Profile of Bob Evans
News & Commentary Posts: 1070
Bob Evans is senior VP, communications, for Oracle Corp. He is a former InformationWeek editor.
Articles by Bob Evans
posted in December 2009
12/18/2009
Oracle's conference call Thursday with financial analysts offered great insights on how its top three executives view their business and the overall IT market, their customers' spending habits, Oracle's products, and its competitors (see second half of headline). Here are 10 such comments you won't want to miss.
12/17/2009
The European Commission will "unconditionally clear the acquisition of Sun in January," Oracle president Safra Catz has just predicted, while also thanking customers for their "overwhelming" support. Hmm--sounds like Catz knows more than she's saying.
12/17/2009
"CIOs understand the potential business benefits of cloud computing but are challenged with how best to manage the risks associated with adoption," said HP executive VP Thomas E. Hogan. Amen to that-so three new HP products are designed to mitigate the risks associated with the security, performance, and availability of enterprise apps in the cloud.
12/16/2009
As it prepares to release second-quarter results tomorrow, Oracle could be showing signs of improvement: EU approval for the Sun deal seems to be close, it's digesting $300 million in restructuring costs, and one influential analyst sees potential pipeline optimism due to "thawing in both database and middleware spending."
12/14/2009
Oracle has just released 10 commitments to customers and developers about MySQL's future accessibility and openness in the hope of gaining EU approval to acquire Sun. Combined with the powerful customer endorsements given to the EU late last week, these promises would appear to put Oracle on the verge of gaining approval to acquire Sun and all of its assets.
12/13/2009
Accenture has dropped Tiger Woods as a featured advertising icon for the company after a six-year sponsorship, the Wall Street Journal has just reported. Ironically, a recent column in the Journal focused on one of the key lines from Accenture's long-time and hugely successful partnership with Woods: "It's what you do next that counts."
12/9/2009
It's unwise to expect much intellectual integrity from the European Union bureaucrats as they put the screws to Oracle, but leader Neelie Kroes has set a new low by dismissing and mocking an official letter of support for Oracle from the U.S. Senate. This is the most disgraceful proof yet that the EU is purely playing politics while thousands of Sun employees lose their jobs.
12/8/2009
As Microsoft and SAP prepare giddily to hammer Oracle in Brussels this week, those two big and dominant global companies damn well better remember that they could be next on the EU rack because the EU's objectives aren't about "fairness"--they're about politics and power. Appeasing the EU now won't grant them sanctuary later--it will only embolden the bureaucrats of Brussels.
12/3/2009
Your business is kinda gritty so it's not really possible for you to offer a fancy-schmancy iPhone app, right? Wrong!! A new iPhone app from the AAMCO car-care chain "lets our customers take that peace of mind with them wherever they go by putting our expert technicians right on their phones."
12/2/2009
A Credit Suisse analyst has boosted his target price for Accenture shares from $42 to $55 on the expectation that enterprise IT spending is beginning to loosen up and that Accenture will be a prime beneficiary of CIOs' more-expansive spending habits and their increasing acceptance of outsourcing.
12/2/2009
Based in Bangalore, India, a Tata subsidiary that specializes in video effects and animation will open a high-tech delivery center in Los Angeles next week to cater to Hollywood's appetite for video wizardry. Since this is clearly a case of outsourcing, I must ask the question: will the professional positions created at the new lab be "our jobs"?
12/1/2009
Looking to show that turnabout is very fair play, Sun has launched a campaign to snatch customers from HP with a "no-risk migration assessment" aimed at HP enterprise users who "are facing higher support costs, performance and availability issues, and loss of ISV support for critical business applications."