Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Elastic cloud infrastructure startup Cloudscaling has raised $10 million in its second round of funding so it can keep growing at a quick clip and innovating its cloud technology.

San Francisco-based Cloudscaling was founded in 2006 and claims to be “the leader in elastic cloud infrastructure.” Its core product is the Open Cloud System, an OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure application that can give companies the same benefits of cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Cloudscaling’s solution is deployable in a client’s data center under an IT team’s control. It can also run its solution on Amazon and Google’s public clouds if a customer wants to do so.

In April, Cloudscaling announced version 2.5 of Open Cloud System. Some of its newest customer wins include LivingSocial, EVault, Ubisoft, and DataFort.

The new funding was provided by prior investor Trinity Ventures and new investors Juniper Networks and Seagate. Previously, Cloudscaling raised $4 million back in Sept. 2011.

“This financing round caps a tremendous year of momentum for the company,” Cloudscaling CEO Michael Grant said in a statement. “That momentum affirms the voice of the market, clearly stating that customers want more than OpenStack. They want an on-premise, OpenStack-based private or public cloud turnkey system solution that delivers architectural and behavioral fidelity with major public clouds like Amazon Web Services. Our Open Cloud System product delivers on that need to enable hybrid cloud application deployments that span private and public cloud services.”

Clouds photo via Alejandro Erickson/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Leading corporate performance management (CPM) company Adaptive Planning has raised a massive $45 million in its fourth and final round of funding with a goal to further dominate the CPM space, the business said Tuesday.

Adaptive Planning offers a suite of budgeting, planning, forecasting, and data discovery software in the cloud. Its software works for small businesses all the way up to large enterprises, which now represent 25 percent of its business. The company had 1,500 customers at the end of 2012 and it estimates it will have 2,000 customers at the end of this year. Big name customers come from all kinds of industries including Box, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Jive Software, NBC News, Nissan, Red Hat, Toyota, and Zipcar.

“We address all of the CPM market — and it’s a huge market,” Adaptive Planning CEO John Herr told VentureBeat. “Most of our new customers move to us from Excel. We help customers upgrade from ‘Excel hell’ to Adaptive.”

Adaptive Planning competes with solutions from Oracle, IBM, and SAP, but its software-as-a-service has made it a leader in its space. And now the company will have more cash to hire more employees, further refine its software, and create more partnerships with resellers.

That last point is particularly important for the company, as it already has a strong reseller network of more than 400 “channel partners.” These partners help sell the product to more businesses and give it better access to international customers. One such partner is NetSuite, which offers Adaptive-based Financial Planning service that is integrated with NetSuite’s software.

The huge new funding round was led by new investor Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), with participation by existing investors ONSET Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, RBC Venture Partners, Cardinal Venture Capital, and Monitor Ventures. BVP partner Byron Deeter will join the company’s board.

“The business is on fire and this investment is a strong endorsement of what we’re about,” Herr said. “Many BVP companies are also customers of Adaptive.”

Including the new round, Adaptive Planning has raised about $100 million to date, including a $22 million round a little over a year ago.

Herr said this will be the last round of venture capital funds raised for the company and that it will explore the option of going public “in the next couple years.” He also indicated other “exit opportunities” were on the table. “We’re open to all positive outcomes,” Herr said.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Adaptive Planning was founded in 2003 and has 200 employees. Herr said the company aims to double its number of employees in the next 12 to 18 months.

Businessman with tablet via ollyy/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For hotels, a technology glitch can result in unhappy tourists and millions in lost revenue.

Hotel Ninjas, a Barcelona-based startup with a vision to be the Salesforce.com for the hospitality industry, is launching this week. Cofounder Avi Meir said he was inspired to start the company after realizing that most hotels still relied on “expensive, outdated, server-based technology.”

HotelNinjas cofounder Avi Meir

Hotel Ninjas offers property management and channel management tools (through an integration with WuBook), a customer relationship management service, and a booking engine for hotel websites. Meir says 30 hotels are lined up and are “ready to make the switch.” The company is charging its first customers $4-9 per room on a month-to-month basis.

Hotels can sign up directly or via AppExchange, Salesforce’s app marketplace. Meir told me he recently made a trip to Salesforce’s European headquarters to form a partnership with the cloud giant. He claims the startup is the first hotel technology provider developed on top of Salesforce’s platform as a service offering Force.com.

Hotel Ninjas was founded in September 2012, and has grown to seven employees. Meir is the former vice president of product at BudgetPlaces.com, an online travel agency.

To continue its momentum, the company will need to win over customers from more established vendors in the space, including Micros.com’s Opera Property Management software and Medallia.

But Meir believes that Hotel Ninjas has an edge over its competition with its customizable CRM and integration with hotel booking websites. “At the end of the day, the one thing that matters to hotel owners is how they can increase occupancy and revenue,” he said.

The founders have poured their own money into the startup, buttressed by grants from the Spanish government. In total, they have raised about $100,000.

Top image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google cloud infrastructure service Compute Engine is now open to all developers who want to use it, the search giant announced today.

Compute Engine was first announced about a year ago and aims to compete with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, Joyent, and other infrastructure-as-a-service providers. Back in April, Google opened up Compute Engine to many more developers and lowered prices by 4 percent.

On top of opening it up for all potential users, Compute Engine has also been updated with the following new features:

• Subhour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a 10-minute minimum, so you don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use.

• Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads.

• Advanced Routing features help you create gateways and VPN servers and enable you to build applications that span your local network and Google’s cloud.

• Large persistent disks support up to 10TBs per volume, which translates to 10 times the industry standard

More Google cloud updates

App Engine, Google’s platform-as-a-service for developers, has also been updated with PHP runtime. PHP is one of the most popular web programming languages, so it’s great to include that in App Engine for all the PHP developers out there.

Google also used today to announce a new product called Google Cloud Datastore. It is a standalone NoSQL-based service for storing non-relational data. Google says the app includes automatic scalability, high availability, ACID transactions, SQL-like queries, indexes and more.

Popular expense report startup Expensify has introduced invoicing and billing clients from inside its cloud-based dashboard, the company said today.

Expensify was founded in May 2008 with the promise of offering “expense reports that don’t suck.” It’s main mission is to make the expense report and reimbursement process easier for companies with relatively simple web, iOS, and Android apps. The company has attracted 1.4 million users from more than 200,000 companies to date.

