Lawmakers, SAP pointing fingers over failed payroll project

The failure of a massive payroll project involving SAP software has California lawmakers, state officials and the vendor pointing fingers of blame at each other. California fired SAP from the project in February and suspended work on it, saying that despite the expenditure of more than $200 million, the system was error-prone and far behind schedule. Officials have been weighing what to do next. Controversy is now mounting anew over who is responsible for the project's woes. The system "suffered from a failure to resolve core issues raised early and often, chronic leadership turnover and lapses in due diligence," states a report released this week by the state Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes. State Controller John Chiang's office, which sponsored the project, "was not always candid about the difficulties" being faced and "delivered upbeat reports to the Legislature and others that often only hinted at the turmoil churning within the project," the report adds. The Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Subcommittee 4 was expected to discuss the report during a hearing on Thursday. Chiang's office and SAP "blame each other for the project's collapse, with the dispute expected to be settled in court," with as much as $190 million at stake between the $135 million the state wants to recover, and another $55 million SAP believes it is entitled to, the report adds. Dubbed MyCalPays, the system was supposed to modernize the state's payroll for 240,000 workers across 160 departments. An initial pilot was rolled out last year in Chiang's office, covering 1,300 workers, but rampant errors persisted until Chiang halted the project in February. The Senate report cited "frequent turnover at the top" of the Controller's office as a possible contributor to the project's issues. Three different controllers have been in charge of it during the past 10 years, although Chiang accounts for seven of those, it states. "In addition, the Controller's team had at least five different project directors and four different project managers, with half of those leadership changes in the last 18 months alone." A Chiang spokesman fired back at the report, saying it "demonstrates a misunderstanding or oversimplification for some of the key issues involved in MyCalPays." For one, Chiang's office "was forthcoming and had great communication with the legislature" about the project, said spokesman Jacob Roper, via email. "We held nine formal legislative briefings in 2011 and 2012, alone. The report only mentions some PowerPoints used in those briefings, which don't reflect all the information offered to legislative staff." "We have also issued our own, internal, preliminary report on the project's history: what went wrong, what worked, and what lessons can be learned," Roper added. download a star is born download recordpad sound recorder crack download simpo pdf creator pro download usaa 2012 tax documents download mac os x lion theme for windows xp 32 bit download the carpal tunnel of love video download gericom ati mobility radeon 9000 treiber download apple quicktime 64 bit for window 7 download android market flash player 10 1 download epson lq-300+ii printer driver

Oracle pushes into database-as-a-service

Oracle has hyped its new 12c database as faster and more powerful than ones that have come before, and now it's highlighting the release's ability to easily serve up multiple databases of varying size and scope according to a particular user's needs. Many Oracle customers are excited about 12c, and for a particular reason, said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of database server technologies, during a keynote Monday at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. "Customers are telling us they want to go to database-as-a-service, on-premise," he said. Version 12c, which became generally available in June, includes an already well-publicized feature called "pluggable" databases, where many discrete databases sit inside a single container database, an approach that Oracle says can radically reduce operational overhead. Mendelsohn described a scenario in which an IT department could offer end users a menu of database options. A bronze tier would be for simple backups of less important databases, while a silver level would add in Oracle's Data Guard for additional security. A top-level gold tier could include Real Application Clusters along with Data Guard. Users would also choose from standard database sizes from the menu. Mendelsohn and another Oracle employee demonstrated a new self-service provisioning tool that is being released along with 12c. "In a couple seconds you're up and running," Mendelsohn said, as the demo showed the selection of a database was possible with a few clicks. "Pretty amazing, right?" Meanwhile, databases could also be easily "unplugged" from various tiers and moved to others as priorities change, Mendelsohn added. The pluggable database architecture also offers a new take on multitenancy, a feature used in SaaS (software-as-a-service). Rather than have all customers share a single application instance, they would each get a pluggable database, Mendelsohn said. "This huge barrier of entry for people to become SaaS providers is all gone," he added. That said, Oracle's technology stack has already served as a foundation for many SaaS vendors, and presumably Oracle will look to move them all onto the latest releases, including Database 12c. One such vendor is Salesforce.com, which recently announced it would commit long term to Oracle technologies. The pact also publicly buried the hatchet between Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Elsewhere in his keynote, Mendelsohn provided further details on the Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance, which was unveiled briefly by Ellison on Sunday. The appliance, which is due out "sometime next year," can scale out to petabytes of data, he said. It differs from and improves on past backup products, allowing users to restore a system back to any point in time they choose. download usbdeview for x64 systems download a was halted before completion. a resumption file download corel dvd movie maker download ati mobility radeon hd 4300 series windows 7 download web ceo full version download video youtube tanpa idm dan keepvid download sims 3 supernatural plants vs zombies download registry first aid 8.0 download drver for bison camera for xp download need for speed underground 2 for android apk

