Shortly some of the yesterday's news:

- SAP signed a deal with CODECS -- important to notice that CODECS is not a big account, on the contrary, interesting to learn about the background of this deal - is it just a coincidence, or SAP also targets the local SMEs?

- Microsoft confirms what I was saying the other day about big corporations taking action for speculating the potential of the IT Romanian market  -- it looks like they will pour another million into elemenatry and high schools (besides the IT Academy from the Galati software park) 

- SIVECO declares that more than 75% of the participants at their roadshow "consider" purchasing a software application for enterprise productivity  - of course they will say they "consider" since it is not polite to claim they are there for cookies and snacks. On a serious tone, the IT Romanian market is not to be neglected by the (local) software manufacturers, and companies like SIVECO understood it very quickly. Some industries became quite competitive and IT upgrade might be a sine-qua-non condition for survival. Sadly enough though, nowadays in Romania running a decent ERP can give you a competitive edge in terms of efficiency.

- an update on the Oracle story, apparently their strategy is opening a center dedicated for servicing their partners in Central Eastern Europe, a second that would be a logistic center and the third acting as a telecom solution provider, the latter two servicing the worldwide Oracle clients. Also very good  marketing gimmick they use - brain gain vs. brain drain - a response to the Romanian programmers runaway.

- the MCTI minister finally acknowledges what we signaled a few days ago about a beautiful e-Governemnt system that is functional but people are not aware of it. Not to mention most of them may not be at least computer literate, I think this is the point they should start designing their strategy with in the first place. 

- more specifics on the Galati software park story: there will be 21 firms - 12 from Galati, 4 big Romanian ones (Softwin, Totalsoft, Siveco, UTI) and 5 big international corporations (Microsoft, Oracle, HP, IBM and Cisco). The total budget is about 100k euros, with 75% coming from the local budget (hence the local management). It looks like the rent is free for the first 4 years, so there is a financial incentive after all. A small step but important.

- finally, since I mentioned just IT-related news, some inserts about politics - Nastase, the Romanian PM is going to go to Bruxelles to show he is not a bad guy after all, all these scandals are just some misunderstandings --- bla-bla-bla. My guess is that everybody knows the truth, but the diplomacy asks to behave in certain ways. Anyway, it looks like the issues are quite serious this time. At the same time, I was mentioning about the money received from external institutions (EU, IMF, WB) the government was not able to entirely spend last year -- it seems that there's several scandals about bribes around allocating these funds. Here is the link to a comment about one of them. (in Romanian) Nothing surprising though, that is something very Romanian like.