'Nederlanders mogen trotser zijn'

We mogen best wat trotser zijn op Nederland. Dat vindt althans de helft van de 24.000 respondenten die meewerkten aan het jaarlijkse Koninginnedag onderzoek van actualiteitenrubriek EénVandaag waarvan de resultaten vandaag werden bekendgemaakt.

55 Procent zegt dat ze zelf trots zijn op Nederland. Eenderde is neutraal en 12 procent is niet trots. De meeste ondervraagden denken ook dat Nederlanders minder trots zijn op hun land dan andere Europese volken. Koningin Beatrix, prins Willem-Alexander, Paul de Leeuw, Erica Terpstra en Rita Verdonk vertegenwoordigen het meest 'het Nederland gevoel'.

A Practical Demonstration of SaaS using Oracle Application Express

by Steve Bobrowski

Learn the basic concepts of "software as a service" architecture by building your own mini-SaaS application.

Whether you believe in creation, intelligent design, or Darwinism, evolution is an undeniable process that spans most everything around us. In nature, species evolve to survive in an ever-changing environment. And in business, well-managed companies evolve their business operations to compete better and increase profits.

One of the most prevalent trends in today's business world is an evolution toward the delivery and consumption of software as a service, or SaaS. This article explains some of the fundamental concepts, benefits, and implementation details of SaaS and provides a workshop on building a demonstration application so that developers and consumers can better understand and take advantage of this emerging technology.

Why SaaS?

In the broadest sense, SaaS is an uncomplicated concept: customers access software as a hosted application over the Internet. So why is such a straightforward idea all the rage? Consider a simple example that compares how a medium-size or large business might implement a standard customer relationship management (CRM) application by taking two different approaches: the traditional on-premises, application ownership model versus the on-demand SaaS, or application subscriber model.

The traditional application ownership model typically requires a company to;

Buy software and support licenses for an operating system, database, and CRM application
Purchase hardware (one or more servers and storage) to support the CRM application
Hire a staff of one or more administrators and consultants to install, configure, and maintain the CRM environment
From the customer's perspective, the total cost of ownership for the first year of owning a traditional CRM application would no doubt be hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention the ongoing annual costs to maintain it. From the CRM application developer's viewpoint, the pool of potential customers is limited to companies that can afford to pay the hefty price tag associated with owning and managing their own copy of the application.

Compare this with the simplified SaaS approach—a company just subscribes to a CRM software service for however many users require access. The company doesn't need to buy any special hardware or software and doesn't need to hire staff to install, configure, patch, monitor, and otherwise maintain operating systems, software, and data. The company's users do nothing more than use inexpensive PCs to load application pages into a standard Web browser and do their job. Consequently, the total cost of the company providing its users with a CRM application drops significantly. For example, one popular on-demand CRM solution, Salesforce, from salesforce.com, sells for as little as $140 per user per year! From the customer's point of view, the bottom line is certainly compelling—unless a company has thousands of users, subscribing to a CRM application is much more cost-effective than paying for the privilege of owning one outright.

Application vendors can also benefit tremendously from a shift to SaaS. Low-cost commodity hardware and open source operating systems facilitate profitable hosting of SaaS applications, provided that the applications are well designed and scale as hundreds or thousands of users subscribe to their services. By passing on the reduced cost to customers, software vendors now have tremendous sales potential from new markets such as small businesses that were traditionally unapproachable with the application ownership model.


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Oracle SaaS Platform

Oracle looks to India for financial services business.

Oracle plans to make its Indian subsidiary a hub for its strategy for the financial services market. I-flex solutions, the Indian banking software subsidiary of Oracle, said Friday that in line with these plans, it will change its name to Oracle Financial Services Ltd.




















The new branding reflects the importance that Oracle attaches to the financial services sector, a notice to the Bombay Stock Exchange quoted Charles Phillips, Oracle’s president, and a director of i-flex, as saying on Friday. Oracle Financial Services will be a focal point for Oracle's investment in innovation and leadership in financial services, Oracle said.

I-flex also announced Friday its plans to acquire the entire stake in Flexcel International, a joint venture it had set up with HDFC Bank in Mumbai to offer its banking software in an application service provider (ASP) model to small banks.

