Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Millions of Malaysian kids will be writing stories, collecting data, creating presentations, and organizing the future of their education in the cloud — Google’s cloud.

Today, Google announced that Malaysia is adopting Google Apps for 10 million students, teachers, and parents. In addition, the country will be shipping an unspecified number of Chromebooks to schools across the country — all part of a national education blueprint to “place Malaysia firmly on the path to development.”

Malaysia has 10,000 schools, and the government’s plan is to equip them all with 4G Internet access, a virtual learning platform, and at minimum a 10:1 ratio of students to computers.

It’s no secret why they’ve chosen Chromebooks: cost. Google says that Chromebooks “yield three-year cost of ownership savings of $1,135 per device compared to traditional PCs or tablets and require 69% fewer hours to deploy and 92% fewer hours to manage.” And it’s also no secret why Malaysia is adopting Google Apps — for educational use, the apps are entirely, completely free.

That’s of course, in strong contrast to its Google Apps for Business, which costs $50 per user per year. Google had originally made that free for businesses with under 50 users, but it quietly killed free access in December last year.

Deals like this put Google in direct competition with Intel, as well as other computer manufacturers. Intel has a global education initiative which has, for example, put computers in the hands of all middle and high school students in Portugal, and focuses on working with local hardware and software producers to create educational laptops, tablets, and software based on Intel’s references designs.

But having been involved in that initiative in a previous job, I can tell you that costs would be much higher than a Chromebook.

Globally, more than 3,000 schools have now adopted Chromebooks, which generally cost around $300-500, although they will cost significantly less in volume, and Google had a Christmas sale last year, offering Chromebooks at just $99.

photo credit: phalinn via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Salesforce-owned productivity app Do.com has partnered with big-name services like Google Drive, Dropbox, and Harvest to improve its offerings and build an even-better app to help teams accomplish tasks.

“A lot of our customers don’t have a dedicated IT person,” Do cofounder Amit Kulkarni told VentureBeat. “These are small groups without a lot of resources. We want to make this easier for them.”

Do offers a productivity service for small and medium-sized businesses, with tools such as task management, project tracking, note-taking, and contact sheets. Known as Manymoon before Salesforce bought it, Do launched in November 2011 and has since attracted 100,000 customers and offers apps for iOS, Android, and the web.

Now the service will go further to help existing customers and to attract new ones. Integrating the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive, and Harvest adds way more functionality to Do. It smartly labels its initiative to add new apps to its stable as “Do More.”

“The main reason we’re doing these specific integrations is because these are the apps our customers have been asking for,” Kulkarni said. “Our customers tell us they use a lot of different data sources.”

Here are the apps that now work with Do.com:

• Dropbox and Google Drive: You can now attach Dropbox and Drive files to tasks, and with one click, you can send files to your customers from inside Do.
• Harvest: This ideally will make your time-tracking less painful. Just click on the stopwatch on a specific Do task to log hours for a customer.
• Wufoo: You use this to engage with prospects and customers using online forms. You can set it up so that when a form is filled out and submitted, it automatically attaches itself to a task.
• Contactually: It automatically creates Do contacts for people and prospects you want to interact with via email.
• Desk.com: The Desk.com app from Salesforce helps you handle customer service issues quickly and collaboratively, so now your help desk can be assigned Desk issues as Do tasks.
• Salesforce.com: Track sales and opportunities from your Salesforce data with Do.
• Fancy Hands: Acts as a personal assistant inside Do. (This is being tested now and will be fully added at a later date.

Check out the slides below for a better look at how these integrations look inside Do:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud management software startup OnApp said today that it has raised $20 million in funding, cash it hopes will help expand its product offerings into more countries.

OnApp claims to power public cloud services for more than 500 providers in 39 countries. OnApp says 40 percent of its revenue currently comes from the U.S. companies, but it is also seeing strong growth in Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

The company’s most popular product is OnApp Cloud, which provides “everything you need to build a fully featured cloud hosting service” and can be deployed in a matter of days. It has also launched OnApp CDN, OnApp Marketplace, and OnApp Storage to diversify its offerings.

“In 2010, we set out to build a turnkey platform to make it easy for service providers to create profitable cloud services,” OnApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl said in a statement. “Our customers now run some of the fastest growing cloud services out there, with an average annual growth rate of over 80 percent. We’ve also seen a new breed of Virtual Service Providers emerge, who are creating a wide range of cloud-based businesses on top of the OnApp Marketplace. This round of funding gives us a solid financial base from which we will continue creating products that make OnApp-powered service providers the most successful in their markets.”

London-based OnApp was launched in July 2010 and has more than 115 employees across Europe, the U.S., and Asia. The new funding was led by U.K.-based private equity firm LDC.

