Cloud News: Salesforce.com, Platform Computing

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the cloud computing sector:

Salesforce.com to acquire Radian6.  Salesforce.com (CRM) announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Radian6, a social media monitoring platform, for approximately $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock, net of cash acquired.  Salesforce.com will use the acquisition to build and accelerate the enterprise shift to the next version of cloud technologies and better manage social interactions taking place both inside and outside of the company.  Radian6 claims over 2,400 customers such as Dell, Kodak, Pepsi and UPS. By combining Radian6’s social media monitoring and engagement platform with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, companies will be able to keep customer success at the center of their business with real-time social intelligence.

Citrix advances NetScaler. Citrix announced a breakthrough new DataStream technology in its popular NetScaler service delivery networking product line. Addressing the explosive growth in data the new NetScaler DataStream inspects data traffic in real time and applies optimization and security policies. It is the first networking solution of its kind to apply native data protocol and transaction intelligence to both structured and unstructured data. “The intersection of customer enterprise data, social data and web analytics will drive at IDC what we call big data," said Cindy Borovick, Vice President, Enterprise Communications Infrastructure and Datacenter Networks at IDC. "This explosion in content is not only shaping changes in IT infrastructure but is creating demand for network intelligence. By expanding its NetScaler offering to include the data tier Citrix is demonstrating how network intelligence can evolve and adopt to provide scalability, availability and security to next generation public and private cloud requirements.” The new DataStream technology is available immediately on NetScaler 9.3 and is supported on all NetScaler editions at no additional cost.

Platform Computing supports big data.  Platform Computing announced that they are bringing enterprise-class distributed computing to business analytics applications that process "big data" using the Apache Hadoop MapReduce programming model. This allows the ability to scale to thousands of commodity server cores for shared applications and extends enterprise-class capabilities to MapReduce distributed workloads. “Platform is perfectly positioned to run enterprise-class distributed workload for MapReduce applications. Our products are architected from the outset to service large-scale parallel processing on commodity infrastructures. The solutions are also designed to work specifically with multiple distributed file systems, avoiding customer lock-in and offering a single, compatible, distributed computing workload solution throughout the enterprise," said Ken Hertzler, Vice President, Product Management at Platform Computing.