Tag: Cloud Computing

HG Insights Acquires Intricately

Technology Intelligence vendor HG Insights acquired fellow data vendor Intricately.  The acquisition provides HG Insights with global cloud product adoption, usage, and spend data, “adding to HG’s market-leading optimization of the world’s top technology brands’ Go-To-Market.”

The entire Intricately team has joined HG Insights, including CEO Michael Pollack and CTO Fima Leshinsky.  Pollack assumed the role of EVP of Market Innovation, and Leshinsky was named an SVP of Product.

HG Insights’ NLP gathers technology installation and spend intelligence for eleven million global companies, capturing 96% of the world’s total IT spend and intelligence on over 15,600 installed products.

“We started Intricately to provide decision-makers with actionable data and insights they could use to plot a course through the ever-expanding Cloud universe.  At the time, we saw a world with individuals relying on gut instincts, teams making ‘best guesses,’ and organizations making big bets on circumspect data.  We started this business with the goal of making the unknown known.  Our vision was, and has always been, to be the authoritative source of truth for digital product adoption, usage, and spend.”

Intricately Founders Fima Leshinsky and Michael Pollack

Intricately’s proprietary sensor network gathers cloud product adoption, usage, and spend data for seven million global businesses across 21,000 cloud offerings.  Data are collected from over 150 global Internet points of presence, helping Intricately map digital infrastructure.  Its insights are delivered via an API, integrations, data snapshots, and web applications.

“Intricately provides unique and actionable insights that enable cloud sellers to increase velocity by focusing on the highest potential opportunities,” said Pollack.  “As the workforces of global companies become increasingly distributed, cloud spend and product adoption have become key indicators when assessing potential buyers’ likelihood of purchasing and deploying new products.  Intricately’s intelligence, now part of HG Insights, is uniquely positioned to lead the market on this trend.”

Intricately Cloud Intelligence

Intricately’s customers include the top three cloud companies.  In addition, the acquisition provides “real-time visibility into a company’s cloud footprint and application tech stack.”

“Now, with the addition of Intricately, we can provide real-time visibility into a company’s cloud footprint and application tech stack to provide richer insights for better decisions and faster results,” said HG Insights CEO Elizabeth Cholawsky.  “Our customers have come to rely on HG Insights as an indispensable input into their most strategic decisions such as market sizing, whitespace analysis, and territory planning as well as for fundamental activities including opportunity prioritization and account-based marketing intelligence.”

HG Insights and Intricately offer complementary spend data.  HG Insights focuses on projected spend for forecasting and go-to-market planning while Intricately measures actual spend for benchmarking and plan measurement.  Combined, the companies offer “unmatched spend insights in the Cloud Market that support the full lifecycle of Plan, Optimize, and Execute to empower sales and marketing organizations.”

HG Insights listed a series of technical benefits:

  • Richer combined datasets to operationalize the planning, targeting, and messaging to prospects based on technology adoption and usage
  • Improved precision of workload volumes, estimated spends, and the related technologies running on cloud-based infrastructure
  • Expansion of insights into customer-built cloud and self-hosted applications
  • Detailed location insights providing a view into both the location of consumption and/or physical infrastructure to power hyper-focused Go-to-Market strategies
  • Real-time detection of changes to a company’s cloud application and technology strategy

Business professionals can leverage HG Insights expanded intelligence to evaluate their TAM/SAM/SOM, prioritize ABM campaigns, establish “equitable and efficient” sales territories, and determine which prospects have the highest propensity to buy.  In addition, sales reps can identify prospects evaluating other vendors or shifting their usage patterns, signals that an account is at risk.

“With this new intelligence in its offering, HG will provide game-changing insights that transform our customers’ Go-To-Market initiatives and accelerate growth,” HG Insights Product Marketing Director Darcy Moss told GZ Consulting.  “Strategy, marketing, sales, and operations teams can leverage this insight to answer critical business decisions with greater confidence.”

The addition of Intricately Cloud insights helps answer the question, “What is Coming?”

“By adding Intricately’s market-leading workload and usage data, we’ll give our customers the most detailed, unique picture available of an account’s technology strategy; not just what they have, but why they have it, how they’re using it, and ultimately, what they’re likely to do next.  It’s a competitive advantage unmatched in the market,” stated Moss.

