If one quickly skims through Sun Microsystem’s newspeak-style press release, its devastating cut to 6,000 jobs, globally, only sounds like a doubleplusungood minor reshuffle. Newsoutlets and investors, however, weren’t fooled, and the announcement caused the troubled company’s shares to plummet to $4.06. At its height, during the dot-com boom, Sun’s shares were worth $250.

For eight years, Sun has been in deep financial troubles, and it hasn’t escaped the global credit crisis—a significant number of its customers are banks. This latest shakeup in has some analysts speculating that Sun will become a “dirt cheap“  acquisition target for larger rivals, such as HP, IBM, or Dell.

While this move is expected to save Sun between $700 million and $800 million annually, it won’t be enough to preserve the company. Sun may still undergo further restructuring, including splitting its software division into three different business units to push its open source business.

According to a recent NYT article, the hotel industry saw record revenue last year reaching $138 billion, growing $28 billion from the previous year. In response, hotels increased rates and major chains like Hyatt and Marriott began planning new hotels. While the recent subprime crisis, low US dollar, and high gas prices have caused these chains to scale back new developments, they have not trimmed them down by much. Over 6,000 new hotels have been built, with a third of those still under construction. Read the rest of this entry »

This week BMC announced it had secured the purchase of ITM Software, a business management provider. BMC is a publically traded data center automation company that competes directly with CA Inc, HP, and IBM. It’s clients include DELL, Home Depot, and Toyota. Over the past two years, BMC has been busy snapping up different IT companies, such as Proactive Net (June 2007), RealOps (July 2007), and Emprisa Networks (October 2007). It’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Bengal Acquisition Corporation acquired 96.7% interest in BladeLogic. Read the rest of this entry »

No, I’m not about to launch into a Paula Abdul cover (I won’t even dignify that with a link).

Lead generation is a process that uses information to create interest in an enterprise’s products or services. It’s end objective is to generate sales.

Several steps are involved in this marketing process. Before a company begins, it needs to define the market that its product or service caters too, segment that market, and then identify its most profitable areas. Once this is done, the leads generation process begins. The leads generation process involves prospecting, preapproach, approach, and close. As a prospect moves through the leads cycle, information is being created and filtered. Sensibly, a business should use this information to follow up with its customers to see if they were satisfied with the service or product, and then generate leads metrics which will be used to further refine the leads generation and sales process. 

The leads generation process gathers a lot of information and involves a lot of tracking, and it should generate dialogue not only between the company and customers, but within the company between sales and marketing in particular. A leads management solution uses different methodologies and practices to govern this information and distribute it to the appropriate people within an organization. Read the rest of this entry »

Things continue to be busy for both Microsoft and HP as they try and make headway in the ever-competitive IT industry.?
Not abandoning it’s pursuit of the lucrative online advertising market, Microsoft has made a deal with HP to make Internet Explorer the default browser on HP PCs. Read the rest of this entry »

Given the majority of participants in a selection committee are not enterprise software specialists, quality enterprise research on applications is crucial. Even if you are employing consultants (with their cute business attire and boxes of love they give during the holidays—my PM brother-in-law once scored a leather jacket, but I digress), it’s still important to be well versed about the solution sets you are considering. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a danish on my desk that I want to eat. Actually, it’s half a danish… almond, homemade with butter. But first, this week’s white paper topic: ecommerce.

I’m actually going to direct you to a datasheet by AppFinity on e-commerce solutions. This does require registration, but it’s worth it. Not necessarily for the datasheet alone, but to access other white papers. I know, white papers sound like they are meant to be dull. You hear “white papers,” and think “white bread”, and if you’re in North America, you think of “Wonderbread” which tastes like sawdust. No, that’s not true. I suspect sawdust tastes better …. (sigh… danish).

When written well, a white paper won’t leave you feeling manipulated into buying something. Rather, will give you a better understanding of the issue and how your company can resolve it either with or without the vendor’s product. (I’m told Mike Stelzner’s book is good–I would tell you more, but I haven’t read it yet. I’m waiting for someone to take pity and send me a free copy. )

Anyhow back to ecommerce. Ecommerce is the commerce of goods and services over the Internet. Transactions involve credit cards, Paypal, and other types of electronic funds transfer mechanisms. In the US, ecommerce grew faster than the total economic activity in manufacturing, retail, merchant wholesale, and (selected) services in 2006.

Like any retail or point of sale system, ecommerce software needs to integrate with other areas of the company, such as accounting, customer service, inventory and shipping, etc. to ensure that product is sent out in a timely manner. The data sheet by AppFinity lays out a couple of other points that need to be considered when looking at an ecommerce solution.

Here’s a little tidbit (tidbit. timbit. bad press): white papers, modeled after government documents, were adapted by the private sector in the 1990s as a messaging tool.

A definitive agreement was reached between HP and EDS today where HP will purchase the global outsourcing company for $13.9 billion ($25 a share).

EDS is a global technology services company centering on information outsourcing. It serves both the private and public sectors, with core areas including manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, communications, energy, transportation, and consumer and retail industries.

HP is one of the world’s largest technology companies with revenues totaling $107.7 billion for the four fiscal quarters ending Jan. 31, 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

Disconcerting? That’s hardly what one feels when losing a laptop, and when it’s stolen … ? 

Lackadaisical, however, seems to be the approach most enterprises take when it comes to safeguarding laptops. The theft of a laptop is devastating to a company, because data is so precious. It’s not just a matter of losing trade secrets, which is also a major concern, but a person’s name is one of the most important assets she has (remember Tina Turner?). Read the rest of this entry »