Last week Oracle CEO Larry Ellison sent an angry email  to the New York Times attacking HP’s board for its decision to fire CEO Mark Hurd.  You can catch up on all the salacious gossip and speculation about Hurd and what he did elsewhere.  I don’t have the time to develop an informed opinion as [...]

Well thought out and researched opinions about Oracle Corporation are sadly hard to find.  Bob Evans of InformationWeek has written a very nice analysis of some the implications of the Sun acquisition that I highly recommend.   Those of you that shares my interest in trying to make sense out of Oracle and what it has [...]

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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was one of forty billionaires that have promised to give at least half of their fortunes to charity over time.  These pledges were obtained through an effort started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet who have each previously promised to give away nearly all of their fortunes during their lifetimes.  The [...]

A blog web site called Software Advice written by Stephen Jannise offers some interesting speculation about what Oracle might acquire next.  I found his analysis an interesting read.  The site offers a chance to offer your own opinion on what might get bought next. I personally took the survey and voted for Informatica as the [...]

Larry Ellison was the best paid CEO in the world over the course of the past decade according to the Wall Street Journal.  His total compensation from Oracle for the decade was estimated at $1.84 billion including the value of stock, options and everything else.  Like most Americans, I am appalled at what some CEO’s [...]

Last week Quest held its annual Northeast conference at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut with over 300 people attending.  John Schiff represented Oracle’s JDE management team at the event.  His presentation differed very little from the one given by his boss Lyke Ekdahl at Collaborate a few months ago.  It represented more of a [...]

Oracle has very successfully closed the books on fiscal year 2009 and already held its new year’s sales kickoff events including a web based event for partners.  Little in the way of news came out of it other than a relentless message to partners to become highly specialized on a subset of the 10,000 products [...]

Most Oracle JDE customers make some use of IBM servers or software so the slowly deepening rift between these two vendors has some relevance to them.  The latest episode in what is becoming something of a soap opera involves Joanne Olsen, an IBM executive who was recruited by Oracle to lead its On Demand efforts.  [...]

Oracle’s seemingly wholehearted embrace of open standards and the open source movement has always seemed a little strange.  Why would a leading developer of software for sale welcome without reservation the creation of free software by volunteers?  As I prepare my presentation on Understanding Oracle for the upcoming Quest Northeast conference I think I am [...]

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, two of the world’s wealthiest people, are attempting to convince fellow billionaires to donate more to charity.  Their “giving pledge” campaign aims to recruit others to promise to give half or more of their a

Every year software vendors introduce new releases and encourage their customers to upgrade to them.  Cynical customers often complain that vendors do so largely to justify charging high software maintenance fees.  There is certainly some validity to

Everything was on schedule for Oracle to close its acquisition of Sun Microsystems last September when the European Union decided to hold everything up in order to determine if the deal would lead to the demise of the mySQL open source DBMS.  As a result, the deal was delayed until late January of this year [...]<img

According to Reuters, Timken CEO Jim Griffith recently said at a manufacturing conference “I call this the SAP recession because companies have a much better control over their inventories and so our customers did a much better job of reducing inventories immediately when they saw the demand go.”  As much as I enjoy poking fun [...]

Did you know that 2011 just started?  Today is the first day of the new Oracle fiscal year.  If the Chinese can have their New Year start on a different schedule than most of the rest of us, why can’t Oracle?  Few of you will have the chance to wish Oracle people a happy new [...]

A new white paper on real-time data warehousing is now available on the Andrews Consulting Group website. Creating a Real Time Data Warehouse The offer made in a previous posting to provide advanced copies triggered a large number of requests so we expect that many of you will want to use the paper to better understand [...]

Last year I started doing blog postings about Oracle itself.  I used them to share observations and bits of intelligence picked up along the way about the most enigmatic of the major IT vendors.  Many of you have helped me by quietly passing along your own thoughts.  Hopefully readers have found the postings useful as [...]

Managing the evolution of a mature software product is not easy.  My previous posting lamented how Microsoft had made a mess out of Office, perhaps the most profitable franchise in software history, by overloading it with esoteric features.  Thinking about the Office tragedy has led me to ruminate on how the same dynamics could damage [...]

The latest version of Microsoft Office has officially been released with great fanfare.  Given the amount of time almost everyone in the business world spends working with Office applications this is an important event.  Microsoft claims that it will save those that adopt it two weeks of effort each year versus the time they are [...]

Is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison really IronMan?  Ellison, already established as one of the most flamboyant billionaires of our age, has now chosen to closely associate himself and Oracle with a comic book hero whose fictional life parallels his own.  Last weekend I was gloriously wallowing in the comic book silliness of the new IronMan [...]

On of the least understood technical topics of interest to the JDE community is the need for real-time data warehousing and what is involved in implementing it.  A new white paper on this topic will be available soon on the Andrews Consulting Group website.  Advanced copies of it were provided to visitors to the RapidDecision [...]

Oracle President Charles Phillips opening keynote at Collaborate failed miserably to connect with the audience.  Having him appear via video to make a presentation that did not seem well rehearsed turned off most of the attendees that I spoke to.  Style aside, the message he tried to communicate was profoundly important to all of us.  [...]

You never want to get between a grizzly bear and her cubs or between Larry Ellison and his $3+ billion per year maintenance revenue stream.  Rimini Street has achieved enough success providing an alternative to Oracle for software support to trigger a mighty roar and paw swipe in the form of an Oracle lawsuit. The [...]

As usual, Collaborate included roadmap sessions for EnterpriseOne (E1) and World.  I sat in on the E1 session and had an associate cover the World one.  The differences were fairly minor as will be obvious from the notes below so this posting will largely focus on E1.  It was no surprise that not much has [...]

Collaborate 2010 feels like a return to normalcy.  Attendance is back close to where it was a few years ago and the mood of participants seems upbeat.  So far there has not been much hard news to report.  Oracle chose not to use Collaborate to introduce any major products, upgrades or changes in direction.  Big [...]

Collaborate is finally here!  In line with my speculation in earlier postings the opening keynote by Oracle President Charles Phillips was all about why Oracle bought Sun.  The content was interesting, but the delivery was somewhat disappointing.  Phillips appeared by remote video, a format that did not work well for him.  He is a dynamic [...]

Only one more shopping day until Collaborate starts and I can’t wait for the big event of the year for our community to begin.  The Monday keynote by Oracle President Charles Phillips and by the top technical executive Tom Kurian has the potential to be one of the more significant Oracle presentations in years.  This [...]

 The opening session at OpenWorld last September featured James Gosling, the inventor of Java, as a way of emphasizing how important Java was as a part of the Sun Microsystems acquisition.  In a tersely worded statement on his blog site Gosling announced his departure from Oracle last week – something that can only be seen [...]

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