Deloitte continues to ramp up its software-as-a-service (SaaS) consulting practice, both through organic growth as well as acquisition. Today, Deloitte announced plans to acquire Workday implementation specialist Aggressor. Aggressor has been one of a very small set of Workday integrators (along with Deloitte), which means Deloitte now further boosts its already-impressive Workday practice.

This move furthers Deloitte’s Workday practice, as well as Deloitte’s overall practice in SaaS implementation and integration work. Deloitte also has strategic partnerships with other leading SaaS vendors, most notably salesforce.com.

For buyers, this means a stronger and deeper bench of consultants at Deloitte. But, on the downside, it removes a boutique/specialist option from the market, which appealed to some because of its laser focus, smaller size, and (perceived or real) ability to be more nimble, flexible, and price competitive.

Are you an Aggressor or Deloitte client or prospect? We would love to hear your thoughts!

There has been a lot of buzz around using the cloud for disaster recovery lately, and with good reason -- it's a new and compelling approach to fast recovery. However, along with any hype comes a certain amount of confusion, so I set out to get some clarity on what cloud-based disaster recovery really is. The core feature of any cloud-based recovery is that ability to actually recover at the providers' location using their cloud assets. Just copying data there is not true recovery. I also realized that the term "cloud-based disaster recovery" was too broad, and that actually solutions fall into one of three categories:

• Do-it-yourself (DIY): Using the public cloud to architect a custom failover solution leveraging the agility and speed of the cloud.

• DR-as-a-service (DRaaS): Prepackaged services that provide a standard DR failover to a cloud environment that you can buy on a pay-per-use basis with varying rates based upon your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Data is either sent using backups or replication.

• Cloud-to-cloud disaster recovery (C2C DR): The ability to failover infrastructure from one cloud data center to another, either within a single vendor's environment or across multiple vendors. 

On Monday, February 13, HP announced its next turn of the great wheel for servers with the announcement of its Gen8 family of servers. Interestingly, since the announcement was ahead of Intel’s official announcement of the supporting E5 server CPUs, HP had absolutely nothing to say about the CPUs or performance of these systems. But even if the CPU information had been available, it would have been a sideshow to the main thrust of the Gen8 launch — improving the overall TCO (particularly Opex) of servers by making them more automated, more manageable, and easier to remediate when there is a problem, along with enhancements to storage, data center infrastructure management (DCIM) capabilities, and a fundamental change in the way that services and support are delivered.

With a little more granularity, the major components of the Gen8 server technology announcement included:

• Onboard Automation – A suite of capabilities and tools that provide improved agentless local intelligence to allow quicker and lower labor cost provisioning, including faster boot cycles, “one click” firmware updates of single or multiple systems, intelligent and greatly improved boot-time diagnostics, and run-time diagnostics. This is apparently implemented by more powerful onboard management controllers and pre-provisioning a lot of software on built-in flash memory, which is used by the onboard controller. HP claims that the combination of these tools can increase operator productivity by up to 65%. One of the eye-catching features is an iPhone app that will scan a code printed on the server and go back through the Insight Management Environment stack and trigger the appropriate script to provision the server.[i]Possibly a bit of a gimmick, but a cool-looking one.

Oracle Corporation announced its purchase of Taleo for $1.9 billion on Feb. 9, 2012, signaling a major shift in its stance on software-as-a-service (SaaS) and talent management applications. The transaction is expected to close midyear 2012, subject to regulatory and stockholder approvals.

Oracle has long held a “we can build it better” position on talent management, learning, and recruitment applications but struggled to compete with best-of-breed talent management vendors like SuccessFactors (recently acquired by rival SAP), Taleo, Kenexa, Cornerstone, and SumTotal Systems. Oracle has been reticent to offer these (or any other) applications via SaaS, preferring a licensed/on-premises business model that provides early revenue recognition versus the deferred revenue model of SaaS.

In fact, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has been outspoken in his anti-SaaS stance in recent years, changing his posture somewhat with the Oracle Public Cloud announcement at last October’s Oracle OpenWorld conference. Meanwhile, the HR apps market shifted overwhelmingly to the SaaS (subscription-based) deployment model, which has become virtually ubiquitous in recruitment, learning, and talent management and is also growing in core HRMS via ADP, Ultimate Software, and Workday.

By acquiring Taleo, Oracle puts itself back in the game for SaaS recruiting and talent management. Taleo is a market leader in recruitment automation and has a competitive portfolio of products across performance, compensation, and learning management. The $1.9 billion deal price is more than six times Taleo’s 2011 annual revenues of $309 million, a high premium but substantially less than the $3.4 billion and 11-times revenues that SAP recently paid for SuccessFactors.