Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud-based call center software maker Five9 has raised $34.5 million in new funding to help it take on legacy software makers that still own 95 percent of the market.

Five9 helps its customers transition from call center software that’s on-premise to its software in the cloud. It offers features like interactive voice response, automatic call distribution, and outbound calling features and claims to facilitate more than 3 billion calls in the cloud each year. Five9 now has 1,800 clients including Citrix, NetSuite, AAA, and Caesars Palace.

Mike Burkland, Five9′s CEO, told us that the market he’s focused on is almost exclusively dominated by legacy vendors like Cisco and Genesys. But Five9 isn’t alone in selling cloud-based call center software — it’s also competing with players like InContact, 8×8′s Contactual, and Salesforce’s Social Contact Center.

Still, it’s growing quickly even with all that competition. It generated $43 million in revenue in 2011 and $64 million in revenue in 2012, a growth rate of 67 percent.

The most common use case of Five9′s software is inside a customer service call center with the software integrated with a CRM solution like Salesforce. Five9 also provides the back-end for some telemarketing call centers. “Think of us as a routing engine between customers and agents,” Burkland said.

The new funding is split into two portions: $22 million in Series D equity and $12.5M in a bank revolver debt facility. The equity funding was led by SAP Ventures with participation by existing investors Adam Street Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, and Partech International. City National Bank provided the bank revolver debt. Including the new funds, Five9 has raised $71 million to date.

As you might expect, the new funding will give Five9 room to make needed new hires. The company has 250 employees in the U.S., and 100 each in Russia and the Philippines. The new funds will target the hiring of U.S. employees in sales, marketing, and product development.

San Ramon, Calif.-based Five9 was founded in 2001. Burkland would not comment on whether the company would consider going public in the next few years.

“Our mission at this stage is to simply grow revenue and market share,” Burkland said.

Call center art via filitova/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Following the lead of other recent tech-focused IPOs, e-commerce software business ChannelAdvisor‘s shares popped almost 40 percent in its first day of trading as a public company.

ChannelAdvisor, based in Morrisville, N.C., was founded in 2001 and offers a cloud-based e-commerce platform that helps retailers easily list items on Amazon, Google, eBay, Bing, Groupon, and more and keep their data unified and up to date. The company had more than 1,900 customers worldwide at the end of 2012. And in 2012 alone its customers processed more than $3.5 billion in gross merchandise value through the platform.

The company filed for its IPO back in April. Its initial public offering of 5.8 million shares was priced last night at $14 a share, the high end of its pricing range. As of this writing, shares are hovering at about $19.50, a 39 percent bump over the IPO price.

“Twelve years ago, my co-founder Aris [Buinevicius] and I started ChannelAdvisor with the mission to help retailers grow and optimize their e-commerce channels,” CEO Scot Wingo said in a statement. “And while we knew e-commerce had potential way back in 2001, we had no idea how big e-commerce — and our mission — would become.”

ChannelAdvisor is now listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “ECOM.” Prior to today, ChannelAdvisor raised $75 million in venture capital funding from investors including New Enterprise Associates, Advanced Technology Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners, and eBay.

Check out the video below for more on the company.

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

Tickets On Sale Now

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

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

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

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

NEW YORK CITY — Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff might not be the best spokesperson for friendly customer service. He’s known for his brash, off-the-cuff comments and leading an aggressive campaign to bring cloud to the enterprise.

But at an event today in New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, Benioff talked quite a bit about communicating with customers and helping companies bridge connections with people through every channel imaginable. Salesforce is now prioritizing “how to be a customer company.”

“When we are connecting to each other, its about the how — how we are connecting,” Benioff said. “The customer revolution is also a trust revolution. And that changes everything.”

Benioff used the stage today to spotlight new additions to Salesforce’s Service Cloud. The big focus of the announcement is that companies can use Service Cloud to connect with customers on mobile devices in four new ways — direct chat in mobile apps, Communities (forums) inside mobile apps, Service Cloud Touch optimized for mobile devices, and co-browsing.

