Software AG announced yesterday it has acquired native PaaS vendor LongJump for an undisclosed sum. LongJump is one of the ‘oldest’ PaaS vendors, being on the market since 2003. The company has only 19 employees, yet it boasts a significant list of enterprise clients such as Cisco, AT&T, Nielsen, Deloitte or US Data Corp. LongJump’s cloud application development platform can [...]

One of the most interesting Big Data software companies I’ve met for some time is WANdisco – which I found a little surprising for a company that’s not from California, but from Sheffield, England. Sheffield is best known as the cradle of the steel industry (and the setting of “The Full Monty,” a movie poignantly depicting the effect of industrial [...]

Atos is coordinating an interesting PaaS-related, EU-funded R&D project focused on Cloud interoperability, governance and open standards. “Cloud4SOA” is creating a middleware framework for applications developers wanting to use a PaaS platform that promises Cloud interoperability and PaaS platform independence. The project is soon to get its first beta release. While not many people talk these days about SOA (almost [...]

The latest output from the European Commission on e-security makes for interesting reading for software and services providers. Entitled Cybersecurity Strategy of the European Union: An Open, Safe and Secure Cyberspace, it is remarkable in its focus on common sense. For decades cyber-criminals have operated more or less with abandon as separate governments and industries have been in permanent reactive [...]

Oracle made an unexpected, creative and strategic move yesterday with its purchase of Acme Packet for $1.7bn. Acme Packet is a US-based “global provider of session border control technology:” It facilitates delivery of voice, data and unified communications services and applications over IP networks. Acme is used particularly by telcos but also by large enterprises and service providers such as [...]

SAP’s announcement of the availability of SAP HANA as a database for its SAP Business Suite was not unexpected, and yet it is true that the vendor has introduced a major advance to the core system, opening up new possibilities for process innovation – what SAP refers to as ‘real-time business.’ Customers now have the option to use SAP HANA [...]

PAC spent time last week speaking with HCL’s senior management about its business and prospects, particularly in Europe. HCL is one of the biggest India-based IT services providers, but some way behind the “big four” (including Cognizant). What’s notable is that it’s taking share: the fastest growing IT service provider of Europe’s Top 30 over the last two years. Notably, [...]

There is no doubt that SAP HANA is a central piece of SAP’s developing product architecture. According to PAC’s latest survey, SAP users are aware of this fact and are already expressing a lot of interest in the topic. However, customers are not sure yet about the role which SAP HANA should play within their companies. On the one hand, [...]

Many column inches have been written in the last week picking over HP’s writedown of its Autonomy investment, and its allegations of accounting irregularities by Autonomy prior to the acquisition. But it seems to us that something that is rather overlooked in all this is HP’s overall software strategy. Although much opprobrium has been heaped on Léo Apotheker for his [...]

One of the key messages to emerge from SAP’s big Sapphire/TechEd user conference last week in Madrid was the centrality of HANA to its developing product architecture. SAP is betting big on HANA’s success [...]