Microsoft and Salesforce unexpectedly buddy up over Office 365

Partnership allows deeper connections between Office 365 and Salesforce's CRM tools, in possible sign of future collaborations

Partnerships between would-be rivals always spur questions about the motives of both sides, and the announcement of a new partnership between Microsoft and Salesforce.com is no different.

The plan they've hatched involves allowing users of Windows and Office 365, and Salesforce's CRM products, to interoperate more deeply. Some of the functionality detailed in the announcement include new Salesforce connectors for Outlook, Excel, and Office for iPad. A Salesforce1 client for Windows itself and for Windows Phone 8.1 will also be released.

These solutions are some time off, though, with the Salesforce1 client slated for a preview release later this year and "general availability in 2015."

So what bought on a deal between two companies not normally known for being warm with each other?

The motives for the joint effort were outlined in a phone conference on Thursday, during which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff both spoke of putting customers of both companies first, and allowing them to benefit from interoperating.

"We both view our missions as helping customers success in a new world of the cloud, social computing, mobile computing, and connectivity," said Benioff.

Benioff also spoke of how Salesforce is planning to ramp up its use of Microsoft's products to further build out its own portfolio, mainly through its exposure to Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Azure when developing its ExactTarget marketing product. ExactTarget was originally built using Microsoft technologies, but it was acquired by Salesforce in 2013. Benioff claims it was that acquisition, along with Nadella's ascension at Microsoft, that helped build a closer relationship with Microsoft.

What isn't happening -- yet -- is for Salesforce to allow its software to run directly on Azure. Bloomberg had reported earlier, based on unnamed inside sources, that Microsoft and Salesforce were partnering to allow the latter's software to run on the former's cloud, but such a setup seemed an unlikely change of heart for a company of Salesforce's demeanor.

Instead, as Benioff said in the conference, "This is about taking Microsoft's core strategies -- Office 365 and Windows -- and integrating it with Salesforce's core strategies, and making a combined offering that offers more value to each of our users."

Still, the rivalries that have existed between the companies, both in existing fields and in newly emergent ones, are likely to be tough to shrug off. Last year, they introduced rival identity servicesdesigned to appeal not just to users of their own services, but other products as well. And earlier this year, Microsoft revved its own Dynamics CRM after several strategic acquisitions designed to compete feature-for-feature with Salesforce.

When asked about how existing competition might affect the deal, Nadella -- like Benioff before him -- fell back on the customer as the best arbiter: "There will we some areas we will compete in, but as anyone who has a broad partnership and platform approach, you will expect us to do what our customers demand of us."

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Top executives fly the coop at Twitter, Foursquare

A top engineer at Twitter, and two business executives at Foursquare, are leaving

Twitter and Foursquare both said Thursday that some high-ranking executives would be stepping down, with the changes coming as both companies look to expand and try out new products.

Twitter said in a regulatory filing that Senior Vice President of Engineering Christopher Fry would be leaving, effective immediately, and shifting to an advisory role at the company after just over a year on the job. Twitter did not say why he was leaving. The company said Alexander Roetter, currently vice president of engineering, would replace him.

Fry confirmed the news in a tweet of his own. Twitter declined to comment further.

Roetter has been with Twitter since 2010 and currently runs the company's advertiser, publisher, and exchange engineering team.

Foursquare, meanwhile, said that Evan Cohen, its chief operating officer and the company's sixth employee, would be leaving at the end of June. Jeff Glueck, formerly CEO at mobile cloud computing company Skyfire and chief marketing officer at Travelocity, will take his place.

In addition, Holger Luedorf, who has led business development efforts at Foursquare for the past four years, is leaving Friday for the on-demand delivery company Postmates. He will be replaced by Mike Harkey, who has served in a business development role at Foursquare since 2012.

"Evan and Holger have been instrumental in growing Foursquare from a small shop to a company employing more than 170 people worldwide -- without them we wouldn't be where we are today," a company spokesman said.

For Foursquare today, that place is a crossroads. The company was one of the most closely watched social media startups a few years ago but now is struggling to find its niche. Foursquare's location check-in service was big when it launched. But as mobile has grown over the years, other social networking, messaging, and discovery apps have flooded the landscape.

