The world’s largest cloud software deal happened overnight at the start of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference. NetApp, a $6 billion cloud-led, data-centric software provider, believes Salesforce realises what it needed to do to remain relevant in our hyper-accelerated lives. NetApp, who announced overnight a 200% growth year on year in its public cloud earnings, also believes 2021 will also bring more commercial success for cloud computing firms. 

The world’s largest cloud software purchase acknowledges the acceleration in the pace of professional and personal lives; we expect responses and decisions in seconds or minutes rather than days or hours. There’s also the acceleration of social change, the way that customers, citizens and employees want to engage and interact with any public or private sector organisation through digital tools or web interfaces.

I believe this deal is the recognition that companies are looking for better ways to manage the interaction and collaboration across their teams anywhere on this planet. Salesforce realises that for them to expand beyond CRM and enterprise applications and into the new ways of working they need to have these capabilities in place to support sales and marketing staff. Now, enterprises should figure out a way to weave their own data fabric and bring together all the richness found in their new and historic data which will support the accelerated pace of life and social change.”