IBM, Salesforce Deals Reinforce Cloud Perceptions

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.”…

Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research, says managing IT should get easier under a more streamlined Salesforce.com offering. “For the smart CIO, this is an opportunity to show how they can take advantage of the overall Salesforce platform to deliver value across the business,” she told CIO Journal…

Read more from the source @ http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/06/04/ibm-salesforce-deals-reinforce-cloud-perceptions/