Expensify CEO David Barrett told VentureBeat that this is a “major milestone” for the company because it is the first time it has launched a feature not directly related to expense reporting.

The new feature will compete directly with Freshbooks and Bill.com, two companies known for cloud-based billing. What makes the new feature so handy is that Expensify users can now take expense reports you have created or been submitted to you and can re-bill them as an invoice to clients.

If clients already use Expensify, payment options for invoices and bills are the same as the ones offered for expense reports, including ACH Direct Deposit, PayPal, and even Bitcoin.

“Expensify’s addition of invoicing and bill processing might seem odd to an outsider,” Barrett said via email. “But inside the industry, we’re all jockeying for advantage in a bigger long-term game: becoming the next Intuit.”

San Francisco-based Expensify has raised $6.7 million in funding from investors including Hillsven Capital, Baseline Ventures, SV Angel, and Travis Kalanick.

Image via Expensify

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Hot database-as-a-service startup Cloudant has raised $12 million in its second round of funding, the company announced today.

Boston-based Cloudant was initially founded in Cambridge, Mas. in 2008 by three MIT physicists. The team struggled to move around multi-petabyte data sets and analyze those data sets wherever they went. So they ended up creating what would become Cloudant.

Cloudant offers a highly scalable database-as-a-service that makes it possible to store, access, and analyze your operational data in the cloud. In the layers of the cloud, Cloudant becomes a “data layer” that can be run on top of most infrastructure-as-a-service providers, including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, and Joyent.

Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle told VentureBeat that this “agnostic” approach to infrastructure deployment separates it from its biggest competitor — Amazon database services. “We believe in not having vendor lock in,” Schoettle said.

Cloudant has attracted some big-name customers with its approach, including Samsung, Microsoft, Adobe, Nokia, Salesforce, Expedia, Zynga, and Flurry.

The new funding was led by Devonshire Investors, Rackspace Hosting, and Toba Capital, with participation by current investors Avalon Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. Including the new round, Cloudant has raised $16 million to date.

“One of the reasons we let Rackspace invest is because of their committment to customer service,” Schoettle said. “We also believe in that.”

In addition to funding, the company has opened up a new office in San Francisco, which joins the Boston HQ and offices in Seattle, the U.K., and South Korea. In the next 90 days, Schoettle said the company will open another office in Hong Kong.

Money in the clouds via Andy Dean Photography/Shutterstock

Smartphone notification startup Urban Airship has launched a new app in the add-on marketplace of platform-as-a-service provider Heroku, a move to give PaaS developers better access to push messaging solutions.

Heroku’s add-on marketplace allows developers to add more capabilities to their app development kits with a single click. At the end of 2012, the add-on marketplace had attracted more than 4 million installs. Big companies that offer add-on apps include Amazon RDS, Cloudant, New Relic, SendGrid, and Zencoder. Now Urban Airship joins the bunch.

The new add-on makes it so developers can integrate Urban Airship’s push messaging services inside Heroku’s environment. Ideally, devs will be able to add push messaging to the web and mobile apps they produce using Heroku.

“A large percent of Heroku’s customers are building mobile apps,” said Heroku CMO Matt Trifiro said in a statement. “Urban Airship in our Add-On Marketplace is an important step in offering best-in-class engagement capabilities to help ensure thriving and vibrant apps.”

Portland-based Urban Airship has raised $46.6 million in funding to date from investors including August Capital, Foundry Group, Intel Capital, True Ventures, Verizon, and Salesforce. Current customers include CBS Interactive, ESPN, Groupon, Walgreens, and Warner Bros.

Top photo via Urban Airship

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple now has more than 300 million people using its iCloud storage and syncing service, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said today on its Q2 2013 earnings call.

During its last quarterly earnings report, Apple announced that it had 250 million iCloud users. So more than 50 million have been added since that time, an increase of 20 percent in just three months.

iCloud is Apple’s cloud service that stores and syncs data like photos, songs, calendars, and email across iPhones, iPads, iPods, and PCs. The service has 27 percent market share among cloud storage services, and more people use it than Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Player, and Google Drive, according to a recent Strategy Analytics report.

While the service is supposed to on 24/7 to seamlessly connect your devices, iCloud suffered an outage this morning and has been hit by several outages in the past few weeks as well.

iCloud image via iCloud.com

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon’s cloud services arm is a giant that towers almost all competitors offering similar services. It looks like that reputation will continue to stick with the announcement that Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is now storing two trillion objects in the cloud.

S3 is used by many developers and companies for scalable and relatively cheap cloud infrastructure. Last June, Amazon announced that S3 had hit one trillion objects stored. That was a big milestone at the time. And now it has doubled that amount in less than a year.

“I’m pleased to announce that there are now more than 2 trillion (2 x 1012) objects stored in Amazon S3 and that the service is regularly peaking at over 1.1 million requests per second,” Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, wrote in a blog post today. “It took us six years to grow to one trillion stored objects, and less than a year to double that number.”

While Amazon has a big lead in the cloud infrastructure space, it faces a lot of heavy competition, especially from Rackspace, Microsoft, Google, and SoftLayer. This week, Microsoft opened up its Azure infrastructure product in general availability, and it made the commitment to match Amazon’s prices on services such as compute, storage, and bandwidth.

Photo credit: Jeff Attaway/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has opened up cloud infrastructure service Compute Engine to more customers while also lowering prices and adding several new features, the company said today in a blog post.

Amazon currently holds the title for largest infrastructure-as-a-service provider with Amazon Web Services, with Rackspace firmly in second place. But Google has a lot of cash and a lot of servers, both of which could help it force its way into the infrastructure-as-a-service sector — much like Microsoft is doing with Azure.

Google announced Compute Engine back in June, but it has limited its widespread availability so far. Today’s announcement makes it so any developer who buys Google’s $400 per month gold support package will now have access to it.

The search giant also lowered all Compute Engine pricing by 4 percent. In the United States, pricing starts at $0.132 per hour for its smallest virtual machine and tops out at $1.221 per hour its most powerful high-memory virtual machine. (Prices in Europe are a bit higher.)

Google says that it has also added the following features to Compute Engine:

• The option to boot from persistent disks mounted as the root file system, persistent disk snapshots, the capability to checkpoint and restore the contents of network resident persistent disks on demand, and the capability to attach and detach persistent disks from running instances.

