Category Archives: Software as a service

BYOA, Identity management, M&A, News & Analysis, Software as a service

LogMeIn acquires LastPass for $125 million to create remote access giant

Remote working SaaS company LogMeIn will acquire password management service provider LastPass for $125 million to bolster its position in identity and access management.

LogMeIn already has a strong position in cloud-based remote login and LastPass is best known as a password manager with an emphasis on enterprise, so it’s easy to see how the two product portfolios complement each other. The combined companies will be in a position to offer a wide range of remote access tools and services.

“LastPass has a great business, a beloved and award winning product, millions of loyal users, and thousands of great business customers – they are synonymous with the category,” said Michael Simon, LogMeIn’s Chairman and CEO. “We believe this transaction instantly gives us a market leading position in password management, while also providing a highly favourable foundation for delivering the next generation of identity and access management solutions to individuals, teams and companies.”

“LogMeIn and LastPass share a great common vision on reshaping identity and access management in ways that not only increase productivity but also improve security for individuals and companies, alike,” said Joe Siegrist, CEO of LastPass. “The striking commonality between our businesses, our products, and cultural DNA make this a great fit for both teams, and we believe a great win for our customers.”

In the rationale behind the move there was much talk of BYOA (bring your own app), which LogMeIn has identified as a key trend. Essentially this means remote workers using whatever tools they see fit and IT managers having to work out how to accommodate them – much as has happened with BYOD (bring your own device). LogMeIn’s strategy is to be the default BYOA enabler.

Amazon, AWS, Database, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, re:invent, Software as a service

Amazon Web Services makes aggressive customer acquisition play

Amazon reinvent 2015At its Amazon re:Invent event Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a number of products and initiatives designed to make it easier for potential customers to move their business to the AWS Cloud.

AWS Snowball is a portable storage appliance designed to be an alternative to trying to upload data over networks, claiming to be able to move 100 TB of data to AWS in less than a week. Amazon is betting that companies are neither willing to prioritise their existing bandwidth, nor devote the time to do this over the network. In addition the company launched Amazon Kinesis Firehose, which is designed to make it easier to upload wireless streaming data to the AWS cloud.

“It has never been easier or more cost-effective for companies to collect, store, analyze, and share data than it is today with the AWS Cloud,” said Bill Vass, VP of AWS Storage Services. “As customers have realized that their data contains key insights that can lead to competitive advantage, they’re looking to get as much data into AWS as quickly as possible. AWS Snowball and Amazon Kinesis Firehose give customers two more important tools to get their data into AWS.”

On top of these new products Amazon announced two new database services – AWS Database Migration Service and Amazon RDS for MariaDB – designed to make it easier for enterprises to bring their production databases to AWS, which seems to take aim at Oracle customers especially.

“With more than a hundred thousand active customers, and six database engines from which to choose, Amazon RDS has become the new normal for running relational databases in the cloud,” said Hal Berenson, VP of Relational Database Services, AWS. “With the AWS Database Migration Service, and its associated Schema Conversion Tool, customers can choose either to move the same database engine from on-premises to AWS, or change from one of the proprietary engines they’re running on-premises to one of the several open source engines available in Amazon RDS.”

Continuing the theme of taking on the big enterprise IT incumbents Amazon launched QuickSight, a cloud business intelligence service that would appear to compete directly with the likes of IBM, while aiming to undercut them with a low-price as-a-service model.

“After several years of development, we’re excited to bring Amazon QuickSight to our customers – a fast and easy-to-use BI service that addresses these needs at an affordable price,” said Raju Gulabani, VP of Database Services at AWS. “At the heart of Amazon QuickSight is the brand new SPICE in-memory calculation engine, which uses the power of the AWS Cloud to make queries run lightning fast on large datasets. We’re looking forward to our customers and partners being able to SPICE up their analytics.”

Lastly Amazon announced a new business group in partnership with Accenture that is also designed to make it easier for companies to move their business to the cloud. The Accenture AWS Business Group is a joint effort between the two and is another example of Accenture putting the cloud at the centre of its strategy.

