With the debut of the new Xbox One gaming system, we could focus on many things: hardware, flashy games, and entertainment options. But one aspect really gets me fired up: Developers should now be able to use Microsoft Azure’s cloud computing platform to make games more powerful than ever.

Wired reports that the game developers and studios can tap Azure for all kinds of things. Microsoft isn’t going to force developers to use the cloud platform, but it will certainly push them to do so.

The Xbox One will not have to be always connected to the Internet to play games, but it does generally require an online connection. And if developers do decide to tap Azure’s cloud computing platform to boost a game’s power, a web connection will be necessary to play that game.

Why Azure?

Microsoft has been building Azure’s cloud computing capabilities for a long while. Azure has been mostly known as a platform-as-a-service that (primarily .NET) developers use to make the process of app development easier.

Microsoft opened up Azure for pure cloud infrastructure use in June. It now competes with top dogs like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Google Compute Engine.

Steven Martin, the general manager of Azure’s operations team, told us this past October that Azure users are consuming more compute capacity than the entire world used in 1998. As of December, Azure’s cloud storage holds more than 4 trillion objects. It also handles an average of 270,000 requests processed per second, with a peak of 880,000 requests per second.

Azure applications in gaming

Now, let’s see what you could do with all that power.

The first and most obvious application of Azure on Xbox One is making Xbox Live more powerful and useful. All your downloaded games and achievements would be synced and available wherever you are. You would also have dedicated servers for every multiplayer game you participate in. Multiplayer matches would be able to host up to 128 gamers in a single session.

Xbox Live currently runs on 15,000 servers, but it will soon move to a stunning 300,000 servers later this year for the Xbox One launch. That’s a lot of power dedicated to making Xbox Live better.

Second (and this is a bit more crazy), developers can offload computational tasks to the cloud instead of relying on physical hardware to do the heavy lifting. Necessary game computations for physics, rendering, and the like could be immensely enhanced with a connection to powerful virtual servers in the cloud.

“It’s not like on day one, everyone will have figured out how to take advantage of that power,” Microsoft interactive entertainment CMO Marc Whitten told Wired. “It’s just one of those stakes we’re placing.”

Screenshot via Microsoft

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

Microsoft’s team of super-hardware geeks talked about what is inside the new Xbox One console.

Gamers may not care about the hardware so long as it runs games smoothly and doesn’t get in their way. But the Xbox One is an engineering marvel that combines both cloud processing and a heavily engineered game console to produce game effects that Microsoft promises will be truly impressive.

If you look at all of the tasks that the machine does, it’s clear there isn’t enough silicon in the box, said Nick Baker, a distinguished engineer of console architecture and one of the head silicon engineers at Microsoft. He was a key architect on the Xbox 360 chips as well as the Xbox One chips. But the cool thing about the box — which has chips with 5 billion transistors in them — is that it can tap supercomputers in web-connected data centers to do processing.

That means the hardware inside the box isn’t fixed. Over time, the hardware can get better as Microsoft upgrades the technology in the data centers. For now, Microsoft has more than 300,000 servers in its data centers to support Xbox One and the Xbox Live online entertainment service. The Microsoft supergeeks spoke on a panel at the Xbox Reveal in a session moderated by Xbox Live evangelist Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb.

That processing power enables things like instantaneous Kinect, where voice commands immediately activate tasks on the Xbox, from waking up the machine instantly to changing the channel on your TV. That kind of processing exists alongside other things going on at the same time. You can, for instance, watch TV and then receive a Skype call without turning off the TV show. To do this type of thing, Microsoft had to design the box in a way that it could access memory and caches of data much faster than in past game consoles.

“There are a growing number of transistors in the cloud that you can move the loads onto,” said Boyd Multerer, the partner director of development and ISS Console Development Management (one of the software experts at Microsoft). “I think it’s an inflection point. So over time, your box gets more powerful. We move loads into the cloud to free up resources on the box.”

Todd Holmdahl, the corporate vice president of IEB hardware and another longtime Microsoft hardware executive, said the load can shift from one device to another. The cloud can tackle tasks in games like physics, artificial intelligence, and even some rendering. The tasks that require low latency, with split second interaction between one chip or one device and another, are those that the box — not the cloud — still needs to handle.

“This is a radically different way of thinking about a game console,” he said.

After the talk, Multerer told me that some tasks don’t need to run all the time. Artificial intelligence, for instance, doesn’t need to be calculated for every single frame of the game. Your enemy in a game will close in on you, but it only needs to know where you are every second, rather than every split second. So that task can be offloaded to the slower connection to the servers.

But anything that happens on the screen in an instant — if you pull the trigger on a gun and you see a muzzle flash on the screen — has to be calculated inside the box, Multerer said. Some rendering, like trees in the distance in a scene, can also be offloaded, so long as the software properly divides up the tasks, he said. That kind of thinking is very different for a game machine, but Multerer thinks many consumer products will be designed like this in the future.

The machine has things like Gigabit Ethernet so that it can be ready for improvements in Internet speeds. It has multiple power states so it can reduce power consumption when necessary. The box has a couple of 802.11n radios to connect to the Internet wirelessly and with other devices in the room.

“You can use just enough power for the experience you are in and nothing more,” he said. “The best example of that is wake-on voice, where you say ‘Xbox On’ and it powers up immediately.”

Holmdahl said that Microsoft redesigned the Kinect system. The sensors are now smart enough to detect your facial expressions, which provides for smarter games that know how you are feeling as you play the game. Kinect has a variety of sensors it can rely on, like time-of-flight depth cameras and infrared, which is good at detecting low-light movements.

“You get better identification, better field of view, better audio, better recognition,” he said.

Baker said that the internal Microsoft chip team had to design five pieces of silicon to handle all of the tasks in the console and the Kinect subsystem, which now comes bundled with the box. The team had to test the chips thoroughly, running 10 trillion cycles of simulation in order to make sure everything worked right. The chips had to be designed to work with each other in a coherent way.

The GPU is multitasking so that it can run compute and cloud tasks at the same time that it renders graphics, Baker said. The net result is that it can do billions of calculations per second.

Holmdahl said, “We started with a blank slate. We talked to the hardware, software people. One of the good things about Microsoft is you have those people under the same roof.”

Holmdahl said developers will be able to exploit these technologies as they learn more about things like instantaneous voice command integration into the game console.

The work started a few years ago.

“The development of these things takes a while,” Holmdahl said. “You develop some things that don’t work. We have converged on something that people will love.”

Multerer said the machine has 8GBs of RAM because it needed to have fast-switching between apps and support two things running at the same time, such as the Kinect entertainment controls and the games.

The new generation of graphics chips is based on supercomputing technologies and having the right data flow, with the focus on having the data in the right places at the right time. So there had to be caches of memory on the die, on the CPU, to feed that data to the processor, Multerer said.

Baker said that things like Hyper V, virtualization, and 64-bit processors really started in a data center. Getting them into a living room device wasn’t easy.

“This is really a first,” Baker said.

“And it’s hard to do,” Multerer said. “David Cutler came under our team a year and a half ago and he worked on the operating system himself.”

The machine’s software takes lessons from the services world. The team started with virtual machine technology and it stripped out general-purpose functions out. It boiled it down to the bare minimum so that the virtual machine — a middle software layer — can run extremely fast and won’t slow down games. This kind of software can be partitioned into different parts so it can handle different tasks simultaneously. One of the machine’s operating systems boots up and is “created” when the machine turns on, Multerer said. Then it stays operating while the machine is on, and then disappears when the machine is turned off.

“When you can do two things at one time, it solves a lot of problems,” like figuring out when your friends are online and they are trying to get in touch with you, Multerer said.

There’s a third operating system as well that handles other kinds of services, such as the TV services. Switching between these operating systems quickly gives the system its instantaneous feel, Multerer said.

With Xbox Live, the number of servers supporting the system in the cloud is huge. Those servers can be swapped out. When the hardware becomes more powerful over time, developers can build bigger game worlds and put more action on the screen at once, Multerer said.