Cloud image via OnApp

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Box’s Aaron Levie, a bundle of nervous energy, kicked off the company’s annual conference this morning with a slew of product announcements.

Levie is the young chief executive of Box, the cloud storage startup based in Silicon Valley that competes with Google Drive and Dropbox. On stage, he revealed that Box will incorporate a host of new collaboration features like internal editing, and it will team up with Netsuite.

“Box continues to deliver a consumer experience for enterprise class requirements.  New features such as edit, easy ways to collaborate with colleagues, and the new user experience are making a big change for the enterprise,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research. “Users can expect to work with their content the way the cloud was meant to be and rest assured that they have to worry about security issues and safety of information.”

Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck, the company’s enterprise general manager, also hinted at a partnership with SAP to improve data security. They would not say more but told me it would announce additional information in the coming months.

News about the ”bigger, better Box experience“ was officially announced on the company blog.

Following the hoopla at BoxWorks 2012, I caught up with the company’s vice president of platform, Chris Yeh, to chat about the new services in more detail. If you weren’t able to make it to the San Francisco conference, here’s a summary of what to expect from the new and improved Box:

• Box Embed – It’s an HTML5-embeddable interface that allows more people to access Box’s service through other applications. It comes with 10 new enterprise partners: Concur, Cornerstone OnDemand, DocuSign, Eloqua, FuzeBox, Jive, NetSuite, Oracle, SugarCRM, and Zendesk. The idea is to provide a better way to link content together. Using the example of Netsuite, users can access a record of all their relevant content in Box. A user is able to see everything associated with their record, including contact information, invoices, and purchase orders.
  Read more about Box Embed here.
• Concurrent editing – Users can make a change and save and it goes right back into the the cloud. Yeh told me that the company has been talking about this feature for a long time and that it’s part of a broader goal to create an “integrated desktop experience into a cloud content system.”
• OneCloud Apps: Box OneCloud brings together all your mobile content into a centralized, secure cloud. The company has an extensive list of third-party applications that have built integrations with Box. Today, they announced an expansion of the ecosystem through a partnership with over 200 apps.
• New social features: A host of new social features are now incorporated into the product. For instance, you’ll see a profile picture of the last person who edited a document.
• Contact discovery: The company has made it easier to discover contacts within your corporate network. During our phone interview, Yeh used the following example: ”Let’s say I work for a large organization and I login with my email account. Now I can discover everybody else in the organization who is already using Box. I can invite those people to view and collaborate on folders. This makes it way easier for us to slide into an organization, and people feel immediately like they have a network of colleagues around them.”

With these new features, the company wants to push deeper into the heart of the enterprise and increasingly attract Fortune 500 clients. It’s a wise move for Box, given that Dropbox has been critiqued for a series of high-profile recent security breaches.

Read more about the company’s enterprise strategy in an interview with Tidmark Bouck here.

Sales communications startup Clearslide has raised $28 million in its second round of funding aimed at opening a New York City office, developing new products, and increasing marketing efforts, the company announced today.

ClearSlide offers its customers cloud-based apps for giving presentations without the friction and hassle associated with services like WebEx and GoToMeeting. On top of phone, web, and e-mail presentation tools, it also gives sales people analytics tools to keep teams on message and establish best practices. Additionally, it has iPad and iPhone apps to help with in-person pitching.

“We focus exclusively on sales teams and supporting inside and outside sales reps,” Al Lieb, the CEO and cofounder of ClearSlide, told VentureBeat. “Traditionally, sales has been ‘every man for himself.’ But our tools are empowering a team-based approach.”

During the past two years, the company has seen strong growth. Lieb (pictured left with co-founder Jim Benton above) said the company’s “users, customers, and revenue” have increased 400 percent each year. The company has “hundreds” of customers, but declined to give a more specific number. Customers include CareerBuilder, Expedia, Gannett, Rackspace, and The Weather Channel.

The new funding round will help the company continue to expand its team and create new native mobile apps. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation by prior investors Greylock Partners and Felicis Ventures. Both Byron Deeter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, and John Jack, former CEO of Fortify Software, have joined ClearSlide’s board of directors.

“I was really impressed by ClearSlide’s team, as well as their operating metrics and rate of market adoption,” Deeter said in a canned statement. “There is extremely strong customer demand for their offering and we’re thrilled to work closely with ClearSlide in their next stage of hyper growth.”

San Francisco-based ClearSlide has raised a total of $39 million, including its $11 million first round. It currently has 110 employees. Along with establishing a brand-new New York City office, the company plans to double the total number of its employees using the new funds

Clearslide founders photo: Clearslide

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Behind every cloud, there’s  … a cloud. Cloud services may not always be saving you money.