Buried in software licensing

David Steinour is at his wit's end with enterprise software cost increases. In each of the past three years, the CIO at George Washington University (GWU) watched his annual maintenance and support costs for Oracle Financials and related enterprise software jump by at least 10%. "Oracle works very well, but at the end of the day we pay a huge price for that service," Steinour says. Today, 99% of the fixed-cost increases in the university's IT budget come from software maintenance price hikes. "That's just not sustainable," says Steinour, whose IT department supports 20,000 students and 1,600 faculty members. Eric Robinson, CIO at Color Spot Nurseries, a $300 million, 4,000-employee wholesale grower that supplies plants to big-box stores, has been an SAP user since 2000. He says his biggest issue isn't the cost of the perpetual license for the outright purchase of on-premises SAP software, or the annual increases in SAP maintenance fees -- it's the fact that Fallbrook, Calif.-based Color Spot wasn't getting much in return for the money it spent on maintenance. Robinson says SAP has been gradually raising support costs in annual increments from the initial 17% of the original software license price. In 2008, SAP had sent Robinson a letter announcing plans to gradually increase his rate to 22% plus an annual increase based on a cost-of-living index adjustment, and move him from Standard Support to a new Enterprise Support plan. In 2010, Color Spot was paying 18.1% and Robinson decided to drop SAP's maintenance plan and move to a third-party provider. At that time, SAP reintroduced Standard Support. In July, SAP raised the price on Standard Support from 18% of the original license cost to 19% for new contracts. Enterprise Support remains at 22%. Rates started at 15% in the early 1980s, then gradually rose to 17% and stayed there until about 2005, says R "Ray" Wang, an analyst at Constellation Research specializing in enterprise software contract negotiations. They've since risen to 19% and now 22%, he adds. Robinson acknowledges that Color Spot's SAP system is stable and that he didn't need to make many calls for support. But he points out that SAP doesn't support any of his company's customizations, and the support packs and major upgrades his IT organization was required to install to remain in compliance with the maintenance and support contract were expensive and delivered no value to the business. SAP's top clients now spend $2 million to $5 million per year on maintenance and support contracts that average 20% to 25% of the original software cost, Wang says. "Every four years, they're paying the same amount they paid for the license," and most say that they're not getting the features they want for their money, he says. "They wonder whether they're better off not paying maintenance and just buying new software every four or five years." For Robinson, the last straw came when he decided not to upgrade from Version 4.7 and SAP was about to require Color Spot to transition to its extended maintenance program, which is for users of older versions of SAP software. "At that time, SAP was 20% of the IT budget. It was ridiculous," he says. That's when he decided not to renew Color Spot's maintenance contract. An SAP spokesman responds that, historically, standard support customers have paid an additional 2% to 6% for extended maintenance. download samsung galaxy s2 android update mit kies air download flash player 11 standalone installer download autogk windows 7 x64 download pictures slideshow maker software download uc browser 7 8 java software download qr code reader for samsung download es file explorer v3 download bluefire reader for windows download aplikasi yahoo messenger for mobile download smart partition recovery 3.3