He said there were many questions that needed to be asked by companies looking to connect with customers and partners.

“How do you listen to every customer?” Benioff said. “How do I engage them on every channel? How do I service customers through the retail store? How do I create communities? How do you connect every partner? How do you connect every product? How do you deliver apps everywhere?”

Benioff cited the “Obama for America” presidential campaign as one of the best examples of how Salesforce had helped an organization connect with people.

That team used Salesforce’s Service Cloud, Chatter, and Platform to help stay connected with employees, registered voters, and leads (in this case, potential voters).

“The election in 2008, I think, was a lot about social media and social networks” Benioff said. “In 2012, it was different. … I downloaded the Obama app and it tells me, ‘These are five people you need to call that aren’t registered to vote.’”

Benioff trotted out Michael Salby, the chief innovation officer for Obama for America, and Vivek Kundra, who was the first CIO for the United States and now a Salesforce executive, as examples of people who had taken advantage of communities and understood how to build customer relationships.

On top of pushing a new “trust revolution” through service channels, Benioff said that social media and networking were clearly another part of delivering on that promise. Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud includes acquisitions of Buddy Media and Radian6, and it uses those tools to help clients better communicate with and track people.

Unilever CIO Willem Eelman talked briefly about how it has used Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud tools to build better relationships.

“Clearly, it’s showing how technology can solve problems for them,” Eelman said. “You have to engage and build trust.”

Benioff also used his stage time to espouse the benefits of location awareness (GPS connectivity to apps) and touch optimization (touchscreens and apps for those screens) as ways to build trust.

“I used to talk about the mobile revolution — now it’s the touch revolution,” “I was at CES and it’s pervasive. … The concept of touch is transforming everything. Touch computers, touch laptops, touch everything.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Health care software and cloud solutions company Recondo Technology has received a $20 million investment from Bregal Sagemount to accelerate its growth in the booming medical sector.

Greenwood Village, Co.-based Recondo Technology provides all kinds of software and services, including payments, insurance verification, and revenue recovery, to more than 450 U.S. hospitals. During its fiscal year 2012, the company claimed to increase revenue by 94 percent.

“This investment will be used to significantly expand our sales and marketing efforts, take client service to a new level, and broaden our product offerings through internal development and strategic merger and acquisition (M&A) opportunities,” Recondo CEO Rick Adam said in a statement.

Phil Yates, a founding partner of Bregal Sagemount, and Pavan Tripathi, a senior associate, will join the Recondo’s board of directors.

Hospital reception via Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Networking behemoth Cisco has agreed to acquire cloud software business Cloupia for $150 million, the companies announced today.

Cloupia offers software that automates the processes inside data centers. Ideally, it lets enterprises and service providers manage power, network services, storage, and virtual machines all in one interface. One of the Cloupia’s specialties is assisting companies with running software on private and public clouds together. The company reportedly has 30 customers and about 50 employees. Cloupia’s employees will be moved into Cisco’s Data Center Group.

(Cloud management and control is one of the six big themes of CloudBeat 2012, VentureBeat’s upcoming cloud conference, November 28-29 in Redwood Shores, Calif. — where Cisco’s chief technical officer, Lew Tucker, will be one of the speakers. Check out the CloudBeat agenda for more information.)

Cloupia’s cloud software specialties will likely help Cisco become a more prominent partner in building and maintaining data centers. Cloupia partners include Amazon, Rackspace, VMWare, and Microsoft, a collection of names Cisco will certainly find attractive to work with on cloud-focused projects.

“Cisco’s data center strategy is based on the premise of making it easier for customers to deploy a unified and integrated infrastructure that is efficient, fast, and flexible,” said David Yen, SVP and GM of Cisco’s data center business group, in a statement. “This strategy involves the delivery of the industry’s most comprehensive data center networking portfolio, which includes physical and virtual products that support multiple hypervisors and storage stacks. The addition of Cloupia’s automation software enhances the efficiency of such unified data center infrastructures, helping to accelerate the transition from physical to cloud environments more quickly and effectively.”