Irish startup CloudVertical monitors how its 2,500 customers use Amazon web services, VMWare, and Heroku. “Looking across our user base, ” says CEO Ed Byrne, “from companies spending less than $50,000 a year to those spending millions, people are only using about 30 percent of the resources they pay for. This is really remarkable, considering that for the past decade, the sales pitch for virtualization has been ‘physical servers only get about 30 percent usage.’”

In a recent Google survey, 58 percent of 800 CFOs said they believe that cloud computing reduces IT costs, while a whopping 96 percent agreed that “cloud computing provides their business with quantifiable benefits.” Admittedly, Google included services like Gmail and Google apps in its definition of cloud services, which may have skewed the results to some degree.

Byrne explains that the key to using cloud services efficiently is the ratio between the total computing power paid for vs. power used, the catchily titled Cloud Usage Efficiency Metric. “The cloud is not pay-as-you-go but pay-as-you-provision. People still fire up lots of servers and leave them there,” explains Byrne. “Companies need to monitor three things — capacity, usage, and cost. We help people answer the questions of who is doing what, with what resources, at what usage, and at what cost.”

CloudVertical provides KPIs (Key performance indicators) for the cloud. Byrne previously ran a cloud provider. Customers were always telling him that they were going to switch to Amazon because it was cheaper but could never tell him exactly what Amazon’s pricing was. He says that there is still a lack of transparency and accountability when it comes to cloud usage. That’s the problem CloudVertical sets out to solve.

The company tracks cloud cost on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, predicts future cost, and benchmarks your usage against other companies. Amazon, VMWare, and Heroku are currently tracked.

CloudVertical’s customer is “the guy who cares about the cost”, whether that is a developer who is using the company credit card for a new project or the CFO of a larger enterprise. Most often compared to Cloudability, Byrne insists that CloudVertical’s real competitors are enterprise tools like IBM’s Tivoli or HP OpenView.

Cloud Vertical has received over $1 million in funding from Irish VC Delta Partners and Enterprise Ireland. The company is based in Dublin and has seven employees.

Note: Byrne is a common name in Ireland so Ed Byrne is no relation of mine (as far as I know).

Enterprise software titan Oracle has agreed to buy facilities management app maker Skire, the company announced Thursday.

Skire’s software helps manage the planning, construction, and maintenance of many kinds of buildings around the world. Oracle intends to combine Skire with its Privavera products, which are designed to help people and organizations manage large-scale projects better.

“The capital construction and facilities industry has for decades sought a tighter relationship and greater synchronization between owners and service providers, and the Oracle-Skire combination makes that vision a reality,” Skire CEO and founder Massy Mehdipour said in a statement. “This announcement is the result of years of tremendous dedication by our employees, and with the support of our customers we are thrilled to be joining Oracle to provide the choice of both cloud-based and on-premise governance spanning the entire lifecycle of EPPM.”

This will be Oracle’s fifth acquisition this year, and just last week Oracle agreed to buy Involver. The company also agreed to buy Taleo, Vitrue, and Collective Intellect.

Oracle said will acquire “substantially all” of Skire’s assets. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Larry Ellison photo: Oracle/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud marketplace platform AppDirect has raised $8.5 million in its first round of funding.

AppDirect’s platform has made it possible for companies like Deutsche Telekom, Bell Canada, Appcelerator, and new partner Rackspace to launch cloud service marketplaces. High-profile apps, including Google Apps, DocuSign, SendGrid, New Relic, and Cloudability, are part of AppDirect’s syndication network and end up for sale to more than six million end users.

“Every app is no longer relevant unless it has an app store,” AppDirect co-CEO Daniel Saks told VentureBeat. “This has really changed the game for people who want to distribute cloud services.”

On top of AppDirect’s funding, it has put together a deal with Rackspace. Rackspace  – the No. 2. cloud-hosting provider after Amazon Web Services — will now be able to sell a whole host of apps to its many cloud customers via AppDirect, opening up a new revenue stream and keeping its customers happy with a bunch of new options. AppDirect will take a small cut of each transaction (as it does in every store it powers) and rake in the dough.

“We’ve only just hit the tip of the iceberg for partnerships,” Saks said.

The new round of funding was put up by existing investors iNovia Capital and Stingray Digital. Combined with the company’s $3.25 million seed round last year, AppDirect has raised about $12 million in total.

San Francisco-based AppDirect was founded in mid-2009 and has about 45 employees. Sacks said the company plans to hire another 50 employees before the end of the year and will open an office in Europe by the first quarter of 2013.

Photo credit: AppDirect/Rackspace

“We are seeing more companies going cloud first, saying they’re not ever going to buy another server,” said Chris Barbin, Appirio chief executive, “We’re also seeing companies making the migration to 100% cloud to reduce costs and help them scale faster.”

