TechCrunch
Microsoft And Oracle Will Announce Major Cloud Computing Partnership Next Monday
Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer, its Azure chief Satya Nadella and Oracle’s president Mark Hurd are holding a joint press conference next week, just two days before Microsoft’s Build developer conference is scheduled to kick off in San Francisco. The press event follows Oracle’s earnings call that featured remarks by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison about a series of major partnership announcements next week, including one with Salesforce.com.
“Next week we will be announcing technology partnerships with the largest and most important SaaS companies (software-as-a-service) and infrastructure companies in the cloud,” Ellison said during the call.
With this press conference slated for Monday, questions are bubbling about what these companies have planned. Adding to the speculation: Oracle is starting to promote its 12c database technology, which the company announced last October and which Larry Ellison said today that companies will use for years to come. 12c is a pluggable in-memory database, which sounds strikingly similar to SAP HANA.
Industry observers I talk to say that it’s possible the two companies are planning their own big data initiative to compete with Pivotal and its mega-partnership with GE. Would that emerge as a separate company? That’s the path that EMC followed when it spun out several of its product groups and those from VMware. Cloud Foundry was part of that spin-out.
But the SAP angle has interesting possibilities. SAP has aligned closely with Amazon Web Services. Oracle could be looking to Microsoft to be its partner for big data, in-memory computing. For Pivotal, its effort is as much about big data as it is about application development. They also face SP as a competitor in the space.
In any case, it’s going to be an interesting week.
France's Dailymotion Finds Stateside Tech Partner In Video Editing Service Givit
In other video news this week, the video editing app Givit has announced its integration with Dailymotion, the second largest social video site globally after YouTube. It is the first U.S. app to be built into the France-based Dailymotion’s API.
This comes after news in late April that the French government struck down Yahoo’s bid for a $200 million majority stake in Dailymotion in order to prevent a U.S. company from taking a controlling stake in one of France’s leading technology companies. Carrier France Telecom / Orange has put between 50 and 60 million Euro into Dailymotion as it waits for someone else to bite.
The Yahoo shutdown sent a bad message to the French marketplace and to foreign investors. This Givit integration is a way for Dailymotion to reach out to U.S. partners from a different angle, tech, while growing their American user base.
When I spoke with Dailymotion’s US Managing Director Roland Hamilton and Givit CEO Greg Kostello today, the two emphasized the commonality of their platforms with respect to fostering creative communities. Givit allows users to stitch together videos of any length, add music and special effects, and “give it” away on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. Hamilton called Dailymotion a “young, hip community” that supports independent filmmakers.
This is a push by Dailymotion to scale up stateside and is especially strategic given recent grumblings from YouTube creators about the site’s revenue shares.
“Dailymotion is becoming a true alternative to YouTube,” said Hamilton. “From articles over the last few weeks, people are looking for another platform, and we want to be there.”
Dailymotion has a public API, and it’s looking for more U.S. mobile and social developers to tap into it. The site is currently reporting 20 million unique monthly visitors for the U.S. versus 112 million globally although a spokesman would not give numbers on Givit’s traction. Even though the Yahoo deal fell through, it seems Dailymotion is still fighting for a bigger toe-hold in the U.S. video scene.
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