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 May 2010
5/28/2010
On this Memorial Day weekend, we have a special chance to hear stories of the unimaginable courage, honor, and sacrifice of the U.S. military. Here's a haunting excerpt from Marcus Luttrell's Lone Survivor, one of those books offering a brief glimpse into the secret lives of these extraordinary warriors who eagerly put themselves in harm's way to protect the rest of us.
5/27/2010
Many leading IT companies are best-known for their legacies instead of their present potential—and that's going to become a big problem.
5/27/2010
I like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's dismissal in the Wall Street Journal of all the frothy media churn over Apple surpassing Microsoft in market cap: "I will make more profits and certainly there is no technology company in the planet which is as profitable as we are." Next question, please?
5/27/2010
With all the chatter about Apple surpassing Microsoft in market-cap, a related detail might deserve more attention: Q1 sales of Android smartphones topped sales of iPhones by 25%, according to a consumer research firm. With consumer engagement driving enterprise adoption, can we expect to see the Google mobile OS starting to crimp the iPhone's style in the business world?
5/27/2010
After Ellison's colorful rants about the cloud's absurdity, idiocy, and nonsense, Oracle's expanding its cloud technology, advocacy, and marketing.
5/26/2010
The Cambridge consolidation of NERDs is underway: Microsoft is relocating two of its suburban-Boston development groups into a new office space in Cambridge that will almost double the size of its facilities there. And about that NERD thing: that's Microsoft's own name for its New England Research & Development center.
5/25/2010
MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson has a new theory on how leading companies are leveraging IT to unlock unprecedented waves of innovation -- and are reinventing R&D.
5/25/2010
Insisting that software piracy in China has become so pervasive that "there is no software market to speak of" in the fast-growing country, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said yesterday that enhanced enforcement in China of intellectual-property rules could save U.S. firms tens of thousands of jobs, Bloomberg reports.
5/25/2010
IBM is planning to hire 600 and possibly up to 800 employees at a proposed new services-delivery center in Columbia, Missouri, and in return will receive various financial incentives totaling about $50,000 per job. It's a great deal for IBM, but is it also a great deal for state and local taxpayers?
5/25/2010
HP released strong financial results last week and in a Q&A session afterward with financial analysts, CEO Mark Hurd offered a range of insights into the company's emerging grand strategy. Here's our take on the 10 most-significant strategic thoughts offered by Hurd.
5/24/2010
Piling on to the popular myth that CIOs know tech but nothing else, a new study's flawed conclusions show that the real know-nothings are the researchers.
5/24/2010
eBay's new $287 million data center in Utah was built in just 14 months and is responsible for managing all transactions and revenue from eBay.com and PayPal.com, which in 2009 totaled $60 billion or about $2,000 per second. Maybe it's no surprise that two of the project's leaders are former tank commanders and West Point graduates. And don't miss the photos!
5/24/2010
The simultaneous transcendence of predictive analytics, real-time computing, and mobile power is creating tremendous new opportunities for CIOs.
5/21/2010
Hewlett-Packard is helping Wal-Mart expand into the publishing business by sweeping aside the old photo-printing model and letting customers select and print everything from greeting cards to branded images from concerts, TV shows, and movies. With other huge retailers signing on as well, HP expects its new retail publishing business will grow 300% this year.
5/21/2010
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, never a particular fan of Microsoft's products, technology, vision, or prospects, can now add its legal strategy to his list of things he can't stand about Microsoft. Commenting on the patent-infringement suit filed against Salesforce.com by Microsoft, Benioff called the Redmond company a "patent troll."
5/21/2010
As HP posts strong growth, CEO Hurd nears the end of his sweeping transformation of the world's biggest IT supplier.
5/20/2010
Follow the logic: enterprise apps are surging onto smartphones, particularly Apple's iPhone. iPhone users will not wait more than 15 seconds to get a response from their device. Ergo, all enterprise apps-even down to lowly dunning reports-must be able to perform at or close to real time. For SAP founder Hasso Plattner, that 15-second maximum might as well be confirmed as a new law of physics.
5/19/2010
In an engaging look at the past and into the future, SAP's founder and chairman laid out the company's development strategy behind "The 'Real' Enterprise 2.0 (powered by in-memory computing)," which he says will give customers phenomenally higher levels of performance and value with absolutely zero risk. Here are his six steps for turning that vision into reality.
5/19/2010
Oracle says the all-Oracle stack cures IT complexity and cost, but SAP says that strategy leads to dead-end lock-in and dramatically less innovation.
5/18/2010
While all IT companies say mobile's strategically vital, SAP is bullishly positioning itself to reap the rewards of a leadership position. See the latest in our SAP Week coverage.
5/18/2010
IBM said it is opening a third services-delivery center in North America, with plans to begin hiring for the Missouri facility this summer. IBM projects that by the end of 2012, it will have up to 800 employees at the center.
