Carnival in the Cloud: Workday and Oracle Continue to Battle it Out

According to a recent research report, cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions market is estimated to have grown 21% in 2014 to $6.1 billion. It is further expected to grow to $10 billion by 2019 at a CAGR of 10%. SAP is the leader in the market with 11% share and Workday (NYSE: WDAY) is the second largest player accounting for 9% of the market, followed by Ultimate Software with 7% share and Oracle with 6% share.

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What Lies Ahead for Salesforce?

According to Gartner, worldwide CRM software sales grew 13.3% to $23.2 billion in 2014. About 47% of the sales were SaaS-based, which has helped Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) grow its market share to 18.6% in the No.1 spot. Salesforce has been successful in leveraging SaaS in CRM for its growth. Its recent results are a testimony to that. But now, it is looking at analytics and verticals for more growth. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You gave an overview. If you were to go out and start a company today, have you heard any customer point out a specific problem that needs to be solved but there is no vendor out there that’s addressing this problem?

Jerry Melnick: We are going to rely on cloud services just like the way we rely on our computer systems today. They are at a level of maturity and accessibility that is not exactly at a level that data centers are today. The opportunity, at least in the space that we live in, is how do I build on or harden that cloud? How do I make that cloud capable of supporting the kinds of service and service levels required for the applications that are most important? Clearly, if cloud can do that, I get the advantage of not just the cloud flexibility and utility and the cost savings, but I also get high value out of its foundational security and availability. What kinds of technologies do we need to provide those high-value services? How do I make my cloud do more? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the industry in your space and the adjacent spaces, where do you see open problems that new entrepreneurs could be working on?

Jerry Melnick: The real movement today is clearly around service-based versus product-based offerings. When I say that, I’m referring specifically to cloud service. Utility computing is finally being realized in the cloud space. Probably the applications that we make highly available are the laggards in the industry in terms of moving into the cloud in providing services, mainly because of the conservative nature. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Kevin O’Malley and Patrick Shea, Co-founders of AdDaptive Intelligence (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about the workflow of this? Where is the data collection happening? Where is the data integration with the algorithm happening? Is this happening in real-time, batch, or pre-setting of some sort? How is this setup? If I’m a publisher who wants to plug in your system into my site, how does this work?

Kevin O’Malley:  Everything is real-time, so is our data management platform, especially the technology that helps segment the data. That is done through real-time transactions. We’ll essentially place our technology on the publisher’s website. From there, we’re collecting, segmenting, and analyzing all that data in real-time. When the publisher has an advertising campaign to run, they’ll select certain segments of users and certain characteristics that they would like to target. We then would run the campaign on our platform.

The algorithm is obviously built into our media buying engine. Essentially, we’re using their data but we’re also using the data that we receive back from all of the impressions that we’re running. As Patrick mentioned earlier, there’s dozens, if not thousands, of different parameters – time >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you help me with an ecosystem map of the space that you’re in? Who are the other players, whether it’s competitors or complementary players? What does the ecosystem map look like?

Jerry Melnick: You can cut the space in a number of directions. Let’s start at the top in terms of what service level a technology provides, starting with photonics. It’s a small market. You can work all the way down to back up and recovery when you talk about high availability. In the middle of that, the most prevalent is high availability and high availability achieved through clustering. That’s basically less than seven or eight minutes of downtime a year and no data loss. That’s the space that we sit in. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 2)

Jerry Melnick: The other challenge in the space is, that’s great if you talk about a single kind of configuration. I purchase a couple of pieces of iron, put my applications on it, and configure it so that it’s all highly available using SIOS Technology. That’s great. If you want to follow the industry trend of moving these applications into virtualization environments to lower cost and increase manageability and flexibility, how do I take advantage to provide the same level of infrastructure availability for foundations.

You don’t want to have to learn how to do it all over again. You don’t want to have to create a whole new way of doing it. You’ve been using these kinds of clustering capabilities of providing critical application services for years. The advantage that we bring is that without changing your operational environment, skill sets, and applications, you can extend what you used to do on these servers into virtualization and cloud environment. There’s a huge benefit because you can literally forklift, upgrade, get rid of the hardware, and move it to Amazon or Azure. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Neal Creighton, CEO of CounterTack (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That actually brings me to the open opportunity question. This is more about going up to the 30,000 foot level of what’s happening in the industry. Do vendors who sell to multiple international authorities have the technology available to them if you were to share data with them to be able to trace it back to the actual criminals and take action?

Neal Creighton: Our technology is very automated in how we design it. We don’t like to have a lot of people doing manual inputs into it. However, the kind of work that you’re talking about really does require some forensics investigation over time. Many nation states have people working in this area to figure out attribution. A lot of times, we can figure those things out. The difficulty is however lies in how we respond. I think we’re all struggling with it.

Sramana Mitra: But it’s not up to you to respond. This gets into criminal law and order territory. It’s not up to private companies or citizens to respond to criminal behaviors. That is for governments and law authorities to act on it. >>>