• An improved administration console, the Google Cloud Console (preview), which allows you to administer all your Google Cloud Platform services via a unified interface.

• Five new instance type families (diskless versions of our standard instance types, plus diskful and diskless versions of high-memory and high-CPU configurations), with 16 new instance types.

• Two new supported zones in Europe, which provide lower latency and higher performance for our European customers. We’ve also made it easy to migrate virtual machine instances from one zone to another via an enhancement to our gcutil command line tool.

• An enhanced metadata server, with the ability to support recursive queries, blocking gets and selectable response formats, along with support for updating virtual machine tags and metadata on running instances (which enables dynamic reconfiguration scenarios).

Clouds photo via Nicholas_T/Flickr

Ever had to collect thousands of applications and whittle them down to find the best hundred candidates? Universities and businesses do it all the time, and it’s not an easy task.

New York and Cleveland-based DecisionDesk wants to change that. The company takes the application and selection process into the cloud, promising to make the lives of administrators a lot less stressful. And it just raised $1.75 million in new funding to keep innovating.

Here’s how it used to work: Let’s say you are a music program for a major university. You get hundreds (or maybe thousands) of video auditions when students are applying to your program. Employees at the college have to review all of these materials to select the right candidates. But most of the software used to process these materials is on-premise, so the review process is not easy to manage among remote and traveling employees.

DecisionDesk skirts all of those conventions by streamlining the process and offering its software in the cloud, making it accessible from any browser and on mobile devices through HTML5. On the back-end, everything runs on Amazon Web Services. To date, the company has processed more than 56,000 applicants, more than 200,000 files, and about 100,000 reviews.

“This opportunity presented itself when we looked at the legacy providers in the market,” DecisionDesk CEO John Knific told VentureBeat. “Some of these services aren’t even online and require you to locally store content. People are still sending DVDs and cassette tapes to these programs.”

Not only does DecisionDesk’s software streamline the application process, but it also does advanced filtering. This way, if a candidate has a major red flag (like they don’t actually play an instrument), they can be taken out of the reviewing process faster.

“We’re allowing the entire application and decision-making process happen in one product,” Knific said. “There’s big savings in time and money.”

Knific said the average amount of time saved on each application is two hours. The company’s biggest clients have as many as 5,000 applicants for a single program, which means up to 10,000 hours can be saved with each batch of applicants.

DecisionDesk is already working with a number of universities and prestigious programs, including the University of Michigan, University of Southern California, Northwestern University, Carnegie Hall, and the Fulbright Scholars Program. But much like hot research startup Qualtrics, DecisionDesk is building its roots in academia and then plans to branch out to bigger companies.

“We’d like to disrupt other areas that focus on tryouts and auditions,” Knific said. “In theory, we could replace casting agencies. We’d also like to get into HR.”

To help with its mission of making the application process easier, the company has raised new funds, which come in two parts. DecisionDesk took $1 million in capital from angel investors in Ohio and New York, led by North Coast Angel Fund. DecisionDesk also scored a $750,000 loan from the state of Ohio, called an “Innovation Ohio Fund Loan.” Combined with $400,000 in prior seed funds, the company has raised $2.15 million in funding to date.

The new funding will go toward expanding its 15-employee team and working on with new products. The company says it is discussing future funding with several VC firms.

Check out the video below for more.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise cloud software giant Salesforce has updated its iOS and Android versions of Chatter — the company’s business social networking and collaboration service — with critical new features to match their browser counterpart, the company said today.

“Companies are social at their core, and Chatter can be the heart of that,” Michael Peachey, Salesforce’s senior director of solutions marketing, told VentureBeat. “Legacy CRM software isn’t social or mobile. This next generation of Chatter sets the bar for mobile and social CRM.”

Chatter competes with Microsoft’s Yammer, Jive Software, Moxie Software, and Tibbr to help big companies with social networking and collaboration. Salesforce claims Chatter is the backbone for nearly 200,000 active business social networks. Chatter helps Salesforce compete in social, but you can’t really own that arena now unless you have robust mobile apps to support it.

Today’s update sees the Chatter’s mobile apps updated to help with Salesforce’s push to own social and mobile and to be a “customer company.” The Chatter applications have received two major updates, so now you can:

• Post and edit media on the go from the new “publisher” including files, photos, polls, tasks, thanks, and more.
• Access and edit customer information from the Salesforce platform including customer accounts, campaigns, cases, leads, and more

“This makes it so you can see all the context of the account and your key customer data in one place,” Peachey said. “You want to take action in less than 60 seconds, and we’re making that happen.”

Both features seem important to making Chatter more powerful on mobile devices. The “publisher” especially is critical because lets you post polls for your colleagues or photos of whatever you can take with your iPhone or Android device. These sort of things are important for quick collaboration among mobile employees.

While Salesforce does seem to have a strong mobile push as of late, it only seems to care about equipping iPhones, iPads, and Android phones with its tools. Peachy said the company has not yet committed itself to creating Chatter applications for Android tablets, Windows Phone, Windows RT, or Windows 8.

“Our customers aren’t asking us for that today,” Peachey said.

Top photo via Salesforce

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Fusion-io, a leader in solid-state storage devices for high-volume datacenters, has acquired ID7, a maker of a Linux-based software-defined storage subsystem.

ID7′s signature product is an open-source project called SCST, the Generic SCSI Target Subsystem for Linux (we’re not quite sure how that results in the acronym SCST, but that’s how they do it). Fusion-io has already renamed ID7 as Fusion-io ID7, and affirmed its ongoing commitment to open source.

“This endeavor matches an overwhelming trend in the industry towards open industry standard server systems, whereby customers can choose the hardware platforms that best suit their needs and couple them with the most capable software to maximize their use,” Fusion-io’s blog post states. A bit further on, it adds, “Fusion-io enthusiastically supports open source, and we will continue to encourage the open principles that have made ID7 and SCST successful, including maintaining an open source version of SCST.”

ID7 chief technical officer and co-founder Mark Klarzynski published his own blog post today as well. It’s sort of a mash note to Fusion-io and its “laser-point focus aimed straight at the user.”

