-          Phil Fernandez, co-founder and CEO, Marketo

[Steve Jobs’] sense of design,that everything had to fit a certain aesthetic, the fact that he, with as little engineering background as he had – it shows that design can lead you in a certain direction so that phenomenal products came out of it. He knew about brand in a very positive sense. He had an intuitive sense of marketing that was amazing.

-         Bill Gates

Our product portfolio is as strong as it has ever been and we won more than our fair share of deals. Clearly we have work to do in training new reps on managing the sales process and the importance of establishing a quarterly rhythm with their deals.

-          Safra Catz, president and CFO, Oracle

It would be hard to envision a more apt “poster child” for the rapidly-shifting realities of enterprise IT than SAP. There are few entities with a more entrenched position and reputation at the core of traditional, server-based, data center-oriented IT.

-          Bruce Guptill, SVP and Head of Research, Saugatuck Technology

We will deliver something that works. We are committed to doing a proper cloud.

-          Darren Roos, COO, Software AG

There is a whole breed of software companies developing based on an idea and they build cheaply and deploy on AWS (Amazon Web Services). These companies don’t need much capital, a sales force and distribution because they have taken all the cost out. It’s a brilliant model, but enterprise software will be more fragmented.

-          Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat

-          Steve Woods, Google’s top Canadian employee

If you are tethered to hardware, high value services that customers don’t have an interest in, that cost too much money and take too much time, or you are just selling commodities and IT that people don’t value because it doesn’t move the needle, there is a very good chance that you might not be around in three to five years.”

-          Bill McDermott, co-CEO, SAP

On the surface, “delight” seems so goofily Californian, a spacey, new-age notion, that it practically begs to be mocked. Hold the eye rolls, however, because underneath its trendiness and the suspicion that it’s just some new marketing babble, the talk of delight signals a radical shift in the way Silicon Valley creates products. … The problem is that now with everyone climbing aboard the bandwagon, delight runs the risk of becoming so overused that its meaning becomes diluted. The temptation is for executives to believe they can create that special feeling by simply uttering “delight,” without rethinking the way they create products.

-          Chris O’Brien, writer for the Los Angeles Times

A study by Washington’s Economic Policy Institute questions whether there really is a shortage of US tech talent. But a political question arises: if highly profitable Silicon Valley companies need engineers, why do they not pay to train them themselves? Why are they using tax-exempt money to lobby Congress into finding them a cheaper alternative?

-          Christopher Caldwell, senior editor, The Weekly Standard

Recent publications by Reuters and Forbes magazines are pointing to a startling trend throughout Silicon Valley: age discrimination. Investors in new tech businesses are blatantly stating they prefer young chief executives over older, more experienced candidates. Not only are these investors potentially setting companies up to fail by potentially putting inexperienced CEOs in office, but they are also putting companies in a difficult situation. Companies that follow their investors’ advice on this matter may be violating the law.

-          Law Offices of Lisa L. Maki

-          Greg Satell, internationally recognized authority on digital strategy and innovation

Many of Oracle’s hardware and systems software product lines may be in danger of being made less market relevant as customers prefer to get more of their computing power in the cloud. Relevance is the key word here. For Oracle, their continued advancements in performance improvements appear to be keeping their products technically relevant, but how important is it to be relevant in declining markets? … If the application market makes another significant move technically, the time it could take Oracle to adjust would be significant (and the cost quite high). It’s time to rationalize the product line some.

-          Brian Sommer, CEO, TechVentive, and research analyst at Vital Analysis

There’s not a company out there that doesn’t say they have in memory analytics and a really nice user interface, but they’re not all the same. They can’t do predictive analytics.

-          Jim Davis, senior vice-president and CMO, SAS

Right now there is nothing sexier than Africa’s trendy and attention-grabbing tech scene. It’s like the hero of a great tale: down and out, talented, with nothing to lose.

-          Michelle Atagana, managing editor, memeburn.com

[Whether tablets will survive for another five years is not the right question.] Rather, the question should be, what single device will consumers use five years from now? The expectation is that over time, users want to carry one device that will connect to a lot of different screens and keyboards. The most important point is that the hardware form factors are becoming less relevant and as a deciding factor for the industry. The industry is becoming a software and service industry that is focused on how platforms are powered.

-          Tyler Lessard, CMO, Fixmo

The mainframe is the most flexible technology platform in computing.

-          Rodney C. Adkins, SVP systems and technology, IBM

-          Pankaj Malviya, founder and CEO, LongJump

From an IBM perspective, in my lifetime, I have not seen so much of IBM all behind one thing [PureSystems] with software, hardware and services; it’s like 50 years ago when we announced the mainframe. In many ways, it is as big as that, but designed for a different world.

-          Ambuj Goyal, general manager of development in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group

Startups as a general category are probably highly overrated. Basically it’s an irrational act. I think that’s the part that’s getting lost. I think the cult of startups, and of course Stanford’s ground zero for this … Those startups are miserable experiences.

-          Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner, Andreessen Horowitz

Samsung’s new Galaxy S4 oozes so much innovation it almost trips over itself. The good news is you can turn much of it off and you’re still left with possibly the best smartphone on the market. The better news is that Samsung has attempted eye tracking and a gesture UI, among other cleverness, and given us all a glimpse of the future. The trouble is, that future isn’t quite now. It’s more parlor trick than necessity, and sometimes more trouble than it’s worth.

-          Fritz Nelson, editorial director InformationWeek Business Technology Network

-          Tom Simonite, IT editor, MIT Technology Review

There’s a war going on in the IaaS market.

-          Paul Burns, analyst, Neovise

Microsoft is clearly serious about the virtualization space, and its support of cross-hypervisor solutions goes right to the heart of cloud management.