“Accenture is already a market leader in cloud and the formation of the Accenture AWS Business Group is a key part of our Accenture Cloud First agenda,” said Omar Abbosh, Chief Strategy Officer of Accenture. “Cloud is increasingly becoming a starting point with our clients for their enterprise solutions. Whether our clients need to innovate faster, create new services, or maximize value from their investments, the Accenture AWS Business Group will help them get there faster, with lower risk and with solutions optimized for AWS.”

Amazon Web Services, AWS, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Platform as a service, Rackspace, Software as a service

Rackspace ups AWS functionality and support, becomes authorised reseller

AWSManaged hosting provider Rackspace has announced a ramped up suite of products featuring enhanced support and functionality with Amazon Web Services.

The agreement with AWS, announced at re:Invent in Las Vegas this week, will see Rackspace launch managed service offerings including tools, expertise, application management and operational support for AWS Cloud. “Fanatical Support for AWS” is the core service offering featured as part of the agreement, with three beta offerings supplementing the managed service – Managed Security for AWS, Compliance Assistance for AWS and Managed Cloud for Adobe Experience Manager.

Through Fanatical Support, Rackspace tells its customers to “leave the heavy lifting to us” as it claims to take care of migration, architecture, security and operations for companies looking to adopt AWS for application hosting.

Rackspace has also become an authorised reseller at AWS, as well as a managed services partner, and has joined the AWS Partner Network. CEO Taylor Rhodes spoke about the announcement on the company’s blog page.

“Over the past year, more and more of them [customers] have told us that they love Rackspace expertise and Fanatical Support, and would like to get it for the workloads that they prefer to run on AWS,” he said. “We have spent the past several months working with those customers and with AWS, to create the best managed-service offering on that platform.”

Rhodes went on to say that AWS adds to Rackspace’s existing commitment to support a number of other platforms.

“We help businesses tap the power of the cloud without the pain and expense of managing it all themselves,” he said. “We have gone deep on support for platforms such as OpenStack, Microsoft and VMware. Our success in leading the managed cloud market for those technologies has been validated by industry experts such as Gartner, and most importantly, by our 300,000-plus business customers.”

Finally, Rhodes then highlighted how Fanatical Support has evolved with today’s announcements, and how it will benefit various customer segments.  He claims it will appeal to businesses that have desired AWS integration with existing Fanatical Support functionality; for rapidly growing businesses needing to outsource some IT functionality in order to reallocate technical resource to other areas; and for customers new to both AWS and Rackspace.

Meanwhile, AWS’s VP of worldwide partner ecosystem Terry Wise, welcomed Rackspace’s increased integration and functionality of AWS.

“We’re pleased to see Rackspace support AWS customers and achieve membership in the AWS Managed Service Program,” he said. “A growing number of businesses who want the benefit of the AWS Cloud will find value in working with AWS Managed Service Partners like Rackspace. We have been impressed with Rackspace’s commitment to include beta customers in their AWS managed services offerings, along with certifying a large number of their technical staff.”

CloudSense, CRM, News & Analysis, Salesforce, Software as a service, Ziggo

Ziggo appoints CloudSense to boost its Salesforce

Money cloudPrice quote service provider CloudSense has been anointed by Dutch cableco Ziggo to boost sales using the Cloudsense Telecoms Platform.

The CloudSense systems integrate with Salesforce’s customer relationship management service to improve the effectiveness of company sales teams. The cloud based service helps employees to configure, price and quote products and services from simple sales of broadband to more sophisticated TV bundles and subscriptions.

In a competitive selection process CloudSense promised Ziggo higher order values, fewer order errors, more automation of sales processes and quicker product launches. CloudSense created a telecoms-specific Configure Price Quote (CPQ) and customer order management, according to Dave Loerts, Director Sales SMB at Ziggo. This means Ziggo can improve both the sales cycle and the customer experience. “We were impressed that CloudSense could offer CPQ across every sales channel,” said Loerts.

One of the deciding factors in the sale was that CloudSense has created a contingency plan for working when no network is available. “Being able to configure, price, quote and contract on an iPad offline means the team are always able to sell more effectively,” said Loerts.

