Portia:
Tarry a little, there is something else.
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are "a pound of flesh."

(painting by Alexandre Canbanel. The Merchant of Venice)

The jury has decided.  SAP owes Oracle 1.3 Billion dollars.  I’ll leave others to speculate on whether SAP appeals, if is a fair sum,  or whether there will be other legal ramifications.  

Watching it all has been fun. Good theatre, with some dramatic performance and and even more dramatic absence.  Tabloid stuff.

1. The amount, while breaking records  for  copyright infringement,  will not impact SAP’s ability to do business.  It has plenty of cash, and there is a serendipitous symmetry with the recent 1,5 billion dollar credit facility.  While it could slow down share buybacks, I doubt that it will have a real impact on its development or marketing spend. It would be wrong for SAP to shrink into cost cutting mode to fund this, but I don’t think they will anyway. 
2. The case illustrates the hyper-competitive and ruthless nature of the industry.  Neither firm emerges Persil white from the process.  I’m not sure that it will really make a difference to how CIO’s view SAP or Oracle. Most CIO’s know that this is a pretty ruthless and aggressive business.  Oracle’s field will have a bit of fun in the sales cycle with this, but I doubt it will really impact business.
3. Most software executives and developers have minimal understanding of copyright law and its implications.  Coming out of this, I’d hope that software developers think a little bit more about intellectual property and IT law generally. This would be a good thing.  I’d like to see software companies funding more IT law research and studies, but then I’m biased.
4. Software companies using intellectual property to beat each other up in court isn’t new, but this judgment will encourage more of the same.
5. The judgment was not about the legality of third party maintenance.  The SAP-Oracle case and Rimini Street –Oracle case will be quite different.  I don’t think we should conflate them.  The SAP-Oracle case was good entertainment, but it was just about damages. In the long run the Rimini Street case is more important for the whole industry.  I ‘m not assuming that just because SAP admitted that TomorrowNow was toxic, all third party maintenance is somehow tainted. 

These are my musings, rather than a formal Gartner position.

(Okay, the heading was from Romeo and Juliet, and the quote from Merchant of Venice)

(photo mine, use with cc attribution licence) Hotel Fusion, San Francisco.

I’m just back home from a trip to California. I attended Oracle Open World, and had several other meetings in the bay area. 

I saw the Keynote presentation, and on the next day  I spent an hour or so with the leaders of HCM product Fusion product. Colleagues of mine here at Gartner have spent more time getting a deeper look, so I will leave the detailed product analysis to them for now. No doubt I will learn more over the next few months, but at the event I was more focused on getting to grips with PeopleSoft 9.1 and catching up on progress of EBS 12.1.

I have read quite a bit about Fusion over the last few days on twitter and on blogs, some of it thoughtful, some of it wishful and some of it rude. 

My thoughts.

Larry Ellison spent most of the keynote talking about hardware, with the odd barb aimed at IBM.

(photo via Oracle’s cc flickrstream. thanks)

He left Fusion right until the end.

It was enough of a look to show that it is relatively close to being done, or at least significantly further along than halfway. Larry outlined the scope, and mentioned some of its innovations. The demo was adequate without being awesome. It set some expectations, but it didn’t promise a new form of sliced bread. What Larry didn’t do is pontificate on how much revenue this thing will do. No suggestions of 10,000 customers, or billions of dollars of revenue. He didn’t promise much at all, other than a vague some time next year. 

He generated interest, but not enough to put a freeze on PeopleSoft 9.1 and EBS 12.1 upgrades. 

It would have been nice to see a bit more, but Oracle is in no rush. Oracle has the Sun acquisition to complete and digest, so I’d expect Fusion get more of push once Oracle has Sun on board and aligned.  It wouldn’t surprise me if Fusion comes shipped on its own special piece of hardware.

In 1967 I submitted a paper called "How Do Committees Invent?" to the Harvard Business Review. HBR rejected it on the grounds that I had not proved my thesis. I then submitted it to Datamation, the major IT magazine at that time, which published it April 1968. 
Here is one form of the paper’s thesis:
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure

This was on my mind at Sapphire last week. To understand the road maps and legacies of software vendors, especially the big ones, you really need to understand how they are organized and have been organized.  The code reflects the organization reality.  Grasping the shifts in the organization was one of my main goal at the event, as this gives us more insight into the company strategy than press releases, keynotes and powerpoints do.

The first German Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck once said

„Je weniger die Leute wissen,
wie Würste und Gesetze gemacht werden,
desto besser schlafen sie!“

This loosely translates as the less people know how sausage and laws are made, the better they will sleep.With large software vendors I’d suggest it is the opposite. The more you know about how your software is being made the better, as only then can you really understand the products and the strategy.

Here is the organisation chart of The Tabulating Machine Co, which eventually became IBM.

photo credit CC flickr. Thankyou Marcin Wichary for an excellent series of computer history images.