Box strikes deal with GE to become the default file-sharing service of its 300,000+ employees

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.

Good overview and some competitive and historic context. HP Helion: OpenStack redux

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.

By way of example, Butterfield said that there are about 2,000 messages a day written by humans in Slack at his company. Another 6,000 more are generated automatically by machines. With such a high volume of information, having it all in one place, ordered, highly searchable, and with human chat layered on top helps make a fragmented and overwhelming amount of communication easier to deal with. Sounds good to me; I wonder if the email zombies will see the light this time.

Oracle announced that it’s putting OpenStack into Solaris, which is good fun. James Niccolai asked for my thoughts on the topic for his story. I hadn’t been briefed, so it was just speculation, but here’s the full text of what I sent over: Solaris was always - and no doubt still is - technically advanced. For example, the zfs filesystem, dtrace, and zones were always tasty looking for Linux folks.

They ran it at network.com: While the Sun Grid has been an interesting alternative for large companies who might want to offload some of their workloads–such as the Monte Carlo analysis used to assess risk in investment portfolios, which doesn’t have any account information in it and is therefore not a big risk for a financial institution to let out on the other side of its firewalls–the Sun Grid is not supposed to be the utility that they use, but rather the utility that is the prototype for the ones that Sun expects its partners to build.

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.