The CloudSense Telecoms Platform brings together the sale and provisioning of the entire range of a mobile telcos’ or communications services provider’s products and services across every sales channel. It then integrates them and provides a single view of the full transactional lifecycle natively on Salesforce. By editing and simplifying the presentation of information, and prioritising the most crucial deal making intelligence, it saves time and speeds up the sales life cycle, CloudSense claims.

Faster quotes lead to more sales, which then creates more opportunities for cross-selling and upselling, according to CloudSense CEO Richard Britton.

“Many companies today are faced with challenges when it comes to selling on-site and over the phone, and CloudSense can have a significant impact on a company’s drive to grow its market share,” said Britton.

Azure, Datacentre, Equinix, Microsoft, Microsoft Office 365, News & Analysis, Software as a service, TelecityGroup

Equinix and Telecity to offer Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365

datacentre cloudData centre operators Equinix and TelecityGroup are both now offering Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 as part of their cloud offerings. Microsoft is understood to be announcing as many as five such partnerships with data centre operators.

Co-location specialist TelecityGroup said it is offering the cloud service to three distinct types of customer, these being enterprise customers, co-location partners and a reseller channel. The reseller channel itself is broken down three groups of telcos, managed service providers and systems integrators.

The nature of the market for Office 365 is broadening, according to Adi Ayyagani, the group head of market development for TelecityGroup. “Once interest was restricted to financial services and a couple of other early adopters, but now enterprises from every vertical market are showing an interest.”

TelecityGroup is offering the Office365 service on its software defined networking Cloud-IX platform. Though a number of operators are reportedly making ExpressRoute for Office 365 available, Ayyagani claimed that the Level 3 MPLS network that underpins Cloud-IX will make all the difference. “It means customers can get the service from anywhere, it’s more robust and there’s a greater level of integration available, so that configuration of the service is a lot simpler for service providers,” said Ayyagani.

The managed service providers, telcos and systems integrators reselling the cloud service will be able to use TelecityGroup’s broad footprint to access almost any market in Europe, the Middle East or African, said Ayyagani.

Meanwhile, global data centre operator Equinix has now announced worldwide availability of the cloud version of Microsoft Office for enterprises. The service improves the levels of data privacy since ExpressRoute enables most Office 365 network traffic to avoid the public Internet. Enterprises that use ExpressRoute in an Equinix data centre also get the benefit of being able to run hybrid and multi-cloud services that didn’t previously scale well over the Internet or over typical WAN works, it says.

“Office 365 customers can now benefit from predictable network performance and the ability to better manage network availability,” said Ross Ortega, Microsoft’s Principal Program Manager for Azure Networking.

Content & Applications, Microsoft, News & Analysis, office 2016, Office 365, Software as a service

Microsoft releases Office 2016 for ‘mobile-first, cloud-first world’

Microsoft Office 2016 devices croppedMicrosoft has promised to ‘re-invent productivity and business processes’ for the mobile and cloud-first world, with its new Office 2016 for Windows. It has also unveiled new additions to Office 365 and made Office 2016 for Mac available as a one-time purchase.

The latest version of Office is designed to make optimal use of Windows 10, with better collaboration and tighter security. The productivity applications within the suite have been updated to make them more cloud friendly, with changes to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Project and Visio to make them more collaborative in nature, according to Microsoft.

One reported change is that groups of employees can now work on a single Word document and view each other’s comments as they are written. The new system now includes Skype for Business so that users of any new Office app can chat, screen share or video chat directly from their documents. Another new feature, enabled by Skype integration, is the ability to simultaneously co-author documents. In October Skype will be available on Office Online, according to Microsoft.

“The way people work has changed dramatically, and that’s why Microsoft is focused on reinventing productivity and business processes for the mobile-first, cloud-first world,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

These latest changes are a ‘big step’ in transforming Office from familiar but individual productivity tools to a connected set of apps and service designed for collaboration and teamwork, according to Nadella.

The security protection for business customers has been beefed up, according to Microsoft, with built-in data loss prevention features designed to cuts the risk of data leaks. New multi-factor authentication will secure the access of those outside the corporate network. Enterprise Data Protection, promised ‘later this year’ will help business to secure the process of sharing corporate content across application and cloud locations.

