With all this talk of disruption in the enterprise, young founders should not underestimate legacy vendors. Business software behemoths like SAP and Oracle have their eye on the big trends, whether it’s cloud, “big data” or mobile computing, and are finding ways to filter out the most innovative technologies from the noise.

At CloudBeat, VentureBeat’s recent customer-focused cloud conference, I caught up with Sanjay Poonen, president and corporate officer at SAP, who specializes in technology and product innovation. That afternoon, Poonen was joined on stage by one of the company’s biggest healthcare customers McKesson to discuss ongoing concerns about the cloud and their reasons for selecting SAP.

In this ensuing discussion, Poonen revealed that SAP has hedged its bets on its own big data solution, known as HANA. He told me that IT will be “transformed” by big data. In 2013, he said, “a lot of the hype goes out [the door] and the substance starts to show up.”

Watch the video for more of SAP’s predictions on the big tech trends for the coming year.

SAP (Source) from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

AgilOne does cloud-based predictive analytics, and at VentureBeat’s recent CloudBeat conference, AgilOne CEO Omer Artun took a few minutes to chat with us about big data topics as well as the startup’s recent funding round.

AgilOne tries to use the cloud to predict parts of the future with some degree of accuracy. The company used CloudBeat to announce its $10 million round of funding and the launch of its product, which provides cloud-based predictive marketing intelligence to help marketers figure out what their customers are going to do before they do it.

Big data itself was a huge topic at the conference. One of the more interesting revelations as one speaker’s assertion that companies were collecting vast amounts of unstructured data on consumers — data that they then were ill-equipped to actually use. Many of the startups at CloudBeat were attempting to meet that need, to make data from social media and other inputs actually useful.

Identity is one of the biggest problems on the internet right now. Not only do people not know where all their accounts are across the web, they often store the passwords to those accounts in files, emails, or on paper.

Companies like Ping Identity, Okta, and others are coming out of the woodwork to try and solve this issue of identity, particularly for enterprises that often have employees signing into a number of different applications throughout the day. Those companies don’t want login credentials — the gateway to their data — just lying around. And they often want to be able to manage and shut off access to certain accounts when needed.

Passwords are now getting the brunt of the blame for weak login security. VentureBeat chatted with Ping Identity’s chief executive Andre Durand to talk about the biggest needs in identity, if the passwords needs to finally kick the bucket, and what companies can do to manage employee accounts. Durand has three steps to a more secure online identity:

1. Companies need to separate “identities” from applications
2. Companies need to get rid of passwords all together
3. Companies need to focus on and enforce their own standards, or policies

Check out the video for more:

Video via livex.tv

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Big business is embracing the cloud more than ever. Cloud tech has reached a level of acceptance in the past year, with many companies moving out of pilot projects and into full-on deployments of critical parts of their business onto cloud-based systems.

This week, VentureBeat hosted CloudBeat 2012 in Redwood Shores, Calif., where executives from VMWare, Dropbox, Box, SAP, PepsiCo, Nebula, and more gave us tons of details on how they are using the cloud to disrupt business as usual.

Sure, we faced a challenge when Amazon decided to schedule its Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas at the exact same time. There’s no question Re:Invent, with its sold-out crowd, peeled some of our attendees away, but we had remarkable attendance (over 400 people) and content regardless.

And through the sessions, we saw several big themes emerge.

1. Security needs to step up in the cloud

One of the biggest concerns people had at CloudBeat was security. At a surprisingly lively panel with experts from HP, Qualys, and CloudPassage, these folks all agreed that cloud security was getting more scrutiny than ever.

Some of that scrutiny is unfair because security is problematic no matter if we rely on cloud services or not. Still, in the increasingly interconnected world of cloud services, a security weakness in one service can lead to breaches in many others, raising the stakes.

Thankfully, the speakers agreed on one easy step to move businesses and consumers in the right direction: Everyone needs to turn on multi-factor authentication if they can. Multi-factor authentication basically means you need to verify an account (part one) on a specific device (part two). Some of them even thought that every site and service on the web needs to turn it on too.

One reason so many people haven’t turned it on is because it’s sometimes a pain in the ass. During our Innovation Showdown, for example, the startup MuleSoft had trouble with its live demo because of multi-factor authentication on a Salesforce account.

2. PaaS is starting to catch on, but the enterprise will decide its fate

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), once the ugly duckling of the cloud, is starting to get way more attention. In an exciting standing-room-only session, four PaaS CEOs discussed how their businesses were changing rapidly by offering more languages and options that even slow-moving enterprises could get behind.

PaaS providers offer tools that make application development easier and faster than ever, so there are lots of reasons for companies and devs to get on board. And PaaS is getting big enough that there’s even a new startup called Appsecute that offers a dashboard for managing multiple PaaS services. But the big question is, which PaaS companies will survive when major corporations start biting?

3. Healthcare in the cloud is gonna be huge

One thing we heard from several speakers at CloudBeat was about the intersection of health care and the cloud. With electronic medical records taking off and companies investing in numerous health-care solutions, things are changing quickly. It’s a bit of a “perfect storm.”

“There is market pressure, pressure from physicians and audience groups,” Scott Whyte, VP of IT Connectivity at Dignity Health, the fifth largest hospital provider in the nation, said on stage.

While there are many hurdles to electronic medical records — including security, breaches, compliance and regulatory issues, and legacy systems — the Affordable Care Act mandates the transition to them by 2014. This will mean a bit of forced innovation is coming and lots of players who will benefit.

4. Big bets on ‘big data’

Yet another topic we heard a lot about the conference was “big data.” Companies are looking for more ways to take advantage of vast amounts of unstructured data that they’re collecting from social networks and other sources and put it to better use.

Ken Stineman, the senior director of enterprise architecture and security at Genomic Health, told us on stage that companies can do better. “We are generating terabytes of data about the human genome,” he said. With that data in hand, Genomic Health hopes to do things like improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy on cancer patients.

A big data startup called AgilOne — which tries to foretell the future using the cloud — used CloudBeat to announce its $10 million funding round and the launch of its product. It provides cloud-based predictive marketing intelligence to help marketers figure out what their customers are going to do next.

5. Cloud compute is getting super cheap

Amazon lowered its S3 prices yet again during Re:Invent, prompting Google to lower its prices as well. We had Google exec Amit Singh tell us Google was “happy to compete.” Clearly cloud computing power is racing to the bottom when it comes to price. This is a great thing for startups and businesses that want to take advantage of the cloud. You could almost say it has a “Robin Hood” effect: It’s bridging the gap between rich and poor businesses.

Singh later told us he believes pricing for the public cloud, especially from major companies like Google should continue to go down. When asked whether it will eventually be free, Singh said he didn’t know if that would actually happen. He did say, however, that it was “possible.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dropbox vice president Sujay Jaswa says people should think of Dropbox like the iPad: a technology that was aimed at consumers but wound up infiltrating the work world.

“The idea that work will be done the same way five years from now is just impossible,” said Jaswa during the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif. “We have some awesome ideas that we will talk about in the next several months.”

He suggested that Apple probably thought of different use cases for the iPad but didn’t imagine customers would start taking them into work and schools, transforming the way we work. Bringing the analogy full circle, Dropbox has tablet-related announcements to come soon.

