Epicor held its annual Insights user conference this week in Las Vegas. This was the first gathering for customers of both Epicor and Activant since the two firms merged last year. Although Epicor made many announcements, in this blog post I prefer to focus on three elements of Epicor's strategy: Epicor's "new culture," its vision to preserve customers' investment in Epicor's products, and its strategy to adopt Microsoft Azure as its go-foward cloud infrastructure.

Last week Citrix held their 7th annual Synergy conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco with close to 7000 people in attendance. Many of the infrastructure products that Citrix sells ($2B+ revenue in 2011) are outside of my coverage area, but now that they are increasing their focus on providing software that helps people get work done, I was honoured to attend the event. Below are my thoughts around their collaboration portfolio which includes GoToMeeting, ShareFile and the recently acquired Podio.

It's How You Tell The Story

SAP’s In The Midst Of Massive Transformation

While enterprise cloud computing pioneers such as NetSuite and Salesforce.com get much of the attention, there is some interesting cloud-work going on among traditional enterprise software providers. One such provider is Infor. I had the opportunity to get an update on Infor’s cloud computing program last week, at Infor’s annual user conference, Inforum. The bottom line: I see Infor’s cloud strategy as having two prongs, and it is beginning to bear fruit.

SAP’s thinking on mobility has been evolving. After its Sybase acquisition, it put the “Sybase Unwired Platform” at the center of its mobility strategy. You want to build mobile apps for SAP? Wonderful—buy, borrow, or otherwise get access to the SAP products you want to integrate with, plus an instance of SUP, and have at it. The problem was, however, that this approach limits the number of developers. SAP, to its credit, appears to understand the problem. In its announcements, two were especially noteworthy in terms of addressing the needs of the developer masses and in terms of filling out SAP’s own mobile apps portfolio. But are they enough?

SAP is further refining its database strategy, positioning itself as "a database company." Although the goal is admirable, SAP faces challenges in achieving its goal. First, from the customer perspective, database migrations are difficult to justify, even with SAP's willingness to subsidize some of the work. Ultimately, very few organizations want to buy databases—or middleware. They want business applications, and those apps require databases and middleware as part of the technology stack. Second, from the perspective of technology start-ups, open source solutions may be more attractive than HANA.

In March, I had the honor of kicking off the first episode of the Social Talent Show, a bi-monthly virtual event sponsored by TalentCulture, UpMo and #TChat (@Twitter).