July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Powerful mobile devices have swarmed into workplaces, and they’re not going away. Pesky employees ignore rules and use their own smartphones for work while CEOs are commanding IT managers to make bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies the norm.

The mobile device field is wide open. Although Android is the dominant smartphone operating system overall, companies appear to be choosing iOS devices over Android as of late, according to a recent Good Technology report. The iPad still has a lot of sway with executives, but we could see a shift toward Windows 8 tablets since they can run some legacy apps that enterprises rely on. Microsoft also just announced that businesses could buy its high-profile Surface tablets in volume if they want.

At VentureBeat’s upcoming Mobile Summit on April 1, one of the six main themes will be “What’s next for enterprise?” So we took this opportunity to spotlight a few startups that are already thinking about and tackling this theme.

Whether the concern is making BYOD actually work, beefing up security, or taking business intelligence mobile, these six startups are reshaping the landscape of mobile enterprise.

Armor5

Rather than install software on devices, Armor5 has come up with a different solution for BYOD. Its software connects to a company network through an existing virtual private network (VPN), virtualizes data and cloud applications, and generates a URL for employees to access content safely from their smartphones or tablets. This way, your employees always have secure access to your company’s stuff — without the risk of storing that stuff on their devices.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Armor5 emerged from stealth mode in February. It has collected $2 million in funding thus far from Trinity Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and the Citrix Startup Accelerator.

Domo

Domo offers up a business intelligence dashboard that can be viewed from any device (so its creators claim), particularly mobile devices. The company says its software is easy-to-use and cloud-based, so you can see real-time data coming in and make important decisions off that data. Domo has been a little shy about unveiling its full offering to date, but it already has more than 100 enterprise customers and is coming out of private beta this year.

Domo is located just outside of Salt Lake City in American Fork, Utah. It recently raised a whopping $60 million in funding from GGV Capital, Greylock Partners, Bezos Expeditions, Founders Fund, and others, bringing its investment total to $113 million.

Enterproid

Enterproid’s Divide platform takes a rather literal approach to BYOD in that it “divides” your personal and business life through software. Essentially, you can install Divide on iPhones or Android phones and know that your work and personal things are completely separate. Maybe most importantly for employers, the info inside Divide is secure and can be deleted at a moment’s notice by the company if something fishy is going on.

On the iPhone, there is a single “container” that looks like an app; your email and business apps live inside that container. On Android, Divide offers different “profiles” you can switch between, and you can have two entirely separate sets of home screens and apps.

New York City-based Enterproid launched at Demo Spring 2011 and has raised $13 million in funding from investors including Comcast Ventures, Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Genacast Ventures, and NYC Seed. The company has more than 75 employees.

MobileSpaces

San Francisco-based MobileSpaces takes yet another approach to BYOD by placing a strong emphasis on employee privacy. Its software lets Android phone owners mark all applications they use for work and only those apps can access business data and systems. The company is testing an iOS version of the product as well, which will be ready by mid-2013. MobileSpaces has raised $3 million to date from Accel Partners, and the company told us it will have its formal launch “soon.”

“If you ever leave the enterprise, they reserve the right to your data,” David Goldschlag, MobileSpaces CEO and a former VP at McAfee, told us in August. “We are enabling the enterprise to comfortably let its apps run and coexist with personal apps.”

Mocana

Mocana is looking to solve the biggest problems with mobile enterprise security in two ways. It has solutions for connected devices and mobile apps. Specifically, it installs on-premise software that creates an interface between your data and connected devices; the interface lets you monitor device usage or encrypt data. However, on the app side, the company only provides services on the application-level for apps that are developed in-house. (So you can’t hook it up with an app like Google Drive or Box, for example.)

San Francisco-based Mocana has raised $32 million in capital from investors including Trident Capital, Intel Capital, Symantec, Shasta Ventures, and Southern Cross Venture Partners.