Currently, the company has 95 percent of the Fortune 500 companies as clients, and according to research by firewall company Palo Alto Networks, Dropbox’s customer usage amount is 204 times higher than that of competitor Box.

When asked about security, Jaswa skirted the issue, saying Dropbox would love to hear from its customers. IT departments in a number of companies have blacklisted Dropbox because of the fear that proprietary information will get leaked.

Dropbox was hacked earlier this year, causing the company to take on new forms of security. Now Dropbox uses two-factor authentication and encrypts your files both in transit and in storage. You data, however, is kept in a hybrid of Dropbox’s servers and Amazon S3.

“We’ve recgonized that from hearing from customers that the administrative side is really important,” said Jaswa.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Seven companies presented on stage today, but only one won CloudBeat 2012′s Innovation Showdown. That was Kabbage, a small-business funding platform that uses cloud power to connect companies with cash.

“The average business has grown by 266 percent since they’ve started using us,” Rob Frohwein, CEO and co-founder of Kabbage, said on stage during his presentation.

The CloudBeat Innovation Showdown, sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank, featured seven finalists from more than 200 applicants that hope to disrupt business using cloud-based technologies.

Upon winning, we asked Frohwein (pictured, far left) why his company potentially beat out the other promising finalists. He suggested it might be relatability and appreciation to small businesses and startups, which often don’t get off the ground because loans or funding don’t come through.

“People want to connect to problems they relate to,” Frohwein told VentureBeat. “Everybody in this room has interacted with a small business at some point. We leverage the cloud, big data, and real-tine analytics to power a large segment of the U.S. economy that otherwise wouldn’t be served. It’s the life-blood of our economy.”

Check out the other six finalists from the Innovation Showdown below:

Adaptive Planning

Adaptive Planning offers a SaaS-based solution for budgeting, planning, and forecasting for companies big and small. It works with companies and nonprofits to fundamentally transform their management processes — the way they plan, monitor, measure, and analyze their business performance, throughout the entire company to improve productivity, costs, and decisions. It claims to be a step better than traditional Excel-based planning and budgeting and legacy enterprise performance solutions.

“We save our customers time, we increase productivity and we help them make better decisions,” Adaptive Planning CEO John Herr said.

Appsecute

Appsecute is a relatively young cloud application management provider. Appsecute bills itself as “RightScale for PaaS.” It claims to bridge the divide between developers and IT operations, delivering collaborative management tools. The company provides app management for the cloud, with an emphasis on transitioning applications into production.

“Enterprises need to be able to use a variety of platforms,” Appsecute CEO Mark Cox said. “We understand the enterprise space and we’re taking PaaS to the enterprise.”

At CloudBeat, the company announced that it would support major PaaS provider Heroku.

CircleCi

CircleCi offers software to make companies’ and developers’ lives easier with “continuous integration.” It claims that its software can make developers 90 percent more productive and save them an average of 36 hours per week. In a nutshell, the company provides hosted continuous integration for web applications. Once developers push their code to GitHub, CircleCi immediately begins testing it and deploying the application to Heroku if tests are successful.

Cloudessa

Cloudessa bills itself as a “Dropbox for network security.” It is a cloud service that control access of every user or device on a particular network. The company claims to use complex network security protocols, simplify them dramatically, and provide them as a cloud utility to any user on any device.

Fiverun

Fiverun offers a service for showcasing your products in a very easy fashion on a tablet. It helps retailers provide advice and recommendations and checkout customers. The company believes consumers should first be helped by a sales associate that is armed with a device that has every product the retailer carries. Fiverun leverage its cloud-based platform to power this functionality as a SaaS-based solution for any retailer that wants it.

MuleSoft

MuleSoft lets organizations harness the power of their applications through integration, which is vital to success these days. The company provides one of the most widely used integration platforms for connecting SaaS and enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premise. Customers include Zynga, Boeing and Bank of America.

“Typical implementation takes 18 hours,” the company’s CEO said. “That’s everything from design through implementation.”

You can watch the full competition between the seven finalists below:

Photos via Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amit Singh, president of enterprise at Google, is ready to fight. Amazon and Google traded blows this week, each lowering their cloud services prices in response to the other.

Amazon, which held its own cloud conference this week, announced on Wednesday that it is lowering its cloud services pricing by 20 percent. This came only two days after Google announced that it lowered its cloud storage pricing by 25 percent. Google responded to Amazon’s price drop by taking an extra 10 percent off today.

Got to love price wars.

“Look, we are happy to compete,” said Singh at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif. “We believe our storage is actually better. We’re seeing some of the largest Amazon customers actually test and migrate over to our infrastructure because it is unique what we do.”

Singh went on to say that he believes pricing for the public cloud, especially from big companies like Google should continue to go down. When asked whether or not it should be free, Singh said he didn’t know if that would actually happen. He did say, however, that it was possible.

But while Amazon is a big competitor for Google — a competitor getting a lot of attention right now — Microsoft is still in the game. It seems Microsoft might be going off in its own direction, according to Singh, making them less of a concern.

“The legacy is going the other way. You know, Microsoft just increased their prices by 15 percent for no reason. It’s ludicrous. I mean, for what? For the same products and the same users you charge more money?”

For now, Google will continue to build on top of its cloud products, which include Google Docs, Google Apps, Google+ Hangouts, and more. In particular, Google Apps is “going through a big hockey-stick.”

Check out a video of the panel discussion below:

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

At CloudBeat, the healthcare panel kicked off with a harrowing statistic. The vast majority of breast cancer sufferers will not benefit from chemotherapy. And yet, most patients today receive this highly invasive treatment.

According to genetics expert Ken Stineman, over 80 percent of patients are treated with chemo so we can “catch that four percent.” Stineman, the senior director of enterprise architecture and security at Genomic Health, believes that we can do better.

Genomic Health offers diagnostic services to cancer patients. The company pulls in health information so patients can be treated based on their genetic make-up and we can take the guesswork out of medicine. Companies in this space, often referred to as “personalized medicine,” have spawned in recent years to take advantage of the plummeting cost of sequencing human DNA.

“We are generating terabytes of data about the human genome,” said Stineman. Read more here about how genomics entrepreneurs are building technologies to help you live longer. 

At CloudBeat, the Silicon Valley cloud conference that emphasizes real customer case-studies, Stineman revealed his concerns about whether cloud technology companies could be trusted with our sensitive genetic information. Chaos would ensue if this data gets into the wrong hands. Stineman’s ongoing concern: “How can we protect your genes and mitigate those risks?”

He revealed to Cloud of Data’s Paul Miller, a CloudBeat moderator, that there has been rapid progress in recent years. One year ago, most cloud companies had negligible experience dealing with sensitive health information. Stineman and his team chose to work with SAP (they were the first healthcare customer to use the SAP Business ByDesign product). SAP’s team was willing to get educated about compliance and regulatory issues, and engage in a dialogue about how to keep patient information safe.

Stineman would take this relationship between healthcare companies and the cloud one step further — he said that vendors should be liable for security breaches that occur, perhaps in the form of a data loss prevention fee.”If we’re going to trust you, you”ll have to be on the hook for some of that liability and cost,” he said.

Read more about one of the hottest topics at CloudBeat: healthcare and the cloud. 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is by far the smallest sector of cloud among the main areas of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and BPaaS. But the CEOs of four young platform-as-a-service startups think their prospects for growth and survival are good — as long as the enterprise bites.