Cisco expects the acquisition to close in the second quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2013, which means some time in the next three months.

Money in clouds photo via Andy Dean Photography/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In a commanding and impressive IPO performance, cloud software company Workday soared 72 percent in early trading today.

The Pleasanton, Calif.-based Workday sells human resources software that’s delivered through a web browser or mobile app. Founded seven years ago by PeopleSoft veterans Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, its revenues have steadily increased to $134.4 million despite tough competition from Oracle. Workday has about 1,500 employees.

In early trading, Workday’s stock moved from its $28 per share offering all the way up to $48.05 per share, or a staggering increase of 71.6 percent. With Workday’s pedigree, smart executive team, and a product that big businesses rely on, this jump may not be such a huge surprise.

PrivCo founder and CEO Sam Hamadeh shared his thoughts with VentureBeat about why Workday’s IPO was such a rousing success:

Workday met all the key criteria for a successful IPO — sterling management team, recurring revenue model, providing earnings visibility, and meeting guidance. [This is] critical for transitioning from a private company to a public company and was in the right sector to boot: cloud enterprise software, as opposed to, say, out of favor consumer Internet. Workday also benefited from other successful debuts from enterprise focused companies such as Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow, to name a few, which have all performed well in their IPO debuts and in their after-market performance.

In sum, we at PrivCo expected that the Workday IPO would be very well received, and indeed it was, opening at $48.05, a huge 72 percent pop over its IPO price of $28 per share. Workday’s opening trades are double its initially filing range of $21 to $24, adding to the list of well received previous enterprise IPOs, such as Palo Alto Networks [$PANW] and ServiceNow [$NOW].

At its opening price of $48.05/share, Workday musters an equity valuation of $7.7 billion, double the valuation it was originally seeking just two weeks ago of a $21 to $24 range, before it was raised earlier this week to $24 to $26/share on strong investor demand. Thus today’s opening price actually is more than double the high end of its original price range, so Workday has effectively received some of its pop before today’s pop.

In all [today is] a winning day for Workday, its investors and employees, and today’s trading evidences a “Duffield Premium” in Workday, where the Workday co-founder David Duffield (who sold his former HR software company PeopleSoft to Oracle for over $11 billion) is clearly receiving a well deserved premium valuation as the market bets that lightning can strike twice for Duffield.

Big cloud companies like Workday are disrupting the application market. We’ll be discussing revolutionary cases of cloud adoption, including cases that include Workday and other SaaS companies, at our CloudBeat 2012 conference. CloudBeat happens November 28-29 in Redwood City, Calif. Register today!

[Die Hard photo via Twentieth Century Fox]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Social collaboration and project management startup Clarizen has raised $12 million in its fifth round of funding to expand and improve the user experience of its software, the company announced Tuesday.

While the company sounds like it’s an allergy drug, it won’t be of much help unless you’re allergic to inefficient workflows. Clarizen offers cloud-based apps accessible in the browser or on the iPhone and Android mobile platforms. Customers include NBC Universal, Frito Lay, Marketo, and NASA.

The company’s most recent addition to its product portfolio is a native Android app (which is quite similar to its iOS app) with real-time access to tasks and projects. Another recently added tool is the company’s Clarizen Anywhere, an in-browser app and a Microsoft Outlook-based toolbar to gives you Clarizen access without logging in. Pricing starts at $25 per month per user.

“Clarizen’s vision for today’s social workforce reflects our understanding that successful organizations need much more than task management or another way to communicate.” said Clarizen CEO Avinoam Nowogrodski, in a statement. “The workplace we enable is powerful, because Clarizen helps move information and communications out of silos, gives them structure, and makes this data actionable. This funding comes at an exciting point as we look to accelerate our investment in mobile access and global expansion.”

