Josh Stevens is CEO of corporate wellness company Keas. 

[Editor's note: Stevens Comcast Ventures' Michael Yang will be debating the topic of educating employees on health benefits at HealthBeat 2013 next week. See Yang's story: "Health assistants can make patients smarter and employees healthier."]

I have met with over 200 enterprises in the last year. About half did not provide PCs, smartphones or Internet access to their employees. At first, this may not come as a surprise, because many roles in corporate America do not require online access to “do the job.”

However, a lack of online access to help employees enroll for benefits, change their healthcare plan or modify their 401K means that employees are far less likely to use or even be aware of the benefits they have. This digital divide hurts the employees and the company they work for.

This is particularly true when it comes to health care. The companies I visit with are self-insured, paying for their employees’ healthcare. When I visit with a CEO, CFO, or CHRO, it’s usually to consult and help the company drive up employee participation in and use of the health and wellness benefits available to them.

When I ask, “How many of your employees have email and online access?” the conversation usually gets awkward as the employer realizes that many employees who are eligible for benefits don’t have effective online access to understand and use them.

A number of enterprise employers are still communicating with digitally unconnected employees via posters in the cafeteria like they did a decade ago.

Why is this a problem?

Those who have online access have access to tools and resources about how to improve their health and lower their risk factors. Those who don’t are left in the dark and may therefore be at higher risk.

Today, the average American self-insured employer pays $10,000 for an employee’s health care per year. Seventy percent of that amount, or $7,000, is absolutely preventable. But that that requires an effective wellness and prevention program.

Our estimate for the cost of getting employees online is about $100 per employee per year.

Netted against the $7,000 of health costs that can be prevented, the investment is well worth the opportunity — up to a 70x return.

Company-wide initiatives, such as biometric screenings and HRAs to lower healthcare costs, can’t achieve meaningful impact if the most basic communications can’t reach the workforce.  Those unconnected and at risk are blue-collar workers — kitchen staff, drivers and janitors — who often comprise a large part of a company’s workforce.

Here are five tips for designing and implementing company-wide information access systems that reach everyone in the organization:

1. Understand that access is key
   Company-wide should mean company-wide. Ensuring communication reaches every employee is essential. That may mean putting a smartphone, tablet, or mobile device in the hand of every worker.

2. Develop a plan to get connected
   Determine the best online program to implement and the best strategic approach for rolling it out to everyone in the organization. Create a detailed roadmap and assess possible barriers to widespread adoption.

3. Provide hands-on interactive education
   Engage the workforce with inclusive classes and step-by-step instruction. Make it fun, get people interested, foster group involvement so everyone can learn the same way and understand what the benefits are.

4. Find applications that are easy to deploy
   Program upgrades and enhancements must be simple to roll out company-wide in a timely way.

5. Provide tracking and reporting to see where it’s gaining traction
   Have a program that tracks progress in a clear and compelling way, and decode that data to identify best practices and areas for improvement.

photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem, a cloud operations optimization service.

Amazon has launched a series of local Amazon Web Services summits across in key cities across the world. Capitalizing on the re:Invent conference in November of last year, the AWS summits are a great forum for local AWS users to learn about featured AWS services and meet partners exhibiting at the event itself.

The AWS Summit in San Francisco a number of days ago lived up to this expectation. Here are 5 insights from Amazon senior VP of web services Andy Jassy’s keynote, and the exhibition itself.

It’s all about the enterprise

Adoption of the public cloud by the enterprise was a key message through the introductory keynote.  In sharp contrast to the keynotes delivered in re:Invent in November, Andy Jassy emphasized the public cloud as part of an enterprise’s IT and cloud strategy as opposed to a complete alternative to on-premise and virtual private cloud.

Andy highlighted use cases of AWS services that the enterprise can use to both move workloads to the AWS cloud as well cooperate between on-premise and AWS environments.

Security = priority #1

Jassy stated that AWS is committed to providing a secure public cloud, highlighting the addition of advanced security controls, certifications and accreditations.

No doubt this was a direct message to enterprise level CIOs that are considering moving small variable workloads to the public cloud, but need to deal with security and compliance risks that run deep into their respective organizations.

Redshift, redshift, redshift

The keynote contained many use cases and examples of using AWS RedShift, a data warehousing and data analysis solution.

