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News from the Cloud: Salesforce.com Haiti appeal

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18th Jan 2010
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A monthly round-up of highlights from our sister site, BusinessCloud9.com.

Salesforce.com launches Haiti relief agency appeal

15 Jan - Salesforce.com has launched a campaign appealing to its community to support Haiti earthquake relief agencies. The Cloud software developer is trying to raise $500,000 to help World Vision and Red Cross with their efforts.
The firm's charity offshoot, the Salesforce.com Foundation, pledged to match any donations from its customers, partners, employees and friends up to $250,000, raising a total of half a million dollars. “We have had a huge response,” CEO Marc Benioff told BusinessCloud9. “We are expanding our match fund.”
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15 Jan - Technology analyst Gartner predicted Cloud computing and in-house tools will help 40% of businesses adopt unified communications technologies by 2012.
Unified communications combines voice and data communications with a range of online tools such as instant messaging and desk-based videoconferencing. Increasingly, these facilities are being hosted by Cloud Computing services.
Gartner enterprise telecoms analyst Scott Marsden told BusinessCloud9: “When you move to a model where you’re not holding things inside the network necessarily, it opens up the opportunity for more Cloud-like delivery. So hosted services, unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS), is an area we expected to start growing a couple of years ago, and it didn’t take off the way we expected. However in some ways, the whole Cloud discussion has restarted chatter in that area.”
Video conferencing is likely to become more popular, he added.
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14 Jan - Salesforce.com's announcement that it was planning to raise $500m through convertible, five-year notes fuelled Wall Street rumours that the company was gearing up for some acquisition activity.
Brad Reback of equity research firm Oppenheimer commented: “With $1.5bn in cash post offering and attractively valued equity, [Salesforce.com] could easily do a multi-billion dollar sized acquisition. We would expect the company to target a company (or companies) that extend its platform, while also offering up cross-selling opportunities.”
On a more practical level, the Cloud CRM developer relased a major interface overhaul in its Spring '10 update. A Real-time quotes facility will pre-populate sales quotes with customer data and sync the quote back into the central database. Mobile Lite smartphone clients are now available for all editions of the CRM suite.
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12 Jan - The Cloud-based business analytics market is likely to grow more than three times faster than the traditional on premise market over the next five years, but still not be as big a revenue spinner for vendors, according to IDC.
The analyst’s study, ‘Worldwide Business Analytics Software-as-a-Service Forecast, 2008-13’ predicted a compound annual growth rate of 22.4% through to 2013 for business analytics delivered as a service. But revenues from the Cloud BI sector will remain low relative to on-premise software throughout this period due to the low starting point of users for the on demand model.
According to IDC, the move to Cloud BI is being influenced by:
  • Budget constraints make SaaS offerings more attractive as they enable departments to subscribe to software services using operational budgets
  • Cloud solutions can by-pass IT resource restrictions and put control of technology decisions into the hands of the business
  • SaaS delivery provides a more flexible platform for deploying BI functionality.
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8 Jan - While 2009 was the year for testing out social computing concepts such as blogs and communities, 2010 will see their transformation into a more mature channel for interacting with customers, says Forrester Research.
Use of social media tools are likely to migrate beyond marketing departments and be backed with action strategies and spending budgets. The analyst’s ‘Top Social Computing Predictions for 2010’ study predicts that enterprises will start to view such less as a means of acquiring lots of followers and as a way to turn followers into business assets. There is also likely to be more focus on measuring the performance of social media and understanding their impact.
Twitter conversations, for example, can inform consumers’ overall view of the brand, so the tools will migrate from the marketing department to customer service and product development functions, Forrester said.
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7 Jan - This month’s cold snap proved to be a godsend for the Cloud Computing industry. “It's clear that when snow falls from the clouds the UK's infrastructure can't cope,” commented Rob Lovell, CEO of  cloud infrastructure provider ThinkGrid.
“Businesses need to look at the Cloud Computing model, as it enables people to work from anywhere, and therefore organisations can ensure that workers are able to continue working as normal even though they can't get into the office.”
Feedback from developers via the Cloud accounting group on AccountingWEB.co.uk backed such claims with tangible evidence. “From our logs it looks like most users are still managing to crack on with business as usual,” commented Pearl Office. “If you’re stuck at home with all your information on the computers at work, you’ll appreciate how nice it would be to access everything remotely.”
“It’s an easy point for cloud vendors to score from that perspective,” admitted Xero’s UK managing director Gary Turner. But he and other developers pointed to the broader advantages not just for flexible work arrangements, but for business continuity.
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5 Jan - The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is looking at security and privacy implications of Cloud Computing as part of a wider digital privacy review.

David Vladeck, who heads the FTC Consumer Protection Bureau, said it recognised the Cloud had the potential to provide cost savings, but also warned that offsite data storage may “raise privacy and security concerns” for users.
With increasing amounts of consumer data being collected and stored centrally, there was a risk that “larger amounts of data may be used by entities not originally intended or understood by consumers”, he wrote.
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3 Jan - The Conservative Party has come under fire for offering a one million pound cash prize for developers to create a Cloud Computing website to solicit ideas from the general public, despite the success of a similar project undertaken by the Obama administration.
The cash prize would be awarded by the Cabinet Office to the people who develop the best online platform which can harness ‘the collective wisdom of the British people’ to shape and test policies.
“Conservatives believe that the collective wisdom of the British people is much greater than that of a bunch of politicians or so-called experts,” said Conservative shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt. “And new technology now allows us to harness that wisdom like never before... When formulating and implementing policy why should we not listen to the hundreds of thousands of experts out there?”
But Labour and the Liberal Democrats dismissed the idea as a “gimmick”. Cabinet Office minister Tessa Jowell said Labour already makes use of collaboration and social networking technologies, while Jenny Willott commented for the Liberal Democrats: “Maybe the Tories are so out of touch they don't know what's out there, but they shouldn't waste £1m of public money reinventing the wheel.”
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Visit our sister site BusinessCloud9.com for more Cloud Computing news, or if you'd like to find out more about how the Cloud is affecting accountancy, join our Cloud accounting discussion group.
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