San Mateo, Calif.-based Clarizen was founded in 2006 and also has an office in Israel. The new round of funding was led by Vintage Partners, with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Carmel Ventures, DAG Ventures and Opus Capital. That brings the company’s total funding to $48 million.

Check out a short, clever video outlining Clarizen’s service below:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In what might be the most-jargon-filled press release ever, enterprise-software giant SAP announced Wednesday how it will incorporate and improve SuccessFactors’ enterprise cloud services, after completing its purchase of the company last week.

SAP agreed to acquire human capital-management (HCM) company SuccessFactors for a staggering $3.4 billion in early December. After that announcement, the HCM space exploded with other major buys that could impact SuccessFactors. First, Salesforce agreed to buy Rypple for an undisclosed sum in December, and two weeks ago Oracle plopped down $1.9 billion to buy Taleo.

Over the past few months, SAP and SuccessFactors have been plotting their own integration strategy to better compete against rivals. The companies plan to find new ways to bridge SuccessFactors’ cloud-based Business Execution Suite (BizX) apps with SAP’s human capital management software. To do this, SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard will begin leading SAP’s cloud software strategy. SAP plans on “boldly investing” in SuccessFactors’ Employee Central product to establish it as “the go-forward core human resources offering in the cloud.”

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to chat with Dalgaard about what’s coming next, but I did get to speak with two execs who explained what the two companies were brewing. Sven Denecken, SAP’s VP of cloud strategy, told me that there is only a 14 percent overlap where companies are using the SAP and SuccessFactors software side-by-side. Ideally, the company is seeking to better integrate SAP’s mostly on-premise software and SuccessFactor’s cloud-based software, so that large enterprise customers will want to have both SAP and SuccessFactors software. Denecken also noted that SuccessFactors’ strong cloud products will help give SAP a framework for moving its local software experience to the cloud.

SuccessFactors Product Marketing VP Jeff Kristick proudly boasted that SuccessFactors was better than all of its rivals. I pointed out that its new parent company still had some shortcomings in the cloud. Workday, for example, offers payroll software completely in the cloud, where SAP’s payroll software is still on-premise only. That means you’re not tied to any single device with that important HR data. Kristick’s response: Workday is only available in two countries, whereas SAP is legitimately global. Touché.

Married couple holding hands: szefei/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Software titan and now cloud services provider Oracle has agreed to acquire talent management cloud company Taleo for $1.9 billion, the companies announced today.

The deal greatly mirrors the $3.4 billion acquisition of employee performance management software provider SuccessFactors by enterprise software giant SAP. Oracle and SAP are involved in an intensifying battle for large enterprise customers, as their software and cloud offerings begin to overlap. With SAP buying SuccessFactors, the only proper thing for Oracle to do was to buy a SuccessFactors rival so it can convince customers that it’s on top of its game.

In context, Oracle’s decision to buy Taleo is a bit funny when you consider that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (pictured) used to fiercely shun cloud solutions, calling them at times “water vapor” and “idiocy.” But Ellison decided to stop worrying and love the cloud in October 2011 with the announcement of the Oracle Public Cloud, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for customers that want to deploy Oracle Fusion apps in a public cloud, or want to develop Java-based applications with cloud backing.

Together, Oracle and Taleo will offer wide-ranging cloud solutions for managing human resources. The companies expect that the combo of services will “empower employees and managers to effectively manage careers throughout their entire employment, enable organizations to retain talent and optimize costs, and improve the employee experience through faster on boarding and better collaboration with team members via social media.”

“Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive VP of Oracle Development, in a statement. “Taleo’s industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

Do you think the Taleo buy is a good move for Oracle?

Larry Ellison photo: Oracle/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Following in the footsteps of Jive Software’s successful IPO, Workday, a company that provides cloud software for business operations, is said to be planning for its own public offering next year.

