Entries by Allan Krans, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

McDermott will support ServiceNow’s ambitions to fill enterprise application gaps left by vendors like SAP

On Oct. 22, 2019, ServiceNow announced Bill McDermott, who resigned from SAP less than two weeks prior, would be taking over John Donahoe’s position as CEO at the end of 2019. McDermott’s experience in the enterprise software space will inform ServiceNow’s innovations in and around business applications from SAP and its closest competitors. McDermott’s knowledge […]

Returning to a co-CEO structure completes the executive refresh to support SAP in the ongoing cloud war

Bill McDermott chose not to renew his contract as SAP CEO, making room for SAP to return to its co-CEO structure with Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein. This changing of the guard is the capstone on SAP’s management realignment, and the announcement comes with some glaring similarities to key ERP challenger Oracle’s announcement a month […]

Oracle sheds bright red branding but maintains database narrative and competitor assault at OpenWorld

A rebranded Oracle aims to improve interactions with customers and partners, but not AWS At Oracle OpenWorld, the similarities between the renovations to the venue and to Oracle’s brand were undeniable. The Moscone Conference Center, which has been home to Oracle’s annual event for years, underwent remodeling to improve traffic flow and implement modernizations that […]

Why license when you can buy? Salesforce to acquire ClickSoftware

After 3-plus years of licensing, Salesforce intends to acquire ClickSoftware to augment Field Service Lightning One week after Salesforce completed its acquisition of Tableau, the vendor announced its intent to acquire ClickSoftware, a field service management solutions provider, for $1.35 billion. ClickSoftware is a practical acquisition target for Salesforce; the vendors have been partners since […]

Streamline and extend: IBM’s play for what it calls ‘hybrid multicloud’ or ‘Chapter 2 of the Cloud’

IBM will use OpenShift to bring a consistent cloud value proposition, remaining agnostic toward delivery method, location or cloud provider In 2015 Red Hat’s CEO made a statement at an analyst day presentation that Red Hat aimed to do to the PaaS layer with OpenShift what it had done to the enterprise operating system layer […]

The State Of Cloud Profitability Has Never Been Stronger

More than a decade after taking a leap of faith, cloud vendors prove profit possibilities For vendors such as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and SAP (NYSE: SAP), offering cloud solutions required them to leave the safe and profitable confines of their traditional software businesses, where they were confident in the business models and […]

Salesforce to acquire Tableau as the market moves to no-code and low-code environments

Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau Software would make additional data visualization and analytics capabilities available to business users Salesforce announced its intent to buy Tableau Software in an all-stock deal valued at $15.7 billion, in which Salesforce will exchange 1.103 shares of its common stock for each of Tableau’s Class A and Class B common stock. […]

Informatica touts AI benefits with a caveat: Data cleanliness and management are critical

To be widely effective, AI needs clean data and cloud scale Informatica World 2019’s focus was on customers of all backgrounds and sizes leveraging AI to accelerate digital transformation. While AI is not a new or novel discipline, cloud computing has supported its growing accessibility by enabling scalable, cost-effective data processing. In that spirit, Informatica […]

Three years after launching Google One, Google Cloud nears enterprise readiness with Anthos

Google Cloud’s enterprise journey started with Diane Greene and the ‘One Google’ strategy When Google entered the public cloud market it leveraged the company’s positive reputation among developers as well as technological expertise around machine learning and data analytics from its Search business. However, as a cloud vendor, the company had yet to establish a […]