Enterprise Software Musings by Holger Mueller

Earlier this week, we learned that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, an already existing partner and a leading development platform for mobile applications.

So let’s take the press release apart in our customary style – actually not a press release – but Scott Guthrie’s blog post (it can be found here):

As the role of mobile devices in people's lives expands even further, mobile app developers have become a driving force for software innovation. At Microsoft, we are working to enable even greater developer innovation by providing the best experiences to all developers, on any device, with powerful tools, an open platform and a global cloud.

MyPOV – Ok, nice start by Scott. What he doesn’t mention is: mobile development gets easier and easier; it’s no longer exclusively in the hands of developers but increasingly more in the hands of (less and less) tech-savvy business users.

As part of this commitment, I am pleased to announce today that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development.

MyPOV – rabbit out of the hat.

In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices, including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin’s approach allows developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform. This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps, while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms. Xamarin’s unique solution has fueled amazing growth for more than four years.

MyPOV – Good summary of why Xamarin has been successful in the marketplace – not only partnering with Microsoft but practically all the major players in the tech-stack business. But Xamarin has always been closer to Microsoft (than say, for example, an Oracle) with its support of C# and .NET. It’s one of the ironies of mobile app development that the tooling is not in sync with the market shares of mobile devices, a higher ground that Microsoft does not want (and cannot afford) to lose.

Xamarin has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries, including more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies - and more than 1.3 million unique developers have taken advantage of their offering. Top enterprises such as Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell and JetBlue use Xamarin, as do gaming companies like SuperGiant Games and Gummy Drop. Through Xamarin Test Cloud, all types of mobile developers—C#, Objective-C, Java and hybrid app builders —can also test and improve the quality of apps using thousands of cloud-hosted phones and devices. Xamarin was recently named one of the top startups that help run the Internet.

MyPOV – Indeed impressive accolades. It’s back to Microsoft to reassure customers that they will keep the partnerships with Microsoft co-opetitors, such as IBM, Oracle and SAP.

Microsoft has had a longstanding partnership with Xamarin, and have jointly built Xamarin integration into Visual Studio, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and our Enterprise Mobility Suite to provide developers with an end-to-end workflow for native, secure apps across platforms. We have also worked closely together to offer the training, tools, services and workflows developers need to succeed.

MyPOV – Both vendors have partnered and demoed at Microsoft’s developer event, Build. One could ask why Microsoft only now is acquiring Xamarin.

With today’s acquisition announcement we will be taking this work much further to make our world class developer tools and services even better with deeper integration and enable seamless mobile app dev experiences. The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure delivers a complete mobile app dev solution that provides everything a developer needs to develop, test, deliver and instrument mobile apps for every device. We are really excited to see what you build with it.

MyPOV – Surprised Scott did not put a reference into the Microsoft Universal app; however, that may not be what the more mobile audience may want to read here. Still in my view, the Universal app approach is one of the most attractive offerings in the development arsenal of Microsoft.

We are looking forward to providing more information about our plans in the near future – starting at the Microsoft //Build conference coming up in a few weeks, followed by Xamarin Evolve in late April. Be sure to watch my Build keynote and get a front row seat at Evolve to learn more!

MyPOV – Nice plug to the events.

Overall MyPOV

There is so much software that needs to be built in the next decade, along with protecting investments and making developers more productive is key. Microsoft has done a big step for the former - allowing all .NET apps to run on Azure - but it also knows it needs to work on developer productivity. The “build once, deploy everywhere” mantra is obviously powerful, and Microsoft has been an early leader in the category with the Windows Universal app. With Xamarin, Microsoft snapped up one of the leading mobile application development platforms. It will interesting to see how Microsoft will plug Xamarin into the existing tooling for mobile developers.

On the concern side, one can only hope that customers with other Xamarin partners will keep being supported, ideally as long as foreseeable and commercially viable. And Microsoft needs to also show its plans to not only enable developers but also (reasonably tech-savvy) business users to create cross-platform mobile applications.

But for now good news; congrats to Microsoft on a strategic acquisition in a key area for enterprises - mobile application development.

More about Microsoft:

News Analysis - Microsoft announcements at Convergence Barcelona - Office365. Dynamics CRM and Power Apps
News Analysis - Microsoft expands Azure Data Lake to unleash big data productivity - Good move - time to catch up - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft and Salesforce Strengthen Strategic Partnership at Dreamforce 2015 - Good for joint customers - read here
News Analyis - NetSuite announced Cloud Alliance with Microsoft - read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build - Microsoft really wants to make developers' lives easier - read here
First Hand with Microsoft Hololens - read here
Event Report - Microsoft TechEd - Top 3 Enterprise takeaways - read here
First Take - Microsoft discovers data ambience and delivers an organic approach to in memory database - read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build - Azure grows and blossoms - enough for enterprises (yet)? Read here.
Event Report - Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote - Top Enterprise Takeaways - read here.
Microsoft gets even more serious about devices - acquire Nokia - read here.
Microsoft does not need one new CEO - but six - read here.
Microsoft makes the cloud a platform play - Or: Azure and her 7 friends - read here.
How the Cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
How hard is multi-channel CRM in 2013? - Read here.
How hard is it to install Office 365? Or: The harsh reality of customer support - read here.

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.

This morning Oracle announced a new storage offering that extends strategic options for enterprises on how, where and when to store data, all at an attractive TCO position. But it’s for data on… mainframes. Why would Oracle go after this market, at default unlikely and unusual for the vendor, so worth a blog post.

So let’s take apart the press release in our customary style, it can be found here:

Redwood Shores, Calif.– March 1, 2016 – Oracle announces the all new StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) 7 System, the most secure and scalable data protection solution for mainframe and heterogeneous systems with the additional capability to provide fully automated tiering directly to the public cloud. Furthermore, Oracle’s StorageTek VSM 7 System has been architected to seamlessly integrate with Oracle Storage Cloud Service – Object Storage and Oracle Storage Cloud Service – Archive Service and provides storage administrators with a built-in cloud strategy. With Oracle, cloud storage is now as accessible as on-premise storage.

MyPOV – Summarizes well what VSM is about –give (IBM) mainframe customers an option to expand storage both on premises and to the cloud. With the integration to Oracle Cloud Service - Archive Service, VSM offers the option to bring this data to the cloud, if desired or required. Giving enterprises the option between on premises / cloud storage is a key capability to allow flexible deployment scenarios of storage, while enterprises are formulating their long term systems and application strategy.