The company hopes to raise up to $500 million in its IPO, Bloomberg reported yesterday, based on information from two sources. Workday is expected to file its S-1, the first step to going public, in the first half of 2012, and to debut in the second half of the year.

The company has begun looking for banks to help out with the process, and it’s currently eyeing Allen & Co., Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase. Workday is also looking to recruit a chief financial officer to spearhead its public offering.

As VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig wrote when covering Workdays’s recent $85 million funding round (which reportedly ended up fetching around $100 million), the company provides more than 230 companies with cloud services for human resources, payroll and financial management. While that may not initially sound exciting, those 230 companies account for more than 2 million users, and unlike many new cloud-based startups, Workday has a track record of helping organizations cut costs and bringing them immediate value.

It seems like we’re finally beginning to see the true value of cloud software — especially for something as critical to a business as operations management. Just look at SAP’s massive $3.4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors, another cloud business software company.

Pleasanton, Calif.-based Workday was founded in 2005 and has thus far raised $250 million in funding.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Jive Software kicked off its initial public offering at $12 a share on the Nasdaq this morning, and closed nearly 30 percent up at $15.05.

The company produces social business software, which enterprises use as an internal communication system outside of the traditional e-mail and instant message options. Competitors of Jive include startups Yammer and Moxie, plus Salesforce’s Chatter. Jive filed to go public in August of this year and offered 13.4 million shares, raking in $161.3 million in capital this morning.

“I think it’s super positive,” said Aaron Levie, chief executive officer of cloud storage company Box, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We had a bunch of IPOs in the mid and late 2000′s that were in the enterprise space. Jive is the first really meaningful IPO in this next generation category, this next breed of software.”

Levie’s company, Box, is a partner with Jive, and offers its cloud storage product in Jive’s application marketplace. The company is cheering Jive on from a “friend and partner standpoint.” When asked what this meant for venture backed enterprise cloud companies, Levie repeatedly said that this was a big win. He believes that the rules are changing for enterprise focused companies, and that investors are going to see this IPO and want to push more capital into the vertical.

But some questioned whether Jive was big enough to go public today. During a conference call today, Jive’s chief executive Tony Zingale explained that was simply not the case.

“Oh yeah, if you look at our prospectus, we are in excess of the $100 million run rate for the company,” he said. “Well above the size required to go public.”

In the future, Zingale said Jive may be looking to acquire with its new capital. While he wouldn’t completely reveal Jive’s product roadmap, he did explain Jive is particularly interested in big data, or the mounds of information about consumers and companies stored on the Web through social media and other channels. Jive is also particularly proud of its cloud and on premiss delivery methods, calling it one of its bigger competitive edges.

“[Competitors are] just really jealous that half of the market is not available to them because they don’t deliver out of the private cloud,” said Zingale.

As for the future, Zingale explained that the company isn’t completely shy to being acquired. He couldn’t speak to the intentions of anyone who would be interested in buying Jive, but did say that any offers would be taken to the board to be appropriately considered.

The company’s Nasdaq ticker symbol is JIVE. It’s stock is continuing to go up in after hours trading today and hit a high of $15.81 around 1:40pm eastern time. It closed 29.5 percent hire than its opening price.

“Jive is up 30 percent?” said Levie. “That means the enterprise is now now 30 percent sexier.”

[Chart via Yahoo Finance]

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Customer help desk management startup Zendesk has launched a new version of its Android app that includes a new design, real-time updates, photo attachment support and improved access to support activity, the company announced today.

Zendesk made our recent list of “Top 10 disruptive cloud companies we’re excited about” because it is enabling small and medium-size companies to create on-demand help desks and cloud-based call centers. The company’s smart and simple web apps and its mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry are helping businesses compete with much bigger players in the area of communications.

