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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SOFTWARE SELECTIONS

Oklahoma’s Department of Human Services selects WebFOCUS
Industry tags: cross-industry
“To solve its reporting requirements, Oklahoma DHS has selected Information Builders’ WebFOCUS business intelligence platform. With massive reporting requirements, the state government institution will rely on (among other things) a reporting application for child support services and a compliance reporting system for its child welfare department. The reporting solution will be used by an estimated 6,000 users or more, and it’s a clear case of BI being put to good use.”—Jorge García, TEC BI Analyst

Peugeot Netherlands selects QlikView’s Business Discovery Platform
Industry tags: cross-industry
“By using QlikView’s proof-of-concept method (i.e., “seeing is believing,”), QlikView partner OnLine Zuid was able to enable Peugeot Netherlands to view, experiment with, and ultimately select QlikView Business Discovery Platform for data analysis related to Peugeot’s vehicles and parts. QlikView continues to increase its global presence within large corporations.”—Jorge García, TEC BI Analyst

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Yesterday in San Francisco, SAP held a press conference to make two (perhaps three) major announcements about its strategy for the data management and mobility spaces. These announcements unveiled big-time movement in two major IT areas: data management and mobility.
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Part 1 of this blog series outlined Oracle’s recent (and seemingly genuine) change of heart and approach towards partnering and catering enterprise applications to small and medium enterprises (SME’s). The analysis then moved onto the Oracle Accelerate program, which was launched about three years ago to allow partners to sell more smaller projects in a fixed time and price manner.

Oracle Accelerate is not only a partner program but also Oracle’s go-to-market approach to provide business software solutions to midsize organizations. Part 1 described the main constituent parts of the approach, while Part 2 talked about the program’s current state of affairs. Part 3 of this blog series will analyze the program’s latest partner-enablement developments as well as the inevitable room for improvements.

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Part 1 of this blog series depicted the differences and some subtle similarities between the well-established enterprise applications giant SAP and up-and-coming vendor Endeca Technologies. The post ended with the new fundamentals for the future of enterprise applications that were outlined at the Endeca Discover 2009 conference.

Part 2 of this blog series explored how SAP is adapting to the new fundamentals outlined in Part 1, especially with respect to the notion of BT or “business technology,” which denotes a pervasive technology in use by casual users and end users alike, increasingly managed outside the direct control of IT departments. I also explained the architecture of the recently unveiled SAP BusinessObjects Explorer product.

Part 3 continues with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer’s traits and areas for improvement, especially in terms of the user experience.  Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series depicted the differences and some subtle similarities between the well-established enterprise applications giant, SAP, and up-and-coming vendor Endeca Technologies. The article ended with the new fundamentals for the future of enterprise applications that were outlined at the Endeca Discover 2009 conference.

Part 2 of this blog series explores how SAP is adapting to the new fundamentals outlined in Part 1, especially to the notion of “BT” or “business technology,” which denotes a pervasive technology in use by casual and end-users, increasingly managed outside the direct control of IT departments. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 2 of this blog topic continued to analyze IBM’s rationale behind acquiring ILOG to bolster its service oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) platforms, in part due to the capabilities of archrival Oracle.

What About ILOG’s SCM Products?

Whether as a sort of “collateral damage” (given IBM’s foremost interest in beefing up its SOA/BPM infrastructure product) or maybe not, the acquisition also leaves IBM with the supply chain management (SCM) applications business that ILOG has recently been developing in pursuit of a more profitable custom solution strategy. This strategy was going to complement ILOG’s tried-and-true “technology & platform” strategy of providing business rules management system (BRMS), optimization engines, and visualization tools. Read the rest of this entry »