“In the past, data protection solutions were designed to deal with exponential data growth on-premises, but an entirely different dynamic drove the design of the VSM 7,” said James Cates, senior vice president, Archive Product Development, Oracle. “The core is still there—elevated performance, twice the capacity, a higher degree of scalability, but we saw a gap in the market, so we developed Engineered Cloud Tiering to enable mainframe users to take advantage of cloud economics.”

MyPOV – Good quote by Cates, summing up both the traditional (on premises) and new (cloud) capabilities of VSM version 7.

Organizations can experience these benefits:

Performance & Scalability: Oracle’s StorageTek VSM 7 System is a superior data protection solution for IBM z Systems mainframes with full data interchange across previous generation VSM systems and key features that IBM’s TS7700 virtual tape system lacks. Oracle’s StorageTek VSM 7 System delivers, 34x more capacity, significantly higher scalability to 256 StorageTek VSM 7 Systems, data deduplication and native cloud tiering that provides mainframe and heterogeneous storage users the ability to access additional capacity on demand.

MyPOV – It’s always key for vendors to build enough new capabilities and capacity in a new offering, to make it attractive enough for enterprises to consider adopting the new offering. At the same time a substantial gain of capabilities and capacity is essential in order to make sure the offering remains attractive given the effects of Moore’s Law on all things hardware. It looks like Oracle has built in enough of a capability and capacity progression in VSM 7.

Enhanced Security: Powered by Oracle’s breakthrough SPARC M7 processor, Oracle’s StorageTek VSM 7 System delivers wide-key encryption for data at rest and on removable tape media without performance compromise and also uses Silicon Secured Memory for data protection.

MyPOV – Good to see the recent hardware based security offerings being part of the offering. Another example of what Oracle can do with the integrated ‘chip to click’ technology stack - designing higher level offerings in conjunction with lower level system capabilities here taking advantage of building its own processors with SPARC M7.

Availability: Oracle’s StorageTek VSM 7 System provides data protection solutions from on-premises to Oracle Public Cloud, with a single point of contact for all mainframe storage and heterogeneous storage requirements. Policies can be set to automatically copy or migrate files from external disk storage to low cost, off-site cloud storage. With native cloud tiering, customers benefit from end-to-end visibility and diagnostics from on-premise StorageTek VSM 7 System deployments to the Oracle Storage Cloud Service or Oracle Storage Cloud Archive Service.

MyPOV – As data volumes explode for enterprises, keeping and protecting data is key for next generation applications that these enterprises are supporting. Being able to manage policy based – and thus automated – on premises vs cloud storage choices is very valuable.

Disaster Recovery: Oracle’s StorageTek VSM 7 System enables a “lights out” disaster recovery strategy, as a mainframe is no longer required at remote sites, dramatically reducing costs and simplifying deployments. Electronic data sharing across separate complexes, clustering, replication, and DR to the Oracle Public Cloud provides a breadth of simple, flexible disaster recovery options.

MyPOV – Disaster Recovery remains a must have capability for most enterprises to ensure business continuity. Oracle provides a key capability not having to mirror complete system capabilities (here a mainframe) on both sides of a DR equation, opening scenarios with system replacement, cost saving and more agile qualities.

Oracle is also addressing the needs of mission critical heterogeneous environments
underserved by other solutions. Extending its enterprise-proven architecture to a broader customer base, Oracle is providing robust mainframe data protection capabilities with flexible disaster recovery options.

MyPOV – Good to hear that VSM supports scenarios beyond mainframes, while keeping mainframe quality to allow support for more heterogeneous system deployments. Enterprises have heterogeneous system landscapes, and having the option of high quality system choices at disposal is very valuable for decision makers.

Overall MyPOV

The cloud has brought new life to many areas of the technology stack that have lived a more quiet life in the recent decade. Storage is one of these areas, where suddenly a well understood, on the path to commoditization IT offering, has become strategic (again). All of the 7 next generation application use cases Constellation Research has identified and that enterprises are evaluating, building and looking to procure, show how strategically important storage is. In many cases, Storage is the critical path from enabling the overall use case both from a capability and / or cost perspective. So seeing innovation in the space, giving enterprise more deployment options and reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) is a positive development for CxOs making strategic next generation application platform decisions.

Moreover, the combination of these offerings with the cloud gives enterprise key new strategic choices. Still necessary older on premises architectures can be extended while taking advantage of cloud bases technologies and deployments, while enterprises formulate their systems and platform strategy going forward. Oracle’s symmetrical architecture for both on premises and on cloud based products, increases the deployment choices and flexibility substantially: Enterprises know with higher level of confidence that they can move data from on premises to cloud and vice versa. This confidence into a capability is crucial for deployment flexibility that has risen to even more importance given the recent data residency challenges enterprises face with the invalidation of the E.U. / USA Safe harbor agreement.

So overall VSM 7 is a further proof point of the Oracle ‘chip to click’ technology stack, deployed either seamlessly on premises or in the Oracle cloud. Enterprise with storage needs should take note / a look.

Recent blog posts on Oracle:

Market Move - Oracle acquires Ravello Systems - makes good on nested hypervisor roadmap - read here
Progress Report - Oracle Cloud - More ready than ever, now needs adoption read here
Event Report - Oracle Openworld 2015 - Top 3 Takeaways, Top 3 Positives & Concerns - read here
News Analysis - Quick Take on all 22 press releases of Oracle OpenWorld Day #1 - #3 - read here
First Take - Oracle OpenWorld - Day 1 Keynote - Top 3 Takeaways - read here
Event Preview - Oracle Openworld - watch here

Future of Work / HCM / SaaS research:

Event Report - Oracle HCM World - Full Steam ahead, a Learning surprise and potential growth challenges - read here

First Take - Oracle HCM World Day #1 Keynote - off to a good start - read here

Progress Report - Oracle HCM gathers momentum - now it needs to build on that - read here

Oracle pushes modern HR - there is more than technology - read here. (Takeaways from the recent HCMWorld conference).

Why Applications Unlimited is good a good strategy for Oracle customers and Oracle - read here.

Also worth a look for the full picture

Event Report - Oracle PaaS Event - 6 PaaS Services become available, many more announced - read here

Progress Report - Oracle Cloud makes progress - but key work remains in the cellar - read here

News Analysis - Oracle discovers the power of the two socket server - or: A pivot that wasn't one - TCO still rules - read here

Market Move - Oracle buys Datalogix - moves more into DaaS - read here

Event Report - Oracle Openworld - Oracle's vision and remaining work become clear - they are both big - read here

Constellation Research Video Takeaways of Oracle Openworld 2014 - watch here

Is it all coming together for Oracle in 2014? Read here.

