Accenture has yesterday announced the acquisition of London-based digital marketing and customer experience consultancy Fjord. The acquisition comes roughly half a year after Accenture announced the purchase of digital marketing services provider avVenta Worldwide, indicating Accenture’s strategic push into the digital marketing services space. Fjord specializes in customer experience and user design providing customer engagement services across new digital consumption [...]

Software AG announced yesterday it has acquired native PaaS vendor LongJump for an undisclosed sum. LongJump is one of the ‘oldest’ PaaS vendors, being on the market since 2003. The company has only 19 employees, yet it boasts a significant list of enterprise clients such as Cisco, AT&T, Nielsen, Deloitte or US Data Corp. LongJump’s cloud application development platform can [...]

EMC and VMware have yesterday launched officially Pivotal, their spin-off dedicated to Enterprise PaaS and Cloud-based Data Management. It is supposed to take a radical new approach to application middleware services, inspired from Cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services and Google. However, Pivotal is no start-up and from its creation, it was designed to take on the emerging PaaS [...]

Salesforce today announced ‘Salesforce Platform Mobile Services’, its response to the market opportunity around mobile application development. Salesforce Platform Mobile Services should smooth the development of mobile enterprise app creation and comes with support for analytics, secure access control (single-sign on based on Salesforce Identity) and other libraries of tools. As part of the ‘Mobile Services’ offering, Salesforce is rolling [...]

Salesforce.com held a “Marketing Cloud” analyst event in London last week, where we discussed its product roadmap and ambitions to become a leader in Social Marketing. Salesforce boasts that over half the Fortune 100 already use its new Marketing Cloud, including brands like Nestlé, Ford and Unilever. Many clients have come via two key acquisitions of the past 24 months: [...]

Atos is coordinating an interesting PaaS-related, EU-funded R&D project focused on Cloud interoperability, governance and open standards. “Cloud4SOA” is creating a middleware framework for applications developers wanting to use a PaaS platform that promises Cloud interoperability and PaaS platform independence. The project is soon to get its first beta release. While not many people talk these days about SOA (almost [...]

Last week it was announced that Telefonica bought the managed services business of bankrupt network integrator 2e2, taking in roughly 100 staff.  The two companies had previously run a joint venture – O2 Unify – which offered network access, kit and related services under a single ICT services model. While the acquisition may have more relevance for the UK, the [...]

It is now official that, as widely expected, Michael Dell in tandem with Microsoft and private equity firm Silver Lake intends to take his eponymous company private, almost 25 years after its IPO. The $24.4 billion buyout would be financed with Michael Dell’s cash and equity, cash from Silver Lake, and a $2 billion credit line from Microsoft. Four major [...]

At its European Analyst event held in Madrid last week, IBM unveiled its latest developments around its Platform as a Service offering. IBM SmartCloud Application Services, as it is branded, marks a bit more than one year since its launch in a beta variant. IBM SmartCloud Application Services has two flavors for its PaaS offering: SmartCloud Enterprise, which addresses mostly [...]

Aurelius AG, a German venture capital group, has just announced the takeover of Steria’s operations in Spain. It is their second acquisition in less than a year in Spain, following the takeover of the operations of another French IT services provider in Spain, Thales CIS, at the beginning of 2012. As previously anticipated by PAC in our various market reports [...]