The new Android application from Zendesk mimics its already good iPhone and iPad applications and works for most Android phones and tablets. Using design philosophies similar to social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, the company has simplified the interface and wants to make it almost fun to use. The company emphasizes the following Android updates:

• Real-time updates give customer support agents the power to take up-to-the-minute action on support requests.
• Improved access to the support activity that matters most. Now up to three views of the must urgent support requests can be pinned to the Zendesk dashboard, allowing immediate visibility into priority support issues, such as requests that have been deemed urgent or unanswered.
• New attachment capabilities mean customer service representatives working out in the field can take pictures of hardware, etc., and attach to the support activity thread, greatly increasing the speed in which a customer support issue can be resolved.

“As adoption rates for Android continue to explode, we want to continue to elevate the usability and effectiveness of this popular mobile application,” said Adrian McDermott, Zendesk’s vice president of product and engineering, in a statement.

The company took a big step in mid-September by partnering with Twilio to create Zendesk Voice, which lets companies set up cloud-based call centers for much less money than regular call centers. Zendesk Voice is available in the U.S. and Canada, with calls billed at 5 cents per minute. Representatives from Zendesk and Twilio also appeared on stage together at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat conference last week to explain why the two companies are “best buds in cloud.”

San Francisco-based Zendesk has raised $25.5 million in three rounds of funding, with a $19 million round in December 2010. The company’s venture backing comes from the likes of Matrix Partners, Benchmark Capital and Charles River Ventures.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud automation startup VMTurbo has raised a second round of funding worth $10 million, which will be used to expand sales and marketing, product development and customer support.

VMTurbo provides virtualization management solutions that combine real-time operations performance data with customized analytics. Companies that want to move their workloads to the cloud can seek out VMTurbo’s automation software, which comes in three flavors — Community Edition (free), Enterprise Operations Manager ($399/socket) or Cloud Operations Manager ($799/socket).

The new funding round was provided by Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners, both of which are previous investors. VMTurbo’s total funding now sits at $17.5 million, including the new investment.

“Customers are finding that VMTurbo’s unique solution is the only holistic means of managing all resources in virtualized environments,” said Ben Nye, Managing Director at Bain Capital, in a statement. “These businesses depend on their applications, and their applications depend on VMTurbo.”

Waltham, Mass.-based VMTurbo was founded in 2009. The firm’s customers include NASA, Akamai, LexisNexus, L3 Communications, Orange, Omnicare and 6Fusion.

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

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise software startup Atlassian announced Tuesday that is moving its collaboration and development products, including JIRA and Confluence, to the cloud with an innovative pricing structure.

Atlassian‘s products, especially bug-and-issue tracker JIRA, are important to enterprise and small clients alike. The company currently serves 26,000 customers, including Cisco, Citigroup, Netflix, Facebook, Zynga and Adobe. But now even more companies will have access to Atlassian products because there’s no need to set up a server to run the software.

Called Atlassian OnDemand, Atlassian’s new cloud products feature a clever a la carte approach to dishing out cloud services. Whereas per-month scalability of cloud products is usually designated for infrastructure, Atlassian is using the per-month model on the customer end. With OnDemand, Atlassian customers will be able to increase or decrease the number of users and the level of features needed every month depending on the customer’s needs.

Atlassian OnDemand software options include JIRA, Confluence, GreenHopper, Team Calendars, Bonfire, FishEye, Crucible and Bamboo. Pricing for OnDemand starts at $10 per month for 10 users. That sort of pricing and flexibility will especially be good for small businesses and startups that don’t have the capital of major enterprise players.

Along with remodeling its service structure, the company also took the opportunity to redesign its website. The company’s logo and branding has been re-purposed as well with a more modern flair to go along with its new emphasis on up-to-date cloud offerings.

Atlassian was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2002 and was self-funded until July 2010, when it took a massive $60 million first round of funding from Accel Partners. The company has recently moved into new offices in San Francisco and earlier this month acquired SourceTree to help expand its software development offerings.

Cloud-based software suite Microsoft Office 365 on Wednesday suffered its first major outage since its introduction in late June.

