5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

The Week Ending March 8

Topping this week's roundup of companies that came to win is Rimini Street, which won a legal victory this week in one part of its long-running legal battle with Oracle.

Also making the list this week are AMD for evidence that its EPYC server processors are gaining ground against rival Intel, Salesforce for its bold revenue growth goals, Intermedia for its new UCaaS analytics platform and Veritas for a savvy acquisition in the data management space.

Not everyone in the IT industry was making smart moves this week, of course. For a rundown of companies that were unfortunate, unsuccessful or just didn't make good decisions, check out this week's Five Companies That Had A Rough Week roundup.

Rimini Street Scores A Supreme Court Victory Against Oracle

Rimini Street, the third-party support services provider that has been ensnarled in years of litigation with Oracle, won a victory this week when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Oracle must repay Rimini Street $12.8 million in the case.

The court decision, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, ordered Oracle to refund $12.8 million Rimini Street paid Oracle in 2016 to compensate for certain litigation expenses in the case.

"We are pleased with this latest victory in the highest Court and look forward to continuing our fierce competition with Oracle in the marketplace by providing the best enterprise software support service and value for Oracle licensees worldwide," crowed Rimini Street CEO Seth Ravin in a statement.

Oracle, however, noted that the ruling was "ancillary" to the broader legal case. "The Supreme Court's narrow decision today on recovery of a type of cost does not change the fundamental facts of the case: Rimini engaged in a massive theft of Oracle's IP and tried to cover it up by destroying evidence and engaging in other litigation misconduct, but it got tagged for its illegal activities anyway by both judge and jury, as the opinion acknowledges," said Deborah Hellinger, Oracle's vice president for corporate communications.

The long-running case revolves around Rimini Street's practices of hosting Oracle software on its own servers, "cloning" that software to bring it to multiple customers and using Oracle's support materials to provide its own support services.

AMD EPYC Gaining Ground Against Intel In Servers, Survey Says

A survey of 500 IT decision makers shows that AMD is making headway in the server processor market against rival Intel, especially among large enterprises, and much of those gains are thanks to the value proposition of AMD's EPYC processors.

The 2019 State of Servers survey results, released this week, show that 16 percent of IT decision makers are using AMD processors for their on-premises servers today and that number is expected to climb to 21 percent over the next two years.

The survey, conducted by Spiceworks, underscores how AMD has stepped up the competition with Intel in the server market since it debuted the EPYC processor in 2017.

Salesforce Looks To Double The Business – Or More – In Four Years

CRM cloud application giant Salesforce reported this week that revenue in its recently completed fiscal 2019 grew 26 percent to $13.3 billion.

As impressive as that was, CEO Marc Benioff said during an earnings call this week that the fast-growing company expects to reach sales of $16 billion in the current fiscal year. And he boldly predicted that sales would reach $20 billion in coming years and between $26 billion and $28 billion by fiscal 2023 – more than double current sales.

Benioff once famously predicted that Salesforce would reach the $10 billion annual sales mark faster than any other software company – a goal the company blew past in fiscal 2018.

Intermedia Launches UCaaS Analytics Solution in Boost For MSP Partners

Cloud communications specialist Intermedia this week debuted a new analytics system that provides better visibility into the performance of communications systems, providing a way for more Managed Service Providers to add unified communications to their product offerings.

The new Intermedia Unite Envision, unveiled at The Channel Company's XChange 2019 conference, works with the Intermedia Unite UCaaS platform the company launched last year, combining cloud-based voice solutions with the video technology it acquired through its 2017 acquisition of web conferencing vendor AnyMeeting.

Envision is a significant move because it allows MSPs and their customers to monitor the performance of the Intermedia Unite UC and collaboration tools in real time, keeping an eye on voice and video call quality and identifying system issues. Intermedia is calculating that providing actionable insights for MSPs will encourage more partners to sell voice solutions.

Veritas Acquires Aptare In Bet On Analytics, Management For Hybrid Cloud

Data protection and management software developer Veritas made a savvy acquisition this week when it bought Aptare, a developer of software tools used to gain insight into data stored in physical, cloud and virtualized environments.

With Aptare Veritas partners will be able to perform data analytics, monitoring and management across heterogeneous storage environments, including data stored on competitors' primary and secondary storage and in multi-cloud environments.

With the move Veritas is making a bid to become a leading provider of technology to monitor and manage both primary and secondary storage systems.