Intricately was founded in 2014 and is based in San Francisco.  LinkedIn states that it has 54 employees, having grown its headcount by 35% in the past year and 93% over the past two.  However, its employment plateaued last November.

“At this time, we will be business as usual until the transition is completed,” stated Moss.  “This includes retaining current office locations.”

HG Insights did not disclose any size or growth details.  It also did not disclose the acquisition price. Intricately is HG Insights’ second acquisition.  In 2018, the firm acquired Pivotal IQ, a curator of IT contract and spend intelligence.

Cloud Computing Growth

Synergy Research Group sized the Q4 enterprise spend on cloud services at $37 billion, up 35% year-over-year.  The full-year spend was $129 billion.  Microsoft Azure continued its growth, reaching a 20% market share, second only to AWS in the low 30s.  Azure has doubled its market share over the past four years.  AWS posted $12.7 billion in Q4 revenue.  Google Cloud has a 9% market share but remains a money loser.  Except for Alibaba, at 6%, the smaller cloud providers continue to lose market share.

Azure grew 50% year-over-year, while AWS grew 28%.

“We believe Azure’s cloud momentum is still in its early days of playing out within the company’s massive installed base, and the Office 365 transition for both consumer/enterprise is providing growth tailwinds over the next few years,” said Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives.

“Based on our conversations with CIOs, CISOs, and IT product managers globally over the last month, we believe cloud-driven architecture IT growth in 2021 could surpass that of 2020 as more enterprises rip the band-aid off on digital transformations.”

Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives

AWS CEO Andy Jassy will succeed CEO Jeff Bezos at Amazon in Q3.  AWS generates half of Amazon’s profits but generates only ten percent of revenues.  Bezos will assume the role of Executive Chairman.

Gartner Forecasts Robust Growth in Global Public Cloud Services

Gartner forecasted continued growth of global public cloud services.  The analyst firm projected 17.5% growth in 2019 to $214.3 billion.  The fastest growth rate will be in Infrastructure as a Service which will jump 27.5% to $38.9 billion.  Platform as a Service is expected to rise by 21.8% this year.

“Cloud services are definitely shaking up the industry,” said Gartner Research VP Sid Nag.  “At Gartner, we know of no vendor or service provider today whose business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organizations.  What we see now is only the beginning, though.  Through 2022, Gartner projects the market size and growth of the cloud services industry at nearly three time the growth of overall IT services.”

Gartner research found that a third of organizations listed cloud investments as a top three investment priority.  Thirty percent of technology providers new software investments are shifting from cloud-first to cloud only.  Thus, SaaS and subscription cloud models will continue to replace license-based software sales.

Microsoft: Nadella Interviewed by Bloomberg

Microsoft CEO Satya NadellaMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella was interviewed by Bloomberg on the topics of cloud computing, Azure, the LinkedIn acquisition, culture change at Microsoft, and the globalization of technology.

Here is a subset of what he said about tech changes:

Is the cloud the big technological change that we’re going to see over the next five years?

I think the big move that is happening today for sure is the cloud move and the mobile move. They sort of go together. And when I say mobility, it’s not the mobility of one device, it’s the mobility of the applications and the data across all your devices, because it’s about the ability of the human experience, not the device.

But I see three other broad platform shifts. One is what I’ve called conversations as a platform. If we can teach all our computers human language, can we democratize computers even more so than we have done today? Think about it. The model today of, “Well, I’ve got to learn the shell, learn to download 20 apps, and navigate between these apps to get stuff done”—what if none of that was a cognitive load on me, but I was able to simply talk, text, or voice and get my things done?

That’s a much more natural way for computing to surface. It’ll work for an 85-year-old person in China, and it’ll work for a 5-year-old in Bellevue [Wash.]. That, to me, is the next frontier and what we’re doing with [voice-enabled personal assistant] Cortana, what we are doing with our bots.

I’m also very, very bullish about making AI capability or machine learning capability available to every developer, every application, and letting any company use these core cognitive capabilities to add intelligence into their core operations. So that’s something that we’re doing with Azure and our Azure cognitive services.

The third one that I’m also very excited about is what’s happening with mixed reality.

Image Credit: Satya Nadella from LinkedIn