After making it available for preview some months ago, Microsoft is now officially launching Outlook.com, Microsoft’s new free e-mail service. According to Microsoft, in its preview stage Outlook.com grew from 0 to 60 million users in six months. With this addition, Microsoft wants to offer e-mail users a fresh user experience—one that’s more intuitive and capable of be used transparently with all major mobile and personal computing devices.

What will happen to Hotmail users? According to Microsoft, every Hotmail user will be progressively upgraded to Outlook.com, transferring their address, password, and contacts.

Additionally to this, Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger users will need to migrate to Skype, as the messenger service will be phased out.

Will Outlook.com be able to compete with offerings such as Gmail?  Have a comment or feedback on outlook.com? Please drop us a line.

The Office of Vocational Training and Employment Promotion (OFPPT) of Morocco, a public training institution offering educational training in 35 fields of study has chosen Microsoft Office 365 for its education and vocational training solutions. The OFPPT will also work with Microsoft to create 100 new Microsoft IT Academies across the country to continue with its mission to offer vocational training.

“The approach we’ve taken with Microsoft is a model of public and private partnership for advanced professional training in the ICT sector. The use of new technologies will actively contribute to human development, as well as support the growth of the national economy and ongoing infrastructure projects through effective, efficient and proven Microsoft solutions,” said Larbi Bencheikh, general director of the OFPPT.

Additional to this agreement, it is expected that Microsoft will lead more than 60,000 Microsoft Office Specialist and Microsoft Certified Professional certifications over the next three years via the OFPPT.

One huge potential benefit of cloud computing is the ability to encourage education via the use of on-demand services that are less costly and perhaps more accessible than on-premise and other types of solutions. This movet will drive customers towards the new SaaS model, but will also drive and encourage the use of Microsoft’s existing set of front office applications.

During its first customer conference, YamJam’12, Yammer announced the Enterprise Graph—a new app directory and platform. The intended customers for this product are enterprise software vendors. Given the current social surge, software vendors are seeking to integrate social features into their products. Read the rest of this entry »

At the IFS World Conference 2012 in Gothenburg, Sweden, it was interesting to notice that Microsoft was the diamond sponsor of the conference, while IBM and Oracle were platinum sponsors.

Currently, IFS Applications runs solely on Oracle database, while the presentation (client) side and prepackaged business intelligence (BI) are Microsoft-centric (the IFS Web client also supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome browsers). Where IFS offers more openness and choice is in the middleware/app server layer by supporting IBM WebSphere, Oracle Weblogic, and Red Hat’s JBoss products based on the Java Enterprise Edition standards. Microsoft Windows, Unix, and Linux are supported OS platforms. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft has acquired the marketing automation software company MarketingPilot. According to the press release, the new acquisition will be integrated into the Microsoft Dynamics CRM suite. MarketingPilot specialized in software that addresses marketing management demands ranging from insight into customer needs to automation of multi-channel marketing campaigns. MarketingPilot appears to provide strong analytics capabilities that can reveal the return on marketing investment for each campaign. This appears to be the key motivation for the acquisition. As more and more customer relationship management (CRM) products are aspiring to become social and benefit from these new channels of communication, Microsoft is hoping to assess the effectiveness of each campaign as well as its medium of delivery.

Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft Server and Tools Business, has officially launched Microsoft’s Windows Server 2012. In a global online launch event Mr. Nadella described how Windows Server 2012 will power what he calls the era of Cloud OS.

Mr. Nadella mentioned that with this launch, Microsoft is set to build the Cloud OS, expanding the traditional functions of an operating system to include services and technologies, which are not generally considered part of an operating system. Could it be possible that we are at the beginning of a new era for computer software design?

Part 1 of this blog series analyzed a snapshot of the SAP HANA offerings’ achievements at the time of the product’s first anniversary in June 2012. SAP is now a de facto database provider that intends to become the #2 database vendor by 2015. The company’s recently unveiled real-time data platform combines the SAP HANA platform, Sybase data management offerings, and SAP BusinessObjects solutions for enterprise information management (EIM). The combination is being touted as an answer to handling the data abundance (the so-called “big data” phenomenon) with near-zero latency.

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It doesn’t take an exceptional industry analyst or market observer to realize that SAP HANA has become one of the pillars of SAP’s future strategy (possibly even a “bet the farm” move). HANA is a major part of SAP’s goal of being a next-generation database management provider, and SAP now has a number of relational database assets, both developed on its own and from the Sybase acquisition. In fact, according to IDC, SAP has been the fastest growing database provider of late, although still smaller than the traditional leaders – Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.

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A recent note that landed on my plate really grabbed my attention: As part of a long partnership, Microsoft and SAP jointly gave a demo in which Microsoft Kinect was used to exploit SAP’s HANA capabilities. Seeing data being managed by a motion-based device made me want to write a post speculating about the way users and computers will interact in the future. Read the rest of this entry »

My blog post earlier this year discussed IFS AB’s (OMX Stockholm: IFS) continued market success in spite of the tough economic milieu.  The IFS Applications suite is positioned as the intelligent Tier 1 enterprise resource planning (ERP) alternative choice for customers seeking efficient return on investment (ROI). The company’s “agile ERP alternative” message is well received by the market and interest in its product remains high. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick post to highlight the best presentations of the two collocated Gartner events in Los Angeles last week:

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Recently, Google launched a beta version of Cloud connect for Microsoft Office. The service will provide synchronization between Google Docs and Microsoft Office documents. What this means is that users will be able to sync documents automatically from Office to Google Docs, and access the doc from anywhere by clicking a URL. Read the rest of this entry »

According to a recent news item in Computerworld, Attachmate will acquire Novell in a $2.2 billion deal. Novell also agreed to sell some intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings, a consortium led by Microsoft. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started with the assertion that cloud computing is reaching mainstream adoption in the enterprise applications space. Indeed, virtually all renowned independent software vendors (ISVs) already offer or plan to offer some or all of their products as a service (on-demand software).

My blog post then expanded onto some cloud computing definitions and nuances, to establish that enterprise resource planning (ERP) ISVs have a few different ways to take the cloud plunge. Possibly the most viable approach is to partner with an established platform as a service (PaaS) provider.

Finally, my post concluded with the recent symbiotic relationship (and mutual endorsements) between Microsoft and Infor. During its annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2010, Microsoft (as expected) continued to emphasize that it was embracing the cloud at the core of its current and future product strategy. For its part, Infor announced the launch of Infor24, its blueprint for delivering cloud versions of its enterprise applications.  Infor is also working closely with Microsoft to enable its key applications on the Windows Azure Platform. 

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Anyone that is still vociferously doubting and denying the future of cloud computing and its near-mainstream nature will sound as strange and nutty as some US Senate hopefuls that still proudly deny evolution and climate change (while admitting to “dabbling with witchcraft” in the not-too-distant past). In fact, can anyone name a renowned enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor that has not yet at least announced its cloud computing plans and strategy (if not already delivered actual cloud products)?

During the Grape Escape 2010 event this past summer, the common theme in all four featured vendors’ announcements was getting the “cloud religion.” I am still amazed to see how some of these vendors’ mantras have transformed from “Our customers do not ask for it!” to “We are in the cloud too!” in just a couple of years. 

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