In addition, the move toward software-defined storage is an industry trend, with enterprise vendors including Nexenta, Scality, and SwiftStack attracting investments to pursue product development in this sphere. It’s symptomatic of a larger shift away from big, inflexible storage area networks (and data center hardware more broadly) and towards more flexible, software-defined computing resources that companies and data center providers can allocate as needed, in real time, without worrying about their physical locations, specific wiring, or underlying hardware.

The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Via ZDNet

Photo: Random Fusion-io product shot. 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google is working to release a new note-taking app called Keep and it could seriously challenge Evernote, the king of note-taking applications.

On Sunday, Google appears to have accidentally released Keep and then immediately pulled it, according to Android Police. The app was available at “https://drive.google.com/keep/” but it was taken down quickly. This official Keep image is still live.

Based on accounts by those who used Keep briefly, the app is a lot like Google Notebook used to be. It offers a list of notes and tools to color-code your notes, make checklists, and save important photos. An Android app is apparently also in the works.

Evernote is the top note-taking app, and it has more than 45 million users. It recently started offering services for businesses, and it will likely IPO in 2015 or 2016. But Google Keep could steal some users away from Evernote because it is conveniently part of the Google ecosystem and Google Apps.

Check out a few photos of Google Keep captured by Android Police below.

Google Keep logo via Google

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise behemoths EMC and IBM are taking a close look at buying major infrastructure-as-a-service provider SoftLayer in a deal that could be worth more than $2 billion, Reuters reports.

Dallas-based SoftLayer closely competes with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and others to help companies with their IaaS needs. In the cloud space, SoftLayer’s name doesn’t get thrown around like Amazon and Rackspace, but it is a popular choice for IaaS and has more than 25,000 small-to-huge customers, including AT&T, SendGrid, Citrix, and Path. It has 13 data centers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia and has raised $30 million in venture capital to date.

The fact that both EMC and IBM are showing interest in buying SoftLayer shows that the company has been successful in recruiting customers to use its public cloud over so many other choices.

IBM especially is interesting since it already offers its own cloud infrastructure products. Perhaps this means IBM wants SoftLayer’s data centers and tech to bolster its efforts.

Storage giant EMC, however, could be looking at SoftLayer to combine with the efforts of cloud services giant VMware, which it owns a majority stake of. EMC’s latest big move is a joint spin-off with VMware called The Pivotal Initiative, which focuses on “big data” and data processing services.

Clouds photo via Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

NEW YORK — It’s easy to make a lot of cheesy puns about web performance startup CloudFlare and its success — “it’s burning,” “it’s blazing,” “it’s hot,” “it’s on fire and no one can put it out.” But maybe the company deserves a little hyperbole, thanks to some surprising new stats from CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince.

Prince said today at the F.ounders conference in New York City that the company is now signing up 3,500 new customers each day — despite the fact that it had a crippling outage two weeks ago that knocked off many sites around the web including Wikileaks, 4Chan, and some U.S. government sites.

“The [new customer] rate keeps growing and growing and growing,” he told VentureBeat after a panel with other enterprise-focused startups. “There’s lots of things we could do to juice growth. We could just email our customers and say, ‘You’ve signed up one site, do you have another one? Sign that one up too.’ We’ve never done that because our ops guys tell us if we double the rate, we’re going to have problems because we have to build capacity.”

San Francisco-based CloudFlare’s outage happened about two weeks ago after a bug in Juniper’s router software took down all of the routers in CloudFlare’s 23 data centers. The routers needed to be manually reset to bring back CloudFlare’s service and all the web sites connected to the service. CloudFlare sites were down between 20 minutes and an hour, and the company refunded money.

“It was really painful,” Prince said. “But sometimes an organization, in order to change and get better, has to experience pain.”

The irony is that CloudFlare offers web performance optimization and security for “more than a million customers,” according to Prince. If hackers try to launch a denial-of-service attack on a website, CloudFlare acts as a line of defense so the site doesn’t go down. But when CloudFlare’s entire system fails (it doesn’t happen often), all the sites using CloudFlare go dark.

While that could scare a lot of folks away, Prince says that CloudFlare lost “very few” customers and that more companies than ever are still signing up. Prince attributes the steady stream of business still coming in to two major things. First, the company was transparent about the problem and had a detailed blog post on its site in a matter of hours explaining what happened.

“It’s not the crime that kills you, it’s the cover up,” Prince said. “So we were incredibly transparent with what happened. The next few days were enormously high sign-up days. And you read the comments on the blog with people saying, ‘We trust you more.’”

Two, word-of-mouth is still really strong among satisfied customers.

“As our customers are more successful, there’s a natural growth,” Prince said. “As they are successful, they tell other people so that we have this really high Net Promoter Score, which then feeds back and creates a natural growth.”

Another surprising fact that makes CloudFlare’s new customer signups almost unbelievable: The company doesn’t have a sales team and has no intention of adding one now because it already takes a lot of work to build out new capacity.

“If we doubled in size tomorrow, it would still work, but if we doubled again, it wouldn’t work,” Prince said.

CloudFlare has raised about $22 million in funding to date from New Enterprise Associates, Venrock, and Pelion Venture Partners.

Matthew Prince photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VMware picked an unusually busy day (new pope, new Android head, new Kickstarter record) to dump a lot of high-level cloud announcements in the laps of tech reporters everywhere. The company has some big things in the works, including an upcoming public cloud that will challenge Amazon and a new focus on software-defined data centers.

Let’s dig into the news dump.

Public cloud to take on Amazon and Rackspace

First up, VMware vaguely announced that it will be offering a stand-alone public cloud from its newly formed “Hybrid Cloud Services” business unit. This public cloud will challenge all the big dogs offering infrastrcture-as-a-service — Amazon, Rackspace, IBM, HP, SoftLayer, Google, Microsoft, and more — and it will launch in the second quarter of 2013.

Forrester analyst James Staten, who was pre-briefed on the announcement, writes about the decision in a blog post:

Sometimes you can only coax a reluctant partner and I&O customer community for so long before you feel you have to take matters into your own hands. That is exactly what VMware has decided to do, to become relevant in the cloud platforms space. The hypervisor pioneer unveiled vCloud Hybrid Service to investors today in what is more a statement of intention than a true unveiling.