The five-year-old company started out helping big companies adopt cloud services such as Google Apps, Salesforce, and Workday. It then turned its attention to cloud app development, creating apps that tie together multiple cloud services and social networks. For example, it developed an app that integrates Google Calendar and contacts with Salesforce calendar and contact lists.

Appirio’s current offerings run the gamut of cloud services. The company will help you decide which cloud service is right for your company, build custom apps to work with the cloud, move your data to the cloud, and manage the cloud services it’s set up for your business. Essentially, it hopes to move your business away from in-house IT departments and run it solely in the cloud.

“Customers are driving us to go bigger faster, and we will continue to drive the cloud community,” said Barbin, “We are finding that companies don’t want a large $100 million project from Accenture. Our customers are seeing value in weeks and months, not years.”

Appirio’s competitors are other technology and cloud service consulting firms, including Bluewolf, Accenture, Cloud Sherpas, and Cloud Technology Partners. Appirio focuses more on large corporations that spend millions on IT and cloud services each year. The company even issued a guarantee that it would save large companies $1 million if they used its service, but your company would have to spend at least $5 million to see that kind of savings.

Appirio’s funding is reflective of the steadfast adoption of cloud services among large businesses. Joyent, another cloud service provider that builds private clouds and applications, received a whopping $85 million in funding in January 2012, a further indication of the cloud industry’s traction.

“Global IT is a $300 billion industry and there haven’t been many changes in the industry since companies began outsourcing IT jobs to Indian in the 90s. Appirio said lets disrupt the IT industry,” said Jeff Richards, partner at GGV Capital, a venture capital firm that participated in this round, “The company has grown the business 10 times since we first invested in 09, which impressed us.”

General Atlantic led this round for Appirio. Existing investors Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital also participated. Appirio intends to use the money to develop its technology and support Cloudspokes, its crowdsourced cloud app development service that hosts hackathons for developers. The company previously raised $10 million in 2009. This latest round brings Appirio’s total funding to more than $76 million.

Appriro is based in San Mateo, Calif. and has 400 employees.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Customer help desk management service Zendesk has launched a Windows Phone application to continue helping small businesses with communications support, the company announced this morning.

Zendesk made our list of “Top 10 disruptive cloud companies we’re excited about” because it helps small and medium-size companies create on-demand help desks and cloud-based call centers. The company’s mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android are already helping businesses compete with much bigger players, and now it will also offer Windows Phone 7 app support.

“The addition of Zendesk for Windows Phone accomplishes our goal of enabling agents to interact with customers across the widest variety of mobile platforms,” said Adrian McDermott, Zendesk VP of product and engineering, in a statement. “We want organizations to have the ability to provide support on-the-go regardless of their preferred mobile device. Adding Windows Phone to our suite of mobile apps furthers our goal of democratizing customer support and significantly improving customer satisfaction.”

Like Zendesk’s other mobile application, Zendesk on Windows Mobile will enable companies to view, create and update support issues with clients on the go. Using the Windows Mobile app, companies will be able to respond to customer support requests in real time. And support agents can use Windows Phone’s handy “Live Tiles” to pin information about support issues to their device’s home screen.

The new Zendesk app will join the 50,000 apps now offered by Microsoft in its Windows Phone Marketplace. The Windows Phone 7 platform got a big push this week during Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s last keynote at CES and by Nokia in the form of its hyped Lumia 900 smartphone for AT&T.

Zendesk additionally took a big step this past September by partnering with Twilio to create Zendesk Voice, which lets companies set up cloud-based call centers for much less money than regular call centers. Zendesk Voice is available in the U.S. and Canada, with calls billed at 5 cents per minute.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Salesforce’s social productivity service Do.com has moved out of beta and into general availability for anyone who wants to give it a spin.

When Do.com debuted in early November in limited beta, the company gave VentureBeat 200 invites, and I know several readers were dismayed that they couldn’t procure one. Now, those looking to add a social element to task management can sign up here.

The service is based on popular social productivity app Manymoon, an app Salesforce acquired back in February. It has a simple interface and intelligent HTML5 deployment, but it’s also built with Salesforce’s emphasis on accessibility and security. It was built on top of Heroku’s cloud app platform, offers an open API for developers and has received input from some of Salesforce’s brightest team members. Plus, it offers e-mail task management and interacts with Google Apps, Salesforce and Dropbox to make tasks jibe with tools your team already knows.

At present, the app is completely free, but it will add paid features next year. Salesforce Senior VP Sean Whiteley told me in November that premium features might include adding new fields and deeper administration tools.

