muscles. Anyone that saw Plattner’s keynote at Sapphire last year could tell he was itching to be back in the game – at least as far as technical strategy is concerned.

But back to Leo and his sustainability legacy.

Before Leo took the CEO role SAP had a fairly traditional approach to Corporate Social Responsibility and Citizenship. They had one of the best guys in the space – James Farrar – making contacts, winning friends, and helping steer corporate ships to better outcomes. I met Transparency International through James. Indeed- James helped me understand that CSR is relevant to business, rather than just being a less than benign form of PR. But CSR still felt a little homespun at the company.

Until Leo pulled the trigger, that is. He created the role of Chief Sustainability Officer and gave it to one of SAP’s rising stars, Peter Graf. Here is Graf getting excited about cutting paper use. Sustainability at SAP had to be sustainable, which meant making it a product-driven activity that was going to help the top and bottom line. Apotheker made sustainability a watch word of his tenure – presenting his ideas at CeBIT for example.

I should disclose that that I have been involved in SAP’s sustainability strategy. I am currently chairing of a group of external stakeholders advising SAP on its Sustainability Reporting and Strategy. I am not being paid directly for my role, but I do have a client relationship with the sustainability business unit. The stakeholder panel is pretty stellar – Bill “Cradle to Cradle” McDonough is one of the advisers! The project’s sponsor, who we were set to report to next Month – none other than Leo Apotheker. Leo takes a personal interest in sustainability. He wasn’t interested in a corporate fig leaf, but growing a big tree with deep roots.

SAP’s Sustainability product strategy is in increasingly good shape. The firm has built and bought new technology to fill out its portfolio, linking Governance, Risk And Compliance with environmental concerns such as Health and Safety and Chemicals Reporting. My colleague Tom Raftery writes up SAP’s Sustainability KPI tool here.

Leo’s legacy is that he took Sustainability seriously and made it part of SAP’s spine, rather than being a fingers and toes activity. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank Leo for continuing to stress the importance of sustainability even as the economy collapsed. SAP and its customers are set to benefit. SAP customers are some of the “dirtiest” in world in terms of energy consumption, chemical use and so on. SAP can act as a force multiplier in making these firms more effective, and cleaner.

Talking of force multipliers, one of the common arguments about Leo’s tenure was that there wasn’t enough technical innovation. With respect to many esteemed commentators that’s rubbish. Take a look at 12Sprints, a tool designed to drive collaboration around corporate data. The Business Objects folks in Palo Alto are on fire right now with product innovation. SAP CTO Vishal Sikka may have just taken a board level position, but he was already driving technical strategy. And Leo was prepared to sell Vishal’s vision of Timeless Software… NetWeaver is being retooled as web glue rather than on premises integration middleware. Non-transactional services will be delivered by cloud.

No – SAP was mainly struggling to sell to customers because they were angry about maintenance fees, especially in SAP’s biggest and most important market- Germany. As the recent Siemens case showed clearly enough. Plattner admits he fully agreed with the hikes, but unfortunately for Apotheker he was their public face.

Sustainability is Leo’s real legacy, and I would like to thank him for it.

[update: it seems the story is still evolving pretty fast. John Schwartz, member of the Executive Board responsible for SAP BusinessObjects, Ecosystem & Corporate Development has just also resigned from the board.]

Share This

Things Looking Up Much?

2010-02-05T09:33:30-08:00

I read the Financial Times most days. Over the last 18 months or so the news has been mostly bad, so I have to say today’s tech digest made for very pleasant reading. You don’t need a sophisticated sentiment analysis engine to see a trend here….

Lenovo profiting from recovery

Chinese PC maker Lenovo reports net profit for its fiscal third quarter to December of $80m, significantly ahead of expectations, compared with a $97m net loss for the same quarter a year earlier
http://link.ft.com/r/73UJGG/IYITVU/UURK8/OJUHR6/3O6PFC/6C/h

Sony lifts outlook after strong quarter

Japan’s leading electronics brand shows the benefits of its restructuring programme cutting its forecast net loss for the year to March 2010 after a strong Christmas quarter
http://link.ft.com/r/73UJGG/IYITVU/UURK8/OJUHR6/72VTPZ/6C/h

Samsung plans to treble smartphone sales

Samsung Electronics says it aims to treble its smartphone shipments this year by expanding its line-up in a bid to close the gap on rivals such as Nokia and Apple in the fast-growing market
http://link.ft.com/r/73UJGG/IYITVU/UURK8/OJUHR6/QFRK5O/6C/h

Facebook dominates mobile internet

Around 16m people in the UK accessed the web via mobile phone in December, with the social networking site accounting for nearly half of all the time people spent online
http://link.ft.com/r/73UJGG/IYITVU/UURK8/OJUHR6/XTLSYZ/6C/h

Tech spending

Cisco has reported sales growth for the first time since October 2008, but the expected celebration did not take place
http://link.ft.com/r/73UJGG/IYITVU/UURK8/OJUHR6/BM78HR/6C/h

Share This