VMware’s public cloud service – yep, a full public IaaS cloud meant to compete with Amazon Web Service, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, HP Cloud, Rackspace and others – won’t be fully unveiled until Q2 2013, so much of the details about the service remain under wraps. VMware hired the former president for Savvis Cloud, Bill Fathers, to run this new offering and said it was a top three initiative for the company and thus would be getting, “the level of investment appropriate to that priority and to capitalize on a $14B market opportunity,” according to Matthew Lodge, VP of Cloud Services Product Marketing and Management for VMware who spoke to us Tuesday about the pending announcement.

VMware said its public cloud will be aimed at its existing customer base and sold through its existing VAR and SI channel. This explains CEO Gelsinger’s strong comments from last month’s Partner Exchange — it wasn’t public clouds he was worried about but non-VMware public clouds. But for this channel fulfillment strategy to come true, its partners will have to get with the cloud program too and like the I&O clients they serve, many don’t see more revenue at the end of the public cloud rainbow. And most channel partners don’t have the skills or the trust level to help their I&O clients transition from static virtualization to cloud – that’s a culture and career path change more than a product they can sell them. This requires consulting skills and real cloud experience and most VMware partners don’t have either.

Software-defined data centers

VMware also said today that it will merge its “VMware vCloud Networking and Security” product line with the “Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP)” into one product family called “VMware NSX.” VMware paid more than $1 billion to buy Nicira in July 2012 for its software-defined networking potential, so here we are seeing that move in action.

There is some skepticism that software-defined data centers are overhyped, but we’re willing to let VMware put itself out there and see what it is able to do on this front.

The company explained the decision in this excerpt from a lengthy blog post:

VMware NSX will be the world’s leading network and security virtualization platform providing a full-service, programmatic, and mobile virtual network for virtual machines, deployed on top of any general purpose IP network hardware. The VMware NSX platform brings together the best of Nicira NVP and VMware vCloud Network and Security (vCNS) into one unified platform. VMware NSX exposes a complete suite of simplified logical networking elements and services including logical switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPN, QoS, monitoring, and security; arranged in any topology with isolation and multi-tenancy through programmable APIs – deployed on top of any physical IP network fabric, resident with any compute hypervisor, connecting to any external network, and consumed by any cloud management platform (e.g. vCloud, OpenStack, CloudStack).

The Pivotal Initiative is a go

Finally, the VMware and EMC spin-off The Pivotal Initiative has become official.

The Pivotal Initiative is led by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz. It is 69 percent owned by EMC and 31 percent owned by VMware and focuses on “big data” and data processing initiatives. The new company has employees and technology from EMC’s Pivotal Labs and Greenplum units and from VMware’s Cloud Foundry, Spring, and Cetas.

EMC CEO and Chairman Joe Tucci believes The Pivotal Initiative will go public in the future, and Martiz has stated it will likely be a $1 billion business in five years.

Enterprise software titan Oracle has agreed to acquire Nimbula — a cloud infrastructure management software startup that was founded by former Amazon Web Services gurus — for an undisclosed amount.

Nimbula dubs itself the “Cloud Operating System company” and lets corporate customers manage their cloud assets (private, public, and hybrid) from one dashboard. It was started by Amazon EC2 veterans Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon.

Pinkham spoke at both of CloudBeat events, in 2011 and 2012, where we showcase emerging disruptive cloud technology. VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall interviewed Pinkham two years ago. It was already clear then the executive was ambitious, targeting what he saw as a $4 billion market, and cutting out “middlemen” like VMware, Citrix and EMC.

“Nimbula’s technology helps companies manage infrastructure resources to deliver service, quality, and availability, as well as workloads in private and hybrid cloud environments,” Oracle said in a small announcement. “Nimbula’s product is complementary to Oracle and is expected to be integrated with Oracle’s cloud offerings.”

Oracle expects the Nimbula transaction to close in the first half of 2013. Other details including the price tag on the deal were not disclosed.

Today’s deal adds to the many acquisitions Oracle has sought in the past year. A month ago, Oracle announced its intent to buy networking technology company Acme Packet for $2.1 billion. And in 2012, Oracle announced agreements to purchase 11 companies, including high-profile buys of Taleo, Eloqua, Vitrue, and Skire.

Oracle HQ photo via Flickr

Web-performance monitoring startup Catchpoint Systems has raised $3.2 million in new funding that will help it better keep an eye on companies’ web services, APIs, DNS, and more.

New York-based Catchpoint was founded in 2008, and its four co-founders all came from web advertising giant Doubleclick after Google acquired it in March 2008. Its service monitors the performance and reliability of various online systems, and it claims to have run nearly three billion tests for more than 100 customers in 2012.

“Think of us sort of like the fire department,” Catchpoint CEO Mehdi Daoudi told VentureBeat. “We don’t put out the fire, but customers use us to detect smoke in the building, and we tell them the right place to put the hose.”

Catchpoint’s biggest competition comes from Compuware-owned Gomez and Keynote Systems. But interestingly enough, Imad Mouline, the former CTO of Gomez and current CTO of Everbridge, is a Catchpoint customer.

“Having the former CTO of Gomez as a customer is a testament to the quality of what we’re providing,” Daoudi said.

The new round of funding was led by Battery Ventures. Prior to today’s infusion, Catchpoint had raised $1.9 million, bringing its new total to $5.1 million. The new funds will go toward hiring new employees, shoring up its marketing efforts, and “three to four” capital-intensive projects.

Catchpoint has 13 employees now, but Daoudi believes the company will be at “20 to 24″ people by the end of this year — “if we can find them.”

Young businessman on a ladder in the clouds via ollyy/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Private platform-as-a-service provider Apprenda is one the strangest players in the quickly growing PaaS space. Not only is the company headquartered in Albany, N.Y., but to date it has only supported one language — .NET — while other PaaS vendors tout support for many.

Apprenda’s big sell is that it’s specifically looking to help developers in the enterprise. Devs that are working for banks, insurance companies, and health care organizations have a lot of constraints and compliance hoops they must jump through, but Apprenda wants to be there to speed up the amount of time it takes to develop and deploy an app. Until now, it has only served developers building .NET apps.

But today, Apprenda is finally jumping in with a second language by supporting Java. In doing so, the company claims it will support “90 percent” of enterprise app development that would be in use on a PaaS.

“Ninety percent of the app portfolio in the enterprise is .NET and Java,” Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller told VentureBeat. “It’s not the languages your support, it’s the depth of support it offers you.”