Today at CloudBeat 2012, the four CEOs — AppFog‘s Lucas Carlson, Apprenda‘s Sinclair Schuller, dotCloud‘s Solomon Hykes, Engine Yard‘s John Dillon — all believe that 10 years from now the PaaS and cloud markets will be substantially changed, with PaaS kicking serious ass. What that takes is big-dollar companies to invest in PaaS companies on the promise that it will help them deploy and develop apps faster and better than they’ve ever done.

“When you go into an enterprise and talk to them, you say ‘we’re here to build the foundation for the next 10 years of app development for you,’ Schuller said.

Apprenda stands out among the rest of the crowd because it offers its product to enterprises as a service that can be run behind a firewall instead of using the public cloud. AppFog works behind the firewall and as a public cloud options, while dotCloud and Engine Yard are public PaaS options.

Even though these are all competitors with different visions on how they survive, the CEOs were remarkably friendly with each other. They had slight disagreements but believe in the overall picture of PaaS growing due to mainstream adoption. The adoption of PaaS correlates strongly with overall cloud services adoption, Engine Yard’s Dillon noted.

“I predict very few companies in the future will build their own data centers,” Dillon said. “If you’re an army base or an oil rig, you might need your own fire department, but most of us will use the San Francisco fire department. We’re not going to dig our own wells to get water. Generating your own compute cycle is one of the dumbest things you can do.”

The biggest cloud services company in the world, Amazon, does not offer a legit platform for app development and is even an investor in Engine Yard. Dillon said even with Amazon as an investor, “they scare the hell out of me” based on their size and power in the market.

dotcloud’s Hykes had a different take on Amazon. He says that Amazon has been “surfing” on the success of its widely used S3 and EC2 products for a long time and that’s why they are the largest. But since cloud is growing, there’s room for other giant cloud players. “Cloud is such a tremendously huge market,” Hykes said. “There’s room for 20 companies that size.”

Some of the companies Hykes mentions could be of the PaaS variety. But yet again, that all depends on buying into the promise of PaaS. “It’s not about running apps — it’s about changing the way they are built,” Schuller said.

AppFog’s Carlson agreed with that point and later said he thinks business IT spending will shift more to PaaS in the near term.

“PaaS brings relevance to where application development is going,” Carlson said. “When it clicks, we’ll see a generational change in enterprise spending.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

At VentureBeat’s cloud-focused conference today, we got a real treat: a fascinating fireside chat with two titans of enterprise IT, Lew Tucker and Randy Bias.

Tucker is Cisco’s CTO and vice president of cloud computing, and Bias is the CTO and co-founder of Cloudscaling, a startup with OpenStack-powered products for elastic scaling.

In their talk, the two men debated the two types of cloud infrastructure that have emerged as cloud migration strategies for the enterprise: virtualization clouds versus elastic infrastructure clouds. A virtualization cloud means built-in support for older, deeply integrated legacy applications, while elastic clouds are defined by newer web services.

What are the strengths of each, and which solution is right for which scenarios? Watch the talk to find out.

Top image courtesy of Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

More is better for cloud executives. The industry is feeling good about cloud investing in the next year, particularly because their technology helps entrepreneurs create many more companies, faster than ever before.

“Now you can throw [together] $50,000, a couple guys, and a good concept, and get [a product] in a couple of weeks,” said Cloudability chief executive Mat Ellis at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif, “Maybe the cloud will allow more good companies to be born.”

The more “good” companies out there, the more opportunity to get a hit technology that changes the industry. Options equal opportunity for the cloud community. And because it’s so easy to get a backend, inventory services, customer service, customer relationship management and so much more in the cloud, we’ll likely see a burst in companies.

Cloud companies are also worried about big time deals that come out of the social and mobile industries. Instagram sold to Facebook for $1 billion, which John Cowan, chief executive of 6fusion, believes spoils investor’s outlook on what a successful investment is.

“The Instagrams we like to read about because they’re great headlines…but that is the effective equivalent of the state lottery,” said Cowan in a panel at the CloudBeat conference. “It’s not something we should all bank on or that VCs should bank on. I think those are detrimental to the market.”

Cowan is also scared about the type of exits cloud companies may get: being sold for parts.

But before cloud investments can boom, some key areas of cloud still need more love. Platform as a a service, according to Mark Cox, founder of Appsecute, is a disruptive technology, but only a sliver of the market uses it because it’s difficult to deploy. Ease of use is often the barrier to entry for many new products, and if companies feel like they can’t integrate PaaS into their systems without eating up a bunch of resources, they’re not going to use it.

But Engine Yard says there’s hope for PaaS. The technology is changing and nearly 60 percent of companies Engine Yard surveyed plan on using PaaS in some way in their businesses.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Business software behemoth SAP is betting big on a next generation in-memory database known as “HANA.”

“There is a lot of halo around this [HANA],” said Sanjay Poonen, President & Corporate Officer of SAP on stage at CloudBeat, the customer-focused cloud computing conference in Redwood City.”We expect this [HANA] to have a billion dollar future on its own,” he said.

HANA (which stands for High-Performance Analytic Appliance) is a container that can store up to 500 terabytes of data, and execute at high speed. With this database, SAP has burst into the “big data” conversation. Large corporations are increasingly looking for ways to store, process and analyze their data, and are turning to legacy vendors (such as SAP and Oracle) as well as the new breed of startups that are jostling for attention.

Mike Kelly, SVP Information Technology of McKesson is one of HANA’s most longstanding and demanding customers. Not only is McKesson, a Cailfornia-based healthcare IT provider, dealing with terabytes of data, but there is highly sensitive patient information that must be protected. Cloud technologies have become more secure, but McKesson’s store of electronic patient records remain on-premise.

McKesson, which claims to be one of the largest purchasers of generic pharmaceuticals in the world, are using HANA for sales and operations planning. “My job is provide timely and accurate information [to our] core distribution business,” said Kelly. By crunching the numbers in real-time, McKesson is in pole position to offer the best pricing to retailers.

Kelly said that in the future, the major concern is to avoid security breaches as the company shifts to mobile; “there are a lot of questions about confidentiality as it relates to mobile,” he said. “This is certainly top of mind [and] on my list of things to do.” Poonen revealed that in the upcoming years, mobility will be one of SAP’s major areas of focus.

Missed out on CloudBeat this year? Check out the video from the session here.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VMWare chief technology officer Stephen Herrod believes in a future filled with choices. And he thinks networking companies better start embracing choice, especially open-source software, or face steep consequences.

“There’s not a networking company in the world that doesn’t realize things need to change dramatically,” Herrod said on-stage today at CloudBeat 2012.

VMWare currently has its hands tied to many different projects, trying to find a way forward in software-defined networking, trying to virtualize every piece of the data center, and embracing platform-as-a-service with Cloud Foundry. Herrod cited VMWare’s acquisitions of Nicira and DynamicOps as big wins that will help them continue to innovate in the virtualization space.

Herrod is so dedicated to choice that half of VMWare’s engineers are working on open-source software and the other half are on closed-source software.

“The approach we’re taking is the one that will win in the long term,” Herrod said.

