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Today’s topics include Google integrating Analytics 360 and G Suite with Salesforce CRM; Sprint ending merger talks with T-Mobile; Dell EMC expanding its all-flash storage lineup; and OpenStack’s continued growth in public and private cloud deployments.
Announced Nov. 6, Google will integrate its G Suite office productivity software tools and Google Analytics 360 technology with Salesforce.com’s core customer relationship management platform.
The integration will allow organizations to use Google’s Gmail, Sheets, Drive and other G Suite tools to view and interact with CRM data from across the Salesforce Sales Cloud. Organizations will also be able to run analytics on sales, marketing and advertising data from Salesforce’s Marketing and Sales Cloud using Google Analytics.
“This integration delivers complete consumer analytics to drive smarter engagement—from awareness all the way through to conversion and retention,” said Salesforce Executive Vice President Ryan Aytay. Google’s head of global technology partners, Nan Boden, said the integration will allow organizations to easily turn marketing, service and sales data from Salesforce CRM into actionable insight.
Masayoshi Son, CEO of Sprint’s parent company SoftBank, has formally walked away from merger negotiations with T-Mobile, due to concerns that the merger would remove Sprint’s identity and power, according to a Nov. 6 Bloomberg story.
Sprint initially had sought to be acquired by T-Mobile in a stock swap with T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom to mitigate significant revenue and subscriber losses over the past decade. However, Son claims Sprint’s finances are improving and that the company “will be able to secure funding on its own.”
Several IT analysts told eWEEK that the latest failure of the on-again, off-again merger talks is understandable. Gartner analyst Bill Menezes said, “It’s not surprising that two companies known for having strong personalities at the helm couldn’t agree on which one would have control after the merger.”
Dell EMC on Nov. 7 announced the expansion of its all-flash storage lineup, as well as free software upgrades for Dell EMC Unity customers and a new “future-proof” storage loyalty program for midrange storage customers.
The two new storage arrays help customers modernize their data centers to gain more speed, efficiency and cost-savings from existing applications. They are offered as 3U appliances that feature dual active/active controllers with 8-core Intel Xeon processors and up to 256GB of memory.
Dell EMC Unity, designed for unified, all-flash SAN-NAS environments, speeds up deployment, streamlines management and tiers storage to the cloud. Finally, the new Dell EMC Future-Proof Storage Loyalty program offers customers guarantees through the lifetime of their arrays.
At the OpenStack Summit in Sydney, Australia, this week, OpenStack Foundation Chief Operating Officer Mark Collier is getting the message out that OpenStack is a growing player in a public cloud market that includes top providers Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
“It’s no secret that OpenStack is the de facto standard for private clouds, but a lot of people don’t realize just how big the footprint is for public clouds powered by OpenStack,” Collier said. A lot of people have “written off” OpenStack as a player in the public cloud space, but, he said, “There are over 60 different data centers for public cloud powered by OpenStack around the world.”
At the summit, the OpenStack Foundation announced its new Passport program, which allows organizations to see a listing of all OpenStack-powered public cloud operators that offer free trials. The program was created to promote and expand the global usage of OpenStack for public cloud deployments.