The delivery of future Office desktop application updates is to change, says Microsoft, so that Office 365 subscribers receive new features and capabilities continuously.

Other new tools include an analytics from Office Delve, a personal work analytics (Delve) and additional charts and formulas for Excel.

“The Office 2016 apps run beautifully on the best Windows ever,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft’s corporate VP for the Office Client Applications and Services. “The Office 2016 apps simplify collaboration and remove barriers to team success.”

AWS, Cisco, Dell, Equinix, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Platform as a service, Public Cloud, Salesforce, Software as a service, Synergy Research

Public cloud generating $22 billion a quarter for IT Companies

metalcloud_lowresPublic cloud computing generated over $22 billion in revenues for IT companies in the second financial quarter of 2015, according to a study by Synergy Research Group.

The revenue breaks down into $10 billion earned by companies supplying public cloud operators with hardware, software and data centre facilities and $12 billion being generated from selling infrastructure, platforms and software as a service.

In addition the public cloud supports ‘huge’ revenue streams from a variety of internet services such as search, social networking, email and e-commerce platforms, says the report. It identifies the supply side companies with the biggest share of revenues as Cisco, HP, Dell, IBM and Equinix. On the cloud services side the market leaders are AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and IBM.

As the public cloud makes inroads into the total IT market, the hardware and software used to build public clouds now account for 24 per cent of all data centre infrastructure spending. Public cloud operators and associated digital content companies account for 47 per cent of the data centre colocation market.

While the total IT market grew at less than five per cent per year, the growth of cloud revenues outpaced it. Infrastructure and platform as a service revenues (Iaas/Paas) grew by 49 per cent in the past year and software as a service (SaaS) grew by 29 per cent.

“Public cloud is now a market that is characterized by big numbers, high growth rates and a relatively small number of global IT players,” said Synergy Research Group’s chief analyst Jeremy Duke.

However, the report noted that there is still a place for regional small-medium sized public cloud players.

News & Analysis, Oracle, PaaS, Platform as a service, Quarterlies, quarterly results, Saas, Software as a service

Software and platforms as a service driving our growth says Oracle

OracleOracle’s latest quarterly results show the increasing strategic of importance of revenue from cloud software and platforms as a service, according to the vendor. Chairman Larry Ellison also claimed the sales figures show Oracle will soon overtake Salesforce as the top selling cloud operator.

The official figures for Oracle’s fiscal 2016 Q1 period show that total revenues were $8.4 billion, which represent a two per cent fall in US dollars but a seven per cent rise in constant currency. Oracle attributed the fall to the current strength of the US dollar.

However, a clearer pattern emerged in the nature of software sales, when benchmarking all sales in US dollars. While revenues for on premise software were down two per cent (in US dollars) at $6.5 billion, the total cloud revenues were up by 29 per cent at $611 million. The revenue from Cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) was $451 million, which represents a 34 per cent increase in sales. Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenues, at $160 million, rose 16 per cent in the same period.

Meanwhile, Oracle’s total hardware revenue figure for the period, $1.1 billion, also indicated a decline, of three per cent. Using the same US dollar benchmark, Oracle’s services revenues for the period more or less stagnated, at $862 million, a rise of one per cent.

Growth is being driven by SaaS and PaaS, according to Oracle CEO Safra Catz. “Cloud subscription contracts almost tripled in the quarter,” said Catz, “as our cloud business scales-up, we plan to double our SaaS and PaaS cloud margins over the next two years. Rapidly growing cloud revenue combined with a doubling of cloud margins will have a huge impact on growth going forward.”

Oracle’s cloud revenue growth rate is being driven by a year-over-year bookings rise of over 150 per cent in Q1, reported Oracle’s other joint CEO Mark Hurd. “Our increasing revenue growth rate is in sharp contrast to our primary cloud competitor’s revenue growth rates, which are on their way down.”