Do.com has also posted a quirky video heavily inspired by Alexander Payne’s Election that explains more about what it can do:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Multi-platform note-taking startup Evernote has now reached more than 20 million users, CEO Phil Libin said at the LeWeb conference this morning in Paris.

Evernote made our list of “10 disruptive cloud companies we’re excited about” because the company has taken to solving the simple problem of effective note-taking in an innovative, cloud-based fashion. Just yesterday, the company launched two free iPhone apps, “Food” and “Hello,” which help you better keep track of meals and people.

Back in June, Evernote reached 10 million registered users, with more than 400,000 of those paying $5 a month for a premium plan that enables larger uploads and better collaborative tools. It’s unclear how many of the current 20 million users are paying, but Libin did say that about 27% of users who continue to use the service for 40 months pay for it.

Libin, as first noted by SiliconFilter, also said Evernote now has nearly 9,000 third-party apps using its API.

Mountain View-based Evernote has raised $95.5 million in total funding to date, with a massive $50 million round in July led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures. Evernote became a profitable company 6 months ago, but due to recent hiring and expansion the company is now back in the red. Libin expects the company to go back to black soon.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

myERP, a cloud-based business management suite for small and medium-sized businesses, just got a major upgrade with a simplified and refined interface.

CEO Francois Nadal took the stage today at CloudBeat 2011 to participate in the conference’s Innovation Showdown, and to show off how the new app works. The application looks almost like a Google search bar, and when you input bits of information, the app recognizes natural language and opens up other boxes to help you get your work done. For example, typing “create new customer” opens a panel where you can add customer information. Or, if you type a customer’s name, that person’s data appears in a new panel. “Show my leads” will pop up your active business leads.

The simple-but-powerful application can help business users with CRM, accounting, invoicing, project tracking, inventory management and document tracking. So far, the application has attracted more than 45,000 registered users from more than 100 countries. Nadal expects the new application to convince many more business customers to sign up.

“With myERP, small businesses can avoid buying multiple expensive and complex applications that don’t talk their language and don’t even communicate with each other,” said Nadal in a statement. “There is no need for special training or support to learn how to use myERP.com. If you can type, you can run your company and get your business done.”

myERP is free for two users, and each additional user costs $29 per user per month. Nadal stands behind the product enough that he’s comfortable letting two users tap into the service for free because he’s convinced they will like it enough to get more people involved. You can sign up for the app from the Google Apps Marketplace or direct from myERP.com.

San Francisco-based myERP currently has 15 employees and has raised $4 million in capital from Altos Ventures, Siparex and a few other angel investors.

Watch a video of myERP’s simplified app in action below:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amit Singh, VP for enterprise at Google, is really high on Google Apps. Not just because it’s his job, but because many people are choosing it over Microsoft Office and he’s seeing real examples of how it works better.

Companies like Jaguar, Genentech and Motorola have already adopted Google Apps, and the company is picking up traction with more companies looking for cloud-based document and communication solutions. On stage at CloudBeat 2011, VentureBeat Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall highlighted Journal Communications as a 3,000-employee company that has rigorously adopted Google Apps. Journal Communications owns the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper, 33 radio stations and 13 television stations.

Singh said it wasn’t hard to convince communications professionals to switch to Google Apps because they appreciate real-time editing and collaboration abilities. They liked being able to use the applications through the browser, which means less time is dedicated to local software.

“They showed an editor and showed a real person writing a story,” Singh said. “They were seeing the changes in real time. The point was ‘how quickly can I get this in?’ and their demands were being met.”

Singh said Google’s social network, Google+, is part of what’s bringing the tools to enterprises and re-shaping the social plane. Although Google+ is a consumer-focused product, business can use the social product in certain cases to help them communicate faster.

“Imagine Circles with your teams,” Singh said. “Imagine meetings with your teams with Google Hangouts. As more and more people adopt it, the whole idea will be simpler.” The Google VP also noted that Google Hangouts and Google Apps can help with worldwide collaboration.

When it comes to competing with and taking criticism from Microsoft, Singh said the company is happy to be competing and that most people are switching from exclusively using Microsoft to Google. And there are even more customers to come.

“We’re past the early adopters,” Singh said. “We’re moving to mainstream companies and large corporations. In the next few weeks, we’ll announce another set of Fortune 500 companies.”

Watch the CloudBeat 2011 livestream here.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon Web Services VP Adam Selipsky doesn’t mind talking about failure.

When asked on stage at the CloudBeat 2011 conference in Redwood City, Calif. by VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall, Selipsky admitted that Amazon’s cloud has had unfortunate lapses in the past few years.

““We take any downtime incredibly seriously. People are running mission-critical applications on us, be it Netflix or the Federal Government,” Selipsky said. “We have to be available and we have to be secure. We’re trying to be transparent about incidents and publicize what is happening as much as possible.”

