Adobe Shifting Business Mix

A SaaS roll-up has been triggered by Oracle’s recently acquisition of SaaS vendor RightNow for $1.5 billion. In 2009, Adobe acquired SaaS web analytics vendor Omniture for $1.8 billion and since then has been making small acquisitions to sharpen their focus on digital marketing. Adobe recently reported fourth-quarter results that beat estimates. The company also announced changes in their reporting structure to accommodate recent activity in digital marketing.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ari Zilka, CTO of Terracotta (Part 7)

SM: There are many classifications of big data and real time. At this point, that’s one of the reasons why there’s so much activity in the space right now.

AZ: Yes. Big data can be sold to enterprises because no matter who you are, you don’t have to be a Facebook anymore to have an explosion of data on your hands. Big data can be sold to the end user. It’s purely a function of context. There are companies like Backblaze and Blaze Logic and Dropbox and Box.net selling data management in the cloud. There is big data for you and me. There is big data for Main Street enterprise. There’s big data for Wall Street. There is big data in different flavors and slices all over the place, helping us manage the fact that all our data has moved online. At some point, the IRS said, “Please don’t send me any paper tax returns. I don’t want to file anything anymore. I’m happy to buy disks. I’m not very happy to buy file cabinets.” If the IRS is online and they’re handling big data, and you’re not thinking about it for your business and your customers, then you’re behind the curve … absolutely. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ari Zilka, CTO of Terracotta (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: OK, as a follow-on question – this is a good, visceral example to illustrate what you’re talking about. Why has Twitter not been able to monetize along those same lines? It’s similar to Facebook, but Twitter has not succeeded in leveraging the big data/real time element of their infrastructure, why not?

Ari Zilka: Twitter is both big data and it’s real time. Twitter could comb through their Tweets, their end user Tweets, and look for patterns in what people are Tweeting about. That’s the hashtags, in fact, where users self-tag as part of a pattern and a trend. Twitter then looks at those hashtags and the symbols’ trends. It also does regular pattern matching on our Tweets. It also has a real-time aspect. The entire interface to Twitter is about a real-time push of data between you and me and all our friends in our networks and so on. So, your question is excellent. Why aren’t they making money? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ari Zilka, CTO of Terracotta (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I have to say, though, that what you’re describing, even at a big data level, not yet available. Forget big data and real time. Correct?

Ari Zilka: That’s where Terracotta comes in. We’re a data management company, and the product’s name is Big Memory.

SM: I know, but what I am saying is you can add the real-time component to it, but the truth is the big data analytics portion of it is not available yet. >>>

Oracle’s SaaS Shopping List

Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) in October announced its plans to acquire its first Software as a Service (SaaS) company, RightNow, for $1.5 billion. Oracle had for long shied away from making any acquisitions in the SaaS sector, but it can no longer ignore the SaaS market, which is projected by Gartner to reach $21.3 billion in 2015. RightNow was the first step for Oracle, and it is highly likely that many more SaaS acquisitions are to follow. Even its rival SAP has followed suit with the $3.4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors, a SaaS talent management vendor. This year seems to be gearing up for a SaaS roll-up.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ari Zilka, CTO of Terracotta (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So, the way end customers access your product is through other application vendors that are using your product to develop their applications?

Ari Zilka: It’s a 50-50 split. Half the world doesn’t even need to know we’re there. They use other applications that use us. We help those vendors sell our product to the customers to get more scale, more throughput. And then half the customers have end developers in-house who go to our site directly, download our products, and integrate them by hand into their own business logic. So, it’s not just for packaged apps. It’s also for custom apps. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ari Zilka, CTO of Terracotta (Part 1)

Founded in 2003 by Ari Zilka, Terracotta, a wholly owned subsidiary of Software AG, develops breakthrough software that delivers snap-in performance, scale, and availability for enterprise applications. Terracotta’s technology can store up to a terabyte of data in-memory, which can boost application and system performance and scalability significantly. At the time of its acquisition in June 2011, the company had 55 employees located in development centers in San Francisco and New Delhi. The company’s customer base is filled with names like JP Morgan, Adobe, BBC, and Hitachi, among others.  >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Lauwers, CTO of Avistar (Part 7)

SM: Let’s switch to entrepreneurial opportunities. Give me some ideas about interesting collaboration applications that are open areas that could be interesting businesses to build today, given today’s landscape.

CL: Sure. I there’s still a lot of opportunities around better unification of the user experience, especially as it relates to data conferencing and Web conferencing. I think Web conferencing is well understood, well adopted, but it has a narrow focus. It’s designed to serve scheduled meetings. The whole user interface paradigm is done in support of that. If you go the other extreme and take technologies like Skype in the consumer space or Microsoft Lync in the enterprise space, there the user interface paradigm is different. It’s based on a presence model. It’s ad hoc meetings. It’s starting with a two-party call, adding multiple participants, but it’s focused on voice and video primarily. The ability to add a data channel to that is often a little [tricky]. There’s an opportunity marry the two paradigms and deliver an experience to the end user. >>>