Charlie Wood is an Austin, TX-based entrepreneur and fellow Enterprise Irregular blogger. After his sister got laid off, he came up with an interesting experiment to help her out (inspired in part by his going back to school to get a degree in Economics). 

...when I learned that my sister Martha had just been laid off from her tech writer/editor position at Freescale here in Austin, I saw her job search as an opportunity cost problem.She's already begun her search for a similar position here in town and will undoubtedly find something suitable. But there's an opportunity cost for the time she spends searching (and not earning).It occurred to me that she would come out ahead if she could pay to reduce that amount of time as long as her out-of-pocket cost was less than the opportunity cost of the time saved....

The first person to lead her to the job she winds up taking gets $500. Specifically, she's looking for a full-time technical writer or editor job in the Austin area. She's held similar roles at companies as diverse as ichat, HP, and Freescale, and is exceptionally smart and very professional.

Please email your job leads to martha.wood.jobs@gmail.com

Does Cloud Computing Mean More Risks to Privacy?

Interesting NY Times article on privacy with regards to information/data you may store in the cloud. For me this would currently mean mostly Gmail and Facebook, but loads of folks are using Google Docs. 

I generally regard my Gmail differently than my work emails (which I know don't belong to me and assume anything written there will someday come to light). According to this article, maybe I should change the way I feel about Gmail too:

a government investigator, or even a lawyer in a civil lawsuit, can get access to records by simply using a subpoena rather than a search warrant, which requires more scrutiny by a court.

The article refers to a World Privacy Forum report that states: “Don’t put anything in the cloud you wouldn’t want a competitor, your government or another government to see.”

"Don't put anything???" Wow and I was mainly just worried about those pictures of over exuberance in college and bad fashion choices in high school. 

SAP Buys PasS Vendor Coghead's Intellectual Property

No commentary, just a few facts from a news report (below) and then some other bloggers' takes (er, below that).

SAP AG has bought the rights to the intellectual property of Coghead Inc., a vendor of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) tools that is in the process of shutting down....Coghead is one of numerous vendors, both large and small, that have developed PaaS tools — cousins of software-as-a-service applications that can be used to create cloud-based apps. Coghead's PaaS offering provides a visual editing environment, workflow and integration tools and a database, along with an underlying computing infrastructure provided through Amazon.com Inc.'s Elastic Compute Cloud.

Coté was interviewed and cited in the Computerworld article:

Coghead's technology is a good fit for SAP, having been a popular PaaS option among the community of SAP developers, according to Michael Coté, an analyst at consulting firm RedMonk. In addition, SAP's venture capital arm invested in Coghead two years ago, a move that "sort of blessed" the PaaS vendor's technology for use by SAP developers," Coté said.

He noted that there also is a "thriving subculture" of SAP developers who are interested in using emerging technologies. One example, Coté said, is the Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment, a Twitter-like messaging service being developed by SAP community members.

SAP Acquires Coghead Assets - NY Times

Coghead customers left high and dry despite SAP acquisition - ComputerWeekly.com

Bloggers

Bob Warfield

TechCrunch

ZDNet

[SAP] [Coghead]

The Future of Cloud Computing in Plain English

After yesterday's post, some of you may think that I just sit around in my office throwing wooden shoes into the loom. However, today, I listened to a Goldman Sachs conference call titled, "The Future of Cloud Computing." My expectations are generally pretty low for these kinds of things, but I found both the structured part of the call and the Q&A to very informative. The guest speakers were Chris Barbin, CEO, Appirio and Billy Marshall, Founder, rPath. When I say the call was good, I mean that Chris and Billy had quite interesting and informative things to say and I learned something. After the call I found Billy's blog, and on it this video "Cloud Computing in Plain English." While I wouldn't describe it as "pretend like your explaining it to your parents" level, it does give a pretty straightforward explanation of rPath's view on the terms "Cloud," "Virtualization," and "Saas." There's a bit on the difference between Cloud and Saas which you may or may not agree with. I'd encourage you to check it out. 

[Cloud] [Saas] [Virtualization] [Appirio] [rPath] [Chris Barbin] [Billy Marshall]

Tweet this: Sage innovates without Web 2.0

The supposed talking heads of enterprise software often complain that there's little "innovation" any more in the industry. I've never been sure what they mean by "innovation," but most recently it seems it must include an integration to the newest Web 2.0 app as a requisite. What I actually think is more useful, if not sexy or innovative, is when vendors put something out that improves the lives of a large number of users at a large number of their customers. (Man, I'm boring!). I think what Sage has done with  it's CRM ACT! 11 is an example of this. (Caveat, I haven't used ACT since I was a sales guy years ago and am thus basing this on having read a few articles and imaging what this integration does). Critics (or cynics) may argue that integrating MS Outlook calendar and email functionality with a CRM system is not innovative, but I would argue that the impact of this integration on a daily user of both applications is significant. But what the hell do I know? I work at a traditional software company and I don't even Twitter! 

Sage recently re-announced this integration at CeBIT in Germany this week, but I also found this article in English from last year.

[Sage][Outlook][ACT!]

SAP announces Business Suite 7

There was a press conference here in the SAP New York office yesterday. Seems I was the only one who didn't wear a suit. Oops. (to be fair, I'm not on the Marketing email DL so I can plead ignorance).  Anyway, SAP announced the release of the latest version of its flagship Business Suite solution, Business Suite 7. Here's a video of the event. Co-CEO Leo Apotheker speaks near the beginning, followed by SAP Board Member Jim Hagemann Snabe who lead the development of BS 7. Finally, there is a customer panel.

Here are a couple of press write ups:

Information Week - SAP Business Suite 7.0 Kills Usual Software Upgrade Process
Reuters - SAP launches biggest software upgrade in 3 years

Also, a few of the Enterprise Irregulars were here and/or blogged about it:
Larry Dignan - Is SAP really done with ’scary upgrades’ and ’sleepless night’ projects?

Dennis Howlet - SAP BusinessSuite 7: Twittery clouds? 

Dennis also did some cool stuff with CoveritLive here

Vinnie Merchandani  - It's a bird. It's a plane. It is BS7.

Also, in response to a question from Vinnie during the Q&A there were some interesting comments from Fortune 500 execs on the iPhone in the enterprise.

[SAP] [Business Suite] [BS7]