Tag: Oracle


The True Meaning of the New Salesforce.com / Oracle Alliance: Pragmatism Overtakes Polemics – Sandhill.com Guest Blogpost

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7th July

Last month’s announcement of a “major” strategic alliance between Salesforce.com and Oracle attracted plenty of industry attention; but it holds more meaning for enterprise decision makers about how a new pragmatism is overtaking the polemics of the past in dealing with the realities of moving to the cCloud in a hybrid environment. Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspective regarding the implications of this alliance for enterprise decision-makers on Sandhill.com.



Salesforce.com, Oracle, SAP/Sybase, Iron Mountain & CallidusCloud Latest Sponsors of Cloud Channel Summit

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4th September

Salesforce.com, Oracle, SAP/Sybase, Iron Mountain and CallidusCloud are the latest companies to become sponsors of the second annual Cloud Channel Summit on Monday, November 5, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, hosted by THINKstrategies, the Cloud Computing Showplace, and Rising Tide Media.

These companies join IBM, Alteva, AppDirect, Aryaka, Corent Technology, CorSource, GoodData, SoftServe and TechData as sponsors of the Summit.

The Cloud Channel Summit provides an intimate, peer-to-peer networking forum for industry executives to share perspectives, best practices and insights about how to build successful partnerships in the Cloud.

Stacy Nethercoat, VP of Software Product Marketing at Tech Data, will be the kickoff keynote speaker at the Summit. Stephen Cho, Director of Software Partner Business Development for Google Enterprise, is also returning as a keynote speaker at this year’s event.

The following executives have also agreed to speak at the Summit:

David Hoff, CTO and Co-founder, Cloud Sherpas
Nick Pegley, VP Marketing, All Covered
Joe Panettieri, Editorial Director of the … Read More »



Salesforce.com Profitability Sparks Renewed Debate About SaaS Sustainability

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28th August

Despite the accelerating growth of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and growing interest in all things Cloud, skeptics are still seeing dark shadows which they think indicate fundamental flaws in the long-term prospects of on-demand services.

The most recent example was the controversy created by Salesforce.com’s most recent quarterly financial results. While the company’s revenues grew 34% and deferred revenues increased 43% on a year-over-year basis, the company still reported a second quarter (Q2) GAAP net loss per share of $0.07.

Although I tend to look at the world through ‘Cloud-colored’ glasses, I don’t think I’m being naive because I see these numbers as a outgrowth of a prudent strategic decision by Salesforce.com’s management to aggressively invest in winning a greater share of the high growth SaaS/Cloud market. In fact, Marc Benioff made the same point during a recent interview on Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money” show.

Like Benioff, SuccessFactors’ … Read More »



Oracle, enStratus, Centerbeam & Chipita America Executives to Speak at Cloud Management Summit

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29th April

THINKstrategies, the Cloud Computing Showplace and Rising Tide Media are pleased to announce the latest round of senior executives who have agreed to speak at the Cloud Management Summit on Tuesday, June 19, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

The Cloud Management Summit will provide an intimate opportunity for corporate decision-makers to learn about the latest Cloud management solutions and share industry best practices for acquiring and administering today’s rapidly evolving Cloud alternatives to achieve their business objectives.

The following executives have agreed to speak at the Summit on June 19 to date:

Sushil Kumar, Vice President of Product Strategy and Business Development at Oracle
Scott Martin, CIO at Chipita America
Shahin Pirooz, EVP of Engineering Operations and CTO at CenterBeam
James Urquhart, Vice President of Product Strategy, enStratus
Michael Crandell, Founder and CEO of RightScale
David Roth, CEO & Co-founder, AppFirst
Feyzi Fatehi, CEO, Corent Technology
Russell Hertzberg, VP SaaS and ISV Solutions, SoftServe
Joseph R. Szmadzinski, CEO, IT Management … Read More »


The 2011 Cloud Market in Review

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18th December

A year ago, I published a series of 10 predictions regarding how the Cloud Computing marketplace would evolve in 2011 in E-Commerce Times. Here’s a recap and assessment of my predictions:

The Cloud Computing market will grow more rapidly than analyst firms forecast as organizations move from asking “what is Cloud and why is it important” to “where and how can I capitalize on the Cloud today.”

