It would be an understatement to say that Red Hat is an interesting enterprise software company. Since its founding in 1994 and initial public offering (IPO) in 1999, the vendor has focused on businesses and divisions thereof that embrace open-source computing tools. In 2001, Red Hat introduced Enterprise Linux, a “frozen” mature version of Linux whose support and maintenance the vendor could guarantee (for a fee) until the next mature version would be officially released (say, a few years later). This approach shields users from the potential disruptions of continual enhancements that the open-source community keeps bringing to the Linux kernel. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, TIBCO announced the launch of its new Integration Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) called TIBCO Cloud Bus. The new subscription-based integration platform will enable users to undergo extensive and complex integration projects, and migrate applications and workload to the cloud, at, as TIBCO states, lower costs and with drastically lesser deployment times.

According to TIBCO, the Cloud Bus enables users to have the freedom to start their projects within minutes and only pay for what they consume, while at the same time having the freedom to choose and move across cloud infrastructure offered by partners that meet TIBCO’s and its customers’ needs and demands. Read the rest of this entry »

Eccentex Corporation provides dynamic case management (DCM), a.k.a. adaptive case management, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions using its multitenant cloud-based AppBase platform as a service (PaaS). DCM solutions should support what the evolving knowledge worker needs and allow organizations to optimize case outcomes, improve customer services, and mitigate risk.

Eccentex recently announced the launch of AppBase 5.0, which includes user-friendly creation tools and templates or frameworks (referred to as AppTemplates) for quick delivery of case management systems by business analysts and line-of-business personnel (rather than IT staff). The vendor is hereby trying to redefine the fundamental processes and user interfaces of the modern knowledge worker. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently released FinancialForce PSA Winter ’13 builds on FinancialForce.com’s commitment to making professional services teams more effective, mobile, and social (having been built on the Salesforce Platform and natively embedded with Salesforce CRM). Winter ’13 is based on enhancement ideas submitted online by the company’s growing community of users via the FinancialForce Community portal that was launched in 2012.

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In many service industries, such as financial, insurance, utilities, healthcare, government, and others, case management is the lifeblood of the business. These highly unstructured (dynamic or adaptive, if you will) processes where the next process step’s best action depends on the outcome of the previous step require apt human process stewards, a.k.a. “knowledge workers.” These knowledge workers, characterized as workers whose main capital is knowledge, are aided by a multitude of tools such as sophisticated business rules engines, knowledge bases, predictive analytics, etc. in executing tasks exactly when, where, and how they are needed to achieve customer satisfaction, while maintaining corporate governance and compliance requirements.

Yet, Eccentex Corporation, a provider of AppBase platform-as-a-service (PaaS) applications for dynamic case management (DCM), just announced the results of a recently conducted survey, which found that companies are failing to equip their employees with the tools they need to thrive in today’s work environment. Survey results, which included responses from knowledge workers in a variety of industries, pointed to widespread demand for mobile and cloud-based access to business-critical information systems and platforms needed to do their job.

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Last week, FinancialForce.com, the cloud applications company formed as a joint venture between UNIT4 and salesforce.com, announced the availability of trust.financialforce.com, a resource for customers that describes the control processes, security, application quality, and platform monitoring environment that underpin all FinancialForce.com cloud business applications. Built on the Salesforce Platform (a.k.a., Force.com), FinancialForce.com applications inherit all the benefits of the investments made by salesforce.com in infrastructure, data management, controls, security and certifications including SysTrust, Truste, VeriSign Secured, Safe Harbor, SAS70, and ISO 27001. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lot of hype about companies moving to the cloud, but are they actually doing it? Cloud adoption is not as rapid as some providers might lead you to think, but TEC data shows that interest in cloud computing is picking up.

The 2012 TEC Market Survey Report for Discrete Manufacturing shows that cloud computing has moved beyond the early adopter phase and is now moving into the early majority phase of the technology adoption lifecycle. The question now is not “if”, but when and how information technology (IT) organizations will adopt cloud computing technologies.

If you’re thinking about a cloud deployment, there are a few things you should know. There’s also an easy way your organization can test a cloud deployment before committing to a larger cloud initiative. Read the rest of this entry »

During its Openworld event, Oracle announced the release of Oracle Solaris 11.1 to deliver enhancements in features and performance.

Some of the outstanding enhancements of this new Solaris version are its capabilities for building large-scale infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) clouds for both SPARC and x86 processor-based servers, as well as extreme availability for mission critical applications. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series introduced Xactly Corporation, a provider of fully multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS)-based solutions for sales performance management (SPM). The article also provided the bullish vendor’s genesis since being founded in 2005 and its current state of affairs. This article will feature my recent conversation with Xactly’s founder and CEO Christopher Cabrera.

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This month Cloudware unveiled its brand new cloud platform for application performance management. With core enhancements in big data handling, the cloud platform is specifically aimed at organizations that are already using cloud services with Microsoft’s Azure and EC2 platforms. The heat is on, with an increasing number of products and services directing the provision of cloud offerings. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently had the opportunity, during Epicor’s global customer conference, to talk with Chad Meyer, director of product marketing, and he shared with me some of the highlights of Epicor’s vision and strategy for cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP). Read the rest of this entry »

During my several years of attending events organized by the cloud computing evangelist salesforce.com, such as Dreamforce and Cloudforce, Xactly Corporation has always had a prominent stand at the expo floor (another fixture at these events has been BigMachines, and not surprisingly the two vendors are close partners). In a nutshell, Xactly’s on-demand software lets sales professionals know, well, exactly what they are getting out of their sales wins.

The company’s flagship software, Xactly Incent, helps sales representatives and other sales professionals determine compensation for sales transactions. Additionally, sales executives can use the company’s analytics software to analyze post-sales information such as what, where, and to whom their product lines have been sold and how profitably.

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Today Jaspersoft entered into a partnership agreement with VMware to integrate Jaspersoft’s business intelligence (BI) platform into Cloud Foundry, the open platform as a service (PaaS). This will make it possible for Jaspersoft to provide analysis and reporting capabilities within a cloud-based application development framework.

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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 »