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On Tuesday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison let shareholders in on a few insights. First, he thinks the deal will ultimately get the go-ahead, in part because a combined Oracle and Sun would be strong competitor to IBM. Secondly, he has no intention of spinning off MySQL, even though doing so might help soothe the EC, which has been holding up the deal while Sun bleeds losses of $100 million a month. Hanging onto MySQL does seem to match Ellison's stated goal of going head-to-head with IBM. David Boulanger of Frost and Sullivan told us, "Oracle is going to need every bit of the technology it acquires for its long-range plans."

Furthermore, MySQL is likely to play an important role in Oracle's future. "He is going to need MySQL for when Sun is part of the Oracle family," said David Boulanger, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan's industrial automation and process controls practice. Ultimately, the Sun ...

A mature market that has served as the backbone for enterprise computing for many decades, the ERP industry is not characterized by rapid change. So, when a "game changer" appears -- that's how Frost & Sullivan analyst David Boulanger characterized SAP's ongoing Business ByDesign rollout -- it pays to sit up and take notice.

At its annual Dreamforce event, Salesforce.com and several of its partners (Facebook, Google and Amazon) made announcements intended to encourage more businesses to pursue Web-as-a-platform using their Force.com business process platform. Taking away significant amounts of hype, there were three themes for the conference: Cloud computing that takes SaaS (Sofware as a Service)-based application delivery to the business process platform level; customer success announcements and ecosystem partnerships designed to provide industry; and business-process applications as part of the Force.com platform strategy...

CEOs across companies and industries have become focused in 2008 on the critical role that customer experience plays in keeping their companies competitive and driving profitability. These same CEOs are challenging their CMOs to move beyond CRM (a transactional, inside-out approach) to Customer Experience Management (CEM), which takes an outside-in approach to the customer experience by providing the right touch to the right customer at the right time, every time...

Contact center managers for years have been using tried-and-true efficiency-oriented key performance indicators to measure contact center success, such as average call handling time and cost-per-call. ...