Roambi

San Diego startup Roambi is also trying to solve the business intelligence problem on mobile with its popular iPad and iPhone apps. The company takes data from all kinds of sources and visualizes it in flashy ways so execs can make better real-time decisions. It also offers a product called Flow that makes it easy to design, publish, and share colorful reports on the iPad. It has raised more than $50 million from investors including Sequoia Capital.

Roambi’s CEO recently wrote a guest post us for us about how companies can unleash the power of “little data” with mobile devices.

Top photo: Businessman on phone in coffee shop via baranq/Shutterstock

With talks falling through to sell off its assets, Juniper Networks is considering raising a private equity round to bolster its enterprise and security business, Reuters reports.

Juniper is one of the largest networking gear makers in the world, second only to Cisco.

Sources told Reuters that in the second half of 2012, the San Jose, California-based Juniper contacted its competitors to attempt to sell assets that handle networking for enterprise clients, but interest was underwhelming. Rumors pointed to NetScreen, a maker of firewall technology that Juniper bought for $4 billion, as on the table.

CEO Kevin Johnson told Reuters at Mobile World Congress that the company is not looking for a buyer for certain business units. “No, if you look at the acquisitions we have done, we’re a buyer, not a seller,” he said.

Incumbent players like Juniper have struggled to stay innovative and compete with well-funded startups. Juniper announced that it would cut 5 percent of its workforce in October. At that time, the company was facing economic uncertainty due to telecommunications customers electing to delay spending.

Enterprise storage and security business Imation has agreed to buy smaller storage provider Nexsan for $120 million in cash and stock, it announced today.

Imation has struggled over the past six years to dominate in the enterprise storage market and has had five years in a row of net losses. (We expect 2012 will also be another year of losses.) Its acquisition of Nexsan could help reinvigorate the company, with new storage and security products targeting medium and small businesses.

“Imation’s acquisition of Nexsan is an exciting next step in our strategic transformation, which includes investing in growth platforms in data storage and security solutions, where we are targeting markets with strong growth rates,” Imation CEO Mark Lucas said in a statement. “Our strategy includes focusing on the underserved SMB market with purpose-built storage systems and appliances. This is a market that Nexsan knows well. Nexsan’s management team has grown this business from startup to more than $80 million, with strong gross margins.”

The deal is worth $105 million in cash and 3,319,324 common shares worth about $15 million. Nexsan has 200 employees and generated about $82 million in revenue in 2011, with gross margins around 40 percent.

Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based Nexsan will continue to operate under the same management, with Nexsan CEO Philip Black becoming an Imation employee.

Storage concept image via Kletr/Shutterstock

IT departments are hoarding thousands of abandoned and little-used applications, often referred to as “Zombie applications.”

The survey results, released today, show that if companies don’t perform a thorough spring clean of these walking dead applications, they can accrue millions of dollars in operating costs, unleash a security threat, and put overall IT performance at risk.

Over half the respondents of the survey, conducted by research firm Harris Interactive, felt that these under-performers were eating up storage space. About seven percent reported that this was costing them tens of millions of dollars in revenues per year.

The biggest revelation from an enterprise perspective is that employees aren’t actually using many applications. About a quarter responded that they used 25 or fewer on a regular basis. Other interesting insights include:

• 52 percent of respondents estimate that slow, crashed, or unresponsive applications cost their business at least hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars per year. 31 percent said that it cost them tens of thousands of dollars per year.
• In a typical day, a majority (57 percent) use fewer than half of their total applications, while 28 percent said they use fewer than 50 apps
• 58 percent of respondents say the performance of applications has a major impact on the performance of their business.

Application performance monitoring companies like Flexera Software, Compuware, Symantec, AppDynamics, and Quest Software (with its Foglight tool) are developing solutions to destroy these zombie apps.

The research doesn’t adequately address one of the most pressing concerns. There is a major security problem that arises from the prevalence of these unused apps: they can still spread malware and, if they are set on automatic update, they can continually access information.

The survey was commissioned by Dell-owned Quest Software in June, 2012. A hundred and fifty IT professionals were polled in enterprises with more than 500 applications and $500 million-plus in revenue.