Cloud computing is the new king of the information technology market, and three acquisitions announced this week underscore the point.
On Tuesday Germany’s SAP AG unveiled its plans to buy cloud-based business commerce network Ariba Inc to expand its cloud presence, in a deal valuing the business and commerce network company at $4.3 billion (2.73 billion pounds). The company expects the acquisition to combine Ariba’s buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP’s broad customer base and business process expertise to create new models for business-to-business collaboration in the cloud.
“This is a logical step for SAP as it needs to accelerate its move into the cloud,” noted Carter Lusher, chief IT analyst at Ovum. “This acquisition is consistent with SAP’s overall M&A strategy and complements the SuccessFactors acquisition in December – providing greater depth of products, executives, and tech talent for the cloud. For Ariba, it’s unlikely the talent, technology and product will be cut. Instead, I expect SAP will invest heavily in Ariba’s R&D. While there is no immediate impact on SAP’s competitors, there could be a need for concern should SAP successfully accelerates its move into the cloud.”
Follow RCR Wireless News – Americas on Twitter, Facebook and subscribe to our free periodic newsletters
SAP’s top competitor in its race to the cloud is Oracle, and this week the world’s No. 2 maker of business management software also announced an acquisition in this space. Oracle has entered into an agreement to acquire Vitrue, which provides a cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform that enables marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns and activities on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+.
In its press release, Oracle did not disclose the purchase amount, but TechCrunch reports that it was a $300 million deal.
Vitrue’s social media SaaS marketing applications might help Oracle customers amplify their social community engagement by giving marketers the ability to develop campaigns from that reach from global to local, and cross multiple social networks and devices.
It’s not just the makers of business management software who are eyeing the cloud. Storage giant EMC has announced the acquisition of cloud-storage startup Syncplicity, in a move to offer enterprises cloud-based sync and share solutions. As the company noted, this capability is increasingly required by clients in response to the proliferation of mobile, social and cloud computing. Terms of the transaction were not released.
More acquisitions in this space are likely to materialize in the months ahead. The number of companies that are migrating their IT infrastructure to a cloud-based model will double over the next three years, according to an IBM study, conducted worldwide with about 500 executives and in partnership with Economist Intelligence Unit.