Based on an hourly pricing model, RedShift enables AWS customers to analyze large volumes of data with their existing business intelligence tools.  The RedShift use case was a common theme throughout Andy Jassy’s address, use cases delivered throughout the keynote, and breakout sessions. RedShift follows in the footsteps of enriched AWS services such as OpsWorks and Trusted Advisor.

Cost is still the driver for onboarding new business

Throughout the keynote Jassy championed many organic AWS services, as well as solutions provided through the AWS Partnership Network that enable companies to scale once on the AWS cloud.  Despite this, low cost is still king.

Just as Werner Vogel discussed cost savings in the beginning of the New York City keynote, Jassy emphasized that AWS lowered prices 31 times in the absence of competitive pressure to do so.  In line with the success of the Amazon.com model, Jassy implied that that AWS will continue to reduce prices.

Jassy also offered examples of customers reducing costs by using solutions beyond EC2, highlighting that Foursquare reduced their analytical cost by 50 percent with AWS.

Launch of the AWS Certification Program

Jassy also shared the launch of an AWS program that certifies solutions architects, SysOps Admin, and developers.

To qualify, applicants must complete an exam that covers both proficiency in AWS as well as general IT knowledge and experience.  The program should complement and reward AWS users who have championed both onboarding and scaling AWS within their organizations by mandating and regulating their skill sets throughout the career.

In other words DevOps and other AWS users can add AWS certification alongside experience and proficiency in code, such as Ruby and Python.

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem, a cloud operations optimization service designed for cloud users. Offering a business view into a company’s public cloud operations, Newvem actively tracks cloud health in order to help reveal and solve cloud irregularities related to cost, security, utilization and availability.  Follow Cameron at @cameronperon

Social enterprise apps abound these days, and more pop up with every hackathon and demo day. But when it comes to key points like app quality and company profitability, I think this whole section of the tech industry is paddling up a certain river in Egypt.

For example, Yammer recently released a report stating its user base grew and sales tripled after being acquired by Microsoft. But if you paid attention to Yammer Android app download stats, they were flat during the same period — not a particularly good sign.

Even Marc Benioff’s Midas touch doesn’t seem to help enterprise app Chatter. A recent survey of 300 Salesforce clients showed that Chatter reception is quite cold.

We are suffering from a major case of denial. We tend to tell each other only the good news, totally ignoring social intranet problems, as if they don’t exist. What are these problems? I believe there are three major ones.

Quality

The high quality required for enterprise apps simply isn’t there. I use Android, and the average rating for a social intranet app in Google Play is, well, average — barely three stars.

We talk about the advent of the BYOD era, but does anyone have a mobile app that has the same functionality as a web app? Yammer’s status page shows a major network-wide problem occurring at least once every month, and others simply chose not to have status pages.

If you want us to use your software, it actually has to work first. It’s not an unreasonable request.

Too much hype

Teens have problems like pregnancy, truancy, drug use, low grades. They also use Facebook. If I were to suggest that I can solve these problems by creating a Facebook page, I’d be rightfully laughed at.

Yet this is often the sales tactics in my industry: five bucks a month per employee and all or most of those pesky problems with productivity and barriers to collaboration magically go away. It may increase sales, but this strategy all but guarantees a blowback in the future.

There certainly are many instances when adopting enterprise 2.0 solutions in certain industries or even departments has an immediate and dramatic effect. Intuit QuickBooks is a great piece of business software, but its marginal utility drops like a rock the further you move from the accounting department. If we can’t deliver company-wide improvements with our product, we are much better off concentrating on specific niches where the measurable impact of using social intranet is significant and targeting only those.

Technological confusion

There’s something not only arrogant but repressive of innovation about the “We’ve decided to copy Facebook and are now waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with us” attitude that characterized some of our industry.

Users of our solutions have been using LinkedIn, DropBox, and Skype for years now, and they don’t expect less when they move to enterprise services. The biggest word in the industry now is consumerization of enterprise technology. This means that users doing their part to advance the technology, but industry insiders aren’t doing theirs. We seem to have forgotten how not that long ago it was enterprise technology like email and network chat and shared file servers that inspired consumer use later on.

These are the major three problems we have to deal with, as I see it personally. And as far as solutions go, I think they are fairly obvious too.

Less social, more work tools

Google is actually the best enterprise 2.0 company, even if we don’t often think of it this way. Google is successful because it focuses on tools that make working together easy; think of Google Docs or Google Hangout or Google Calendar.

