Top Players Face Off in Marketing Cloud Wars Cartoon
Day: March 13, 2018
Best of The Best: Who Is Winning the Cloud Wars?
Cloud computing is a term that was invented by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff after he left employment at Oracle where he was a rising star. The bold idea of the innovative paradigm is to provide services from companies or any organization using the internet. For a very long time, cloud computing has made life easier for professionals and businesses around the globe. But with their revenue, who is winning the marketing cloud wars?
What was first doubted by many of the most powerful software CEOs, has now become a global phenomenon and has completely altered the way software is delivered and consumed.
Now, the demand for cloud computing services is continuously growing every year. It was even projected that the market will reach up to $411 billion by the year 2020.
The following are the top companies that have been providing different services of cloud computing like, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) ranked by cloud revenue.
Microsoft – Deemed as the leading developer of consumer electronics, computer software, personal computers, and laptops, Microsoft is also number one in terms of providing all cloud-computing services (IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS).
The Redmond Washington-based company has been assisting consumers and clients deploy ML, AI, and Blockchain in innovative production settings. Microsoft has a market-leading cloud revenue of $16.7 billion.
Microsoft was founded in 1975 and since then has been on top of its game. The leading developer has an estimated revenue of $98.9 billion and is headed by Satya Nadella.
Amazon – Amazon was established in 1994 and Jeffrey P. Bezos is its Chairman and CEO. The company based in Seattle, Washington, is an online retail platform that has the ability to market different household appliances, apparels, electronic products, and even books.
Experts say that the company is the poster-child for the cloud computing movement because it is the first-moving paradigm-buster and category creator. Now, Amazon has a projected revenue of $177.9 billion. Its cloud revenue is $16 billion.
IBM – The International Business Machines or more commonly known as IBM manufactures and sells computer software and hardware to other companies and businesses around the world. It presents consulting, hosting, and infrastructure services.
Just like Microsoft, the provider is also offering three cloud-computing services. It recently made a $15.8-billion cloud business. IBM is also one of the top providers in the leaderboard because it pairs both cloud and cognitive, which critics say is a great approach.
Virginia M. Rometty is the Chairman and CEO of the company. Now, the Armonk, New York-based manufacturer has an estimated revenue of $78.4 billion.
Salesforce.com – The San Francisco, California-based company was established in 1999 and since then it has made a name for itself in the industry of advertising and marketing. The CEO is Marc Benioff.
Salesforce is a platform for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) using cloud-based applications for service, marketing, sales and a lot more. The company has a projected revenue of $9.9 billion. The estimated cloud revenue of Salesforce is $3 billion.
SAP – SAP is a multinational software corporation based in Walldorf, Baden-Wurttemberg and was founded in 1972. William R. McDermott is the CEO.
SAP offers enterprise solution and software for handling customer relations and business operations. The company has an edge in its service of cloud computing. The SAP is unmatched when it comes to its tenure within all of the leading companies around the world. Reports have also suggested that SAP is the leading supplier of mission-critical business applications for most businesses and corporations. SAP now has a cloud revenue of 3.8 billion Euros.
The multinational software company has a projected revenue of $39.2 billion.
Oracle – Headed by co-CEO’s Safra A. Catz and Mark Hurd, Oracle is a computer technology firm that offers all things information technology from business intelligence to storage systems for businesses. Oracle started its business as a database company. It has steadily grown its revenue to $1.5 billion.
The Redwood City, California-based company is performing well in terms of the developing excellent cloud technology.
Oracle’s top competitors are Workday, Salesforce, VMware, and Microsoft. The company now has an estimated revenue of $38.9 billion.
Google – Out of all the top providers of cloud computing, Google is the most popular. With a projected revenue of $94.7 billion, Google has definitely made it big in the internet software industry. Sundar Pichai is the CEO of the company that is located in Mountain View, California.