In an attempt to reinvigorate its service and gain new users, Foursquare recently split its app in two. A new app, Swarm, provides a messaging service and a way to see nearby friends. The main Foursquare app will pivot to focus more on location discovery, potentially presenting a new rival to Yelp.

Foursquare's executive departures come at a precarious time for the company, but new blood might be just what the company needs.

Twitter, for its part, is trying to appeal to a more mainstream audience since becoming a public company last year. The company's chief executive, Dick Costolo, says he wants to speed up product development. Engineering plays a big part in that, so Fry's departure could signal a stronger effort to move fast.

Costolo said this week at the Code Conference in Los Angeles that the company was experimenting with new ways to surface more relevant tweets for users.

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The deal is expected to broaden Seagate's offerings in the flash storage business

The deal is expected to broaden Seagate's offerings in the flash storage business

Seagate Technology will buy LSI's flash storage business from Avago Technologies for $450 million in cash.

The deal will expand Seagate's offerings and future capabilities in the fast-growing flash storage business. The assets include LSI's ASD (Accelerated Solutions Division), which makes enterprise-class products with PCIe interfaces, and the FCD (Flash Components Division), known for the popular SandForce line of controllers for high-volume flash components. Seagate expects the transaction to close in the third quarter of this year.

Earlier this month, Singapore-based Avago closed a $6.6 billion buyout of LSI, which makes wired and wireless network components as well as storage technologies.

Seagate is a major supplier of spinning hard disk drives, and flash is playing a growing role in both consumer and enterprise storage. Established vendors and startups alike are introducing all-flash and hybrid arrays built with SSDs (solid-state drives) as well as server-based flash products that use PCIe. Speed, size and power consumption are the major drivers of the shift.

Controllers, like LSI's SandForce line, play a key role in achieving more performance and reliability in flash components.

Seagate had to make a move in flash because virtualization and mobile computing are making solid state a much bigger part of storage, said Forrester Research analyst Henry Baltazar.

"The future's going to be flash, for a lot of storage," Baltazar said. The exception will be "cheap and deep" storage for data that's used less often, where hard disks will remain, he said.

The company seems to be embarking on a broader expansion of its business, including its acquisition last December of Xyratex, which builds custom systems for high-performance computing environments, Baltazar said. That purchase could help Seagate make higher-margin products for its OEM customers, though it's unlikely to start selling its own branded gear, he said.

"Clearly, they want to be more than just a hard-drive player," Baltazar said.

Seagate's hard-drive rival Western Digital isn't standing still in flash, either. Last September, WDacquired enterprise SSD vendor Virident for $685 million.

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Apache Spark is Hadoop's speedy Swiss Army knife

Fast-running data analysis system provides real-time data processing functions Hadoop has been pushed to incorporate

Credit: Wikimedia

Hadoop, the data processing framework that's become a platform unto itself, is only as good as the components that plug into it. But the conventional MapReduce component for Hadoop has a reputation for being too slow for real-time data analysis.

Enter Apache Spark, a Hadoop data processing engine designed for both batch and streaming workloads, now in its 1.0 incarnation and outfitted with features that exemplify what kinds of work Hadoop is being pushed to encompass.

Spark's libraries are designed to complement the types of processing jobs being explored more aggressively with the latest commercially supported deployments of Hadoop. MLlib implements a slew of common machine learning algorithms, such as naïve Bayesian classification or clustering; Spark Streaming enables high-speed processing of data ingested from multiple sources; and GraphX allows for computations on graph data.

Another feature sported by Spark, Spark SQL, which is only in alpha at the moment, allows SQL-like queries to be run against data stored in Apache Hive. Extracting data from Hadoop via SQL queries is yet another variant of the real-time querying functionality springing up around Hadoop. Everyone from Pivotal to Splice Machine has offerings in this vein now, although the exact implementation varies widely, and they're not based (yet) on an existing open source standard.