-          John Ross, IT consultant

The Pivotal technology vision is not just another big data strategy-even Maritz concedes that it’s not for the “faint of heart.” But if he is able to turn his big data dreams into market reality, it could very well be the big bang for big data. Just as Google reinvented the search experience and Amazon reinvented the shopping experience, Pivotal is determined to reinvent the business experience.

-          Steven Burke, editor news, UBM Channel

We have created the world’s first Braille smartphone.

-          Sumit Dagar, founder, Kryate Design Solutions

You know there was a song back a number of years ago, I think the band was Chumbawumba. And the refrain of the song was, “I get knocked down, but I get up again, ain’t nothing gonna hold me down,” or something like that. … I think that if you looked at iRobot, and what we’ve been through that might be a fitting song to be playing in the background.

-          Colin Angle, co-founder and CEO, iRobot

-          Meg Whitman, CEO, HP

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, valuation will always matter. … salesforce.com, inc.‘s ascent to the top of the cloud discussion doesn’t justify its gaudy stock price. It didn’t make sense three years ago and it still doesn’t make sense today.

-          Richard Saintvilus, contributor, The Motley Fool

Typically we don’t like people messing with our intellectual property.

-          Mark Hurd, Oracle co-president

Google has evolved from an endearing Internet startup to an imposing giant running Web and mobile services that vacuum intimate details about people’s lives. Despite repeated management assurances about respecting personal privacy, Google has experienced several lapses that have resulted in regulatory fines, settlements and scorn around the world.

-          Dawn.com

This is a powerful merger as the technologies of the two companies [Actian Corp and Pervasive Software] are industry leading and clearly very complementary. This is particularly the case in the area of highly parallelized and scale-up, scale-out data integration and database. In my view, the combination of these technologies will provide Actian with a performance capability for BI and Data Analytics which no other company can currently equal.

-          Robin Bloor, chief analyst and co-founder, The Bloor Group

[It] made me wonder where Stanford ends and Silicon Valley begins. Or, put cheekily, is Stanford now just a tech incubator with a football team?

-          Nicholas Thompson, editor, The New Yorker.com

-          Austin Smith, The Motley Fool contributor

The sale of software licences is a leading indicator of the transformation projects that are happening globally. If software does not sell, it means that not many large implementations and change projects are happening. So given this, it is going to be a tough time for Indian companies, at least for the next 12-18 months.

-          Samiron Ghoshal, partner and national leader, IT advisory, Ernst & Young

There is one group that should be worried about the disruption Facebook’s mobile play will have on their business.That group is the mobile phone network operators.

-          Ewan Spence, Forbes

As Hadoop has become a de facto standard, so has the notion of building on top of it with open source. There is some advantage in software innovation, but it is momentary. Once something is known to be possible, there are enough smart programmers out there that reproducing it becomes straightforward. (Because of this, I gloomily predict no shortage of patent battles in the not-too-distant future.)

-          Edd Dumbill, editor in chief, Big Data

-          Doug Ehrman, Motley Fool contributor

“Oracle is big, but it’s focused on trying to put together a system of hardware, and it is confusing as a software company … on applications, they are easier to beat than SAP.”

-          Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor, and former president of Oracle

“There are so many techies in Silicon Valley that they’ve started chasing small inconveniences instead of truly changing the world for the better.”

-          Josh Constine, technology journalist

“Apple could surprise us in the next six to nine months by emerging with yet another big new idea. On the other hand, I think the stock market is telling us that the public is beginning to believe that Apple really doesn’t have strong visionary leadership. Apple will be a solid technology company but the Apple era may be on its way out.”

-          Bob Herbold, managing director, Herbold Group, author of “What’s Holding You Back?” and former Microsoft COO

“Others are now confirming that [data discovery] is where the puck is moving, and it’s a great testament that we’re in the right place. Most of the traditional BI players are growing slowly if they’re growing at all, and some of them are going backwards.”

-       Lars Bjork, CEO, QlikTech

-          Thorsten Heins, CEO, Research in Motion

“Database revenue, which has been the cash machine of the company [Oracle], has changed. There are now alternative databases, as well as the cloud. That pressure is still a tiny bleed, but it is out there and the question is — is it bigger than we think it is?”

-          Mark Moerdler, analyst, Bernstein Research

“If he were alive today, I suspect he’d be really fascinated about what’s happening with sensors. When you look at the ability to capture all kinds of information with sensors and then customize services back to individuals, that is so Steve Jobs. That’s the kind of thing he’d have salivated over.”

-          John Sculley, currently manager of investment firm; former CEO of Apple

“Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.”

-         Bill Gates

“After reading Lean In and listening to Sheryl, I realize that, while I believe I am relatively enlightened, I have not consistently walked the talk. I think each of you, on reflection, will identify opportunities to operate at a new level with your women employees, leaders, customers, partners, and peers … 1) please read the copy of Lean In you will be receiving shortly, before we get to the SVP/VP off-site and 2) determine 3-4 specific things you will do differently.”

-          John Chambers, CEO, Cisco (in an email to Cisco employees)

-          Evgeny Morozov, author of “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism”

“I’ll put our scientists up against anybody’s scientists. Between what we have in Bing and MSR [Microsoft Research] we’ve got some very smart people working on some very big problems. . . . They’re [Google] in a different position to what we are, 97 percent of their revenue comes from advertising. I think 97 percent of ours doesn’t. We can probably be a little bit more disruptive to the search category than they can, or that they’re willing to be.

-          Adam Sohn, Microsoft

“Where games traditionally model the real world, organisations must now take the opportunity for their real world to emulate games. Enterprise architects must be ready to contribute to gamification strategy formulation and should try at least one gaming exercise as part of their enterprise context planning efforts this year.”

-          Brian Burke, Gartner analyst