News of Swine Flu continues to permeate American media outlets.

“Is it safe to take my children to Disneyland next week?” one parent asked an expert during a segment on this morning’s The Today Show. (The answer was, Yes, it’s okay to travel — Just not to Mexico.)

“Should I avoid eating pork products?” (No. You can’t contract the Flu from bacon.)

As Jessica Tsai pointed out in her April 29 post, the Swine Flu pandemic has led to a media frenzy — not only on the 24-hour news channels, but all over the Web. The Facebook map indicates that not only are people reading to educate themselves about the healthcare news, but they are talking about it with friends. The chart below indicates the jump in the number of blog posts referring to Swine Flu and also maps Twitter posts referencing Swine Flu.

It’s interesting to me the extent to which people react to sensational healthcare news. They scurry to buy surgical masks, but are these same consumers as concerned with other forms of disease management? Have they updated their electronic medical records and engaged with personalized medicine? My guess — and yes, it’s only a guess — is no.

I’m in the process of researching an upcoming CRM in Healthcare feature. Part of what I am looking to uncover is the real-time technologies that allow for awareness to be brought forth in an instant such as what has happened with Swine Flu. However, another major topic in which I am researching is that of the attitude of the average healthcare consumer. From what I gathered at a Consumer Health World conference last winter, the healthcare consumer is for the most part categorized as uninformed, lazy, and unsatisfied with the industry. I wrote about the lack of adoption of Health 2.0 initiatives back in December. Yet, I’m fully aware that the consumers are not fully to blame for slowing of the next generation of healthcare. Many information gaps exist. As one source told me, there’s a flawed delivery system which is to blame for many of the problems facing both providers and patients.

So, with the buzz generating around consumers protecting themselves from Swine Flu, it leaves me wondering whether with the social Web we are entering a new era of health education and conversation, or whether this is a reaction to a sensational news story. Amidst the news and education circumnavigating the Web, there is a great deal of misinformation, too. Opinion writer Evgeny Morozov highlighted some of this in this NPR.org post.

Morozov presented the following misinformed tweets about Swine Flu:

Short Ribs! How long before the Swine Flu hysteria crashes the pork market? 2 hours? 3?

be careful of the swine flu!!!! (may lead to global epidemic) Outbreak in Mexico. 62 deaths so far!! Don’t eat pork from Mexico!!

Swine flu? Wow. All that pork infecting people….beef and chicken have always been meats of choice

The bottom line here is that it’s great to see so much awareness coming forth about a potential health hazard. However, people will be people — sometimes fickle, lazy, misinformed, and confused. Conversation is happening and that, at least, is a step in the right direction.

If you haven’t met me before, you know I believe companies live or die by their customer service.

I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this month, and it was great. I’ll write more about that soon, but what I wanted to focus on here was how surprised I was by my hotel accommodations. I was also surprised that I was surprised.

Let me start at the beginning: As I was getting ready to go to the conference, I realized a lot of the hotels were already booked. Since I wasn’t sure where to stay, a friend suggested I call the Pickwick Hotel.

[More after the jump...]

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In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s an epidemic going around. It’s caused (according to Wikipedia) by a “reassortment of several strains of influenza A virus subtype H1N1,” a virus also found in birds and swine, which explains why it’s called the swine flu. In addition to all the medical-related sites tracking breakouts of this disease around the globe, you’ve probably seen the mass coverage from Google, Facebook, Twitter (Twitterers are going crazy with this). Of course, the authorities on the issue, i.e., World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), are also trying to post the latest news, but the “citizens” may be doing a better job of spreading the news.

WHO on Wednesday raised the pandemic alert to phase 5 (out of 6) and New Scientist magazine twittered that WHO Chief Margaret Chan “called for less hugging in response to #swineflu.” Certainly not an official statement, but it just goes to show how the news–along with the jokes and the panic–are spreading. No doubt, as great as social networking is at keeping us updated, it’s causing some people to either run out to deplete the local pharmacy’s stock of face masks, or just roll their eyes in skepticism.

This map of the United States shows the percentage of Facebook users in each region discussing ‘swine flu’ through Wall posts.

Oracle announced a $7.4 billion deal for Sun Microsystems just a few weeks after the IBM deal for Sun fell through. Oracle now controls a significant open-source alternative and a nice piece of the high-end computing business.

These open-source components had been viewed as the alternative to the dominance of the Big 4 (or “MISO” — Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle). In addition, Oracle gains an innovation engine with the assets of Sun’s Labs groups, which pioneered a series of advances that include potential enterprise solutions for the virtual world.

