Daily Links 1/11/2013: Comcast launches Xfinity X1 platform in Philadelphia region

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SAP on HANA: where SAP wins and how it has missed the real goal (Dennis Howlett/Irregular Enterprise via ZDNet)

A Promise Delivered – SAP Business Suite Is Now Powered by HANA ( Vishal Sikka/SAP HANA Blog)

Forrester: IT spending facing challenges in 2013
Particularly in Europe, and in servers and storage (The Register)

RAND: Health IT No Bargain Yet (Information Week)

History of Electronic Health Records (EHR) (Software Advice)

Comcast launches Xfinity X1 platform in Philadelphia, New Jersey (FierceCable)


Comcast, Time Warner Cable take lower profile at CES 2013 (FierceCable)

NBC has no qualms about using news unit as a marketing tool (LA Times: Company Town)

New student startup combats textbook price
Textbook Friend was found by freshman roommates (Daily Pennsylvanian)

Ben Franklin funds technology startups
Five Lehigh Valley high-tech companies get financing. (Allentown Morning Call)




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Daily Links 1/10/2013: SAP unveils Business Suite ERP to HANA in-memory database

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SAP Challenges Oracle With Speed Increase to Mainstay Software (Bloomberg)

SAP Ports its Business Suite Software to the HANA In-memory Database
The capability will become generally available later this year (CIO.com)

SAP co-founder responds to 'drugs' gibe from Oracle's Larry Ellison (LA Times)

Billtrust Announces Merger With Best Practice Systems
Combination of Two eBilling Market Leaders To Shape Future Market Direction (PR Newswire)
Billtrust is based in Hamilton, NJ.

Can Meg Whitman Reverse Hewlett-Packard's Free Fall? (Business Week)

NetSuite Acquires Point-of-Sale Company Retail Anywhere (All Things D)

Cognizant beefs up in Europe via C1 Group acquisitions (ZDNet)

Urban Outfitters Posts Record Holiday Sales (Fox Business)
Direct to consumer (essentially ecommerce) increases 38%.



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Daily Links 1/9/2013: Dish bids for Clearwire; Goldman to establish small biz program in Philly

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Dish Network Makes Bid for Clearwire, Topping Sprint Offer (New York Times: DealBook)

Verizon looks to LTE completion, Gigabit FiOS (Network World)

FCC's Genachowski: Gov't will open up radio spectrum to improve Wi-Fi
Commission Chairman says move is needed to avoid "Wi-Fi traffic jam." (Ars Technica)

Goldman Sachs expected to help small businesses here
(Philadelphia Inquirer)

Who Made That Universal Product Code? (New York Times)
How bar code invented at Drexel ultimately came to market.

History of MRP Software
(Derek Singleton/Software Advice)
Key element behind SAP's rise to prominence.

Q&A: NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson talks growth, strategy and life with Oracle
NetSuite has tripled its number of developers in recent years, according to Nelson (Computerworld)


Workday's Co-CEO Looks Ahead to 2013 (Forbes)

SAP CIO: BlackBerry 10 looking good
The company plans to offer and support BlackBerry 10 devices within the first quarter of 2013 (Infoworld)

SOFTWARE AG SELLS SAP-SERVICE OPERATIONS IN NORTH AMERICA TO ITELLIGENCE (Software AG Press Release)




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Highlights last week on Philly Tech News (12/31/2012 to 1/6/2013)

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On Philly Tech News:

Wayne-based Cloud Communications provider Evolve IP closed another strong year, GM & COO Guy Fardone told me. The company appeared on the 2012 Inc.500 at #321.

Johnson & Johnson is among several area companies installing Worday's SaaS Human Capital Management solution, several job listings indicate.

Massachusetts-based Parexel International acquired Horsham-based clinical trial software maker Liquent for $72 million.

And I looked back on two events in Philly Tech history, Motorola's 2000 acquisition of General Instrument, and Comcast's rebranding of Versus as The NBC Sports Network one year ago.

From other sources:

Wilmington-based InterDigital had a noisy week, extending its licensing agreement with RIM, filing patent infringement complaints against four other device makers, including Samsung, and launching a machine-to-machine focused joint venture with Sony, which also included a patent licensing agreement.