Apprenda sets itself apart from other big-name PaaS providers like Salesforce’s Heroku and Google App Engine, because its software runs in the private cloud while most of the other big dogs are in the public cloud. Since companies like banks and health care providers almost always want to use private cloud solutions, this gives Apprenda access to the huge IT spend that comes from enterprises.

Schuller says the only real competition Apprenda has is VMWare’s Cloud Foundry. But he says Cloud Foundry has alienated some in the PaaS ecosystem by offering a service that competes with key technology partners.

Apprenda is also using today to announce a huge new customer — JP Morgan Chase. Apprenda’s software is being used by JPMorgan to host and get better control over 2,000 apps, creating what it claims is the “largest private PaaS in the world.” That’s a pretty hefty achievement for the PaaS sector.

Schuller also noted that “nine out of 20″ of the biggest banks in the world are running or testing Apprenda.

Apprenda has “dozens” of customers including Diebold and Symantec and has 42 employees. It has raised $15 million in funding to date from Ignition Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and High Peaks Venture Partners. The company has a second office in New York City, and it plans to eventually expand into Europe.

Check out a video outlining Apprenda’s core features below.

Sinclair Schuller via Apprenda

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage startup SugarSync has launched its smart redesign out of beta so all of its customers — and potential new ones — can give it a spin.

As we wrote back in November when the redesign hit beta, the new design simplifies the experience and adds in new features like searching across all devices you have SugarSync installed on and a sharing tab to send files to your contacts more easily. You can download the new apps for Windows, Mac, and other platforms here.

“Our business is growing quickly, and we have many millions of customers,” SugarSync CEO Laura Yecies told VentureBeat in November. “The market has grown more competitive, but the larger players are actually educating people about the cloud. And eventually, many of those people choose SugarSync.”

The only issue I see when it comes to SugarSync’s growth opportunity is that Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive (maybe even business-focused Box) have already collected quite a few users. Migration from one cloud storage service to another isn’t smooth, and those companies don’t really want it to be. So no matter how nice SugarSync’s interface is, it will be hard to get folks to switch.

Which means SugarSync’s best chance of success is attracting new users. One big thing it claims that drives new users is offering storage in exchange for getting more users to sign up. Another thing: SugarSync has done a great job with partnerships and counts Samsung, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and SanDisk as partners that offer SugarSync preloaded on some devices. But is that enough to carve out a decent chunk of the market?

San Mateo, Calif.-based SugarSync was founded in 2008 and has raised around $60 million in funding from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ORIX Venture Finance, and Sigma Partners.

Check out the video and screenshots below for more on how SugarSync 2.0 looks and feels:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Note-taking service Evernote has named a new chief operating officer and launched its Evernote Business product in another 26 countries in Europe, a sign it is getting more serious about making money from businesses rather than consumers.

Evernote, based in Redwood City, Calif. and Paris, has attracted more than 45 million users to its service to date and was mostly focused on helping consumers until recently. Evernote launched its service for businesses in seven countries back in December.

New COO Ken Gullicksen will help the company manage its transition from focusing entirely on consumer needs and to helping both consumers and companies. Gullicksen was formerly the VP of Corporate Development for Evernote and before that, he was a general partner at Morgenthaler Ventures for over 10 years.

“Ken has played a key role in Evernote’s strategy and execution including heading up our five acquisitions to date and the successful rollout of Evernote’s China-based service Yinxiang Biji,” Evernote CEO Phil Libin said in a statement. “As COO, Ken will be instrumental in continuing to foster strategic initiatives, building on the momentum we’re seeing with Evernote Business and developing efficient services to support our entire global operation.”

As of today, Evernote Business is available in these countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S. On Feb. 12, Australia and New Zealand will also be turned on. That will bring Evernote Business to a total of 33 countries.

Evernote said it expects the business service will be available in more than 50 countries by the middle of 2013, including key markets in Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

Elephant head photo via NATTHAPRAPHANIN JUNTRAKUL/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While it may seem easy, making video play across a hundred different devices (like Netflix does) is actually a giant pain in the butt — unless you use a service like Amazon Web Service’s new Elastic Transcoder service.

AWS’ new service, which launched today, is basically focusing on cloud video. More specifically, it targets customers (video services, cable networks, and anyone that produces lots of professional video content) who want to convert (aka transcode) video into formats optimized to play on a variety of devices, like smartphones, tablets, PCs, and smart TVs.

With streaming video media on the rise, it makes sense for Amazon to turn its attention to transcoding in the cloud. Previously, the process required web publishers to dedicate hardware and software to convert their original video files into enough formats to play across the growing number of devices. But pushing this process to the cloud to transcode that video is a much easier option.

Amazon is hoping to challenge others in the video transcoding space, including Brightcove’s Zencoder, Encoding.com, and the recently launched Azure Media Service from Microsoft.

One thing that may lure people to the new Amazon service is its pricing model of paying for what you use, rather than signing up for an expensive monthly service package. It’s offering 20 minutes of free video to customers per month. After that, customers pay between $0.015 and $0.036 per minute of video, with the price varying based on the quality of video and regions the video will be transcoded. (For perspective, Zencoder offers a pay-as-you-go plan that starts at $0.05 per minute of output.)

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Slick conference calling app UberConference has integrated its service with hot startups Evernote and Box, a sign it’s dedicated to making conference calling smarter and more useful.

UberConference’s goal is to make conference calls not as painful as they usually are with cloud-based software. It recently launched an enterprise-class version of its offering and new iPhone and Android apps. Now it is lining up partners to make the experience better.

“The direction we’re going is to be more collaborative,” Craig Walker, CEO of UberConference-parent Firespotter Labs, told me while demoing the new features. “We’re always asking ‘How can we make this more powerful?’ We’re excited to be partnered with these two great companies.”

With Box or Evernote integrated into the software, workers can collaboratively edit documents while on a conference call and then share the results with team members. At the end of a call, links to the notes and files used during the meeting are included in the call summary. Notably, UberConference is one of the first partners to integrate with Evernote Business. Walker said he will likely add Box and Evernote support to its mobile apps eventually.

On top of adding handy Box and Evernote Business integration, the UberConference team has also added international calling support for more than 40 countries across Europe, South America, and Asia. Basically, the company has made it so if you are located another country besides the U.S., you don’t have to pay for often-expensive rates for international calling to the U.S. Instead, you’re able to dial an in-country local number to get into a conference. International support only works for UberConference paid accounts.