The deal continues Oracle’s path to acquiring deeper components of the enterprise-computing stack, including appliances. Here’s how the addition of Sun expands the stack:

• Middleware — While Java and Solaris may appear to be the crown jewels in the deal, Oracle has managed to slowly buy out other stack competitors (i.e. BEA and now Sun) and integrate them into the Fusion Middleware suite of tools for custom development and its own Fusion Applications product lines. Sun complements BEA. In addition, the open-source stack will also provide Oracle with a new avenue to the reach the small-and-midsize business (SMB) market.
• Database — Oracle takes out the low-cost competitor to SQL server on the low end and gets a shot at converting them to Oracle DB instead of IBM. Adding Sun’s MySQL expands an SMB entry point as well as the removal of a competitor.
• Hardware — Oracle gains another great recurring revenue (maintenance) base with Sun’s Solaris. This complements Oracle’s large and profitable existing database installations on Solaris that would have fallen prey to the IBM DB2 team. While there’s some talk about Oracle selling the hardware side — see this eWEEK article — this seems unlikely as Oracle focuses in on the appliance market. Even more important is the fact that Oracle can take Sun’s tools and create a purpose-built appliance running its database, middleware, and applications.

The bottom line: Oracle succeeds at post-merger integration where others often fail.

Despite skepticism, Oracle has made these acquisitions work from a financial perspective, with year-over-year quarterly profit growth that has generally been well above 20 percent. Some key success factors include:

• Acquiring companies for the recurring revenue. Oracle’s first set of deals (i.e., PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems) focused on installed-base acquisitions that provided a strong foundation of support-and-maintenance customers. This base of recurring revenues provided Oracle with the room to continue strong research-and-development investment while reducing overall costs. With this deal, Oracle gains another highly profitable maintenance base, adding pressure to competitors. This acquisition delivers Sun’s profitable Solaris revenue stream while enabling Oracle to move into a maintenance business for open-source software.
• Eating its own dog food. In the late 1990s, Oracle made a major commitment to re-engineering its back-office processes using its own applications. As a result, Oracle has become highly efficient, with a ratio of general and administrative expenses to revenues of 3 percent to 4 percent — in most calendar quarters, one percentage point lower than SAP’s and even lower than other large software vendors such as Microsoft and Symantec. Expect Oracle to put the Sun assets into its arsenal of tools for delivering software innovation.
• Mastering post-merger integration. With two former investment bankers at the helm, Oracle has one of the best post-merger integration teams in the business. Oracle’s profit performance signals that it has been able to add new companies — and those companies’ streams of revenues — while keeping costs down. Sun will provide considerable synergies in both the short and long run.

Related Coverage:

• 20090420 CNBC – Squawk Box with Karen Tso & Maura Fogarty “VIDEO -Oracle Snatches Sun, Foils IBM’s Bid“
• 20090420 The Associated Press – Jordan Robertson and Michael Liedtke “After IBM dalliance, Sun goes to Oracle for $7.4B“
• 20090420 USA TODAY – Jon Swartz and Leslie Cauley “Oracle to buy Sun for $7.4B after IBM drops bid“
• 20090420 SearchOracle.com/TechTarget – Ed Scannell “Will Sun help Oracle eclipse IBM?“
• 20090420 DestinationCRM – Lauren McKay “Oracle Takes a Shine to Sun Microsystems“
• 20090420 Managing Automation – Emily-Sue Sloane “Oracle to Spend $7.4B to Buy Sun Microsystems“
• 20090420 The Guardian – Andrew Clark “Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems comes as surprise to software industry“
• 20090420 Computer Zeitung – Hans-Thomas Hengl “Mit der Kontrolle über Java sitzt Oracle am Schalthebel des Softwaremarkts“
• 20090420 Internet News – Alex Goldman “Oracle Buys Sun in IBM’s Wake“
• 20090420 Infoworld – Tom Sullivan “Can Oracle make sense of Sun’s hardware?“
• 20090420 eWeek – Nicholas Kolakowski “Oracle, Sun Deal Strengthens Competition Against IBM, HP, Cisco“

Your Point of View
What do you think about the acquisition of Sun? Did you count on Sun as your open-source stack alternative to the Big 4? You can leave public comments on this post, or send a private email to rwang0 at gmail dot com. Comments are preferred! Thanks, and looking forward to your POV!

R “Ray” Wang is an analyst at Forrester Research. His personal blog, A Software Insider’s Point of View, can be found here: http://blog.softwareinsider.org. This post first appeared on his site and appears here with his permission.

As I’m sure you have noticed from various media outlets, promotions, events, etc, that today is Earth Today. It’s a nice chance to raise awareness about our environment and what we could be doing to live more sustainably. It’s also interesting to see how various retailers are using the day to promote their green or natural products.

