Dimension Data’s acquisition of OpSource marks the end of an era and illustrates how the Cloud Computing competitive landscape is expanding to encompass every type of tech vendor and service provider.

Although it is only a fraction of the size and has only a fraction of the brand equity of Salesforce.com, OpSource has had a disproportionate impact on the growth of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market and broader Cloud movement.

The company’s CEO, Treb Ryan, has been a tireless evangelist for the business value of SaaS and now the Cloud. He and his staff have invested heavily in educating and facilitating the industry’s growth through an endless stream of webcasts and whitepapers, and founding the industry’s most important annual gathering, the SaaS Summit, now known as “All About the Cloud” and managed by the SIIA.

Rather than simply offer a set of hosting services, OpSource put together … Read More »

OpSource and the Virtual Computer Environment (VCE) Company announced an alliance today which will offer joint solutions aimed at helping service providers (xSPs) launch public cloud services more quickly. This joint initiative is the latest effort by various vendors to enable  xSPs to fulfill their promise as potent ‘cloud brokers’.

VCE is a joint venture formed by Cisco and EMC, with additional investments from VMware and Intel, to create a new generation of networking, storage, virtualization and management technologies to improve xSP infrastructure operations. VCE’s primary product is the Vblock™ Infrastructure Platform for virtualization, data processing, networking and storage capabilities in cloud computing environments.

In this new alliance, OpSource is adding its cloud orchestration software capabilities to VCE’s Vblock Platform to enable xSPs to handle the user sign-up, provisioning, metering, billing, and reporting requirements associated with cloud services. Together, OpSource and VCE’s combined solution promises to eliminate needless development costs, accelerate the service providers’ time … Read More »

Cisco Systems’ decision this past week to shut down its Flip video camera business generated plenty of attention because of its implications on multiple levels for the networking company and the IT industry. Here are a few of my perspectives on the meaning of this event and the lessons to be learned.

Cisco deserves credit for the boldness of its acquisition of Pure Digital, the maker of the Flip camera, in 2009 and its equally brave decision to walk away from the over $590 million investment (acquisition, development and marketing costs) in a two year span. It had hoped to use the Flip camera and other home entertainment products as catalysts for additional consumer demand for its network connectivity capabilities and its service providers’ transmission services. Although Cisco didn’t sell as many Flip cameras as it hoped, it certainly can be credited to contributing the rise in video transmission … Read More »

Dell’s acquisition of Boomi today is the latest example of the tech industry’s herd mentality.

In the same way that Dell followed HP’s example when it purchased Perot Systems after HP acquired EDS, Dell is now copying IBM’s acquisition of Cast Iron Systems with its own move into the integration business.

Besides trying to keep up with other ‘systems’ vendors, Dell is also attempting to fortify its Cloud Computing capabilities which hinge on helping potential customers cost-effectively migrate and integrate data from various legacy applications and databases into a new set of cloud services.

Dell indicated at an analyst briefing in Boston last week that it wants to ‘move up the stack’ and build a platform which can help enterprises and independent software vendors (ISVs) develop and deliver applications. Dell can’t compete with the other major Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendors — including Salesforce.com, Google and Microsoft … Read More »

When Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun Microsystems in April 2009, CEO Larry Ellison proclaimed the acquisition, “transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems.”

Although he was not ready to use the term at the time, it didn’t take long for Oracle to refer to its combined capabilities as a Cloud Computing solution set, which it recently put on full display at its annual OpenWorld conference.

The event was also a coming out party for its new President, Mark Hurd, the high flying former HP CEO who departed in disgrace only a month earlier. Hurd’s appointment wasn’t hard to understand given his hardware experience at HP and NCR, and now gives Oracle’s move into the system business even more significance.

HP has retaliated by announcing the appointment of Leo Apotheker as its new CEO, along with Ray Lane as its non-executive chairman of the board. Apotheker comes to HP … Read More »

Mark Hurd’s sudden resignation as HP’s CEO has opened a floodgate of speculation regarding who the company will select to succeed him.