From the fences - Oracle AR Meeting takeaways - read here (this was the last analyst meeting in spring 2013)

Takeaways from Oracle CloudWorld LA - read here (this was one of the first cloud world events overall, in January 2013)

And if you want to read more of my findings on Oracle technology - I suggest:

Progress Report - Good cloud progress at Oracle and a two step program - read here.

Oracle integrates products to create its Foundation for Cloud Applications - read here.

Java grows up to the enterprise - read here.

1st take - Oracle in memory option for its database - very organic - read here.

Oracle 12c makes the database elastic - read here.

How the cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.

Act I - Oracle and Microsoft partner for the cloud - read here.

Act II - The cloud changes everything - Oracle and Salesforce.com - read here.

Act III - The cloud changes everything - Oracle and Netsuite with a touch of Deloitte - read here.

Finally find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.

We had the opportunity to attend the 1st Hortonworks analyst summit held in San Francisco February 29th and March 1st at the beautiful Nikko hotel.

This was the first analyst event held by Hortonworks and despite some substantial competition there was a good turnout of 20+ analysts in attendance, I was joined by fellow Constellationite Doug Henschen.

So take a look at the video:

No time to watch – here are the key takeaways:

Momentum– Hortonworks is growing, doing well, a testament to the transformational power of Hadoop in the enterprise. No surprise as enterprises for the first time have the opportunity to bring together all their enterprise data in a single platform, at a fraction of the cost of maintenance of a single silo of data. And no need to know what insights and questions maybe asked later. Hortonworks execs were bullish to have passed fellow competitor Cloudera, we will see at that vendor’s analyst summit. Anyway – great proof point of the momentum.

Next generation DB for the enterprise– It was very clear that the Hortonworks ambition is to become the next generation database for enterprises. And while for ‘data at rest’ the vendor has achieved that status (with all Hadoop based vendors, Hadoop has become the de-facto next gen database for the enterprise) – the verdict is all open on the ‘data in motion’ use cases (think most prominently of nothing else than IoT). And Hortonworks has now integrated last year’s acquisition of Onyara, providing an integrated product with HDF 1.2. It’s sibling for data at rest is HDP 2.4, which has Apache Spark 1.6 support. HP Enterprise ‘donated’ a re-write of the MapReduce Shuffle code in C (originally in Java), showing up to 15x performance gains - -so more performance to come for ODP at some point.

Two release trains– A sign of maturation of the Hadoop market and its adoption is shown by Hortonworks now moving to two release trains…. One for the cutting edge users (called Extended Services) and one for the more conservative (often live) enterprises with Hadoop Core. A good move that should make both growing constituent groups happy.

MyPOV

Always good to be at the first analyst summit, especially when it the vendor sees the traction like Hortonworks does. The vendor has a clear ambition to become the next generation database for the enterprise – addressing both data at rest and in motion. These are traditional different architectures and players and bringing both together will be a challenge for anyone – so a tall ask (hence the blog post title). But it’s good for vendors to have an ambition and given the early phases it is good to see Hortonworks is off to an early start to bring these two database domains together.

On the concern side – more is needed than a database, but a complete platform. Given the Springsource DNA in the executive team I am sure Hortonworks leadership is aware of that, but I guess it is one step at a time. And becoming more of the de-facto standard as the Hadoop distribution for an IaaS player (as Hortonworks has achieved with Microsoft Azure) is a short term priority.

For enterprises it is clear Hortonworks is one of the two (or three if you add MapR) Hadoop distributions to work with, and the ambition of becoming the next generation enterprise database will be attractive to more enterprises than less. We will be watching, stay tuned.

More on BigData

News Analysis - SAP Unveils New Cloud Platform Services and In-Memory Innovation on Hadoop to Accelerate Digital Transformation – A key milestone for SAP - read here

News Analysis - SAP delivers next release of SAP HANA - SPS 10 - Ready for BigData and IoT - read here

News Analysis - Salesforce Transforms Big Data Into Customer Success with the Salesforce Analytics Cloud - read here

Progress Report - Teradata is alive and kicking and shows some good 'paranoid' practices - read here

Event Report – Couchbase Connect – Couchbase’s shows momentum - read here

News Analysis - Couchbase unveils N1QL and updates the NoSQL Performance Wars - read here

Event Report - MongoDB keeps up the momentum in product and go to market - read here

News Analysis - Pivotal pivots to OpenSource and Hortonworks - Or: OpenSource keeps winning - read here

Progress Report - Cloudera is all in with Hadoop - now off to verticals - read here

Market Move - Oracle buys Datalogix - moves into DaaS - read here

Event Report - MongoDB is a showcase for the power of Open Source in the enterprise - read here

Musings - A manifesto: What are 'true' analytics? Read here

Future of Work - One Spreadsheet at the time - Informatica Springbok - read here

Musings - The Era of the no-design Database - Read here

Mendix - the other path to build software - Read here

Musings - Time to ditch your datawarehouse .... - Read here

Finally find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.

View the story "Hortonworks Analyst Summit - Day #1 + #2" on Storify

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced new hybrid capabilities in its storage and database offerings, which are remarkable in the way the products and offerings are set up and offer the existing Microsoft install base a path to the cloud.

So let’s take apart Mark Jewett’s blog post in our customary style (it can be found here).

Applications and data are at the heart of how organizations drive competitive value and improve efficiency. However, this digital transformation is resulting in an explosion of data. Enterprises have to figure out how to get a handle on this data – how to increase their storage capacity and keep their data safe and secure, without drastically increasing IT costs.

MyPOV – Good point and in line with what we have been seeing and then saying for a while. All seven of the next generation application use cases that we track across the industries involved an explosion in data, resulting in challenges to both the database and storage tier.

Microsoft believes a hybrid cloud approach can offer unique ways to manage this data proliferation. We believe you should be able to take advantage of the best of the public cloud and the best of your on-premises technology. Hybrid solutions should enable mission critical, recent, or latency-sensitive data to remain on-premises, while backups and archival data can seamlessly move to low cost and nearly-limitless cloud storage. Applications and tools can access the data transparently, no matter where it is - so that it’s always available to you. And you can do it all without investing in new infrastructure, saving you time and money to focus on driving innovation.

MyPOV – Good description of the strategy. It offers enterprises an outlet to not expand infrastructure on premises, but, instead, to skip the investment cycles while satisfying the additional demand and load by moving it to the cloud, here Azure. This may be a win-win for customers and vendors; customers cannot necessarily afford to re-architect for cloud but may want to take advantage of new use cases that need to be automated. For vendors like Microsoft, this creates a way to grow cloud revenues substantially.