Dan Greenawalt, one of the game development experts at Microsoft and creative director at Turn 10 Studios (the folks behind the Forza Motorsport auto-racing franchise), said that Microsoft brought together teams from Microsoft Research and other teams.

“This is the next giant leap forward,” he said.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Could you explain your enterprise technology company to a 13-year-old?

We’re all a bit sick of the “big data” trend, and founders making abstract claims about “answering unknown knowns.” And don’t even get me started on “SaaS,” “Dbass,” and “PaaS” (frankly, they are all a pain in the ass).

So VentureBeat has hatched a crazy plan to banish buzzwords and marketing speak, at least for an afternoon.

At our San Francisco office, VentureBeat invited four CEO’s from various cloud and “big data” companies to talk tech in an on-camera interview.

The catch? The execs would face a grilling from … a group of kids flown in from around the country. We didn’t just want Bay Area natives on the panel, as many of them grew up surrounded by tech. So we contacted an ed-tech startup called Rocket21, which helps young students explore their interests and passions, and they assembled a group.

The kids proved to be straight-talkin’ interview machines (I’d better watch my back; I could be out of a job one of these days) with a keen understanding of consumer technology and mobile apps.

We were gobsmacked when Ella Gillmor, 13, asked Huddle founder Andy McLoughlin about his data center (pictured above, center, with Gillmor and Alexa Stephenson) and if the cloud collaboration tool was “similar to Apple iCloud.” Her dad, Steve Gillmor, works in a senior role at Salesforce.com, so she’s clearly versed in tech. Likewise, 13-year-old Tommy Whiteley asked some tough questions about the Software-as-a-Service business model (“Do you make money by selling to people or companies?”)

It became apparent during the interviews that these tech natives had little patience for jargon. Gillmor prompted Chris Saad, the cofounder of Echo, to explain the meaning of a widget (which Saad aptly described as a “piece of a website that gets put into other websites”).

Alexa Stephenson, a high schooler from Tennessee, asked the founders whether big data is like the movie Fight Club because no one could give her a straight answer, which prompted nervous giggles from the room.

“Um, I don’t know where to start,” Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom responded. “I knew it. It’s the first rule,” Stephenson said.

It’s not easy to explain business intelligence and analytics in such simple terms. Here were some of our founders and CEO’s explanations:

1. On business intelligence and analytics: Birst CEO Brad Peters made a useful analogy to driving a car. ”The dashboard measures how fast you’re moving … [otherwise] it would be hard to drive a car,” he said. “Analytics is the dashboard for a lot of people and business to understand things that are more complex than what’s right in front of you.”
2. On big data: Goldbloom gave it a stab: “Big data is mostly about taking numbers and using those numbers to make predictions about the future. The bigger the data set you have, the more accurate the predictions about the future will be.”
3. On the cloud: “The dirty secret in this industry is that nobody even really knows what the cloud is,” said McLoughlin. “What it means is it’s put up in the Internet and it’s gone to our servers and it’s held somewhere centrally. All it means is it’s a place up there in the sky that is available from all of your devices no matter where you are.”

For further jargon-free (we promise!) discussion, register for DataBeat 2013, the conference about putting data to work.

Kids from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Entrepreneurship is too often viewed as the realm of twenty-something, college dropouts with a crazy idea.

For Mark Snow, a 63-year-old long-time insurance executive (pictured above), it was a no brainer to start a cloud computing company. “The thought of playing golf every day is not something I look forward to,” he said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat.

The idea for his newly-launched startup SafelyFiled originated when Snow saw a need for a storage system for paper-based (wills, birth certifications, and so on) and digital documents. SafelyFiled isn’t designed for a generation of digital natives, so it’s highly-intuitive to use.

Just set up an account on SafelyFiled, snap a photo on a smartphone via the free iPhone app, and documents are automatically uploaded into a cloud-based storage system. The technology is targeted to seniors and caregivers, which as a whole, is booming and shouldn’t be underestimated.

The company makes money by charging account-holders $48 per year or $4.50 per month. This lets you upload and store 1,000 documents, including photos, which is enough storage space for personal use.

Based on feedback on the beta, Snow sees an opportunity to reach thousands of small businesses and professional organizers. 

Snow heads up the SafelyFiled team as CEO, but he recently recruited a CTO, Terri Caldwell, who previously worked at Cisco Systems, and a senior engineer, Susan Hinrichs, who lectures on computer security at the University of Illinois. The team has poured about $400,000 into the company from personal funds and private investors.

According to the AARP, a membership organization for people age 50 and over, SafetyFiled is one of hundreds of new startups founded by seniors.

“We know from our work and research that people in their 50s and older have a significant interest in entrepreneurship and starting their own companies,” said Jodi Holtzman, the AARP’s senior vice president of Thought Leadership. Holtzman referenced data from the Kauffman Foundation to show that people in their 50s and 60s start companies at significantly greater rates than people in their 20s.

“Any time is a good time to take risks,” said Snow.

For more info on the product, check out the video below.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

LAS VEGAS – IBM just announced that it’s basing its cloud products and services on open cloud architecture.

IBM is placing its considerable heft behind OpenStack, a cloud operating system that kicked off two-and-a-half years ago to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware. The nonprofit Open Stack Foundation manages the product, and IBM announced it would be a big-time sponsor last April.

“It’s a vote of confidence for the maturity of the [OpenStack] technology,” said Robert Leblanc, the senior vice president of IBM Software (pictured, left), on a conference call with the press. IBM made the announcement at its Las Vegas cloud conference “PULSE,” which began Sunday and ends Friday.

The hope is that IBM’s existing customers will adopt open source-based technologies, which can be ported across hybrid cloud environments.

“I’m excited to see IBM throw their considerable weight behind Open Stack,” said Deepak Advani, a general manager at IBM customer Tivoli, on the call. 

IBM is a long-time contributor to the OpenStack project, along with companies like Rackspace, Dell, Cisco, and Yahoo.

“I think the first couple years of OpenStack is really about helping people run and configure it,” said Scott Sanchez, Rackspace’s strategy lead for Open Cloud in a recent interview with VentureBeat. “But we are seeing a tremendous amount of traction,” he said.

Going forward, IBM will dedicate 500 of its developers to work on open cloud projects. IBM also announced that its Smart Cloud offering (the cloud portfolio used by 5,000 customers) will incorporate open cloud pieces. ”It brings along so many capabilities ” said Leblanc, who pointed out Smart Cloud launched before there even was an Open Stack movement.

IBM’s rebranded offering, “SmartCloud orchestrator,” is currently in beta testing. Benefits for customers include a reduction in operational costs, better integration with third party tools, and a simplification of cloud services.

Jim Smith, a managing partner for Mohr Davidow Ventures, said this is a step forward in “breaking the chains for high cost technologies.” On the conference call, he said that for large businesses and entrepreneurs, “the canvas for innovation is moving to the cloud.”

Photo illustration by Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud-computing giant Rackspace has made a small but smart acquisition in ObjectRocket, a MongoDB database service.

Rackspace senior vice president of corporate development Pat Matthews said, “Customers have been asking for a powerful database,” and the acquisition is in line with their open cloud strategy. MongoDB was the best option from Rackspace’s perspective as it’s one of the fastest growing NoSQL open source databases, and many existing customers already use it.

According to a report from British technology research firm The 451 Group, NoSQL software revenue is expected to grow at an annual of 82 percent to reach £141 million ($214 million) by 2015.

Database technology floods the market, but Matthews said that MongoDB has experienced a “runaway success” with developers. It’s easy to get started and supports about a dozen programming language on the Web, including C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Node.js, and Scala. But it can be difficult to manage and scale, which is where ObjectRocket comes in.

In the future, Rackspace is likely to support other database technologies.

ObjectRocket co-founder Kenny Gorman has been recognized as a “MongoDB Master,” an award 10gen gives to only 35 MongoDB contributors around the world. (Check out a video interview with Gorman and Rackspace’s chief developer evangelist Robert Scoble below.)

The full team will relocate to Rackspace’s San Antonio headquarters (they previously worked remotely), and customers should see the benefits of an integration in a matter of weeks.

