The Most Important Enterprise Apps Stories of 2007

Oracle continued its nearly three-year-long acquisition binge-including a bid for BEA-and touted its applications strategy to investors during earnings calls, but some industry watchers sounded a warning call.

BEA declined Oracle’s unsolicited bid to buy the company at a premium and restated earnings to prove its worth. Carl Icahn, a major shareholder, threatened a proxy battle if BEA didn’t consider Oracle’s offer. The fallout for BEA is yet to be determined.

Oracle’s suit against SAP and its TomorrowNow subsidiary brought into question the third-party application support model, including intellectual property rights, and cast a long shadow of doubt on SAP’s motives. After careful review, the judge in the case

Technology and all-around business wunderkind Shai Agassi resigned from SAP, leaving a gaping hole perhaps not in the company’s technology road map but in its ability to convey its message and convert the masses.

Salesforce.com introduced its Apex programming language, the first on-demand, multitenant language on the market, setting a new standard for on-demand development and infrastructure as a service.

Ending months of speculation and secrecy, SAP launched its BBD (Business ByDesign) on-demand suite, formerly known as A1S, and set an incredibly high customer acquisition target. The question is whether BBD will live up to the hype.

The business intelligence sector rapidly consolidated in 2007 with Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion, followed by SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects and IBM’s acquisition of Cognos. The latter two deals likely won’t close until early 2008, when the

After months of talking about it, Microsoft released its Titan CRM on-demand code to about 300 partners in early 2007 and promised a full release by year’s end. As of press time, the actual code is nowhere to be seen. And the real story around Titan-

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