I certainly anticipated that the nearly 60 acquisitions by Oracle since 2005 would help the largest business software company in the world (with more than 320,000 customers in over 145 countries) continue to make even more money (e.g., via increasing cross-selling opportunities and by penetrating more markets) and deliver an array of reliable upper-range technology products. What I did not expect back then, though, was that Oracle would concurrently solve some shortcomings that had customarily plagued the powerhouse before this (still ongoing) acquisition spree.

Namely, Oracle was not then known for being the most partner-friendly company. The giant was also largely a horizontal technology infrastructure (i.e., relational database and middleware) provider rather than a trusted industry solutions adviser (and provider) at the time. To be fair, Oracle had an established presence in certain industries, but that was more coincidental (e.g., many financial service companies have bought Oracle Database or Oracle E-Business Suite) than a deliberate attempt by Oracle to provide a vertical industry solution per se.

With its techno-macho corporate culture (as opposed to more touchy-feely approaches by former PeopleSoft or JD Edwards), Oracle was also more of a fit for the largest global corporations than for the lower-end of the market. Indeed, its customers include 100 of the Fortune Global 100 companies. Well, what difference a few years and several dozen acquisitions may make!

In an upcoming series of blog posts, I plan to analyze Oracle’s recent moves to mitigate its abovementioned traditional shortcomings. The series starts with this post on Oracle’s strategy to become both a better partner in general and to attract smaller partners and customers. Read the rest of this entry »

The Part I of this blog topic concluded with SAP’s supremacy in the upper-end of the regional market. What also helps SAP ERP [evaluate this product] is a number of well-established value added resellers (VARs) that cover the entire former Yugoslavia region, some of which have a few dozen renowned installation sites (customer references) and a roster of experienced consultants. Some of these are the earlier mentioned S&T Group from Austria and Croatia-based B4B.

While one can always be doubtful about the success of implementations and users’ adoption in those divisions/plants where the implementation mandate came from the HQ office abroad and without any due selection process and users’ involvement (buy-in) in selecting it, some implementations at certain life science companies were apparently successful. That was in part because of implementing corporate-wide best practice templates, such as for current good manufacturing practices (cGMPs). Read the rest of this entry »

The launch of TEC’s blog has somewhat coincided with my visit to Belgrade, Serbia (what used to be Yugoslavia and then Serbia & Montenegro) for personal reasons. Those several days spent in my homeland in late October/early November (whereby I missed my beloved Boston Red Sox’ winning the MLB World Series ’07 Championship, darn it!) I at least used this time to also learn about the enterprise applications market in that region, and maybe even in the entire Balkan region. I have never seen any such market report from any other analyst house about this (possibly obscure) region, and I thought this topic might be of interest to our (curious) readers as well as to me. To be fair, I’ve seen other similar trip reports, such as this recent one about the Australian enterprise applications market. Read the rest of this entry »