Clipboard, a startup that launched in May 2012, has been acquired by Salesforce, the team announced Thursday. The company allowed users to “clip” material from across the web into private collections. Read more »
The UK-sited data center, which should help settle the compliance worries of many of Salesforce’s European customers, will be completed in 2014. The firm is also running a €5 million Innovation Challenge for EU startups. Read more »
For online media companies, social platforms like Facebook and Twitter bring many opportunities as well as risks. An intelligent and proactive social media strategy can expand a brand’s reach. But the more heavily a media company relies upon a social media platform the more it relinquishes control over the customer experience. Read more »
Dexplora, the co-founders of which were also behind The Astonishing Tribe, is about to launch an iPhone app to make salespeople actually want to use the CRM systems they’re supposed to use. Read more »
Competitive advantage used to come from using pricey enterprise applications to create operational efficiencies. Ross Mason of MuleSoft says SaaS and APIs have killed that model, and the future belongs to companies that integrate applications to discover new business models. Read more »
Social media technologies continue to permeate marketing and enterprise collaboration, even if investors felt let down in the third quarter by their consumer-facing businesses like Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. So B2B technology offerings in support of marketing and collaboration will soon steal all the social tech attention. This quarterly wrap-up analyzes these events, and provides a near-term outlook for trends, technologies and companies to watch in the next 18 to 24 months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
To keep tabs on clients and competitors, many businesses rely on a handful of Google alerts and Twitter feeds. But this is becoming harder as the digital din grows ever louder. Now, listening platforms are emerging to help businesses monitor their online mentions. Read more at paidContent »
Jim Fowler, who sold his crowd-sourced business contact data company Jigsaw to Salesforce for $175 million in 2010, is back and he’s applying a crowd-sourced model to competitive intelligence, using a team of freelance researchers to build business reports on private companies. Read more »
Salesforce is reportedly close to buying social media marketing platform Buddy Media for $800 million. If true, it shows how Salesforce is adapting to the changing face of customer relationship management, which is increasingly about managing branding, social media interactions and marketing for customers. Read more »
Amazon, the market leader, plays at the infrastructure level. But there was a lot of talk at Cloud Connect about Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, where cloud folks think the real action will ultimately lie. The company will soon have to address these shifts as well as trends ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Precise’s Zohar Gilad explains how his company shaved more than $2 million from its annual IT budget by migrating its IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud. Read more »
Los Angeles-based startup Causecast this week debuted its Employee Impact Platform, a web-based program that connects companies and their employees with non-profits and charitable causes. With Causecast, small businesses can compete with larger, more established companies when it comes to offering employees ways to give back. Read more »
Don’t expect the pace of change in web technologies to slow down in 2012. The web is far from dead. Social media may have anointed one huge player in Facebook, but even if there is little room for a start-from-scratch general-purpose social network, there are several companies creating useful alternative social graphs. Companies can leverage key technologies and trends in 2012 to earn revenue and gain share, whether that’s by leveraging HTML5 for rich cross-platform experiences, doing heavy data analysis or integrating collaboration tools across businesses.Companies mentioned in this report include Dropbox, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Salesforce.com on Monday announced its acquisition of Model Metrics, a company that provides mobile and social cloud consulting services. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. The deal will “add mobile and social expertise” to Salesforce’s current offerings, the company says. Read more »
Battling CEOs: Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff tweeted that his counterpart at Oracle canceled Benioff’s big OpenWorld keynote. We can’t be sure because Oracle isn’t responding, but either way Salesforce.com probably just boosted attendance at its alternate event big-time. Read more »
Delivering a cloud service isn’t easy and figuring out how to handle things when they go wrong marks a huge leap in maturity for a company as guys from Heroku and Opscode explain. So what do webscale companies do when things go wrong? Read more »
TrustYou, a Munich-based startup that makes semantic search technology for categorizing online reviews, has taken on $5 million in Series A funding to fuel its U.S. growth. The company has already put a significant portion of the funding round toward acquiring ReviewAnalyst, its Texas-based rival. Read more »
