July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

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

The company’s newest integration will allow Box.net customers to transfer Google Docs documents to and from their cloud storage units. Box.net user will be able to open Google Docs from within the Box.net application and share them with other Box.net customers in their network. All features available in a typical Google Docs account, including live co-editing and sharing, will be available through Box.net.

Besides Google Docs , the company gives its customers access to Netsuite for enterprise resource planning and Salesforce.com for customer relationship management. It’s different from a strategy run by other companies like Microsoft, which is trying to cram all of those different types of features into a single software package like Office 365.

Box.net already has rudimentary document editing built into the application. But that editing feature wasn’t designed to be competitive with Microsoft’s Office or Excel applications. Google Docs, however, is designed to compete directly with those applications, which is one of the reasons Box.net decided to integrate it into its service, the company’s chief executive Aaron Levie said.

For now, Box.net users can only co-edit Google Docs documents with other Box.net users. But eventually, Box.net users should be able to co-edit with other Google Docs users that are not Box.net customers, Levie said.

Box.net currently has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February. It raised $48 million in its most recent round of funding. Box.net is also expanding to a new office in the next several weeks because its staff has grown so much.

The company provides businesses with a way to store and share files securely over the web. The files are uploaded to remote servers where anyone with permission can access them. Employees can also edit the files through Box.net’s web-based interface and leave comments and notes.

Box.net has been pushing its cloud-storage application to mobile devices — particularly the iPhone operating system and Google’s mobile operating system, Android. As of January, the Box.net application was downloaded more than 250,000 times on the iPad. The company launched the Android application in the fourth quarter of 2010 and already has 70,000 downloads. Box.net is working with Samsung specifically to further develop its application on Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Pure Storage, a company trying to revolutionize the enterprise storage industry using flash memory, is preparing to raise another $28 million, according to a SEC filing.

The company is focused on using flash memory, typically found in consumer technology like USB flash drives or MP3 players, to make enterprise storage more efficient. Currently, many enterprises use storage that seeks and spins disks to access information. With flash, enterprises could theoretically save money as there is no seeking or spinning, saving seconds on accessing info. Of course, this is all theory as the company’s product is still in private beta. A more detailed explanation on how flash works can be found here.

The SEC filing includes the names of both founder and chief technologist, John Colgrove, and chief executive, Scott Dietzen. In addition, a host of investors are mentioned, including Aneel Bhusri (Greylock), Satish Dharmaraj (Redpoint Ventures), Mark Leslie (former Veritas CEO) and Mike Speiser (Sutter Hill Ventures).

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, founded in 2009, has raised close to $53 million in total funding.

HBMG, a developer of enterprise content management tools, announced that it is launching a complete network in a box at the DEMO Spring 2011 conference in Palm Desert, Calif.

The newest product, called VECTOR, is basically a data center on wheels. The appliance can run multiple instances of an operating system that users can access through a network — called virtual machines. The device supports about 600 users and up to 100 virtual servers. It looks like it packs a pretty strong punch, too, for being such a small appliance.

HBMG also has a document management service. If you’re familiar with Dropbox, the popular cloud-storage startup that’s been a hit with Internet-savvy types, you can think of HBMG’s software as basically a Dropbox for enterprises. It gives employees a way to quickly store and access files and collaborate on projects. The main service, HBMG’s eManager, lets employees store and access documents in their native file format and then quickly email them or download them from a separate location. The service operates through a Web browser.

One of the features HBMG highlights is security. IT professionals can track any changes to a file and see when it’s been accessed. They can also rigorously control who has access to the file and apply some basic security features like a password lock and other authentication levels. The whole service is also wrapped in a collaboration package — so multiple people can access the file and track what kind of changes have been made.

The company is jumping into a pretty crowded enterprise storage space and going up against titans like cloud storage provider Box.net and Salesforce’s Database.com service. HBMG has been around since 2001, but — so far — has lacked the visibility that other companies have achieved.

HBMG is based in Austin, Texas. It has seen consistent 20 percent annual revenue growth over the past four years. Seven of the top ten engineering firms in the country use its software to keep track of their documents, according to the company.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Enterprise cloud storage provider Box.net is launching a new version of its software that includes a front-facing interface built from scratch and additional mobile features, the company announced today.

The new Box.net interface is a mash-up of micro-blogging activity streams like FriendFeed and online storage like Dropbox. Box users can drag and drop files from their computer directly onto the site to send files into cloud storage. There are also folders that are synched up directly with the cloud, like Dropbox, that automatically update files as they are changed.

Users can preview those files directly within Box.net — and the software supports a lot of file formats. Box developer Kim Lockhart showed off the capabilities by opening up Adobe Illustrator files within the web interface and previewing other files from Photoshop and the like. Whenever any file is viewed, commented on or changed, Box.net users get an update on their activity feed.

“This basically kills the software problem,” Lockhart said. “You can view files like illustrator files and pretty much anything else as we move forward without ever having to have the software.”

The idea was to remake the front-facing application from scratch because it was becoming too complicated with too many features. Box.net released a new update just about every week last year and added more and more features, and that was clouding up the service and making it too complicated for some end users, said Box.net CEO Aaron Levie. While Box is mainly focused on the enterprise, Levie said Box had plenty of potential in the consumer space — to compete with cloud storage providers like Dropbox and the like.

The new version of the cloud storage service will also include an app marketplace that includes other cloud-based applications, like NetSuite and Salesforce, that can sync up with Box.net. The idea is to spread the applications virally by including notifications of co-workers adding applications and using them in each activity stream. Box.net is also expanding its relationships with VMWare, NetSuite and other companies to ramp up those applications.

Throughout the presentation, one Box.net employee in the crowd was adding photos and documents on the cloud storage provider’s demonstration account to show off the new mobile features. Box.net wants to focus on tablets — specifically Android tablets — in the future after seeing some pretty decent success on the iPad, Levie said. The Box.net application was downloaded more than 250,000 times on the iPad. But the company launched the Android application in the fourth quarter last year and already has 70,000 downloads. Box.net is working with Samsung specifically to further develop its application on Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

“The iPad really opened up the enterprise’s eyes with what was possible with mobile computing and tablet computing,” Levie said. “It’s not just about email, web applications, it’s actually about getting rich business tools on mobile devices.”

The software will roll out to Box.net’s customers over the next 30 days and launching today. For the first month, users can switch back and forth between the new and old interface. But after a certain period of time, only the new user interface will be available for Box.net users.