Selipsky talked briefly about Netflix, which has its streaming service built on top of the Amazon cloud. Because Netflix is built with to withstand some AWS downtime, it was able to keep running even when Amazon went down in high-profile instances that crippled other sites.

“Netflix is wonderfully architected,” Selipsky said. “They came through the instance of downtime very well.”

Selipsky also talked about security as the other main goal for the cloud besides uptime. He noted that the cloud offers companies a way to fundamentally architect their service in completely different ways and because of that, each company’s security needs are different as well.

“The cloud has been a new way of offering services, and there is a lot of skepticism there,” Selipsky said. “With AWS, it has a strong track record on security. That comes from the time and effort that goes into it. We don’t quantify security issues, but our customers have been satisfied by our security. Being up and being secure our our main priorities.”

Selipsky also noted how the company is exploring standards for cloud computing, but for now believes in a flexible, open model that works with all operating systems.

“We don’t tell companies “here is one model,” Selipsky said. “If you want to run Windows that’s fine. If you want to run Linux, that’s fine. We don’t care. We ask what resources you want to use. Standards are important in cloud computing. But too often, committees are set up too early and often they stifle innovation.”

Cloud application management provider Standing Cloud has raised $3 million in a new funding round, the company announced today.

Standing Cloud is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company that offers an application storefront and life-cycle management to cloud service providers. The service makes it possible to deploy, manage and monitor web applications like WordPress, SugarCRM, Bugzilla, ChimpExpress, Drupal, Joomla, TWiki and WebCollab.

“This is important because companies in the business of cloud infrastructure and hosting are rapidly moving to the infrastructure as a service space,” Standing Cloud CEO Dave Jilk told VentureBeat. “The bar has been set higher because of Amazon and its application layer. New cloud providers realize they need to be competitive and we’re helping them accomplish that.”

Standing Cloud’s catalog currently includes 100 open-source and commercial applications. The company’s service capabilities support several programming languages, including Ruby on Rails, PHP, Java and Python.

Along with the funding, Standing Cloud also announced that it has also added TechStars Boston mentor Will Herman to its board of directors. Herman previously served as CEO of Viewlogic Systems, Innoveda and Silerity.

“Standing Cloud is well-positioned to fill an essential and growing need in the cloud market,” Herman said in a statement. “Cloud service providers know that they need to offer an application layer for their customers, but have no effective way to build or maintain it. Standing Cloud delivers a solution to that problem today.”

Boulder, Colo.-based Standing Cloud was founded in 2009 and now has 19 employees. The new funding comes from existing investors Foundry Group and Avalon Ventures. Including today’s funding, the company has raised a total of $8 million.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike  other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Our first annual CloudBeat 2011 conference is fast approaching! Today we are extremely happy to announce our finalists for the conference’s Innovation Showdown, a battle between 10 companies that are each making big waves with unique cloud technologies.

In these 10 finalists, we were looking for companies with products that are using the cloud in a disruptive way. The more revolutionary the company’s idea, the the better its chances. Nominations included startups as well as established companies with brilliant new ideas.

Live at CloudBeat 2011, finalists will have four minutes to showcase their products or services. Our team of sages — made up of industry experts, venture capitalists and actual enterprise customers — will provide feedback on the 10 products or services presented, and determine one winner.

The Showdown winner will be announced onstage and will receive a VentureBeat editorial profile, introductions to investors and relevant potential customers in our network, and other prizes yet to be announced. All 10 finalists have also been invited to attend a special Bootcamp session hosted by Sequoia Capital, taking place at Sequoia’s offices in Menlo Park this Friday.

Without further ado, here are the 10 Innovation Showdown finalists:

GigaSpaces Technologies

Gigaspaces is part of a new generation of application virtualization platforms and a leading provider of end-to-end scaling solutions for mission-critical application environments, and cloud enabling technologies. GigaSpaces’ big solutions are XAP Elastic Application Platform and Cloudify. Cloudify enables the deployment of any app with any stack on any cloud without any code changes.

myERP.com

myERP.com is an incredibly fast-growing all-one-one business cloud application and one of the most popular apps in the Google Apps Marketplace. The myERP.com app helps small and mid-size businesses leaders run a business with tools for accounting, CRM, purchasing, inventory and more.

OfficeDrop

OfficeDrop is a popular cloud-based document scanning and document management solution that provides small businesses with affordable ways to manage their paper and digital files. The company converts paper and digital files into text-searchable documents, and has recently begun focusing on mobile, web and desktop scan-to-cloud apps.