For example, The Polish Bar of Brooklyn ( a salon in my Brooklyn neighborhood) today sent out a e-newsletter introducing its new line of eco-friendly cosmetics. The text reads: “By educating ourselves and our customers, we are doing our part to create a healthy environment for our Glamour Gals.”

Other Earth Day marketing messages include:

A local IKEA store in Canton Township is giving away 1,000 blue spruce saplings in honor of Earth Day. The giveaway is not a companywide initiative.

Department store chain Macy’s today is selling reusable shopping bags for $1.95. They are then giving $1 from each sale to the National Park Foundation.

Some larger retailers are making Earth Day headlines with corporate-wide initiatives:

Today super retailer Wal-Mart announced it will increase its use of solar power. According to a USA Today article, Wal-Mart plans to double its usage of solar power energy by adding rooftop solar arrays to as many as 20 stores and distribution centers in California.

Today Delta Airlines sent its mile counters this an email newsletter with this message: “To celebrate Earth Day, we will match all carbon offset donations made April 22 through May 22 at delta.com. Together, our efforts will help The Conservation Fund’s Go Zero® program plant trees and restore habitats for wildlife.”

[Editors' Note: We posted on Oracle/Sun earlier this morning, and will have a news story up shortly here's Lauren McKay's news story on the acquisition.]

Ahh, what to make of this? Good? Bad? Creative destruction? All of the above? Probably. Of course, it’s too early to offer more than a few prognostications but that’s what’s so much fun about this.

First, Sun’s shareholders got a dime more per share than the IBM offer — $9.50 versus $9.40 – Whoo-hoo! Seriously, a dime over millions of shares is a lot of money — think about a good weekend in Vegas.

More seriously, the deal complicates Oracle’s relationship with Dell and HP, which Oracle has courted aggressively recently. Last September Larry Ellison introduced the Exadata — part storage array part computer — built in cooperation with HP to provide orders of magnitude better support for terabyte and bigger databases. A good idea. But now where does the budding relationship with HP go?

On the other hand, I wish I had one of those extra dimes for every Oracle database that was sold on a Sun box over the last three decades. Sun’s customers are Oracle’s customers — but the same can be said of HP.

More after the jump…

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Here’s Lauren McKay’s news story on the acquisition, We’ll have more on this later, of course — over on destinationCRM.com — but for the time being, here’s the skinny and below are some relevant links and excerpts.

• Oracle’s own press release. [Note: Oracle's servers have been returning error messages for this.]

In case the problem’s persisting, here’s that same press release, carried on an aggregator site.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. 

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.

According to a blog post on The New York Times’ Bits, YouTube and Universal Music Group have come to an agreement about how to provide online access to music videos.

This is a follow-up to a post I wrote earlier this year about how UMG was muting all of its music videos on YouTube (see: The Day The Music Died). Since then, videos have been removed from YouTube.

The brainchild of this dispute is a new music site called Vevo, which will bring better content, and hopefully, more revenue from advertising.

Universal Music Group explains its plan for Vevo:

“VEVO will be a premium online music video hub built for consumers, advertisers and content owners that will blend UMG’s broad catalog of top artists and content with YouTube’s leading edge video technology and user community. YouTube will provide the technology infrastructure that will power VEVO and host UMG’s extensive library of professionally-created music videos on the new site. On YouTube, this content will be exclusively available through VEVO.com and a new VEVO channel through a special VEVO branded embedded player.”

Read the official press release here.

In addition to what music labels hope to be a better advertising model, there are also plans to eventually offer merchandise and concert tickets on Vevo.

Let’s face it — the financial services industry is taking a beating right now. The hope is that it will continue to move forward, despite the Rocky Balboa-esque multiple blows to the head it has taken lately.

That’s why it’s no surprise that this vertical, arguably as much — if not more — than any other is furiously trying to find ways to hold onto existing customers.

Customers are scared out of their minds — and justifiably so — about what they can expect moving forward. They also want to know the relationship they have with an existing financial institution is personal, one that can offer numerous benefits. Deluxe mattresses for plummeting Roth IRAs are not included.

During a time in which customers are likely extremely hesitant to bank-hop, the onus is still on the institutions themselves to continue to innovate and offer packages that will keep their respective consumers coming back. Looking to help banks in this aim, Norcross, Ga.–based S1 Enterprise, a global provider of flexible, bank-centric solutions and payment services, unveiled what it hopes to be a Balboa-esque knockout blow to the recession: S1 Online Banking 3.7.

According to Mark Moore, S1 Enterprise’s vice president of marketing, customer intimacy is its key differentiation in the market. “This is definitely resonating with our customer base,” he insists.

