Oracle to Join the Cloud Crowd?

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Yesterday I recommended that Larry Ellison read Marc Benioff’s book. It seems that he did. #Nextslide.

Here’s a summary of the Oracle Public Cloud and the Oracle Social Network – clearly ZDNET is not impressed!

And here’s how @benioff replied on Twitter. #Nextslide.

 

 

 

 

RIP Steve Jobs.  A true legend. A great loss.

Related articles

• Oracle Public Cloud Announcement: Salesforce is a Roach Motel (searchenginejournal.com)
• Oracle’s Larry Ellison finally puts his head in the cloud (venturebeat.com)
• Ellison Reveals Oracle’s Public Cloud; Calls Salesforce The ‘Roach Motel’ Of Cloud Services (techcrunch.com)
• Oracle being dicks: cancels Marc Benioff’s keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld (dccrowley.posterous.com)
• Benioff Bounced From Oracle Stage (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Oracle OpenWorld snub fails to put off Salesforce CEO (go.theregister.com)

Did Larry Ellison Forget to Read @Benioff’s Book?

I’ve been attending Oracle Open World all week and tracking the hashtag #oow11 on Twitter and I have to say both pale in comparison to Dreamforce 2011 in terms of energy, excitement and buzz. Until last night, when Marc Benioff tweeted that Larry had cancelled his keynote. The gloves came off and the tweet stream came alive.

Yes, the irony of student becoming teacher has not gone unnoticed in the twittersphere/blogosphere (or whatever the kids are calling it these days).

Yes, Salesforce runs on Oracle’s database, but in the direct CRM and PaaS channel, the two companies are direct competitors.

All Larry Ellison had to do was pick up Benioff’s book – Behind the Cloud and he would have noted Play #22 (and subsequently #23 and #24). It outlines many of the tactics salesforce.com deployed to successfully win the battle against Siebel back in the day (before they were acquired by Oracle). Going beyond the well-publicized protests (which he has also organized today), Benioff:

“Ran an ad against Seibel with a “Don’t get bullied” theme with a boy writing on the chalkboard, “I will not give my lunch money to Siebel” and “I will not spend my summer vacation installing Siebel.”

In the book he recommends that you, “Hit balls over the net to your competitors. By Siebel acknowledging Salesforce.com, they legitimized them.  The tail wagged the dog.”

Well it appears today that the dog is once again being wagged.

Check out how @benioff has dealt with the cancellation on Twitter – his keynote could still trump Oracle’s cloud session later in the day. Well played, sir!

You can watch Marc Benioff’s keynote live from the hotel next door or follow the streaming video here. As he says, The Cloud Must Go On!

Your move Larry…

Congratulations to AppExchange – 1 Million Apps Installed

There doesn’t seem to be a press release, but lots of buzz on Twitter and a new banner on the website promoting the fact that the salesforce.com AppExchange has reached the 1 million install milestone. As an early member of the AppExchange team and as a Salesforce customer and partner, I’d like to pass along my congratulations. The AppExchange is a key element of the overall Salesforce experience and represents outstanding cloud computing innovation as well as a very healthy partner ecosystem.

And did you know that a cloud integration application is the most popular all-time free AppExchange app? Yes, it’s true! Here’s the top 5:

1. Informatica Cloud Data Loader
2. InsideView
3. Project and Issue Management (Force.com Labs)
4. Lead and Opportunity Management Dashboards (Force.com Labs)
5. Mail Drop (Force.com Labs)

And the the most popular all-time paid apps, you ask? #1 is VerticalResponse – here’s the list.

CIO Insight: Top IT Applications in 2012 and Beyond

CIO Insight published a great slideshow overview today on  application adoption trends over the next 12 months. I’d embed if if I could figure out out. Here’s a brief summary:

Top 5 apps to be integrated:

1. Business intelligence/analytics (39%)
2. Productivity/collaboration (36%)
3. Sales (34%)
4. Financial (28%)
5. Social Media (27%)

Top social media platform for marketing/customer support:

1. Facebook (32%)
2. Twitter (20%)
3. LinkedIn (20%)

Biggest roadblocks for fully harnessing data (percent respondents):

1. Insufficient integration (45%)
2. Data-quality maintenance (40%)
3. Network/system performance maintenance (35%)

Other results:

• 57% of respondents anticipate that data volume will increase 25% during the next 12 to 18 months.
• 56% of respondents feel that easily connecting applications and data will allow staff more time to work on other business initiatives.
• 33% of respondents say they’ll implement at least four SaaS/cloud applications during the next two years.
• 42% of respondents plan to incorporate cloud solutions to address integration needs.

Be sure to check out the complete presentation here.

Related articles

• Data is the key that ties it all together (zdnet.com)
• 1 in 10 CIOs want to be a ‘revolutionary’ (infoworld.com)
• Dreamforce 2011: Salesforce & the Social Enterprise Will Be Here All Week (Part 2) (zdnet.com)

Mock Gartner Quads and a Salesforce.com Movie

Strangely, my 2 year old slept in this morning so I fired up Twitter and immediately clicked through to these two posts – both equally funny and scary to think about at the same time.

