Symnatec just announced its Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition 2013 which effectively moves Symantec's flagship security solution for SMBs to the cloud. The solution has an on-premise solution as well giving SMBs the flexibility to start with an on-premise solution or use directly a cloud-based solution with no additional hardware requirements and no special IT staff or training needed.
Techaisle Take
In the SMB space, the trend is definitely moving to the cloud, with SMBs reporting growth in the average number of cloud applications rising from 2 in 2010, to 4.3 last year and expected to hit over 7 this year. Symantec has seen flat revenue in a growing market and needs to take advantage of this trend in cloud services. Security is among the most widely deployed cloud application (~60% of Cloud Users). Symantec has a very broad portfolio of products and despite a management shakeup and unwanted attention from hactivists; they have been able to maintain stability over the past few years. Having said that, there is always some uncertainty when migrating from one architecture to the next; it will be very important to maintain a solid opportunity for channel partners and they will have to execute well as they make this move.
Symantec needs to ensure that their channel partners are well trained in the difference between between the 2013 cloud edition and the 12.1 on-premise version to avoid any SMB marketplace confusion. Symantec also needs to make sure that their marketing campaigns present the choice of offers as a benefit rather than a hard decision; there are benefits to both cloud and on-premises versions depending on the SMB customer need. We have found that there is a gap in demand from channel partners for cloud security services based on what they are hearing from their SMB customers – Vertical Applications, Security and Storage and Backup solutions top the list of requested applications.
All software companies are wrestling with or implementing cloud services strategies. After Cloud Security, which is a strategic imperative for Symantec, the largest opportunities within Cloud Infrastructure are in Remote Storage & Backup services, unless they step far outside their core business. SMBs recently reported that although their business priorities have remained fairly constant, 77% want vendors to reduce complexity in IT so they can focus on business and customers. It seems Symantec wants to enable that by offering both (all) their services through a common interface which is delivered through the channel and allows remote management of both On-Premises installed base and Cloud versions. If they can do this successfully, it should be a win for both small businesses and channel partners. Even so, the devil is in the detail, and if they fail to bring both of these to the market successfully they risk losing credibility in their core security market.
Anurag Agrawal
Techaisle Analyst Insights
We have covered Marketing Automation as a major topic, especially through the Techaisle SMB Marketing Automation Study conducted in US, UK, Germany and several blog posts, commenting on the rapid growth and consolidation in the market. In one fell swoop Oracle is now addressing a US$3.5 billion opportunity in the US by 2015 and US$6.0 billion opportunity globally.
Oracle’s announcement that it would acquire Eloqua for $871M, a leading Marketing Automation vendor, seems a little odd at first, mainly because majority of Eloqua’s customers are said to be using Salesforce.com as their CRM platform, and because Oracle competes with Siebel-on-Demand and recently released its’ own Fusion CRM product.
In the typical Oracle fashion of acquiring existing market leaders, i.e. Siebel Systems, PeopleSoft and JDE, Oracle snatched up another jewel for the Ellison crown, apparently valuing B2B and Enterprise-level functionality over SMB and Social Media Marketing automation that have been the focus of arch-rival Salesforce.com. It also sends a message to Redmond, whose recent acquisition of MarketingPilot seems to offer a substantial list of features and functions, but does not carry the weight of Eloqua’s brand. In the short term, it kind of looks like a mixed bag; the repercussions of the purchase seem to revolve along these areas:
SMB Customers:
1) Oracle says they will continue to support third party applications, but they have a huge vested interest in on-premise CRM in Siebel and other solutions that will compete for resources,
2) Enterprise customers who still have a staff to manage applications may be open to another level of integration with a combined Fusion/Eloqua/Siebel offer, but for those SMBs already on SFDC, it is very unlikely that there would be a compelling reason to move from SaaS to an on-premise model; getting away from capital purchases, IT headcount, maintenance fees and software upgrades was the main reason for going with Salesforce.com from the beginning. Same for those who are already managing their marketing campaigns and customer communication programs using Eloqua; it is hard to take that away without some revenue risk and employee dissatisfaction.
3) In a recent Techaisle survey, 77% of SMBs interviewed stated they were looking for vendors to reduce complexity. The type and level of integration of Eloqua into the larger Siebel suite will either make things more or less complicated depending on the approach taken by product managers to create a seamless experience.
Competitors:
4) Oracle denies access to Eloqua’s technology to Salesforce.com, which would have been a very good fit both in terms of customer acquisition/migration and start up culture. This may well be the most important (short-term) advantage gained by Oracle. This moves Marketo, SliverPop and others up the ladder as the large independents in the space, with Hubspot and Marketo obvious next-in-line M&A targets, in a market that has seen scores of start-ups, mergers and acquisitions over the past few years.
5) Despite a 30% premium paid by Oracle for Eloqua ($23/share over the market $17), there is already a class action suit alleging that the board should have shopped a buyer more aggressively, suggesting a $27 price as more reasonable. No comment.
