Big tech firms have chance to gobble up cash-poor cloud rivals
Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: Robert McMillan.
The recent market selloff is pummeling the business-technology sector, but it may come with a silver lining for its top players: an opportunity to buy cash-poor upstarts that have been eating away at their business. Enterprise-technology giants like International Business Machines Corp. IBM, +1.16% , Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO, +1.92% and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. HPE, +5.00% have all seen their market value shrink by at least 9% in the past month — underperforming the S&P 500 index, which fell 7% over the same period.
Some younger firms have fared much worse. Box Inc. BOX, +5.49% a seller of Internet-based data storage, has dropped by 26%. Workday Inc. WDAY, +2.38% which sells online access to accounting and human resources software, lost 13%. The market capitalization of Hortonworks HDP, +8.54% , which makes data-analytics software, has plummeted by half…
Despite being launched more than five years ago and being supported by high-profile businesses of the likes of IBM, Intel, Yahoo, CERN, Disney, and hundreds of others, OpenStack is not particularly well known in business circles. This is largely because OpenStack is a cloud operating system that works behind the scenes delivering the infrastructure that organisations need to work effectively.
Alibaba Cloud Computing (Alicloud) is to launch 20 new online services to the Chinese market under the brand name Big Data Platform. The new application service range caters for activities in the data development chain, including processing, analysis, computing, machine learning and big data hosting. Around 1,000 developers are expected to be developing services with AliCloud in the next three years.
Alibaba’s cloud computing unit, AliCloud, is gearing up to launch a new suite of big data solution and analytics widely accessible in China. The e-commerce powerhouse is also planning to work with NVIDIA to initiate an internet based high graphics processing service in China. Formerly known as Aliyun, the cloud services arm serves the company’s websites and external clients which includes small enterprises working in China and businesses abroad.
Peter Magnusson wants to make one thing clear: Amazon Web Services, in his opinion, does not define enterprise cloud computing. In fact, if Magnusson, senior vice president of cloud development for Oracle ORCL 1.03% , is worried about any rival cloud provider, it is Microsoft MSFT 1.14% , he told Fortune in an interview after an Oracle CloudWorld event in New York on Wednesday.
Fusion, a leading provider of cloud services, announced today that a major East Coast hospital system has signed a three year, $1.5 million agreement with Fusion to upgrade the healthcare institution’s communications infrastructure, facilitating its migration to the cloud while protecting its significant technology investments. A key reason for the hospital system’s selection was Fusion’s ability to customize its secure, cloud-ready solution with call control technology that prevents fraudulent calls from reaching patients within the institution, supporting compliance requirements to shield patient information. 
CloudPhysics, provider of data-driven insights for smarter IT, today announced record growth in 2015. The company’s success was fueled by mid-market customers looking for operational insights to preempt and eliminate hazards that threaten to disrupt their IT operations and applications.