Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top photo: basketman23/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Michigan-based Yottabyte claims to have a cloud-based operating system to control and manage virtually anything.

The startup is coming out of stealth mode today with a plan to build private, public, and hybrid enterprise cloud storage, creating Google- and Amazon-like clouds that runs on an existing storage area network (SAN). Its OS has been in beta for months.

Yottabyte was founded in 2010. It has raised just under $10 million in private investment and competes with Mountain View, Calif.-based Nimbula.

The product’s concept originated when the founders, Gregory M. Campbell and Paul Hodges, were sitting in a conference room tossing around ideas. “If we could put these together in a suite or a single system, we could actually deliver on the original intent of the cloud,” Campbell, the company’s CTO, explained. “The big, scaled out, successful public cloud companies like Google and Amazon built their infrastructures with inexpensive, no-name equipment and custom software built by gifted teams of Ph.D-level engineers employed to build these complicated, scalable systems.”

Most business can’t afford to employ these full research teams. Yottabyte aims to be a lower-cost software alternative that still runs on commodity hardware. It’s a nice idea, but analysts fear that it may be “overly ambitious.”

Yottabyte does not currently support public clouds such as Google Cloud Storage and Microsoft Windows Azure. It has its own data centers on each coast and a third in Bloomfield, Mich., where the company is based.

Image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VentureBeat is proud to announce our second annual Mobile Summit, where we are once again inviting 180 top mobile executives, investors, and policymakers to discuss five significant issues facing the mobile industry.

The event will be held at the beautiful Cavallo Point Resort (just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco) on April 2-3. The Mobile Summit is an invitation only event, but you can request an invite here.

We decided to host the Mobile Summit last year after realizing that there aren’t many places for mobile leaders to sit down and have a conversation. There are plenty of mobile conferences out there, including our own annual MobileBeat conference, but those events can often be crowded, and don’t allow for the same sort of intimate discussions that our Mobile Summit fosters.

This year we’re discussing five new issues facing the industry:

1. Platform Wars: Size matters, but what else will dictate who wins among iOS, Android, Amazon and Microsoft?
Four titans, iOS, Android, Amazon and Microsoft, are now duking it out on the global stage to become the biggest mobile “platform” upon which users — and the mobile industry — will standardize. But what will really determine the winner?

2. The mobile shopping revolution: Where billions can be made with location, targeting, and the mobile web.
The adoption of mobile commerce is poised to create a massive, multi-billion dollar opportunity. With smartphones becoming smart wallets, as well as instant research tools that are able to communicate specific tastes anywhere people go, what technologies and what companies will help improve the way people discover and pay for items? Who will be the biggest winners from this trend?

3. Mobile disruption of the enterprise: What are the new types of apps and services that will spur productivity and competitiveness?
Employees are choosing to bring their own devices to work — iPhones, iPads, Android phones and more — and enterprises are using the cloud to adapt. Given the new enterprise cloud, what are the next disruptive apps or services that will dramatically improve productivity and competitiveness?

4. The media revolution: What forms of content will survive and thrive in mobile?
With mobile devices evolving in 2012, and millions of new consumers buying them, who are the most successful publishers of new mobile media, what are the factors driving their success, and what is the impact of that success on the mobile industry?

5. User Acquisition in 2012: What lessons will the mobile gaming industry show the rest of us?
In terms of models of user acquisition, the games industry has led the way. What are the next steps game companies must make to stay compelling and innovative on user acquisition strategies (advertising, offers, etc.) now that better broadband, better OS’s, better interfaces, and better devices (including tablets) have arrived. What can the rest of us learn from that?

Just as we did last year, we plan to take the results of conversations from the Mobile Summit and make them an integral part of our MobileBeat conference, which will be held together with our GamesBeat conference taking place July 10-11.

We already have some great participants lined up for this year’s Mobile Summit, including Jason Spero, Google’s head of mobile; Mihir Shah, President and CEO of TapJoy; Jim Goetz, General Partner at Sequoia Capital; and Simon Khalaf, President and CEO of Flurry.

The move seems like an effort to counter the growing services and software focuses of rivals such as IBM and HP.

Dell hopes to transform its business from simply selling hardware to providing more value-added services that will help customers offer consumers all sorts of web services in an era of an ever-expanding internet. The move combines hardware, software and service offerings to customers that will make Dell into a more well-rounded enterprise vendor.

HP voiced a similar vision — which included running data centers for its customers — as new chief executive Leo Apotheker laid out his strategy a couple of weeks ago. Both HP and Dell sell a lot of equipment to web service vendors such as Amazon, but now they’re effectively going to compete with Amazon in hosting businesses in their data centers.

The $1 billion figure is impressive, but given that the company already spends $50 billion a year to support revenues of $61 billion, it’s unclear how much that $1 billion is over and above what it would have spent anyway.

Over 15 months, Dell has made nine acquisitions related to everything from new services platforms to storage. All of them are helping to build up Dell’s capability to serve customers at “every layer of the architecture,” said Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services, in a conference call with reporters.

“This is a very important investment for us,” he said. “As we increase the velocity of bringing new solutions to market and drive the intimacy with our customers, we can change the nature of what we sell to our customers.”

In other words, Dell isn’t just selling hardware or software slapped together from vendors such as Intel and Microsoft. Rather, it is providing customers with data center capacity, cloud services such as mass storage, and other solutions. Schuckenbrock said this change is happening now because trends like cloud computing — where user data and apps are hosted in web-connected data centers rather than in on-site computers — are transforming the way that business is being done.

Dell’s $1 billion investment will include hiring more salespeople and training them to sell data center services. The company will also build 10 new data centers around the world in the next 24 months to host public and private cloud capabilities. Dell will also set up 12 “solutions centers” that include a lot of real-world labs where customers can figure out what they want to build and integrate different technologies together. That will help small and medium-size business adapt to the “virtual era” of the cloud more easily. Many of those customers don’t even know where to start.

Dell’s announcement comes a couple of days after it announced plans to open the Dell Silicon Valley Research and Development Center to establish a bigger research presence in one of the most important tech regions of the world. Dell has acquired four companies in recent years and will now centralize them in 240,000 square feet of office space in Santa Clara, Calif. Over five years, Dell expects its Silicon Valley workforce to grow to more than 1,500 people, from about 700 by the end of 2011.

Dell says one of the new services it will offer is “computer as a service,” such as hosting the entire backend service for a social network. Like Amazon’s S3 storage in the cloud service, Dell will also offer “storage as a service.”

Dell is based in Round Rock, Texas.