Microsoft is investing in building hybrid capabilities across our product portfolio to help you take advantage of all that hybrid has to offer, simply and cost effectively. Today, we are extending that commitment with new offerings in SQL Server 2016 and StorSimple that make it even easier for you to leverage a hybrid cloud model to put you in control of how you store and protect your applications and data.

MyPOV – Microsoft is executing a two-pronged approach. It brings its Azure technology stack to on premises with the Azure stack, and it allows customers to keep older Microsoft products operating on premises while extending them to the cloud. We see the latter here for SQL Server 2016 and StorSimple.

Leverage the infinite capacity of Azure with SQL Server Database updates

This week we are introducing the SQL Server 2016 Release Candidate with new hybrid enhancements available in preview. These capabilities make it easier than ever for you to choose whether you store your data on-premises or in the cloud. These new features integrate hybrid capabilities into the market-leading Microsoft data platform product you use today, empowering you to leverage the cloud to extend capacity for your massive data growth, while ensuring your data is protected.

MyPOV – We have given Microsoft a hard time around SQL Server scalability for a long time (looks like the longest time), but now there is a clear path to extend capacity…

SQL Server 2016 with SQL Server Stretch Database service, a new Azure companion service, enables you to dynamically stretch your on-premises warm and cold data to Azure for virtually endless compute capacity and storage. Now you can keep as much data as you need in the cloud, up to 60 terabytes per database in preview, without the high costs of traditional enterprise storage. The Stretch Database service makes remote query processing possible by providing compute and storage in a way that’s completely transparent to the application. SQL Server Stretch Database also works with Always Encrypted technology, which encrypts data before sending to Azure and the encryption key remains on-premises to give you added piece of mind that your data is protected no matter where it’s stored. SQL Server 2016 with the new Stretch Database service enable you to keep more data accessible for deep insights at significantly lower cost.

MyPOV – We learn a new ‘Azure companion service,’ SQL Server Stretch Database, is the enabler on the Azure side. Enterprises will be happy to learn that they can move data to the cloud based on application scenarios and data temperature. It’s very good to see the support of an external (on-premises) local key, addressing the security/privacy challenge in the post- Snowden/ NSA/PRISM age.

Another new hybrid capability available in SQL Server 2016 is support for Transactional Replication toAzure SQL Database which expands on the existing option for replicating data to SQL Server in an Azure virtual machine (VM). With this feature you can now replicate data directly to Azure SQL Database and benefit from a fully managed database. This extends the options you have to back up your data to the cloud to ensure it’s protected in worst-case scenarios. You can also migrate data from SQL Server on-premises to Azure SQL Database – providing a simple mechanism to move data to the cloud without downtime to an on-premises database.

MyPOV – SQL Server (to the days back of Sybase) always had very good replication capabilities; it’s good to see these capabilities now put to work for moving/replicating data from on premises to Azure – there, next generation applications can be built. Being able to go from SQL Sever in an Azure VM to an Azure SQL DB is a major step and way forward out of the (older) SQL Sever code (which we have seen as an issue for many years). Giving customers a scalable cloud-based DB outlet is a major step by Microsoft and a truly good move for customers.

Simplifying hybrid storage with Azure StorSimple Virtual Array

Azure StorSimple is another great example of how Microsoft has increased the hybrid capabilities of its products. Designed to help you increase storage capacity and data availability without investing in new infrastructure, StorSimple offers economical cloud storage or on-premises storage so you can choose where to store your data.

MyPOV – Microsoft had a precursor of the Azure stack on the storage side with the (relatively) newer StorSimple offering. Good to see that the on-premises and cloud StorSimple are now coming together.

Today we are extending the StorSimple offering with StorSimple Virtual Array, a version of StorSimple offered in a virtual machine form, now generally available. The VM enables additional scenarios, in particular environments with minimal IT infrastructure and management, for customers to take advantage of StorSimple. The virtual array is built on the success of existing StorSimple technology, which uses a hybrid cloud storage approach for on-demand capacity scaling in the cloud and cloud-based data protection and disaster recovery. The hybrid approach centers around your choice to store the most used data on the virtual array and optionally tier older data to Azure. The virtual array can be run as a virtual machine on your Hyper-V or VMware ESXi hypervisors and can be configured as a File Server (NAS) or as an iSCSI server. It also provides the ability to back up your data to Azure.

MyPOV – Wait, now it reads more like Microsoft is bringing capabilities of StorSimple from Azure to on premises via virtual machines. That makes management easier for customers who have a number of VMs to manage already. Supporting not only Hyper-V but also VMware ESXi gives customers familiar choices. So a small component of the Azure cloud stack (though Microsoft does not stake it explicitly, so I am speculating a bit here) is coming to on premises.

Both SQL Server 2016 and StorSimple enhancements are available for you to try out today. We hope that you’ll test drive these exciting new offerings and let us know what you think.

MyPOV – Sand boxes, pilots, test drives – always a good way to get customers on board and learn about scale.

Overall MyPOV

We are seeing an overall industry-wide move by the established IT giants to hybrid. Last week, it was IBM partnering with VMware (see here); this week Cisco acquired CliqR (see here); and Oracle offers to move mainframe storage out of the mainframe and/or to the cloud (see here). As mentioned above, Microsoft announced the Azure stack for on premises (see here), and now important storage and database offerings are ‘stretched’ (pun intended) to the cloud.

It’s a win-win for vendors and customers as customers can avoid discretional investment on premises. Move the investment to building new (cloud based), next generation applications, and vendors can also repurpose R&D investment and grow cloud revenue.

Closer to Microsoft’s announcement, customers need to look at the potential license and operational implications. We are sure Microsoft will get the pricing right, but the operational cost of ‘bursting’ or replicating to the cloud can be expensive, starting on the networking side.

But overall a good move by Microsoft. We will be watching for adoption and further developments – stay tuned.

