More generally, Garantia offers its Redis Cloud on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Heroku, Appfog and AppHarbor, whereas Memcached is offered on Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure. This week’s announcement by Garantia points to the proliferation of enterprise-grade, cloud-based NoSQL options over and beyond the likes of MongoDB, Cassandra and Berkeley DB.

ExactTarget is used by over 6000 companies to manage email marketing, text messages and social media camapagins, including the likes of Nike, Coca Cola and Gap. Its acquisition enables Salesforce to offer customers a more comprehensive marketing platform in contrast to Buddy Media and Radian 6, another of its recent acquisitions. Buddy Media specializes in social media marketing and Radian 6 focuses on understanding what is said in social media platforms. CEO Marc Benioff commented on the magnitude of the deal’s size and the broad scope of ExactTarget’s product line by noting:

We can’t just keep making these small acquisitions. That strategy was just taking honestly too long. We needed to do something of consequence and we needed to do something strategic and we needed to do something now.

Shares of similar companies within the email automation and marketing automation space rose upon news of the acquisition, with Responsys closing at $10.53 a share, up 8.78%. Constant Contact shares closed at 15.76 a share, up 5.14%. Privately held Act-On, an integrated marketing vendor that delivers a comprehensive automated marketing solution featuring SEO, integrated Google Analytics support and analysis of search histories, reacted to the news of the acquisition with the following remarks from Act-On CEO Raghu Raghavan:

Marketing software is undeniably one of the hottest markets right now and can be attributed in part to the fact that more CMOs are purchasing marketing-related technology and services from their own capital and expense budgets…All of the recent activity over the past year in the marketing automation space with Oracle’s acquisition of Eloqua, and then last month’s news of Marketo’s IPO are validation of this red hot space that Act-On is operating in. To think that only 5% of the market has been penetrated leaves green fields for marketing software vendors to innovate, expand and grow. This is only the beginning of a long and prosperous road for marketing automation.

The key point Raghavan makes here is that Chief Marketing Officers are increasingly purchasing technology for marketing from their own budgets as opposed to IT, with the result being that the marketing automation is space is exploding as CMOs experiment with different vendors and types of analytics. In December 2012, for example, Oracle acquired Eloqua for $871 million, or $23.50 per share. According to The Wall Street Journal, Salesforce paid 5.5 times the 2014 forecasted revenue price of ExactTarget, less than the 6.1 multiple of forward revenue that Oracle paid for Eloqua. Shares of ExactTarget closed up 52.4% on Tuesday at $33.69 a share, whereas shares of Salesforce declined 7.89% to $37.80. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff celebrated the finalization of the acquisition but noted that the company was likely to take a “vacation from M&A for anywhere between probably 12 and 18 months.”

In addition to revealing its reserved pricing option, Joyent revealed an expansion of its product line whereby its IaaS platform now offers a total of 58 instances, 13 of which mimic the most popular instances offered by Amazon Web Services. The 58 instances fall into the following five categories: Standard, High Memory, High CPU, High Storage, and High I/O. Joyent CEO Henrik Wasik remarked on the significance of the company’s recent expansion in product offerings by noting:

Our goal is to make our value fully visible to the market while continuing to make the Joyent public cloud easier to use. In dramatically expanding our compute products to meet and anticipate the breadth of customers’ needs, we’re reaffirming our commitment to make the Joyent public cloud truly accessible and affordable to any business.

Joyent’s goal is to underscore the value, accessibility and affordability of its public cloud platform. Importantly, it strives to accomplish this goal by mimicking the functionality and pricing of Amazon Web Services, the undisputed IaaS leader. Given the gargantuan challenge of competing with Amazon Web Services with respect to innovation, recent announcements by Joyent and Microsoft illustrate that matching AWS in terms of price and select functionality represents the strategy of choice for vendors seeking to expand their footprint in the IaaS space. Google Compute Engine (GCE) marks the likeliest candidate to deviate from the path of AWS mimicry, but the jury is still out on GCE’s ability to surpass AWS in innovation because of its recent release in general availability.