On the topic of Rackspace’s broader acquisition strategy, Matthews revealed that his team doesn’t plan to buy established companies. “We have a good sales and marketing engine and know how to acquire customers,” he said. Instead, they are on the lookout for small, under-the-radar teams with impressive technology. The company’s other recent acquisition, MailGun, was a six-person operation with just a seed round of funding.

Rackspace has not disclosed the terms of the deal.

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Ravello Systems has raised $26 million from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners to launch its Cloud Application Hypervisor.

Ravello bridges the gap between the private datacenter and the public cloud. The technology helps developers overcome their “internal resource constraints” by replicating their existing applications in a public cloud environment. From there, they can collaborate on projects, create blueprints, make changes, and QA test more efficiently.

“Enterprises cannot use the public cloud the way that they would like to which is to be able to rent capacity on demand and simply spill-over bursty workloads,” said CEO Rami Tamir in a statement. “That’s not possible today because the public cloud environment is completely different from the enterprises’ internal data center. The industry needs a solution to normalize the application environment across the private and public cloud, so that enterprises can truly begin using the public cloud.”

Tamir and his cofounder Benny Schnaider were on the Qumranet team, an early developer of virtualization technology known as the KVM hypervisor. Open source provider Red Hat acquired Qumranet in 2008. The duo’s extensive experience in this field is attractive to top tier investors like Sequoia, who invested in Ravello’s first round in 2011.

Now with $35 million in capital under its belt, Ravello is announcing the public beta of its service. The company’s headquarters are in Palo Alto, which is significantly less scenic than the Amalfi Coast.

[Apologies to our copy editor Jason Wilson who has a strict no-rhetorical-questions-in-ledes policy.]

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Energetic CEO Aaron Levie of Box today revealed that his company is prepping for an initial public offering in 2014.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Levie said a 2013 IPO would be a “long shot,” but he didn’t completely rule it out. The company had previously aimed to IPO in the coming months, and analysts predicted that it would be in a strong position to compete in the public markets.

2012 was a hell of a year for companies that target their products at businesses, rather than consumers. And as we reported, about 80 percent of companies that will IPO next year will be business-to-business (B2B). Likely contenders include SurveyMonkey, which raised $800 million today, Zendesk, and Hubspot.

With software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) vendors Workday and Splunk surging more than 80 percent since 2012 public-market debuts, expectations are high.

The company’s ample shareholders expect to see a return on their investment. Venture capitalists have poured a massive $284 million into Box, which began in 2005 as a college business project. The rapidly growing cloud storage provider competes with larger players like Dropbox and Microsoft.

In recent interviews with VentureBeat, 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 recent years, the venture capital community has caught up. “In 2007 when we looked more into the enterprise, even Silicon Valley didn’t think we could win,” he said.

Levie revealed today that his company would be using its ample resources to hire staff and open offices in countries like Germany and Japan. He expects to add about half a dozen executives in senior management roles, including an international chief. According to Bloomberg, it expects to bolster its staff to 1,000 employees in the next year, up from about 670.

The Los Altos-based startup recently celebrated the opening of its London and San Francisco office.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Alastair Mitchell

Think of standalone social business software like a point-and-shoot camera.

Cameras are perfectly suited for achieving one singular thing: taking a picture. Now, pick up your mobile phone. Right there, jammed into just four ounces, is a camera that not only rivals many point-and-shoots when it comes to picture taking, it can do so much more. You can edit images, share them instantly with countless people via any number of channels and add endless comments and captions. For many, point-and-shoots just don’t make sense anymore — as Kodak’s decline has demonstrated.

Standalone social business software companies may soon find themselves in a similar situation.

About five years ago, standalone social software defined a new class of business software. Yammer, Jive and countless other companies saw a new market emerging that seemed to answer one of the most frequent questions in the modern workplace: how can we make workers as communicative, engaged and connected as they are in their personal lives thanks to tools like Facebook? The promise of the social business was, and still is, compelling. By connecting workers, businesses can unlock and distribute siloed worker knowledge and information, thereby increasing collaboration and achieving boosts in productivity, creativity and efficiency.

In some ways, these standalone social business tools were great. The interface mimicked consumer platforms that were quickly becoming ubiquitous, like Facebook and Twitter, ensuring rapid adoption. Instantly, workers around the world had a space, outside of email and personal social networks, where they could communicate and share ideas with colleagues. Those were the days when activity feeds seemed somehow magical—and proved useful.

And then, suddenly, it happened. Noise began to fill the once-glorious activity feed as coworkers started to chat idly about their cats or favorite lunchtime sandwich. Suddenly, the useful business conversations that the platform was purchased to foster were made obsolete.

Businesses began questioning whether there was any measurable ROI, or if they had simply provided an online location for water cooler conversation.

A little less conversation, a little more action

So, why, given that “social” is still a popular buzzword, will 2013 herald the end for standalone social software?

Primarily, it’s because social software facilitates communication but doesn’t facilitate action, making it difficult for businesses to determine ROI. Business action, that is, workers getting work done, is typically how businesses determine ROI. As content (documents, files, multimedia, webpages, and so on) is central to all of the work we do, effective collaboration must unite conversations and content to create context.

Communication is only as useful as the context that exists to enable workers to act upon it. Elvis Presley summed it up perfectly when he said, “A little less conversation, a little more action please.”

Indeed, in 2011 and 2012 we started to witness a shift in standalone social business software as content management providers augmented their offerings with powerful social features (or vice versa) and standalone social software providers declined or saw themselves consumed by bigger businesses. Just look at the following examples:

• Microsoft purchased Yammer for $1.2 billion to incorporate Yammer’s social functionality into its decidedly unsocial SharePoint content management product.
• Salesforce augmented it’s “Chatter” social offering with a file-sharing and content management offering, “Chatterbox”
• Google Apps for business began integrating with a business version of Google+, Google’s flavor of social network.

Fortunately, the business software marketplace is maturing. This is evidenced by these acquisitions and other developments, including the U.S. Federal Government shifting billions of dollars in IT budget away from inherently “unsocial” legacy technologies and into cloud content collaboration services that have social features baked in.

In my opinion, the future of social software isn’t as a standalone service, which simply becomes a fire hose of irrelevant conversations for workers, but as part of a suite of applications that enable workers to collaboratively share information and act upon it. So, perhaps it’s less of a death and more of an evolution — after all, where would Instagram be without Polaroid?

Alastair Mitchell is the cofounder of Huddle, a cloud-based content collaboration and content management provider. As CEO, he has raised more than $40 million in funding since 2007 and has grown Huddle to more than 150 employees in London, San Francisco, and New York.

Huddle is currently being used by more than 100,000 organizations around the world. 

Alastair lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he regularly hosts DrinkTank and HuddleUp networking events for tech entrepreneurs. Reach him at @alimitchell and on the Huddle blog at http://www.huddle.com/blog.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

YouSendIt, the Campbell, Calif.-based startup that wants to do more than let users send large files, has made its latest strategic acquisition.

The company bought a venture-backed startup called “Found” (the founders are pictured, above) for an undisclosed sum. The technology lets users discover their files, documents, and data across a variety of devices and cloud services.

YouSendIt’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse aims to “go beyond send”, and help users access and manage their data. In an interview, he liberally uses the term “cloud-nogistic” to describe how technology should be able to cater to the full spectrum of providers, whether its Google Drive or Dropbox.

Garlinghouse said the corporate development team was tasked with finding startups to potentially acquire “that were thinking horizontally, not just vertically.” The company bought Found with a combination of cash and stock. They will retain the full team in their San Francisco offices, and will provide resources for the 5-person team to build out the product.

YouSendIt has raised a total of $49 million in venture funding in the previous seven years. According to Garlinghouse, they are experiencing 50 percent growth year over year, and recently exceeded 40 million users. Last year, the company pulled in $57 million in revenue.

BetterCloud announced this morning that it raised $5 million in its first round of financing from Flybridge Capital Partners, Greycroft Partners, and TriBeCa Venture Partners. BetterCloud provides cloud management tools specifically for Google Apps.