“At approximately 11:30am PDT, Microsoft became aware of a networking issue affecting customers of some Microsoft services hosted out of one of our North American data centers,” said Steven Gerri, General Manager for Global Foundation Services, in a statement. “We worked to isolate the issue and we are beginning to see service restoration. We continue to investigate the root cause of this issue.”

Microsoft additionally confirmed the outage via its @MSCloudUS Twitter account:

“We apologize for the inconvenience that the #office365 outage has caused today,” the account wrote. “We’re [sic] are working on resolving the issue.”

Office 365 is Microsoft’s first major play into the cloud office software scene and it is trying to establish itself as a better option than Google Apps, so outages during work hours are definitely not a good thing. In my hands on review of Office 365, I praised the service for its depth of features and its accessibility for startups and small businesses. The service promises 99.9 percent up time, so hopefully the issue does not happen again soon.

Are you an Office 365 user? If you are considering the service, does this outage deter you?

Update: As of 4:38 p.m. PDT, Microsoft said all systems were back up, meaning the outage occurred approximately five hours.

If you’re a small business or startup, Microsoft Office 365 should be on your technology shortlist. It’s a cloud-based suite based on the world’s most popular office software that launched in late June. It will likely get small businesses and enterprises to start considering cloud software solutions if they haven’t already. Microsoft also hopes this offering can edge into the space Google Apps has had to itself for several years.

After testing the suite’s small business tools for several weeks, I’m convinced that it’s a strong option for small businesses, startups, and enterprises. It’s possibly even better for small companies than Google Apps. With a promise of 99.9% uptime, generally reasonable pricing, a deep list of features, and rich cross-application compatibility, I can see many businesses wanting to use Office 365.

Opinions are mixed on just how useful the Office 365 will be to small businesses and nimble startups. Our own Matthew Lynley made the case that startups with young personnel that grew up with social networking won’t see Office 365 as the ideal solution for them. But frequent VentureBeat columnist Peter Yared argued that Office 365 will clobber Google Apps and similar cloud software options because it has familiarity and considerably more features.

The pricing for Office 365 packages is wide-ranging, perhaps too much so for its own good. Pricing starts at $6 per user per month for small businesses under 25 people. At a step up, the cost for medium- to enterprise-size businesses ranges from $10 to $27 per user per month. This is considerably more than competitor Google Apps, which charges $5 per user per month no matter how big the company.

Office 365 pricing plans escalate when companies need to add more features. If a user needs more powerful features than the ones provided in the cloud-based Office Web Apps, the company can pay more for a monthly subscription to Office Professional Plus, which is the latest desktop version of Office. A business with under 25 employees pays $18 per user per month, while businesses with more than 25 employees pays $24 per user per month to rent the latest desktop version.

A lot of the cloud-based tools available in Office 365 were previously available under the less-catchily named Business Productivity Online Suite. Office 365 improves on those tools by updating Exchange Online and SharePoint Online to include the features of the 2010 desktop version, whereas BPOS had its software bits based on the 2007 versions.

The online services that 365 specifically offers are Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, and Office Web Apps. In addition, there’s a set of Web Apps, which are slightly slimmed down versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that are accessible through a web browser.

Next: The Good and The Bad of Office 365

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Microsoft Office 365 is a cloud-based service that’s similar to Google Apps and Zoho, which gives users the ability to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and e-mail using a combination of subscription desktop software and web apps. Google started its actions against 365 last week when it announced integration between Box.net and Google Apps.

Google knocked 365 as a product built for individuals rather than for team collaboration. It pointed out that users must buy individual licenses to collaborate, where Google Docs only requires a Google account to access. “With Apps you can work with multiple people in the same document,” Google’s Sinha writes. “There’s no need to worry about whether or not it’s possible to share a spreadsheet, or co-edit a presentation. You can see people type in real time, and share a file in just two clicks.”

Another chief complaint is that Office 365 is optimized for Windows PCs and devices instead of working equally on all platforms. Google claims to support almost any device or operating system with Apps.