Plymouth Meeting-based supply chain software vendor WAM Systems was acquired by Connecticut-based Triple Point Technology.



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Daily Links 1/8/2013: SAP's North American President departs; Aereo coming to Philly

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Verizon Says Buying Out Wireless Venture ‘Feasible’ (Wall Street Journal: Digits)

“The telephone network is obsolete”: Get ready for the all-IP telco
AT&T wants to get rid of obsolete PSTN equipment, and those pesky FCC rules.
(Ars Technica)

Aereo will take its TV distruption to 22 new cities this spring (Gigaom)
Philadelphia is one of them.

Google Brings Free Wi-Fi to Its Section of Manhattan (All Things D)

SAP Adds North America to Cardenuto’s Remit as Predecessor Quits (Bloomberg)

Lehigh Valley-based Cloud Services provider INetU Set to Expand After Private Equity Investment (Data Center Knowledge)
Will open new data center in Seattle.

Quintiq expands its North American headquarters (Quintiq
Press Release)
Expansion in Radnor triples Quintiq's US office space.

LLR Partners Invests in Alsbridge
Investment to fuel substantial growth for IT and telecom sourcing advisory leader
(PR Newswire)

Dish’s $5B Clearwire bid may throw a monkey wrench into Sprint’s plans (VentureBeat)

Amazon, Frontier expanding in Trenton, N.J. (AP via USA Today)



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Neat: 2012 revenue over $110 million; 57% growth

Tom Paine

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Philadelphia-based Neat (FKA NeatReceipts), a pioneer in providing tools for scanning and digitizing paper-based information such as business cards and expense receipts, crossed the $100 million revenue threshold for the first time in 2012, according to a press release from the company today.

Neat said its revenue surpassed $110 million in 2012, growing 57% over the prior year. The company said it also achieved its third consecutive year of profitability, and grew its customer base by 30% to 1.3 million.

Neat introduced its NeatCloud and NeatMobile services in the third quarter of 2012, and while the company said that 70% of those who signed up for a free 30 day trial subscription became paid subscribers, it doesn't indicate how many customers that involves or how much revenue they generated. Among other benefits, Neat's new offerings enable greater integration of paper-based and digital-based information sources.

Neat also opened a new call center facility in Center City Philadelphia, and said it added new retail distribution partners and strengthened its relationship with other existing retailers.

Neat is expected to make some announcements from CES '13 in Vegas this week. I plan to follow up with more details.

Neat's principal investors have been Ben Franklin Technology Partners SEP, MentorTech Ventures and Edison Ventures. Its CEO is Jim Foster.



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News from CES '13

I'll try to post important Philly-relevant news coming out of CES in Las Vegas here:

CES: Samsung OLED TV Gets Quadruple Vision (Multichannel News)
Samsung is presumably using Ewing, NJ-based Universal Display OLED technology.

Stream TV glasses-free 4K 3D eyes-on (video)
Stream TV is based in Philadelphia.

Neat® Enhances Cloud and Mobile Capabilities for its Digital Filing System
Neat's cloud-based Digital Filing System to be demonstrated at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) (PR Newswire)


At CES 2013, Salesforce tracks show buzz in the cloud (ZDNet)

What Does Roku’s New Time Warner Cable App Mean For The Apple TV? (SplatF)

Verizon & Motorola Partner on Next-Gen FiOS TV Media Server (Verizon Press Release)

CES: Broadcom Powers Pace's Comcast X1 Gateway, Set-Tops (Multichannel News)

Cisco Teams With AT&T on Home Security (All Things D)

Cisco introduces ‘videoscape unity’ to manage the future of video everywhere (VentureBeat)

Roku, Time Warner Cable strike a deal at CES (Washington Post)

CES: Arris Gets Into Comcast's X1 Mix With Hybrid Gateway
(Multichannel News)

Ten Companies (Including Logitech) Team Up To Create The Internet Of Things Consortium (TechCrunch)
This group sounds more consumer than enterprise-oriented.



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Daily Links 1/7/2013: Passport Health, Heartland Payment make acquisitions

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PE-backed Passport Health nears deal to buy Data Systems Group: sources (Reuters)
Passport Health Communications, based in Franklin, TN, has significant operations in
King of Prussia dating back to its 2005 acquisition of Healthworks.
Update: The deal has been agreed to, according to a Passport press release.