Check out the great full interview with Herrod in the video below.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Bill Platt is senior vice president of operations at Engine Yard, a Platform as a Service, where he enables cloud application development for thousands of Engine Yard customers, worldwide across PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Node.js communities.

There’s no question that the adoption of PaaS (Platform as a Service) is accelerating. With analysts like Gartner predicting PaaS will increase from “three percent to 43 percent of all enterprises by 2015,” it can no longer be ignored.

PaaS is a complete application development platform that can be used online, in “the cloud.” Gartner also says that “broad vendor adoption amounts to a sound industry endorsement of PaaS as an alternative to the traditional middleware deployment models.”

So, what’s driving the rapid growth of PaaS? Engine Yard surveyed 162 management and technical professionals in companies of all types and sizes to learn more about PaaS adoption, PaaS advantages, and perceptions about the role of PaaS in business strategy. The results were intriguing:

• Awareness and adoption are already quite high.
 Almost 90 percent of respondents were familiar with the term, and 64 percent have implemented PaaS or are planning to.

• Companies are using PaaS for increasingly critical functions. 
Contrary to what you might think, the fact that PaaS saves companies money was the least important to respondents. Instead, PaaS is now seen as a way to boost agility, improve operational efficiency, and increase the performance, scalability, and reliability of mission-critical applications.

• 
People are discovering that PaaS breaks down barriers to rapid innovation. With PaaS, developers can test, deploy, and iterate new applications with unprecedented speed—so they can improve application agility, customer engagement, and the overall customer experience.

PaaS adopters are achieving real-world results and there’s a clear mandate for PaaS adoption now.

“This is the year where you’ve got to incorporate the cloud into your IT strategy. The time is now,” said John Rymer, analyst at Forrester in a previous video interview with Engine Yard.

No PaaS plans? You’re in the minority.

The Engine Yard “PaaS State of the Market” survey was conducted in the spring of 2012. The respondents included technical management and application developers (56.6 percent of the total), as well as executives (40.3 percent). Almost half of the respondents (46 percent) came from application development companies or digital agencies. The remainder came from a variety of company sizes, including mid-size enterprises (7.9 percent) and large enterprises (15.1 percent).

The survey found that 39 percent of respondents have already implemented PaaS, and 25 percent more are planning to adopt PaaS in the months or years ahead.

Figure 1: In the Engine Yard survey, about 60% of respondents indicated they are 
already using PaaS or plan to adopt it within a year.

The Engine Yard survey also found that those who have adopted PaaS tend to be using it for business-critical applications, as reported by respondents who were asked to gauge the importance of the applications being deployed on their websites. The types of applications being deployed are mainly customer-facing: software as a service, mobile, commerce, and social or a combination of these categories.

Figure 2: Early adopters of PaaS view their web apps as critical and tend to be
using PaaS for customer-facing apps.

Perhaps because the applications running on PaaS are seen as “business-critical,” operational improvement was most often cited as an important driver for PaaS adoption. Specifically, three categories of benefits were mentioned above all others:

Real companies see real results, fast.

The actual benefits achieved by companies using PaaS have been both quantifiable and substantial. Here are highlights of the results that two companies have achieved:

The best is yet to come.

One of the most interesting revelations of the Engine Yard survey is that additional advantages of PaaS are emerging as the technology matures. For example, survey respondents cited all of the following as “very important” benefits of PaaS:

• Application uptime (46 percent): PaaS vendors have the tools, technologies, and experience to help you avoid the unplanned outages that cause downtime. The best PaaS vendors embed technologies and techniques in their products to keep availability high enough that they can offer service-level agreements (SLAs) at or above 99.9 percent availability.

• Innovation (41 percent): With PaaS, development teams can focus their time and effort where it counts—on innovation. Rather than spend scarce resources on building and maintaining infrastructure, they can test more ideas faster, find the ones with real potential, iterate and deploy quickly, and build the company’s reputation for superior services. PaaS also makes it easier and faster to create targeted promotions that truly engage consumers — while cutting the cost and complexity of deploying creative new web apps, services, and interactive applications. And when your new campaign is a big hit, you can scale quickly and efficiently.

• Augmenting expertise (21 percent): PaaS also helps you can boost the performance, scalability, and security of your web and mobile apps without having to acquire or develop all that expertise in-house. It’s like having a broad team of operations specialists working with you — except that you don’t have to recruit, hire, train, and retain them as employees.

“With large and growing vendor investment in PaaS, the market is on the cusp of several years of strategic growth, leading to innovation and likely breakthroughs in technology and business use of all of cloud computing … Users and vendors of enterprise IT software solutions that are not yet engaged with PaaS must begin building expertise in PaaS or face tough challenges from competitors in the coming years,” said Yefim Natis, vice president and analyst at Gartner in a statement.

Looking for the next big thing? PaaS can help you find it.

The survey affirms what analysts are already saying: PaaS is maturing, and the value extracted from PaaS to date is still just a small fraction of the true potential. Benefits such as increased agility, operational efficiency, and cost savings are just the tip of he iceberg – PaaS is also driving innovation and customer engagement to new heights, expanding the reach of your operations staff, improving application uptime, and more.

Simply put, PaaS is the foundation of a truly transformative business strategy.

Train platform image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cinchcast lets you create your own massive webcasts and conference calls for events such as quarterly conference calls. The number of participants on the calls can scale from a handful to millions of people. Without the cloud, this wouldn’t be possible.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy (pictured right), chief technology officer at New York-based Cinchcast described the key lessons from scaling up Cinchcast using cloud services at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2012 conference in a fireside chat with Vanessa Alvarez (pictured left), director of product marketing at Gridstore. Cinchcast disrupted the conference call business by creating self-serve, reservation-less web-based conferences.

“We scale from hundreds to tens of millions,” Yampolskiy said. “With the influx of traffic, you can easily provision extra instances” of server hardware.

Yampolskiy said he relies on three rules to help scale up the company’s business. The first rule is to automate as much as possible. When a process requires an engineer to work until 2 am in the middle of the night, it clearly isn’t scalable or automated. Rule No. 2 is simplicity. He says you have to make complicated things simpler in order to scale a service to the millions. Rule No. 3 is to use metrics to measure every aspect of performance, security, uptime, and latency.

Those rules were put to the test on June 29, when usage of the site began to plummet. Over the course of a few weeks, traffic fell from 4.8 million page views a day to 4.2 million. Executives were camped outside Yampolskiy’s door seeking an explanation. His company used New Relic‘s performance management app as an X-ray for the business. The team used it to identify a problem known as “donut caching” that wasn’t working properly, resulting in a slowdown in performance for users. The company attacked the problem and improved the service.

Since Yampolskiy joined 15 months ago, the load time for the site has gone from 14 seconds to 4.9 seconds.

“We saw a huge corresponding increase in revenues,” he said.

As for a public or private cloud, Yampolskiy said, “I like to be in control of my destiny. If it goes down, it is my responsibility. But I have a mix of public and private clouds.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It is a big day for precipitation and data. With gloomy skies and CloudBeat 2012 going on right now in Redwood City, the time is ripe for cloud company AgilOne to make two big announcements.

Today, the company launched its flagship solution (also called AgilOne) and announced the closure of a $10 million round of investment.

AgilOne provides cloud-based predictive marketing intelligence to help marketers figure out what their customers are going to do next. The platform serves as a “data scientist in the cloud.” It not only helps teams make sense of large quantities of data, but also make smarter marketing decisions and address issues of acquisition, retention, and reactivation.

