The other day I was reading Paul Graham's latest comments on the increasing irrelevancy of Microsoft under the provocative title of 'Microsoft is Dead' and today an announcement about Microsoft pumping enormous amounts of cash and energy - literally and figuratively - into new data centres. A bit early to be sounding its death ...

"Mid-sized companies want to work within standardized applications and processes" - For me, this is the most significant statement in this discussion as it represents the true nature of the challenge in addressing mid-market needs. It's clear that the main vendors in the mid-market space recognise this need - Sage, for example, ...

The midmarket is wide open for software as a service offerings. Enterprise vendors such as Oracle and SAP have failed to reach midmarket companies with the fading strategy of deploying broad -- and proprietary -- business suites as the market is too fragmented.  Traditional IT and business process outsourcing companies, which have oriented ...