Summertime is the time to mull.

Today I have the time to consider whether Microsoft and Nortel — currently unified communications (UC) partners — will move from heavy dating to marriage.

According to channel partners of both companies, rumors of such an acquisition have been swirling for some time. They say that while an acquisition is not apparent in the near term, none would be surprised to see it happen eventually. 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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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 »

WiMax is having a rough life — and this week epitomizes that.

The wireless protocol for broadband access — known in long form as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access — started off the week on a high note. On Monday, six tech heavy hitters, including Cisco Systems, Samsung Electronics, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, Sprint and Clearwire formed the Open Patent Alliance.

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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 »

MySQL execs took to the road this week, talking up the database’s increasing relevance to big businesses.

The message at a Boston event Tuesday night, was that Sun Microsystems’ buyout of the open source database company gives MySQL easier entry into very large accounts.

Read more »

Microsoft’s new Dynamics AX 2009, now available, targets multinational companies. This release lets companies combine multiple time zones and currencies in a single ERP instance. — something that should suit mid-sized and even large companies with sites in multiple countries, according to Kees Hertogh, Microsoft Dynamics product manager.

Also new: Bi-directional support for Arabic languages. That means that PC screens in Arabic-speaking offices will read right to left with the appropriate character set while other offices can retain their screen look-and-feel. Read more »

A new version of the Google Web Toolkit (Gwit to Google insiders), promises full support for the latest Java language as well as faster-running apps at the end of the process.

GWT 1.5 will be formally introduced by Google’s top engineer Vic Gundotra Wednesday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco and be available for download within days.
“The biggest news is the Java 5 language support. Java itself has evolved a lot in the last few yeas and GWT 1.5 supports those new language features including the more modern syntax, generics and enumerated types,” said Google engineering manager Bruce Johnson.
As before, the goal of GWT is to make it easier for developers to create JavaScript code that can run on a wide variety of devices.

Johnson said early testers report better application performance. “Additional compiler optimizations in 1.5 result in noticeable application performance improvement,’ Johnson claimed.
Alex Moffat , engineering manager at Lombardi, Austin, Texas, is fully aboard. “The big benefit in 1.5, he says, is the support for all the new Java 5 syntax improvements. “They’ve added support for generics so you can write code that gives the compiler more information so you can catch more errors at compile time. You can now avoid a whole class of mistakes,” Moffat said.
Much of Lombardi’s Blueprint document discovery tool’s front end was written in GWT while the backend is all Java.

“If you are a Java shop, you’d have to be an idiot not to use GWT for the Web front end these days,” Moffat said. Non Java (i.e. .Net) shops would have to acquire Java expertise before venturing in.

With GWT, Google is making a play for business developers. Companies like Queplix, Contact Office, DoubleCheck LLC and Lombardi Software all use the current GWT 1.4 to develop applications ranging from customer care to business process management. 

This year Google  is even charging conference admission fee for the first time,  apparently trying to weed out non-serious programmers.  

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Microsoft partners really, really, really want to be recognized by the quality of their work. And not surprisingly, they want to be paid for it.

One recurring theme sounded by Gold Certified partners as reported earlier this week in SearchITChannel.com, is that being Gold is no longer enough. These partners say there are too many VARs sporting the Gold designation and that leads to cut-throat pricing to win deals. And razor thin margins on the deals won.

Several solution providers, Rand Morimoto, president of Converged Computing among them, say the vendor needs to recognize its truly -top tier partners.

“I’ve always commented to Microsoft that there’s a need for a ‘platinum’ level, kind of like what Novell had during their heyday,”

Partners say Microsoft has been told this over and over and talks about better recognition of partners who put the most “skin in the game” but still resists the notion of another program level.

But least one Gold partner disagrees with the notion of another tier, saying that would just add more confusion into an already confused partner program.

Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) Dynamics partners, in particular, feel that the company has done too much recruiting in their bailiwick. This is a particular sore point since the ERP and CRM offerings they deal with make for a longer sales cycle, more hand holding and thus so far command higher margins than the volume-oriented Windows-Office-SharePoint-type products that can be sold by anyone. A Dynamics sale, on the other hand, requires an authorized MBS partner.

“There seems to be a continued push to add more and more partners instead of driving the capacity and ability to scale to those partners that continue to constantly grow and invest in Microsoft. The monies spent on recruiting new partners should be directed toward accelerating and adding capacity to the successful partners in the channel,” said one partner, who thinks his organization would benefit from this treatment. But he is not alone. Over the past two or three years, there has been a push among larger MBS partners to consolidate talent and geographical coverage all to better sell and support CRM and ERP applications.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.