Based in Mumbai, i-flex is a vendor of banking and financial services software and services. It has 790 customers in over 130 countries. Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI),a financial institution in Central America, for example, has recently deployed i-flex’s Flexcube banking software.

Oracle currently owns 81 percent of the equity of i-flex. The change of name is subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals, i-flex said.

The local managers who set up i-flex will however continue to manage the company, a spokesman for i-flex said on Friday.

Oracle acquired from Citigroup's venture capital unit about 40 percent of the equity in i-flex in 2005, and raised its stake in the subsidiary in stages. The acquisition of a stake in i-flex was part of Oracle's move to expand beyond general-purpose ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications and into more industry-specific software, Oracle said at the time.

Oracle also has product development and services centers in India.

Could worry over Oracle earnings mean deals for customers?

A head of a consulting firm that helps Oracle customers cut licensing deals with the enterprise software giant said Friday (28-03) that fallout around Oracle's recent earnings announcement could help clients out at the bargaining table.

"If Oracle is posting fantastic numbers and growth, they tend to play hardball," said Ed Ramirez, president of Software Licensing Consultants, a San Ramon, California, firm. "If earnings are weak, perception is weak, that's good for end users and customers."

Oracle said Wednesday that its third-quarter revenues were up 21 percent to US$5.3 billion compared to the same quarter last year. On the surface, the numbers looked strong, especially in light of the widespread malaise in the U.S. economy, but Oracle still fell slightly short of analysts' estimates and its stock dropped in subsequent days this week.

But Eliot Arlo Colon, president and chief operating officer of Miro Consulting, an Oracle license consulting firm in Fords, New Jersey, didn't go quite as far as Ramirez. "It provides notice to clients that there's a weakness with Oracle," he said. "It gets them excited that maybe there's a possibility for a bigger discount. I don't know if that will play to getting huge concessions from them. It's still a case-by-case basis."

For its part, Oracle downplayed the results and said investors could expect a stronger fourth quarter. During a conference call Wednesday, the company president, Charles Phillips, said "a lot of people have annual buying cycles around our Q4. Customers think they're going to get a better deal if they wait until Q4."

But will they? The answer isn't clear-cut, according to Ramirez and Colon.

For example, while there might be a rush of discounting at the end of the fiscal year, it's difficult to predict how much, Ramirez said: "Everything is triggered by sales people not hitting their quota. In turn, their management doesn't hit their number. That is what triggers it -- it's not necessarily that Oracle as a corporation says, 'We need to do this.' It's a trickle-up effect."

Ramirez, who worked as an area sales manager at Oracle, added that the company can make concessions to customers beyond discounts, such as on various terms and conditions.

Colon offered a different caution, saying that there's far more competition for discounts during such rush periods.

"It's becoming more public that Oracle only has so much bandwidth to process larger deals at the end of the year. The message coming from Oracle field reps now is, 'Don't wait until the end of May, because I won't be able to get you the aggressive discounts.'"

"Once one big deal closes, a sales team may have hit their number and [other customers] get kicked to the second tier," he added. It might be wiser, he said, to "be the first in line, have a good story and play to the weakness of Oracle, which is that they have so many people waiting until the end of the year."

Nailing down a huge influx of complicated licensing deals can be overwhelming, even for a company the size of Oracle, Colon said. "For the first time this year, I was seeing six-figure deals missing the quarter because there wasn't enough time. That never happened in the past."

However, Oracle's sales representatives on the whole have been hard bargainers recently, Ramirez said.

"With all the acquisitions [Oracle has made] a lot of times they realize, 'Where is the customer going to go? What are their options? Before, there was a lot more competition. That's the attitude. 'Where are you going to go? We've got you.'"

Colon agreed that Oracle's buying spree has changed the landscape, but from a different perspective. His firm is now seeing clients order nothing for several months, but then buying up a slew of products at once.

"I've never seen that take off as much as it has in the last six months," Colon said. "The positioning from Oracle from all these acquisitions is, 'Now is the time to bundle and get all these things together.'"

On the flip side, customers are being emboldened, he said. "I'm seeing people asking for higher discounts and an overall lower price because they're dealing with one vendor."