Predictive algorithms monitor clients’ sites for risks and opportunities and send alerts about what is happening in the customer base. AgilOne then applies machine learning to show the reasons behind trends and results, and provides dashboards for measuring and analysis. Detailed customer profiles are also available, so marketers can quickly react to their customers’ behavior.

The platform is tailored to high-volume marketers and it works with large corporations such as Bosch, ideeli, Moosejaw, PetCareRx, and Shazam. Many marketing professionals do not have a background in complex math, and AgilOne seeks to give them the information they need without it.

The $10 million in financing was led by Mayfield Fund, with participation from Sequoia Capital who led the $6 million Series A last year. The money will be put towards expanding sales, marketing, and engineering efforts. AgilOne is based in Mountain View, California.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Box VP of engineering Sam Schillace recently moved to his current job after several years at Google. He doesn’t tolerate bad user experiences in the products he develops, and he doesn’t think users will either.

“Users in general are getting more and more savvy and tolerance for bad experiences is getting lower,” Schillace said on-stage at CloudBeat 2012 conference. “The bar keeps getting higher in terms of design and user experience. We see it in Google Docs, we see it in Box quite a bit. You get carried into enterprises because there’s a blurring of lines between your work and your personal life.”

This philosophy relates intensely to his work at Box, the enterprise cloud storage startup that’s attracted $287 million in funding from top-tier investors and now has more than 140,000 customers.

The biggest area Box is focused on when it comes to designing a better experience? Mobile, no question.

“When you’re in a mobile device, that’s essentially a consumer experience,” Schillace said. “It’s very fast — you don’t have a lot of time or space. You’re running next to other consumer-grade applications. You have to be at that level of quality. And we see knowledge workers demanding that more and more.”

Check out out full interview with Schillace in the video below.

Top photo: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Corporate interest in software-as-a-service apps continues to grow, particularly in the era of cloud computing. But integrating those apps with the data in core systems of a business isn’t easy. And a number of companies are working on how to make integration “suck less.”

That was the topic of discussion for a breakout session at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2012 conference today in Redwood City, Calif. The goal is to make data integration “lightweight,” or easy enough to be done in an automated way, said Sam Ramji (pictured second from right), vice president of strategy at Apigee, a company that sells its applications programming interface (API) platform to big corporations.

“Apps were never built to be shared, and it’s like prying information out of folks who are unwilling to share it,” Ramji said. “Our goal is to make it suck less.”

Core databases from Oracle are used to run corporate functions, but enterprises are embracing apps in a big way. Developers can write apps that run on those systems, but only if there are APIs to make the data flow back and forth. The data have to be shared in a secure way, Ramji said.

SnapLogic has built an integration platform that allows data to be accessed across both apps and core systems that are located either in the cloud or in on-premise data centers within corporations. Chris Wagner (pictured second from left), chief technology officer at SnapLogic, said that the need to integrate modern apps is driving up the costs and barriers to entry to building those apps.

“You have dozens of APIs now, and every one has a different idea of how data should be represented,” Wagner said. “SnapLogic’s idea is to ride this wave of API technology and build a platform to allow people to integrate data and move it where it’s supposed to be.”

And that integration should happen in a short time, not after a lengthy evaluation and testing process. Integration is important because new apps are generating a fountain of data, and it can’t be isolated in an inaccessible silo.

Darren Cunningham (pictured far left), vice president at Informatica Cloud, said his company also bridges core data systems and new cloud applications in the hybrid world of today’s cloud services.

Wagner said modern databases aren’t going to replace Oracle installations anytime soon, but those Oracle systems aren’t doing everything that more flexible modern apps can do.

“Systems of record won’t go anywhere,” Ramji agreed. “An Oracle-backed SAP system running five countries where you do business isn’t going to go away. But interoperability is key. Everyone now has devices like tablets, laptops and smartphones. They want to access their data on those devices. Where is all that data being stored? Do you need it after 30 days? Will you want to access data from a year ago?”

For instance, he noted, developers may want to create an app that captures Black Friday sales data, but they may also want to compare that to data from a year ago. The data from a year ago has to be accessible.

Cunningham said, “You are making a great case for Informatica.” And Ramji added, “You have to do it in a way so you expose the data and don’t crash old legacy hardware.”

Other issues arise from the mixture of cloud and core systems. Ramji noted that it’s easy to cut off access to data for an employee who is terminated. But what about making sure that there is no company data in a Dropbox account that the employee can access?

“Do you remember going from local area network (LAN) computing to the web? That was terrible. This is like it,” Ramji said.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you’re not using multi-factor authentication as a company or as a consumer, you really need to start. No, seriously, go turn it on now if you can.

During today’s cloud security panel at CloudBeat 2012, three security experts that didn’t always agree about the best approaches to security did agree that everyone needs to start using multi-factor authentication.

Mentioning the now-famous incident of Wired writer Mat Honan being hacked, the panelists — HP senior security strategist Rafal Los, Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek, and CloudPassage chief security evangelist Andrew Hay — basically said every connected device you own and every electronic account you have has the potential of being hacked.

One of the easiest ways to start protecting yourself is multi-factor authentication. For example, if you have a Google account, you can install Google Authenticator on your devices.

“Standard passwords are not secure,” CloudPassage’s Hay said. “Multi-factor authentication is the only solution that will be accepted by the mainstream.”

Qualys’ Kandek went a step further, saying every service and site needs it: “Every site should use multi-factor authentication,” he said.

The panel also hit several other big topics:

– Should we be emphasizing security first for the enterprise or for consumers? HP’s Los and Qualys’ Kandek agreed that it needs to start with the enterprise, mostly because you can actually force security policies on employees whether they want it or not. Consumers won’t necessarily embrace security no matter how much you prod.

CloudPassage’s Hay disagreed. He believed security isn’t starting explicitly with either the consumer or enterprise. He said:

“It doesn’t have to start with enterprises or consumers. Personal users should be educated to use these tools. With enterprises, you’re assuming that the organization is going to know better than you when that may not be the case.”

– Is a standardized password policy across all big enterprises a good idea? Yes, but it’s not going to happen.

“I would love to have one standardized password policy to use across all companies, but my grandkids will be driving hover cars on Mars before that happens.”

– How can we make security policies better at companies? Get feedback from real employees, not just IT guys.

“Have your employees vet what you’re saying,” Hay said. “If you involve two or three people on the process, they’ll have a connection to the policy and add input that you might not have thought of.”

Check out more of our coverage and livestream from CloudBeat.

Photo credit: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We’ve added a new speaker to the CloudBeat 2012 lineup: CloudOn.

CloudOn, which is a sponsor of CloudBeat 2012, is an interesting company with truly impressive growth stats. It provides an app for tablet and smartphone users to create, edit, and collaborate on Microsoft Office documents — all from the cloud, and without the need for an Office license.

Thanks in part to its impressive value proposition — realtime collaboration, on tablets, using industry-standard Office files, such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations — CloudOn has racked up 2 million users in 10 months. That’s an almost unheard-of growth rate.