The open-endedness of Hadoop is echoed further in the sheer number of the above in-demand functions -- stream processing, machine learning, and so on -- are now addressed by multiple products. In the case of machine learning, for example, Apache's Mahout project is designed to be a far more scalable and robust processing engine for such jobs than MLlib alone.

What Spark has to offer is bound to be a big draw for both users and commercial vendors of Hadoop. Users who make Hadoop into a default repository for data of all kinds (albeit with caveats) and who have already built many of their analytics systems around Hadoop are attracted to the idea of being able to use Hadoop as a real-time processing system.

Hadoop vendors, too, should be drawn to Spark 1.0 because it provides them with another variety of functionality to support or build proprietary items around. In fact, one of the big three Hadoop vendors, Cloudera, has already been providing commercial support for Spark since earlier this year via its Cloudera Enterprise offering. Hortonworks has also been offering Spark as a component of its Hadoop distribution, though only as a technology preview. Where those companies go from here with Spark is likely to be dictated as aggressively by their users -- and Spark's developers -- as it is by their business plans for Hadoop.

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IDC: Cloud, software options deflate sales of enterprise video systems

Sales for this market were 'dismal' in the first quarter of 2014

Sales of video conferencing and telepresence hardware systems are declining, hurt by an increase in cloud and software-based options that often are cheaper and simpler to deploy, according to an IDC study.

In 2014's first quarter, video conferencing equipment revenue shrank 16 percent worldwide year over year to $473.5 million, while units sold fell 6.2 percent.

Market leader Cisco took a big hit. Its video equipment revenue dropped 22.4 percent. It sat at the top of this shrinking market in the first quarter with a 40.1 percent share of the revenue.

Polycom, whose revenue fell 8.4 percent, was in second place with a 29 percent share, while Huawei took the third spot with a 7.8 percent share and a 2 percent drop in revenue.

So what's behind the market's depression? Customers are delaying purchases as they look for alternatives that are less expensive, software-based and cloud-hosted, signaling a shift away from hardware-based products, according to IDC.

However, video remains a key component of enterprise collaboration stacks in many organizations.

"IDC believes that among the challenges customers are currently trying to work through are a market transition and determining exactly what, when, and how to provision their video deployments as more software-centric and cloud-based service offerings become part of the enterprise video market landscape," said IDC analyst Petr Jirovsky in the statement.

Looking at a couple of specific market segments, multi-codec immersive telepresence equipment revenue fell 33.5 percent and its units sold dropped 26 percent, while room-based video system revenue fell 10 percent and its units sold were down 1 percent.

Revenue dropped year over year in all major regions, falling 19.8 percent in Europe, Middle East and Africa, 16.4 percent in Asia-Pacific, 13.4 percent in North America and 5.1 percent in Latin America, IDC said.

A silver lining is that "most or all" of this market's vendors are responding to the shift by also offering cloud-based video alternatives, according to IDC.

For example, Cisco is looking to embed social collaboration functionality in its applications, even though it recently retired its enterprise social networking suite WebEx Social and replaced it by partnering with ESN vendor Jive Software, IDC analyst Rich Costello said via email.

He also noted that while announcing video conferencing hardware recently, Cisco introduced a cloud service for private, room-based video conferencing called Cisco Collaboration Meeting Room. "I think that Cisco is adding to its broad product portfolio in order to continue meeting evolving customer requirements -- whether premise or cloud," Costello said.

In addition to CMR, Cisco also has other cloud suites for Web meetings and video and audio conferencing like WebEx Meetings and the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution.

"So although hardware remains a big part of what they do, I think they envision more of a hybrid approach -- i.e. a mix of hardware and software -- as the way forward for mid-size and enterprise customers," he said.

"With Polycom, I see a similar situation as far as them being a traditional hardware vendor who has begun to offer more software- and cloud-centric solutions, and services, along with their hardware, in their UC [unified communications] portfolio," Costello added.

The study's results can also be seen as validating the software-focused and cloud-focused approach of Microsoft with its Lync UC server and, to a lesser degree in the enterprise, with Skype.

"There's certainly a lot of interest -- and growth -- in the Microsoft Lync approach to UC, as well as other cloud-based communications and collaboration offerings on the market," he said.

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