Act-On Inbound features the following:

•SEO Enhancement

The solution provides customers with direction for improving website content, blogs and other landing pages after a thorough analysis of the SEO performance of each respective component of inbound content. Importantly, Act-On Inbound delivers SEO recommendations after performing a 360 degree evaluation of SEO performance across multiple sources of content in order to understand whether keywords perform differently in one content repository as opposed to others. The SEO analysis provides recommendations not only regarding keywords but also about the metadata underlying pages as well as their structural composition.

•Google Adwords Support

Act-On Inbound supports Google Adwords from within the application itself, empowering customers to obtain granular analytics about the performance of specific keywords and the ROI associated with Google Adwords campaigns. Customers can understand which keywords resulted in leads and revenue by way of Act-On Inbound’s integrated dashboard.

•Search History Analytics

Customers can leverage Act-On Inbound to analyze the search patterns of customers by segmenting search terms that resulted in inbound points of customer contact. The resulting search history analysis enables customers to tailor inbound content to the search patterns of prospective customers.

Act-On Inbound delivers its functionality by way of a single, comprehensive dashboard that allows users to effectively understand the performance of a customer’s inbound marketing universe both in its totality and in relation to analysis of its specific parts. In conjunction with the launch of Act-On Inbound, Act-On also recently announced the release of a mobile app that allows marketing professionals to access Act-On marketing dashboards and analytics from any mobile device. Act-On positions itself in the hot but intensely competitive marketing automation space featuring the likes of Marketo, whose post-IPO performance continues to impress shareholders.

Key features of the VMware IaaS vCloud Hybrid Service include the following:

•IaaS platforms delivered through VMware service providers that provides vCloud Datacenter Services to enable customers to provision virtual environments with ease. vCloud Datacenter Services feature SLAs guaranteeing uptime of 99.5%, role based access control and the ability to configure stacks for compliance with SAS 70 Type II or ISO27001 standards.
•A choice of dedicated or virtual private cloud solutions. A dedicated solution offers customers “physically isolated infrastructure” in contrast to the “logically isolated infrastructure” specific to a virtual private cloud solution.
•An IaaS infrastructure delivered by certified VMware service providers such as AT&T Inc., Bluelock, Colt, CSC, Dell Services, Optus, SingTel, Softbank, T-Systems
•vCloud Connector 2.0 enables customers to transfer workloads between private datacenters and VMware public clouds. Customers can effect the transfer of workloads betweeen infrastructures by using one network configuration instead of reconfiguring network settings in the destination infrastructure. Additionally, customers can manage the transfer of data between different infrastructures with “One Catalog” that synchronizes the list of available content across all relevant infrastructures, thereby avoiding the scenario whereby customers are forced to manage multiple content catalogs concurrently.

Because VMware’s IaaS vCloud Hybrid Service is delivered through a cluster of service partners, the offering is fundamentally different from the IaaS product offerings of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. VMware plans to make its vCloud Hybrid Service technology and IP available to all service partners, and promises to build one of the most extensive IaaS partnerships for public cloud computing available in the world today. The product effectively gives new meaning to the term cloud interoperability given that customers can transfer workloads not only between private enterprise datacenters and public clouds enabled by VMware’s service partners, but also between VMware’s public cloud, partner datacenters as well. vCloud Hybrid Service will be available through an early access program in June and anticipates becoming generally available in Q3 of this year.

Teresa Carlson, AWS Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector, remarked on the significance of achieving FedRAMP compliance as follows:

More than 300 U.S. government agencies already use the wide array of AWS services to be more innovative, agile, and cost-efficient. Today most government computing systems require built-to-order platforms and applications to meet government security and compliance requirements, which involve time-consuming and costly evaluations. With this FedRAMP compliance, agencies can now utilize a streamlined process from AWS when moving applications to the cloud to meet their unique business and mission requirements.

All government agencies now have the information required to assess the suitability of Amazon Web Services for hosting the specificities of their own classified or protected data sets, as well the authorization protocols required in order to initiate transfers of workloads to AWS for testing and production purposes. The authorization applies to AWS GovCloud and all Amazon Web Services regions. With this authority to operate (ATO) enabled by HHS, Amazon Web Services hopes to dramatically expand its usage amongst government agencies both in terms of the number of agencies and the use cases for which its platform is currently deployed. HHS, for example, currently uses the AWS platform to host over 200 terabytes of data for DNA sequencing from the 1000 Genomes Project for disease research. Amazon Web Services is only the third cloud provider to achieve compliance with FedRAMP alongside CGI Federal and Autonomic Resources.