Its deal with Puppet, a private IT automation software corporation, is giving the users and clients the chance to experience a DevOps software, which is a much easier transition to the cloud, especially for companies that are running older systems. Google has a cloud revenue of $1 billion every quarter.
ServiceNow – ServiceNow is a company led by John Donahoe. It is known as an Enterprise as a Service platform that offers real-time analytics, security, IT service, and operations management solutions.
The Santa Clara, California-based company is giving other providers a run for their money as it enters the world of cloud computing with great innovation, energy, and customer-centric tactics.
ServiceNow may be new to the scene but its revenue has already grown to $1.9 billion.
Workday – Workday is one of the leading sources of cloud-based enterprise applications. It caters the industry of finance and human resources management. Aneel Bhusri is the Co-Founder and CEO of the company that was founded in 2005.
The company based in Pleasanton, California, has made it to the top without the help from major companies. Workday is a global powerhouse when it comes to HCM and has a projected revenue of $2 billion.
VMware – Pat Gelsinger is the CEO of the Palo Alto, California-based company. With an estimated revenue of $57.7 billion, VMware has already come a long way, as it is the worldwide leader in virtualization. The company is a software firm that offers virtualization and cloud software and services.
The competitive world of cloud computing is not for faint-hearted companies. These top providers have made the impossible things become possible and easier for a lot of people, their clients, and different businesses. Cloud Computing is definitely important and it has created a bold impact on the digital transformation.
Diversity and Inclusion Improve Bold Businesses – Interview with Yaël Eisenstat and Suri Surinder
Businesses across the world know from their everyday experiences that better business performance and more innovation stem from diversity and inclusion. They also open opportunities for everyone and lead better access to talent. But how does a business implement this strategy, and why? Bold Business recently sat down with Suri Surinder, the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CTR Factor, and Yaël Eisenstat, a former CIA officer, founder of Kilele Global, and current Head of Facebook’s Business Integrity’s Global Elections Integrity Ops team to learn how the best businesses are implementing it.
Diversity and Inclusion Improve Bold Businesses
A Forbes study revealed that 85% of executives today believe the importance of diversity in the modern workplace, especially its importance in fostering innovation. Inclusion and diversity help employees feel they belong – an important factor in performance and motivation at work.
Suri Surinder asks, “How do you make sure that their voices are heard and they feel included in the process of decision-making around the firm?” He affirmed by saying, “The truly bold companies are focused on that.”
Yael Eisenstat also believes in the importance of inclusion. “The bigger issue in my mind is the inclusion question,” she told Bold Business. “Who is sitting at your table actually participating in these conversations around some of these big decisions?”
“Having a perspective from someone in a different community from you,” Yaël Eisenstat pointed out. “That’ll let you know your client base in different ways, but you will also understand your risks differently.”
“Diversity in the top 25 people of the firm drive inclusive behaviors in the entire firm,” said Surinder. “And there’s data that support the same thing in the talent innovation. 75% better chance of product innovation if you have 2D diversity within the company.”
McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, found that businesses with inclusive, diverse workplaces tend to perform significantly better, as inclusion helps companies in many different ways. Talent becomes abundant, customer orientation strengthens, employee satisfaction skyrockets, and the decision-making process improves. With such great benefits, these lead to an overall enhanced company image and impressive financial performance.
Yaël Eisenstat and Suri Surinder Discuss Workplace Impacts of Diversity and Inclusion
While it cannot be denied that we have a long way to go in making the workplace a fully diverse and culturally inclusive environment, many companies have created bold action in involving women and minorities in decision-making. However, a report by McKinsey revealed that despite that, women remain unrepresented at every level within corporate America. They also divulged that men still have a 30% higher chance of promotion than women do during their careers’ early stages.
“I can say, in the national security world – this is where I started. When I was overseas. If I as a woman had not actually been in a leadership role on our counter-extremism programs, nobody would have been accessing the women in these communities,” Yaël Eisenstat said.