1. Enterprise Irregulars: Variations on Hype Quadrants.. no Magic Hype… no, Hype Cycle.. or is it Magic Quadrant?
2. BusinessCloud9: Hollywood Plans Salesforce.com The Movie

Ok, my son is now up but I don’t think either of these need much commentary. Good stuff!

Enjoy your weekend.

Related Articles

• Variations on Hype Quadrants.. no Magic Hype… no, Hype Cycle.. or is it Magic Quadrant? (cloudave.com)
• Gartner Explains the Process for Creating a Magic Quadrant (readwriteweb.com)
• Unhyping Gartner’s Hype Cycle, Part 2. (cloudave.com)

The Role of Social Data in the Enterprise

Informatica‘s Chris Boorman posted his thoughts on the “ability to pull in data from the world of social media to understand more about our customers and prospects.” His blog post, Embracing Social Data Within The Enterprise, focuses on both cloud data integration and Master Data Management and provides examples of organizations that have blurred the lines between social and business data. His conclusion:

“From a data integration perspective this opens up a whole new world as companies look to gain competitive advantage and look to use this new world of data in previously un-thought of ways!”

Check out the blog post here and this video of Chris speaking about the role of social data in the enterprise:

…and here’s a demo of pretty cool cloud integration use case showing the ability to pull Twitter data into Salesforce CRM.

Informatica Cloud Takes the Main Stage at Informatica World

Yesterday I posted a summary of some of the cloud integration activity going on at Informatica World 2010 (#IW2010). What I didn’t mention is the main stage demonstration this morning that featured the cloud integration service running on an iPad and loading, validating, and synchronizing unstructured data from spreadsheets and Twitter feeds with Salesforce CRM. The easy-to-use-Informatica Cloud interface is getting a lot of attention for the self-service data integration possibilities. Here’s Mr. Ron Lunasin in action. I’ll post the video as soon as it’s available.

Informatica Analyst Coverage on Twitter

Today I’m at the Informatica Analyst event in Palo Alto. You can follow the discussion at #infaanalyst.

Here are a few of my favorite “tweets” so far:

• “Anything that allows for configuration vs. code drives LOB transparency, visibility. more mashups!”
• “Another customer is using Informatica Cloud Services: ” It is as easy to use as an online email tool. Quite straightforward.””
• “Informatica Marketplace – crowd sourced innovation!”

There was also a great customer panel. Here’s one of the Informatica Cloud customers talking about his implementation:

Cloud Integration Social Networking Resources

I’m interested in where you go to learn more about the topic of data integration as a cloud-based service. Salesforce integration? Cloud to on-premise integration? SaaS app to SaaS app integration? Data integration delivered as an on-demand service for non-technical users to manage and administer?

A few resources that I track:

LinkedIn Groups:

• Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum
• SaaS Business Intelligence and Integration

Active Bloggers:

• Loraine Lawson’s blog often covers the topic of data integration as a cloud service
• David Linthicum’s blog covers data integration broadly
• Informatica Perspectives (featuring yours truly, but also many gurus and industry experts)

Twitter:

• While my tweets are available on this blog, you might also want to follow INFAcloud.
• There’s no business intelligence Google spreadsheet yet. Who do you follow? Do you use lists? Care to explain?
• I once tried to create a “Cloud Integration Twibe” but it didn’t seem to work (and I don’t know if anyone uses them)

Got some resources to share? I’m interested…

SaaS Business Intelligence Smack Down on Twitter

I was skimming Twitter this morning and saw this announcement from Cognos, “Cognos Takes Aim at MidMarket with New BI Tools.”  I was surprised that the press release said nothing about SaaS / Cloud computing, and posed the question on Twitter: “Why no SaaS BI?”

Well, Andy Bitterer (aka Andy Twitterer), who is currently in Ottawa for analyst briefing day, took me to task with this reply:

“Maybe IBM doesn’t want to go down like LucidEra…”

BOOM!

My old friend Lance Walter from Pentaho stepped in with this defence of the SaaS/Cloud model:

“But failed co. doesn’t equal failed model.”

Andy’s reply: “Fair enough, but not a really proven model either. LucidEra wasn’t the first. See IT Factory. Different reason, though.”

I then asked Andy: “Are you suggesting midmarket not well suited for SaaS BI?”

His response:

“On the low end of the midmarket I see no issue. But a 1B company doing a big-ticket SaaS BI deployment I have yet to see.”

But what about enterprise departmental implementations? I saw quite a bit of interest here in my time at LucidEra, where the SaaS BI solution was sought to address specific needs of a line of business. So far, there’s been a surprisingly muted response from the SaaS BI vendors out there. Do they have proof of enterprise customer success for Andy? Was anyone else surprised not to see a SaaS/Cloud offering from Cognos or is it still considered to be too bleeding edge? What about Business Objects OnDemand from SAP? Is it still a growing concern in this market?

In the meantime, if enterprise departmental implementations are the way forward for SaaS BI vendors outside of the midmarket (Cognos aside of course), it’s certainly good news for data integration in the cloud that includes data synchronization and data replication services.