More about Microsoft:

News Analysis - Welcoming the Xamarin team to Microsoft - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft announcements at Convergence Barcelona - Office365. Dynamics CRM and Power Apps
News Analysis - Microsoft expands Azure Data Lake to unleash big data productivity - Good move - time to catch up - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft and Salesforce Strengthen Strategic Partnership at Dreamforce 2015 - Good for joint customers - read here
News Analyis - NetSuite announced Cloud Alliance with Microsoft - read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build - Microsoft really wants to make developers' lives easier - read here
First Hand with Microsoft Hololens - read here
Event Report - Microsoft TechEd - Top 3 Enterprise takeaways - read here
First Take - Microsoft discovers data ambience and delivers an organic approach to in memory database - read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build - Azure grows and blossoms - enough for enterprises (yet)? Read here.
Event Report - Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote - Top Enterprise Takeaways - read here.
Microsoft gets even more serious about devices - acquire Nokia - read here.
Microsoft does not need one new CEO - but six - read here.
Microsoft makes the cloud a platform play - Or: Azure and her 7 friends - read here.
How the Cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
How hard is multi-channel CRM in 2013? - Read here.
How hard is it to install Office 365? Or: The harsh reality of customer support - read here.

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.

We are attending Ultimate’s user conference UltiConnect taking place at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. The conference kicked off with a welcome reception at Drais, a great location to get attendees to enjoy Las Vegas. And with over 2000 attendees and over 60% first time attendees the conference sees record attendees.

Always hard to find the top 3 - but here are my Top 3 takeaways from the keynote:

People Centricity remains front and central for Ultimate– Ultimate has been stressing people centricity for a long time, and no surprise it was front and center at today’s keynote. CTO Adam Rogers walked us through the three main directions for Ultimate improving people / employee experience:

Don’t waste people’s time – A good direction, see payroll innovation as key deliverable below.
Build stronger leaders – Equally good – Ultimate will help leaders become more effective with the help of suggested actions.
Let HR focus on Strategy – Probably the best of all three – as the lack of strategic aspects is moving many HR leaders away from the executive table (and conversations).

Innovation to Payroll with Pay Insights– During the keynote Martin Hartshorne walked us through the importance of getting payroll right. As we have pointed out before – everything stops when the paycheck isn’t right. For the individual employee who is talking back to HR, and for all of HR and the enterprise when a large employee group is affected. Pay Insights is being rolled out to selected customers in the next few months and more broadly in fall of this year. The general focus is on capabilities to help employees to better understand their paychecks as well aid them to interact more efficiently with HR.

Ease to do business – Software vendors often get set in their action and processes as they scale their operations, revisiting best practices is a good move and Rogers announced three new initiatives:

Tierless Support – Nobody wants to wait for the next level support agent to solve an issue, so it is good to see Ultimate eliminating the tiering of support representatives. This does not raise the experience of the support representatives so it will be interesting to see how Ultimate will solve that.
Learning Center – Ultimate will offer new ways to understand its software, always a good move.
New online service experience – The fastest way to solve support is self-service, so it’s good to see that Ultimate is making it easier for customers to resolve support issues directly, and themselves. Customers love empowerment.

MyPOV

A good start for Connections, which is not only a customer conference, but also a customer appreciation event and Ultimate is striking a good balance between the two. Focusing on people centricity, more specifically on employee experience is a good true north for any HR software vendor, and it is good to see Ultimate building more capabilities in that direction. Coupled with an improvement in know how transfer and customer support, Ultimate is doing the right things to become an even more attractive HCM vendor. Again a good start for the UltiConnect conference, stay tuned.

More on Ultimate:

Event Report - Ultimate Software Connection - People first and an exciting roadmap ahead - read here
First Take - Ultimate Software UltiConnect Day #1 Keynote - read here
Event Report - Ultimate's UltiConnect - Off to a great start, but the road(map) is long - read here.
First Take – 3 Key Takeaways from Ultimate’s UltiConnect Conference Day 1 keynote – read here.

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.

View the story "Ultimate Software UltiConnect - Day #1 Keynote" on Storify

Today Workday announced the availability of its French Payroll capability, available imminently on March 12^th 2016. This brings to an end the long ago announced road map for payroll support beyond the USA and Canada, with the delivery of UK payroll last summer and French payroll right now.

So let’s comment on the press release in our customary style, it can be found here:

PLEASANTON, Calif. and PARIS — March 10, 2016 — Workday, Inc. (NYSE: WDAY), a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, today announced the availability of Workday Payroll for France, a new application that enables organizations with employees in France to streamline the payroll process and address the full spectrum of enterprise payroll needs. Workday Payroll for France was built as part of Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) to facilitate faster financial reporting, improve compliance control, and provide a more comprehensive view of global and local labor costs.

MyPOV – Describes well what is being announced, including the benefits. Customers want native vendor support for payroll, as they know from experience that usually less things can go wrong given the challenging legislative environment for payroll, when it is owned by their HR Core vendor. The long term Workday observer will also notice the two time mentions of Finance, the newer of the two Workday applications, that is getting a lot of marketing attention these days.

Payroll has traditionally been challenging for global organizations due to complex regulatory requirements pertaining to each country and a lack of real-time insights on global payroll actuals. Building on the success of Workday Payroll for the U.S., Canada, and UK, Workday Payroll for France helps alleviate these pain points and equips customers with the flexibility, control, and insight required to support the unique aspects of their organizations.

MyPOV – Again a description of the challenges of payroll, but interesting it stresses the global perspective into payroll. There is of course a French only perspective on a local payroll, too. Workday is walking a fine line with native / own payroll support for USA, Canada, UK and now France – versus the ‘rest of the world’ that it supports with a partnership with payroll giant ADP (read the news analysis here) and its Global Payroll Cloud Program, where Workday partners leverage Cloud Connect for Third Party Payroll – of which there are pre-built and delivered certified integrations for over 117 countries today. As Workday builds native payroll applications based on customer demand, customers may well ask for more native payroll support for further countries.

Customers using Workday Payroll for France benefit from:

• Support for France-specific and Regional Legislative Requirements – For example, Workday Payroll for France automatically runs the newly-initiated Déclaration Sociale Nominative (DSN) process, making it simpler for organizations to replace a wide range of reports with a single statement. The application also supports the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) payment-integration initiative of the European Union.

MyPOV – Good to see support for French legislative requirements. The nature of payroll requires that you support it all – including latest developments and requirements, e.g. the support for DSN.

• Real-time Analytics and Reporting – Organizations can now see what they are actually spending on workers via pre-built reports and analytics. In addition, the new application features a unique dashboard that enables customers to quickly identify and proactively manage high-impact compliance changes directly affecting their employee populations.

MyPOV – Always good to show customers what is going on in payroll. Getting pro-active on compliance changes will be appreciated functionality for both payroll managers and employees. And who does not love dashboards?

• Automatic Tax Updates – With a cloud delivery model, new tax updates are automatically applied, eliminating the need for upgrades and patches required by on-premise payroll systems.

MyPOV – Good to read and hear, but a table stake for a cloud based payroll system.

