Where the Dollars Flow

Strong Q1 profits appear despite slowed economy, SaaS evolves to PaaS and DaaS, giants partner to capture mid-market revenue, Oracle expands SAP lawsuit, MySQL causes uproar and more software news of the week.

First quarter reports are in, and IBM is the big winner. It surpassed profit estimates, thanks in large part to its ability to withstand the US economic slowdown because of IBM's large percentage of revenue from countries outside the US.

Google's profit from the first quarter showed a strong rise. Analysts' eyes are turned now to Yahoo's earnings report due next week, which may indicate strength to continue fighting off Microsoft's takeover bid.

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SANDHILL.COM BLOG POST OF THE WEEK:

Is SOA Getting Boring? A Conversation with Steve Mills

At IBM"s annual Impact SOA bash last week, software group head Steve Mills stated that the next frontier for SOA is really not a frontier at all: it's the basic blocking and tackling of getting Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) backbones to deliver the high levels of ACID reliability and fault recovery now taken for granted with OLTP transaction systems. In other words, when you start thinking about enterprise SOA, you"d better expect rollback, compensation, and high availability features that are taken for granted with online transaction systems.

By comparison, IBM's message last year was that it was time for SOA to graduate from IT and get driven by the business. No matter, when we sat down with Mills afterward, we asked him if this meant that SOA was getting, well, kind of humdrum.