Jeff Nolan was one of the top VCs in the Valley and worked at SAP Ventures for many years before shifting to this role within SAP, as director of the Apollo Strategy Group in SAP Marketing and Customer Operations.

Informally, he heads the "Kill Oracle team" I'm told. BTW SAP Ventures is an investor in MySQL.

I think Jeff makes a good point. I have a meeting with Jeff early next week...

Tom,

You have been all over the oracle/open source topic, do you think they may be trying to buy their own LAMP stack in order to bolt on Fusion middleware or is it really as simple as they want to frustrate the best open source efforts from moving into Oracle home turf? Ellison is spending a lot of time talking about subscription revenues and all-you-can-eat pricing models… and much of the middleware is in fact moving to commodity levels.

Just some random thoughts, my team is doing a lot of work in this area if you are interested in comparing notes.

Jeff Nolan

Director, Apollo Strategy Group

SAP Marketing and Customer Operations