Pete Babb's blog

Salesforce leaps into social networking

Pete Babb — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:48:20 +0000

Salesforce.com today introduced Salesforce Chatter, a social networking service in the cloud that customers use to set up secure walled gardens for collaborative business efforts. The new offering also enables subscribers to the Force.com app dev platform to turn existing Force.com applications into social apps.

IBM debuts massive analytics cloud

Pete Babb — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:00:00 +0000

IBM has launched what it says is the world's largest private cloud for business analytics, dubbed Blue Insight, and used the internal template to create a separate offering for clients called IBM Smart Analytics Cloud.

Bing incorporates Wolfram Alpha APIs

Pete Babb — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:16:56 +0000

If you often find yourself pondering how many calories are in the meal you're cooking or needing to plot a complex equation, Microsoft's Bing has got you covered, courtesy of Wolfram Alpha. The company, which says its mission is to "make the world's knowledge computable," is bringing some of its data and algorithms to Microsoft's search engine, meaning users can get answers to queries like "what's my BMI?" directly within Bing.

Avaya helps automate incident response

Pete Babb — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:00:00 +0000

Enterprise communications vendor Avaya has been talking up the idea of CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes) for years now, but with its announcement of Avaya Notification Solution (ANS) at VoiceCon on Monday, the company took a big step toward moving CEBP from abstraction to reality.

Splunk announces free IT search app

Pete Babb — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:39:20 +0000

Splunk likes to call itself "the Google of IT." Its product crawls network in search of log data -- stuff typically ignored until something goes wrong -- indexes it, and presents it in a graphical BI (business intelligence) format that IT decision makers can use to optimize performance, availability, and security.

NetSuite plugs into Oracle financial software

Pete Babb — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:42:21 +0000

While all the hubbub last week was around Oracle OpenWorld, where vendors nattered on about increasing application agility and clearing out clutter in the middleware stack, NetSuite -- a software-as-a-service company in which Larry Ellison is a major investor -- made an interesting announcement .

SAP and Novell expand governance partnership

Pete Babb — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:50:17 +0000

SAP and Novell announced at TechEd today an expansion of their partnership with a focus on GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) issues. The move combines SAP's business process background (including elements from the BusinessObjects portfolio, which SAP acquired in 2007) with Novell's security and compliance expertise to provide a full GRC solution.

Apptio brings analytics into the IT shop

Pete Babb — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:50:37 +0000

Back in 2007, Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta noticed a disconnect when it comes to enterprise IT: Technologists have a technology agenda, but CEOs have a business agenda, and the two don't always overlap. In fact, the two are often starkly different. Technology is strategic to business, but enterprises don't always think of it as such and have resisted applying BI (business intelligence) to their in-house IT operations. Furthermore, IT is too complex and constantly shifting for a standard BI model to work.

Microsoft announces Project 2010

Pete Babb — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:32:26 +0000

Microsoft is announcing today the latest step in its next wave of Office-related products, Project 2010, which the company says is the biggest Project release in a decade. The software has been given a significant upgrade with an eye toward simplifying project management.

Salesforce.com announces Service Cloud 2

Pete Babb — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Salesforce.com upgraded its Service Cloud customer service offering today with Service Cloud 2. The upgrades include three major new features: Salesforce Knowledge, Salesforce Answers, and Salesforce for Twitter.