n NEWS ANALYSIS Salesforce1 resonate with customers, partners, and developers or is there another reworking to come?” Martens said via email. Salesforce.com will also be pushing its Marketing Cloud product family, which it built out through acquisitions such as Buddy Media and ExactTarget. The question is whether Salesforce. com is done buying. One area where Salesforce.com has lagged in some observers’ eyes is analytics. This year, it might be wise to watch for a stronger analytics product push from Salesforce. com, whether through acquisitions or partnerships, Martens said. Microsoft: Martens is also keeping watch on Microsoft, which will soon have a new CEO after the pending departure of longtime chief Steve Ballmer. Ballmer has treated Microsoft’s Dynamics ERP and CRM business with deference, preserving it as a separate entity as part of the company reorganization he pushed through last year. Dynamics is seen as a means for Microsoft’s sales force to have more conversations with C-level executives in companies, rather than just IT, and therefore as a conduit for other Microsoft products. There are four ERP products in the Dynamics family, something Microsoft tried to streamline but ultimately gave up on some years ago. The new CEO will be faced with “the age-old question of how to balance the needs of four ERP product families and integrate them to one CRM product,” Martens said. Workday: The HCM (human capital management) 16
IBM Pumps $1.2 billion into Global Cloud Datacenters
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ISPELLING any lingering doubt that IBM sees cloud computing as the way of the future, the company announced that it will invest $1.2 billion (about Rs 7,400 crore) this year in expanding its global cloud infrastructure. “Having lots of datacenters in lots of different countries around the world will be important in the long-term,” said IBM SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby. “We want the world to understand that cloud is transformational for IBM.” The company plans to open 15 new datacenters this year, more than doubling the cloud capacity it acquired when it purchased SoftLayer last year for $2 billion. It plans to combine the new data centers, the existing SoftLayer data centers, and the data centers it already ran before the SoftLayer purchase into a single operation that would provide public and private cloud services to its customers, as well as provide services for internal operations. While IBM has remained relatively quiet about its cloud plans, at least in comparison to Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, it has been busy preparing for the cloud-centric future, said Rebecca Wettemann, a vice president at the enterprise IT analysis firm Nucleus Research. This announcement is the logical next step for the company, Wettemann said. “IBM has always taken a measured approach to announcements. But IBM has quietly been running datacenters for a long time, and the IBM cloud has been established,” she said. “We’ve seen a slow transformation of IBM from a services company to a software company, and now to a cloud company.”
software vendor remains hot coming off its late 2012 IPO and will look to ride the momentum through 2014 as it builds out its financial software product line and sells it into large enterprises that have traditionally been Oracle and SAP shops. On the company’s thirdquarter earnings call in November, co-CEO Aneel Bhusri said Workday now has more than 550 customers around the world. Bhusri also revealed that Workday had landed 10 new financials customers in the quarter, but said none were in the
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Since 2007, IBM has acquired more than 15 companies with cloud computing software or expertise, spending more than $7 billion in the process. “Through acquisition, IBM has really done a good job of retaining people who can grow this business,” Wettemann said. In fact, the SoftLayer acquisition of last August plays a key role in the new expansion. Thanks to its easy scalability, the architecture and supporting software that SoftLayer developed for its own operations will serve as the foundation for this unified IBM cloud. “Everything at IBM going forward will reside on the SoftLayer infrastructure-asa-service,” Crosby said. Building on SoftLayer’s services, IBM will offer a global IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) as well as the hundreds of IBM PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and SaaS (software-as-a-service) offerings. IBM’s recently announced initiative to commercialize Watson-style cognitive computing, for example, will take advantage of the global cloud. Initially, IBM will opendata centers in Washington, London, Hong Kong, Toronto, Mexico City and Dallas, as well as in cities in Japan and India. Additional locations will be announced later in the year. IBM plans further expansions next year, setting up new locations in the Middle East and Africa. IBM is estimating that global cloud revenue will grow to $200 billion per year by 2020. IBM hopes to generate $7 billion in cloud revenue in 2015. —Joab Jackson
Fortune 1000. NetSuite: The cloud-based ERP vendor may have a busy year. Of particular interest could be the evolution of its HCM strategy. NetSuite has taken a two-tier approach, with its recent TribeHR acquisition serving smaller companies, and partnerships with Oracle and others for large enterprise deals, Martens said. Infor: Under the leadership of ex-Oracle president Charles Phillips, Infor has retooled its user interface, added hundreds of developers and formed partnerships with cloud vendors such as
Salesforce.com. But some might argue the company’s profile is still fairly low. This year, Infor will be ramping up its marketing machine in an effort to change that. “We feel the technology is in place, and now it’s time to tell the story,” said Infor spokesman Dan Barnhardt. On the product end of things, it wouldn’t be surprising to also see Infor take further steps into HCM, whether through partnerships with companies such as Cornerstone on Demand and Ultimate Software, or acquisitions.