Cloud vendors produced a busy week as Rackspace launched its next generation of OnMetal cloud servers, Salesforce banked on a cloud revolution in financial services and Microsoft launched its cloud-first Dynamics AX ERP software.
1. Salesforce
Salesforce continued its cloud innovations with the general availability of its Financial Services Cloud. It made the announcement at the same time as revealing that over 20 partners would be a part of it.
Included in the lengthy list are companies such as Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte and PwC who will provide implementation services. Informatica and MuleSoft will provide data aggregation services while DocuSign and eSignLive will be providing document management.
Raj Mistry, SVP Solutions Engineering, Salesforce EMEA told CBR: "We’ve arrived at a perfect storm scenario, what’s happened with the industry, what we’ve been creating through cloud computing, social mobile, what investors are looking for in this new economy has led to this result of going to market with Financial Services cloud."
The service will be powered by Salesforce Lightning and it will offer capabilities that will help financial services to built 1-to-1 client relationships, increased productivity through automated admin tasks and mobile and social capabilities.
2. Rackspace
On the 10th of March, Rackspace revealed the latest version of its OnMetal cloud server. The OpenStack-powered offering is designed to work with workloads such as Docker, Spark, Windows and Cassandra.
The reason for designing it to work with such workloads is due to the requirements for intensive data processing, raw compute power and the ability to scale and deploy quickly.
The company said that it offers single-tenant servers that are API-provisioned in two minutes.
One of the major developments is that the bare metal servers will be available in UK data centres for the first time.
The servers have been designed from Open Compute Project specifications and will use Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors and will offer storage with 800Gb SSDs.
Pricing will be around $1 per node per hour which makes them more expensive than using virtual machines from either AWS or Microsoft Azure, however, the idea is that the servers are intended for applications that require higher levels of performance.
3. Microsoft
Microsoft promised customers that it would release its cloud-first Dynamics AX enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in early 2016 and it has delivered.
The software combines database capabilities along with infrastructure services and business intelligence into an extensible platform. The idea is to allow customers to be able to implement industry specific business processes that are based on the product.
Support for the solution is already quite high with ISVs having made over 50 preconfigured Microsoft-curated solutions available on the Dynamics Azure Marketplace.
The system will offer features such as business intelligence, offer tools for purchase orders, cost management, integration with Office and a new HTML5 interface which will allow businesses to create custom solutions using Visual Studio.
In addition to this it will only be available on Azure, at least for the moment because at the end of the year it will be available on the Azure Stack.
4. Box
Box, the file collaboration cloud company reports its earnings for the 2016 fiscal year alongside its Q4 2016 results.
Revenue grew to $303 for fiscal year 2016, up 40% year-over-year with billings in fiscal year 2016 at $369.1m, an increase of 50% from fiscal year 2015.
For the fourth quarter revenue stood at $85m, an increase of 36% from Q4 2015. Billings grew by 59% year-over-year in the fourth quarter to $130m.
Non-GAAP operating loss in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016 was $31.1 million which is equal to 37% of revenue. This compares to non-GAAP operating loss of $32.2 million (51% of revenue) in the fourth quarter of 2015.
GAAP operating loss in Q4 2016 stood at $49.6m (58% of revenue) which compares to $45.8m or 73% of revenue for Q4 2015.
Net cash generated from operating activities in Q4 2016 totalled $4.9m, Q4 2015 stood at $15.6m.
Net cash for the full 2016 year totalled $66.3m compared to $84.9m in 2015.
5. Infor
The company which specialises in business applications by industry and built for the cloud revealed its third quarter 2016 financial results.
Along with total revenues increasing by 2% at actual currency rates and 7% in constant currency compared to Q3 2015, it also showed that software license fees and subscription revenues were up 23% at actual currency and 27% in constant currency over the same period.
Non-GAAP total revenues increased 3% at actual currency and 7% in constant currency compared to Q3 2015 and non-GAAP software license fees and subscription revenues were up 28% at actual and 32% in constant over the same period.
Growth in the retail and healthcare verticals were particularly strong in the quarter, this was supported by high SaaS booking growth in financial services and GT Nexus.
In Q3 the company made a $25m investment in retail analytics provider Predictix, the idea behind this is to help push innovation into the industry which is facing high levels of disruption.