Many businesses these days use Google Apps to manage operations, collaborate, store data, and more. BetterCloud’s flagship product FlashPanel gives administrators better knowledge, control and security of their apps to help them work as efficiently as possible. There is also the “Google Gooru” that can answer specific questions and provide training on topics like “how to create a mail merge” and “how to use animations in Google presentations.”

As cloud computing becomes the norm for IT operations, it will be increasingly important for businesses using legacy systems to migrate to the cloud. BetterCloud serves over 15,000 organizations of all sizes, with over 5.5 million users and is growing quickly. With this funding, it will expand its products to cover more of the Google Enterprise Cloud. This brings its total capital raised to $7.25 million, following a $2.2 million angel round in May of 2012.

BetterCloud is based in New York. Read the press release.

Med-tech is off to a bold start this year with a hot acquisition, which will serve to consolidate the market.

Epocrates Inc., a medical applications company based in Silicon Valley, is being scooped up by AthenaHealth for $293 million. According to a company press release, AthenaHealth will pay $11.75 per share, a 22 percent premium to Epocrates’ Friday closing price.

Massachusetts-based AthenaHealth provides cloud-based services and tools to doctors and hospitals. The company faces fierce competition from Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Quality Systems, as well as Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, which is retooling after a protracted drama with its board. 

Epocrates is an attractive prospect for AthenaHealth, as it has built up brand-name recognition with doctors. AthenaHealth estimates that it is has been used by 338,000 U.S. physicians to pull up short summaries on drugs, including information about side effects and interactions.

“Capturing mindshare has been an uphill battle for Athena for years, and the addition of Epocrates to the platform is a step in the right direction,” said Greg Bolan, an analyst with Sterne Agee & Leach Inc, in an e-mail interview with Bloomberg.

The acquisition will help the company gain an iPhone app and expand into the lucrative electronic medical records (EMR) market.

“I have been an admirer of Epocrates since it first emerged and have watched the company grow consistently, one app download at a time, as it has cemented itself into the consciousness of America’s physicians,” said Jonathan Bush, the president and CEO of AthenaHealth in a statement. “Together, we’re excited by the opportunity to redefine the mobile toolset for care givers,” he added.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Mike Folgner

Cloud services are projected to be a $100 billion market by 2016, according to IDC, and just recently KPMG predicted a doubling of revenues over the next two years. Cloud computing is permeating most industries, even sports.

In sports, the cloud means lower production costs, the ability to broadcast content to audiences anywhere at any time, new consumer experiences, increased monetization opportunities and advanced real time analytics.

It is clear that the cloud is transforming how broadcast video content is being used and will be used in the future. Below are three ways the cloud is redefining sports broadcasting and coverage right now:

Capturing the “Did you see that?!” moment

“Michael’s jumper, Landon’s goal, Posey’s leg!” Sports conversations that used to dominate the water cooler have extended into social media. Now, through services in the cloud, fans can get a real-time sports fix anytime, anywhere with live video access to the sports coverage they want – high school, college or pro, basketball, football or golf — you name it.

Video streaming, capture, DVR, clipping, editing and distribution services in the cloud are making it possible for fans to easily share and enjoy the “Did you see that?!” moment even if they’re not physically at the game or watching it at home on TV.

One major change in the technology stack that is the widespread adoption of DVR technologies for streaming sports content. With DVR functionality, fans can go back and start watching clips or streams from wherever they want, with full event recordings available from the cloud immediately after airing live.

Another shift is the adoption of cloud editing and real time publishing. Rather than just tweeting their opinion about a play, fans can now back it up with the instant video that supports their POV, taking the conversation to an entirely new level. Sports rights holders can edit content live in the cloud and tweet key moments, post them to Facebook and send mobile phone alerts directly to smartphones so fans can immediately send out timely video clips of the game via social channels. With viewers estimated to spend one quarter of their time online on social networks, including Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, this enlarges the circle for the sports conversation and, combined with cloud DVR viewing, can drive meaningful tune-in and revenue from live and on-demand sports programming.

Making it less expensive to produce high quality video content

The cloud is lowering production costs for high quality video content by streamlining video editing and distribution workflows. Organizations of all sizes can now quickly and easily produce and deploy professional grade cloud-based live video streaming and editing – to deliver content instantly across the web, mobile and social networks at a fraction of the cost. Your entire video production workflow can be easily managed in real-time from any location– a process that took days in the past.

Lowering production costs increases the supply of content. As the content continues to grow, it will become more important to ensure that people can find this content, watch it easily at their convenience and share it in the way they want.

Creating new revenue streams and rights agreements

Not surprisingly, the increased content being developed is expanding the inventory for advertising and subscription services, generating new revenue opportunities for content owners.

As these opportunities have expanded, companies are now pursuing new rights agreements for content, such as rights for real-time game highlights on Twitter or mobile devices. This is also extending to areas of sports such as youth sports, Olympic and college sports that previously either had no rights agreements or had not made use of the agreements in place. ESPN already licenses the Little League World Series, we are not far away from a world where most high school and youth games are streamed under some rights agreement. These rights have to be managed and centralized cloud services reduce those management costs.

One key to fully leveraging rights agreements is syndication. Through instant syndication of video clips in the cloud, broadcasters can easily monitor and track the usage of their video content, wherever it’s distributed. They can ensure that traffic on social media is captured and linked into these experiences, increasing audience engagement and tune-in for their content.

For sports coverage, the future is cloud

From the most prominent sports events organizers and programmers, including FOX Sports, Pac-12 Enterprises, the Big West and the Tennis Channel to high school and youth production companies including PlayOn Sports and FOX’s Prep Zone, Sports companies are already using the cloud to implement new forms of sports viewing, expand their audience and increase revenue.

With opportunities abounding, the future of the cloud and sports coverage is certain to be entwined as fans look to video for new ways to enjoy the game and amplify the conversation.

Mike Folgner is the founder and CEO of SnappyTV, a live social video platform for streaming video and sharing clips from live television and internet streams with friends on Facebook and Twitter. Mike’s career has been at the intersection of technology and media.

Prior to founding SnappyTV, Mike was the General Manager of Video at Yahoo! after his first company Jumpcut was acquired by Yahoo! in 2006 and worked for 4 years at OpenTV, the leading provider of digital set top box software. Mike has an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering and operations research from Stanford University and an MBA from Stanford’s graduate school of business.

Basketball net image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Need to get up and running in the cloud? Cloud Sherpas, the brokerage services company that helps its customers take advantage of the cloud, is betting that you’ll need some expert guidance.

Today, the Atlanta, Georgia-based company has raised $40 million in fresh funding. It is showing impressive signs of traction, and projects it will pull in north of $100 million in revenues next year. With partnerships with Google Enterprise and Salesforce.com, it boasts over 3,000 customers. “Cloud is experiencing increasing rates of adoption,” said David Northington, the company’s CEO in an interview. He said that most of Cloud Sherpas’ customers are highly unsatisfied with legacy on-premise solutions.

Cloud Sherpas works with customers in almost every vertical to aggregate cloud applications, and enhance the capabilities of existing software. Their bread and butter is to help companies shift from dinosaur programs like Outlook Exchange to Google’s suite of applications. “We help people leverage Google’s app engine and platform as a service,” said Northington.

To get their foot in the door on the West Coast, the company has successfully closed a deal to acquire CloudTrigger, a Southern California-based cloud consultancy focused on helping organizations implement customer relationship management (CRM) tools in the cloud. CloudTrigger was an attractive proposition as it works with brand-name customers like AOL and USA Today.

Cloud Sherpas aims to make a name for itself as an industry consolidator.  Since 2007, the firm has merged with or acquired eight cloud consultancies.  In March, we reported that it received $20 million in funding, and merged with GlobalOne.

“Our approach is all about finding quality companies with huge upside, and helping them reach their full potential” said Ashton Newhall, a co-founder at Greenspring Associates in a statement. “Given its first mover advantage, unbelievable success to date and massive greenfield opportunity, Cloud Sherpas fits our model perfectly.”

