Renee Boucher Ferguson

Earlier this month, after at least two years of rumors and speculation, NetSuite filed for its initial public offering. While the IPO is good news for the software as a service sector, where NetSuite is considered a strong contender, NetSuites S-1 filing reveals some troubling vulnerabilities. Perhaps the biggest concern: NetSuite supports all of its […]

The hoopla around Oracles ongoing lawsuit against rival SAP has left a gaping hole for customers questioning the value of major application vendor support. Oracle is accusing SAP of corporate theft on a grand scale, the result of SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow downloading too much documentation in the process of providing third-party support for Oracle customers. […]

Microsoft is giving notice that it plans to directly challenge Salesforce.coms online application marketplace, AppExchange, and on-demand programming language and platform, Apex. Microsoft announced at their World Wide Partner Conference in Denver this week the planned launch, in 2008, of a new on-demand marketplace in which Microsoft partners can showcase their company, applications and templates […]

Oracle may command 47 percent of the database market, but the company is pushing headlong into a saturated market with little room for growth, according to some analysts. At first blush, Oracles market position looks unassailable. Oracle has experienced 14.9 percent market growth over the last year, besting the market average of 14.2 percent growth, […]

Microsofts pricing for its Dynamics Live CRM is undercutting the competition by about half, and partner compensation for on-demand sales is about 20 percent less than it is for annual subscription rates. The software giant announced the long-awaited product and pricing information for its on-demand customer relationship management offering at its annual Worldwide Partner Conference […]

Googles July 9 acquisition of Postini is another clear sign that the search giant is staking a claim in the on-demand enterprise applications market and ratcheting up the heat in the already sizzling software as a service sector, especially against Microsoft. With Postini, which began as an e-mail filtering company and evolved into compliance technology […]

At an analyst day event in January 2005, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison sent a stern warning to rival SAP. It was just a month after Oracles controversial takeover of PeopleSoft, a move that kicked off a two-year-plus buying spree that has put the Redwood Shores, Calif., software maker into the middle of the highly competitive […]

In 2006, Miro Consulting was ranked No. 15 on Doloittes list of 500 fastest growing tech companies and No. 397 on Inc. Magazines 500 ranking of the fastest growing privately held companies in the United States. The company has had a three-year growth rate of 362 percent. What makes Miro so successful? Its in a […]

In a dramatic turnabout, officials at software giant SAP admitted what bitter rival Oracle had claimed in a lawsuit: that one of SAPs subsidiaries had inappropriately downloaded some Oracle files. SAP CEO Henning Kagermann, in two news conferences July 3, said employees of TomorrowNow—a third-party support company SAP bought in 2005 after seeing Oracle acquire […]

SAP is getting ready to fire back at rival Oracle, the last salvo in a bitter competition that was most recently fueled when Oracle filed a lawsuit. SAP officials said in a statement that they will respond to Oracles lawsuit through two press conferences on July 3. The first is scheduled for 2 a.m. EST, […]

After months of searching, Microsoft announced on June 30 that it has named a new leader for the Microsoft Business Solutions group. Microsoft hopes that filling the position will provide direction for the business applications group, which has been struggling to find an identity within Microsoft and to establish its presence in the ERP (enterprise […]

Finally, after months of speculation and rumors, NetSuite Inc. announced July 2 that it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relating to the proposed initial public offering of its common stock. NetSuite, based in San Mateo, Calif., develops on-demand ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] and CRM [Customer […]