UNIT4, a cloud-focused business software  and services company, has announced a partnership with Amazon, one of the top global providers of cloud services. Under this agreement UNIT4 will develop the necessary consultancy services and technical support to deploy its UNIT4’s business software with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. Read the rest of this entry »

Jaspersoft, a provider of open source–based software specializing in business intelligence (BI) and analytics applications, has announced the general availability of its BI platform on Amazon Web Services.

This offering will be able to run as a standalone version or embedded within a third-party application. But its price schema is the real innovation for the BI cloud space—instead of being charged monthly, users will be charged for usage by the hour, with no limitations on data usage an no monthly fee. Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon is pulling out all the stops in its bid to get ahead in the highly competitive data warehouse market by announcing the limited preview of Amazon Redshift, Amazon´s new data warehouse offering.

Redshift is a petabyte-scale, fully managed data warehouse service in the cloud. Amazon customers will be able to deploy their data warehouse solutions and analyze large amounts of information by using the same set of business intelligence and analytics applications they regularly use. Using a wide variety of  innovations, such as its method for storing stores each column sequentially, Amazon will offer data warehouse services in the cloud ranging from hundreds of gigabytes to a petabyte. Read the rest of this entry »

During SAP’s TechEd event in Las Vegas, SAP announced that in an agreement with Amazon, SAP HANA can be used on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and will be available immediately via the AWS Marketplace as an offering called SAP HANA One. Read the rest of this entry »

Jaspersoft has decided to take the JasperReports Server Community Edition and make it available on Amazon’s recent offering called AWS Marketplace, free of charge. This will make it possible for users to use JasperReports as a preconfigured Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to be deployed as part of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

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In a very interesting move in what I would call a software consumerization trend, much like the AppStore, recently Amazon launched Amazon Web Services Marketplace (AWS Marketplace). The new service from Amazon will make available a number of cloud-based software to its users. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series talked about the historical background of the JRocket Marketing Grape Escape(TM) event. Grape Escape has become a June fixture over past several years, right after the high traveling season to major vendors’ events subsides and before everyone takes their summer vacations. It is a signature event that showcases the intimate analyst relationships (AR) and event expertise that JRocket Marketing’s president and founder Judith Rothrock delivers to her software vendors’ client base by giving them exposure to a selected group of industry analysts.

Part 1 also analyzed the news announcements by Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce.com, followed by the testimony from its customer Wi-Fi Alliance. Part 2 analyzed the Grape Escape 2010 news announcements from Meridian Systems CEO John Bodrozic and SYSPRO US CEO Brian Stein, followed by these vendors’ customers (Walt Disney and Lee Spring, respectively).

Part 3 will analyze major news coming from UNIT4’s Agresso product line.

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Part 1 of this blog series talked about Consona Corporation’s recent acquisition of leading open source and cloud computing enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider Compiere. After reading a slew of speculative blog posts (including the one from TEC’s free and open source [FOSS] buff and advocate Josh Chalifour), I had an incisive briefing with Consona’s CEO Jeff Tognoni, to give the company a fair chance to explain its strategy and the rationale behind the acquisition.

In Part 1, Tognoni first dispelled any idea that Consona’s intentions were to to copy the much larger and also acquisitive vendor Infor, as suggested by the related ERP Graveyard blog post. Thereafter, he explained that his interest in Compiere’s cloud platform coincided with (and was validated by) the recent launch of Consona’s CRM Cloud leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) for the server infrastructure and platform.

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In early June Consona Corporation’s analyst relationship (AR) contact forewarned me about the company’s upcoming acquisition of a “leading open-source and cloud computing enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor” and asked about my availability for a briefing once the acquisition was closed. After consultation with TEC’s free and open source software (FOSS) buff Josh Chalifour, we quickly identified Compiere [evaluate this product] as the most likely target (not to say prey).

Namely, this open source software vendor had been eerily quiet for a while (and ignoring our repeated calls for update briefings) and lately there had been much less activity within its once vibrant FOSS user community. The rumors about Compiere running out of “dough” and looking for a white knight had also floated occasionally. Once the acquisition was made official on June 16, 2010, Josh was swift with his blog post that mostly talked about the abovementioned observations prior to the merger and gave some speculations about Compiere’s future under Consona.

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