Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage startup Box has announced its plans for the coming year as it readies for a 2014 IPO – and these call for international expansion.

The company intends to open new offices in Europe, Asia, and Brazil and is planning to fortify its enterprise sales team in those regions. This follows on the heels of healthy growth in 2012: Box experienced a near 150 percent jump in sales from the previous year.

The cloud storage market is flooded with competition: Google Drive, Dropbox, Egnyte, and SugarSync rank among the companies jostling for dominance in the sector. But Box has emerged as an investors’ darling (it raised $150 million in a recent over-subscribed funding round) for its knack of winning over enterprise customers.

Box has announced a new program called the “Box Partner Network,” which formalizes its relationship with channel and platform partners. New partners include Autodesk, Marketo, and Tidemark, which are using Box Emded (the HTML5 embeddable framework) in their applications.

“What we’ve done is taken existing partnerships and brought them under a program,” said Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck by phone. The former chief marketing officer at EMC was brought on to carve out an enterprise sales strategy and land big-name customers like The Gap and Volkswagen.

Bouck points to growth in several areas as proof that the strategy is working: Sales in construction and engineering services grew 103 percent; education grew 119 percent; manufacturing grew 233 percent; and media and entertainment grew 200 percent.

She said the company will refer to itself as an “enterprise content collaboration platform” to emphasize that the technology is used by businesses as well as consumers. In addition, Box wants to promote its open API to third party developers. About 17,000 developers use the platform to build custom applications, approximately a 300 percent increase from 2011.

In recent interviews with VentureBeat, Aaron Levie said that the role of the chief information officer is changing, and startups have an opportunity to compete with legacy vendors like Microsoft and Oracle. “In 2007 when we looked more into the enterprise, even Silicon Valley didn’t think we could win,” he said.

In the coming year, Box will continue to grow its 700-strong team in the U.S. and in international markets. In Europe, Box will hire 100 employees by the end of the year, primarily in sales, support and marketing roles.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Find any file in two taps: That’s the promise of Openera.

The cloud is wonderful, but when you have accounts at Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Evernote, or any number of other cloud storage companies — not to mention your email — how can you ever find anything?

“I’ve been in the content management space for 15 years,” says Openera chief executive Peter Lalonde, who previously worked for OpenText and other enterprise file management companies. “I’ve lived the pain of file management … but realized that no one likes managing files!”

Even when it’s simple, Lalonde says, people don’t put files where they’re supposed to be. Instead, they put files where it’s convenient and easy. So he created a cloud-enabled mobile service that automatically files your documents and email attachments so you don’t have to.

“I love my iPhone but can’t find any files on it,” Lalonde says.

So Openera lets you connect all your cloud services, and then automatically saves, organizes, and backs up your files. Even better, from an enterprise perspective, companies can set up corporate policies to automatically file certain types of files in predefined places.

How does it work?

“First you download the app,” Lalonde told me. “You then connect your email — that’s the first thing you do, and then connect all your cloud services.”

In the background Openera then indexes, tags, and categorize all your files — no matter where they’re stored. Then you’re set up for finding your apps easily. In addition, you can create rules and personal preferences of where you want files to go. For example, all Word documents from Agnes, your corporate counsel, go to Dropbox. Or all documents with “revenue” in them go to your Google Drive.

Essentially, Openera has created an abstraction layer for file storage services and knows where to put what based on the sender, metadata, and terms and keywords in the file. The company is adding even more intelligence shortly, Lalonde said.

But it’s not syncing, it’s finding, he’s quick to say, adding that Openera is useful for finding files even if you don’t care where they are stored:

“Personally, I don’t care where my files are stored. As the CEO of Openera, I do care.”

The company’s iPhone app is available right now, and the Android app is under development. Microsoft and RIM are interested in native apps for their phone platforms as well, Lalonde said.

Tomorrow the company is graduating from FounderFuel, a Montreal accelerator. Lalonde, who’s a veteran of the software and online services industry, doesn’t exactly fit the twenty-something image of an accelerator graduate, and his co-founder, Mark Lennox, recently had a $40 million exit with MXI Technologies.

