Oracle recently acquired its first SaaS company, RightNow, for $1.5 billion. RightNow had annual revenue of $185.5 million in 2010, and its acquisition makes Oracle a direct competitor of Salesforce.com. Meanwhile, Salesforce, the leader of the SaaS CRM market, continued to develop its social networking capabilities with its recent acquisitions of social customer service startup Assistly for $50 million and Model Metrics, a mobile and social cloud computing consulting services company for an undisclosed amount. Let’s take a closer look.
In 1994, Marc Ewing created his own distribution for Linus Torvald’s Linux, called it Red Hat Linux and released it in October of that year. After merging with Bob Young’s ACC Corporation in 1995, the company was renamed Red Hat Software. Today, Red Hat is a global company that provides enterprises with technology and services via the open source model.
Sramana Mitra: Hi Lee. Let’s start with some context about Red Hat and about you to give our readers an idea about the cloud computing environment we’re dealing with, from what perspective we’re going to look at it and the scale of the problem for you. Read the full article »
SAP, one of the largest companies in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market, recently reported strong results – its seventh straight quarter of double-digit growth. It even reported a double-digit gain in market share against Oracle, which recently announced its plans to acquire customer service SaaS vendor RightNow for $1.5 billion. Let’s take a closer look.
Sramana Mitra: Let me give you another example, and let’s have a bit discussion about another trend within the social CRM space. We have another company called Crowd Engineering that is actually getting traction with large companies. Both of the companies I mentioned are getting traction with very large accounts. What Crowd Engineering is saying is, you have a customer support organization. For consumer electronics, telecom, and similar companies, the call volume in a customer support organization is very high. The margin pressure is very high, so each call that you have to take costs you in margins.
You have level one, level two, and level three customer support. Crowd Engineering is saying, why don’t we introduce a level zero customer support in your organization? We are going to set up such that customers will be able to talk to other expert customers. People who know the system inside out can solve their problems and are willing to engage. We have most of these, especially in companies that have strong brand value and passionate customers who are happy to show off their expertise and knowledge. Crowd Engineering is tapping into that class of customers, engaging them. The thesis is you can divert a large chunk of calls that will never have to touch a customer service rep. It will be tackled by expert customers. This translates into very high ROI. Read the full article »
Arthur Young and Alwin C. Ernst never met in life, and their companies didn’t merge to form Ernst & Young until 41 years after they died within days of each other in 1948. But both men were innovators who believed in globalization. Today, the company provides professional services for its customers but on a much broader and, thanks to the advent of the cloud, more complex scale than anything that Ernst or Young could have imagined.
Sramana Mitra: Hi, Mal. Let’s start with some context about the scope of your work, the scope of the cloud computing footprint that you are dealing with, then we’ll go to your philosophy around it and so forth. Read the full article »
Market analysts do not foresee a steep recovery in IT spending as both the U.S. and European markets continue their struggle to come out of the economic crisis. According to RBC experts, IT spending will grow a mere 4%-5% over the year in 2011. Gartner also expects slower growth in the coming years. Their recent study estimates IT spending in 2012 to grow 3.9% over the year to $2.7 trillion in 2012. For the current year, Gartner expects IT spending to grow 5.9% over the year.
Fourteen years ago, Apple was going through a rough patch and its stock was trading at below $5 levels. Steve Jobs took the reins again and made Apple the most valuable company on the planet. Sadly, Apple’s former leader passed away this month. Though Jobs had been away from Apple’s daily affairs for a while, he remained a major influence for the company. A spiritual leader of sorts, almost.