The company also quickly killed Google Wave, while others are still waging a war on corporate email which is likely to be as successful and war on drugs has been.

I know that a tool-centric approach works, because we use it at my own company. We simply looked at tools that businesses already use (CRM, project management, file sharing, calendars, absence reports, business processes, and so on) and simply added social options into those.

Trickling up

To borrow an analogy from politics, you can have a Karl Rove approach (a clever top-to-bottom manipulation based constant polling of changing public fears and attitudes), but you can also have Occupy Wall Street, a bottom-up movement that comes as a result of regular folks of getting fed up with nothing changing for years.

We’ve got the Rove part down, but we now need to come up with a feedback mechanism that would make it easy for actual users of enterprise 2.0 tools to influence development of our solutions. Again, Google scores high, because the Google Apps marketplace, warts and all, is certainly a mechanism that addresses this issue. Others, like Huddle and Asana are already following the suit, even if the result isn’t automatically guaranteed.

Getting nichey

They might all be called ‘social networks’, but Facebook is very different from Twitter, which is very different from Instagram, which is very different from Foursquare.

It’s quite likely that we’ll see a rise of niche-specific solutions, because a social intranet for realtors, who don’t spend much time in the office, must be very different from social intranet for software developers. The logic of business simply dictates it.

This diversity in approaches is just starting to appear. Surely many of those startups will fail, but it is equally likely that some of the biggest players will repeat MySpace history, which failed to evolve and essentially died, despite being the most popular social networking site from 2005 to 2008.

Dmitry Valyanov is CEO of Bitrix24, a cloud-based social intranet SaaS for business, which is free for companies with 12 employees or fewer.

Image credit: ericconstantineau/Flickr

Mani Gopalaratnam is head of innovation at business process outsourcing company Xchanging.

BYOD has been talked about ad nauseam, but now there’s a trend surfacing that will start to push BYOD out of the picture in the next few years. Corporately Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) devices are the next big thing, and within the next three years, projections indicate 70 percent of global organizations will adopt it.

BYOD is a concept that was floated first in Asia, where CIOs were quick to embrace the trend, but also quick to realize its implications: challenges in securing corporate data, an increased need for IT resources and support, increased costs, difficulty maintaining network performance, and challenges in managing devices and applications.

Companies like BlackBerry, which was ahead of the curve in adopting BYOD, were also the first to try out COPE pilots, where the goal was essentially to show customers this model was a better, less risk-laden option for enterprise mobility than was BYOD.

BYOD vs COPE

The biggest difference between BYOD and COPE is the management of personal data on the device.

Employees own their devices with BYOD, hence Bring Your Own, which gives organizations less control over how they are being used. It goes without saying that this leads to massive potential for security issues. It also puts an organization in peril, especially with the sales force owning their own phone numbers.

With COPE, the end user has more flexibility, but the organization still has control over costs, security, and other areas of potential risk such as legal and HR implications. For example, corporations can dictate what carrier the organization uses and what devices can sit on the network but may, for example, allow users to indicate what apps they want on their phone, or may offer employees a device catalog to select from. This gives employees options, while also minimizing the need for IT to manage an overwhelmingly mixed range of devices

COPE also gives organizations the power to monitor policies and devices, beyond simply selecting which ones can be distributed. If the device is stolen, the company can send a wipe command. Organizations can also conduct automatic checks on malware and dangerous applications, sending warnings about certain apps to the device owner in order to proactively avoid potential issues.

Migrating to COPE

When helping our clients migrate to COPE, we’ve found a number of ways to aid organizations in further maximizing the benefits.

Some best practices to consider include:

• Take advantage of the ability to recycle devices as part of the contract. Alternatively, to keep costs down, buy in bulk. By doing so, you can negotiate substantial discounts.
• To take that one step further, beyond minimizing just the device costs, outsourcing enterprise mobility contracts also enables organizations to make the best use of resources and budgets. You can negotiate usage-based plans, for example, to minimize unnecessary spend.
• Understand the benchmarks from cost benefits, usage statistics, and device performance so you have a framework from which to measure and learn.  Benchmarking is important when making a transition in your mobility model, as it provides a measureable way to evaluate costs, usage, performance. and more. It enables executives within your organization to see the tangible benefits of a COPE model by clearly indicating the improvements in productivity, efficiency, and overall business execution from a numbers perspective.
• Be aware of potential hidden costs. While there are more hidden costs associated with BYOD than with COPE, costs to look out for include device management and maintenance, personal service partitioning and impacts, and migration expenses, among other things.
• Due to dramatic improvement in device software upgrades, it’s vital to ensure the internal systems are able to work with the latest software versions. This can have a bearing on how well COPE adoption can take place without a huge hidden migration cost.