Heartland Payment Systems® Acquires Ovation Payroll to Position Heartland Payroll Services for Rapid Growth (Marketwire)

Athenahealth to acquire physician favorite mobile app Epocrates for $293M (Gigaom)
Big move by a forward looking Healthcare IT vendor; one I think its CEO had hinted at
before. See Why athenahealth might buy Epocrates from May of last year in Mobile Health News.

Intel confirms partnership with Comcast, brings Xfinity TV viewing to Intel-based devices (Engadget)

Comcast NBC Delays Biggest TV Shows to Avoid Repeats (Bloomberg)

Amazon’s cloud is bigger, more profitable than we think, report says (Gigaom)
At least one piece of Amazon has decent margins, according to research report.

Independence Blue Cross Launches Free Smartphone Service for Members (Globe Newswire)
Teams up with Radnor-based Relay Network.

SunGard Acquires XSP, Beefing Up Corporate Actions
(Wall Street & Technology)

ERP, RIP? Cloud financials and revenue management in 2013 (Phil Wainewright/Enterprise Irregulars)

Elsevier Acquires Knovel, Provider of Web-based Productivity Application for the Engineering Community (PR Newswire)



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Johnson & Johnson among area enterprises implementing Workday HCM

Tom Paine

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New Brunswick-based Johnson & Johnson is one of the large area enterprises implementing Workday's SaaS HCM (Human Capital Management) solution, according to various job descriptions posted on the web. A photo taken at Workday Rising (Workday's user conference) in November posted on Twitter shows about 15 J&J employees there. Some J&J Workday job listings date back to a year ago, though the number of listings seem to have accelerated recently.

This may not be news to some in the enterprise software business, but I haven't been able to find any published news items referring to it, and J&J is not among customers listed on Workday's website. J&J has about 118,000 employees.

J&J has been largely known as an SAP shop for ERP. Its current Workday implementation appears to be for the Core HR Module only. Workday is still in the process of scaling up its financial module to meet the needs of larger enterprises, and I understand it to be not nearly as comprehensive in terms of functionality as SAP's ERP solution is at this time.

Other Workday customers in the region include Wilmington-based DuPont (70,000 employees), Radnor-based VWR International, LLC (8,000 employees), Tyco International, which has its US headquarters in Princeton (70,000), Berwyn-based DFC Global or Dollar Financial (6500), Newark, DE-based Sallie Mae (6600), and UK-based GlaxoSmithKline, whose US headquarters were formerly in the Philly area - and it still has substantial operations here (97,000).

Pleasanton, CA-based Workday went public in October and currently has a market value of almost $9 billion. Widely seen as a disruptive threat to SAP and Oracle, Workday is succeeding in grabbing mega accounts, while Salesforce.com in its early days was often adopted as a departmental rather than enterprise-wide solution.
.
Workday is also going after the higher education enterprise market, where companies such as Sungard HE (now merged with Datatel as Ellucian) and Oracle Peoplesoft (founded by Workday co-founder David Duffield) have dominated.




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Philly Tech People News 1/6/2012

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Publicis Healthcare Communications Group Launches Publicis Health Media (Publicis Press Release via PharmaLive)

PwC Appoints Michael Swanick as Global Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Industry Leader (PwC Press Release)

Cloud Workspace™ Provider independenceIT Continues to Expand with New Business Development and Sales Leadership
Former CEO of Thrive Networks, A Staples Company and Industry Veteran Joins independenceIT as Executive Vice President of Business Development (Business Wire)

Cadient Group hires Stacey Davis as CD and Linda Bailey as Sr Copywriter (Cadient Press Release via Philly Ad Club News)

E! Programming President Lisa Berger Resigns
Exec who launched 'Kardashians' exits after nine years (Broadcasting & Cable)




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SaaS in 2013: Companies and trends to watch
Salesforce.com, Oracle, SAP and a range of startups are going to make plenty of news in SaaS (Computerworld)

Enterprise Software – the secular trends (Vinnie Mirchandani/Deal Architect)