Salesforce.com’s plan to purchase Rypple shows the importance of human capital management to the new cloud-savvy enterprise. The game plan calls for a new Salesforce.com HCM business unit and the relabeling of Rypple’s offerings as “Successforce.” The effort will be directed by industry vet John Wookey. Read more »
A recent survey suggests that “mobile computing appears to be a driving force behind cloud adoption in enterprises.” While the cloud clearly plays a role in making mobile devices as valuable to the enterprise as they are, it may be too much to suggest that mobiles ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The cloud-based SAP Social Media Analytics service aims to bring more consumer-centric smarts to SAP’s enterprise customers. SAP will sell and provision NetBase semantic search and analytics capabilities and provide a user-friendly dashboard to display the results on an iPad or other device. Read more »
The world of words gets in the way of conversations between IT and the business all the time. Cloud computing is no exception. Words such as “application” and “service” mean different things to different people, but perhaps there’s room for consensus on some core principles. Read more »
The future of work is already here. It is just already distributed, one might say. The freelance economy, microtasking, mobile workers, coworking spaces, crowdsourcing: All of these point to how work is increasingly shifting from the twentieth-century model of Taylorism (think scientific management applied to labor processes such as assembly-line production and fixed workplaces) to a more flexible, hyperspecialized and connected workforce. This report examines the new world of work, from the devices and software services we use to the growing role of social media, the importance of a group-centric mentality and how the roles of employees, managers and organizations are evolving. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
SAP America’s decision to buy SuccessFactors and its human capital management expertise for $3.4 billion in cash, is just the latest acquisition of a vertically-focused SaaS player by a legacy software giant. Look for that trend to continue. Read more »
If you’re a Software-as-a-Service provider and want to wring the richest rewards out of what is already a lucrative gig, you should “verticalize” your services. That’s according to a newly published report from Forrester Research analyst Liz Herbert. Read more »
New research shows that software-as-a-service companies, which have been valued (much) higher than legacy software players, will continue to reap price premiums over the next 12 to 24 months. The numbers come from Martin Wolf’s M&A Advisors’ MW Index. Read more »
Platform-as-a-Service provider Heroku is expanding its horizons by offering an on-demand version of the PostgreSQL Database-as-a-Service. Heroku Postgres is a commercial version of what Heroku has been providing for years, only it’s now available to all developers regardless where they host their applications. Read more »
Marketo, a SaaS startup focusing on revenue performance management, has raised a $50 million round with Battery Ventures leading the way. Marketo has been on a roll, totaling $107 million in VC investment, and now earning upward of $40 million a year in revenue. Read more »
With the public beta of Cloudability’s cloud cost-tracking service, new APIs are available to help customers access their billing and usage information from popular cloud providers including Salesforce.com, Azure, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Oh, and if you refer a paying customer, there’s free beer! Read more »
So, what’s Oracle’s going to buy next? Here are five companies that might help the software giant fill in the check boxes on its public cloud, data analytics, management and infrastructure check list. Given Oracle’s bulging wallet, it doesn’t make sense to rule anything out. Read more »
Oracle’s planned acquisition of RightNow Technologies gives the enterprise apps giant a bigger presence in SMB accounts and helps populate its planned public cloud with applications more quickly. Oracle is paying $43 a share, or roughly $1.5 billion for the SaaS company. Read more »
Last quarter we highlighted the fast maturation of the Platform-as-a-Service and big data spaces. Those two trends only picked up speed during the third quarter of 2011. Joining them on the cusp of IT greatness, though, are the OpenStack project and flash storage. The former gathered serious validation from big-name companies, while the latter saw less funding than last quarter but a significant number of product launches. Of course, the third quarter wasn’t all lollipops and rose petals. We saw new computing technologies and delivery models such as tablets wreak havoc on both HP and Cisco, and there are concerns (aren’t there always?) about how the Internet will handle our increased use of streaming video and cloud computing. Unfortunately for HP and Cisco, the latter problem might be an easier fix than the strategic woes facing them. Additional companies mentioned in this report include CloudBees, Rackspace, Engine Yard and Joyent. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Box.net just closed additional Series D funding, netting new money from SAP Ventures–the VC arm of enterprise software giant SAP AG, as well as Salesforce.com, Bessemer Venture Partners and NEA. This brings the total from the overall Series D round of funding to $81 million. Read more »
Last quarter’s big headline in social media and real-time technologies came from Google, which launched Google+, its first social tech product that seems legit. In the third quarter, things were back to normal. Google+ is still growing, but Facebook’s platform update dominated the news. And as Google+ passed 25 million users and won some raves from the digerati, its competition with Facebook intensified. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Zynga, Salesforce, BranchOut and Foursquare. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Developers at the Surge conference in Baltimore have a love-hate relationship with America’s largest online retailer and cloud provider. But repeated tales of Amazon’s failures were immediately followed by assurances that the service was cheaper and better than buying your own hardware. Read more »
Online CRM pioneer Salesforce.com continues to back up its ecosystem with its checkbook, this time with an investment in cloud storage provider Box.net. In the past few months, Salesforce.com has made a series of outright acquisitions of Assistly, Radian6, and Heroku. Read more »
While developers working on business apps agree that HTML5 is coming along, they’re not ready to abandon native applications. At Mobilize 2011 the theme was hybrid, where executives from Salesforce, Rhomobile and MeLLmo talked about not making a commitment to one or the other yet. Read more »