At its core, this latest solution combines an enhanced, flexible user interface (UI) with a single platform for personal banking and business banking, along with an entitlements engine. This way, financial institutions can have the wherewithal to tailor services — and enhance the user experience — to individual customer segments without having to deal with silos.

What’s important here is that the tailoring can be in the hands of the line of business users, and not professional services. “From a technical perspective, in the past, to have tailored service capabilities it took a very large professional services engagement,” recalls Jennie Palocsik, senior product marketing manager, retail online, at S1 Enterprise.

Other new features and functionality include:

• cascading style sheets, giving financial institutions the opportunity to add its branding to the Web site to enhance the look-and-feel;
• “My Bank” landing page, displaying most commonly accessed information immediately after logging in, beyond simply account balances;
• class of service entitlements, allowing banks to tailor the accounts viewed by each user in real-time as well as the ability to mix and match business and consumer banking, payments services, reporting capabilities, authority levels, and limits;
• electronic vault, allowing end-users to store critical documents online that can be accessed at any time, not just when the brick-and-mortar institution is open for business; and
• S1 Mobile, an integrated solution allowing end-users to access their banking on their phone.

“The real opportunity here is that the entitlement engine we’re bringing to market … its literally checking a box to turn on different packages for customers,” Moore says. “We’re focused on customer intimacy, and so are our customers.”

For financial institutions out there, is this a la carte approach to banking something you are interested in utilizing for your own customer base? What are your most pressing worries right now — is it keeping customers loyal to your bank? Or, are more macro-level worries about the economy taking precedence right now?

In the April 6th issue of The New Yorker, Mike Peed wrote a piece about the Economic and Social Chamber of the United Nations’s recent “creative community outreach” program. It was a panel discussion to address today’s global problems–”terrorism, torture, religious conflict”–based on lessons learned from the 1978-revived-in-2004-science-fiction TV show, Battlestar Galactica.

The panel consisted of actors from the new Battlestar Galactica (“B.S.G.”)  Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell, along with two producers from B.S.G., in addition to U.N. officials including Radhika Coomaraswamy and Craig Mokhiber, a U.N. deputy director.

The purpose?

Dave Howe, the Sci Fi president, declared that, like the U.N., “great science fiction forces us to look at who we are and ask the tough questions: Where are we going? . . . And what can we expect to find when we get there?”

OK, not that this article was so outlandish or anything but I had to take a doubletake (anything too close to April 1st leaves me a little skeptical of anything I read…even if it’s 5 days later). It’s amazing to me that political organizations are making moves, trying new things, being innovative about solving their problems, when it’s still so difficult for businesses to do the same. Granted the results (ah, results) of this meeting aren’t  exactly explained but the point is that at least there’s initiative! Moreover, it’s about life-changing issues and not just “the sale.”

The government has typically been regarded as the industry laggards when it comes to engaging with its citizens. CRM magazine has written extensively about how government is faring in the world of CRM, that is, how it’s using technology like CRM and connecting with the people through social media (President Obama helped with this one). They’ve improved, no doubt, but customer-facing verticals like retail are still leading in customer satisfaction. .

Not to ruin the surprise, but in a to-be-published issue of CRM magazine, I interviewed marketing strategist David Meerman Scott (author of World Wide Rave). In it, he brings up how he recently visited the United States Air Force and spoke with their head of public affairs.

Get this: Everyone in the Air Force is allowed to use social networking. Sure, they’ve got a published set of guidelines around how to behave on these networks, but it’s nothing debilitating. (Scott also brought up examples of large corporations like IBM that permit social networking, but provide clear guidelines.)

Meanwhile, I have a friend who worked at a consulting firm where his only access to the Internet is through the company Webmail. They have a single “Internet kiosk” on which employees take turns using during their free time. It’s for security measures because clients send highly sensitive information to his former company. Whether or not it’s as  security concern (employees are allowed to use their smartphones to access the Internet at their desk) or just a precautionary measure, he’s not sure. Another friend works at a large bank where, he says, “It is mostly blogs, Facebook, all email services they can detect, porn. I think that’s about it.” He also adds that even the cameras on his corporate-issued BlackBerry has been disabled. Some of it has to do with perception. An employee was fired a few years back for watching porn on his work laptop. “The bank doesn’t want that publicity,” my friend says. Not because porn might be laced with viruses? “That could be part of it.”

Maybe I’m underestimating the severity of what damage access to the Internet can do (phishing scams, for instance, can occur through email alone so only allowing Webmail isn’t bulletproof), but even though I understand the rationale behind the security measures, it all just seems so…haphazard.

To quote Scott (again, sorry for the spoiler), “If the US Air Force [and the U.N. --jt] can do it, anyone can do it.”