The proportion of enterprises that have replaced or plan to replace existing ERP systems with SaaS has doubled from 12 to 24 percent in the past year, according to research published this week by industry analyst firm Forrester. In addition, the numbers planning to use SaaS alongside on-premise ERP — for example in ‘two-tier’ ERP deployments — leapt by more than half to 41 percent. Taken together, the survey shows that 65 percent of enterprises expect to be using SaaS in some ERP role before the end of 2015 — a massive increase of two thirds on what respondents were saying a year ago.

I’m always looking for definitions of “enterprise grade,” and this is a good contextual point for that: The noise in the consumer market would have us believe that software is almost disposable. Something doesn’t work – junk it. Users don’t like XYZ software – replace it. Fail fast, fail often – that’s the road to success. That’s not the way (most) things work in the enterprise. It is largely true regardless of whether we’re talking a mom and pop shop, the truly global companies and pretty much everything in between.

My report on Lakeside Software’s new release is up. SysTrack is one of the veteran tools used in the end-user device management space and, if it can start adding in more mobile and tablet functionality, is well setup to profit from the churn in that area helping companies asses and then plan for how to migrate those fleets of aging PCs to new platforms. Here’s the 451 take: While end-user device management has been one of the sleepier areas of IT in recent years, the shift to mobile and the rise of non-Microsoft end-user devices looks to be creating enough churn in this space to make it more interesting.

Enterprise software vendor TIBCO has acquired Jaspersoft, an open source business intelligence company, for approximately $185 million. One of the older charting kit companies goes for pretty cheap to an established BI (and queue/middleware) company. Jaspersoft acquired for $185m by TIBCO

According to IDC, the 5 percent IT growth it sees for 2014 is comprised of two elements: Stagnant legacy infrastructure growth (0.7 percent) and a high third-platform infrastructure growth (15 percent). Just to bring the point home, IDC asserts that a full 29 percent of 2014 IT spending and 89 percent of all IT growth spending will be in the third platform; of the latter, a full 50 percent represents cannibalization of traditional markets.

I have a new podcast up that’s on the ongoing topic of software development, big and small, tools and practices, news and theory, old and new. I’m co-hosting it with Bill Higgins. I’ve talked with Bill Higgins for many years, and occasionally we’ve done a podcast episode together. He was in town a few weeks back, and I thought we should start recording our conversations rather than have them disappear into the ether.

A good overview of what the software-heavy enterprise storage company does, including this assessment on market segment targeting: SolidFire is very honest about not being built for the mid-market, as it feels that most of the middle of the market is headed toward cloud providers anyhow. Some may consider this a weakness, but I consider it a great strength. It has allowed SolidFire to focus on the pain points of organizations with large storage and storage performance needs, to do so with great scale, and to do so in a way that greatly reduces operational complexity and all the mental friction that usually accompanies that scale.

I like this post on what filling up the deal-flow pipeline for VCs looks like. For example, a good bozo bit heuristic: One of the reasons that a meeting doesn’t go well is that the founding team will say they expect $50 million in revenue in 5 years, but they have difficulty articulating how they’ll get to their first $1million. Having worked on the buy side of the table (when I was in corporate strategy, working on M&A for software and cloud at Dell), there’s a similar story for what the exit looks like.

[A]pplication development and maintenance eats up 34 percent of the total IT budget and that by getting rid of legacy applications, simplifying complex architectures, and ceasing outdated approaches to IT staffing, companies can cut those application development and maintenance costs in half. The cost of old corporate code