Enterprises spend $270B on software every year, yet some don’t yet some can’t even calculate the number of employees in their organizations. Rudimentary challenges like this plague every enterprise in the world. When deriving anything beyond enterprise software basics, most corporations are out of luck. Read more »
Heroku is reporting it saw more than 33,800 Facebook applications launched on its service since the social network giant unveiled new features at yesterday’s f8 conference. On the official Heroku blog, Adam Seligman notes “that’s more than 20 a minute.” Read more »
Red Hat is the Microsoft of Linux. But now, like Microsoft itself, it obsesses more on cloud infrastructure than lowly operating systems. Questions about Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS and CloudForms IaaS dominated last night’s earnings call, but CEO Jim Whitehurst was cautious on revenue predictions. Read more »
Social media is playing an increasing role in enterprise IT, with companies like Jive Software and Telligent jockeying with IBM, Microsoft and Cisco to tap into corporate IT spending. Today, they build social platforms customers use for both employee collaboration and consumer marketing objectives. Vendors need ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
CloudSpokes, an Appirio-led community that hosts contests in which developers compete on projects for cloud companies with the goal of winning a monetary prize, recently re-architected the site from Microsoft Windows Azure to Database.com, and its team couldn’t be happier with the results. Read more »
In the world of Software as a Service, integration is critical. It gets small SaaS providers in front of new potential customers already predisposed to buying cloud-based services, and it gives individual SaaS vendors a fighting chance against large software vendors with lots of products and salespeople. Read more »
Heroku, the popular Platform-as-a-Service offering initially for Ruby developers only, now supports Java. Actually, Heroku has added support for both the Node.js framework and the Clojure programming language over the past few months, but Java is in a whole other league. Read more »
Feed-based UIs are powerful because they encourage frequent usage and participation. They’re becoming one of the most important ways to present information, and are critical areas of competition in social networking and ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
AppFog, the company formerly known as PHP Fog, has raised $8 million in a healthy second round of funding for the year-old company. The company’s name change coincides with the funding and hints at a future supporting languages beyond PHP. Read more »
Cloud-computing insurance has long been posed as a solution to the problem of cloud users assuming too much risk of failure in the wake of things such as lengthy outages, data breaches and Lulzsec attacks. But it seems the idea of off-loading some of that risk ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
IT managers now face a new challenge in the enterprise: the significant presence of a new generation, the Millennials, in today’s digital workplace. These young employees were born in the 1980s or later; they were raised with ever-present mobile phones and ubiquitous online access and social media, and they often demand access to those services and devices while at work. This report, the first in a two-part series, surveys Millennials about their use of technology at work, with a particular focus on how they communicate and learn and what they expect in regard to technology support. We aim to assist IT and tech-support management by pointing out the opportunities Millennials present and also the potential pitfalls. Companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Google and Twitter. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Heroku might have expanded its embrace to include Node.js and Clojure, but its heart is still with Ruby. To wit, Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto is joining the company as its chief architect for Ruby, which should only improve its standing in the developer community. Read more »
PaaS pioneer Heroku has added support for the Clojure programming language to its offering. Heroku also supports Ruby and Node.js as development options. Supporting three development options might not appear like a big deal, but it is, especially for enterprise developers who require certain features. Read more »
Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Platform-as-a-Service pioneer Heroku, now part of the Salesforce.com cloud empire, has released a new version that expands programming support beyond its Ruby roots and gives developers more control and insight than previously available. Among the new features is full support for the Node.js framework. Read more »
In five short years, cloud computing has gone from being a quaint technology to a major catchphrase. Amazon and others are now moving at Internet speed, trying to offer better security, faster networking, more compliance and a host of other products that are attempting to meet the demands of startups, consumers and enterprises alike. On GigaOM’s Structure channel, we cover the gear and software that comprises the cloud, the services and the people who are changing the industry. Now for the first time, we’ve decided to condense that knowledge into the Structure 50, a list of the 50 companies that are influencing how the cloud and infrastructure evolves. All of these players, big or small, have people, technology or strategies that will help shape the way the cloud market is developing and where it will eventually end up. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon, Rackspace, Cloudera, China Telecom and SeaMicro. For a full list of companies, and to see the Structure 50 as one full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With each passing day, cloud computing — and the platform-as-a-service space, in particular — looks a lot more like a large software vendor’s game than it does a space where plucky startups might actually be able to establish a presence and remain independent for the long run. Read more »
VMware has entered the cloud game by offering an open-source package called Cloud Foundry, a platform as a service that should strike fear in the hearts of its compeitors, especially the likes of Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Rackspace. Read more »
Platform-as-a-Service star Heroku has grown up since Saleforce.com bought for $212 million in December, attracting the attention of some big names in systems integration an enterprise consulting through the Heroku Partner Program, including Accenture and Pivotal Labs. The traction helps validate Ruby, Heroku and PaaS. Read more »