Oxygen Cloud

Oxygen Cloud enables companies to create private storage clouds that provide secure, anywhere, any device access to all corporate files. Oxygen replaces old-school network drives mapped to old file servers with a Universal Cloud Drive synchronizing access to shared files in the cloud.

Talkdesk

Talkdesk lets customers bring their call center to the cloud and eliminates the overhead associated with traditional call centers. Typically, only large companies have the resources to do call centers and associated management properly. Talkdesk lets you act like a big company but without long-term contracts or infrastructure costs because it is in the cloud.

VeaMea

VeaMea provides cloud-based video conferencing and collaboration tools that connect the desktop to the board room over existing IP networks.

VirtualSharp

VirtualSharp offers its customers disaster recovery solutions for virtual data centers. The company’s next-gen disaster recovery can help control private and public clouds. Its software makes possible new levels of resiliency for virtual IT infrastructure and full alignment between IT disaster recovery and corporate business continuity planning.

Visier

Visier builds workforce analytics applications that help with and streamline human resource management. The company’s cloud apps, in one major example, optimize the largest expenses for organizations across all industries.

Xiimo

Xiimo’s free marketing platform enables small businesses across global markets to publish local promotions, accept mobile payments, launch loyalty programs and leverage smart analytics.

Zadara Storage

Zadara provides its customers with virtual private storage arrays within public clouds with the privacy, control and performance associated with standard enterprise-class storage arrays.

We wish the best of luck to all of these great finalists, and may the best one win! See the Showdown live, as part of an information-packed two days that will offer actionable lessons and great networking opportunities. Grab your CloudBeat 2011 ticket today. Spots are extremely limited!

Storm clouds photo via MAMJODH

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!

“We want to be more aggressive in areas like imaging, video, gestures, facial-recognition and 3D,” CEO Michael Deng told VentureBeat. “Our codecs and software greatly improve many devices being used today, and we can do more.”

The $20 million in funding was led by Intel Capital, which is Intel’s global investment arm, and Tudor Ventures, the venture capital unit of Tudor Investment Corp. “We’ve been in talks with Intel and Tudor about possible investments for two years,” Deng said. “Finally, we’ve made this happen so we can develop next-generation imaging and multimedia solutions.”

Arcsoft is best known for bundling its software with new desktops and laptops from computer manufacturers like HP and Dell, and it has expanded its reach to phones, digital cameras, scanners and printers. Its mobile hardware partners include Nokia, Samsung, LG and Motorola, but Deng declined to say which specific devices from those OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) had Arcsoft technologies inside.

The company does not have any consumer-facing mobile apps at the moment, but the new funding will help the it produce iOS and Android apps. “We’ve been focused on the OEMs for a long time, but we see this as an area worth dedicating resources toward,” Deng said.

The most popular PC software titles from Arcsoft include PhotoStudio, Print Creations, DVD Slideshow, Panorama Maker and TotalMedia Theater. Deng said the company plans to launch similar apps but for the cloud. Deng also noted that the company would have more announcements related to this software in the next few months.

Fremont, Calif.-based Arcsoft has been around since 1994 and is privately owned. The last time the 800-employee company received funding was a $10 million round in 2001 from the likes of Panasonic and Seiko Epson, signaling the company’s ability to thrive without the need for outside investments.

Palo Alto-based CloudOn’s marketing materials say the company is “creating a mobile, enterprise, cloud-based workspace” to help workers with productivity and collaboration. Presumably, the company is developing applications for smartphones and tablets with an emphasis on the business and enterprise market.

Outside of its modest website and its profiles on Facebook and Twitter, little is known about the company and its projects. A call left with the company asking for further details was not immediately returned.

CloudOn is led by CEO Milind Gadekar, who previously worked at Cisco for five years as director of marketing. The team also includes co-founder and vice president of research and development Meir Morgenstern, who was a system architecture manager at Cisco for five years, and co-founder and CTO Shuki Binyamin, who led a video and design consulting company for almost five years.

The new $7.7 million in funding comes from Rembrandt Venture Partners and Foundation Capital. Back in October 2010, the company raised $1.8 million in equity and debt funding when it was known as AppToU. Foundation Capital also participated in that funding round.

Small and medium-sized companies looking to bring their business operations to the cloud but lacking the technical knowledge or resources to do it themselves may have just found a friend in new startup CloudBasic, which is unveiling a tool to move business operations from local servers to Internet-hosted services today at the DEMO conference in Silicon Valley.

The company claims it can help businesses to build, deploy and customize applications easier and more efficiently than existing cloud-enabled tools.

CloudBasic’s tool, developed using Microsoft’s .Net programming framework, helps companies move key elements of their day-to-day computing, such as Excel spreadsheets, to Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud hosting service. The company’s tools target nontechnical users. A tool dubbed CloudBasic AppSheets allows the user to create applications based on existing spreadsheet designs, in addition to mirroring existing references and calculations.