Those who care most about pricing will be interested Google’s point that Apps is always $5 per user per month, while Office 365′s minimum fee is $6 per user month and increases depending on which plan is selected. “We have a single, transparent, low price that meets everyone’s needs, and it hasn’t changed in 4 years,” writes Sinha. “No extras for basics like phone support and robust productivity apps. No long term contracts or opaque enterprise agreements.”

Finally, the last major criticism Google has of 365 is that Apps is built for the web while 365 is meant for the desktop. “You can’t just take legacy, desktop software, move some of it to a data center and call it ‘cloud,’” Sinha writes. “Apps was born for the web and we’ve been serving hundreds of millions of users for years.”

While I see why Google is trying to get ahead of 365′s push with some relevant criticisms, it may still prove hard to convince users who have used Office for 15 years to make the switch. I’ve also talked to a several business users that use Excel frequently who have complained about lack of spreadsheet features in Google Docs.

What do you think about Office 365 and Google Apps? Do you plan to give Office 365 a try?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Cloud Sherpas, a designated reseller of Google’s online application suite for enterprise customers, announced today it has raised $1.6 million in its first round of funding.

The funding is pegged to help the company sell its Google Application implementation to new markets. Cloud Sherpas will also use the funds to develop its own cloud offering, SherpaTools, which serves as a companion application that helps manage Google’s cloud software.

“This is mainly working capital, but we are going to be investing more in our primary product, which is SherpaTools and (other intellectual property,)” said Cloud Sherpas CEO Jon Hallett. “The last round was more about paying down debt and cleaning up the tab.”

There are three ways Cloud Sherpas makes money. The company serves as a primary reseller of Google’s applications suite — including Mail, Docs and the like — to enterprise companies and gets a slice of that. Cloud Sherpas also offers IT support for enterprise customers, which includes migrating data from existing sources to the cloud. Finally, it sells and supports its proprietary SherpaTools software. SherpaTools has been installed at around 8,000 companies, said Cloud Sherpas CEO John Hallett.

The funding was led by Syncarpha Capital, Vento Security Holdings and Hallett Capital. Hallett said Cloud Sherpas was able to close the round in a little more than three weeks thanks to its growth rate, and has never had a client not renew its Google apps license through Cloud Sherpas.

Cloud Sherpas earlier raised $1 million in a seed round led by Hallett Capital, Hallett’s own investment portfolio. The Atlanta, Ga.-based company has 40 employees but expects to have 50 people on staff by the end of the month — and more than 100 by the end of 2011. It’s been cash flow positive for some time and grown from 80,000 users six months ago to 600,000 users today, Hallett said.

The new Office is geared toward small businesses, and businesses with remote employees who telecommute. It integrates cloud services like SharePoint and Exchange with its traditional Word and PowerPoint office applications, bringing everything online with a subscription service.

“End users aren’t going to see much of a difference, they’re using the same tools they use today,” said Chris Capossela, senior vice president of the Microsoft’s Office division. “Word on the PC, phone and browser are really unchanged — they’re just connected to the Internet.”

Office 365 brings video conferencing and a public-facing website provided by Microsoft, as well as intranet software for internal collaboration. The service will come as a “basic” package for small businesses, or an a la carte pricing package for larger businesses that only need specific services. It will be a subscription-based service, unlike Google Apps, at $6 per user per month for the basic package. For larger businesses, Office 365 can cost anywhere from $2 to $27 per user per month, based on the services they purchase.

Microsoft has come under a little bit of pressure from companies like Google that are offering similar Web-based services that have become de facto collaboration tools for businesses with employees strewn across multiple locations. As companies have become more virtual and business collaboration services like Yammer have become increasingly popular, cloud services have become a necessary strategy for enterprise software providers like Microsoft.

Office 365 will launch next year, along with the traditional educational discounts for students and faculty. A beta program is launching today at noon in the U.S. and a few other countries.