Aruba has smartphone, iPad-crazy enterprise covered, CEO says

The influx of smartphones, tablets and other wireless devices into businesses is making many employees more productive, but Aruba Networks is seeing firsthand how much strain all of this newfound mobility is putting on the enterprise IT and security staffs that are its customers. In this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant spoke with Aruba CEO Dominic Orr about the changing wired/wireless network architecture, competing with Cisco Systems, exploiting the cloud and the rise of 802.11n. You guys are having a great year financially (and just reported strong Q1 '11 numbers). What's behind the success? Three trends are working in our favor. One is the workforce is getting more virtualized and mobile. Second is this whole explosion of more capable mobile devices people want to bring to work and a significant migration of enterprise application processing capabilities to those devices. The third is this whole cloud computing concept where you're embedding your application servers into an always-on data center. download japanese keyboard windows 8 download sony ericsson c510 pc suite driver download manchester united theme for blackberry 8520 download hand reading pro apk download backup assistant verizon on computer download call recorder for android 2.3 download k lite codec pack full xp download plants vs zombies iphone ipod touch

Closing in on all-wireless enterprise network

Meru Networks claims to have been the first company to deliver an 802.11n access point and is now riding that technology's popularity as enterprises move increasingly to high-speed wireless networks. In this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Meru President and Ihab Abu-Hakima speaks with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant about what sets Meru apart from bigger competitors with broader networking product lines such as Cisco and HP as well as what needs to be done by enterprises to manage and secure networks being flooded by iPads, smartphones and other devices. What makes Meru unique? Meru was founded based on a vision that sooner or later most enterprises will operate day to day in an all-wireless environment. For us, a wireless environment is a wired data center, a wired backbone but all wireless everything else, all wireless edge. As we looked forward to what an all-wireless enterprise would look like, we said it would have thousands or tens of thousands of devices, many of them operated by humans, others machine to machine, but they would all be mobile or stationary but working in a wireless environment. And we built an infrastructure from the ground up to support density and mobile or stationary voice, video or data applications. We built this with the end user in mind. We wanted the end user to have an interactive experience accessing the content that they needed or the applications that they needed to get their job done. To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in. download mortgage calculator excel template download acer aspire one d270 linpus review download baixar talking tom cat 2 em apk download skype for samsung galaxy s i9003 download plants vs zombies para wine download audio editor gold windows 7 download ea sports fifa 11 for android download hp color laserjet 2600n printer software download adobe photoshop elements 9 manual download jugar plants vs zombies gratis version completa sin descargar

Q&A: Avaya's CEO on how video will change business world

Last Wednesday, Avaya, Inc. made a splash in New York City with a portfolio of new collaboration products, including the Flare Experience multimedia conferencing system, a new tablet designed to support the Flare software and the web.alive virtual reality meeting service, among other offerings. In the latest installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant talked with Avaya leader Kevin Kennedy about the company's collaboration strategy, how the new products change the competitive battle with Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems, Inc., and what it's going to take to make video a part of everyday life for business users. A lot of the pre-launch buzz about your announcements centered on Avaya developing a tablet in a market that already has a variety of tablet options. But that wasn't really the focus here, was it? How would you encapsulate the key news of the rollout? Today, the fact is that people buy isolated high-def video for enterprises and they probably spend $5,000-$6,000 to put that on their desks. The second fact is that most desktop video consumes a lot of bandwidth, 1.5M to 2M [bit/sec]. That's limiting for global companies that want to go to Asia, South America, and so forth. It's a boundary that can't be crossed at that level. Third, these are disparate systems, so it's hard to do things like forward an unanswered video call into voicemail. Integration is poor because [systems are] isolated. The Avaya Desktop Video Device runs the company's Flare interface. (Photo courtesy of Avaya Inc.) Today was about accessible videoconferencing collaboration, meaning it's a lower acquisition cost and lower bandwidth, so your operating cost is less. We tried to put a fun user interface on this and we called it Flare. It's a user experience that features a lot of integration, whether it's directories from the consumer or the enterprise world, or it's making use of SIP infrastructure. So, number one is innovation; number two is execution for over a year on innovation; number three is a new set of devices that solve a real problem in the enterprise; then lastly a software experience that we can put on any device, we just happened to introduce one [the tablet] today. You made some big claims about the improvements that this brings, one of them being a 10X productivity improvement. How do you support that? Where does that number come from? Let's walk through an audit of what it takes you to have a board call. I don't know about you, but we may all dial in, and the first thing is that everybody comes in differently because the end points have to come onto the call. That process alone can take sometimes five or ten minutes - as opposed to simply dragging a set of people from a directory into a spotlight, which takes seconds. Right off the bat we've got, call it, single-digit seconds versus double-digit seconds. Then you do a roll call in today's world, because you don't know who's actually on. Then, let's say you want to ask the two lawyers to exit so you can have a private company conversation. Then you hear a beep-beep after you've asked, they go away, then you want them to rejoin, and you call them up again. Hopefully, they get it. If they don't get it, you leave a message on their Blackberries, and then they come back in, it's beep-beep-beep, and you do a roll call. Versus swipe, bring them in, swipe, put them into a separate area, and swipe, bring them back. Literally we've done an audit and the improvements could be as much, in some cases, as 20 times faster. download pocket quran for blackberry download lg u8120 mole phone able ringtones download fujifilm finepix s7000 manual download total eclipse of my heart download password protected file php download national debt clock windows download real football 2010 jar download samsung galaxy s4 usb drivers download nokia pc suite 701 download sun microsystems java jdk jre 1.6