• Powerful and Flexible Calculation Tool – Workday’s robust calculation engine makes it easy for payroll administrators to handle complex requirements and run calculations as often as needed, with faster payroll-processing time.

MyPOV – Good to hear about the performance of the Workday calculation tool, good that it seems to be performing well, but it would be good to see specifics.

• High Configurability – Payroll administrators can easily configure unlimited earnings, deductions, pay groups, and pay frequencies to support calculation and reporting needs.

MyPOV – Always good to see configurability, but that is what customers expect from a modern payroll system.

• Mobile Access – With one self-service application, employees can check pay slips and payment elections, and administrators have the ability to process payroll – anywhere, anytime.

MyPOV – Good to see mobile self-service supported, as mobile is the most popular platform to access pay check information for today’s employees. That sums up a pretty functional first payroll release, which goes beyond the very bread and butter requirements for a payroll system.

Comments on the News -“Organizations in France require a modern application to simplify payroll processing and keep pace with recent legislation and a constantly-changing workforce,” said Barbry McGann, vice president, payroll and time products, Workday. “Workday Payroll for France unifies payroll and HR in the cloud, offering customers the control, flexibility, and insight required to gain complete visibility across the business and workforce to help fuel growth.”

MyPOV – Good quote of McGann that sums up well what Workday delivers with French payroll.

Availability Workday Payroll for France will be generally available on March 12, 2016. […]

MyPOV – Good to see imminent general availability of the new French payroll.

Screensho how Déclaration Sociale Nominative (DSN) is supported in Workday.

Overall MyPOV

Always good to see software vendors deliver product at the announced milestones and congrats to Workday to deliver the French payroll as announced over 2 years ago. That seemed a long way out, but time flies and French payroll is now available both for global customers with French employee populations and local French customers of Workday. It looks like the first version is a robust, functional release, the mobile capabilities even going beyond a typical V1 of a payroll product, as it is build on the same platform as its other payroll offerings.

On the concern side Workday will have to explain why it supports 4 country’s payroll, native in the product and no other countries, but uses the partnership to ADP instead. In recent meetings we noticed jokingly that Workday offers native payroll applications in countries with red, white and blue flags. Future will tell if Workday can keep it at 4 native payrolls in the Workday product or if it will need to support more natively in he product, we are seeing Germany and Japan as likely next candidates, but that’s our speculation and guess right now.

But for now, congrats to Workday to deliver native payroll to French customers and global customers who want / need a native French payroll.

Overall MyPOV

This is a key announcement and a milestone for the new HP for enterprises, HPE. As HPE adjusted its public cloud strategy and pivoted away from the public cloud offering at Helion, it had software assets like Haven (remember it was HAVEn at some point – see below) that need a public cloud platform. Hence the partnership with Microsoft that was announced in December of last year. And with Azure the new public cloud home for Haven is certainly an attractive platform, that the ‘new’ Microsoft is working hard (and with some surprising moves) to make even more attractive.

On the concern side HPE will have to work hard to show value for using Haven. There are many other offerings for building the same breed of next generation applications on other and the same public cloud platform, so the value proposition for enterprises and developers needs to be clear. That this is possible can be seen, e.g. on the successful Heroku on AWS offering. Closer to HPE the revenue potential and growth needs to be understood – but we will see that over the next quarters.

But for now congratulations to HPE for putting Haven on Azure, good to see a forward strategy for the Haven software offering. Now it’s time to look at roadmap and commercial performance going forward.

More about HP

News Analysis - Updates to HP Helion Portfolio - a commentary - read here
Market Move - HP acquires Aruba - It's about Wifi - not the Caribbean - read here
News Analysis - HP acquired Eucalyptus - Genius or Panic on Page Mill road? Read here
News Analysis - Today's Billion in Cloud Investment is HP's and goes to Helion - read here
A tale of two cloud GAs - Google & HP - read here
The cloud is growing up - 3 signs from the news - read here
To HAVEn and have not - or: HP Bundles away - read here

And more about Microsoft:

News Analysis - Microsoft - New Hybrid Offerings Deliver Bottomless Capacity for Today's Data Explosion - read here
News Analysis - Welcoming the Xamarin team to Microsoft - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft announcements at Convergence Barcelona - Office365. Dynamics CRM and Power Apps
News Analysis - Microsoft expands Azure Data Lake to unleash big data productivity - Good move - time to catch up - read here
News Analysis - Microsoft and Salesforce Strengthen Strategic Partnership at Dreamforce 2015 - Good for joint customers - read here
News Analyis - NetSuite announced Cloud Alliance with Microsoft - read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build - Microsoft really wants to make developers' lives easier - read here
First Hand with Microsoft Hololens - read here
Event Report - Microsoft TechEd - Top 3 Enterprise takeaways - read here
First Take - Microsoft discovers data ambience and delivers an organic approach to in memory database - read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build - Azure grows and blossoms - enough for enterprises (yet)? Read here.
Event Report - Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote - Top Enterprise Takeaways - read here.
Microsoft gets even more serious about devices - acquire Nokia - read here.
Microsoft does not need one new CEO - but six - read here.
Microsoft makes the cloud a platform play - Or: Azure and her 7 friends - read here.
How the Cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
How hard is multi-channel CRM in 2013? - Read here.
How hard is it to install Office 365? Or: The harsh reality of customer support - read here.

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.

We had the opportunity to attend Ultimate Software’s user conference UltiConnect in Las Vegas, held at the beautiful Bellagio resort. The conference was well attended with over 2000 attendees, a record number for Ultimate.

Always tough to pick the top 3 takeaways – but take a look:

No time to watch – then keep on reading:

Product Innovations – Take a look at my Day #1 Keynote takeaways (here), the two that hit the mark with me were

Pay Insights– Questions about correct or incorrect paychecks have been always a drag on employee performance and payroll manager efficiency. Tackling the problem with better explanations, more interaction as Ultimate is planning to do for the rest of 2016 is a welcome approach. As the keynotes referred this was inspired (amongst others) by marquee customer Google, but I am sure this will be well received across the Ultimate customer base. And it is one of the areas where we think there is room for innovation in the payroll space.
Leadership Actions– Helping people leaders with advice, training and actions is probably a plan that will lead to good outcomes. Ultimate plans to provide people leaders with a set of actions that they may want to take to become better people leaders, to get the people they lead more engaged, to solve certain people challenges etc. Almost naturally this cannot be functional with a preset bundle of actions, so it is good to see that Ultimate plans to roll out the feature with configurability from version.

