SaaS

Serial acquisitions vs. serial innovation

Gaining market share by buying up smaller companies in key tech sectors is an established practice in the software industry and has been for years. But is it the future?

In the past three years Oracle, CA, and Hewlett-Packard have been on acquisition sprees, buying their way into markets that they felt rounded out their product portfolios.

CA spent almost $1 billion rounding out its cloud computing capabilities in a series of buying sprees in 2009 and 2010. HP dropped a bomb on the software world with its hotly debated $12 billion purchase of Autonomy this August. And Oracle has … Read more

A final thought from The Wisdom of Clouds

Three years ago, Matt Asay (then-author of The Open Road) introduced me to Dan Farber, then the CNET editor in chief, who invited me to begin blogging as a member of the CNET Blog Network.

I accepted, and from that day forth, I made it my goal with every post to inform and educate you, my reader, about the varied nuances of this disruptive way of doing IT that we call cloud computing.

Since then, I've written several posts that I am very proud of:

I covered the tenuous relationship between existing law and cloud computing in several posts, … Read more

Cloud, open source, and new network models: Part 2

OpenStack's Quantum network service project is an early attempt to define a common, simple abstraction of an OSI Layer 2 network segment. What does that abstraction look like, and how does Quantum allow the networking market to flourish and innovate under such a simple concept?

OpenStack itself is an open-source project that aims to deliver a massively scalable cloud operating system, the software that coordinates how infrastructure (such as servers, networks, and data storage) are delivered to the applications and services that consume that infrastructure. Easily the largest open-source community in this space--others include Eucalyptus and CloudStack--OpenStack consists … Read more

Cloud, open source, and new network models: Part 1

What is the network's role in cloud computing? What are the best practices for defining and delivering network architectures to meet the needs of a variety of cloud workloads? Is there a standard model for networking in the cloud?

Last week's OpenStack developer summit in Boston was, by all accounts, a demonstration of the strength and determination of its still young open-source community. Nowhere was this more evident than in the standing-room-only sessions about the Quantum network services project.

I should be clear that though I worked on Quantum planning through Cisco's OpenStack program, I did not … Read more

Opera Solutions nabs $84M for 'big data' analytics

This week Opera Solutions, a provider of "big data" analytics tools, announced that the company has taken in an $84 million investment to expand its rapidly growing business. The investment round, the company's first, was led by Silver Lake Sumeru, with participation from Accel-KKR, Invus Financial Advisors, JGE Capital Management, and Tola Capital.

Founded in 2004, Opera has grown from 10 people to more than 600 staffers globally with development locations in New York, Shanghai, and New Delhi. The staff includes 180 scientists working to solve data-oriented challenges.

I spoke with CEO and founder Arnab Gupta today … Read more

Regulation, automation, and cloud computing

Chris Hoff, a former colleague now at Juniper Systems, and a great blogger in his own right, penned a piece last week about the weak underbelly of automation: our decreased opportunity to react manually to negative situations before they become a crisis. Hoff put the problem extremely well in the opening of the post:

I'm a huge proponent of automation. Taking rote processes from the hands of humans & leveraging machines of all types to enable higher agility, lower cost and increased efficacy is a wonderful thing.

However, there's a trade off; as automation matures and feedback loops … Read more

Totango set to enhance SaaS sales tools

As enterprise users grew tired of installing massive suites of on-premise customer relation management software and Internet-oriented businesses began to rise, Salesforce.com came along and turned hosted applications, or software-as-a-service (SaaS), into a multi-billion dollar market.

Following in Salesforce's wake came lead-nurturing tools like Constant Contact, Eloqua, HubSpot, and Marketo that have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding, and have ostensibly added value to their customers' relationship.

This week we see the launch of Totango (pronounced like "to tango"), which bills itself as a "real-time customer usage analysis platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) … Read more

All cloud roads lead to applications

Last week's Structure conference in San Francisco was fascinating to me on several levels. The conference centered much more on the business and market dynamics of cloud than pure technology and services, so there was significantly more coherence to the talks as a whole than in previous years.

Vendors had products and services, and customers had private and public cloud deployments; as opposed to previous years where the "vaporware" almost formed storm clouds.

Another key observation from the show was the change in emphasis this year from virtual machines (2009) and "workloads" (2010) to an … Read more

Apple's iCloud reps best vision yet for consumers

Apple's much-anticipated announcement of cloud services for its OS X and iOS device portfolio was as sleek and integrated as most everything the Cupertino, Calif., company does.

While there has been extensive coverage of last week's announcement, I think the most important aspect of the announcement hasn't been given its due.

Apple now owns the beginnings of what will likely be the world's leading integrated consumer cloud portfolio.

Let's be clear. I'm not claiming Apple is the only consumer cloud service or that it will have the dominant share of cloud services overall. But … Read more