A report that Salesforce.com is entertaining takeover offers whipped up a storm of speculation Wednesday, as analysts and other observers mulled the possibility and what it could mean for the enterprise software market.
“It would require a massive deal for that to happen,” noted Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst with Constellation Research. “Salesforce still has a lot of growth ahead.”
Spurred by the approach of a potential acquirer, Salesforce has hired financial advisers to help it field such offers, according to the Bloomberg report, which was based on anonymous sources. The company’s stock closed up 11.6 percent on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday, giving it a market capitalization just north of US$47 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Salesforce is working with financial advisors to field bids after being approached by an unnamed party about a possible buyout, according to a Bloomberg report.The cloud-based CRM (customer relationship managment) company has a market value of more than $40 billion. It could be the largest software acquisition ever, according to Bloomberg.The report cited unnamed sources and did not name any potential bidders. There is no guarantee a deal will come together, the sources told Bloomberg.Salesforce stock was up almost 9 percent on the New York Stock Exchange less than an hour before the end of trading Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While marketers want to engage customers in a unified way, disconnected systems often make that difficult. Adobe and Microsoft aim to tackle that problem by integrating Adobe’s Marketing Cloud with Dynamics CRM.The goal of the integration, announced Wednesday at Adobe Summit in London, is to let companies execute marketing strategies that take all customer engagements into account, from reach and acquisition to retention and loyalty.Microsoft Dynamics Marketing complements Adobe’s Marketing Cloud with capabilities including marketing-resource management. With the new integration, companies get a combined tool for both customer relationship management and marketing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
PC prices have enjoyed record lows for many years now, but buyers might have to shell out a few more bucks for their desired laptop or desktop later this year.
Research firm Gartner is sounding the alarm that PC prices might go up later this year due to recent currency fluctuations. The effect may especially be felt in Europe and Japan, where local currencies are weakening against the U.S. dollar.
The alternative to rising prices is fewer features. PC makers might opt for less memory, a cheaper webcam or a lower-capacity hard drive to avoid higher prices. PC makers do something similar every holiday shopping season when they sell computers at rock-bottom prices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Some American Airlines passengers faced lengthy flight delays on Tuesday after a fault in the iPad navigation app used by the carriers' pilots and co-pilots caused the tablets to crash."Some flights are experiencing an issue with a software application on iPads," American Airlines said on Twitter to a passenger whose flight was delayed.The glitch appeared to impact the airline's fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft and occurred suddenly.+ ALSO Big new United Airlines carry-on item: iPhone 6 Plus phablets for 23,000 flight attendants +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Name a tech company, any tech company, and they're investing in containers. Google, of course. IBM, yes. Microsoft, check. But, just because containers are extremely popular, doesn't mean virtual machines are out of date. They're not.Yes, containers can enable your company to pack a lot more applications into a single physical server than a virtual machine (VM) can. Container technologies, such as Docker, beat VMs at this part of the cloud or data-center game.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco is looking to provide threat protection for data centers and clouds by integrating acquired security technology with its programmable, policy-based networking portfolio.Cisco this week announced that it is combining the FirePOWER threat protection services software obtained from the 2013 acquisition of Sourcefire with its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) automated policy fabric. ACI is Cisco’s response to software-defined networking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Pebble hopes to replicate in China the success it has had in the U.S., by working to build a fanbase for its smartwatches.Three years ago, Pebble’s first product launched on Kickstarter as a crowdfunded project that initially raised over US$10 million from thousands of backers.“We have always had a tight relationship with the people using the product, and our intention is to continue that in China,” said Eric Migicovsky, Pebble’s CEO in an interview on Wednesday.The Silicon Valley startup is still in the early stages of tapping the country’s market, and only a month ago it upgraded its software to support Chinese language characters. It also began offering its smartwatches as a crowdfunding campaign on local e-commerce site JD.com that managed to rake in almost 300,000 yuan ($49,000) from 1,400 supporters earlier in April.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Samsung Electronics registered its sixth straight quarterly decline in profits in the first three months of this year as competition bit into its key smartphone and display businesses.The company said net profit during the January to March quarter fell 39 percent on the same period last year to 4.6 trillion won (US$4.3 billion). Revenue was 47 trillion won, down 12 percent, in line with guidance issued earlier in April.Samsung is under fierce pressure in the smartphone sector, where low-cost Chinese rivals are eroding sales at the low-end while Apple is winning customers at the high end.The company doesn’t disclose precise smartphone sales figures, but it said it sold 99 million phones of all types during the quarter. Of those, the share of smartphones was in the “mid 80s percent,” it said in a conference call with investors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hitachi Data Systems is aiming its big-data expertise at health care and enterprise IT departments with specialized products for combining types of information.The company has been expanding beyond its traditional storage business through development and acquisitions in big data in recent years. It bought Avrio and Pantascene last year for public safety video and sensor systems, and this year it has announced acquisitions of SAP services specialist Oxya and business analytics vendor Pentaho.