5/18/2010
SAP sees mobility as indispensable for customers and for SAP's new strategy. Will that effort give SAP a unique advantage over Oracle? Our SAP Week coverage takes a close look.
5/16/2010
Welcome to SAP Week, our in-depth look at the company's strategy, products, and customers. Today: 10 steps SAP must take to reclaim its global leadership.
5/14/2010
CEO John Chambers says Cisco just had "probably the strongest quarter in our history" and given that storied history, that's a remarkable perspective. But investors have been pooh-poohing Cisco shares, which have actually even fallen a bit: do they know something CIOs should know? Here are four possible explanations from a great equity-research firm.
5/13/2010
Tibco says its new event-driven middleware can dramatically enhance customer engagements and marks the beginning of Enterprise 3.0. (Part 2 of 2-part series.)
5/13/2010
Actually, Workday co-CEO Aneel Bhusri liked the video itself: he called it "enjoyable and amusing." But he didn't care much for the core messages and strategies imparted in the video by SAP's founder and chairman. In fact, he wrote a blog post skewering Plattner and SAP for being five years behind the times and called it, "Welcome to the Present."
5/13/2010
We're all paying for electric cars—even if we don't buy one. So why shouldn't Steve Jobs demand tax breaks for the tree-saving iPad?
5/12/2010
IBM says Indiana owes it $125M from a huge deal canceled before completion. But Indiana says IBM's not getting another dime.
5/12/2010
As Intel CEO Paul Otellini told analysts the company sees strong growth ahead for the next few years, the company's senior VP in charge of leading Intel's incursions into the television business said an Intel coalition with key players in that business will reinvent TV in the coming year.
5/12/2010
In his keynote talk at Tibco's global customer conference, Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble reflected Tibco's new theme of "the 2-second advantage" by describing how, in Interpol's crime-fighting operations in 180 countries, "two seconds is the difference between security and tragedy."
5/11/2010
Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadive' describes how event-driven businesses anticipate demand and stop problems before they happen. (Part 1 of a 2-part series.)
5/10/2010
At a recent meeting of CEOs from the manufacturing industry, Timken Co. CEO Jim Griffith said, "I call this the SAP recession" (and Timken's an SAP customer!). But despite how it bad that sounds, Griffith intended it as a compliment. (I think).
5/10/2010
CEOs are putting extreme pressure on CIOs because IT drives too much complexity and not enough innovation. HP says its broad new strategy can help.
5/10/2010
IBM's CIO describes six internal cloud initiatives, including one the company has turned into a new business-analytics product for external customers.
5/10/2010
The cloud-based apps provider honors 10 customers that have dislodged and dispensed ugly tangles of convoluted and undigestible enterprise apps.
5/7/2010
To support its new $500 million, 5-year strategic engagement with Merck & Co., IT-services firm HCL Americas will be adding at least 100 new positions at its services-delivery center in Cary, North Carolina.
5/6/2010
Focusing on growth and new products as it looks to slash costs by $3.5 billion, Merck is betting long-time partner HCL can help on both strategic fronts.
5/6/2010
At the intersection of two red-hot technologies-the Apple iPad and mobile business intelligence-lie a range of choices: build your own traditional enterprise BI apps; build a web-based BI app; or pluck one from the App Store. Here's a link to a blog post that focuses on the third option and describes six BI products for the iPad from the App Store.
5/6/2010
In a new video, SAP's founder interviews himself (really) on virtues of in-memory databases and Ellison's claim that they are "wacko" and "ridiculous."
5/5/2010
Palmisano's speech shows the power of intelligently applied technology, even in sectors that today seem hopelessly stuck in the past.
5/5/2010
Microsoft's head of anti-piracy efforts says the bad guys are still "one step ahead" of the company's efforts to stifle the $50 billion global software-piracy problem and believes that the rise of cloud computing will make it even tougher to clamp down on the copy-crazy crooks.
5/4/2010
Top execs from the two enterprise-software powerhouses say CIOs must lead growth, transformation, and business impact.
5/4/2010
Facebook former chief privacy officer Chris Kelly is running for attorney general of the state of California, and in a recent blog post he tries, but not very convincingly, to distance himself from the intense criticism engulfing Facebook over its new data-sharing policies. If the privacy culture he fostered at Facebook crumbled so easily, what does that say about his potential as California's top cop?
5/4/2010
A 300,000-seat trial turns into a 2.1M-seat global deal as SuccessFactors' business-execution strategy continues to resonate.
5/3/2010
Just how far is Michael Dell willing to go in downplaying hardware and embracing services? "We are changing our business from being manufacturing-based to one that's focused on services and solutions. And no, we're not done."
5/2/2010
Indiana cancels a $1.34B outsourcing deal with IBM and the always-ugly "disengagement" process has begun.
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