So I asked him why he joined the accelerator.

“I’ve always been an intrapreneur, but it’s a big difference starting your own company,” he said. “I’ve always been a believer in accepting the resources that are offered, and it’s been one of the best experiences. I know enterprise, and I know how to sell. But we also have to raise money, and develop on a shoestring, which is new to me.”

That humility and wisdom is likely to put Openera in good stead as the company navigates out of acceleration mode and into revenue mode.

photo credit: Junior Henry. via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google’s big vision was to organize the world’s information. Eric Warnke of Mover.io just wants to move it.

In an increasingly cloudy world of big data, transport is a growing problem. Megabytes and gigabytes may be no big deal, but when you start moving multiple terabytes from a corporate database to Amazon Web Services for processing on a regular basis, that’s a different matter.

Warnke, co-founder and chief executive of Mover, wants his company to be the default mover of data. Everywhere.

He’s aware that this is a big vision, and he says it with a hint of a self-deprecating smile. But he’s also deadly serious in his team’s ability to deliver a globally significant solution for a globally significant problem.

“We’re moving petabytes,” Warnke told me at the recent GrowLab demo day in Vancouver. “When you’re moving that volume of data, there are a lot of problems to solve.”

Quick reminder: a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes … which are each 1,000 gigabytes. In other words, just one petabyte is pretty massively large. Moving it is a correspondingly large headache.

Removing that headache and overhead for developers is the goal for Mover.io.

In fact, Warnke wants to do for data portability what Fedex did for shipping: Create a full-service single point of contact for getting files from A to B, with all the details managed for you. The company has already moved 40 million files for 11,000 users, and it’s still in private beta — with paying customers.

Mover.io has built Backup Box (“we move your stuff from anything to anywhere”) as a demo app showcasing what it does, but the end goal is not to create apps.

Ultimately, Mover.io will simply be an API developers call to move data. Need to move data? Call the API and call it a day. Currently, the company supports Box, Dropbox, SkyDrive, Amazon S3, Google Drive, and more, but the API isn’t scheduled to be released until the first quarter of 2013.

“Why so far away? We’re solving extremely massive problems,” says Warnke.

The company already has an investment from GrowLab but is raising a $1 million seed round now — a large chunk of which is already committed. The money will go to hiring more people (the team is only five right now), scaling the service, and setting up deals with various cloud vendors.

And the worldwide vision?

Warnke is strongly committed to it — when I wondered aloud whether Mover was a product rather than a company, he said he was not interested in an aqui-hire.

Google’s come close to achieving its vision. We’ll see if Mover can duplicate that astonishingly rare startup feat.

photo credit: eldeeem via photo pin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise cloud storage startup Egnyte has raised $16 million from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Polaris Venture Partners in its third round of funding, the company announced Tuesday.

Egnyte helps businesses with various hybrid cloud storage solutions and competes with Box, Nirvanix, Zetta, and others. Through increased marketing efforts and a smart anti-Box campaign, the company has attracted more attention and now has 1 million users across 30,000 paying companies.

However, it still has work to do.

“Our biggest weakness is lack of awareness, so we’re going to use this funding for sales, marketing, etc.” Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain told VentureBeat “That said, I could have gone higher than $16 million. I’ve done this before, and I didn’t want to go too big.”

With Google’s recently launched Drive cloud storage product on the market, the addition of Google Ventures as an investor is significant. While Jain would not admit to it, it appears Google doesn’t trust that its Drive product alone can satisfy the enterprise, so it will put some chips down on Egnyte’s hybrid cloud solution as well. Google Ventures partner Karim Faris will join Egnyte’s board.

“What we have is very different from Drive,” Jain said. “Drive is more competing with services like Dropbox and iCloud.”

Including the new round of funding, Egnyte has raised a total of $32 million. Floodgate Fund and Steve Blank have also invested in the company.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Egnyte was founded in 2007 and plans to open its first international office in Europe before the fourth quarter of this year.

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat
Original photo: Pavelk/Shutterstock