Cloud

Thomas Wailgum of CIO magazine ponders the Oracle/SAP rivalry and wonders whether or not either has what it takes to successfully deliver Cloud ERP. In other words: Have SAP and Oracle become too big to compete in this new decade of constant change, next-generation app pipelines, pricing upheavals and innovation-first business strategies? Read the...
Read more »

A few weeks ago Gartner acquired AMR, and this week Dennis Gaughan replaced Bruce Richardson (who left AMR to join the vendor Infor) with the responsiblity for editing the AMR newsletter. One thing didn’t change – we still found a few gems in the newsletter. In today’s B2B discussion, Dennis points out the need...
Read more »

Several organizations are discussing the activities associated with creating SaaS standards. As Dennis Howlett mentions in his article “UK trade groups come together to develop SaaS / cloud standards”, these discussions are business focused and welcomed by most in the industry. The SaaS standards Dream Customers can purchase SaaS applications which share information through...
Read more »

Today, we noticed an interesting blurb from a lead analyst at a well known research company. The note appeared in an article about SAP’s hybrid approach to ERP. Before I get started, I need to point out that I’m using the word “cloud” as a synonym for software as a service (SaaS) and/or on...
Read more »

An article in Manufacturing & Technology eJournal reminds us that SaaS and cloud computing can lower your costs. The chart, reproduced below, portrays several cost criteria and concludes that you need to consider SaaS vendors in your decision making process. ERP Cloud Considerations What the chart doesn’t show is the relative size of the...
Read more »

In a recent conversation, we discussed the pro’s and con’s of moving ERP applications to the Cloud with Phil Wainewright from Procullux Ventures. During the discussion, Phil mentioned “Businesses want to embrace the cloud in a controlled way.” Our opinion … well said! When we speak with value added resellers and business, they are...
Read more »

What is the difference between platform as a service and infrastructure as a service? Infrastructure as a service (for example Amazon EC2) provides on-demand computing power and storage. Platform as a service (one aspect of Microsoft Azure) provides computing power and storage plus an operating system. With PAAS, the operating system is patched and...
Read more »

Next week, Microsoft is announcing the release of their Windows Azure platform at the PDC09 conference in Los Angeles. In doing some prepwork for the conference, I ran across the Windows Azure TCO calculator. So, I figured that I would try it out and report the results. Inputs to the TCO Calculator The calculator...
Read more »