Walker said the company’s next big additions will likely be a full-fledged iPad app and a native app for Android tablets.

UberConference-parent Firespotter Labs, based in Pleasanton, Calif., has raised $18 million to date from top tier investors Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. The company is also the brains behind the apps NoshList, Nosh, and Jotly.

Photo via UberConference

Kim Dotcom, the founder of defunct Megaupload service, has finally fully launched his follow-up service with Mega — a site that offers 50GB of free cloud storage and ultrasecure ways to transmit files to friends.

Mega opened for some users on Friday, but it didn’t open for the public until Saturday. The service gives new users 50GB of storage for storing and sharing music, movies, documents, and other files. If you want even more storage, you can pay a monthly fee — 500GB of storage runs €9.99 ($13), 2TB of storage costs €19.99 ($27), and 4TB of storage runs €29.99 ($40). The service has lots of encryption, so much that Mega will not know what kind of files users are uploading.

Dotcom clearly is trying to use Mega as more powerful and secure version of Megaupload, which the U.S. government shut down in a spectacular fashion. Dotcom was charged with enabling piracy on a massive scale. Prosecutors have been trying to have Dotcom extradited to the U.S., but New Zealand’s legal system has provided him some cover so far.

“The launch of Mega is not about mocking any government or Hollywood — this is about our right to innovate and start a new business.” Dotcom said at his launch event for Mega last night. “What we are offering is a smarter, faster, and more secure way of cloud storage. And we are fully assured by our legal team that we are in compliance with the law.”

Some early users complained the site was loading and behaving slowly. Dotcom addressed that issue on Twitter, saying that demand for the service is massive and should be resolved.

“If you are currently experiencing slow access to #Mega its because of the unbelievable demand,” Dotcom said in a tweet early this morning. “We are working on more capacity.”

50GB of free cloud storage is an immensely nice offer, one that trumps what Dropbox, Google Drive, SugarSync, Microsoft SkyDrive, and other storage players offer for free. Will you use Mega’s service?

Check out some of the offbeat launch event of Mega in the video below:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

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

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

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

Cloud image via OnApp

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Fred Destin is a partner at Atlas Venture.

There’s a little strategy game that both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists excel at. It’s called re-segmenting markets. It’s as old as marketing itself and it’s very useful when you’re trying to define white space for your market. So cloud has now morphed into a series of acronyms that somehow all manage to incorporate “as a service”.

Maturity in PaaS

Behind all the hard work in seducing analysts into designing ever more precise magic quadrants, there is a movement at work in which the cloud is spawning the second wave of startups. Central to this new wave are dynamically configured – or “runtime” – services like Heroku that don’t require hardware provisioning and services that combat IT “lock-in” by making data portable. Both runtime and portability services not only need to provide value, but also must hide complexity from the user.

Let’s focus on the Platform as a Service (PaaS) segment for a moment. If you think Debian is an electronica band you might not relate, yet companies like Heroku and Engine Yard have slowly been building the infrastructure and range of scripting languages that web developers have been dreaming about. Unsurprisingly, they’ve also attracted the watchful eyes of acquirers (with Salesforce buying Heroku a couple of years ago) and incumbents (with SAP, RedHat, Oracle and VMWare all entering the space with slideware and, occasionally, product).

Now we’re all waiting to see how the game plays out and, in particular, what moves the big boys – Google with App Engine and Microsoft with Azure – make.

Mobile First

For those who think the real disruption is in mobile, PaaS isn’t where the puck is going. PaaS offerings were designed and built for a web-centric world, where customers build and host a backend and a web tier on the PaaS technology stack. Mobile apps, however, live across native and HTML5 platforms that require libraries that connect to the backend. PaaS doesn’t make this easy. Developers have to figure out how to connect cross-platform PaaS in a secure manner to their backend, while ensuring that the apps work online and offline, while synching data with the backend and various other third-party services.

Enter: BaaS

So mobile brings an explosion in complexity. The services are now in dire need of smart “context awareness” (that’s a fancy way to see that you don’t do the same stuff on your mobile as you do on your big screen) and developers are dying to provide consistent experiences across devices. Right now all we hear are stories of dev teams backing away from Android simply because they cannot deal with the platform complexity. It’s a nightmare for everyone. Who wants to bet their business on a single-platform, iOS-only launch?

Enter Backend as a Service (BaaS) – a simple runtime environment that spins up all the backend connectivity developers need, allowing them to focus on the user experience, not the app’s “plumbing.” BaaS provides mobile developers with the entire backend stack, including native mobile and web libraries, which ensure the app keeps the data secure and works online and offline. As a result, developers have a consistent user experience across all devices.

Check out the infographic above (or click here for a larger BaaS infographic) to see where it fits in this increasingly complex cloud ecosystem.

Why should you care?

Back to my opening point: Who needs JASA (Just Another Stupid Acronym)? Well, you may want to pay attention as the second wave of cloud services picks up where the first one left us. IT infrastructure is a total mess, and with the emergence real-time analytics and big data it’s getting messier still. We’re looking at a second wave of companies that are runtime by nature and facilitate (rather than impede) data portability all while shielding the user from technical complexity.

The VC industry has certainly paid attention. And since everyone knows we never create anything remotely interesting without entrepreneurs, that means the smart entrepreneurs took a liking to this trend a few years ago. VCs are refreshingly dumb because experience has taught all of us that it’s no good being too smart. So we look at massive macro trends (Ten billion devices! One billion mobile apps!), hard customer requirements (speed to market, code quality and security, cost efficiency) and attractive platform opportunities.

There are in the region of 25 companies active in the BaaS space today. I backed the guys who coined the term “Backend as the Service,” Kinvey, out of TechStars. Kinvey recently raised a $5 million Series A from Avalon Ventures (the team who backed Zynga) and from my firm, Atlas Venture. Parse and StackMob are two other leaders in the BaaS field, and there are rumors that Ray Ozzie is working on a BaaS startup too.

Michael Facemire at Forrester has written a good overview of the BaaS market, which is a great place to start if you want to learn more.

Money is flowing in for a simple reason. If Salesforce is the hub for CRM and LinkedIn is the economic graph, then the company that becomes the data hub for the world of apps will be very, very valuable. We’ve got their backend, so they can have yours.

