SOA filling the Gaps

Few years ago I participated in a strategic CRM consulting. The customer was using  Siebel and SAP ERP . He considered  other alternatives for CRM. My role in the consulting team was to analyze the CRM market and trends. CRM as a SaaS or on Demand was one of the major  trends I mentioned. I wrote on SalesForce.com transforming the CRM market. I wrote on Seibel on Demand as well as on other SaaS style CRM solutions. Sap was an exception. It was the only vendor with no On Demand CRM strategy or solution. According to SAP, CRM should be integrated with ERP components and database, therefore it is not possible to properly implement CRM as a Service, together with Data Center based ERP. I explained to the client, that sooner or later we will find SaaS CRM solutions by SAP. However, about two days before we completed our paper Oracle announced Siebel acquisition. The most important questions were: Is the acquisition is due to Installed Base or product features? ...

Complexity was one of the issues presented by Dr. Jimmy Schwarzkopf 's STKI summit Keynote presentation. My Take in a previous post glanced at Complexity and the topic of a comment to my post was Complexity. Pini Cohen's Architecture and Infrastructure EVP & Senior Analyst' s presentation in the STKI Summit included many slides on the same topic.  The key point was that In Israel  2009 was a year with record downtime dew to Complexity. Storage was a major cause for not good enough service due to under staffing. According to Pini's presentation the complexity is driven by three factors: 1.    The total number of entities 2.    Their degree of heterogeneity 3.    Their degree of interconnectedness The solutions to the Complexity problem according to Pini's presentation are: 1.    Industry in a Box is Consolidation which reduces the total number of entities and could also reduce the degree of hete...

On March 16th I participated in the STKI summit by the local analysts company STKI . The company headed by Dr. Jimmy Schwarzkopf is focused on the Israeli market. The theme of this year conference was: Finding the Right Balance: Standardize vs. Innovate. Presentations were based on an Israeli market survey performed by the company. The company's analysts' presentations topics were Infrastructure Trends, Applications Trends, Office of the CIO trends and Infrastructure Services Trends, followed by wrap-up IT Trends presentation by Jimmy. Jimmy's Keynote presentation included two parts: The first topic (and the more interesting topic in my opinion) was directions and trends. This part was not Israeli market centric. The second topic summed up the surrey's results and was limited to the Israeli market. The local companies in each category (e.g. Storage Hardware, Integration Software), were ranked by Revenue and Client's Mind Share. I was surprised to find mys...