The company raised $40 million in second round capital from existing investors Columbia Capital and Delta-V Capital, joined by Greenspring Associates, and Queensland Investment Corporation, one of the largest institutional investment managers in Australia.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Plex Systems, the cloud-based planning and management tool for manufacturers, has received significant strategic investment from Silicon Valley firm, Accel Partners.

For $30 million, Accel will gain a seat on the company’s board, alongside Francisco Partners, which acquired Troy, Mich.-based Plex Systems earlier this year. With this new infusion of capital, Plex will continue to migrate its customers — primarily in the high-tech, electronics and automotive industries — from on-premise systems to the cloud. The company offers production, inventory, quality, human capital, and financial management tools, which are visible via the Web.

According to the company’s  CEO Mark Symonds, the cloud can help manufacturers cater to international markets. “Globalization and today’s pace of business requires manufacturers in all industries to be increasingly transparent, nimble and cost efficient, and these attributes demand cloud solutions,” he said in an interview.

The company, which was founded over two decades ago, competes with tech giants like Infor and SAP — but there may be room for multiple players as manufacturing still accounts for about a third of the U.S. economy.

Symonds claims the company has seen 30 percent year-over-year growth, with quarterly revenue growth increasing each quarter for over 20 consecutive quarters — impressive and somewhat unusual for a software as a service play. However, the company has experienced its ups and downs. Symonds told ZDnet columnist Dennis Howlett that when the company shifted from on-premise to SaaS, it took a 20 percent revenue hit.

In the first quarter of 2013, Symonds told me they will be hiring 16 new employees to add to the 260-person team, which will augment the R&D efforts. Initially, the company served automotive clients, but has recently been able to expand its client-base to include defense and high-tech customers.

Accel is one of the firms in Silicon Valley that has ramped up its investment in enterprise computing — they raised a $100 million fund dedicated to “Big Data” startups. In a recent interview with Accel Partners’ Ping Li, he told me that the firm has noticed “people embracing enterprise technologies like never before.”

Industrial chemistry image // hans engbers, Shutterstock 

To transition these companies into the new world of cloud-based operations, Fruition Partners has raised $12 million. FP assists companies with every step of the transformation process, from pre-discussions through implementation, platform development, management services, and training. It is an implementation partner of the cloud IT management service ServiceNow, which has experienced high-demand and also contributed to Fruition Partner’s growth.

In 2012, Fruition Partners signed on 150 new customers. Clients include Coca-Cola, General Electric, Delphi, Fox, H&R Block, Target, Tiffany & Company, Viacom, and Yale University. To remain cost-effective and efficient in the era of cloud computing, it is imperative they transition to more modern systems.

This first institutional round was led by Trident Capital, a venture capital and growth equity firm based in Silicon Valley. It will be used to accelerate growth and expand sales, marketing, and delivery efforts. Fruition Partners is based in Chicago.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dave Wright is the founder and CEO of SolidFire.

The initial rush to the cloud has been led by businesses moving data for backup and archival purposes and for less mission-critical use cases such as testing, development, and web hosting. This mirrors the early days of server virtualization where test/dev was the predominant early use case. As virtualization technology matured, security, performance, and availability concerns were addressed and server virtualization reached into production environments.

Heading into 2013 and beyond, the evolution of cloud computing will likely take a similar path. Using the cloud as a “cheap and deep” repository to host data is now well established. More than 1 trillion objects stored in Amazon Web Services’ S3 object storage should serve as sufficient evidence. What is exciting is that we are only scratching the surface of the cloud opportunity.

From an enterprise perspective, the public cloud is an extension (albeit sometimes rogue in its current form) to traditional on-premise IT resources such as compute and storage. While accounting for only a small percentage of IT operations today, there is little debate that a significant percentage of incremental workloads are being executed in the cloud.

For the cloud market to realize its full potential requires a continued push into the business and mission-critical application workloads that remain mostly on premise today. If Cloud 1.0 is about hosting business data in the cloud, Cloud 2.0 will be defined by the move to host production applications in the cloud. But where does the burden lie to drive this shift?

There are two constituencies that bear the responsibility of pushing this movement forward: the service providers that build and run clouds, and the technology vendors crafting the key infrastructure building blocks. Many players are vying for market leadership within each segment. Service providers going after this opportunity span everyone from basic web hosters, managed/dedicated hosting providers, co-location providers, telcos/operators, data center outsourcers, and IaaS pure-plays. Heck, even online bookstores and search engines are already part of the game.

The magnitude of the opportunity at stake in the cloud is also driving a massive innovation cycle from start-ups in the infrastructure vendor community. Without the right tools for the job, service providers will fail to drive the economics, performance, security, and reliability necessary to realize the full potential of the cloud. Legacy systems and software were not designed with this job in mind, and few service providers have the engineering resources to build the infrastructure themselves. Cloud infrastructure presents a whole different set of operating constraints that were not a consideration when most legacy vendors were crafting their wares. The scale, quality-of-service, automation and efficiency demanded from a cloud environment are unlike anything we have seen from traditional enterprise IT environments.

One area where innovation is occurring in cloud infrastructure is high-performance storage. Unlike compute, where wide ranges of price and performance options are available, cost-effective storage with predictable performance is not readily available in the cloud today. Attacking this problem is central to driving more and more applications to the cloud.

A key enabler of this innovation is solid-state storage and the dramatic price/performance advantage of flash over spinning disk. Applied to traditional IT cost centers, this technology is interesting, but when applied to profit-driven cloud services it is game-changing. Amazon’s Provisioned IOPS, launched earlier this year, is an early example of this extended innovation sequence where component level technologies, enable new architectures that drive new services. The combination of infrastructure innovations (flash) and the execution environment shift (cloud) are feeding on each other to enable a new opportunity for enterprise CIOs: run business-critical applications in the cloud with confidence.

So where do we go from here? Heading into 2013, the burden of proof is squarely on vendors and cloud service providers to deliver evolutionary new products and services. These innovations will drive the performance and economics required to extend the public cloud to an even wider range of workloads. If all goes well, 2013 will be the year that the industry comes together to move beyond “cheap and deep” and really start advancing the way the world uses the cloud.

Dave Wright helped start GameSpy Industries in 2008, and he led the team that created a backend infrastructure for millions of gamers. GameSpy merged with IGN Entertainment in 2004. Dave served as Chief Architect for IGN and lead technology integration with FIM/MySpace after IGN was acquired by News Corp in 2005. In 2007, Dave founded Jungle Disk, a pioneer in cloud-based storage and backup solutions for consumers and businesses. Jungle Disk was acquired by Rackspace in 2008, and Dave worked closely with the Rackspace Cloud division. In late 2009, Dave left Rackspace to start SolidFire.

Dusting photo via Richard Harrison/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For most cloud providers, the biggest PR problem is security. Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain has invested years into understanding — and alleviating — common concerns about the cloud.

If the enterprise-focused cloud storage startup is to continue luring customers away from heavyweights like Box and Zetta, it will be due to its commitment to security.

I caught up with Jain at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2012 conference to discuss the questions that companies should ask their cloud providers before entering into a contractual agreement.

Considering migrating sensitive information to the cloud? Jain suggests you ask about a vendor’s ability to deal with encrypted data, and their understanding of industry-specific compliance laws.

If the vendor passes these tests, Jain recommends delving into where the data is stored. Recently, an Egnyte customer flew in an IT director from Pittsburgh, PA. to check how physically secure the data centers are and where the servers are located.

These questions will help companies protect themselves from the “vagaries of the Internet,” Jain explained. ”These three things are becoming table stakes now,” he said.

For more, check out the video.

Video via livex.tv

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by writer Andy Meek 

ProfitBricks, a global cloud infrastructure provider, has big ambitions despite not yet having widespread name recognition. The Boston-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company this week announced the launch of a foundation program for the startup community.

Amazon, with its cloud computing power, is the giant in the space. But ProfitBricks — the company that launched in a major way in the U.S. in September – wants to change that and believes it has the tech to back up that goal.

The reason why might not seem obvious at first. But it is intended to directly help the company’s larger mission.

