In Enterprise Software News, the Holiday Season Starts Early

During a slow news week for enterprise software, it’s tough to be a blogger. There’s nothing interesting to comment on.

The trade press must be having the same problem because this is what I found in googling “enterprise software” filtered by “news” and “past week.” The No. 1-ranked story about enterprise software for the past week (as of Saturday, Nov. 14) is about a pink-sheet-listed company called Solutions Group Inc. It has released “a comprehensive set of business modules to seamlessly manage complex business units through an easy-to-use Web-based interface.” Everyone needs some of those. Pink-sheet listed companies, if you are not familiar with the term, are companies whose shares are publicly traded but not on an exchange. Often they are called over-the-counter shares. That doesn’t mean there is any thing wrong with the product, the company or the shares. I’m just amazed that it is the highest-ranked news story about enterprise software this week.

But it’s not surprising when you look through the rest of the search list.

“Open Source Software (is) Ready for Big Business,” according to PCWorld.com. Besides the fact that large enterprises have always been the leading, if not almost exclusive users of open source software, I like the line that says:

Adoption has also been fueled by the success of established open source companies such as Red Hat, Novell, ….

Novell has sure done a great job of re-inventing its image from the days of NetWare lock-in.

A couple of trade magazines and newspapers hyped year-old Forrester research saying ERP spending would hold steady in 2009. How’s that working out for you, SAP and Oracle?

ZDNet says “Enteprises are saving $26 million per project…” using open source software. ZDNet readers outed that claim for the ridiculous excuse for news that it was. Readers said that meant that you IT folks would have had to be spending more than $100 million on every IT project. (And remember, software is only a relatively small percentage of most IT project's expense budget, so what it really meant is that you would have had to be spending $100 million just on software on every IT project.)

In the IT investment research world, HP bought 3Com and JDA bought i2… again as some good bloggers pointed out. JDA had tried to acquire i2 about a year ago, only for the deal to go sour in the 2008 panic. As for 3Com, well… refer back to the comment about Novell above. 3Com didn’t do a very good job of re-inventing itself. I mean it moved here to Massachusetts from Silicon Valley, for crying out loud; what was that about?

I hope the news picks up next week, but I fear we’re already into the holiday doldrums. I’m might have to go out and hustle up some news to comment on.

But wait a minute... holiday doldrums… that means it’s time for end-of-year recaps and 2010 predictions.