6) Over the longer term the implications are larger in a market that is moving fast, which will be influenced increasingly by Big Data, Automation and Optimization - Enterprise capabilities to compete with the big players like IBM, Salesforce.com and SAP, who will be bringing competition and automation to a new level in the next few years. A recent Wikibon Post is a good example of how hardware and software are evolving to meet these emerging real time challenges. The post describes how fast the bar is rising in optimization in general and online advertising in particular:
“Many commercial Web publishers make space available on their Web pages for banner and display advertisements. Typically, when a user opens such a Web page, the browser reaches out to an online ad exchange network and requests an ad unit to serve to that user. The ad exchange broadcasts this information, often enriched with behavior data specific to the user in question, to multiple advertisers. Each advertiser compares the information against its internal ad inventory and existing ad campaigns to determine what that ad impression is "worth" to them. It then decides whether to place a bid and at what amount. Bids are returned to the ad exchange, which determines who the highest bidder is and delivers the winning advertisement.”
- Wikibon
All without noticeable lag to the user. These are the kind of industrial strength capabilities that are on the way as the market compounds at almost 130%, dominated by Mobile spending as devices grow by the hundreds of millions, as shown in this Kleiner-Perkins forecast.
Who’s Next?
So in our opinion this is a significant acquisition for Oracle, mainly because Eloqua has a strong base of satisfied users and a strong brand, and strong technology that can be applied to Oracle’s stack in the long run. The $871M price tag was not enough to prevent a lawsuit for some shareholders, but represents a sizable investment for Oracle as they strive to define the ultimate Customer-Centric, Multi-Channel Relationship Management platform in their race against the large horizontal vendors in the space (IBM, SAP, SAS, Google, Teradata). To this end Oracle has acquired eight companies in the last two years (ATG, FatWire. Endeca, RightNow, Inquira, Vitrue, Collective Intellect, and finally with this announcement, Eloqua). The scope of what used to be called the “360ᴼ customer perspective” has evolved to include pre-sales, sales, post-sales, customer service and lifetime customer value application components, with a relentless push to automate and integrate each piece of the puzzle.
In the wake of this acquisition, an obvious question is who's next? As mentioned earlier, Marketo is an obvious choice, as are Silverpop Hubspot, Responsys, and others. Will SFDC respond in kind or continue to focus on the lower end of the market and Social Media acquisitions? Regardless, we think 2013 will continue to see a rich market for Marketing Automation M&A activity, following two years that have seen scores of transactions in the space.
Dropbox, Carbonite and many others have accelerated the use of Cloud storage in the consumer market for backup of music, photo, file sharing and more recently with various social networking needs and media sites. Similarly, Box.net has established its strong presence within the business segment. Techaisle’s SMB and mid-market business MarketView forecast shows that cloud storage will be a US$1.1 Billion market by 2016 growing at a 37 percent CAGR.
It would not be out of place to say that businesses are always very concerned about regulations and business policies requiring them to retain data for longer periods. Add to this the intricacies involving data protection via backups and replication, data scalability requirements and data availability needs across multiple geographies - the complexities and cost with storing massive amounts of data that is generated across the enterprise becomes huge.
Though it has limitations, an object based Cloud storage solution addresses many of the business challenges above – a scalable, easily replicable, pay-as-you go solution that is geographically accessible through public internet solution, thereby meeting businesses’ most demanding requirements with respect to their data storage policies.
Given the cost competitiveness, scalability and security attributes, backed by enterprise grade SLAs, Object Storage in the Cloud is an extremely viable option for the small and medium businesses (SMBs) looking to migrate their datacenters into the Cloud. RAID arrays are mostly used by mid-sized businesses but that is no protection against a disaster or any malware attacks.
What is Object Storage and why it is significant for mid-market businesses?
An object Storage solution breaks storage data into distinct segments, or ‘Objects’, each containing a unique identifier (or metadata) that allows data retrieval.
Valet parking is often cited as an analogy for Object Storage. When parking at a garage, the attendant gives a claim ticket that identifies the car that allows the driver to pick up the car later. The driver is not concerned where the car is parked as long as it is identifiable when it is time for pick up. Object Storage, likewise, stores data (objects) and retrieves when required based on its unique identifier.
Object Storage differs from traditional Storage Area Network (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) in that the former is ‘Object Based’ and has the following characteristics:
- Each object has its own ID, metadata, data protection policy and is unlike any file system where files often inherit attributes from their parent containers/files/directories.
- There is no limit on volume restriction of size of file systems – unlimited scalability, not limited on infrastructure capacity maximums.
- Data is accessible anywhere over HTTPs - availability of the service can be anywhere on the internet. Hence this is latency sensitive.
- Data is typically retrieved via a RESTful or SOAP based API Web service. Storage vendors have their own proprietary API platforms – e.g. Amazon S3, Nirvanix APIs, OpenStack or EMC Atmos platforms. Any programming language that supports web service-based API calls to remote systems can be used to build applications around the storage solutions.
- Price, which is normally based on usage, is much lower than traditional Block and File storage solutions. Businesses typically pay a per-gigabyte rate for upload and download and a per-gigabyte fee for monthly storage. In addition, some providers charge for each data access request based on reads, writes, etc.
