Concur And NetSuite On Larry’s List

Concur (NASDAQ:CNQR) recently reported strong results that beat estimates and said it would be ramping its investment across its business. The prospect of higher spending has led to investors selling shares, causing the share price to fall from about $48 to $43. Let’s take a closer look. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jared Wray, Founder and CTO of Tier 3 (Part 1)

Businesses continue to move their operations to the cloud. So, the need for companies like Bellevue, Washington–based Tier 3 will continue to increase, as will the need for such companies to provide faster, more efficient cloud solutions. Tier 3 has provided large and small enterprises with an enterprise cloud platform that allows them to keep their business operations flowing smoothly since 2006. The company’s technology partners are VMWare and NetApp, among others.   >>>

Salesforce.com Near 52-Week Low

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.

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Taleo A Takeover Target?

According to market research firm Bersin & Associates, the talent management market, currently worth about $3 billion, is expected to grow by 12-15 percent or more this year. SuccessFactors (NASDAQ:SFSF) and Taleo (NASDAQ:TLEO), the leading players in the market have over the past two to three years, have made many acquisitions and seen tremendous growth. Let’s take a closer look.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In my research so far, I have not seen a lot of great offerings in the social media analytics space that do a good job of taking a lot of data. I agree with you that yes, the relationships can easily be struck with the firms that are producing data – the Twitters and Facebooks and so on – and there’re lots of APIs and so forth. But I think the analytics side of that equation is inadequate.

Lee Congdon: I agree. In fact, I’m sure we’ve identified one provider. I know there are multiple ones out there. We will be learning, based on the capabilities of this new engagement, what’s available. It’s an area of interest to us. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that topic for a second. You’re absolutely right. That is a platform that is going to be very difficult for a startup company to bring to market. What’s happening is that there are several camps that are trying to do that and don’t have a full solution yet. Salesforce.com has a stake in the ground on that front. Google has a stake in the ground. Microsoft has a stake in the ground. IBM and Lotus have a stake in the ground.

Lee Congdon: Zoho, perhaps, as well I would add to your list. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to share a trend that I’m seeing right now, particularly in companies where the number of customers is very large. [Red Hat] has a large number of customers. The number of support calls can be very large. You know how customer support organizations are set up as level one, level two, level three customer support? There is a company that is part of our One Million by One Million program called Crowd Engineering. These guys have introduced a level zero customer support where it’s a full enterprise system that engages and integrates the community into the support system so that some of the support calls can be tackled by the expert customer community when they’re available to deal with support needs. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have in total? How many customers do you service from your entire IT infrastructure?

Lee Congdon: Internally or externally?

SM: Externally.

LC: Certainly, [we have] hundreds of thousands [of customers] around the globe. >>>