Is Cloud Computing A Threat To Older Tech Companies? Part 2 Continued From Part 1…. So, how accurate were IDC’s predictions? Hindsight is, as the saying goes, 20/20; so while we won’t know exactly how precise IDC’s projections are, we can certainly determine if their aim was true. IDC predicted: “Worldwide IT spending will grow 6.9%, surprisingly solid growth in a fragile, recovering economy. Mobile devices and apps and emerging markets will be the biggest growth drivers, while European debt issues will dominate downside risks.” The reality: It’s close. IT spending is projected to top out at 6 percent in 2012,
M&A
Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne Merge in a Meeting of Equals Consolidation in industry takes two routes – mergers and acquisitions. Not surprisingly, they are often tagged together as M&A. While the cloud computing industry has seen a lot of acquisitions in recent times (See: Some Recent Cloud Computing Acquisitions – I and What Will The Taleo Purchase Bring To Oracle? ), mergers have been conspicuous by their absence. Although companies have entered into partnerships, these have been temporary arrangements (See: Recent Cloud Computing Team Ups – III). However, all that is set to change with the recently announced merger of
Cloud Computing Startups Raise Big Money: UPDATE 10 Today, there are two startups in focus – Vaultive and Eccentex. Vaultive Cloud data encryption services provider Vaultive recently completed a $10-million funding round led by .406 Ventures, New Science Ventures and Harmony Partners. Headquartered in New York with its R&D center in Tel Aviv, Israel, Vaultive plans to launch its first product next month. Beta testing for the product, Vaultive for Hosted Exchange, is in progress. “Security remains the primary barrier to widespread cloud adoption. Migrating data to a cloud environment introduces significant security, regulatory compliance, data residency and privacy risks
HP Seeks To Give Amazon Competition with a New Public Cloud Service For several years now, Amazon has held sway over the cloud computing heap, especially in IaaS. HP, in contrast, though being one of the largest traditional IT infrastructure players, had been slow to jump onto the cloud computing bandwagon. However, over the last year, it had tried to overcome its late start with furious action. From expensive acquisitions (See: HP’s Revised Proposal of $33 per Share Values 3PAR at $2.4 billion and HP acquires data software firm Stratavia) to partnerships (See: SAP Certifies HP as its Cloud Services Provider and
IDC Analyst Firm Predicts: Cloud Computing to Create 14 Million New Jobs by 2015 REDMOND, Wash. – March 5, 2012 – Spending on public and private IT cloud services will generate nearly 14 million jobs worldwide from 2011 to 2015, according to a new study by the analyst firm IDC. The research, commissioned by Microsoft, also found that IT innovation created by cloud computing could produce $1.1 trillion a year in new business revenues. (Click To Zoom Infographic) “The cloud is going to have a huge impact on job creation,” says Susan Hauser, Microsoft corporate vice president of the Worldwide Enterprise
Cloud Computing, Big Data and EMC’s Impressive Quarterly Results One of my recent articles explored the idea of cloud computing contributing to lower margins at Microsoft (See: Can Cloud Computing Be Bad For Microsoft?). While that may still be true with respect to Microsoft’s highly profitable MS Office suite, recent developments have showed how cloud computing has contributed to several storage giant EMC’s impressive quarterly results. EMC reported Q4 of $832 million, or 38 cents a share, on revenue of $5.6 billion, up 14% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 49 cents a share. Wall Street analysts had predicted
What’s Special about the Joyent Funding Round? There is nothing special about small companies or startups getting funding, other than the obvious vindication of the opportunities in cloud computing. In fact, such funding stories have been the focus of several articles here (See the latest one: Cloud Computing Startups Raise Big Money: UPDATE 8). However, there’s something different, and in my opinion, special, about the $85 million round of funding closed by San Francisco cloud services provider Joyent (http://www.joyent.com/). What’s special about this round of external financing is not the amount (which, by prevailing standards, is quite impressive) or the
Some Recent Cloud Computing Acquisitions As an industry matures, consolidation occurs and some prominent players emerge. With big companies already staking their claims in this space – a phenomenon which I had argued differentiated the cloud computing fervor from the dotcom bubble (See: Are Cloud Computing Stocks Overvalued?) – it was only time that the bigger fish started swallowing the small ones (See: Is Consolidation Coming to Cloud Computing?). While startups are always on the acquiring companies’ radars (See: Acquisitions of Cloud Computing Startups Speed Up), some mid-size companies are also attracting considerable interest. This article features two such recent
