SOA filling the Gaps

I recently read Tien Tzue 's post titled The End of ERP . As usual, I suspect the validity of statements beginning with the End of ... without a question mark in the end. Tien Tzue's statement is not an exception. According to Tien Tzue there is a shift from 20th century products based economy to 21th century Service subscription economy, therefore ERP is doomed. He refers to the acquisitions of Cloud ERP solutions companies,  Successful Factors by SAP and Taleo by Oracle , as an End Of Life signs of traditional ERP.   No ERP company can afford to ignore Cloud based ERP, but that does not mean that SAP, Oracle and other traditional vendor, are going to kill the goose who lays golden eggs i.e. their traditional On-Premise ERP suits. SaaS based ERP is a better fit for some enterprises and Traditional ERP fits better for other enterprises. Three years ago I already discussed the issue of Future Applications: SaaS or Traditional .   Basically it i...

On May 2010 SAP acquired Sybase . According to my post titled: Acq uisition is not simple: SAP-Sybase acquisition agreement , buying Sybase was not a great idea. If you would like to know why you can read my post. Today (December 3rd 2011), SAP buys Successful Factors the provider of Cloud-based human resource management software, for  $3.4bn in cash . This time I would not argue that it is not a good idea. Actually the last paragraph in my post about Sybase acquisition was titled: Which type of company I would acquire if I were Sap's CEO? Believe it or not, I recommended that "a successful SaaS applications company could be an adequate acquisition target".  According to Financial Times , SuccessFactors Human Resources (HR) SaaS applications provider has 5 millions subscriptions at more than 3,500 companies worldwide and it is believed to be the second largest Cloud-based  provider of  Enterprise software after Salesforce.com . Lars Daalgard, SuccessFactor...

Probably not. Java is too strong to be killed. I posted the following answer to the question: Will Oracle's lawsuit Against Google Put a Chill on Java Adoption?  asked in ebizQ SOA Forum When Oracle acquired Sun, I thought it was a wrong decision (read my post: Vendors Survival:The Sun is red - Oracle to buy Sun First Take   ). It seems that Oracle's managers reached a similar  conclusion and are trying to minimize the amount of money they lose. The lawsuit against Google is one  of the ways to achieve it. However, this lawsuit  supports the concerns about Java after Oracle  acquired Sun. The delicate balance of the Java community with two  strong players (IBM and BEA), Sun as the owner of  Java and leader of the Java Community Process and  other strong players (Oracle, SAP, RedHat/Jboss etc.)  no longer exists. Oracle swallowed BEA and Sun and is now the owner  of Java. Java w...

On May 14th SAP AG signed a definitive agreement to acquire Sybase Inc. for approximately $5,800 million. The offer price represents a premium of 44% over the three-month average stock price of Sybase and a premium of approximately 56.36% over the closing price of Sybase' common stock of $41.57 on May 11, According to the announcements by the two companies the deal, which follows a partnership for a significant time, is beneficial for both companies. I partially agree: It is very good for Sybase. However, I think that acquiring Sybase looks like a SAP's mistake. What motivated SAP to acquire Sybase? Previous SAP's CEO LEO Apotheker was replaced by Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe due to conservative business approach. One of the significant results of this approach is few acquisitions. SAP's main competitor Oracle, is acquiring many companies in a relatively short time. So far SAP's significant acquisition was Business Objects a Business Intelligence inf...

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? ...

P robably many of the readers of this post will read it because of the title. Provocative titles such as:" IT does not Matter" ( Nicholas G. Carr , MIT ), "The End of Corporate Computing"(Nicholas G Carr, MIT), "The End of the IT Department" (Neil MacDonald, Gartner Group) attract readers attention and sometimes trigger emotional reactions. By using provocative title you can make sure that your opinion and your arguments are read, noticed and commented at. Many readers are probably sure that Microsoft will be a dominant market player on 2018; however my opinion is that the probability for scenario of that kind is less than 100%. Let's go back in time to 1989. If someone would have written an article (no Blogs and Posts on that time) titled: Will DEC survive until 1999? And explain why DEC will not survive, he would have been mocked. Dec was the second or third largest IT vendor in the market. In the 90ths IT business model was changed fro...

The topic of the meeting of the Israeli SOA Forum of November 29th was: BPM & SOA . This is the 17th meeting of the SOA Forum of the Israeli Association of Information Processing . I am moderating the forum since its imitation on March 2005. The forum meetings take place once in a month. The forum is opened for anyone involved or interested in SOA activities. Most of the meetings included presentations and discussions. The 16th meeting was exceptional: experts' panel on SOA Governance . The presenter was Gilad Rothschild ( ARIS product manager of Seker the local distributor of IDS Scheer 's products).His perspective is Business Process Centric and mainly ARIS centric (and therefore focused on the modeling part of the Process Life Cycle). The view point of someone who is not a SOA expert, but rather an expert in business processes, as they are perceived by Business people instead of the usual IT people talking to IT people. The following bullets highlight the key elements i...