The former CIA analyst emphasized, “By not accessing the women in these communities, we would never have succeeded in some of the things that actually we did accomplish overseas.”
Intel, one of the world’s leading computer chip makers, is proactively addressing diversity and inclusion. Silicon Valley is notorious for having diversity issues, but Intel recently revealed in their 2017 Mid-Year Diversity Report that 25.5% of their employees are women, beating company records. Their Vice President (VP) of Human Resources, Rosalind Hudnell, said this record-breaking boost in diversity helped boost productivity as well. “When you can move people to contribute to their fullest, it has a tremendous impact,” she said.
Bold, innovative companies should focus on all aspects of inclusiveness. Yaël Eisenstat believes such a wide perspective is how companies really succeed. Through various methods including the type of diversity and awareness training that CTR Factor offers, employees, become more educated on the proper ways of treating people regardless of their different backgrounds. These make the workplace more inclusive and open and help employees improve their interpretation of cross-cultural differences, further improving communication and creating a more cohesive work environment.
Creating Diverse Workforces
Businesses today are becoming more diverse in recruiting. Sibyl Edwards, the Chief Creative Officer at wetogethr, observed that tech companies have issues with diversity because often they focus on hiring because of certain schools with good reputations. “Only hiring from Stanford means you are missing out on great talent from other schools,” she explained.
A more diverse company, consisting of minds from different backgrounds and mindsets, creates a variety of bold ideas and innovative thoughts. Compared to a less diverse company, these people tend to collaborate more, are more open to new concepts, and are able to welcome change and brave actions.
It is not just recruitment as well – keeping these employees around often become quite a challenge for corporate America. A company that welcomes diversity should know how to create an environment that not only claims to be inclusive. They should be able to let employees feel well represented and valued. In such situations, not only are different cultures promoted – but the work environment also promotes awareness and respect.
Steps Businesses can Take to Promote Diversity and Inclusion
There are appropriate steps any bold business can take to promote diversity in the workplace:
- Publicize job openings in diverse venues – There are many available websites recruiters can post job openings to, ones more focused on diversity and equal opportunity employment. There are many societies and subgroups that focus on minorities and niche groups such as for female engineers, people with Hispanic backgrounds, and the like.
- Do not discriminate in job descriptions – Strange as it is, there are still job descriptions out there that exclude and discriminate. To promote diversity in the workplace, start with descriptions that do not discriminate and are clearly for all types of applicants.
- Create a public diversity policy – It’s one thing to create a diversity policy, and another to have it publicized. These formal goals and strategies regarding equal opportunities should be transparent both within the company and outside of it.
- Be aware of and apply current legislation – At present, the Equality Act 2010 and the Human Rights Act 1998 are the key legislation relating to diversity and inclusion. It is important for companies to be aware of these, and apply it in the workplace.
In some ways, recent controversies help bold businesses all over the United States and around the world to understand the importance of diversity and inclusion, and to apply positive changes to reflect it. Companies need to pay attention more or risk losing their astounding talents to competitors – ones that capitalize on more inclusive workforces.
Fast Food Lunch or a Mortgage: Which Takes Less Time?
For a lot of people, buying a house is not just an investment – it is the biggest, most fulfilling purchase of their lives. However, the home buying experience can also be filled with extra roadblocks, drawn-out time commitments, and stress. At least that’s the way it worked out for Vishal Garg who turned his bad experience into a new company called better.com.
In an interview with Bold Business, Better Mortgage’s founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Vishal Garg talked about the frustrations he encountered at every step of the process. His home-buying journey began with a three-week wait for a pre-approval letter from his national bank.
“Our bold idea is reimagining homeownership,” Garg affirmed. He believes Better.com’s mortgage platform evens out the playing field for all interested buyers. It helps give people a good chance of getting a home loan approval, thus allowing borrowers the same chance of getting a home as cash buyers do.