I’ll be moderating a fireside discussion with CloudOn’s founder and chief executive, Milind Gadekar, tomorrow afternoon at 4:30. I’m looking forward to chatting with him about CloudOn’s growth, how mobile devices are fueling the need for more sophisticated cloud services, and how tablets are rapidly becoming productivity tools, thanks to the growth of mobile-friendly cloud technologies.

Here’s the session description. Check out the CloudBeat 2012 agenda for the full schedule today and tomorrow. And it’s not too late to register to attend CloudBeat.

Productivity: The Coming Cloud Revolution

Microsoft and Google have embraced the cloud to offer their respective productivity solutions, albeit optimized for a PC experience. The future of cloud-based productivity needs to build on an open federated storage model, optimized for mobile devices and a group productivity environment. Milind Gadekar, CEO/co-founder of CloudOn, will discuss their initial success as they build such a solution.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For cloud technology companies that are brave enough to tackle the healthcare industry, it’s a perfect storm — there are major challenges and opportunities.

At CloudBeat, the conference focused on how real customers are transitioning to the cloud, healthcare technology experts gathered to discuss moving from paper-based to electronic systems.

For IT leads at hospitals and health providers, now is the time for action. “There is market pressure, pressure from physicians and audience groups,” said Scott Whyte, Vice President of IT Connectivity at Dignity Health, the fifth largest hospital provider in the nation.

By 2014, Obamacare mandates that hospitals and practitioners who have been maintaining paper records to switch to electronic medical records.

It will not be a simple transition. “The healthcare industry is fragmented, complex and paper-based,” said Darin Brannan, president and CEO of ClearDATA, a secure provider of e-mail and cloud computing technologies that take the risk out of mail and app hosting.

The key hurdles for companies like ClearDATA include security and breaches, compliance and regulatory issues, and the existing legacy infrastructure systems.

Brannan was joined on stage by Whyte, who selected ClearDATA five years ago. He recalled choosing ClearData from myriad providers because they “got healthcare.” ”They understood the compliance issues that are unique to the industry,” explained Whyte. “They delivered value and executed quickly and we started learning the value of the cloud.”

According to these experts, the leading cloud providers are not adequately serving the healthcare vertical. “AWS [Amazon Web Services] will give you the tools to make yourself HIPPA compliant but that isn’t really an option,” said Brannan. “We are HIPPA compliant to the same level as a hospital.” To ensure that the security is adequate, Dignity Health performed deep privacy checks and legal reviews.

Security is an enduring problem in healthcare – The Office for Civil Rights reported that (the “OCR”), from 2009, 477 breaches affecting 500 people or more were reported. In total, the health records of 20,970,222 people were breached, according to the OCR’s website.Read more about how healthcare is moving to the cloud here. 

Healthcare IT is hot: As the market matures, we can expect that more mainstream cloud providers will introduce solutions specifically designed for this vertical.

If you missed it, catch the live stream of the talk!

Image credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Chris Kemp has a pretty impressive resume: a co-founder of OpenStack, former NASA CTO, and CEO of next-gen private cloud startup Nebula. So when he speaks, people listen up.

On stage at CloudBeat 2012 today, Kemp predicted that “next year is the year of OpenStack.” OpenStack, the open source cloud platform that was established in 2010 by NASA and Rackspace, has attracted a lot of fans since its inception and has more than 150 participating companies using it including Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, and Yahoo.

So it makes sense that OpenStack adoption will continue to increase, especially over the next few years as more companies increase their reliance on cloud solutions. This ties perfectly to what Kemp is selling with his company Nebula. Nebula has raised more than $30 million from Comcast Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and others on the promise of equipping businesses with more flexible and secure private clouds.

Kemp argues that private clouds need to deliver all the benefits of the public cloud (Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer, Joyent, etc.) but behind a firewall. Ideally, you get fast and reliable computing power but with more security. He also makes a fair point that companies need better hardware, especially if they are running a cloud.

“If you’re a developer using the cloud, the hardware doesn’t matter,” Kemp said. “If you’re running a cloud, it very much matters.”

Check out the full talk with Kemp below for more interesting tidbits from this impressive fellow:

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

PepsiCo does not plan on moving its systems public cloud. Yet.

Frank Edwards, the director of IT strategy at PepsiCo has been working on the “Exit Strategy Group” at the global food and beverage giant. The group looks at how to bring operating costs down and make PepsiCo’s backend as efficient as possible. And he doesn’t think the public cloud fits that mold.

“We haven’t seen that it’s compelling to be less expensive or to fit our risk profile,” said Edwards at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif. “If you have a compelling case that will save us a million dollars, that’s not really compelling enough.”

PepsiCo takes in $65 billion in revenue a year.

In order to come to this conclusion, Edwards and his team used the Monte Carlo Simulation, which took over 40 billion different situations in which PepsiCo could save money through the public cloud, and found that it just didn’t make sense.

“I’d love to see more companies adopt this kind of mechanism when selling to large enterprise,” said Edwards. “It does seem like a lot of messages are geared toward the developer or SMBs [small to medium sized businesses].”

Edwards said that PepsiCo believes that it won’t last forever as a private cloud company, however.

“The public cloud is eventual, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” he said.

In order to prepare for that, the company has purposefully built its data centers near Amazon and other cloud providers so that it can physically hook up to them if need be.

For an enterprise company like PepsiCo, the public cloud really makes sense for product launches and other unpredictable events. PepsiCo likes to work with public cloud vendors when it has various promotions or product launches so that it doesn’t have to deal with the resulting traffic spikes.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

CloudBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s high-quality, customer-centric, solutions-oriented enterprise cloud conference, happening Wednesday and Thursday, November 28 and 29. Follow complete CloudBeat coverage here.

You can still get a ticket. But what if you can’t attend in person — maybe because you’re at some other company’s cloud event? Worry no more.

VentureBeat has partnered up with xTV to bring you a live video feed of everything happening onstage at CloudBeat.

Plus, we’re offering the CloudBeat 2012 Backstage Pass.

The VentureBeat team and XTV host Malou Nubla will work the conference for you and capture those insights and learnings you could have caught if you attended.

The CloudBeat 2012 Backstage Pass delivers in-depth insights from IT executives, interviews from the hottest cloud startups, and previews of the latest in enterprise technologies. It’s got a mix that will appeal to CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, VPs of product development, analysts, investors, high-level press, and more.

You can watch CloudBeat 2012 free thanks to xTV at livex.tv/venturebeat

To access the CloudBeat 2012 Backstage Pass click on the banner below and sign up.

Over the course of the two days of the event, new interviews and footage will become available on the channel and they’ll be available for 90 days live on xTV.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Click here if you’d like my weekly column sent directly to your inbox. It takes less than a minute to sign up, and you’ll get the stories before they’re published on VentureBeat.

VentureBeat’s second annual CloudBeat conference is coming up, and here’s why you should be there:

* Unlike most other conferences, customers are center stage at CloudBeat 2012. We’ll have IT executives talking about how they implement cloud technologies in the real world, sharing equal billing with the vendors that provide those technologies.

So if you’re sick of marketing mumbo-jumbo and want to know what the reality is behind all this “cloud” verbiage, come check out CloudBeat.

* It’s a small, intimate venue, perfect for learning about cloud technologies at a high level and for making deals. If somehow the people on stage aren’t clear enough with their examples or aren’t giving you the data you need, ask them about it afterwards. This is not a velvet-rope conference where only the few have access to the speakers. This is a true networking event.