While COPE enables organizations to better control corporate assets — over information, as well as tangible control — it also boosts employee satisfaction. This, in turn, results in a surge in employee productivity (evident from the days of BlackBerry) due to the shortening of decision support.

So while today BYOD buzz continues to dominate enterprise mobility discussions, you’ll soon start to see COPE fazing it out as more organizations realize the benefits and flexibility that can be achieved though this alternative model.

Mani Gopalaratnam heads the architect team at Xchanging, Inc. (XCH: LSE), a $1B business process and technology services provider and integrator. He is also Head of Innovation for the company and CTO for the region of Asia Pacific. To learn more, visit www.xchanging.com.

Swipp, the much-hyped app for sharing your opinions, has nabbed an additional $2 million in funding.

Swipp’s app asks you to share your opinions

After emerging from stealth mode in June 2012, Swipp has marketed its app to consumers. Sign up via Facebook to share with other Swipp fans (and brands) how you feel about products, news, and other topics. You can also access a real-time stream if you’re simply curious about what people think.

With its new infusion of funding, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company also announced the launch of “Swipp Plus,” a new business offering. Brands can pay to access relevant data; for instance, a major retailer might be interested to learn about how customers are reacting to its new spring line.

I downloaded the free app and gave it a try. The experience felt a bit awkward — I don’t personally know many of the folks on my Swipp stream — and frankly, don’t really care what they think about a scene from Die Hard. But Swipp is betting that most people love to share and that this information will prove useful to big brands.

Moreover, the data brands are collecting from Facebook and Twitter is often unstructured and scattered. So Swipp may have a real opportunity to pull in revenues if it can reach a critical mass of consumers.

Brands like Macy’s or McDonald’s can use the app to pinpoint top influencers — those who frequently “Swipp” their products. The company says marketers can also use the app to keep tabs on the competition and track how their products are perceived over time.

A Swipp Plus dashboard for brands

Swipp is hoping you’ll use the app as an alternative to — or alongside — Facebook and Twitter.

“We look at social as it is today as version 1.0. It’s really just the first instance,” Swipp CEO and co-founder Don Thorson told VentureBeat in a recent interview. “What kind of applications would the world come up with if you had everyone persistently connected on the globe?”

Swipp isn’t the only app that is gauging consumer sentiment. Knotch uses a color scale (as opposed to Swipp’s smiley face) and asks consumers to express how they feel about anything from the latest Game of Thrones episode to their experience at the gym. Likewise, Knotch intends to make money by helping brands target consumers. ”For marketers, this data is really valuable,” Knotch’s CEO Anda Gansca said in a recent interview.

This new infusion of cash brings Swipp’s total funding to $5.5 million. Venture firm Old Willow Partners lead the previous funding round.

Today, SendHub launched its Android application, upgrading the business communication app to allow unlimited calls and added new features including call forwarding, call transfer, shared groups, and auto attendant.

SendHub graduated from Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator a year ago with a $2 million check in its pocket — a sizeable amount to get the SMS-based product off the ground. The company billed itself as an SMS service for organizations and has morphed into a social business phone system.

The system works on a variety of devices and includes features such as VoIP calling and voicemail services as well as free SMS and calling. The company also offers simple text messaging and mobile marketing features, allowing business and organizations to broadcast messages to colleagues and customers through group text.

“Email is not really that medium anymore, it’s just such an overburdened channel. Social media is even worse. It’s often impractical to call people. So that leaves SMS. And nobody has really made SMS serious — and that’s what we do,” SendHub cofounder Ash Rust told VentureBeat last year.

SendHub joins other social business services like Yammer striving to engage and connect the workplace through social tools as networks like Facebook and Twitter permeate our personal lives.

However, some analysts are skeptical of the benefits of standalone social business software. Unproductive noise has begun to fill up the business network, writes entrepreneur Alastair Mitchell, and “useful business conversations that the platform was purchased to foster were made obsolete.”

