Market Dynamics

Gaining market share by buying up smaller companies in key tech sectors is an established practice in the software industry and has been for years. But is it the future?

In the past three years Oracle, CA, and Hewlett-Packard have been on acquisition sprees, buying their way into markets that they felt rounded out their product portfolios.

CA spent almost $1 billion rounding out its cloud computing capabilities in a series of buying sprees in 2009 and 2010. HP dropped a bomb on the software world with its hotly debated $12 billion purchase of Autonomy this August. And Oracle has … Read more

As interest in open-source cloud computing continues to grow, a new--albeit self-interested--survey shows that users are looking to move from experiments to production deployments.

Today, systems management software provider Zenoss released the results of what they've titled the "OpenStack Adoption Survey". (OpenStack is an open-source cloud operating system.) The data was culled from 772 surveys filled out at the recent OpenStack Conference in Boston and the Zenoss open source management community.

OpenStack, which came on the scene in July of 2010 out of Rackspace, is software that delivers a massively scalable cloud operating system for both public … Read more

The big guns of customer relationship management--Oracle and Salesforce.com--continue to vie for dominance through acquisitions.

Back in March, Salesforce.com enhanced its social strategy and Service Cloud 3 offer with a $326 million purchase of Radian6, the popular social-media monitoring platform. Last week, Oracle made competitive moves to boost its cloud business announcing a $1.5 billion purchase of RightNow, the customer service monitoring company. For that price, Oracle will get a nice set of social cloud applications and some 2,000 reported customers.

Oracle's stockpile of cash and savvy acquisitions has heated up its rivalry with Salesforce … Read more

New data from network policy control provider Sandvine reveals what many have suspected: Internet video usage now rivals basic cable.

Sandvine's Global Internet Phenomena Report: Fall 2011 (PDF) (registration required) shows that real-time entertainment applications are the primary drivers of network capacity on fixed access (non-wireless) networks in North America, accounting for 60 percent of peak downstream network traffic from 7 p.m.-9 p.m., up from 50 percent in 2010.

The report also reveals that we've entered a post-PC era where the majority of the traffic is destined for devices other than a laptop or desktop … Read more

Consider the old adage that it is harder to attract new business than to retain current clients. This is especially true with companies specializing in software as a service, or SaaS, where it might make just as much sense to focus on retaining (and garnering new revenue from) current customers as it would be to focus on gaining new customers.

As a result, there's a new seat at the executive table that could rival the importance of the traditional "vice president of sales" role: enter the "VP of customer success."

Thinking Out Cloud blogger Geva … Read more

Venture investing for the third quarter of 2011 reached new heights yet again with a record $7.9 billion in funding for 790 companies according to a new report from private company research firm CB Insights.

The report released today shows that, despite market turmoil and economic uncertainty, VCs opened their wallets at a record level in the third quarter. And if this pace continues, we're on track for 2011 to see the highest levels of financing in more than a decade, potentially at $30 billion for the full year.

I discussed the new report with CB Insights CEO … Read more

Virtualization's benefits--server consolidation, improved resource utilization, faster application deployment, and overall flexibility--have made it one of IT's most important tools.

Earlier this year, a Gartner survey of more than 2,000 CIOs indicated that virtualization was one of their highest priorities in 2011 (eclipsed only by cloud computing).

But given the benefits and the rapid adoption of virtualized environments, can we expect virtualization will be extended to 100 percent of applications? If not, what are the barriers to increased virtualization footprints with the enterprise?

Tintri, a provider of VM-aware storage appliances, recently conducted a survey of 126 virtualization … Read more

The majority of the world's top marketing executives recognize the shift in marketing norms but are not well-prepared to deal with it, a new study reveals.

Even among the most successful enterprises, half of all CMOs feel insufficiently prepared to provide hard numbers in regards to return on marketing investment, according to IBM's study, which surveyed more than 1,700 chief marketing officers from 64 countries and 19 industries.

Despite a wealth of tools available to track social media and public relations, the IBM study found that only 26 percent of CMOs are tracking blogs, 42 percent are … Read more

This week, cloud-based advertising company Flite will be launching FliteHub, an ad component marketplace allowing brands and agencies to include applications directly in advertisements.

According to Flite CEO Will Price, advertisers can use FliteHub to "program" their ads via application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable deeper integration and dynamic updates based on metrics, location, or other criteria. For example, if a movie studio wants to push an ad that includes showtimes, theater information, and ticket purchasing, it can easily adjust it to better target customers in real time.

Display advertising remains one of most profitable Internet businesses, with … Read more