UPDATED 14:43 EDT / MAY 31 2012

NEWS

This Week in the Cloud: from Salesforce’s Big Buy to Xbox Video Streaming

This week’s major highlights spanned across quite a few areas, ranging from the M&A scene to the personal cloud and the latest move in Xbox’s campaign to take over the living room.

Yesterday we learned that enterprise SaaS giant Salesforce.com agreed to dole out $800 million for Buddy Media, a social marketing firm that cater to the same market as the CRM provider. It’s easy to see how social media ties in with customer relations management, and the fact that Salesforce’s competitors have also been investing in this space adds some further validation to the deal.

Another enterprise cloud service provider that had an update this week is Box. The popular storage platform has been updated to include number of new security features that aim to simplify the management of mobile users just a bit more. Admins can now search files belonging to their organization and password protect the ones being accessed from a phone, among other things.

Panaroma9 enhanced its offering as well via a partnership with Zendesk. The IT automation platform will now leverage some of the help desk software’s functionality to better register and handle the process of identifying problems, adding another field to the long list that the Danish startup’s SaaS covers.

The final tidbit comes from Microsoft, the unofficial winner of the console wars. While Sony is promoting the upcoming PS4 the software giant is too working on the next generation of its living room hardware, although the latter has been upgrading the software powering the Xbox much more consistently. The latest addition is Amazon’s Instant Video service, which will sync with the 360 and give users access to all the titles they’ve purchased. It even supports Kinect.


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