But with a variety of devices and ways to connect, the growing social business software community could help simplify collaboration in the workspace through idea sharing, file exchange, and integrated communication. The SendHub Android application is the startup’s next step in creating a simple, fast, and reliable communications platform for organizations that want an easier and more social way of staying connected.

Image credit: rbulmahn/Flickr

That’s impressive growth, and it’s along the lines of other top software-as-a-service players who are household names in Silicon Valley and beyond.

“We’re kinda matching Zendesk and Evernote in user growth curve,” HootSuite CEO Holmes told me this morning. “Our progressive cycle to each additional million is getting shorter and shorter, which is a good thing.”

The Vancouver-based company, which counts 79 of the Fortune 100 as its clients, also continues to excel at enterprise sales. Sales to enterprises under $10 billion in value grew 272 percent in the first quarter of 2013, HootSuite said, and sales to enterprises over $10 billion grew 900 percent.

See HootSuite’s swanky new offices

The company also added a major client just in the past few days which I cannot disclose, but is a massive consumer-focused company with almost 17,000 global locations.

While a strong focus on sales and marketing has helped the company grow quickly in enterprise — which former Yammer exec Dee Anna McPherson will help accelerate — Holmes says that viral, social, and content marketing have actually been more important.

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite’s new offices in Vancouver, Canada.

“We’ve seen a very nice progression of users from our free to premium product,” he said. “Often organizations of 100+ people are on board, all at the free level, and then when they become a paying client we’ll help tie all their accounts together.”

The big new features coming in the next month are in security and analytics, Holmes told me, as HootSuite puts more technology in place to prevent hacking or phishing attacks. One of the most problematic security issues, of course, is via internal users who go rogue. To limit this risk, HootSuite is enhancing its account provisioning and LDAP support so that internal users’ social media account access can be easily and safely managed.

“If you give them direct account access … you’re giving them the keys to the kingdom,” Holmes said. “Then you’re relying on social networks to turn them off, and that can take days. We’ve seen that with McDonalds and Burger King recently.”

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluegenieart/7045869337/

The HootSuite bus at SXSW

In terms of analytics, HootSuite is capitalizing on the fact that its members send out over three million social media messages each day to help brands become more viral.

New tools in HootSuite will help brand managers know not only how they’re doing on one network versus another — which content is successful on Twitter, Facebook, or elsewhere — but also which of their social media managers is more effective at engaging social media users. And then, of course, sharing those lessons so all can benefit.

All of that growth requires more head count, which ballooning 250 percent last year — partially due to acquisitions such as Seesmic — and will grow another 60 to 80 percent this year, Holmes said. Which, of course, necessitated new offices, that HootSuite built in a former police station in east Vancouver.

It’s also something that reminds me of Holme’s comments a year ago about not selling out too early. He felt at the time that HootSuite could become a billion-dollar company.

Those feelings haven’t changed — if anything, they’ve increased:

“We’re getting closer all the time,” Holmes said. “I’m not interesting in selling out … we have a huge opportunity looking ahead, and the billion-dollar number is just a stick in the sand. Hopefully we’ll run right through that and keep going!”

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This week’s Mobile Summit, organized by VentureBeat and held at the Cavallo Point resort just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, brought about 200 industry executives together for deep discussions of the mobile technology market.

The event featured a number of boardroom sessions with 20 or so people apiece, focused on intensive conversations around the Summit’s main themes.

I helped facilitate two hourlong discussions on enterprise mobility. Gaurav Tewari, a partner at SAP Ventures, and Scott Davis, the CTO for end-user computing at VMware, led the conversations, which also included top executives from Apperian, Capital One, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Ingram Micro, Intel, MasterCard, McAfee, StackMob, TIBCO, and T-Mobile, not to mention an assortment of venture capitalists, a handful of analysts, and one press person (myself).

The conversation provided a good window into what executives are most concerned about regarding mobile tech in the enterprise.

Better security tools

The number one topic, which kept recurring throughout the two hours, was security. In a world of increasing fragmentation, security threats are harder and harder to plan for. Employees want to use the devices of their choice, on the carriers of their choice, with apps that IT managers don’t control. Corporate developers want freedom to choose their app development platforms, languages, libraries — or to develop native apps or web-based solutions. Enterprise apps will have to deal with an increasingly complex environment, where data might be stored locally, on Dropbox, Box.net, Sharepoint, or elsewhere.

“You’re going to have to deal with messiness,” one participant said.