I think I did ok on this one, although there remain plenty of organizations who are still trying to define the Cloud and determine why they should seriously consider employing it.

This accelerated growth will occur despite a major cloud computing service disruptions and/or significant security infractions, which will heighten customer concerns but won’t discourage wider adoption.

This certainly was the case as we watched Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) crash, jeopardizing numerous start-ups and other companies dependent on its Cloud … Read More »


SAP Finally Buys SuccessFactors – Is It Too Late?

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4th December

For years, a variety of industry analysts and bloggers have suggested that SAP jumpstart its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and broader Cloud initiatives with a major acquisition, such as SuccessFactors. Today’s news that SAP will buy SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion shows that the company’s executives have finally admitted that they can no longer rely on internal development and organic sales efforts to gain a meaningful share of the rapidly growing SaaS/Cloud marketplace.

I can’t say that I’ve been among those advocating this type of bold move because I’ve been a part of a similar acquisition which failed to achieve its strategic objective, and I’m not convinced that SAP will be able to transform its business through this transaction.

Back in 1999, I worked for a fast-growing network professional services company, called International Network Services (INS), which was acquired by Lucent Technologies for $3.7 billion, or 12x revenues! Lucent’s goal … Read More »


Dancing in the Clouds With the Elephants

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7th April

The recent flurry of major vendor announcements regarding their new Cloud Computing initiatives, latest acquisitions and offerings clearly shows that the “Cloud Rush” is in high gear.

Here’s a quick list of the announcements which have caught my attention over the past few weeks in chronological order since HP unveiled its Cloud ‘vision’ last month, and my views regarding their significance,

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire newScale, 03/29/11  – Cisco Systems has been pushing into the ‘new data center’ environment for a while with its Unified Computing solutions. It acquired newScale to improve its provisioning capabilities to make it a more viable Cloud vendor for enterprise customers and service provider partners.
Salesforce.com to Acquire Radian6, 03/30/11  – Now that Salesforce.com has succeeded in popularizing its Chatter social networking capabilities, it wants to give its customers the necessary tools to monitor, manage and measure the effectiveness of these … Read More »


Back-Office Cloud Solutions Soar

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3rd February

A series of announcements over the past week clearly indicates that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) financial management and enterprise resource management (ERP) solutions are taking hold among organizations of all sizes worldwide.

The first was Intacct’s announcement that it had grown its customer subscription base 68% in 2010 and added more than 800 new client organizations. The company also reported 94.2% of clients surveyed indicated they would recommend Intacct to their colleagues, which is a perfect example of the customer-driven referral engine which is powering the overall growth of SaaS solutions. Intacct also said that 11 of the top 100 largest CPA firms in North America have joined the Intacct Accountants Program from CPA2Biz, showing that mainstream professional service firms are also adopting SaaS and recommending their clients take advantage of these solutions as well.

Plex Systems,  a provider of SaaS-based manufacturing ERP software, … Read More »


Soaring Clouds at Dreamforce

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9th December

The year of the Cloud has come to a climax at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco where over 30,000 registrants converged to celebrate the rapidly expanding world of ‘on-demand’ solutions and collaboration tools.

Salesforce.com used the event to beat back the recent efforts of Oracle and Microsoft to gain a share of the Cloud Computing market with a new round of initiatives aimed at building on its phenomenal momentum and success.

The two most significant announcements on Day One were Salesforce.com’s offer of free Chatter accounts across its customer base along with a public version of the social networking service in February, and a new Database.com offering as a spin out of its Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Day Two began with the news that Salesforce.com plans to acquire the Open Source oriented, Ruby-based application development platform, Heroku, for $212 million in cash. Salesforce.com and BMC Software also announced that … Read More »


Dell Delves Into Data Integration Market With Boomi Acquisition

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2nd November

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 »





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