Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apprenda, a startup that claims to transform legacy infrastructure into modern cloud-based architectures, has announced its latest release. The update allows a customer to run hybrid platform as a service (Paas) simultaneously between the data center and its existing cloud infrastructure.

Apprenda makes it easier for developers to deploy and scale their applications; the service itself is the brainchild of a former application developer. Prior to founding the company, CEO Sinclar Schuller was a software developer at global investment bank Morgan Stanley. He told VentureBeat in a phone conversation his team would often receive requests from a colleague on the business side with a “big idea” for a custom app.

“It took us three months to write the new [app] out and another three months to deploy it,” said Schuller. “It seemed wrong that we were wasting half the time waiting for an app to be deployed.”

To increase productivity for companies like Morgan Stanley, he set to work on an idea to streamline the process of building these “exotic software infrastructures.” Schuller claims Apprenda shaves about 18 months off  development time. The original idea was to develop a private cloud product that big enterprises would run in-house.

After some internal wrangling over the merits of public versus private cloud, Schuller came to the realization that a hybrid cloud approach made most sense.

“Enterprise customers are saying, ‘We want a private cloud to feel like a public cloud,’” he said. Using Apprenda, CIOs can run apps in Windows Azure cloud and other cloud environments that use Windows Server 2012.

With the new release, users can install Apprenda in a data center and point it to a cloud infrastructure like Amazon or Azure to manage them all from one centralized dashboard.

Apprenda has established itself by providing on-premise PaaS solutions to large pharmaceutical companies and financial services firms; it competes with VMware’s Cloud Foundry and new players to the on-premise PaaS market such as AppFog.

To explain his grand vision for Apprenda, Schuller uses an analogy of an old house. Instead of demolishing it and building a new house from scratch, why not remodel it with modern fixtures? The outcome will be the same as a custom home, but you’ll save time and resources. “Companies can migrate an app to the cloud without having to worry about altering it or rebuilding it from scratch,” he said.

Schuller will speak about the growing demand for PaaS at CloudBeat, a conference that highlights the most innovative cloud companies. CloudBeat is unique with its emphasis on customer case-studies. It’s not abstract theories and ideas — executives will reveal their hard-frought solutions to very real technology problems.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

These days, it takes guts for a company to make a strategic decision without referring to the numbers. However, accessing the most useful data is easier said than done.

It’s extremely expensive for small to medium sized-businesses (SMB’s) to access the tools they need to store and model their data. Even if they fork over the cash for a business intelligence tool, there is little room left in the budget to hire a team of database analysts to manage the service.

Today, Chartio launches an alternative: an analytics dashboard for companies to visualize their data. The small team of founders have been working on the technology for several years, and aggressively testing it with users. As is increasingly the case with early-stage enterprise software companies (particularly those that can avoid selling to CIO’s), Chartio’s founders have been focussed on beautifying the product and making it easy to use.

“”I started Chartio out of frustration in the difficulty of visualizing the data in my database,” said Dave Fowler, Chartio’s CEO and cofounder.

“My idea was to build an interactive dashboard where even a business user could create charts, and engineers wouldn’t have to deal with learning different API’s, SQL syntaxes and charting libraries,” he explained.

At present, Chartio is marketing to startups and SMB’s that do not have the budget for a legacy vendor like Oracle or SAP. These companies, often in hyper-growth mode, will need all the help they can get to fend off stiff competition.

One of the first customers, Ticketbis, an international ticketing company, used the product to uncover patterns on how customers are buying tickets for concerts and other events. It turns out that a vast number of purchases that were made from outside the U.S. or the country of the event. In response, Ticketbis was able to tailor their product and expand into international markets.

“Chartio saved our business time and money in the long run because it provided us with easy access to see what our customers wanted from Ticketbis,” said Jorge Diaz Largo, product director of Ticketbis in a statement.  “For example we were able to drill down into our customer purchasing patterns,” he said.

