Data Sheet—Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Welcome to Wednesday, Data Sheet readers! EMC has acquired three cloud computing companies in the past month—at least those are the ones we know about. Online payments startup Stripe has lured a senior Google executive to prepare for its next phase of growth. Plus, new research suggests wearable technology could catch on faster on the job than at home—at least among workaholics in the United States.

EMC speaks up. The storage giant is using technology inherited through its buyout of startup Cloudscaling last month to help enterprises manage data distributed across local hardware and public cloud services. It also acquired two other companies, Spanning and Maginatics, that will expand its backup, data protection, and management technologies for cloud services. (The terms of the deals weren't revealed.) The news comes one day after rival NetApp launched its own hybrid cloud strategy and disclosed plans to expand its cloud backup services through an $80 million takeover of Riverbed Technology's SteelStore. Wall Street Journal, ZDNet

CLOUD CHATTER

Big win for Google. Accounting and consulting services giant PricewaterhouseCoopers is a convert: about 45,000 employees in the United States and Australia are adopting the Google Apps for Work suite including Gmail (email), Hangouts (videoconferencing), Drive (file storage), and other services. Plus, PwC will represent Google cloud services to its own clients. WSJ

IBM cloud expansion reaches India. Its 31,000-square-foot facility in Mumbai joins centers in London, Amsterdam, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Melbourne, Toronto, Dallas, and Raleigh, N.C. Paris the next stop for the company's planned $1.2 billion investment in new cloud computing capacity.

STATS & SPECS

Google's prescription for mobile healthcare apps. Its Google Fit technology for Android competes directly with Apple's HealthKit. Both offer basic features for tracking fitness and vital, and both are a starting point for other mobile healthcare apps. Computerworld

STARTUPS & DISRUPTORS

Stripe hires prominent Google exec. Claire Johnson was recruited to establish and organize internal business processes for the 175-person online payments company, which has scored prominent relationships with Apple and Twitter. So far, Stripe has raised $120 million from investors including Sequoia Capital. Johnson most recently led Google's self-driving car project, but she also worked on the Gmail and Google Apps launches. Re/code

Can Poynt reinvent the payments terminal? The ex-Googler responsible for the company's failed mobile wallet initiative, Osama Bedier, is developing a $299 point-of-sale device that supports new mobile payment approaches. The vision is to help smaller retailers accept these sorts of transactions more quickly. “A phone is an essential device for the consumer," he told Reuters. "The terminal is [the] required device for the merchant.” Bedier's approach is also shaped by his experience as a PayPal executive.

Shoretel board spurns hostile $540 million Mitel offer. A pioneer in equipment that unifies voice, email and collaborative communications, ShoreTel is racing into cloud services so it can create a recurring revenue model. In his rejection of the Canadian company's unsolicited bid, Shoretel chairman Chuck Kissner characterized the offer as "financially inadequate." eWeek

FAQ

Will the workplace lead wearable technology adoption?

Consumer adoption of devices such as smart watches, eyeglasses, or fitness monitors is far from mainstream, at least from a global view. Still, almost three-quarters of the 9,100-plus people surveyed last month by Harris Interactive see potential benefits in workplace efficiency, productivity and safety. Positive sentiment is especially high in Mexico, India and China.

The research was conducted on behalf of the Workforce Institute at human resources software and services company Kronos. The online poll during early September (right around the time of the Apple Watch launch) reached 9,126 adults ages 18 or older in Australia, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Mexico, and the United States.

“There’s a strong belief that wearable technology will take off in the workplace before the home because devices such as smart watches, intelligent ID badges, and fitness and health monitors can provide organizations with uncharted data collection points to greatly improve safety, productivity, collaboration, and overall workplace effectiveness," says Workforce Institute director Joyce Maroney, in a statement about the findings.

She notes: "And while more and more types of wearable technologies have hit the market, the concept of wearables at work isn’t new. Workers have been wearing uniforms, safety gear, ID badges, communications headsets, and so on for years to do their jobs better."

As a whole, U.S. adults were the least optimistic respondents. For example, only 48% saw a workplace benefit from wearables, versus almost 96% in Mexico, 94% in China and 91% in India. Approximately 13% of the U.S. respondents used wearables in their personal lives, compared with 73% of those from China.

The U.S. prospects for wearables in the workplace look far brighter if you look at responses from just those classified as students: almost 72% could cite at least one business benefit (compared with 48% of all U.S. respondents).

That finding echoes separate survey results released last week by PricewaterhouseCoopers that suggest 53% of Millennials are "excited" about the future of wearables, particularly in retail, entertainment, and personal healthcare applications.

To that end, it's worth noting that data generated by wearables, particularly fitness bracelets that monitor exercise and health vitals, is fast becoming a must-have component of products and services offered by weight-loss businesses.

On Tuesday, Medifast disclosed a partnership with Fitbit and joined competitors Weight Watchers and Nutrisystems in launching apps for tracking nutrition, weight, sleep patterns and other data integral to gauging progress. “Studies show that people who use journaling and tracking systems have far greater success with healthy weight management than those who do not,” said Medifast CEO Mike MacDonald, in a statement.

Whether the weight-loss industry is getting ahead of itself remains to be seen. Then again, there could be 130 million wearable devices on people's wrists, heads and bodies by 2018—an adoption rate akin to those for tablet computers.

ONE MORE THING

How much longer will we call it a smartphone? Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans predicts 80% of the world's adults will have a smartphone in hand by 2020. His 45-slide thesis, "Mobile Is Eating the World," also suggests voice communications will account for a mere portion of the tasks those gadgets handle. "When tech is fully adopted, it disappears," Evans notes in the presentation shared Tuesday at a Wall Street Journal technology conference.