The ProfitBricks Foundation Program is rolling out initially in New England and then nationwide in 2013. Through it, the company is offering startups the possibility of getting virtual data centers at a sharply reduced cost for one year.

Startups are a key market for Profitbricks. And by offering incentives for ProfitBricks’ next generation cloud computing services, it lowers the risk for a startup to try an alternative to Amazon. Companies with below $1 million in revenue will be eligible to use a cloud server from ProfitBricks for one year without cost. They’ll also get 20 percent off their IaaS services from ProfitBricks for one year.

“Our goal is to offer ProfitBricks’ virtual data center technology to startups who value access to cost-effective, next-generation cloud computing services,” said ProfitBricks USA CEO Bob Rizika.

Or, in other words, the goal is to add incentives where possible to further motivate startups to look outside the Kingdom of Bezos. And in a broader sense, the ProfitBricks story is one of a team of German computer engineers who regarded Amazon as forcing customers into buying packages they might not fully need.

The company was founded in 2010 by serial entrepreneurs Achim Weiss and Andreas Gauger. And with funding from the founders and United Internet, ProfitBricks built and is offering virtual data center technology with a host of benefits – flexible user defined instances, live vertical scaling capability, double redundant cloud storage — with basic minute-based billing. The team spent time and money to create ProfitBricks’ IaaS environment and presence, which now includes more than 100 team members from 17 countries.

They’re not the only ones attempting something similar. Along those same lines of pay-per-use economics, HP this week announced its HP FlexNetwork Utility Advantage Program at an event in London. According to HP, the new program allows communications service providers in collaboration with HP to help enterprise customers modernize their network with prepackaged network solutions with no upfront cost involved. Customers then work with the CSP for the network offerings they need on a pay-per-use basis, according to the company.

Andy Meek is a journalist in Memphis who frequently contributes to outlets including Fast Company, Forbes, Politico, and several tech blogs.

Image credit: HappyDancing/ShutterStock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

When is the right time for a cloud computing or “big data” startup to bring on a full enterprise sales team?

Tablet productivity app CloudOn has been quietly growing its base to several million users over a period of three years. The company is set to reach the 10 million user-milestone by Q2 2013. The popular product is available to consumers for free, and lets people read and edit Microsoft Office files on tablet devices.

In recent months, CloudOn has recently begun receiving calls from large enterprises, but does not plan to execute on a formal sales push until its honed the product and reached 10 million users.

At CloudBeat 2012, cofounder and CEO Milind Gadekar offered advice to startups at a similar stage of growth. According to Gadekar, it’s not as making a few key hires. He revealed the host of new requirements that will need to be considered, including improved security, manageability and reporting.

Check out the video for more:

Video via livex.tv

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Silicon Valley-based CloudVelocity has emerged from stealth mode with $5 million in investment and a technology that aims to remove the barriers of adoption to public clouds.

The $5 million first-round was led by Mayfield Fund. Navin Chaddha, Mayfield’s managing director, said the firm made the decision to invest as the technology is a “major breakthrough.” He explained that the core innovation is that companies can “rent infrastructure from a public cloud but make it look like your own data center.” Chaddha told me the product was developed ahead of schedule, and beta users include a diverse range of midsize and large companies.

CloudVelocity makes it easier for enterprise customers to migrate business applications that are stored on-premise to any public cloud whether it’s Rackspace, Windows Azure or Amazon Web Services. Its still early days, but it’s launching its beta with an AWS-integration.

“[We are] automatically extending the data center to the cloud,” said Rajeev Chawla, the company’s CEO. Prior to cofounding the company, Chawla was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mayfield Fund and an engineer at Sun Microsystems.

CloudVelocity also offers cloud cloning, which enables developers and application managers to launch duplicate apps for development or test purposes. If the primary site is down, applications are automatically moved to the cloud. If the cloud application fails, an administrator is alerted, and it shifts to another cloud instance.

One of the first customers on the beta said that the technology helped them “substantially reduce our expenses.” Nitin Shingate, the VP of engineering for Lealta Media, said the trial worked so well that they are using it ahead of schedule in their production environment for cloud failover.

“This will help ensure that our online business stays available within the AWS cloud,” said Shingate.

The startup is taking on VMware, which provides a hybrid cloud software that enables companies to move to the public clouds that use VMware. “But it’s VMware to VMware,” Chaddha explained. CloudVelocity hopes to appeal to enterprise customers with its cloud-agonistic approach.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Despite concerns about data security and loss of control, cloud-based service providers are highly confident about the growth of the industry through to 2014.

The confidence stems from cost savings for customers; a KPMG International survey released today found that technology companies can expect the portion of revenue they generate from cloud services to double in the next two years.

The survey found demand for cloud services is “even stronger than we expected,” Tom Lamoureux, global leader for KPMG’s technology advisory team, told the Wall Street Journal.

Cloud providers revealed that revenue generated from the migration to cloud will be from data-intensive applications, such as business and data analytics, content management, customer care, and operations and manufacturing.

The survey’s participants expect the shift to occur despite ongoing concerns over loss of control of data and security as well as the challenge of providing consistent cost-savings.

“While providers are seeing the challenges of a maturing yet still relatively young market, we’re at a pivotal point in the evolution of the cloud ecosystem as users become more comfortable with a variety of cloud applications,” said Gary Matuszak, a partner, global chair, and U.S. leader for KPMG’s technology, media, and telecommunications practice in a release. “Leading cloud providers know they must evolve to provide a new level of scale, capacity and capability.”

The survey found evidence of a disconnect between real and expected cost-savings from cloud-based services. Four out of 10 survey participants said that proving cost savings was the biggest challenge in selling cloud services, and that most IT buyers are unrealistic about the amount they can save by switching to the cloud.

Indeed, cloud providers will need to work hard to continue winning over customers. Nearly half of providers say that loss of control is one of the biggest hurdles to deciding to purchase a cloud service to perform critical business functions, and 60 percent of service providers say they need to retrain their sales forces to effectively sell cloud services.

“The lines are blurring across the various types of cloud services; users need and want to understand cloud’s value and immense power much better than they do,” said Lamoureaux.

KPMG, the global provider of audit and advisory services, surveyed 179 cloud companies in North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After the Autonomy debacle, software giant Hewlett-Packard is putting its eggs in a new basket: converged cloud services.

HP has announced the general availability of its Open Stack-powered public cloud service in the hopes that this will boost customer confidence as it recovers from the $10 billion botched acquisition of enterprise search vendor Autonomy.

The race to commoditize the open-source cloud operating system is firmly underway, but as an original investor, HP has a head-start. For HP, this is part of an ongoing push to bring enterprise customers a combination of private, public and managed cloud resources — a true hybrid cloud.

In addition to releasing its OpenStack-powered public cloud product, HP also announced enhancements to its Cloud Service Automation software, and that its suite of cloud offerings now includes a platform as a service (PaaS) based on VMware’s Cloud Foundry. Read more here about the growing demand from enterprises for PaaS, which makes it easier for developers to deploy applications in the cloud.

HP will make the announcement of the release today at its Discover event in Frankfurt, Germany. The company faces some stiff competition from incumbent cloud computing giants — Rackspace and Amazon make similar claims about the benefits of the hybrid cloud. Dell and Internap are also rolling out their Open-Stack based public clouds. But given HP’s early experimentation in the area, it is already in the game in some ways: France’s second largest carrier, SFR, for example, is using HP’s OpenStack modification in its own offering in France (see how that deal emerged from our own CloudBeat conference in 2011).

HP’s open-cloud offering, Cloud Compute, promises to deliver reliable resources to handle heavy production workloads — its a “pay as you go” model that lets customers pay for the services they actually use. Cloud Compute is an “open cloud” service, meaning that customers are free to choose their platform and language without fear of vendor lock-in.

Free trials are currently on-offer and promotional pricing is available until January – early customers will receive the service at a 50 percent discount.

According to Network World, the company is also announcing a beta version of a cloud-based block storage service, which will likely be generally available in the coming months.