Use Cases
- Data Archiving and backup: Retain data that needs to be easily accessible and always available but is not constantly used in real-time.
- Data Compliance Requirements: Must keep data safely and reliably for audits, reporting, regulatory compliance, discovery, backup and restore, or disaster recovery.
- Data accessibility: Have a library of content and/or media files that employees in many locations must access to download items. Also need employees in many locations to be able to upload or download files.
- Web 2.0 and Social Media: Manage exploding data growth or have fluctuating data storage requirements - Object storage systems have massive scale and provide moderate performance at low cost.
Medical Imaging and medical records applications also have massive use for Object Storage due to sheer volume of data storage requirements. Healthcare Vertical, particularly, have shown high adoption rates for Object based storage.
Competitive Landscape
The market is yet very fragmented though Amazon AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) is considered the leader in this space. Though it has challenges, AWS is a highly innovative service and has created AWS Storage Gateway that enables hybrid storage architectures that span both on and off premise storage options. Nirvanix, a pure play Cloud Storage provider that offers public, hybrid or on-premise Nirvanix-powered storage services which are priced for various support levels. There are other big names such as Google, Windows Azure Blob, Rackspace CloudFiles, AT&T’s Synaptic Cloud Storage and recently Savvis has also entered the Cloud Object Storage space.
Vendors seek to differentiate themselves on price, quality of services (QoS), SLAs and hybrid architectures. At the same time they tend to gravitate towards some established storage and compute platforms to enable standardization, achieve economies of scale and allow for ecosystem build-up. This allows their business customers to combine their storage solutions with any third party solution that uses a similar platform. For example, AT&T Synaptic and Savvis are aligned with EMC Atmos Storage Platform, whereas providers like HP, Rackspace CloudFiles and SoftLayer are aligned wtih OpenStack platform. This enables any third party solution that is based on the above platforms to be combined with storage solutions offering any custom configurations. AmazonS3 is an exception that is based on its own AWS Storage Gateway.
Techaisle Take
Justifiably, there is a great deal of hype today around Object Storage, especially relating to its Cloud, Social Media and Big Data applications. However, it is important to understand the specific use cases and workloads Object Storage can be useful for, given its limitations such as Latency sensitivity, lack of standardization among object storage interfaces and in some specific uses where the stored data is modified frequently and hence not suitable for an Object Storage solution.
Upcoming report: Techaisle's Cloud Object Storage Competitive Landscape report.
Send email to
If you want your company to be included in the report and want to arrange a briefing, please send an email to
Techaisle’s recently completed US SMB Cloud Computing Adoption Trend research shows that Cloud computing – which IT suppliers often position as a means of reducing cost – is viewed by 80 percent of US SMBs as a solution that contributes to business growth. This is a huge departure from previous years when reducing cost used to be the overarching objective. It implies that cloud vendors and resellers should expand their marketing dialogue beyond the cost and CAPEX vs. OPEX motivations for cloud adoption and focus on ways in which cloud-based solutions enable SMBs to expand their reach to new markets and customers. In fact, over 40 percent of SMBs state that business agility and new capabilities are driving SMB cloud adoption.
This new trend of SMBs adopting cloud for business growth creates a “perfect storm” of opportunity for cloud computing. It satisfies the demand for new technology-enabled business capabilities such as mobility, social media, business intelligence/analytics and collaboration by providing a platform for supporting these initiatives. At the same time, as IT continues to struggle with cost control, cloud provides a clear means of reigning in CAPEX and reducing management costs.
Techaisle’s survey data shows that while there is broad recognition of the importance of business agility as a cloud benefit, a “mid-SMB” niche exists – stretching from 50-250 employees – in which IT productivity is the overarching cloud objective.
The key reasons for using cloud and benefits realized vary by size of business as well as issues that are of critical concern to SMB organizations. For example, small businesses (1-99 employees) focus tightly on business benefits: increased business agility is the most compelling cloud benefit, followed by obtaining capabilities that would have been cost/time prohibitive, reducing business process-related costs, and improving business staff productivity. Mid-market businesses (100-999 employees) also appreciate these outcomes – but the highest-ranked benefit of cloud is IT related, with “make our IT staff more productive” cited as a compelling cloud benefit by nearly 60 percent of mid-market businesses.
Drilling down into the different sizes of businesses the 1-9 micro-business group also places a high value on using cloud to reduce process costs, which makes a great deal of sense, since these tasks are likely not automated in any fashion today. Respondents in the 250-499 employee size segments prioritize use of cloud to increase business user productivity, while the 500-999 employee segments is focused on cloud delivery benefits such as capabilities/agility and IT productivity. Analyzing the data by BDMs and ITDMs, the study finds that these groups have different perspectives on how cloud delivers value to their companies.
Marketers can use this data to establish broad themes for the US SMB market, and then tailor their appeals to specific sub-segments based on demonstrated needs and expectations. For more details or to learn about Techaisle’s SMB Cloud Computing Adoption Trends report please contact