Because his departure wasn’t anticipated, there are no clear-cut internal candidates. And, because Hurd himself was a surprise selection for the post in 2006, it is possible that another little-known industry executive may be tapped again for the position this time around.

So, this creates a wonderful opportunity for anyone with a passing interest in HP’s future, and the future of the technology industry as a whole, to throw a few names in the hat.

The HP CEO position is particularly intriguing in part because it has grown to become the largest IT vendor in the industry through a series of acquisitions of Compaq, EDS and others. More importantly, HP like the rest of the IT industry is at a pivotal crossroads … Read More »

SuccessFactors, Inc. announced today that it is acquiring Inform Business Impact, an Australia-based provider of workforce analytics and planning solutions.

Here are my quick impressions about the business implications of this announcement:

This move confirms my prior predictions that the pace of acquisitions within the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) would accelerate and that major U.S.-based SaaS vendors would put greater emphasis on growing internationally in 2010.
The acquisition of an Australia-based SaaS vendor, on the heals of yesterday’s revelation that Salesforce.com recently acquired a Scotland-based SaaS vendor, illustrates that the on-demand services movement is taking root globally. In fact, approximately 30% of the over 1200 companies listed on THINKstrategies’ SaaS Showplace are headquartered outside the U.S.
This is SuccessFactors’s first acquisition, and it is clear that it plans to do many more because the company also announced today the hiring of Cisco Systems veteran Judy Blegen as its new VP of M&A … Read More »

As the new year and decade get underway, here are a few of the areas of the cloud computing market which I think will be important competitive battlefields for established and emerging players:

Collaboration Wars: Collaboration is the ‘killer app’ in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) segment of the cloud computing market. The rapid adoption of Google Apps has demonstrated the latent demand for these web-based solutions. Now, IBM is promoting the enterprise-class qualities of its LotusLive offering to win a share of the market. Cisco Systems is also intensifying its efforts to promote its collaboration solutions built around WebEx and Telepresence. I also think Microsoft will accept a greater level of cannibalization of its Office products to win a bigger share of the collaboration market with OfficeLive.
Business-Oriented Social Networks: These are closely linked to collaboration and have gained a tremendous amount of attention because of the explosive growth … Read More »

As I recover from yesterday’s Thanksgiving festivities, I’ve been struck by two thoughts regarding last week’s Dreamforce conference,

Salesforce.com’s new Chatter social computing functionality may be a defensive as well as proactive move.
An acquisition of Salesforce.com by Oracle may be a friendly maneuver rather than a hostile takeover.

As I reported in my previous blogpost, Salesforce.com’s introduction of Chatter last week at Dreamforce was met with mixed reviews. Many customers, partners, analysts, press and even internal staff and salespeople were uncertain about the company’s goals and capabilities in this new area.

I believe that building an ‘enterprise-class’ social networking component makes sense and adds a timely new dimension to salesforce.com’s fundamental functionality.

Marc Benioff justified salesforce.com’s move by claiming in his keynote address at Dreamforce that neither Facebook nor Twitter were willing to fortify their services to meet the needs of enterprise users.

But, what … Read More »

Last July, I offered my views on the similarities and differences between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing. This past week, I had an opportunity to elaborate on the relationship between these two worlds and terms, along with Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS), during a webcast hosted by Symplified entitled, “Beyond the Buzzwords”.

Then and now I believe cloud computing is an outgrowth of the success of the SaaS market and web-based, packaged applications. Cloud computing represents a rapidly growing array of web-based tools which enable users to build their own applications or utilities that can be deployed via the Internet (“cloud”) or ‘downloaded’ to an on-premise environment.

Much like the open source world, the cloud computing environment enables users to take advantage of a wide assortment of piece-parts from a variety of sources to create their own solutions for various project and production purposes. They both rely on incredibility economical development resources … Read More »