Google’s Disruption Of Enterprise Email Market And Their “Social Challenges”
Ever since Gmail captured the imagination of consumers, Google has been trying to push Google Apps to enterprise customers. In spite of some news about problems in their implementation for big customers, it has been gaining traction steadily. The biggest attraction towards Google Apps Email over other systems is the cost. Even though other players [...]
Gartner Says Social CRM Market Will be $1 Billion in 2012
Gartner has predicted that the market for social CRM software will be over $1 Billion by 2012. According to the research firm, social CRM spending will rise exponentially in 2011 and a 3 year shakeout will begin in the space. The huge potential in the space has resulted in over 100 vendors entering the market [...]
Organized Robbery
We’re at a time of rebellion against maintenance fees, which now include the elements of insurance, extortion, declining systems, and of course refactoring all of which add to the costs of any implementation. Add that into the actual implementation itself, and one is left with whopping fees and eventually ineffective…
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Available Globally
After dilly dallying for a long time, Microsoft is going global with their cloud push. Today, Microsoft CEO announced that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will be available globally. This is the cloud version of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 which itself will be available globally on Feb 28, 2011. It is now available at 40 [...]
Acquisitions, Trust And Cloud Services
Last week, Salesforce.com acquired the web conferencing provider DimDim for $31 Million. Immediately after the news was out, DimDim sent a mail telling their users that free and month by month subscription plans will end by 15th March, 2011. Those with annual subscription will be allowed to continue till the end of their subscription period [...]
Salesforce.com Acquires DimDim
Image via CrunchBase Salesforce.com (see previous CloudAve coverage) today announced that it is acquiring DimDim, a low priced Webex competitor, for approximately 31 Million in cash. DimDim was founded in 2007 with its development office in Hyderabad, India. They offered real time collaboration service with video, presentation, whiteboard, etc.. I have been using/following DimDim ever [...]
Looking Back 2010: Key Cloud Acquisitions
This is the final post in the Looking Back 2010 Series and, also, for the year 2010. After looking at the three key cloud events in this year (thanks to James Urquhart for kicking up the discussion on Twitter), I want to do a post talking about some of the key acquisitions in the cloud [...]
Looking Back 2010: Salesforce, Heroku And Democratization Of Platforms
This is my second post in the series Looking Back 2010 where I plan to highlight some of the significant cloud related events in 2010. These year end picks are based on my observations of the industry over the past one year. In today’s post, I am going to talk about my second pick, the [...]
ServiceSource Meshes Cloud Technology And Human Expertise To Help Increase Renewals
As cloud (computing) looms over the businesses of all sizes and shapes, there is a fear that machines are slowly cutting out humans from the workforce. Even though it is partly true, businesses are finding niche areas where the human expertise and machine based automation are both considered to be an asset. One such area [...]
PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Salesforce.com’s Plan For Enterprise Domination
I think today is a good day to revisit PaaS is the future of the cloud services theme. Salesforce.com today announced their agreement to acquire Heroku, the ruby on rails PaaS provider. When people talk about Salesforce.com, the buzz is mostly around their CRM or Chatter and the discussions center around how it fits into [...]
Dreamforce: Decade of Inspiration
I was at the first Dreamforce. It was in a hotel at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco and it attracted 500 people and perhaps another 200 employees — roughly 2/3 of the entire company. The big announcements were related to sales force automation, but the company also announced custom tabs and some nifty [...]
Database.com: Salesforce’s New RDBMS as a Service Offering
Today at Dreamforce 2010 event, Salesforce.com announced the launch of Database.com, their enterprise database offering built just for the cloud. Not only they have acquired an awesome domain name but they have also built a robust service from ground up. Even though we have database as a service from providers like Amazon, Microsoft and a [...]
Jitterbit CloudReplicate – Syncing Salesforce.com Data With A Database On AWS
Jitterbit (see previous CloudAve coverage here), the Oakland based data integration company, today announced Jitterbit CloudReplicate for Amazon EC2. Jitterbit offers both appliance based downloadable and cloud based integration solutions to enterprises of all sizes. I got interested in Jitterbit because they also offer their platform under one of the open source licenses. In October, [...]
Software is Roadkill
The fastest way to become roadkill to venture capitalists is to become a software company. Software may not be inherently evil (it has created wealth for many people that is in proportion to the pain it has provided to many customers). Software and specifically on-premise enterprise software, however, is clearly…
JP Rangaswami Joins Salesforce As Chief Scientist
Salesforce.com today announced that they are appointing JP Rangaswami as the Chief Scientist. We very rarely write about individuals joining companies in this space but I think this news deserves a mention here. I think it is a great move on the Salesforce’s side to bring in a person like JP Rangaswami to evangelize about [...]