Top photo: basketman23/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A year ago, Benjamin Revcolevschi, the senior vice president of services and cloud at French telecom carrier SFR, came to VentureBeat’s CloudBeat conference on a mission. He found partners to support the creation of a new cloud business dubbed Numergy. The company provides infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service to French and greater European companies that need them.

And overnight, it’s become a major competitor to Amazon’s own cloud services business. Numergy, a division of SFR (owned by Vivendi), has raised $300 million from the French state and information tech company Bull. The startup division launched in September, and in the next four years, Numergy is targeting $400 million in revenues, said Revcolevschi in a fireside chat today at CloudBeat 2012 with VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall. And it’s all thanks to what Revcolevschi (pictured above, right) called the “chocolate factory.”

The Chocolate Factory was the name for the workspace that the ad-hoc team created inside SFR. The multidisciplinary team gathered around a big oval table, which also had plenty of chocolate candy on it. The team operated on the principle of “availability,” where decision makers could talk to each other across the table and work quickly. There were no closed doors. Anyone from the 250 people on the executive could come and ask questions.

“It was an open place,” Revcolevschi said today. “No doors. No boundaries. Availability was the rule. People could pop in. There is always someone to decide. We changed the way the company behaved.”

The urgency was there because of challengers to traditional telecom and information technology businesses. The board wanted Revcolevschi to do something about competition from the likes of Amazon.com.

Revcolevschi went to CloudBeat and “came away with the conviction and authority to implement our strategy,” he wrote in a recent post. He met storage provider Scality, which became a partner.

Within four months of settling on its plan, the company launched its end-to-end cloud service and started taking customers. SFR was able to do this because it is a 15-year-old telecom giant, one of the largest independent carriers in Europe. It has 10,000 employees and is a major information technology supplier.

But such companies can be slow to move into new markets. Hence, the chocolate, which Revcolevschi said represented creativity and a spirit of collaboration. The company built the cloud solution on HP Operations Orchestration, and it will soon evolve move to OpenStack in the future. Numergy now offers public and cloud service for companies that don’t want to invest in their own cloud infrastructure. It offers flexibility, reliability, and the legitimacy of large investors, Revcolevschi said.

“We did this because we wanted to take our business to the next level,” he said. “Scale matters.

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

Windows Azure Active Directory has processed more than 200 billion authentications for Microsoft services in two years, and it now processes an average of 4.7 billion logins a week, the company announced today.

Active Directory (AD) handles authentications for Windows Azure, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Windows Server Online Backup, and Windows Intune. Companies that sign up for Active Directory can use its cloud-based store for directory data and various identity services. Additionally, AD can let companies configure a single sign-on to “allow interoperability with their existing on-premises Active Directory environment.”

Microsoft has been notoriously shy to share key metrics about its Windows Azure growth. For a recent article outlining the Platform-as-a-Service market, Microsoft told me Windows Azure has “tens of thousands” of customers and that it had doubled its customers during the past 12 months.

But at least when it comes to Active Directory, which is processing 1 million logins every two minutes, this at least shows that Microsoft’s cloud can handle a ton of data flying around.

In a blog post today, Windows Azure GM Bill Hilf outlined a few other important details on Active Directory worth noting:

Windows Azure AD goes beyond the first party services delivered from Microsoft. It is being used by our customers and third party developers as well. By using Windows Azure AD we deliver cloud based authentication services for you at scale with fast response and, if desired, enable federation and synchronization with your existing on-premise Windows Server Active Directory (AD). This is important as Gartner estimates that 95% of organizations already have Active Directory deployed in their environment.

By connecting your existing Windows Server AD to Windows Azure AD you can manage a hybrid
environment that provides unified authentication and access management for both cloud and on-premise services and servers, eliminating the need to maintain new, independent cloud directories. In addition, Windows Azure AD supports multiple protocols and token types, therefore apps that use it can be accessed from any device that supports an industry standard web browser including smartphones, tablets, and multiple PC, desktop and server operating systems.

Clouds photo via Flickr/Nicholas A. Tonelli

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by investor Robert Abbott

In a field where handwriting notes on paper charts and managing large rooms filled with filing cabinets have been the accepted practices for decades, healthcare providers are being deluged by a perfect storm.

Not only do they have to grapple with implementing new technology and converting paper files to digital format, they are simultaneously dealing with how to secure this growing cache of electronic data while complying with complex corporate governance policies and federal mandates.

Despite these challenges, healthcare providers are finding a silver lining in secure cloud services that help them address the key technology, regulatory and privacy issues they face.

The market and legislated demands created by 900,000 healthcare providers migrating to electronic records has resulted in a $25 billion healthcare IT market, which is expected to grow more than 24 during 2012-2014, according to global market research company RNCOS.

But because healthcare is about a decade behind other industries in the adoption of IT technologies, this perfect storm is giving healthcare companies a chance to leapfrog into cloud-based solutions designed to solve their unique needs.

Cloud adoption is still in its infancy in healthcare with early adopters representing only about four percent of the market. However, there is great potential for cloud technology. According to a report from research firm Markets and Markets, the cloud computing market in healthcare is estimated to grow at 20.5 percent from 2012 to 2017. [At VentureBeat's CloudBeat conference, which begins tomorrow, healthcare is going to be a major theme; providers will discuss how they're adopting the cloud, and healthcare companies will explain how it's also helping them use novel "big data" strategies.]

Given these growth prospects, there is a sweet spot in this market for cloud service providers that can effectively combine IT expertise and experience dealing with the unique privacy, security and compliance demands of the healthcare market.

Of particular interest are cloud providers that offer automated solutions to replace traditional paper-based processes, enable better connectivity and communications between patients and their providers, and that support the entire healthcare supply chain.

Some of the leading cloud providers in healthcare today include CareCloud, ClearDATA Networks Inc., athenahealth, ADP AdvancedMD, PracticeFusion, RemitDATA, and TeraMedica Inc. For example, Baptist Health South Florida, the largest not-for-profit healthcare organization in the region, recently announced it is subsidizing CareCloud’s integrated electronic health record and practice management solution to more than 2,500 community-based physicians to improve patient care. While ClearDATA, for example, is providing its HealthDATA Cloud Platform to Dignity Health, the fifth largest hospital provider in the nation and the largest hospital system in California.

“By moving various healthcare infrastructure and applications to ClearDATA’s cloud platform, Dignity Health has been able to reduce its IT costs while increasing security and efficiency and greatly decreasing the time it takes to deploy a solution,” said Darin Brannan, ClearDATA’s president and CEO. “We also improve reliability – in terms of uptime and redundancy – and our state-of-the-art cloud systems provide greater performance over legacy hardware and networking architectures, which is typically not well-suited for the hospital’s growing data requirements.”

During CloudBeat 2012, on Nov. 28 at 10:15 a.m., Brannan and Scott Whyte, Dignity Health’s vice president of IT Connectivity, will join VentureBeat Executive Editor Dylan Tweney to talk in more depth about the challenges that healthcare companies face in their transition to electronic medical records and new IT solutions, and what they need to consider when adopting a cloud solution. During the session, they’ll also share more details about how Dignity Health has employed ClearDATA’s innovative solutions to strategically upgrade select components of its IT infrastructure, prepare for personalized care models, comply with mandates and ensure the security and privacy of patients’ electronic records. 

Robert Abbott is a general partner at Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), where he focuses on a wide variety of investment categories including mobile, cloud and IT infrastructure. NVP is an investor in ClearDATA and CareCloud. 

Navigating the storm image // Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google Compute Engine has added 36 server instances to its cloud catalog and cut prices by 5 percent in a bid to compete with Amazon Web Services, the largest provider of cloud services in the world.

It’s still early days for Google Compute Engine, which has received the bulk of its signups and support from Silicon Valley tech startups.

We’re sure incumbent players in the space such as Rackspace and Microsoft’s Azure have been paying close attention as Google slowly reveals more details about the service.

Compute Engine provides virtual machines developers can use for hosting and storage. Google has data centers from around the world, so it makes sense to use them as sites to store data. The cloud infrastructure is considered to be reliable for businesses as it’s made of the same data center servers that power Google search.

