Philly Tech Peoplenews 9/21/2015








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BioClinica Names Mukhtar Ahmed as eClinical President (PR Newswire)
Came from Oracle.

Kirsten Leute Joins Osage University Partners as Senior Vice President of University Relations (Marketwire)

USA Technologies Expands and Strengthens Management Team With Industry Veteran
Appoints New Chief Financial Officer and Creates Chief Services Officer Position
(Business Wire)

American Driveline Systems Adds New Talent To Executive Leadership Team (PR Newswire)

DuPont Names Rose Lee as President, DuPont Protection Technologies (PR Newswire)





Silver Lake: Dell spinout of Boomi, other unit may make sense




Tom Paine



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A couple of months back, Silver Lake Partners, the PE giant that owns about 25% of the privatized Dell, raised the possibility that Boomi and another Dell unit, SecureWorks, be spun out in some way. One suggestion was a structure along the lines of EMC's "federation", which may seem dated as EMC's star fleet structure is under attack now.

SecureWorks, a cybersecurity firm, is speculated to have a standalone value of more than one billion. I don't see any valuations mentioned for Boomi, but the fact is Boomi needs to serve a broad horizontal market, not a vertical, and may not be best served operating from within the Dell structure if its going to reach its full potential.

So I have no idea whether any thing will come out of this, but when a Silver Lake managing partner who works closely with Michael Dell suggests it, I'd take it seriously. And I think the very fact that Boomi merits so much high-level consideration is testament to the enduring value of Rick Nucci's creation.

Read Fortune's article on Dell's possible moves and see its interview with Silver Lake managing partner Egon Durban. Discussion about Dell starts about 5:20 in.








             Kim Jong-un: "Had a great time at Dreamforce, but couldn't see anything because everything was stored in the clouds or something." And I couldn't find any video games




Ad Tech Meets Marketing Tech As MediaMath Integrates With Oracle (Adexchanger)
Safeguard Scientifics owns a 21% stake in MediaMath.

Oracle's cloud transition will require some patience, say analysts (ZDNet)

Age-old question: Can commercial software succeed in an open-source world? (Fortune)

SAP wants to own the real customer relationship. You should care. (Diginomica)



Comcast Targets Big Businesses to Offset Consumer TV Defections (Bloomberg)

Comcast acquires one of Cincinnati's largest IT firms (Cincinnati Business
Journal)

AT&T, Comcast Mum On M&A; Comcast Ads Mock DTV Deal (Investor's Business
Daily)

Microsoft and Salesforce have more joint products up their sleeves (Fortune)





PeopleLinx receives $3.5 million; does the town at Dreamforce


Tom Paine



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PeopleLinx, the Philadelphia-based social selling app, received a new round of $3.5 million in late August from Osage Venture Partners, MissionOG and Greycoft Partners. The investment, all from returning investors, demonstrates their contnuesd confidence in PeopleLinx' future in spite of some reports suggesting it was in disarry in terms of personnel. The funds will be used to build up product development, including adding developers to replace an outsurcing arrangement with Arcweb. PeopleLinx has now raised over $8 million.

PeopleLinx, which last year moved to the Salesforce platform, is busy at Dreamforce again this year, giving previews of its new PeopleLinx 4 platform (release date unknown), and doing a demo with marketing officials from customers Red Hat and the Sacremento Kings. The Kings are of interest since like so many West Coast franchises they are now owned by a tech titan, Vivek Ranadive, who sold his software firm TIBCO to private equity for about $4 billion. Like many of the new breed of owners, Ranadive is trying to tranform the Kings through technology, and PeopleLinx is part of the solution, not to improve the bssketball team, but to build relationships with season ticket holders and add more. PeopleLinx should next try selling Hasso Plattner, Larry Ellison (no, not a Salesforce product), Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer.

