Must-know: Tech players plan to leverage the cloud’s fast growth
Why we're seeing price wars between cloud storage companies (Part 5 of 5)
The cloud services market is poised for rapid growth
The tech sector is seeing rapid growth in the cloud services market. Several players have beefed up their offerings lately. According to a report from IDC and as the chart below shows, worldwide public cloud services spending is expected to increase from $47.4 billion in 2013 to $107.2 billion by 2017 at a compound annual growth rate of 23%.
Price wars intensify in the cloud storage space
The cloud storage market has seen fast growth in the last few years. Start-up companies like Dropbox and Box are seeing rapid growth. Big tech players are also trying to leverage this growth. There seems to be a price war at the moment. Microsoft (MSFT) announced a few days ago that it would more than double OneDrive’s free storage space, from 7GB to 15GB, for consumers.
During the WWDC event in early June, Apple (AAPL) also announced big price cuts to its iCloud storage service. A few days ago, at the I/O developer event, Google (GOOGL) announced that it will give companies unlimited storage space for $10 per user per month. Recently, Amazon (AMZN) launched its Fire smartphone. Amazon plans to leverage its competence in the cloud services market through an unlimited photo storage feature on the smartphone.
Microsoft’s flagship cloud product, Office 365, also sees rapid growth
A few months ago, Microsoft announced that Office 365 is already the fastest-growing business in Microsoft’s history. The company said that Office 365 use among small and midsize businesses has grown by 150% in the past 12 months. Microsoft also said the percentage of enterprise customers using its paid service has increased from 14% to 20% in the last 18 months.
Salesforce.com enters the healthcare cloud market
Salesforce.com (CRM) is known for its customer relationship management (or CRM) products on the cloud. Recently, the company partnered with Philips (PHG) to enter the healthcare cloud market. Salesforce.com has already started working on a few cloud applications to monitor patients’ health information people suffering with chronic diseases. The partnership plans to automate patients’ health records in order to free doctors’ and nurses’ time finding the data themselves.
SAP expands its portfolio of CRM offerings to more industries
SAP (SAP) is the second biggest player in the CRM software market after Salesforce.com. In a quest to leverage the fast-growing cloud CRM market, SAP announced that it’s expanding its portfolio of CRM software offerings to the insurance, utilities, and retail industries. These offerings will leverage the SAP HANA Cloud Platform to give these industries predictive analytics capability. SAP also said it’s introducing a cloud-based marketing performance dashboard that gives company executives sales and marketing insights.
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