* Cloud and mobile are two sides of the same coin. Cloud technologies enable the be-anywhere, you-can-take-it-with-you mobility that tablet and smartphone users demand. If your employees are using iPads or Nexus 7s for work (and you can bet they are, whether or not they got them from IT), cloud-based enterprise apps will make those devices far more productive and useful. That’s why learning about the cloud is critical right now.

* Last year, one of the most amazing revelations came from the chief information officer of a nationwide physical therapy chain, RehabCare: He said that the company saw a 92 percent reduction in broken devices after it switched to supporting Apple iPads and iPhones. The tipping point that pushed IT to support Apple devices? When the CEO got an iPad, of course.

The lesson isn’t that Apple products are amazing — though that certainly might enter your head, especially if compared with whatever pathetically outdated device, probably from RIM, your IT used to provide. Rather, the lesson is that well-made devices that don’t get in people’s way are less likely to get hurled against the wall in frustration and rage. The world is shifting away from PCs and smartphones designed for computer lovers and towards simple tablets made for nontechnical people; your employees expect your company’s tech to keep pace with this trend.

* Another thing we learned at last year’s CloudBeat event: Small startups have a shot at knocking behemoths like Microsoft and Oracle off their pedestals. Enterprise technology is where it’s at, as far as market opportunity and revenues are concerned. Forget about trying to make the next Pinterest clone or yet another mobile app for getting your Facebook friends to help you find the best onion rings in town. Build something that will solve a real problem for real businesses, and there is a small army of investors and customers waiting to help you succeed.

* We’ve got an amazing lineup of speakers. On the vendor side, we’ve got senior execs from Box, VMWare, Nimbula, Cisco, Huddle, Google, and more. On the customer side, we’ve got IT execs from Pepsico, Harvard University, Bosch Tool, Dignity Health (the largest hospital network in California), and the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Yes, the Mormon Church is going to talk about how it is using the cloud.

And, of course, on the VentureBeat side, we’ll have the talented moderation of our founder and editor-in-chief Matt Marshall as well as the onstage interviewing talents of VentureBeat reporters Jolie O’Dell, Meghan Kelly, and Christina Farr. I’ll be there too, so get in touch if you’re attending. I’d like to hear from you.

Want to attend? Here’s a link to register with a deep VIP discount of 30%.

Top photo: Zendesk’s Adrian McDermott and Twilio’s Jeff Lawson chatting with me at CloudBeat 2011. Photo credit: VentureBeat.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With all of the migration to cloud-based services in the enterprise, it’s worth noticing that server spending has been flat at about $50 billion a year. But managing and administering to the cloud and all of the virtualized apps that it spawns has become a huge expense and the cost is growing at an alarming rate.

That’s the problem that SnapVolumes hopes to address with a clever tool for keeping track of everything. The Los Altos, Calif.-based company recently raised $2.3 million from industry executives to attack the problem of managing their apps. It does so by enabling enterprises to run a single copy of a major app, said Raj Parekh (pictured), chief executive of SnapVolumes, in an interview with VentureBeat.

[Editor's note: VentureBeat's CloudBeat conference tomorrow and Thursday is all about showcasing these revolutionary ways companies are managing cloud environments; it'll include presentations from a range of companies of the same ilk of SnapVolumes, from application management companies like NewRelic, to integration specialists such as SnapLogic. Are you an entrepreneur? Click here and come at a discount.]

SnapVolumes was founded by experts on virtualization, Windows kernel, and security: Matthew Conover, Shaun Coleman and Matthieu Suiche. The cloud — or web-connected data centers powered by racks of computers known as servers — allows users and companies to log into their virtual environments, which are supported with dynamic cloud data centers. A single server can be more fully utilized by virtually dividing it up into parts that can handle different tasks. That results in huge capital spending savings, as it reduces the total number of servers an enterprise needs.

But tracking all of those divisions between apps and companies (that is, the number of virtual servers) isn’t something that today’s enterprise information technology tools were designed to do. The result is substantial overhead and costs associated with application deployment, support, management, security, and infrastructure. IDC recently reported that the “virtualization management gap” is costing enterprises $100 billion a year and it is growing at an unprecedented rate.

“The expense is related to the number of virtual machines out there,” Parekh said.

The problem is that for every 1,000 employees, companies have to run about 1,000 copies of apps such as Microsoft Office.

To address the problem, SnapVolumes has developed an entirely new approach, running one app per thousands of virtual machines.When an app has to be updated, the changes are made to one copy.

“No one can do that today,” Parekh said. “There is still no good solution.”

What you need to accomplish this, Parekh said, is talented engineers who understand the nature of physical memory in the infrastructure, and the security associated with each copy being used.

“We build a bridge of the logical (virtual server) and the physical, and our software operates on both sides at the same time,” Parekh said. “We set up a control network that can scale to tens of thousands of virtual machines.”

SnapVolumes inserts a small piece of its software in every virtual machine, with another piece in the physical world handling control procedures. It’s almost like a watermark for virtual servers in the cloud. The company supports all server, desktop and other apps without requiring too much effort. It costs $600 per year to manage each virtual machine today. Parekh hopes to cut $200 a year out of that cost.

SnapVolumes is led by CEO Raj Parekh, former CEO of Virident and a former chief technology officer and vice president of engineering at Sun Microsystems. He has recruited engineers who worked at VMware, Citrix, EMC, Symantec, Microsoft and Trend Micro. Suiche, a former Microsoft MVP (most valuable programmer) and Conover, a security expert and former technical director at Symantec Research Labs, have focused on a creating a system that is secure. The company was founded in early 2011.

“The ever-expanding virtualization management gap will simply stall cloud momentum,” Parekh said. “A solution must be fully automated, fit seamlessly with all clouds, hypervisors, operating systems and apps. It must be secure, easy to use and fit with existing tools from major players like VMware, Citrix, Dell and Microsoft. There exists no such product in the market today with these attributes. At SnapVolumes, we are developing a patent-pending solution to address critical issues, reduce CIO headaches and save millions of dollars in operational expenses ‘in a snap.’ Due to the size of the opportunity and urgent need from customers, we plan to form key partnerships with industry leaders as we complement their solutions.”

Board members at SnapVolumes include Henrik Rosendahl, former CEO of Thinstall (acquired by VMware in 2008); Klaus Oestermann, an executive at Citrix Systems; and Prashant Shah, former managing director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Investors include TiE Angels of Silicon Valley and former industry executives who worked at Brocade, SAP Labs, Infoblox, Symantec, EMC, Citrix, and Tibco also participated in the round.

“SnapVolumes has the potential to fundamentally change the way that enterprise desktops, server and cloud platforms are managed,” said Simon Bramfitt, founder and principal analyst with Entelechy Associates. “The ability for IT to easily adapt their enterprise applications to the dynamic and elastic nature of cloud computing is a remarkable benefit. SnapVolumes technology is the closest thing to magic I’ve ever seen.”

CloudBeat 2012 assembles the biggest names in the cloud’s evolving story to uncover real cases of revolutionary adoption. Unlike other cloud events, the customers themselves are front and center. Their discussions with vendors and other experts give you rare insights into what really works, who’s buying what, and where the industry is going. CloudBeat takes place Nov. 28-29 in Redwood City, Calif. Register today!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As Huddle is a sponsor of CloudBeat, we asked their customer AKQA contribute a relevant article. This post is written by Robert Burns, Executive IT Director, AKQA.

