Robert Deshaies and Cynthia Bates will divvy up responsibilities for Microsoft’s US partner organization, Microsoft said late Wednesday night.

Deshaies, who had been vice president of the US Partner Group is now vice president of Partner Business Development & Sales, a new role. Cindy Bates, who had been general manager of Microsoft’s Small Business Group was promoted to vice president of US Partner Strategy for marketing and programs. Read more »

Larry Ellison had some interesting thoughts on the on-demand model, especially intriguing as he retains his interest in NetSuite, the on-demand ERP provider. His ownership stake, which might appear to be a conflict since Oracle competes with NetSuite, is in some sort of blind trust.

Oracle’s CEO said the company’s on-demand business posted 25% growth year over year but seemed to agree with a questioner that it had been hovering at about 3% of overall revenue for some time.

“We’ve been in the on-demand business for almost a decade. We’re the second largest provider of sales automation software behind Salesforce.com and Q4 was the first quarter we actually made money [at it],” he told analysts on the fourth quarter and fiscal year ‘08 earnings call Wednesday night.

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It’s that time of year for the database market share squabble. IDC has released its numbers–at least to the vendors–and two of the three big database players are claiming victory.

From the snippets the vendors themselves release, it’s hard to draw conclusions. It’s like the blind men and the elephant: You can’t judge the entire gestalt from mere fragments.

On its earnings call last night, Oracle president Charles Phillips crowed about IDC data showing Oracle’s database share at 44.3% vs. 21% for IBM vs. 18.5% for Microsoft.

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Being an Oracle partner can be a pricey business.

For example: If you’re a select Oracle partner who wants face time with Oracle reps at the vendor’s yearly sales kickoff, you can pay either $6K, $10K or $25K for the privilege.

For that amount you get to be an Exhibitor Partner at the big Las Vegas event. The idea is to get your pitch to Oracle sales reps. There are many. The event draws some 40,000 people in early June. Maybe even (knock wood) get a look from Charles or Larry. Read more »

Canonical on Tuesday posted its Ubuntu Mobile Internet Device (MID) Edition to its website.

This is a developers’ release based on the desktop edition of the Linux fan-favorite Ubuntu operating system. The release should help developers tailor apps to smaller screens

Ubuntu MID will start to follow the usual Ubuntu six-month release cycle starting with the Ubuntu 8.10 release.

This year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference will be in Houston. In July. One word: Ugh.

And, interestingly, insiders say preliminary numbers show that more than half (60%) of attendees will be from outside the U.S. That’s a first, to my knowledge and is at least partially attributable to the incredible shrinking dollar.

Note to vendors: If you’re gonna drag people into triple-digit heat and humidity, make it cheap.

As for news: Look for Microsoft to talk up repeatable solutions in SMB markets. And don’t forget SaaS and the mega-billion dollar question of how partners fit into Microsoft’s software plus services game plan. That’ll be a big theme.  Read more »

MySQL is switching version control ships, leaving BitKeeper for Bazaar, an open-source version control system.

“Both the main MySQL server code and the code for many ancillary projects have been converted to Bazaar and are published on Launchpad,” blogged Kaj Arno, MySQL’s vice president of community. (Sun Microsystems bought MySQL earlier this year.) Read more »

The Cadillac of databases has become the Mercedes. Ok, that might not be the right analogy, so let’s just say that Oracle has hiked prices across its software portfolio. Significantly.

An example: Per CPU pricing on the big Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition database is now $47,500 vs. $40,000 before. Per user pricing on the same SKU is now $950 vs. $800. Read more »

For many VARs, cloud-based computing is a worrisome prospect.

The notion of functions served up direct to users from a vendor-owned-and-operated cloud poses a huge disintermediation threat to partners, as Richard Warren, of North Carolina Technologies told SearchITChannel.com, earlier this week.

 But the cloud vendors still need to prove themselves able to fully compete in a world where 99.9% of users need remote or offline capabilities. They need to work on their data and apps even if they’re not (gasp) connected to the Web.

Google execs say they will prove their technology worthy of the enterprise, blazing the trail with the Google Appliance. Google Gears is starting to bring offline capability to the company’s consumer and business services — Google Reader is “Gears enabled” as is Google Docs. (The spreadsheet and presentations so far  support just view-only offline access.) Read more »

Spreadsheet pioneer Dan Bricklin is at it again. The father of VisiCalc is now working to bring the spreadsheet’s productivity to workgroups.

Bricklin, in his trademark flannel shirt (it’s nearly 100 degrees out!) said hello before heading into Ross Mayfield’s Enterprise 2.0 keynote. Mayfield is chairman, prez and co-founder of Socialtext– the company working on Bricklin’s “Social Spreadsheet.” Read more »