Category: News

Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Tom Brewster.

Salesforce is again set to splash out to boost its marketing prowess, chucking a whopping $2.5 billion (£1.6bn) on rival cloud-based service ExactTarget. A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company like Salesforce, ExactTarget was founded back in 2000. It has scored some top customers over the last 13 years, including Coca-Cola and Nike, helping run their digital marketing.

Salesforce, which is still a loss making firm despite its strong revenue growth, has agreed to pay $33.75 per share in cash for ExactTarget – a 53 percent premium above the company’s $22.10 closing price on Monday…

Grazed from Wall Street Journal. Author: Michael Hickins.

The high premiums built into Saleforce.com Inc. ’s $2.5 billion acquisition of ExactTarget Inc. and International Business Machine Corp. ’s $2 billion purchase of SoftLayer Technologies Inc. illustrate the growing importance of cloud services, particularly to business users outside the IT department. Cloud applications such as these are proliferating throughout organizations, often without the knowledge or blessing of CIOs Gartner Inc. has predicted that by 2017, chief marketing officers will have larger IT budgets than CIOs, but that doesn’t absolve CIOs from the responsibility of securing corporate and customer data, and of helping their companies make the most of their technology investments.

Michael Relich, senior vice president and CIO at Guess Inc. , said, half-jokingly, that CMOs would have more power over IT budgets “over my dead body,” during MIT Sloan’s CIO Symposium last month. But he also noted that SAAS applications are adding to complexity CIOs deal with “because it’s proliferating… I call it cockroach technology,” he said. Bill Miller, CIO at Broadcom Inc. , also noted that SAAS “creates more complexity” because vendors sell “directly to the business.”…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

StreamLink Software, a software as a service (SaaS) technology provider, closed $1,530,000 in new investment on April 15, 2013. This Series A-2 funding led by a group of individual investors will be used to accelerate the company’s growth strategy in order to meet aggressive marketing, sales and partnership goals.

Specifically, funds will be used to engage new, targeted markets for its products, decrease the sales cycle and close rates, and develop strategic federal partnerships. “Our goal has always been to build a great company, and our investors have helped us achieve significant progress toward this goal,” said Adam Roth, CEO of StreamLink Software. “This new investment will allow us to be very focused on growth strategy over the next 18 months, ensuring that we can build on our 348% growth from the previous year…

Grazed from WiredPRNews. Author: PR Announcement.

nexMatrix Telecom has announced that it is making its ATLANTIS application suite available in modular form, both as an add-on to its Protel premise PBX line, and as a cloud (SaaS) solution. ATLANTIS (Automated Telemarketing Local Area Network Total Information System) was first developed in 1981 under the name Distribunet 2100. Originally released as an enterprise-grade suite of integrated applications, it includes modules for Contact Records Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Fulfillment, Support Ticketing, plus numerous accounting, distribution, human resources and many other functions.

ATLANTIS also forms part of the core of the nexMatrix premise and hosted PBX product line and its nexSwitch softswitch. The modular format will now allow customers to purchase only what they need instead of a full suite of the CRM through to the Supply Chain. Currently, ATLANTIS is only offered in it’s full format starting with sales right to manufacturing based on the pipeline. By breaking out the modules, the application can be used solely for the CRM function…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud Technology Partners, the leader in transforming businesses with cloud solutions, today announced the private beta availability of PaaSLane™, a software tool that reduces the time and effort required to migrate applications to the cloud. Traditionally, cloud migration assessments are a manual process that can take months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. PaaSLane automates the process by evaluating application source code against a customizable rules engine to identify cloud compliance and compatibility issues.

"Our clients are moving hundreds of enterprise applications to multiple cloud platforms and need an effective way to clearly identify issues and estimate the effort required to make the move. We built PaaSLane to systematically accelerate migrating applications to the cloud," said John Treadway, senior vice president at Cloud Technology Partners. "PaaSLane inspects application code to find the underlying causes of these issues in a matter of minutes so development teams can start fixing them immediately."…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

SmartFile, a leader in FTP and file sharing, announced today the release of SmartFile for Developers. SmartFile for Developers is a fully integrated file management solution for companies and developers who need to quickly integrate web, smartphone and internal applications. The SmartFile platform gives businesses the tools they need with no code to develop, manage or support, freeing them from worries about file security and compliance.

Drawing on 4 years of experience in the SaaS file sharing business, SmartFile has repositioned itself to become the only Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for file sharing in the world today. SmartFile uses proprietary infrastructure combined with a RESTful API to offer the most robust and scalable platform of this kind…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Gina Narcisi.

Flexible, pay-as-you-go cloud pricing models have attracted enterprise customers to cloud services, and providers are struggling to turn a profit. In a recent TechTarget survey of cloud providers, 44.8% of nearly 300 respondents listed profitability of cloud services as their main business challenge. The problem will only worsen as cloud services become commoditized, said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp., a consultancy in Voorhees, N.J.

The upfront costs associated with building data centers, coupled with unrealistic buyer expectations and competitive cloud pricing, can set cloud providers up for failure. Cloud providers can find profits by differentiation through value-added services and with a little help from larger cloud players or colocation…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

IBM is trying to block the massive 10-year, $600 million cloud computing deal Amazon won from the CIA in January. Big Blue had also bid on the CIA cloud but didn’t win. Now it has filed a protest, reports Federal Computer Week’s Frank Konkel.

It’s actually pretty common for the losing bidders to file protests when huge government contracts are at stake. For instance, last year IBM won a protest over a $543 million contract for wireless tracking sensors awarded to HP. But after a review of the bids, the government decided to stick with HP…

Grazed from IT Pro Portal. Author: Editorial Staff.

In today’s business environment, organisations of all sizes are struggling to maintain the advanced IT capabilities they need to be competitive while reining in cost and complexity. Shifting to off-premise hosted models, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and business process outsourcing, is a common activity undertaken to manage costs.

One of the main challenges businesses face in adopting cloud and SaaS delivery models is the task of synchronising data and integrating the multitude of systems already in data centres with new cloud-based applications, not to mention within the cloud itself. Traditionally, this required organisations to leverage existing tools as well as custom development…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

It took Microsoft a while to launch its Azure infrastructure-as-a-service offering, but I’m seeing signs that it’s one to watch among enterprise service providers. Today Microsoft announced it is now offering per-minute billing. Most providers charge by the hour, although Google Compute Engine recently also began offering per-minute billing. Amazon is still offering billing by the hour. I’ve asked the company if it wants to comment on Azure’s move and will update this post if I hear a response.

In a blog post, Microsoft noted that 65 minutes of use could cost more than double on a competitive cloud service, now that it’s offering per-minute billing. It’s literally the difference of only pennies but “multiply that by the thousands of virtual machines that you may ultimately run, [and] the difference adds up quickly,” Scott Woodgate and Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Windows Azure product marketing, wrote in the blog post. “Suddenly you may find your cloud economics are not what you thought they would be.”…