Enterprise Software News on the Cutting Room Floor

Each week, I make a prioritized list of new enterprise-software issues I want to blog about. But almost every day during the week another news item intervenes, the push/pop stack goes to work, and items near the top of the list get pushed down. Eventually most go so low I never get to them. So if you think any one of these enterprise-software news items from the week of July 20 might affect you either personally or professionally, and you would like me to dig deeper into their information technology (IT) planning and budgeting aspects, send an e-mail and I’ll change my priorities.

• Why does Intuit stop and go in the payroll processing outsourcing business, disgorging a unit one year to ADP and buying a company the next year to start a new payroll processing unit? If you’re involved as a client of either the outgoing on incoming company, how might it affect you?
  
• Why do Red Hat, Novell, IBM and others need a front group in Washington (multiple front groups in Red Hat’s and Sun’s case) to push their products on U.S. taxpayers? Aren’t the products’ features and benefits good enough to stand on their own? (I have blogged on the IT investment research aspects of Open Source for America on my own site if anyone is interested.)
• What does JDA Software have going for it in this down economy? I’d argue that it is its industry centricity that you like but that’s just an off-the-top-of-the-head opinion. Let me know what you think.
• When I saw Lorraine Lawson's post Thursday that Oracle bought Goldengate, I thought at first it meant Golden Gate Capital/Infor, not the BI software company. Wouldn’t it be something if Oracle added all the 50-something Infor brands to its stable? That would be full time work for the whole U.S. Department of Justice anti-trust group. Actually, I would like to see it go the other way around. Oracle should sell the old J.D. Edwards business to Infor so as to get all those old System/36-AS/400 warhorses (JDE, BPCS, Mapics, Marcam, Software 2000, and so forth) into a lush pasture for their impending retirement.
• Whose spending all this money on enterprise mashups? Are they counting program development time in IT departments in the spending estimate or do they mean you're sending a check to someone to license and maintain some enterprise services/components/applets (depending on your generation)?