Fred Destin is a very early stage investor who loves what he does. You can follow on him on Twitter @fdestin or learn just about nothing about his firm on its website www.atlasventure.com. He invested in Kinvey.

Top image: Infographic of the BaaS ecosystem provided by Kinvey. (Click for larger version.)

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by Joe Andrews, director of product marketing at VMware.

Gartner predicts worldwide IT spending in 2013 will top $3.7 trillion. Coupled with IDC’s prediction that there will be over $25 billion in acquisitions as cloud services become the centerpiece of more and more vendor’s offerings, you can see that enterprise IT customers will have many more choices in front of them when it comes to acquiring technology and services in 2013.

A 2012 Enterprise Strategy Group study of 243 IT and business professionals further solidifies this trend towards the cloud. The study found that 80 percent of companies are beginning to feel more comfortable with the public cloud as they move beyond the test and development phase of their public cloud deployments and on to production workloads.

So as the new year approaches and IT dollars start getting allocated, what criteria do you need met and what questions do you need to ask a potential service provider if you are evaluating a public cloud?

Through interviews with enterprise IT customers, as well as service providers, we have identified the top areas and questions businesses should ask when considering a move to the cloud:

1. Performance and availability service level agreement: What level of guaranteed uptime and recovery targets does the service provider offer for your applications? Will the service enable you to reserve compute resources and allow you to easily add them on demand?

2. Data security and compliance : Where is your data actually being stored? Is it encrypted? Who has access? Can you get audit controls for regulatory compliance like ISO 27001, SSAE 16, and SOC 2?

3. Hybrid cloud management and application portability: Does the service allow you to bring your existing virtual machines into the service? Is it compatible with your existing on-premise infrastructure? Can you easily get your virtual machines out if you need to? Does the service offer a single pane of glass to manage workloads between private and public cloud environments?

4. Support policy: What will the response time be for any issues should your instance go down or be impacted in some way? What is the escalation path in such situations? Do you have a dedicated support contact?

5. Type of service payment models: Is the service pay-as-you-go to start? Does it offer resource pools to get more capacity at a predictable price point and dedicated instances should your application require physical isolation?

While this process can be daunting, you must consider and weigh the importance of these criteria and evaluate how each service provider meets them. Companies can reap huge business benefits by adopting a private, public, or hybrid cloud computing strategy, including cost savings, disaster recovery, improved operational efficiency, and more.

So before you move your company’s mission-critical workloads to the cloud, make sure your potential service provider passes the test.

Joe Andrews is director of product marketing at VMware and is responsible for marketing VMware’s cloud solutions. He has 20 years of experience in technology marketing, sales, and IT business operations. Previously at VMware, he led virtualization marketing initiatives targeting the Small and Medium Business (SMB) segment. Prior to VMware, he worked at Intuit and iMarket, a software division of Dun and Bradstreet, in various product, channel, and field marketing roles as well as IT business consulting.

Top photo via Karsun Designs/Flickr

Open-source cloud software provider Red Hat has agreed to acquire cloud management startup ManageIQ for $104 million in cash, the company announced today in conjunction with its quarterly earnings.

ManageIQ provides enterprise customers all kinds of management solutions to deploy and optimize private, public, and hybrid clouds. That makes it a great fit with Red Hat, which has seen promising traction with its open-source cloud software solutions for the enterprise. Red Hat recently launched its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service for enterprise customers.

“For enterprise cloud initiatives, effective cloud management is critical,” Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, said in a statement. “ManageIQ offers robust features, including orchestration, policy, workflow, monitoring, and chargeback, that deepen Red Hat’s cloud management capabilities and bring the promise of open hybrid cloud a step closer for the industry.”

For Red Hat’s earnings, the company reported third-quarter revenue of $343.6 million, which is up 18 percent year-over-year. Red Hat’s net income for the quarter totaled $34.8 million, or $0.18 per diluted share.

Woman in red hat via refleXtions/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage startup Bitcasa has released new mobile apps for Android and Windows 8 platforms, with iOS and Mac apps coming in January, the company announced Tuesday morning.

Bitcasa offers a back-up solution that’s a bit different from peers such Dropbox, SugarSync, and Google Drive. Essentially, Bitcasa can back up all of your data and files on Bitcasa’s servers and you can even move things to the cloud that you can delete on your personal hard drive. The service’s interface makes accessing your files as easy as tapping an external hard drive. It costs $10 a month, a pretty reasonable price for what it claims is “infinite storage.”

Bitcasa and its new apps promise the following benefits:

Instant Streaming, Access Anywhere: With Bitcasa, users can play whole music albums, watch videos in various formats, view and share photo albums, and read documents from anywhere. Instant streaming from the Bitcasa Infinite Drive allows users to stream their personal jukebox of music, videos, and photos to mobile and desktop devices without having to sync or store files locally on each of your devices.

Infinite Storage: The Infinite Drive acts as a virtual external drive that expands with the user’s growing storage needs without ever worrying about running out of space again.

Safe Backup: Continuous and automatic backup gives peace of mind. Users can mirror their content from all their computers to Bitcasa, and access it anywhere. All files and backups are protected with client-side encryption, which means that only users can see and access their data. Users can easily retrieve files with time-capsule versioning by date.

Share Content: With one click, users can share any file or folder with their friends and family – Bitcasa or non-Bitcasa users – regardless of file size. For sharing on mobile devices, users can also set up alerts to protect against large downloads that might affect their mobile bandwidth charges.

Get Organized: Bitcasa automatically categorizes users’ data into Music, Photos, Videos, and Documents. Users no longer have to worry about managing and organizing their files — the same way they do not have to worry about storage capacity limits.

Bitcasa CEO Tony Gauda strongly believes in the power of mobile and one of the things he wanted to accomplish was making it easier to tap your files no matter where you are.

“With our mobile app releases, we are now making all of your data easily available from mobile and PC/Mac clients while taking the security of that data very seriously,” Gauda said in a statement. “By announcing our cross-platform support today, we are offering our global users secure access on all computers, mobile devices, or Web browsers by streaming from the cloud while allowing them to keep the data they access more often localized on their hard drive.”

You can download the new apps from Bitcasa’s download page.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Bitcasa launched in Sept. 2011. The company has raised $9 million in funding from Pelion Venture Partners, Horizons Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, CrunchFund, and Samsung Ventures.