While the company appears to not have much competition in its Microsoft-centric niche, it does have several rivals focusing on Java, a programming framework now controlled by Microsoft rival Oracle. They include VMForce, a joint project from online-software provider Salesforce.com and virtualization software vendor VMware, as well as LongJump, which provides a platform for software-as-a-service offerings.

The Irvine, California-based company, founded in 2008 and privately funded to date, has signed up several customers, including an oil and gas company and manufacturing and logistics operations.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Appirio, a startup that works to connect the various internet “clouds,” plans to make Facebook more business-y with a new referral management system that will help companies recruit workers, and market and sell products on the social networking site.

The referral engine is basically the business side of Appirio’s user application Refer2myFriends (previously called MyFriends@Work), which allows people to plug their contacts from Salesforce.com‘s customer relationship management (CRM) software into Facebook. Now businesses can tap into those connections as well, and can build their own customized extensions.

Here’s how it works: Let’s say your company wants to promote a specific event, product or job opening. On the relevant page in Salesforce, it would hit the “Publish to Facebook” button, and Appirio would push the listing to everyone who has installed the company’s app — presumably company employees, but also customers and other folks who are part of its community. If you’re one of those users, the app checks whether any of your Facebook friends seem like a good fit for the listing and notifies you if they are. Then if you agree, you can click “refer,” and your friend will receive a message (they don’t need to install anything). Finally, if they accept the referral, they get entered into the company’s Salesforce database as a lead. Here’s a demo video.

The product has obvious value to any company that wants to leverage people’s social connections on Facebook (and who doesn’t?), but it’s less clear whether users will want to install it. Ryan Nichols, who runs Appirio’s product management and marketing operations, acknowledges that the user app hasn’t exactly taken off; there’s a core of “a few hundred” people who love it and use it constantly, but it hasn’t grown much beyond that. He says Appirio is hoping that the app will attract more users through explicit benefits like referral bonuses, and also through continuing refinement of the user experience to ensure that recommendations are relevant and that users have to do as little work as possible.

Nichols also emphasizes that none of your friends’ Facebook data gets passed to a company until your friend approves the referral. That should alleviate some of the privacy concerns.

Now, there’s a part of me that longs for for the “good old days” of Facebook, when the only people on the site were my college friends. But there’s no denying that companies are already looking for ways to take advantage of Facebook — and the referral engine could make things a lot easier and useful.

There’s some other promising activity around the Facebook-Salesforce connection: Appirio has already been building custom recruiting apps for companies like Dell, and there’s an application called faceconnector (formerly dubbed faceforce) that brings your Facebook contacts into Salesforce. If people succeed in making Facebook a genuinely useful place to do business, that could spell trouble for professional networking site LinkedIn.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Appirio has raised $6.6 million in venture backing from Salesforce.com and Sequoia Capital.

Appirio, an online software startup whose most popular offerings sync data between Salesforce.com and Google products, has raised a $5.6 million second round of funding led by Sequoia Capital.

The startup has close ties to Salesforce.com — the customer relationship management (CRM) company led Appirio’s $1.1 million first round, Appirio’s most popular products are sold on the Salesforce.com AppExchange and its offices are located at the AppExchange incubator in San Mateo. The partnership has already paid off for Appirio — the company’s app for synchronizing calendars between Salesforce.com and Google Apps is currently the most popular AppExchange download, and two of Appirio’s other Google-Salesforce integrations are also in the top 10.

Of course, it’s a good time to be offering these products, given the Google-Salesforce partnerships announced this year — first the integration of Google Apps into Salesforce.com, then the release of applied programming interfaces (APIs) that allow Force.com developers to access data in Google Apps.

But chief executive Chris Barbin says Appirio isn’t just an AppExchange company. His long-term goal is to make business software that connects a range of internet “clouds.” Appirio will be increasing its presence in the Google Solutions Marketplace, and it will also explore partnerships with companies like Adobe and Workday.

Only a few months have passed since Appirio announced its first round, so it seems a bit early to raise more funding. Barbin says the Sequoia deal fell into place very quickly, taking only three weeks to finalize. In fact, Barbin says Appirio hadn’t even used any of its first round money yet, but the deal with Sequoia was too good to resist. The venture firm was the first to really understand Appirio’s business model — other VCs had wanted the startup to focus exclusively on product development or services, but as a software-as-a-service company, Appirio does both. (It probably didn’t hurt that Sequoia is one of the biggest names in the venture world.)

Stanford University and angel investors also participated in the round.

Update: Barbin has just posted his thoughts on what the funding means for Appirio.