In light of that messiness, security is an anxiety-producing issue. Yes, mobile platforms are by and large more secure than the old, Windows PC-based environment that IT departments have been managing for two decades. But mobile platforms aren’t entirely secure, and given that people are using these devices over insecure networks, they are open to new and extremely dangerous vectors of attack.

Combine that with an environment where international attackers are getting more sophisticated and are going after more economically critical targets (like blueprints and other intellectual property), and it’s clear why enterprise IT leaders are getting very, very nervous.

A more consolidated, overarching security model would help corporations a lot in dealing with this fragmented, complex mobile environment.

BYOD policy education

A large majority of companies are now bowing to the inevitable and allowing some kind of “bring your own device,” or BYOD, activity, letting employees use the smartphones or tablets of their choice and adjusting the company’s IT tools accordingly.

BYOD, by the way, is not happening because it saves money. (In fact, it might even cost companies more money, thanks to the cost of processing expense reports for monthly telecom bills.) It’s happening “because we can’t stop it,” in the words of one roundtable member.

But, according to another participant, while BYOD is a reality at 80 percent of companies, only 10 percent of companies actually have a spelled-out BYOD policy. (I couldn’t track down figures to support that assertion, but Insight Quarterly has some related data, as does Threat Metrix.)

That’s a problem because employees might not know how to be safe online, what devices to choose, or what consequences they might incur if they use their devices for work. Mobile Device Management (MDM) often gives your IT administrator the ability to remotely wipe your phone — personal data and all — which is something you ought to know before you start using your phone for work.

Apps that do more with mobile devices

Many enterprises are still using mobile devices as little more than tiny, portable terminals to their corporate information systems. Yet smartphones and tablets are capable of so much more. Cameras, GPS devices, accelerometers, and other features that are now ubiquitous in many mobile devices can all play a role in enterprise apps. For example, one speaker talked about a company that created an augmented-reality app for equipment maintenance workers to use. Hold up the phone to a piece of equipment, and the app superimposes information about what that machine is, what its last service date was, and the like. Another speaker described equipping forklift operators with iPads and a customized video-chat app that let them hold the tablet up to a pallet, so the person requesting a delivery could see in real time whether the operator was picking up the right thing.

IT managers who are brokers, not providers

As more companies embrace the flexibility and speed of cloud services, IT executives run the risk of being marginalized. We’ve heard how chief marketing officers (CMOs) are supplanting chief information officers (CIOs), and in many companies, the CMO’s budget already exceeds that of the CIO. One participant in our discussion said he’d seen several CIOs terminated and replaced with CMOs when the former failed to deliver. (Given the security concerns mentioned above, those might prove to be rather shortsighted replacements.)

Mobile tech exacerbates the trend. After losing control of corporate apps to cloud providers, IT managers are now losing control of the most basic tech: the very devices and networks that employees use to get their jobs done.

In the short term, at least, IT executives need to adapt by embracing their new roles as brokers for tech services, rather than the exclusive providers of those services.

They also need to understand their company’s business goals and get ready to move quickly on projects that can drive revenue or cut costs. But that’s always been part of the IT remit, hasn’t it?

Apps for humanity — or at least your employees

Many companies have failed to understand that the best mobile apps aren’t just mobile versions of their existing corporate apps. (More than one person at the roundtables complained about how poorly Salesforce.com works on tablets, for instance.) Enterprise developers creating in-house apps need to understand two things:

First, design matters far more in the mobile universe than in the old desktop world. Smartphones and app stores have conditioned users to expect apps that are simple, slick, fast, and responsive.

Second, you need to make apps work for your employees. If you make apps that improve their lives or help them get their work done, they’ll use those apps. If not, they’ll go around you to find apps that meet their needs.

“Build a great app that helps people do their jobs, and they will use it,” one speaker said.

A simple example: One participant described a company that had some difficulty getting acceptance for its employee-oriented mobile apps. Then it created an app that let employees order food from the company cafeteria. Not something that was essential to the business’s success, of course — but it did help make people’s lives easier. As a result, they used it. What’s more, when they went to the corporate app store to get that app, they noticed that there were a lot of other useful apps there, too, so usage of all the company’s apps rose.

The short lesson: Make something that makes your employees’ lives better.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

Attune is a provider of technology solutions for the fashion and lifestyle industry. Today, the company announced a $20 million round of investment to expand its offerings “across all areas of the fashion and lifestyle value chain” to help brands to streamline and manage their operations and optimize their performance.

