Weekly Cloud Review: Services and Partnerships
Cloud providers are forging unusual alliances to stay ahead of the curve. Raising eyebrows, CRM giant Salesforce and HR management specialist Workday recently joined forces to “standardize” each other’s cloud services. Under the agreement, Salesforce’s sales and marketing solutions will be integrated with HCM, financial and data analytics applications from Workday. The latter will also expand support for Chatter, the Force.com’s collaboration platform.
The pair decided to make their alliance public on the same day Oracle, Salesforce’s archenemy, reported its first quarter earning earnings. The timing of the announcement is made even more notable by the fact that a couple months earlier, the two rivals entered an agreement to bundle their respective offerings.
The Salesforce ecosystem is expanding in all directions. Veeva, a Pleasanton, California-based provider of Salesforce-based solutions for the pharmaceutical industry, recently filed for an IPO in hopes of raising $150 million from investors. The company appointed Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank as lead underwriters. Veeva didn’t disclose an anticipated stock price or the number of shares it’s looking to sell, but anonymous tipsters revealed that the offering is expected to catapult the firm’s valuation to $2 billion.
Two days after we reported that Veeva is preparing for a stock market debut, Red Hat teamed up with dotCloud to make Docker more viable for mission-critical apps. The companies will bundle the Linux-based container with Fedora OS and Red Hat’s Openshift PaaS offering, and add advanced networking capabilities through libvirt integration. Docker will also be modified to take advantage of the provisioning technology that is baked into Red Hat’s Linux distributions.
While Red Hat is busy stirring up the virtualization market, AT&T is working to make cloud services more accessible for business users. The carrier integrated its NetBond virtual private network offering with Windows Azure to address the security and reliability concerns of companies that are reluctant to venture beyond the firewall.
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