Appcelerator has built up a community of 1.5 million developers that have used its cross-platform development tool to build more than 25,000 apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry. Now it’s looking to turn that community into a selling opportunity by launching a marketplace for software modules. 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 »
Seesmic, the company best known for making consumer-facing social networking apps, has shifted its strategy for the second time in its four-year history, this time to focus on building mobile apps for the enterprise. Can the third iteration of Seesmic finally bring the company success? Read more »
In our cloudy times, VMware is a barometer for IT, and VMworld is what CES is to the consumer electronics industry. So check out what this week’s hoopla in Las Vegas is telling us about enterprise IT and the cloud. Read more »
Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola this week has been widely interpreted as a bid to control the mobile phone company’s portfolio of 17,000 mobile patents. As Colin Gibbs noted last week, handset manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung and HTC appear increasingly willing to claim patent infringement in order ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
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 »
When it comes to getting major companies to embrace building their applications in the cloud, Salesforce and its newly acquired platform-as- a-service company Heroku are relying on a tried-and-true method: Peer pressure. 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 »
This week’s announcement of VMware’s Horizon App Manager is the latest addition to the company’s increasingly rich portfolio, but the company is not alone in wanting to strengthen its market position by expanding far beyond its original offering. Where, then, does that leave the competition? 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 »
Xobni, a popular productivity add-on for Outlook that automatically displays additional information about email contacts, has announced that it is making available “gadgets,” third-party additions to Xobni that will let well-known collaboration tools like Yammer, Chatter and Dropbox become an integral part of the Outlook interface. Read more »
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 »
In 2011, enterprise will finally get wise to the importance of social media, according to a research paper by Stifel Nicolaus. The biggest areas of growth will be in tools that use consumer technologies and combine internal collaboration with external feedback. Read more »
These days it seems raising funding gets all the focus. Most of us forget that there is a big difference between raising capital and starting a business and actually building a business. Many of us underestimate how long it takes to build a business. Read more »
Salesforce.com has agreed to acquire Canadian social-media monitoring company Radian6 for a total of $326 million in cash and stock, and says that it will make the company’s tools and services a core part of its Sales Cloud customer-relationship management dashboard for businesses. Read more »
Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Technological advancements have minimized the need for employees to be as physically present in a traditional office setting, and employee relationships now extend across different time zones and geographies. This paper discusses the future of work and the workplace in that context. We examine the shifting nature of actual workspaces, from four office walls to the online world; the emergence of new flexible hours that no longer require a nine-to-five mindset; the role of consumer-grade technologies such as iPads, smartphones and notebooks in the workplace; and what role cloud-based services such as Box.net, Huddle and Dropbox play. Companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Apple, Google and Skype. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Salesforce bought social productivity app maker Manymoon today in another push toward social collaboration. The acquisition gives Salesforce the top app in Google’s Apps Marketplace and a popular product for businesses looking to enhance existing tools for better collaboration and sharing. Read more »
Salesforce has made its Facebook-like enterprise collaboration app, Chatter, generally available at Chatter.com. The app was previously only available to Salesforce CRM and Force.com customers, but now anyone can get a free account simply by signing up using their company email address. Read more »
With enterprise data volumes growing, business and IT leaders face significant opportunities and challenges from big data. Using cloud-computing technologies, organizations are experimenting with distributed data stores, cloud compute capacity for data analytics, hosted data integration and even operational databases in the cloud. Hadoop/MapReduce, meanwhile, has moved past test and development stage to become a viable extension or alternative to traditional relational databases. Though the space is not without its obstacles, including plenty of privacy concerns, there are numerous sales-growth opportunities and new business models finally surfacing in 2011. Companies mentioned in this report include Google, IBM, Apple, Oracle, Salesforce and VMware. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