About three years ago, AKQA was facing a challenge: with 900 employees and thousands of external clients and partners scattered around the world, working on hundreds of major advertising and marketing campaigns, we needed a way to effectively manage information and projects.

(Want to learn more about AKQA’s cloud strategy? The company will be onstage at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2012 conference, later this week in Redwood Shores, Calif. Register for CloudBeat today and come check out this and many other compelling enterprise case studies.)

Managing business content and enabling secure file-sharing and collaboration isn’t typically easy, especially as companies grow into hundreds or thousands of employees. In fact, it’s rather problematic. You’re faced with the task of keeping track of business information, ensuring there are no data leaks, while empowering workers to share and collaborate on information with each other and external parties.

Typically all information sharing—from files to discussions, ideas and tasks—is accomplished through an endless stream of emails. Some organizations also turn to legacy technologies, shared drives and VPNs. This makes life difficult for the IT department as information is locked within the organization’s four walls and external access has to be granted to people outside of the firewall.

It would be easy to say that the cloud is the solution to all the problems associated with legacy technologies. The cloud is infinitely more scalable; requires fewer capital expenses; enables both internal and external collaboration and provides a platform for anywhere, anytime access. But the truth is, the cloud can only achieve these things when it’s leveraged in conjunction with mature platform that guarantees the things that have made the traditional model great (e.g., security, reliability and control) are not lost.

The big question was how do we ensure our employees can share information and collaborate without sacrificing security and compliance?

Huddle provided AKQA with a solution to effectively manage content and facilitate secure collaboration across the firewall for thousands of users.

Since deploying Huddle in January of 2010, usage of Huddle within AKQA has grown rapidly, now exceeding 1,100 users. With Huddle, internal global teams share information and collaborate with clients around the world, including Delta, Gap, Nike, Verizon Wireless, Xbox.

Using Huddle, all material relating to client campaigns can be stored in a central workspace that can be easily accessed by the planning, creative, technology, media and analytics teams, regardless of their physical location. These teams can also manage their relationships with key suppliers, to ensure the efficient delivery of the end product and present work to their clients. As a result, all constituents have full visibility of all collateral, content, discussions and tasks relating to their account or campaign—without the need to email anything back and forth or use any other project management tools, social networking tools, VPNs or shared drives.

From an IT perspective, Huddle scales easily without placing extra pressure on IT resources. Perhaps more importantly, Huddle is secure and reliable. It has been awarded the ISO 27001 certification and offers a great deal of IT control, allowing granular security and permissions protocols. The company offers a money-back guarantee if uptime falls below 99.9% (it’s consistently above 99.995%) and makes its uptime publicly available.

On the topic of reliability: AKQA, like many businesses, was affected by the tragedy of Hurricane Sandy. Natural disasters are often among the last things IT managers consider—until it’s too late. In our case, because our content was stored in Huddle, users around the world were able to access and continue working, even though onsite datacenters were temporarily unavailable during the power outage.

Cloud-based platforms like Huddle have been built from the ground up to align the needs of enterprise IT departments with the needs of end users, whose content-rich, collaborative workflows are redefining the fabric of modern business. As the rate at which workers create and consume content continues to increase, it’s important for businesses to understand how their IT infrastructure—and specifically the cloud services they choose—can facilitate more productive working, rather than inhibit it.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Only a few seats remain for Wednesday and Thursday’s CloudBeat 2012 event.

We’ve decided to offer up a handful of heavily discounted tickets to students and/or founders who may not have the budget to make the event at full price.

So, if you’re a student or a startup founder on a very tight budget and you want to come to CloudBeat (Nov 28 – Nov 29 in Redwood City, CA), send a quick note to competition@venturebeat.com explaining why. We’ll be going through entries all day and handing out select discount codes that will carry a very significant discount.

The agenda is packed, the speaker lineup is robust. Like our successful inaugural event last year, we’ve selected the most interesting real cases of cloud adoption we can find.

(Notably, this year, we even have several university representatives talking about their own case of cloud adoption In the case of Purdue, it’s built its own cloud, and a Purdue executive will be talking about he did it. Oxford University, meanwhile, has adopted a hybrid cloud and is offering an impressive database-as-a-service for all of its researchers. VMWare will discuss how it helped in the process. Harvard University will also be talking about how it has leveraged the cloud.)

We’ve got representation from just about every major player and disruptor in the cloud industry: Not only Oracle, SAP, VMware, Salesforce.com, Google, and the other big guys, but the emerging players as well. Dropbox will show brand new data on how enterprises are using storage services, and what it means for companies like Dropbox that started outside of the firewall. And we even have the Church of Latter Day Saints explaining how it is using NoSQL big data technology to process its family tree property, FamilySearch. Its service holds more than 3 billion vital records and images, and is second only to social network Facebook in the sheer amount of data it must parse. A FamilySearch executive will also feature the first early demonstration of a special “Bumping” application that allows two users to locate where their family trees may have linked up generations ago.

Most importantly, CloudBeat avoids the pitfall of competing events, which have been mainly for vendors to push their wares. Instead, we’re focusing on customer-centric case studies to uncover the key cloud architectures that companies of all stages are adopting to survive and prosper. CIOs and other IT decision makers will be heavily represented in the audience.

We look forward to seeing you at what has shaped up to be the cloud event of the year!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For years, institutions of higher education have been a target for cloud technology providers.

College students and faculty are desperately in need of cloud-based services that enable them to stay connected, store documents, and collaborate on coursework with their peers. However, budgets are slim, and the industry is in the nascent stages of understanding how to market to college technology executives.

To get ahead of the market, one of Meg Whitman’s first public appearances as the chief executive for Hewlett Packard (HP) was to beam in by video-conference and address a group of college technology decision-makers. During the meeting, they discussed how the leading colleges could band together to demand better terms (increased storage capacity, lower pricing and so on) from vendors than an individual college could get on its own.

The participants also voiced a major concern: how to pick between dozens of vendors with similar marketing messages. What are the right questions to ask? Would they place their trust in an innovative startup or stick with a legacy vendor like HP? And what cloud-based services would students benefit from most?

At VentureBeat’s CloudBeat, we’ll be taking the discussion one step further to address these issues, and cut through the jargon to reveal the best options for higher ed.

(CloudBeat is unique with its emphasis on customer case-studies. It’s not abstract theories and ideas — executives will reveal their hard-frought solutions to very real technology problems).

Purdue’s Executive Director of Infrastructure Systems and Operations, Michael Rubesch, will provide feedback and tips on the university’s transition to the cloud. The session will be moderated by Ben Kepes, blogger and cloud computing expert at Diversity Limited.

In a twist, the university chose Oxygen Cloud, a smaller and younger competitor to the leading cloud services provider Amazon Web Services, to provide mobile access, file sharing and collaboration capabilities. Oxygen Cloud specializes in making it possible to move around data between a corporate network and a device outside the firewall.

Rubesch will reveal how he assessed the full spectrum of services before coming to a decision, and how the university will expand its range of cloud-based services in the future.

At CloudBeat, another major theme will be cloud security – this is a leading concern for colleges that deal with student’s sensitive and private data.