Why the enterprise can't shake its email addiction

Atos CEO Thierry Breton caught a lot of flak last year when he announced he wanted his employees to give up email, but he may have been onto something. Kids these days don't use email -- digital market research company comScore found that use of Web-based email dropped 31% among 12- to 17-year-olds and 34% among 18- to 24-year-olds in the period between December 2010 and December 2011. And consumers in general are also off email. The Radicati Group, which tracks use of email and other messaging media, projects the number of consumer emails will decrease by 3% to 4% each year between 2012 and 2016 (see chart, below right). Then again, there was a reason Breton came in for so much derision: Enterprise email isn't going anywhere. Or, more precisely, enterprise email usage isn't going anywhere but up. Radicati is projecting the number of business emails to increase by 13% every single year between now and 2016. For businesspeople, that means more time scrolling through the inbox (not only on PCs and laptops but now on tablets and smartphones) clicking past newsletters, social media notifications and spam in search of the messages they truly need to do their jobs, and then later filing, archiving and retrieving those messages. For IT, that means more complaints from users about storage limits being too low (especially when Google lets them keep everything), as well as worries about security, archiving, retention, e-discovery, deletion and syncing mail between mobile devices. And then there's the cost: In 2010, Gartner estimated that the various costs tied to email add up to $192 per user per year. Why do we subject ourselves to this madness? Because for all its aggravations, email works. "It's still an efficient way of communicating, almost in real time," says Phil Bertolini, CIO of Michigan's Oakland County, who's responsible for 10,000 email boxes. "It does what it's designed to do quite well, which is allow us to securely communicate on a one-to-one or one-to-few basis," says Rob Koplowitz, an analyst at Forrester Research. Simply put, we may hate email, but we can't work without it. But CIOs and messaging experts agree that something must change that if enterprise email volume is going to boom the way Radicati's numbers indicate. Email is going to have to get more sophisticated and, at the same time, easier to use. And the people doing the using, who often make life harder for themselves, need to evolve, too. Why We Love Email We love email because it's useful and ubiquitous. It keeps us connected and updated without requiring sender and recipients to be online at the same time, thanks to its asynchronous nature. Everyone doing business today can reasonably be expected to have an email address, whereas only some people use alternative tools like chat, videoconferencing or SMS texting. Beyond that, email creates a de facto audit trail with a record of who sent what to whom when. And, barring space limitations, that trail is readily available on one's computer. download lingvosoft talking dictionary 2008 english-albanian download bolt browser for symbian belle download enhance my se7en full download wifi hacker for software download ultra mp3 player for nokia 6600 download adobe pdf ebook reader download vaagai sooda vaa songs in tamilwire download 2012 calendar printable one page with holidays download plants vs zombies game of the year edition instant recharge download plants vs zombies trainer using f1