Now that I am back from my trek to Redmond, I have time to come back to earth and think about what I heard. I think that several issues surfaced in my mind. Here are the three key issues that I think are worth more time: 1. We are at a turning...

Since the web has increasingly become the platform for interacting with customers, partners and the like, the notion of managing the online experience has skyrocketed. The term user experience is confusing. I have traditionally thought about...

Every year at about this time I attend IBM Software Group IT Industry Analyst meeting. This meeting is attended by about 90 industry analysts and about three times that number of IBM software group leaders, managers and support staff. It is...

This has certainly turned into an exciting M&A season. First SAP announces that it will buy Business Objects and now IBM announces that it will buy Cognos. I am actually not surprised. While Cognos does sell traditional business intelligence...

Today I am at EMC's annual analyst meeting. Just like IBM, EMC's theme is innovation. EMC is on an interesting journey from its roots in storage managment. EMC has been on a journey for a number of years with acquisitions in information and...

I was thinking this week about Oracle. You remember them. The big database company that decided that it would be a big packaged applications company and a big middleware company. I have to give them credit for swooping in and buying their way...

I know that you expected me to write something fun and exciting about some new fangled service oriented architecture platform. I have a surprise - let's call it a Thanksgiving surprise. I want to share a story with you. A few years ago I met an...