Key features of the latest release of the N-series thin client include the following:

•Certified integration of Imprivata’s OneSign single sign on (SSO) technology to streamline authentication amongst multiple devices in ways that are ideal for healthcare professionals that move from one room to another. The partnership with Imprivata also enables professionals to leverage RFID badges to seamlessly gain access to an ecosystem of machines without having to perform a single click.
•Additional USB options to support industry use cases such as specialized scanners, imagers, teller workstations in banking and other specialized peripheral devices.
•Integration with the Citrix receiver for Linux to optimize the user’s High Definition Experience (HDX) and utilization of multimedia audio and video streams.
•The latest version of vSpace Management Center in order to deliver management via a web-based management console including the capacity to perform and schedule critical updates to N-series firmware technology.

Raj Dhingra, CEO of NComputing, remarked on the value proposition of the latest release of the N-series as follows:

Together, NComputing and Citrix are transforming the economics of desktop virtualization. Since launching the N-series at last year’s Citrix Synergy show we’ve added more than 100 customers worldwide. The latest release is in direct response to the continued demand we’re seeing in every single market we serve, and keeps us well ahead of the competition. We will continue winning every time with our unique combination of simplicity, performance and value.

Dhingra’s remarks summarize NComputing’s strategy in the context of delivering simplified, high performing thin client solutions at a competitive price. NComputing’s customer base has expanded rapidly over the past year and now includes customers in healthcare, finance, education, manufacturing and government. Customers from all verticals leverage the benefits of the low power consumption specific to the N-series, whose System on Chip (SoC) technology consumes an average of 5 watts of power in contrast to the 150 watts of power typically consumed by a PC or laptop. The reduced power consumption specific to N-series firmware allows for less frequent recharging of thin clients in settings such as hospitals and manufacturing where the devices are typically moved from one space to another frequently, often in conditions where power outlets are not within immediate proximity.

Overall, the market outlook for thin clients remains positive with IDC projecting market growth of 6.2% in 2013 overall with higher growth rates expected for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) as noted by Oleg Sidorkin, senior research analyst at IDC:

Although commercial desktop PC shipments are shrinking, the thin client market remains buoyant. Vendors now offer attractive thin client solutions that meet the needs of different vertical markets, such as healthcare, banking, education, or retail. Increased security concerns, easier administration, lower maintenance costs, and lower power consumption are among the main reasons why companies may choose thin clients over traditional PCs.

Growth potential on the thin client market is still high in the EMEA region. We expect total thin client shipments in 2013 to grow fastest in France, Germany, and Russia – at more than 10%. This growth is driven by demand from healthcare entities, financial institutions, and public-sector customers, which are looking for a centralized desktop environment with high level of security and reliability. As the lifecycle of the current PC installed base among many companies is coming to an end, more organizations will consider thin clients as a viable alternative to desktop PCs in the coming years.

NComputing stands poised to increase market share in relation to competitors such as HP and Dell as its product line matures and traction in the enterprise space across multiple verticals deepens. According to IDC, NComputing currently has a market share of 16.1% in comparison to Dell’s (Wyse) 25.4% and HP’s 26.2% in the enterprise client device space. Given that thin clients typically do not perform well with HDX technology, NComputing’s latest N-series release could well disrupt the thin client market given its high performance with Citrix’s HDX technology and competitive cost and user experience simplicity.

An example of a use case for Pattern includes evaluating the efficacy of models for a “predictive marketing intelligence solution” as illustrated below by Antony Arokiasamy, Senior Software Architect at AgilOne:

Pattern facilitates AgilOne to deploy a variety of advanced machine-learning algorithms for our cloud-based predictive marketing intelligence solution. As a self-service SaaS offering, Pattern allows us to evaluate multiple models and push the clients’ best models into our high performance scoring system. The PMML interface allows our advanced clients to deploy custom models.

Here, Arokiasamy remarks on the way in which Pattern facilitates scoring of predictive models that enables the selection of one model amongst others. AgilOne uses Pattern to run multiple predictive models in parallel against large data sets and additionally illustrates the efficacy of Pattern’s operation on a Hadoop cluster deployed in a cloud-based environment.

