HP could use a better services arm - while it has some marquee clients like P&G, it is inconsistent in most outsourcing deals. EDS could use a layer of cover. The company which just about defined outsourcing has been running...

This continues a series of guest columns from practitioners and bloggers I respect. The category - The Real Deal describes them well. James Taylor is co-founder of Smart(enough)Systems and co-author of a book with the same name. "While almost anyone...

Hush - don't tell my boss, but it is 10.30 Monday morning and I am on my exercise bike watching TV - Gerri Willis of CNN talks about telecommuting. I remember Verizon pitching telecommuting to clients as a buffer against...

I learned about the major earthquake in Western China from Scoble who posted about it ahead of most news media. New Scientist recently had an article that I wrote about on the New Florence blog titled Emergency 2.0 - about...

My mind was still buzzing with the Tom Brokaw generational speech I wrote about here, when I saw Karen Beaman's post about multi-generational talentforce. While you can argue about her generational classifications, it occurred to me an archaeologist would be...

Caught in a world where Motorola got caught flat footed, and facing global competition from the likes of Apple, Nokia, Samsung and HTC RIM is coming out blazing to protect its corporate turf. It recently announced an initiative with SAP,...

Dennis being kind discussing Oracle and its plans for "Enterprise 2.0" Honestly, there is so little Oracle has had to show around Fusion or next-gen apps for the last few years that even this pre-announcement deserves a mention. Of course,...

While several bloggers reported good progress from Sapphire last week in a number of SAP horizontals - Jason Busch on SRM, Jason Corsello on HR, Brian Sommer on Business Objects and other analytics, and Paul Greenberg on CRM, I was...

What I wanted to get for Mother's Day :) My kid's overruled me. My son said - she's our mother! Estee Lauder, Lindt and Barnes and Noble won out. My AT&T rebate paid for it. Yup, finally arrived. For those...

Living in Florida, I am keenly interested in hurricanes. I have written before about technology which is going into tracking those monsters. So I was curious how much advance notice the Myanmar government had before the catastrophic Nargis hit. This...

Ok, enough self-pity about the sinking US dollar. This gallery at Portfolio.com shows we still have plenty to be grateful for

3 decades after Gartner was started, Carter Lusher (formerly of Gartner) asks the question and many in the industry jump in with their opinions. No question the role/definition of an analyst is changing. Compared to their hey days in the...

Popular Science catalogs how hackers are starting to soup up the Asus EEE PC with more memory, more USB slots - and installing Mac OS. Of course, see the bottom. "Installing an Apple operating system on non-Apple hardware is a...

Of course evolve to JP2 - er, Jesus Phone 2, oops, next version of iPhone - with features this Popular Science gallery asks for. Wait - my AT&T Tilt already says yes to all 10 items in the gallery. And...

So we got the mandatory "No comment" as we asked Dr. Henning Kagermann of SAP about the TomorrowNow matter. I followed with what he thought about Rimini offering maintenance to his customers. He nodded his head - not sure he...

Whatever you think of Tom Friedman or the New York Times, read this.

I deal with a number of multi-national clients where the HQ is somewhere a few thousand miles away and it is always interesting to hear perspectives from the "other side". Every Sapphire, you get to hear that from the 747...

On the New Florence blog Blockbuster's makeover Refinery City Maker Faire HP's Memristor breakthrough Babbage comes to the US Innovation in the Heartland

Had I not shared a ride with Denis Browne, head of SAP's Imagineering Lab and heard what his group is doing, I could have sworn innovation was a banned term at Sapphire. When I asked co-CEO Leo Apotheker what he...

Oracle, in conjunction with the other large software vendors — IBM, Microsoft and SAP among them — is plotting to launch a salesforce.com and Google competitor...so reports Om Malik. NOT!..but he does report a rumor that AT&T - along with...

