Workday Taking on Oracle and SAP with Recruiting

According to an IDC report released last year, the worldwide Human Capital Management (HCM) market was pegged to be worth $7.5 billion in 2011. IDC estimates that HCM will grow annually at 8.1% over the next five years through 2016. The growth in the market is expected to be driven by the increasing adoption of cloud-based services.

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HP’s Turnaround Now Focusing on the Cloud

According to Gartner’s quarterly report, during the first quarter of 2014, Worldwide PC shipments fell 1.7% over the year to 76.6 million units. The market was led by Lenovo, which saw PC shipments grow 10.9% over the year to 12.9 million units. HP was the second largest vendor growing 4.1% over the year to ship 12.2 million units and claiming 16% of the market.

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Marketo Should Roll-Up Their Category, Acquire On24

Earlier this year, Experian Marketing Services released their 2013 Email Marketing Study. The report found that personalized promotional emails had a 29% higher unique open rates and 41% higher unique click rates. In fact, the study claims that personalized promotional emails improved transaction rates and revenue per email by six times compared with non-personalized emails.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bob Renner, CEO of Liaison Technologies (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that the structured data integration problem at scale is still an open problem? I’m looking for problems that are unsolved out there, not problems that you’ve solved already.

Bob Renner: I think scale is an unsolved problem at this point. A very difficult problem that you have to solve elegantly is cross-domain master data management (MDM). I think you’ve got a few products and solutions and implementation within a given domain and a less complex domain had been adequately handled, but I think cross-domain master data management is a problem that continues to be very use-case specific, and generally, there have not been a lot of solutions.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bob Renner, CEO of Liaison Technologies (Part 3)

Bob Renner: In one example and use case, we married our sales data with Twitter feeds so that we can access the API’s. We pull the data in, normalize and correlate it, and we created a dashboard that allowed our clients to look at sentiment. We were able to dimension that along with the sales data. We product a very different, simultaneous view of geography, volume of sales, and demographics of who they’re selling to and then generalize sentiment about how people are talking about the data from social media standpoint. The interesting part of that is it uses some forms of natural language processing and parsing to take free-form data and turn it into structured data from the Twitter feeds and marry it up to other structured data.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bob Renner, CEO of Liaison Technologies (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a couple more use cases from different industries.

Bob Renner: Let’s go all the way over to distribution. Two of the largest distributors in the US of a variety of industrial supplies as well as paper products leverage Liaison’s technology to pull in information about the products that they then package and sell, normalize that, and synchronize that data to their ERP systems. In one case, one of those two very large distributors has a fairly common ERP model. The other one, a direct competitor, has a geographically distributed ERP model. Both of these companies use Liaison’s cloud-based integration and data management platform as the authoritative data source for all of their products that they pull in and also a variety of attributes related to those products. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bob Renner, CEO of Liaison Technologies (Part 1)

Entrepreneurs in the field of data integration would like to read this interview to get a sense of the state of the union, and identify open opportunities in the field.

Sramana Mitra: Bob, tell us about Liaison Technologies and yourself.

Bob Renner: I’ll tell you a little bit about myself first and then I’ll dive into Liaison. My background is in the technology space. I call myself a technologist by trade. I joined Liaison Technologies almost 15 years ago as a Chief Technology Officer. Then, I moved up from CTO to CEO after being with the company for a couple of years.

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Salesforce Continues on Growth Track

According to the recently released Gartner report, Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2013, the global CRM market grew 14% over the year to $20.4 billion last year. The researcher found that 41% of the CRM systems sold last year were SaaS-based offerings and Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) led the market with a 16.1% market share. SAP was a distant second with 13% market share followed by Oracle’s 10% share.

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