Many clients are either buying more Oracle licenses, or renewing their Oracle maintenance service and support agreements this month (May - Oracle’s Fiscal Year-end), and continue to be dismayed at how difficult it is to cost optimize their Oracle estate. Because it is such a dark science that contains highly confidential information, the secrets of cost optimization are highly protected. Most clients either believe they are getting a pretty good deal or they’re not, but they have no real way to benchmark their agreement to the market. For most Oracle customers, the best options are to evaluate general market averages which doesn’t really ...
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Information technology has always been in one state of disruption or another almost by definition as the science of technology evolves and market forces change, and IT Infrastructure is no exception -- particularly in the manner in which we host and manage our data center centric resources. There is dynamic change all around us as the cloud transforms the ideas of traditional ‘on premise’ big iron investments. Whether on premise or in the cloud, our clients are experiencing a tectonic shift to faster, lighter and easier to manage platforms that deliver a higher level of performance, a simplified operational interface, a much less costly ...
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Timing as they say, is everything. Nowhere is this more evident than in the strategic technology supplier arena. When most of your budget is consumed by less than 10 suppliers, knowing everything there is to know about them is critical. Most of our client’s don’t have time to be experts on every one of them, but that’s ok…that’s why we’re here and it’s what we do. We’ve outlined in a short summary below, what your organization needs to be looking out for right now. With many of these strategic suppliers, the window of time is small but the opportunities are great, to drive value and cost savings for 2016 and beyond. Oracle May is the Fiscal ...
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Salesforce.com recently announced a major change in its Sales Cloud subscription programs that requires customers to act before Salesforce Q2 starts (which was May 1st) to lock in with old pricing model or automatically move to their new plan, and there are some potentially major implications for our clients. It’s imperative that you know how these changes impact your budget in the near future, and more importantly – what you can do about it. The most interesting part of this announcement and change seems to be the creative use of the word ‘Lightening’, which appears to be not much more than a significant increase in price, coupled with some ...
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“The relative weakness in the legacy on-premise (Oracle) software business, which includes sales of new licenses and support revenue, is expected to continue.” - Forbes, December 15, 2015 The money tree is shaking. There was a time when audits were merely punitive in nature, a tool to be wielded to bring a customer who may or may not be in compliance with hundreds of terms, conditions, and clauses they’ve signed up for over the course of years in some cases to heel. But that was then, and this is now. Audits are now the norm – routine – as traditional on premise software providers like Oracle attempt to bridge the revenue gap as they attempt ...
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Microsoft’s Enterprise customers should already realize that “Team Redmond” is in a desperate rear-guard battle to defend its incumbent monopoly positions in infrastructure software, against the increasingly successful insurgent attacks from Amazon, Google, and an ever-growing list of startups and disruptors. The ‘softies’, with great fanfare, are using every trick in their huge, complex, ever changing book of tyrannical licensing rules, to push their customers away from traditional licenses for on premise software, towards cloud subscriptions. Why would one of the richest companies of all time intentionally cannibalize its incredibly ...
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About 3 years ago, Ms. Virginia (Ginni) Rometty took over as the new CEO for IBM, and it has been anything but smooth sailing for her, the Company, IBM's customers, the technology market, and perhaps most importantly, the IBM shareholders. Since March 14, 2013 IBM has suffered through 11 consecutive quarters of poor performance. At the start of that time, IBM’s stock price was $215.80 per share. IBM stock has now fallen to $122.59 per share as of 22 January, a 43% reduction in value. Back in 2012, when Ginni Rometty first took over, I was one of the first (if not the only) to predict that Ginni Rometty would fail as the new CEO of IBM, and ...
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Salesforce.com is massively expensive at scale. In fact, our compre hensive study of over 20 leading customer relationship management (CRM) software providers again reveals that Salesforce.com has the highest total cost of ownership (TCO) in the market, meaning that Salesforce.com is quite simply the most expensive way you can furnish your organization with CRM software. A super majority of clients are economically sub-optimized in their Salesforce.com investments. At NET(net), we have seen very serious problems with the commercial arrangements (among other areas). In fact, due to our extensive work in this area, we have developed the ...
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The State of the Enterprise CRM Market Salesforce.com continues to be the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software market leader with around a 20% share by the end of 2015. SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft have all stabilized over the last several years, but SAP and Oracle are showing signs of a steady decline at the expense of the other CRM providers. Of the “Big Four” CRM suppliers, Salesforce.com remains the clear front runner in 2016, and due to the relatively unimpressive results from the other challengers, we believe Salesforce.com will remain at the top this year as well. To make matters worse for SAP and Oracle, the industry trend ...
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Top 10 Reasons Why the Dell EMC Merger is DOA The $67 billion Dell purchase of EMC is the largest technology deal in history -- dwarfing other major deals, but unfortunately, we think it’s too late for these two former tech titans. The writing is on the wall as they say – or in modern terms, the writing is in the cloud. After analyzing the possible scenarios of what this deal means to our clients, we can find nothing that addresses the fundamental and underlying problem both these firms face, in what is an almost certain long term decline brought on in large part from the insurgency of cloud companies. NET(net) believes this Dell EMC Merger ...
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