Gerry Brown, Senior Analyst, Customer Engagement

Between October 2013 and February 2014 Oracle made three acquisitions that enhance the Oracle Marketing Cloud proposition. The first acquisition was Compendium for marketing content management; the second was Responsys, a cross-channel marketing platform; and the third BlueKai, a data management platform and data marketplace focused on the marketing industry.

Many “core” marketing technology applications are already provided by the Oracle Marketing Cloud. The three acquisitions are enhancements designed to supplement, add value to, and differentiate Oracle’s offer, and certainly give Oracle a larger footprint in cloud marketing applications. It should also be noted that the Oracle Marketing Cloud is part of the larger, more embracing Oracle Customer Experience Cloud, which includes commerce, sales, service, social, and marketing.

Oracle has unfulfilled ambitions in the “Marketing Cloud” area, and believes that the market offers a strategic business opportunity. These acquisitions provide three key challenges …

The latest edition of Six of the Best, featuring the CloudTech editorial team’s favourite links from around the web, has either a slightly hotchpotch feel to it, or covers an extremely wide range of cloud computing stories over the past couple of weeks. We’ll leave it up to you to decide.  

1)      Moving to the cloud? Don’t rush to kiss legacy applications goodbye [Forbes]

Dominick Paul, national vice president of strategic solutions for SunGard Availability Services, opens with an anecdote. He kicked off a presentation at a CIO summit by explaining that “with the advent of the cloud, UNIX was now a legacy platform.” The audience got the joke – given that UNIX was the hottest thing just five years ago, it seems bizarre to consider it legacy because of the cloud.

As a result, Paul’s theory in the article goes: “Just because cloud-based technologies are the …

Ariba’s product and services roadmap is rapidly evolving, including gaining more analytics capabilities. BriefingsDirect had an opportunity to learn first-hand how at the recent 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.
To learn more about the recent news at Ariba LIVE — and also what to expect from both Ariba and SAP Cloud in the coming months — we sat down with Chris Haydon, Senior Vice President of Solutions Management for Procurement, Finance and Network at Ariba, an SAP company. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

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Code-named “Carina”, the twenty-first release of OpenNebula is available today with a new innovative provisioning model based on virtual Data Centers that offers a simple but comprehensive framework for resource allocation to different groups of users in federated data centers and hybrid cloud deployments. Carina brings the ability to easily federate multiple OpenNebula clouds for high availability, scalability, isolation or multiple-site support, and the seamless sharing of golden images across these zones through a new revamped AppMarket. Users can also browse and provision services on-demand using a new simple, intuitive cloud provisioning portal.

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Code-named “Carina”, the twenty-first release of OpenNebula is available today with a new innovative provisioning model based on virtual Data Centers that offers a simple but comprehensive framework for resource allocation to different groups of users in federated data centers and hybrid cloud deployments. Carina brings the ability to easily federate multiple OpenNebula clouds for high availability, scalability, isolation or multiple-site support, and the seamless sharing of golden images across these zones through a new revamped AppMarket. Users can also browse and provision services on-demand using a new simple, intuitive cloud provisioning portal.

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Blink your eyes and five years have gone by. That’s my feeling as I posed questions to Ross Turk (pictured below), VP of Community at Inktank.

I first interviewed him almost five years ago, at an event in San Jose, when he was with SourceForge. Since that time, the entire cloud computing revolution went into full-launch mode, with Inktank’s focus on massive distributed storage along with it.

Inktank and Ross were at the recent Red Had Summit, which seemed like a great opportunity to re-visit his thoughts. Here’s what I asked him and what he had to say.

Roger: What sort of scale do your customers face?

Ross: Deployments in the 3-5PB range are common, and larger ones are slowly coming online. In 2014, we plan to see regular deployments in the 10PB range.

Through Inktank Ceph Enterprise, we aim to deliver massively scalable storage that runs on commodity hardware, radically improving storage economics and easing the costs of managing exponential enterprise data growth.

Because Ceph contains no single point of failure and is built using only scale-out components, there is no theoretical limit to the deployment size. And because our solution is based on open source, it frees enterprises from vendor lock-in, providing the flexibility and scalability necessary to keep up with evolving storage needs.

Roger: What problems are InkTank and Ceph designed to solve?

Ross: Traditional storage solutions typically are built using costly and restrictive proprietary hardware, requiring enterprises with vast amounts of data to invest heavily. But they are also restrictive, often tying enterprises to a single vendor and reducing their ability to adapt to changing storage demands.

Roger: What are the keys to your relationship with Red Hat? What do each of the companies contribute to one another?

Ross: Our relationship with Red Hat is critical to us; as we work to bring the power of Ceph into the enterprise, more and more of our customers are demanding tight interoperability with technologies in the Red Hat ecosystem, and their customers are increasingly requesting Ceph-based solutions.

Inktank Ceph Enterprise is certified to provide storage for RHEL-OSP, Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution, and RHEV, Red Hat’s enterprise virtualization product. Our relationship is necessary to deliver and support the fully-integrated solutions our customers are asking for!

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Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum Software

At the end of March 2014, and in short succession, Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft announced significant price cuts to their public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud offerings. Widely reported in the press, the market rejoiced at the news, which combined price cuts with other announcements.

IaaS price cuts are not a new trend, but the most important aspect of this latest round of cuts is that it reflects Google’s unambiguous ambition to position itself as a major IaaS player. However, the company has much more to do to catch up with AWS, because price cuts are not the main weapon in an IaaS vendor’s arsenal.

For more information, see the upcoming Ovum report IaaS: Beyond Price Cuts.

IaaS is also one of the key topics that will be covered at the Ovum Industry Congress, May 13/14, 2014, at the Victoria …

Red Hat, Inc., on Wednesday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Inktank, a provider of scale-out, open source storage systems. Inktank’s flagship technology, Inktank Ceph Enterprise, delivers object and block storage software to enterprises deploying public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack clouds. Combined with Red Hat’s existing GlusterFS-based storage offering, the addition of Inktank positions Red Hat as the leading provider of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage.

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Infor on Tuesday announced the completed acquisition of substantially all of the assets of Colorado-based GRASP Systems International, Inc. («GRASP»), a leading provider of automated patient acuity, workload management, patient assignment systems and consulting services to healthcare organizations in the U.S. and Canada. GRASP’s strong analytics and reporting capabilities will help Infor address the current cost-crisis occurring in healthcare, and deepen the Infor Healthcare suite by providing another leading solution to the market.
«This acquisition will add value to our existing development efforts for Infor Workforce Management for Healthcare by leveraging information from Infor Cloverleaf and real-time analytics from Infor Care Path Optimization,» said Duncan Angove, president, Infor. «Adding this functionality will enable health systems to go deeper than ever in understanding how staff resources are used in patient care and the costs associated at the patient procedure level to predict not only patient staffing needs based upon patient diagnoses, but also cost while benchmarking against their peers.»

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