Analytical Applications Momentum– Ultimate is one of the many vendors that had analytics on their product roadmap for the last 24 months, the good news is that Ultimate provides ‘real’ analytics (those who take an action or make a recommendation – more here) and has made four analytical applications available over the last 12 months. With an uptake of over 600 customers (out of a 3000+ install base) of the earliest analytical application focusing around retention risk, Ultimate probably has the largest customer base adoption for a ‘true’ analytical application. Good to see, though I would have liked to see more true analytics innovation, but on the flipside customer adoption takes time. We will be watching the next quarters.

Platform Innovation– Every vendor that has been around for 5+ years runs into platform innovation challenges. So it is no surprise that Ultimate, in its 26th year has an older and a newer platform. The newer platform being the architecture on which the new Recruiting and Onboarding applications have been built on, the older (more Microsoft centric) platform runs the rest of the products. Ultimate has shared that it has revised it go-to platform recently, and the direction is towards Pivotal’s CloudFoundry PaaS running on OpenStack. Certainly a good update in direction, but time was lost in the process and it is time for Ultimate to build more product and move older products to the new platform. One popular approach to tackle such a transition is to expose APIs for integration purposes and that’s the mission of the new Ultipro Connect product. It is scheduled for 2017, so quite some way out, but interaction with customers is positive. So a lot of new platform coming to Ultimate product development at the moment, 2016 will be key to see its validation and uptake in the customer base, more likely even 2017.

Analyst Tidbits

Ecosystem – The Ultimate ecosystem is doing well and growing fast – what started with 6 partners in 2013 is now standing at 96 partners – and it reads like a who is who of enterprise software with a large chunk of HCM players. Almost 50 exhibited at UltiConnect and from my random both check were all very happy to be there. It’s good to see that Ultimate was able to create an ecosystem in short time, creating options and value for customers.

NetSuite – A year ago both Ultimate and NetSuite surprised us with a partnership. A year later both vendors report back and state they could not be happier. The number of joint customers is a good sign for that. The integration is advanced to the point that the Ultimate employee master replaces the employee master in NetSuite, when Ultimate is present. A single employee master in regards of CRUD operations is supported. Good to see a working partnership, and given that NetSuite has not changed its HCM partner strategy (after 3 rapid pivots before this partnership announcement) is also a testament that something is working well. Joint customers are happy with the progress of the partnership as we found out.

Usability concerns– At the last two UltiConnects Ultimate was able to show substantial UI innovation and new user interface paradigms. The newer UI is implemented well in Recruiting, Onboarding and some new functionality, but the older user interface on the more Microsoft centric is showing its age. A new org chart and more work on the portal is coming this year, but Ultimate will need to do some work in the future, better sooner than later.

Services Innovation– One of the key announcements of the Day #1 keynote was along a new ‘tierless’ support model. In more detailed briefings we learnt it is really about higher support levels ‘swarming’ the first level support calls, with the goal to drive to faster call resolution. A good move that should get answers to customers faster, and more importantly bring first line service representatives up to speed faster. But Ultimate is investing on the self-service side, too – with a new community offering, where customers can help customers and ultimate is only coming in when needed. Both are good moves to make a customer community successful on the support side.

On the implementation services side Ultimate has been also offering more services, e.g. for change management and around the new analytical product offerings. Good moves that should help customers to what ultimately matters most for both customers and vendors – customer success with the vendor’s solution.

MyPOV

A good UltiConnect conference for Ultimate customers. The vendor is growing and doing well and that positive momentum is always felt at a user conference. And Ultimate knows how to appreciate its customers, who by themselves are passionate about culture, product and vendor. Anyone doubting that – make it to McCarran on Friday after an UltiConnect conference and see how many customers are travelling back in Ultimate conference shirts. A move encouraged by the vendor, but also easily endorsed by attendees, where acceptance of vendor and culture is getting close to cult like settings.

It’s equally good to see that Ultimate is innovating in product, reverting back to the core of what most users leverage, payroll, it is good to see investment here with Payroll Insights. And on the ‘real’ analytics side Ultimate probably sees the largest uptake of it new analytical offerings across vendors, with over 600 customers using the retention predictor. That’s remarkable, as the first wave of adoption of analytical applications is washing along the beach of reality check and day to day proof of value.

On the concern side the vendor needs to accelerate its move to its newer platform(s) to create a common user experience and product set. With CloudFoundry as PaaS platform and OpenStack for IaaS services, Ultimate is more likely than not heading in a good direction. With global expansion underway, Ultimate will also have to expand beyond North American data centers. And the user experience of the older, built on the Microsoft stack applications needs improvement.

But overall a good UltiConnect user conference for Ultimate customers and the vendor, showing traction, innovation and strong indicators to be on track to reach the ‘legend’ (as CEO Scherr puts it) of reaching one billion of revenue in the near future, as it looks 2018.

More on Ultimate:

First Take - First Take - Top 3 Takeaways from Ultimate’s UltiConnect Day #1 Keynote - read here
Event Report - Ultimate Software Connection - People first and an exciting roadmap ahead - read here
First Take - Ultimate Software UltiConnect Day #1 Keynote - read here
Event Report - Ultimate's UltiConnect - Off to a great start, but the road(map) is long - read here.
First Take – 3 Key Takeaways from Ultimate’s UltiConnect Conference Day 1 keynote – read here.

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.

And here are my notes - on Twitter - of Ultimate UltiConnect 2016:

View the story "Ultimate UltiConnect - @holgermu Tweets" on Storify

We had the opportunity to attend ADP’s yearly user conference ‘Meeting of the Minds’ in Fort Washington, at the beautiful Gaylord National. The conference was equally well attended as last year in Nashville with over 1000 attendees.

Always tough to pick the top 3 at an event – but here you go – take a look at the video:

No time to watch – read on:

New UI for Enterprise and Vantage– Last year at MOTM ADP promised to bring both Enterprise and Vantage products to the new UI the vendor had already used for a number of new applications. Especially the talent management product UI, Vantage looked like ‘vintage’ (pun intended). ADP had to move to a declarative way to build its UIs, encapsulate functionality in APIs and revisit workflows and information model, so taking a year is not a bad timeline for the effort. Attendees were looking forward to use the new versions when talking to them around the conference. Almost all is done, except for the practitioner UI in Enterprise and the recruiter role in Vantage. All should be done later this year. This moves the needle from product development to sales and services, with the question how fast customers can be in a position to use the new UI. It also removes the well reported ‘frown effect’ when demoing ‘vintage Vantage’ – which shortchanged a serious look at a pretty functional rich Talent Management product due to UI concerns.

