David Dobrin

Oracle's Big Plan: Double Revenue in Five Years

Even if the apps and middleware businesses grow at three times the rate of economic growth--unlikely, for middle-aged apps--this means Oracle will have to add 10% per year through acquisitions--call it $12 billion in 5 years.

This seems vaguely possible, if optimistic, but there is one nagging question. Won't Oracle run out of things to buy? This already happened to them in the applications space and in the middleware space. How much more hardware is there?

NetSuite Targets SAP's Home Market - Barron's

NetSuite targeting the middle market? Not. They stick pretty much below $100 million.

See my blog at blog.b2banalysts.com

Why Intuit Could Become A Major Cloud Player

If Intuit does become a major cloud player, I pity their customers. See my recent blog post on what happened at the developer forum mentioned above and the reasons why Intuit needs to change before its new cloud offerings can be plausible. blog.b2banalysts.com

Microsoft Rubs Salt: Asks for Some Severance Back

For the record, Microsoft uses SAP for its financial software. Without knowing exactly how their implementation works, it is difficult to know, but It is quite (extremely?) unlikely, of course, that the software itself is to blame, though quite likely that the SAP implementation doesn't directly support the severance caculation that was actually used. If so, as is so often the case, offline calculations (in Excel, probably) had to be done and the results fed back in to SAP by hand, a process that is sure to be error-prone.

Choosing to ask for the money back is, of course, Microsoft's decision; it has nothing to do with the software that is used.