Oracle is still on target to book up to $2.0 billion of new SaaS and PaaS business this fiscal year, claimed executive chairman Larry Ellison. “That means Oracle would sell between 50 per cent more and double the amount of new cloud business that Salesforce plans to sell in their current fiscal year. Oracle is the world’s second largest SaaS and PaaS company, but we are rapidly closing in on number one.”

Internet of Things, IoT, IoT cloud, M2M, Salesforce, Software as a service

Salesforce IoT Cloud promises to create meaning from M2M talk

Internet of Things flat iconic illustrationSalesforce has launched its Internet of Things (IoT) offering with IoT Cloud, which promises to convert machine to machine conversations, digital content and customer information into useful intelligence that sales staff can act on.

The IoT Cloud is powered by event processing engine Salesforce Thunder, which will allow customers to personalise the way they sell, service and market. Development partners include processor maker ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC ThingWorx and Xively LogMeln.

The service was unveiled by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. “Salesforce is turning the internet of things into the internet of customers,” said Benioff. The IoT Cloud will allow businesses to create instant one-to-one proactive actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process, Benioff said.

According to Salesforce, its ‘massively scalable’ cloud computing architecture can ‘listen’ to the connected world and make sense of the billions of events each day from all sources. The connections with wearables, windmills, telephones and turbines – and all other devices – can be contextualized by Salesforce’s own real-time rules, it claims. The IoT Cloud aims to give business users intuitive, point-and-click tools to define rules and logic for events that can trigger actions among the users of Salesforce’s customer relationship systems.

The rationale is to glean information reported by devices – such as the numbers of hard braking movements by drivers of a car fleet – in order to monitor and manage customer cases. Machine intelligence, such as vehicle braking data, could help Salesforce users negotiate from a position of superior knowledge with their customers.

According to Salesforce’s figures there will be 75 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020, with the volume of data growing exponentially each year. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that IoT applications have the potential to make $11.1 trillion worth of economic impact per year by 2025.

The challenge is to make sense of all that data, said IoT market watcher Gary Barnett, chief analyst at Ovum. “IoT deployments only bring value when organisations can act on the information their IoT networks generate,” said Barnett, chief analyst, Ovum. “The ability to make sense of that data will be a key factor in turning it into action.”

analytics as a service, app cloud, Big Data, News & Analysis, Salesforce, Software as a service

Salesforce boosts its Analytics Cloud intelligence tool

Analytics1Salesforce has added new options for users of its Analytics Cloud intelligence tool. The new ‘Wave Actions’ flash up crucial information on dashboards so that salespeople can act more incisively as crucial information reaches them faster.

The new features allow companies to create customised Wave Actions, such as creating cases, updating accounts or assigning tasks. Since Wave is natively integrated with App Cloud, the Wave Actions are automatically pushed from Wave into the corresponding Salesforce record. The system instantly identifies the type of problem that sales managers need to know about as soon as possible, according to Salesforce. When an account suffers particularly bad customer attrition, for example, a sales manager will be alerted to this pattern more rapidly. This is achieved by customising the Wave Analytics App to alert managers about patterns on sales figures (such as defecting customers) and enables them to take action more rapidly.

A new Wave Visualizations feature aims to create a consistent user experience and create a more intuitive process. Salesforce has also revamped the Analytics Cloud’s user interface in a bid to encourage users to become more adventurous in their creation of reports and dashboards. This, according to the cloud software vendor, will bring Analytics Cloud in line with the Lightning Experience design that was rolled out first for Salesforce’s Sales Cloud.

New information has also been unveiled about the use of the Analytics Cloud within the portfolio of other vendor’s software offerings. According to Salesforce there are 81 companies in the Analytics Cloud’s partner ecosystem, with 13 software companies scheduled to unveil new apps based on Analytics Cloud, including Apttus, FinancialForce, SteelBrick and Vlocity.

In its most recent earnings statement, Salesforce revealed that subscription and support revenues from Analytics Cloud were ‘not significant’ for the three and six months ending on July 31, 2015.

The addition to Analytics Cloud comes exactly one year after it was first launched. According to Salesforce, the upgrade gives Analytics Cloud a wider, more active remit than its existing role as a standalone business intelligence application.