Data Cloud powers Benchmarking– One of the more exciting products that ADP has created in the last years is the ADP Data Cloud, which is the platform not only to new reporting and visualization, but also the base for its predictive analytics and benchmarking products. And Benchmarking was the new capability showed at MOTM. As ADP pays over 30 Million people in North America it has a better data exposure to salary and more information than probably any vendor. ADP’s labor forecasts routinely beats the government’s labor forecasts. Now – as one of the first benchmarks – users can see salary and more information for a job role across the USA. Participation is very high, well in the 90ies of the customer base, as even the reluctant customers see immediate value. This puts ADP in a very good position to tap into future DaaS (Data as a Service) revenues. On the predictive analytics side things have slowed down a bit (like with other vendors), as HR practitioners remain skeptical towards analytics. All vendors (not only ADP) have to work hard to overcome this, and the path to predictive analytics success in HCM does not lead through the HR department but the business user, who needs any level of automation that works, and can right away see if a prediction / automation ‘works’ (or not).

Market Place– Since its launch a few quarters back the ADP marketplace has been growing fast to almost 100 signed up partners and close to half of them being live. ADP’s approach of allowing competitors on the market place (e.g. Cornerstone) and to compete on merit is a healthy approach that enterprises value. The cloud allows for ‘zapping’ the sales cycle to an afternoon, the provision of free (or cheap) sand boxes to enable ‘try & buy’ sales mechanisms and a fast way of implementation. The future of enterprise software consumption and it is good to see that ADP has enabled the platform and marketplace early.

Analyst Tidbits

New Onboarding– ADP has also released new Onboarding capability, a solution the vendor had the courage to onboard analysts with at the last analyst meeting in fall. The product has been delivered in a pretty functional version 1 that will be highly welcome (and is anticipated highly) be ADP customers.

Global Offerings– ADP keeps offering global solutions and related services like BPO. The offering has also been moved to the new UI starting with the portal, that most (international) employees see first. Partnerships are progressing, the most recent prominent one being the one with Workday (see below for News Analysis). We see ADP and NGA HR as the ‘last men standing’ to offer comprehensive BPO, whenever that market will find its prince, wakening it from now almost 10 years hibernation.

ACA keeps giving and giving– With new regulation and compliance burdens hitting enterprises and ADP’s record on compliance it is no surprise this is a well working offering for ADP. Enterprises need help with ACA, as every formal and informal poll shows, and ADP is ready to help, at a staggering scale, e.g. the vendor shared that it is providing more than an 8 digit number of 1095s this month.

Development best practices– ADP has transformed the way it builds product, how it goes to market and large parts of is culture. I think this is the first time a keynote speaker wore jeans (!) on stage, ok it was a developer, but still a milestone. It is good to see ADP is not resting on its laurels and looking at more innovative ways of building products. The session was under NDA, but it was exciting to learn about very short review and product deliver cycles. Some of the products can already be found on the ADP marketplace – I encourage you to find and try them.

MyPOV

A very good MOTM for ADP, the vendor has delivered what it promised a year ago and now has a competitive product, for the first time I can think of. Good to see ADP is not resting on its product laurels and has more interesting offerings and products coming. Naturally, focus now turns to sales and services, customers need to understand and adopt the new offerings. Too early to tell how well ADP will do here.

On the concern side ADP now needs to show its sales and services muscle. With over 800 sales reps in North America that’s not a question of presence but of mentality. It’s a different sales cycle to ‘grab land’ with an aging product but market leader position vs. winning and converting customers towards newly competitive products. E.g. the ADP sales force will have to show it can sell / upsell Talent Management now. And customers will have to be converted / upgraded to the new user interface (and platform in the case of e.g. Data Cloud) – a new challenge for the services organization. ADP customers need to understand well what it takes to move to the new offerings and chart the course to the upgrade / updated. But at the end of the day a good problem to have.

Overall good progress as ADP morphs into more of an overall global HCM software player from a North American payroll giant, a good trend for customers. We will be watching, stay tuned.

MyPOV

Good to see traction on the platform side at SAP Ariba. It looks like the division has found new speed and dynamics, that attending customers noticed. Procurement is a huge opportunity for SAP and its customers and it looks like there is a better grasp at getting into a very good position in the next years to come.

On the concern side SAP Ariba needs to execute on the new vision and roadmap. Networked applications of the scale that SAP Ariba needs to build are not trivial, even with today's advances on the cloud side. Operating this on internal data centers is a valid strategy, but can / could become also of concern as capability and TCO of the popular cloud based IaaS platforms will become more and more competitive.

But overall good to see the progress at SAP Ariba - we will be watching, stay tuned.

Overall MyPOV

Always good to see software vendors deliver, especially when it is a strategic piece of software, that basically allows the vendor to survive for the next decades to come. Some people may think this is exaggerated, but those should keep in mind that SAP had no Hadoop story 12 months ago. The question will now have to be if Vora is the right and the full story – but it the start of a new book for SAP, and we are in the first chapter.

On the concern side, as elaborated above – SAP will need to make sure the perspective is not coming from the traditional (HANA based) ERP application, but from the Hadoop based Bigdata. That is where enterprises are building their next generation applications – in may use cases out of sheer necessity, because all other storage mechanisms and mediums are not cost effective or even – if cost played no role – feasible. The sooner SAP understands this – the better.

But for now, a good day for SAP customers as their vendor has done major step to future proof offerings and to remain a key player in enterprise software going forward. Tuning is always part of an offering and I am sure SAP will sooner than later get the whole story right.

MyPOV

Good to see the overall progress at Cloudera, the vendor is doing well, it has a plan to take advantage of the 'real' Hadoop adoption wave and it looks that it is handling product growth well. It's great to have Intel as an investor, but also as a partner to share future hardware design, so Cloudera can take advantage of them in its products. Unfortunately most of the product plans were under NDA, likely to be unwrapped in a few months, so can't comment on these.

On the concern side Cloudera needs to tie together the directions. The vendor went at length to make clear it understands and cares for the vertical needs of Hadoop adoption, but those needs have to find themselves in specific future product capabilities. And I am looking forward to see the first 'hard' feature uptake from Intel into Cloudera software.

Overall Cloudera is in a very good position to keep taking advantage of the rise of Hadoop as the critical data engine for enterprises. 2016 will be (another) key year - stay tuned, we will be watching.

More on BigData / Hadoop / noSQL:

News Analysis - SAP HANA Vora now available... - A key milestone for SAP - read here

Progress Report - Hortonworks wants to become the next generation for the enterprise – a tall ask - read here