Cloud Wars: Win Through Acquisition

Featured article by Andre Smith, Internet Marketing and E-Commerce specialist

There is a hidden war going on in the tech world – a war to see who will come out on top of the Cloud. And if war was about acquiring land, then this War of the Tech Giants is about acquiring Cloud space (or at least the companies that govern it). This isn’t anything new. The battle to become the top Cloud provider has been going on for some time now.

The Cloud started out as a way for startups who didn’t have the money to build or maintain complex computing infrastructures to store big data. Now, as companies are seeing the benefits of shifting their data from computers to Cloud, tech savvy companies are seeing great opportunities to cash in – and so are the tech giants who want to keep the next guy from taking over their business. Here is a list of some of the most well known examples.

IBM Buys Bluewolf Group

With 12 offices globally, with more than 500 employees in America, Europe and Australia, Bluewolf Group was a leader in the world of cloud consulting and implementation services. It was Salesforce’s longest standing consulting partner with more than 9,500 successful Salesforce projects for clients including Stanley Black & Decker, Sapa Building Systems and Vodafone Hutchison Australia.

“Delivering an exceptional customer experience has emerged as a fundamental element in modern business strategy, and essential to any company’s competitive position,” said Paul Papas, Global Leader, IBM iX. “With Bluewolf, we’ve added expertise to address the growing demand from Salesforce clients for transformational, cloud-based services that allow them to transform the experiences they provide their customers.”

Google Acquires Firebase

In 2014, Google added Firebase to its Google Cloud Platform. Firebase is a service that helps developers create mobile and web apps that store and sync data in real-time. Some of the results of the acquisition were the emergence of firebase push notification for Android last year, which ultimately allowed for Google to introduce their cross-platform messaging solution that lets users reliably send messages at virtually no cost.

What Google did with Firebase is pretty much the same thing Facebook did some time ago with its acquisition of Parse. It offers a backend-as-a-service in order to gain the database savvy it needs to create a kind of cloud-based platform that developers have grown fond of.

“With Firebase, developers are able to easily sync data across web and mobile apps without having to manage connections or write complex sync logic,” Google Director of Product Development Greg DeMichillie wrote in a blog post.

Oracle Corp Buys out Maxymiser

In 2015, the global software giant Oracle bought out Maxymiser, a marketing cloud company, for an unknown price. Maxymiser was a leader in the Cloud software universe that enabled advertisers to maximize user engagement in individual browsers by optimizing ad content. Since Oracle has been slow to enter the Cloud game, it must have seemed better to simply buy Maxymiser, which already offered organic development.

And this seems to ring true all the way across the board, not with only the companies listed in this article. Those companies who have either been too slow to enter the Cloud arena or who aren’t as good at developing such software find it easier to just buy those companies out who are good at it. The old adage comes to mind: If you can’t beat them, buy them out.

And this war of the tech companies (if you even could call it that) isn’t showing any signs of letting up. There are a good number of startups out there with some really great minds behind them. At what point will acquiring startups in order to hold them back stop working in these tech giants; favor? For now, it seems that it is working out for them. Some great things have come from these acquisitions – things that have improved products across the board and kept stakeholders happy.

It isn’t only Cloud that these tech giants have their eyes on. This year alone, Google has acquired 11 Artificial Intelligence startups. Even Ford Motor company is joining the acquisition action by investing $1 billion in Argo AI, founded by former executives on self-driving teams at Google and Uber.

Andre Smith is an Internet, Marketing and E-Commerce specialist with several years of experience in the industry. He has watched as the world of online business has grown and adapted to new technologies, and he has made it his mission to help keep businesses informed and up to date.