Better.com is Overhauling Mortgages
“I said, ‘if it is so bad for me, how is it for the other Americans out there that are trying to buy a home for the first time?’” Garg recalled.
Garg’s envisioned a digital mortgage lender able to drastically cut the time it takes for a homebuyer to complete the applications steps. Better.com claims they cut the process from three weeks to just three minutes.
Launched in 2016, Better Mortgage is a full-stack mortgage lender digitizing every step of the financing process. They were created by a group of engineers from Google and Spotify committed to putting consumers back in control of the most important financial decision of their lives.
To accomplish that, the company cuts out several steps involving third-party brokers, substituting a carefully guarded artificial intelligence program to ensure accurate as well as timely processing. Fewer steps and fewer people involved in the process also means the company saves money that it shares with the homebuyer in the form of lower fees. This is also how they differentiate themselves from competitors such as Rocket Mortgage (by quicken loans) and conventional mortgage brokers.
“There should be no difference between sort of people who have a lot of money and can buy houses like they are buying handbags and an average consumer that wants to buy a house that they actually want to consume.”
Better Mortgage from a new Digital Mortgage Platform
Launched in 2016, Better.com has backing from both Goldman Sachs and Kleiner Perkins. The New York City-based company is one of the fastest growing in the country. So far they have made over $600 million worth of home loans.
Garg doesn’t believe Better.com is just digitizing the traditional mortgage process as competitors as Rocket Mortgage does. He believes that by streamlining the process as they have, they are creating a “frictionless” buying experience.
“What we are doing is eliminating all the transactional friction that traditionally happens with the homeownership process whether it is finding the right house, finding the right realtor or finding and figuring out how much you can afford,” Garg told Bold Business. “We are taking that and all the complicated math, all the paperwork and we digitize it and we turn it into a process that you can understand and that you can afford.”
Better.com is aiming directly for the younger homebuyer by making the tiresome and often confusing process easier and more certain for buyers.
Home Ownership Made Easier
“We are on our path to making home ownership easier for a new generation of Americans that has never understood the idea of walking into a bank branch and never had to deal with a mortgage loan officer. Today’s ecosystem is just not built for the way that younger people want to transact finances,” Garg explained
The early stage venture is already on its Series B funding, amounting to a total of $45 million. “We have done about 10 million of those mortgages today, one-day mortgages,” said Garg. “And our goal is to make that 10 billion and then 10 trillion.”
Through a bold idea stemming from the founder’s own experiences and difficulties, Better.com has built a simple product that respects not just a person’s time and efforts, but also their circumstances, attracting even more people to the idea of finally having a place they can call their own home.
Edward Kopko
CEO & Publisher
———————
Ed Kopko is BoldBusiness.com’s CEO and Publisher. He has a passion for business, economics and media. A serial entrepreneur, Ed has launched Bold Business to help broadcast the great accomplishments that come from business and entrepreneurial activity. He believes the very real and amazing Bold Impacts that these activities have created also make a micro economic case for trade and commerce. Ed’s previous media experience was as CEO, Publisher and Owner of Chief Executive Magazine and its related media activities. He has been published in many media venues including the Wall St. Journal, Detroit Free Press and Forbes.com. He has also been a sought after commentator and appeared numerous times on CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News and other media outlets.
CEO & Publisher
———————
Ed Kopko is BoldBusiness.com’s CEO and Publisher. He has a passion for business, economics and media. A serial entrepreneur, Ed has launched Bold Business to help broadcast the great accomplishments that come from business and entrepreneurial activity. He believes the very real and amazing Bold Impacts that these activities have created also make a micro economic case for trade and commerce. Ed’s previous media experience was as CEO, Publisher and Owner of Chief Executive Magazine and its related media activities. He has been published in many media venues including the Wall St. Journal, Detroit Free Press and Forbes.com. He has also been a sought after commentator and appeared numerous times on CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News and other media outlets.
