Cloud consolidation: Sage is acquiring SaaS financials vendor Intacct for $850 million, in one of the larger pure enterprise application deals in recent memory. It's the biggest purchase in the history of Sage, which grew steadily in the 1990s through a string of acquisitions. For Sage, the move also takes a key competitor off the table, given the success Intacct has had in replacing on-premises Sage financials packages in midmarket accounts.
Intacct's leadership will remain on board after the deal goes through. The company is one of the most venerable independent SaaS vendors, having been founded in 1999. Intacct's sweet spot has been in companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees, although its current messaging states that its platform is "hard to outgrow." In general, Intacct competes with the likes of Quickbooks, Workday and FinancialForce.
POV: The acquisition seems like a beneficial one to both sides, with Sage paying a handsome premium for Intacct but in return gaining a mature product with a strong U.S. presence and more than 11,000 customers overall. The question now becomes how much Sage devotes to Intaact in terms of resources going forward, particularly with respect to keeping pace with longtime key competitor NetSuite.
Hubspot brings in AI with Kemvi: CRM and marketing software vendor Hubspot is adding some AI capabilities to the mix with the acquisition of Kemvi, a tiny startup that has developed an algorithm called DeepGraph. In essence, DeepGraph is about giving salespeople a headstart on learning more about their customers and prospects, as Hubspot's announcement describes:
DeepGraph uses machine learning technology to help salespeople better understand their prospective buyers. The system identifies new prospects, provides suggestions for creating personalized emails, identifies new market segments, freeing up time that can be spent on more valuable sales tasks. DeepGraph also acts as a knowledge graph with information about buyers, markets, and products, helping salespeople understand the nuances of their customers’ behavior.
POV: The deal is an acqui-hire more than anything else (Kemvi has just two staffers, according to Techcrunch) but gives Hubspot's platform additional AI capabilities to go along with existing ones for lead scoring and personalized content delivery.
Google Cloud Platform's big deals: Whatever Google's enterprise sales division is doing with Cloud Platform, it seems to be working. Either that or Google has now managed to deliver a combination of features and pricing that can deliver hockey-stick growth. In the second quarter, the number of GCP deals worth at least $500,000 grew 300 percent year over year, CEO Sundar Pichai said during Google parent company Alphabet's earnings call:
In terms of serving Cloud customers, we are world-class and available being reliable and those are things we want to stay best-in-class. So, we are clearly planning for that and planning ahead of our infrastructure and we have been consistently doing that.
And Heather in terms of your question about workloads and stuff, we are actually seeing quite a diverse set of used cases across sectors and industries and geographies.
POV: While Pichai characterized GCP as one of the company's fastest-growing businesses, he didn't specify the total number of large deals, or other metrics that would help provide context for the year-over-year growth numbers.
The uptick in deal size makes sense, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "Machine learning, AI and big data deployments all start with a trial and then get big quickly," he notes. The big money deals have only started coming Google's way in the past two or three quarters, and before that there was a lot of prototyping and validating going on, Mueller says.
RightScale targets cloud waste with Optima: As the IaaS and PaaS markets shake out to four big players—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and IBM—customers are looking to mix and match services for the best pricing and targeted workloads, particularly as overall usage of cloud grows. RightScale would like to rent you a tool for that. It's called Optima, and builds upon the company's existing portfolio of cloud management services:
Collaborative optimization: RightScale is the first cloud management platform (CMP) to help various resource owners in an enterprise to collaborate to take action on changes to cloud spending.
RightScale Optima includes data from all public and private cloud providers and enables organizations to see usage and cost data in a single unified dashboard; view costs by cloud account, team, or application to understand usage trends; perform chargeback and showback; and leverage tags to allocate costs to departments or business units.
POV: RightScale competes with other independent cloud monitoring vendors, such as CloudCruiser, as well as in-house services offered by IaaS and PaaS vendors. With Otpima, it's betting that customers will want to rely on a third-party—one presumably unbiased toward any particular service—to manage cloud spend.
Legacy watch: The end of Flash: Adobe has set a retirement date for Flash, its widely used but oft-criticized and famously buggy multimedia browser plugin. Flash Player will no longer receive updates after the end of 2020. Adobe is working with a number of partners, including Google and Apple, to phase out Flash over the next few years. (There's some irony in Apple's participation, given that many saw its decision not to support Flash on the iPhone as the proverbial writing on the plugin's wall.)
Flash has been on a steep decline of late. Three years ago, 80 percent of desktop Chrome users visited a site with Flash, but today that percentage is just 17 percent, Google said in a blog post.
POV: While few may truly miss Flash, it's pending doom nonethless stands as a major milestone in the future of the web, and paves a wider path forward for more modern standards such as HTML5.