So, at Sapphire SAP presented reasons for delay around its BBD SaaS offering. Most explanations centered around SAP "learning and optimizing what our customers have been doing" with hosting, applying SAP fixes, Basis support, upgrades, user support - various aspects...

The Sprint-Clearwire off again/on again WiMax offering is back on again. And that is welcome news for consumers as Verizon and AT&T dominate US telecoms. The fact that Comcast and Time Warner are also investors will mean more "bundles"via cable...

Fellow EIs Phil Wainewright, Jason Corsello and Bob Warfield anoint the leaders of SaaS: Concur, Omniture, salesforce.com and Taleo. All I have to provide is the acronym COST . All the current market leaders - MISO orMicrosoft, IBM, SAP and...

Stanley Bing at Fortune reveals that in the middle of the recession why there are plenty of entry level jobs right here at home. Fortune also has a Faces of the Future gallery profiling the next generation of employees -...

I did not spend long at Sapphire - but in a 24 hour period I felt like I had borrowed a time machine which allowed me to span a century. Tom Brokaw, the former NBC anchor, a featured speaker brought...

So, I wrote the outline for a movie script around the recent FCC wireless spectrum auction. Now Google is helping develop the script for a follow up. It is asking the FCC to ensure Verizon will indeed honor the open-access...

On my innovation blog 50 years of NASA Beijing's Giant New Terminal 3 Yahoo rolls out mobile voice search Virtualization of Mobile Devices Camcorders - Basic and Crossovers Wanted: Bicycle mechanics

To sell in the SME market you have to think channels... Computer Reseller News (CRN) catalogs its annual survey of channel perception of tech vendors in 26 categories from business applications to various peripherals. See the gallery here Next, Business...

Several of the Enterprise Irregulars are spending time with SAP executives at Sapphire. The issue of delays around Business ByDesign (BBD) came up in separate meetings this morning with co-CEOs Dr. Henning Kagermann and Leo Apotheker. They clarified several items....

So I am reading in Fortune that Ford is betting on another "world, small car". Do you get a sense of deja vu? I thought they already had Focus, Fiesta etc around the world. But their DNA is about big...

SAP is battling Oracle in court over its TomorrowNow subsidiary. But as it kicks off Sapphire in Orlando this morning, it is also facing its own version of "TomorrowNow". Rimini Street, which has offered such services around several Oracle applications,...

I have a love-hate relationship with AT&T. So do most of my corporate clients. But it is good to see Fortune profile AT&T's (relatively) new CEO Randall Stephenson as he and his team reshape the behemoth. Days like Friday where...

on the innovation blog Enterprise RSS Day of Action Cosmic Collision IT-Olympics $100 Genome See-saw to power African schools The Ultimate Fashion Contest

Two readers sent me stuff about unintended consequences: a) How "green" campaigners have actually led us to a different set of issues - "ecophobia" b) on a lighter note, the consequences of honking at a senior citizen

So the Microsoft/Yahoo! deal appears finally off. Kudos to Yahoo! for not just caving in - even though it will get crucified in the media and on Wall Street. I realize I am one of the few in the tech...

..."making the TIME 100—after all, some 6.7 billion people were left off..." says Richard Corliss, the renowned movie critic, in his write up of the Coen (No Country for Old Men) brothers for the Time special issue on influential people....

SAP and RIM announce CRM on the Blackberry. Salespeople are inherently mobile so it is good to see this from SAP. salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and others have offered the feature for a while. But will going native on the...

New York says even a single in-state web site (of even an affiliate) qualifies for all sales in the state to be taxed. The US Customs considers your laptop no different from your other luggage. Make sure you have no...

Compliments of the Software 2008 and InterOp show organizers I stayed at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Vegas. While I do not know what they paid for the room, I imagine it was reasonably steep. What was scary was just...

So I wrote about IBM's service "innovation". Now Dell announces a new support plan, which the WSJ reads to mean - pay more and get to speak to an American. Now, I am all for giving people choice and if...