Pattern runs on the popular Cascading framework for simplifying the deployment and management of Hadoop clusters that is used by the likes of Twitter, eBay, Etsy and Razorfish. A free, open source application, Pattern constitutes yet another pillar in Concurrent’s array of applications for streamlining the use of Apache Hadoop alongside Cascading and Lingual, the ANSI-standard interface that enables developers to leverage SQL to query Hadoop clusters without having to learn MapReduce. The release of Pattern consolidates the positioning of Concurrent as a pioneer in the Big Data management space given its thought leadership in designing applications that facilitate enterprise adoption of Hadoop. Enterprises can now use Concurrent’s Cascading framework to operate on Hadoop clusters using JAVA APIs, SQL and predictive models written in PMML compatible analytics applications.

Appium on Sauce solves a big problem at a critical time. Companies are relying more and more on their mobile channels where they have just seconds to prove their worth with a positive user experience and a lot of mobile apps aren’t thoroughly tested, if they’re tested at all. Automated testing in a virtual environment represents the future, and we’re providing it for the mobile ecosystem.

Based on the open source testing framework Appium, the Sauce Labs cloud-based platform for testing enables mobile developers to focus on definition and development of mobile apps while leveraging the Sauce Labs testing environment to facilitate and streamline testing. As the mobile app market expands, the ability of Sauce Labs to support testing of Android testing is especially crucial given that the market for Android apps is one of the few mobile app verticals experiencing rapid expansion.

According to the market analyst firm Canalys, Apple’s App Store, Google Play, the Windows Phone Store, and BlackBerry World—the top four app stores—reported 13.4 downloads globally in Q1 of 2013, an 11% increase as compared to the entirety of 2012. In revenue terms, the top four app stores reported $2.2 billion in revenue from app downloads alone, or an increase of 9% over 2012. Whereas Apple’s App Store claimed 74% of revenue, Google Play claimed 51% of downloads with the Apple App Store coming in a close second.

Canalys senior analyst Tim Shepherd summarized the market landscape for the four main app stores in the mobile app market landscape as follows:

Apple’s App Store and Google Play remain the heavyweights in the app store world. In comparison, BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store remain distant challengers today, though they still should not be ignored. Each of these four stores represents a different market proposition for developers, and remains the primary outlet to reach users on the platforms they serve.

By supporting Apple’s App Store and Google Play, the Sauce Labs testing platform supports the overwhelming majority of market share in the mobile app space in terms of both revenue and downloads. The company’s SaaS platform for mobile and desktop application testing currently runs approximately 5 million tests per month and supports testing on over 150 browser/OS combinations. Customers should expect Sauce Labs to additionally support testing for mobile apps via BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store as and assuming both markets mature.

CloudShare CEO Zvi Guterman commented on the value proposition of the CloudShare labs by remarking on how they facilitate access to IT resources for testing as follows:

Limited and slow access to infrastructure causes delays in release cycles and puts testing at risk of being incomplete, resulting in bugs in production. Lack of access to IT infrastructure and the limitation of existing solutions remain huge barriers to rapid innovation. With CloudShare Labs, application development and testing organizations work faster and companies will find a competitive advantage by gaining access to IT resources at the speed of development.

Guterman underscores the importance of developer access to dedicated IT resources that support development and testing. But the real innovation of CloudShare Labs consists in its ability to deliver advanced QA functionality that allows developers to more expeditiously fix bugs by way of the following functionality:

•Multi-VM disks can be leveraged to freeze bugs, fix them and reinsert the corrected the version into the original application
•The ability to replicate master environments to isolate and rectify defects caused by incorrect configuration
•Cross-functional team collaboration by way of a web browser console
•Libraries and templates of applications for subsequent testing and reference

The larger point, here, is that CloudShare expands the options for application development and testing to the cloud and delivers an environment with targeted testing functionality that is compatible with the Jenkins continuous integration server and the Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Enterprises can leverage their VPN platforms to share testing results with geographically dispersed teams and stakeholders. In addition to testing, customers can use the CloudShare platform fundamentally for development purposes as well by spinning up infrastructures designed for agile development and testing by uploading their own VMs or using CloudShare’s library of templates for virtual machines.