Cloud race is here. You can see it by how companies are actively acquiring all possible and impossible cloud assets. Just to mention few examples that might be interesting to know. Navigate to the following link Oracle pays 1.9B to Taleo to read about this acquisition. Taleo, which has about 1,400 employees, said it has more than 5,000 customers, including nearly half of the Fortune 100. Through its software, people can apply for jobs and companies can manage the careers of their hires.
This acquisition is definitely come to balance Oracle’s rival SAP, which acquired SuccessFactor for 3.4B. SuccessFactors, based in San Mateo, Calif., is a big maker of cloud-based human resources applications. The company focuses on applications for managing relationships with employees, such as organizing and developing performance reviews and bonuses. The company says it has more than 3,500 customers. It lost 12.5 million on 205.9 million in revenue last year.
Another interesting acquisition just came out to press few days ago, and it is actually in CAD/PLM space. Dassault is acquiring Netvibes. Netvibes is a website for dashboards. Netvibes, the San Francisco–based company that allows people and brands to create personalized RSS and social media feed dashboards. The dollar amount is incomparable, but the trend is clear, in my view. Cloud assets become interesting.
In my post few days ago, I was discussing PDM/PLM evolution. You can read more by navigating to the following link. This picture will give you an idea of my thinking of where PDM/PLM evolution is going – to the cloud.
However, I think my post was missing one picture, which explains the final step. Please take a look on the picture below. Here is my point – moving actually CAD on the cloud will be the final step.
What is my conclusion? I want to stress this point – CAD will be the latest application in the list of PDM, PLM and other business services to move to the cloud. What is interesting to me is how vendors are going to support this “cloud transition”. Companies clearly won’t be able to move all in a single shot. So, we can expect a long time when cloud and on-premises application will co-exist. That drive me to another discussion… tomorrow. I’m taking off to SolidWorks World. Follow my tweeter and watch my blog from time to time. SolidWorks World coverage with “spicy PLM flavor” is about to begin.
Best, Oleg
