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.

There is currently quite a buzz around the concept of advanced analytics, as organisations look to predict future outcomes more effectively, based on a detailed understanding of what has actually happened in the past rather than testing theoretical hypotheses based on statistical analysis. Put simply, the better the analysis, the better-informed decisions will be around anticipating – and responding effectively to - future demand.

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...

While corporations have embraced cloud technology for everything from customer relationship management to recruitment, one area of the business has lagged behind. CFOs and treasurers are often slower to bring their systems into the cloud than their colleagues across the business; so what's holding them back and how could they benefit from cloud technology?

The International Data Center (IDC) has released a report which reveals that Microsoft remains the largest software vendor globally through 2012 revenues and overall market share. Figures from the Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker put the Washington-based tech giant at a 17.1% market share, lower than its 2011 figure of 17.4% but still nearly twice as far ahead as its nearest competitors, IBM and Oracle.

Analyst firm Forrester predicts the CRM software market will reach more than $15 billion by 2014, nearly double what it was in 2007. The CRM market totaled about $11 billion in 2012. The reason for the growth? Companies are placing an emphasis on driving growth by attracting new customers and selling more to existing customers. Is your business keeping pace?