An Enterprise Software Tsunami: Oracle/Citrix, Lawson in Healthcare, Open Source Education, and More

The lot of the information technology (IT) opiner is sometimes overwhelming.  Catching up on news that has varying effects on IT investment research as the first week of January 2010 ends I read that:

• Lawson (LAWS) is putting Quovadx out of its misery. But will Lawson simply catch Quovadx's ailments? I need to get a hold of Terry Blake at Lawson to find out if the emphasis on Quovadx Healthvision in the Lawson press release means it is not picking up (in alphabetical order) the former CareScience/Confer/Healthcare.com/ HCI/HIE/Hublink/Integrated Media/MPower/Noblenet/Outlaw/Pixel/Riley Dike Dosher/Rouge Wave/Xcare.net. Or maybe all those pieces became Healthvision? It's all a little too Oracle (ORCL)-ish for me and Lawson is not Oracle in terms of being able to handle that melange. (But Lawson CEO Harry Debes is experienced at it; he came to Lawson from Geac by way of J.D. Edwards.)

• Speaking of Oracle, it acquired Silver Creek and more importantly is rumored to be after Citrix (CTRX). If you follow this blog you know I don't think highly of government anti-competition bureaucracies but now I think I've found a deal they should object to.

• CDC wants to buy Chordiant (CHRD). I thought maybe that meant CDC wanted to get into customer relationship management (CRM) to complement its past acquisitions of Ross, Catalyst and other ERP/supply chain management (SCM) players. But old friend and CRM guru Mary Wardley of IDC says "Where have you been?" Turns out CDC has slowly been building up its CRM bonafides for some time. I guess this means that the second-tier non-SaaS CRM players will start to get bought up by the Infors of the world.

The Mellon Foundation is pulling grant money from the open source education software world. That news led me to a short discussion yesterday with Patrick Burns, "CIO" of Colorado State University (CSU), which has recently retired a decades-old mainframe-based FRS installation in favor of the open source Kuali educational-financial-management software developed with Mellon grant money. Kuali was developed under an interesting concept that a group of universities calls "community source" instead of open source. CSU is also using Banner for student admin and Oracle HR, a real mix of the old and new. More to come on this bullet because I think there is a strong relation to the next one.

Michael Krigsman continues his rant about trillions of dollars being wasted in IT. I figure best case (I guess I should say "worst case") that IT departments are only "wasting" a half a trillion or so, "only" 16% of spend and a much smaller percentage of total IT expense. Interviewing more than 1000 "CIOs" and writing up about 500 of the interviews in case studies and the like in the last 20 years tells me there is no problem here. I doubt if such "waste," and it's never really all wasted, is any different than in any other human activity. In addition, Michael seems to think it all relates to the possible demise or preferable demise of the enterprise software market as we all know it. So it makes for a good discussion for us IT market opiners.

Apparently not all IT market analysts can handle the flood of events.

Speaking of Quovadx and FRS and CDC and the gobbling up of second-tier enterprise software name brands, congratulations to Bruce Richardson of AMR, one of the few IT analysts who can say he has been doing this stuff longer than I have. Apparently overwhelmed by the tsunami of enterprise software news this week, Bruce has gone back to work in the mines, as Chief Strategy Officer of Infor. Infor is the poster child for enterprise software brands lost in the mists of time and that only Richardson and I could recall.

Infor includes the hall of fame of last century ERP and SCM, including the former Agilisys/D&B/Geac/JBA/Marcam/Mapics/Nxtrend/SSA and more than two dozen other enterprise software nameplates. I have suggested Oracle sell the J.D. Edwards line to Infor so that all the former AS/400 guys could get some comfort level under one roof.

My guess is that Richardson just could not stand to see the word Gartner on his business card after 30 years of competing against it.

 -- Dennis Byron