I attended a press conference earlier this month in New York, where Big Blue talked up its latest prize -- Cognos Inc., which it acquired last month for $5 billion -- marking the company's largest acquisition ever. Executives at IBM explained why the company
abandoned its longstanding stance on partnering with various BI players
.
While pledging to be open, Steve Mills, senior vice president and general manager of IBM's software group, said performance management must be an embedded component of its Information On Demand strategy. "It was time to bring these things together and make them one contiguous set of capabilities," Mills said.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/20/20080 comments
Microsoft’s
$44.6 billion bid
for Yahoo last week certainly opened up a new saga in Redmond and Silicon Valley. Only time will tell whether Microsoft actually bags Yahoo. If it does, Microsoft certainly has created plenty of food for thought for database administrators and developers, who will certainly want to see how Redmond handles Yahoo's data management infrastructure.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/06/20080 comments
As you no doubt have read, Microsoft made official what some had quietly anticipated
all along: that SQL Server 2008, code-named Katmai,
might
not make
the company's target release to manufacturing (RTM) date of the
second quarter.
The writing has been on the wall for a while. The company's goal of releasing
community technology previews in 60-day batches fell by the wayside in the fall,
and conversations with Microsoft always seemed to leave the door open for it
to slip. Indeed, most in the SQL Server community appear to be willing to cut
Microsoft some slack if it's one quarter late.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/30/20080 comments
It's rather ironic, but
Sun's surprise move last week
to acquire database supplier MySQL for $1 billion could actually give the open source DBMS a boost in the market, while at the same time bolstering SQL Server.
Following the announcement, I had a chance to talk with Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg, who had some poignant thoughts on the deal. The way he sees it, the deal probably hurts Oracle the most, since Sun has focused much of its database efforts on Oracle and it is the Oracle customer base most likely -- for pricing reasons -- to be looking to other database platforms.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/23/20087 comments
Want to take SQL Server 2008 for a test drive but perhaps you don't have the computing resources to run it? The Professional Association For SQL Server, the umbrella user group for Microsoft's flagship database, has opened up a hosted site for just that purpose. PASS has enlisted Louisville, Ky.-based MaximumASP and Dell to provide the resources to host the Community Technology Preview. Originally offered to Microsoft MVPs in November when CTP5 was released, PASS opened it up free of charge to any potential customer who wants to test SQL Server 2008.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/15/20080 comments
Ryan Donovan, who had been the public face of Microsoft's Commerce server efforts, now works for Cactus Commerce.
A few months ago, Ottawa-based Cactus Commerce took on further development of Commerce Server, irking the Commerce Server ISVs and VARs who did not happen to be Cactus Commerce.
When the turnover was disclosed in August, a Microsoft official -- yes, that would have been Ryan Donovan -- maintained that Commerce Server remained a strategic product to Microsoft. The story then was that since Commerce Server implementations take a tremendous amount of customization work, that Microsoft needed expertise to streamline delivery of such custom work.
That news capped months of speculation about Commerce Server’s roadmap and months of Microsoft silence on that topic.
Donovan did not return a call to his Cactus Commerce number requesting comment. He no longer has an extension listed at Microsoft.
Barbara Darrow, industry editor of Redmond Magazine, Redmond Developer News and Redmond Channel Partner, can be reached at
[email protected]
Posted by Barbara Darrow on 12/04/20071 comments
Here's an example of why Microsoft's so smart.
Most people realize the company's whole mobile effort -- Windows CE, Windows Mobile, etc. -- hasn't exactly hit the cover off the ball. And they've been at it for quite a while.
So what do they do? Some emissary -- in this case word is it was Steve Ballmer himself -- goes to his old buddy/nemesis (frenemy?) Mort Rosenthal, formerly of Corporate Software, once Microsoft's largest large account resellers who has since reverted to entrepreneurdom.
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Posted by Barbara Darrow on 11/30/20070 comments
Here's some stuff flying around the "Internets" that may be of interest to developers.
First, the chatty Marc Fleury, ex of JBoss, flames some of the Apache faithful.
First of all, you gotta love anyone who leads with that terrific Kissinger quote. And also anyone who brings up aging Star Trek conventioneers.
Also, Microsoft is renaming Silverlight 1.1 (drum roll please) Silverlight 2.0 as noted in Scott Guthrie's blog.
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Posted by Barbara Darrow on 11/29/20070 comments
Talk about jaded.
After years covering channel partners and their vendor relationships, my first reaction to news that Microsoft is giving MCPs the same access to its Knowledge Base as partners, was: "MY GOD, what will the partners say?"
Second thought: Probably not much. Especially since most partners employ MCPs, sometimes in large numbers as part their partner program requirements.
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Posted by Barbara Darrow on 11/27/20072 comments
This week’s bombshell that
SAP will acquire Business Objects
for $6.7 billion is perhaps the largest milestone yet in the business intelligence, analytics, reporting and corporate performance management market. Despite the hugeness of this deal -- presuming it goes through -- it should not be disruptive to Windows and .NET developers, since both vendors’ offerings already have strong integration with Microsoft’s programming environment and tools including Visual Studio, as well as platforms such as Sharepoint and SQL Server.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/11/20073 comments
The long wait is about to come to an end. The Intellisense with the Transact-SQL
language service in SQL Server will indeed be available in the next Community
Test Preview (CTP) of 'Katmai,' the code-name for Microsoft’s SQL
Server 2008. That indeed was one of the most widely sought after features
among SQL Server developers after it was removed from a beta of SQL Server
2005 several years ago and hasn’t been seen since.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/26/20070 comments