Chief Marketing Officer Dr. Michael Idinopulous (always have to check spelling of his last name) refused to say much about PeopleLinx 4, except that it would feature a compelling user interface (he hinted at video), and would integrate more SaaS offerings and more information sources.

PeopleLinx has hopes that everyone attending Dreamforce will sign up for its Share the Dream app, which enables you to customize your Dreamforce Experience.

Ever wonder how the TastyKakes PeopleLinx serves at Dreamforce arrive there so fresh? A batch of that incredible concoction that only Philly could dream up is flown there by air prior to the event. By the way, I've often wondered if Tasty Baking made a good decsion to implement SAP prior to its bankruptcy. Just seemed too big, too complex, too expensive for a relatively small company. But I've
never heard a post-mortem on that one. Of course, now its part of Flowers Foods, a much larger and more sophisticated business.


SAP reveals Hybris toolset to smash CRM data silos (v3.co.uk)

Comcast adds Netgear's cameras and Chamberlain garage doors to Xfinity home platform (Fortune)



Dreamforce '15 is upon us


Tom Paine



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Dreamforce '15 begins tomorrow and runs through Friday at the Moscone Center in San Franscso. The purported 100,000 plus will be there, I'm sure, though some may be diguised as depressed Giants fans.

But this year I'm closer to buying into the Salesforce vision, and I don't mean by that all the celebs who will gather there or Marc Benioff's vision for the world.

Rather, I mean the strength of the business logic surrounding Salesforce. I see no major player gaining ground on CRM in the cloud, except perhaps Amazon Web Services, which is a different type of fish. And the Cloud, most agree, is becoming the established standard in computing.


And I'm not just talking about Salesforce, but its partner companies, many of whom garnered huge investments this year, often led by Salesforce itself, a change in direction for them. And most of the partners that I'm aware of are generating real revenues selling to BtoB companies, and are less likely to suffer if the bubble bursts.

This year more of the talk will be about live non-CRM products.

And Salesforce has finally freed its Heroku platform to provide a true alternative for big data users who were cramped by the Force.com (read: Oracle DBMS) environment.

Bloomberg reported in July that Salesforce was specifically trying to attract M&A interest from Microsoft and SAP, though I don't know whether that was a rumor-spreading effort by Benioff to prime the pump. Then a month later Benioff pulled out his best Trumpism, declaring that Bill McDermott was "scared of Salesforce", a characterization that I doubt many who know McDermott would buy.

Of course, if Benioff is correct about Salesforce growing faster than SAP, he should just wait a while. Salesforce's current market cap is $47 billion versus $80 billion for SAP. If things keep going Benioff's way, soon he could negotiate a merger of equals.

I'll be covering it all with a special eye on the Philly-area companies that make news at Dreamforce as I did last year. I find that more companies in the area getting drawn into the Salesforce ecosystem, in some cases only because their customers are leading the way.

If you have any relevant content, please email me at phillytechnews@gmail.com.


WealthCloud to provide an integrated trust administration platform for Seward & Kissel LLP

WealthCloud, LLC Rebrands with New Name

Salesforce talks up sales intelligence, small business offensive (Fortune)

Rootstock aims to thrive in the manufacturing industry cloud (Diginomica)

Compass raises $50M in Series C; now valued at $800M (The Real Deal)
Looking to open Philly office, report says.

Phenom People Unveils Industry’s First Talent Relationship Marketing Platform (Business Wire)
Formerly iMomentous, relaunches on Salesforce platform.

PeopleLinx receives $3.5 million; does the town at Dreamforce

Microsoft isn’t being ‘overly cooperative’ with Salesforce despite their renewed friendship, analyst says
(Business Insider)

LiquidHub Refuels Global Brand

Horsham-based Proscape, with new mobile apps, seeks broader market




Comcast, Arris Open Up Gateway Deployment (Multichannel News)

Bentley Enlivens Reality Modeling through Acquisition of e-on Software (Business Wire)

Dreamforce powers Salesforce's market rise (USA Today)