Fowler is also trying to put an end to the the endless back and forth communication chains between marketing and IT departments. This game of email tennis typically occurs when a data needs to be stored, processed and packaged on a tight deadline.

Sign up to the service, and an IT rep will need to set up to the software to integrate with existing data sources, including Google Analytics, Oracle RDBMS, PostgreSQL, AWS RDS, Rackspace Cloud Databases, Heroku, and MySQL (a Salesforce integration is under development). Once the basic set-up is complete, it’s out of IT’s purview, and can be managed by any employee in an organization.

What may prove interesting to investors is that by appealing to marketing, sales and IT, the company has opened up its channels of distribution. This will be particularly useful if it ramps up its efforts to sell to larger enterprises.

With the launch today, Chartio is releasing a host of additional features. These include:

• Dashboard Filters: Visual, user-friendly controls that quickly shift every chart on a dashboard to a new metric. Date ranges can be changed with a slider that shows actual data, so customers can zero-in on when events actually happened – not just arbitrary calendar days – or the entire view can be pivoted per product, per category, or by any similar metric.
• Automatic Drill-downs: Chartio automatically drills through time-series or category-based charts, so nearly any line chart or bar graph will drill-down into more finite data ranges without any custom set-up work.
• Dashboard Layouts: A new grid system provides much greater control over how dashboards can be laid out, and scales to fit any size of display.
• Dashboard export and reporting: Any single chart can be downloaded as a PDF, PNG or CSV, whole dashboards can be downloaded for printing as a PDF, and PDF dashboard delivery can be scheduled by email for any Chartio customer.
• Improved Dashboard and Chart User Interface: Chartio continues to make readability and the presentation of beautiful data its top priorities. The new chart and dashboard interfaces showcase the data, letting controls, buttons and distractions blend into the background.

The San Francisco-based company is a recent graduate of Y Combinator, the highly-competitive Silicon Valley accelerator program. It has 800 customers and has experienced 30 percent growth month-over-month.

To date, the company has raised a total of $4.4 million from investors like Cloudera’s cofounder Jeff Hammerbacher, and Data Collective’s Matt Ocko. Crosslink Capital and Avalon Ventures participated in the most recent funding round.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Polycom, maker of video conferencing technologies, today unveiled a new software suite it claims will be worth $12 billion by 2015.

The cloud-based product for the enterprise integrates with the most popular consumer video tools. Polycom’s RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite, released today, lets existing customers add anyone on Skype, Facebook, and Google Talk to their video conferences from a browser via a simple hyperlink.

With a growing number of companies employing a mobile workforce, video conferencing services are touted as a huge market. However, this announcement comes at a time when the market has stalled. According to research firm IDC, video conferencing revenue worldwide fell 10 percent, in part due to the global economic crisis.

There is interest in video conferencing, but it’s not seen as a necessary IT spend — yet. Is this product rollout enough to spike interest and increase the market for these tools?

According to Polycom, this is the most significant business development in years, and will give the company a competitive edge over Cisco, the established market leader. Cisco holds 41.9 percent of the video-conferencing market for enterprise, according to IDC.

Universal video conferencing is a huge need, but Polycom faces a tough competitive landscape. Privately held companies like Vidyo and Avaya are snapping at its heels with their cost-competitive video software. And enterprises are holding on to legacy tools, so Polycom is struggling to compete with the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, and Citrix.

According to Reuters, the success of this new product is a “vital” for Polycom, which still generates most of its revenue from hardware-based systems but (similarly to computer-maker, Dell) is shifting to a software model.

Analysts are saying that while Polycom has a brief head start by integrating with other services, it’s only a matter of time before Cisco (which is already moving in this direction) catches up. And as Ira Weinstein, an analyst at Wainhouse Research, pointed out, startups are already moving in this direction.

Is this technology worth $12 billion? Voice your opinion in the comment section below.