“Google certainly has established themselves as one of the few companies in the world with an army of developers that can build massive-scale solutions at low cost and a network of data centers to host it at,” said Forrester infrastructure and operations analyst Andrew Reichman in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Reichman predicted that a three-way battle of de facto standards would eventually erupt between “Amazon, Openstack/Rackspace/HP/Dell/IBM, and Google.”

Google’s previous entry level virtual server (3.75 GB of RAM and 420 GB of disk space) was priced at $0.145 an hour. It’s now $0.138 an hour. With the price reductions, cloud storage that was $0.12 for the first terabyte is now 20 percent to $0.095 per terabyte.

Google has been slowing building more muscle behind Compute Engine, its infrastructure-as-a-service offering since it was first announced during Google I/0 in June, 2012. Shailesh Rao, director of new products and solutions, told InformationWeek that the service will remain a limited preview for the time being.

Top image of Google IO Compute Engine demo // Sean Ludwig, VentureBeat 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Who would have thought that cloud computing would be the modern day equivalent of Robin Hood?

In a report published by the University of San Diego, Unlocking the Benefits of Cloud Computing for Emerging Economics, researchers found countless benefits in increased global access to cheap data storage and processors. The authors intimated that in the future, cloud computing technologies will be an economic stabilizer.

Cloud-based technologies have experienced explosive growth in recent years, and evidence suggests they they will continue to grow. By 2014 Gartner predicted that 60 percent of the world’s server workloads will take place on virtualized cloud servers.

It’s great news for vendors and businesses, but what does this mean for people in countries like India, Mexico and South Africa?

The researchers make the case that cloud computing is keeping the cost of storing information down, and is making broadband faster as more people can access it. In combination, these two factors will enable people in the low-and middle-income bracket to enter into the competitive global economy.

“This growth emerges from the Cloud’s economic advantages of scale and scope that lower costs, improve speed of service, expand operational flexibility for users and reduce risks in IT deployment,” the report explains.

If conditions are reasonable (broadband is sufficient and there is the freedom to operate data centers), there are five major implications for people in the developing world:

• The Cloud enables people to be more competitive in “higher value-added products because goods and services are becoming more ICT (information and communications technologies) intensive.” As ICT grows in intensity, the Cloud enables emerging economics to tap the economic gains.
• It’s vital to ensure that these countries can compete in the “knowledge economy“.
• The Cloud can stimulate the growth of small to medium sized businesses, and improve job creation. It’s beneficial for entrepreneurs as it reduces the cost and upfront investment in the necessary IT infrastructure.
• It enables governments to more effectively share and deliver information to citizens.
• There is a strong synergy between the growth of the cloud and the build-out of broadband networks.

With an eye to the future, the Cloud will improve transparency, and create a dialogue between governments and citizens. As a final step, the researchers recommend that these governments work with multiple stakeholders to improve access to information and create policies that will enable people-in-need to benefit from the Cloud.

(VentureBeat’s upcoming conference 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 and discuss the impact on the global economy).

Robin Hood image // Tumblr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post written by cloud analyst Paul Miller, who is content advisor for VentureBeat’s upcoming CloudBeat 2012 conference, November 28-29 in Redwood Shores, Calif.

Established by US space agency NASA and hosting company Rackspace in 2010, the OpenStack open-source cloud project has done a remarkable job of attracting attention to itself over two short years. The project now lists over 150 participating companies including major players like Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, and Yahoo, and consistently eclipses earlier open source projects such as Eucalyptus in media coverage of the cloud.

For a quick check of its growth in mind-share, check out the graph above, taken from Google Trends. It shows OpenStack’s dominance (the blue line) of search terms for open source cloud infrastructure projects.

OpenStack’s proposition is simple, with the same freely downloadable code powering big commercial cloud data centers run by Rackspace, Hewlett Packard, and others. Customers, the argument goes, are therefore able to easily move their applications from one provider to another without having to alter their own programs. They can even download a copy of OpenStack to run inside their own data center as well, which (in principle) makes it feasible to move computing jobs from a private data center to commercial clouds and back again, at will.

For some customers, this portability might be critical to the way they run their IT. For many (most?), it’s simply an insurance policy; a comforting demonstration that they can move, should they ever need to.

The proposition is simple, and it is compelling. The roster of participating names is a veritable who’s who of IT infrastructure. But the OpenStack story has not been without its hiccups:

• Throughout much of 2011, grumbling about the degree of control exerted by Rackspace persisted. In October, 2011, Rackspace announced plans to pass control to an independent Foundation; a process that only completed this summer;
• In April of this year, long-time OpenStack supporter Citrix took the CloudStack software it gained through acquisition of cloud.com in 2011, and submitted it to the Apache Software Foundation as a new (competing?) open source project. The first fruits of that project were released earlier this month. Citrix remains a ‘supporter’ of the OpenStack project;
• In June, a blog post by NASA CIO Linda Cureton sparked a flurry of speculation, as pundits claimed NASA was ‘ditching’ OpenStack in favor of Amazon and Microsoft’s Windows Azure. The reality, in which a large and complex organization sensibly continued using a range of different tools for a plethora of different purposes was clearly too mundane to report;
• And, despite already powering services for which customers are willing to pay, other pundits continue to complain that the code is developing too slowly, and neither robust nor complete enough for mainstream adoption.

Not the only game in town

OpenStack, however, is far from alone in providing cloud infrastructure. E-commerce behemoth Amazon remains the dominant provider of a public cloud solution, letting customers rent computing capacity in Amazon’s global network of data centers by the hour with a credit card.

Telecom giants such as AT&T and France’s SFR are also entering the market, as are established technology players from Dell and HP to Google and Microsoft.

Virtualization specialist VMware is increasingly keen to help its existing customers transform their corporate data centers into mini clouds, powered (of course) by VMware’s software.

Finally, smaller local entrants are increasingly offering services of their own, typically differentiated by geography, support, or nuances of configuration. These solutions are often proprietary or depend upon extensive modifications to open source foundations, and there are certainly plenty of open source pieces to choose from.

Those in need of some open source cloud infrastructure aren’t limited to OpenStack; they could also turn to Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, CloudStack, and others.

Each of these has its merits, and each is worth exploring further for its own particular story. OpenNebula, for example, emerged from a European research project and is now doing rather well in deployments both inside Europe and overseas.

Eucalyptus also emerged from academic research, this time at UC Santa Barbara. Designed to emulate Amazon capabilities using computers inside any data center, Eucalyptus has for years presented itself as a logical adjunct to Amazon usage. With OpenStack now promising the whole package (public and private clouds, running exactly the same code) there were many who presumed that Eucalyptus’ partial solution would struggle. I was amongst them but, despite continuing to attract less media attention, Eucalyptus continues to quietly attract paying customers. An agreement with Amazon earlier this year also made it easier for Eucalyptus to bill their product as the natural partner to Amazon’s offerings.

And if OpenStack ever gains sufficient marketshare to become a credible threat? The current market leader, Amazon, surely has a very simple response. The company will simply buy (or replicate) Eucalyptus, not in order to support innumerable private clouds for ever, but to smooth the path and drag reluctant corporate server-huggers ever closer to Amazon’s all-consuming data centers.

OpenStack certainly continues to attract the bulk of the media coverage for open-source cloud computing, and the project is also now beginning to deliver tangible deployments. But there is still plenty of room for other open source offerings to grow and differentiate.

Want to learn more? Open versus closed cloud computing is one of the six major themes of CloudBeat 2012, VentureBeat’s upcoming enterprise conference, November 28-29. With a stellar roster of speakers like Chris Kemp (co-founder of OpenStack whilst CTO at NASA), Chris Pinkham (responsible for the initial development of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud whilst working at Amazon), Lew Tucker (responsible for the development of Sun’s cloud computing offering, and now vice-chair of the OpenStack Foundation), we’ll have plenty of expertise and insight available to attendees. What, we shall ask them, are the merits of the various ‘open’ clouds, and how do they stack up against today’s 800-pound gorilla (Amazon, of course), or the bold ambitions and deep pockets of relative newcomers such as Google? Is there enough room for everyone? Come to CloudBeat and find out.