Salesforce.com May Acquire Concur

Last quarter, Salesforce.com’s stock tumbled to a 52-week low due to disappointing billings growth. But this quarter, its stock is climbing after the company reported strong growth in sales and deferred revenue. The company says its success in closing deals this quarter was powered by the momentum of its social enterprise strategy.

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Concur, NetSuite As Acquisition Targets

Both SAP and Oracle have over the past few months stepped up their cloud strategy with acquisitions. Oracle recently announced its plans to acquire Taleo for $1.9 billion. Coming on the heels of SAP’s December acquisition of SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion, it creates huge expectations of further consolidation of the SaaS industry. Let’s take a closer look at two likely candidates: Concur and NetSuite.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Stephens, Senior Vice-President of Cloud Services, Xerox (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What other areas do you have interesting perspectives on?

Ken Stephens: One of the things that the cloud positions us to do is to move into regions where we haven’t played before. ACS, as an example, before being purchased by Xerox, was largely a U.S. company. We did some Europe and some Asia and Latin America, and so on, but certainly 85% of our revenues were in the U.S. In the cloud space, we’ve already gone to Asia, and we’ve already gone to Europe. I’ll be in Latin America [soon]. Cloud services position people to go global much faster than traditional services ever dreamed of. The question turns into, which regions can you make money in? How do you deal with the challenges of different legal entities? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Stephens, Senior Vice-President of Cloud Services, Xerox (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Well, you know, the application suite that is seeing the maximum migration is actually Lotus Notes.

Ken Stephens: No, it’s amazing. Lotus Live was an amazing success for IBM. That was a bit of a coup on their part to do that. But we shall see.

SM: People are moving out of Lotus, right?

KS: They moved a great deal of users to Lotus Live when they introduced their Lotus Live. But there are a lot of users moving away from Lotus Notes entirely, yes, that’s true.

SM: What is your impression? What are you seeing? What are they moving to? Is your impression that they’re moving to Azure or Google Apps or what?
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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Stephens, Senior Vice-President of Cloud Services, Xerox (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That’s where I think Salesforce.com has been extremely successful.

Ken Stephens: Yes, but do you think Salesforce.com is going to become a major player at the platform?

SM: Yes, I do. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Stephens, Senior Vice-President of Cloud Services, Xerox (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Even within the IT portion, it sounds like I’m hearing infrastructure as a service as the organizing principle.

Ken Stephens: Yes. It’s a staple. You have to do that, and we do that.

SM: What gaps do you see in the market right now? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Stephens, Senior Vice-President of Cloud Services, Xerox (Part 2)

SM: It sounds like Xerox is turning into an IT outsourcing company.

KS: We have about $2 billion in revenue today from IT outsourcing already. We’re a $22 billion company, and about $2 billion of it is IT outsourcing. Now, in the market that we’re pursuing, the services business, historically, ACS and Xerox have pursued Fortune 2000, generally speaking. In the cloud space, we’re pursuing the SMB market as well. So, we’re not only pursuing the top 2000 companies in the world. We’re also pursuing companies that have $10 million to $250 million a year in revenue. Those are much smaller companies, as you can imagine. The reality is smaller companies have just as much, if not more, to gain from cloud computing than their larger competitors. So, it’s a very attractive market and one that we’re excited about. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Stephens, Senior Vice-President of Cloud Services, Xerox (Part 1)

Xerox, originally known as the M.H. Kuhn Company and then the Haloid Company, has been around for more than 100 years. The first electrophotographic or xerographic copy was made in 1938 by inventor Chester Carlson, who patented the technology in 1942. In 1948, the name “Xerox” was trademarked. Since then, Xerox has permeated our culture to the point where some people, when they want to make a photocopy of something, will simply say, “Xerox it.” Xerox has changed a lot in 100 years, as my conversation with Ken Stephens will reveal.   >>>