Strategies for SaaS, Cloud Computing, Open Source and Governance

URL shortening is the fashion these days. Every second url you get in your email or social community activity stream you will see URLs encoded into a short cryptic URL with some arbitrary domain name like http://bit.ly or http://is.gd or http://bit.me
A long url like – http://www.thisisthelongsitedomainname.com/category/link-baits/you-are-a-sucker-if-you-fall-for-this/ easily gets shortened to http://bit.me/b4Ido
A little bit of [...]

Earlier this week a mega event happened in the technology arena without much fanfare. No it was not another mega acquisition deal that Oracle or Cisco announced. Neither was it another scandal or high tech executive bolting to another company as his company stock continued to sag.
If you have not guessed it by now, it [...]

As companies continue to make great efforts to connect with their customers, partners through their social media efforts including executive blogging, twitter, wikis and videos, Oracle pulled a switcheroo by yanking a popular employee blog that augmented Oracle Support.
The blogger’s crime, apparently, was that he provided an avenue for community users to interact and as [...]

After 4 months of wrangling and hundreds of thousands of dollars in the lawyer’s kitty and finally the European Competition Committee seems to be closer than ever before to approving Oracle’s $7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems. When all is said and done it will be a case of much ado about nothing.  Sans the [...]

Making lofty claims is nothing new in the technology sector. Every company claims they are the leader in their space. Over the years we have seen many a over-the-top marketing quotes from technology executives  deriding their competition or showmanship in highlighting their “greatest-product-since-slice bread” over their competitors.
But Microsoft executive Ron Markezich outdid all of them [...]

I just completed a quick consulting assignment with a company back in the East Coast. It was a Oracle E-Business Suite Implementation and specifically implementing one of the products (Oracle Procurement Contracts) that I managed and had a big role in building while at Oracle.
It was one of those interesting cases of implementations. Unknowingly or led [...]

The recently filings by the company, disclosed that, its chief Larry Ellison would be drawing a salary of $1 for the year of 2010.
It has been a practice (or some call it publicity stunt) of CEOs to take $1 salary and cash in on other perks like stock. Most notable ones in the recent past [...]

Customer support has always been a thorny area for both the companies providing the support and customers availing them. With the advent of the social communities and tools, customers have used them as alternate means to voice their grievances. I came across this really great video through which a customer was voicing his displeasure of [...]

R “Ray” Wang of Software Insider blog recently wrote an interesting piece on how companies should consider and pursue resale of their unused, shelf ware they licensed or acquired as part of an acquisition. This he felt was an opportunity for companies to effectively manage their spend on software.
Shelf ware to those who are not [...]

Time Warner announced today that it will spin off AOL as a standalone company. This completes a full circle to a 8 year old saga that was filled with controversies from the beginning to the end.
Talk about a marriage that was never meant to be. Dubbed as a merger of equals, the $147 billion merger [...]

In what amounts to a groundbreaking (atleast in recent times) decision, the courts of Massachusetts have barred EMC executive David Donatelli from joining HP. As most of you might have heard that EMC had filed a case against Donatelli in MA invoking the non-compete clause in his employment contract. California does not allow, honor such [...]

It has been a week since the news of the mega deal about Oracle acquiring Sun broke. In the week that went by every body and their cousin has written about this deal. It might even be the most searched term in Googlosphere.
In the meanwhile I have met with many people who have been dissecting [...]

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz announced herself to the world with the proverbial F-bomb in the earnings release. In explaining the dysfunction within the Yahoo product organization where they have way too many people running around telling engineers to do things – she interjected a F-bomb.
Way to go Carol! – Show them who wears the pants [...]

Oracle acquiring Sun close on the heels of a failed attempt by IBM has set off a lot of buzz in the industry about a possible flurry of more transactions in the days to come. Lots of names are thrown around as potential acquirers and as ones to be acquired. I will try to capture [...]

Twitter is all the rage these days with movie stars to anyone on the street having an account. Barack Obama single-handedly did more marketing of  Twitter than anything Twitter could have done by itself. It is spreading faster than free email spread when it was first introduced (Remember initial Hotmail days).
People have found interesting ways [...]

Close on the heels of IBM-Sun deal falling apart, Oracle has jumped in and acquired Sun. Oracle was being talked about even as Sun was trying to find suitors but I for one was seeing fewer synergies and more problems of doing such a thing. I thought besides IBM, HP or Apple would be a [...]