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Twitter failed to meet revenue estimates for the first quarter, and is lowering its expectations for the rest of the year, due to weaker than expected performance of some of its ads products, the company said Tuesday.Total sales for the period that ended March 31 were $436 million, Twitter reported, up 74 percent from the previous year. Analysts, however, were expecting sales of roughly $457 million, according to estimates compiled by Thomson Financial Network.The company’s stock plummeted by nearly 20 percent toward the end of trading on Tuesday, to around $42. Twitter typically publishes financial data after markets close, but they appeared online, apparently in error, during the trading session.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Build 2015 is where the Microsoft truly begins the work of selling Windows 10, starting with developers.“This is a really important Build for Microsoft, probably the most important developer conference it has ever done. The company is on the brink of launching a new wave of operating system technologies that will affect almost everything it delivers over the next few years,” said Al Hilwa, IDC analyst who covers enterprise development, by email.Held this week in San Francisco, with the first keynote kicking off Wednesday morning, Build 2015 also promises to provide developers with more information about how to prepare their applications for the cloud, and may even offer a glimpse into HoloLens, the Windows 10-based virtual reality headset.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
LAS VEGAS -- Linux network operating system developer Cumulus Networks this week at Interop rolled out a management platform that provides a common interface and operational process for data center racks.The Cumulus Rack Management Platform is based on the company’s Cumulus Linux network operating system code base. Out-of-band management switches running Cumulus RMP may be managed by the same Linux toolsets as both servers and data-plane switches running Cumulus Linux, the company says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A few years ago, my first impression of the MacBook Air was generally dismissive -- I felt the Air was underpowered and overpriced -- until I took a second look and realized it was perfect for road warriors. I won't make that mistake twice with Apple's latest MacBook. Like the MacBook Air, the 12-in. MacBook has new design elements that will be a deal-breaker for some and a revelation for others.As of this writing, I've spent less than a week with this laptop -- and the MacBook, with its forward-thinking design and accompanying tradeoffs, is the type of computer that requires time to get a real feel for its strengths and weaknesses. Instead, think of this as more of a first impression; I'll see how these observations hold up when I fully evaluate the MacBook after I've used it more.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Toshiba is hoping developers will use its application processors to build wearable devices, and has launched hardware and software development kits to help make it happen.The chip industry has become transfixed by the massive potential of the market for wearables and other IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Vendors such as Intel and Broadcom are developing products and offering development tools to make them easier to integrate. Toshiba has now joined the fray.The company’s new development environment includes an HDK (hardware development kit) embedded with the TZ1001MBG application processor, an SDK (software development kit) that runs on it, as well as a software development tool, according to Toshiba.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Interop 2015Image by ShutterstockInterop 2015 is in full swing this year with an estimated 12,000 attendees and 300 exhibitors, including 125 new ones compared to last year. Check out our roundup of the hottest products and services being announced or displayed at this year’s conference. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google will give €150 million (US$163 million) to European publishers and digital journalism startups in the next three years as part of a wider package that aims to support the news sector.The Internet giant has had a difficult relationship with publishers in many countries in Europe over using snippets for its news indexing, but having eight top publishers joining its initiative may soften up other publishers to also do a deal.The move also comes just weeks after the European Commission charged Google with abusing its dominant position in Internet search services in Europe and started an antitrust probe into Android over app bundling practices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple achieved its second straight quarter of record results as demand for the new iPhone 6 surged and China became Apple’s second most important market after the U.S.The company sold 61.2 million units of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus during the the first three months of 2015, blasting past the 44 million [m] it shipped during the same quarter of last year when the iPhone 5S was still new on the market.Those sales helped Apple to a net profit of $13.6 billion [b], up by almost 33 percent, on revenue of $58 billion [b] for the quarter, up 27 percent. That’s above the $55 billion [b] Apple had said it was expecting and the $56 billion [b] consensus expectation from financial analysts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
NASA is looking at developing a public competition that would pit competitors in developing fast, powerful computers that would help support advanced applications.According to NASA, despite tremendous progress made in the past few decades, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools in particular are too slow for simulation of complex geometry flows, particularly those involving flow separation and combustion applications. To enable high-fidelity CFD for multi-disciplinary analysis and design, the speed of computation must be increased by orders of magnitude, the space agency said.+More on Network World: The zany world of identified flying objects+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Aerohive Networks announced Monday that Dell will begin reselling its wireless LAN and related management products -- not a shocker in light of longtime Dell OEM partner Aruba Networks being snapped up by HP in a multi-billion deal last month.Aerohive says Dell is a good fit in that the 802.11ac access points and HiveManager NG cloud-based management platform help to fill out Dell's line-up of products spanning from the data center to endpoints. "We believe there is a large demand from customers that like doing business with 'pure play' access layer solution providers vs. large networking companies like Cisco and HP," says Bill Hoppin, Aerohive VP of Business Development.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here