Cloud Tech News

The future of customer relationships depends more on context than transactions. And this trend is accelerating, driven by the integration of social media into customer relationship management (CRM), rapid gains in usability of CRM and integration applications, and the global growth of the API economy.

Oracle is now taking the next step in optimizing portions of its application portfolio to take full advantage of the new X3-2 line. Oracle’s Fast Data approach to enterprise applications follows SAP’s release of SAP Business Suite and CRM on the in-memory HANA platform. Ovum believes that Oracle’s approach is a logical first step, and would like to see this eventually yield a new generation of application-specific, single-appliance engineered systems.

Last year, four out of every 10 CRM systems sold were SaaS-based, and the trend is accelerating. In the recent Gartner report Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Software, Worldwide, 2012 published April 18 2013 the authors provide insights into why the worldwide CRM market experienced 12% growth in 2012, three times the average of all enterprise software categories.

In my role as a globetrotting cloud consultant, I continue to be amazed at how many executives still favour private clouds over public. These managers are perfectly happy to pour money into newfangled data centres (sorry, "private clouds"), even though Amazon Web Services and its brethren are reinventing the entire world of IT. Their reason? Sometimes they believe private clouds will save them money over the public cloud option...

For any modern entrepreneur I`d suggest the sweet spot of cloud applications you should master is the holy trinity of these three killer apps – Linkedin, Salesforce.com and Google+ Apps.

Regardless of the sector in question, home-based working has always aroused emotions among executives. The recent comments made by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg against home working have further inflamed this debate, but Ovum feels that contact center services players would be wise to heed the remarks of Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, which were well thought out and very much in favour of working from home.

Through 2012, many CRM outsourcers struggled to adjust to ongoing economic uncertainty, as well as shifting requirements from clients in terms of supporting mobility and social media solutions. However, there were encouraging signs from the standpoint of financial performance, with a number of the sector's major players managing to moderately increase revenues and maintain profitability.

As public cloud computing gains greater adoption across enterprises, there's an increased level of spending occurring on infrastructure-related services, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Enterprises are prioritising how to get cloud platforms integrated with legacy systems to make use of the years of data they have accumulated.