Software strategies and more…

Not that much of a surprise to those watching SAP‘s moves over the past 5 months. The changing of the guard combined with a big promotions and promises of in-memory based ERP and BI tools meant SAP needed to bolster its assets and the acquisition of Sybase just made sense. In addition, the need for SAP to start building a bit of an empire like nemesis Oracle has done meant that SAP needed to step outside its more traditional lines of business and incorporate adjacent solutions and technologies needed by its customer base.

Make no mistake about this deal though, SAP needed to back its in-memory promises with some substantial clout. Sybase has invested heavily in the development and testing of in-memory databases with its Adaptive Server Enterprise and SQL Anywhere technologies.  With SQL Anywhere this should boost SAP’s ability to deliver functionality its customer needs for transaction, inventory and financial applications across the business more effectively and across more devices and platforms. ASE gives a big boost to SAP Business Suite users and the power they are looking to handle incrementally more and complicated transactions across large office locations. By moving to in-memory and optimizing its ERP applications and BI tools for them SAP is hoping to lure more customers who may be looking to rid themselves of expensive database license and maintenance costs. And by doing so these customers may get significant boost in performance, scalability and reporting flexibility.

As far as the impact on cloud and SaaS business, in-memory tools may have a growing impact on virtualized servers, application and hosted data centers are looking to bring more services into an as a Service model. Also the partnership of SAP and long-time customer Research in Motion (RIM) may get a big boost as SAP (with SQL anywhere) offers a significant boost to business users using RIM’s popular Blackberry mobile devices to augment and deliver business insight.

My point of view: This was as much an needed move by SAP to both aid in business growth as well as deliver the road map its been preaching to its customers for nearly the past year. Its no accident this happens right before SAPphire in Orlando and we can expect even more in-memory news in the coming weeks. I also expect SAP to continue acquiring firms that it can add to its ecosystem, most likely a server virtualization player – and to do so in the next 12 months.

I am not sure.

After hobbling thru the choppy live webcast yesterday and trying to piece together all the PR fluff, blogger commentary and random 140 character posts on Twitter I am still not sure how VMforce will be a monetize-able joint venture between VMware and SFDC.

On the surface it seems to be a great new sandbox for developers to play in to develop future cloud and on-premise applications for their organization and/or for the market at large. Folks that already utilize SFDC’s appexchange and chatterexchange to develop add-ons for SFDC user communities now have access to an even more robust and dynamics infrastructure – but what is VMware’s cut in this?

My gut says VMware is trying to position themselves as a leader in cloud based infrastructure as a service. Potentially even helping companies not only shed business software, but also the hardware needed to support these and other client/server apps. It a bold gambit that vaults them into competing on higher footing with the likes of Amazon’s AWS and both Cisco’s Smart Grid and HP’s Cloud Assure IaaS plans.

Of course the interesting play here is how both of these companies through VMForce are looking to attract the Java developer communities and enable them to create connection across both application and infrastructure software realms. This should further bolster interest in FinancialForce.com, making it easier to build out its core accounting and financial solutions to include industry and role-based users and business processes. Finally this also may allow for BI as a Service to also take off by utilizing virtual machines to power processor hungry analytics, reporting and planning tools.

Personally, I think this makes them a very interesting M&A target for SAP or a merger with SFDC themselves – both to compete more effectively with Oracle. Time will tell as more information and customer adoption of VMforce.com comes to light.

I am a huge fan of BI as a Service.

I first started thinking about BI-a-a-S when I attended a FAST Search and Transfer analyst conference back in 2005 when they were talking about BI applets rather than search applets. Their vision at the time was that BI needed to be web enabled and customizable by the user of the data and the job at hand. In January 2008, FAST was gobbled up by Microsoft (a BIG SAP miss in my humble opinion) and its enterprise search thought leadership seemed to dissipate.

But the need for web-based enterprise business intelligence has continued to gain momentum. Both the need and opportunity for this technology has recently come back into the limelight with the Economist article Data, data everywhere and has been furthered in blogs like Retention and Compliance: The other side of the big data problem by Ramon Chen. Its my opinion if you combine these with social business trends as cited by Michael Fauscette in his recent blog post Applying social to business , web-based BI is well placed to automate and make search intelligent to hone business and customer experiences - all the while taking advantage of the dynamic storage and processing power coming on-line from a wide variety of infrastructure as a service offerings.

I expect savvy organizations will pay close attention to BI-a-a-S and how it allows them to make sense of their markets, customers and processes. I also foresee BI co-existing as both on-premise solutions and web-based depending on need and scale requirements, thus being more of a software+services solution rather than an either or solution.

Note: Microsoft promises we’ll see much more of FAST technology in the new version of SharePoint which is sorely needed given the poor search in previous versions.