“At a high level, our services and solutions enable the fashion and lifestyle supply chain to operate much more efficiently,” said CEO Vajira De Silva in an email. “This is a massive industry where competitive advantage is determined by the ability to deliver high-quality products that people want, at a price they want to pay, while turning a good profit. And, since fashion trends constantly shift, achieving these basic goals is far more difficult than it is in other less dynamic industries. We make it possible for organizations across the fashion and lifestyle supply chain (designers, material suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, etc.) to work much more efficiently with each other so they can drive out waste and improve overall responsiveness to market opportunities.”

Customers include Lacoste, Hanes, K Swiss, Reebok, Tommy Hilfiger, G-Star, Levis, and other well-known, international brands. De Silva said that there is an enormous need for greater supply chain and industry-specific IT solutions. Attune specializes in the fashion and lifestyle industry and has offerings for brands, manufacturers, textile manufactures and retail that help them implement SAP to run their businesses.

De Silva founded Attune in 2006 after serving as the CEO of Rapier Consulting where worked extensively with MAS Holdings, a large clothing manufacturer in South Asia, to implement SAP. He founded Attune to bring this expertise to other brands, and the company is now active on five continents with 200 employees. MAS Holdings invested the entirety of this round, and along with the deal, Attune will merge with Sabre Technologies, a software services provider.

Photo credit: Shutterstock/Attune

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cesare Garlati is the co-chair of the Mobile Working Group at Cloud Security Alliance.

Many employees don’t understand the implications of using their personal devices for work. Many companies don’t understand that they are in fact liable for the consequences. This post covers the things you always wanted to know about BYOD but were too afraid to ask.

Good News: Your company offers a BYOD program

You can finally stop carrying that boring corporate phone and use your own shiny new iPhone for work. Even better, you can now check your corporate email from home while streaming YouTube videos on your Galaxy tablet. Your company picks up part of the bill and even provides enterprise-grade help desk support to help you with your gadgets. It looks like an offer you can’t refuse.

Bad News:  You joined your company’s BYOD program

One morning you wake up, reach for your iPad to check the email but it doesn’t turn on. Your iPad is dead. Totally bricked. After a quick family investigation you realize that the little one tried to guess your password to play Angry Birds before you would wake up. Too bad the security policy enforced by the corporate email account triggered your iPad self-destruction to prevent sensitive corporate data from unauthorized access.

Angrier than those famous birds? Wait until you realize that the device itself can be brought back to life and your corporate data restored. But that your pictures, videos and songs are gone. Forever. (Note: the case above is based on a true story, my son’s name is Luca.)

Don’t read on if you’re already scared. This is not the worst it can happen to your data, to your privacy and to your device. Many employees who use their personal devices for work are shocked to find out that their smartphones, tablets, and laptops may be subject to discovery request in the context of a litigation involving their company. Employees may be asked to surrender their personal devices — in which they have browser history, personal information and documents they created — as they may be subject to review by 3rd parties in connection with litigation.

The BYOD fine print

If you were too impatient to read all through the Acceptable Use Policy that you signed when you joined your company’s BYOD program, or if you simply were not too eager to know what you were really getting into, this may be a good time to go back to that document or to contact your IT or HR department to ask for clarification.

Here are the things you should know about your company’s BYOD program and that you shouldn’t be afraid to ask.

Personal Data Loss

When your personal smartphone, laptop or tablet is used for work related activities, such as access to corporate email, calendar or corporate directory, there is a good chance that your company relies on built-in features and additional software tools to secure and manage the data in your device.

As a first line of defense, many organizations enforce ActiveSync policies, pre-installed in most consumer mobile devices, to enforce password protection and remote wipe and lock. More sophisticated IT departments may request the installation of additional Mobile Device Management software agents to extend corporate IT reach into any application and functionality of your device. While security and manageability are legitimate concerns for the company, most BYOD programs rely on IT tools that don’t make a clear separation between personal and corporate data and applications. As a result, in case of unauthorized access – real or presumed – the whole content of the device is more or less automatically deleted and the device itself made unusable.

What you should ask if you are not too afraid of the answer: Is the data in my device susceptible to automatic or remote deletion? What events trigger the automatic deletion? Is remote deletion part of the standard employee termination process?  Is my approval sought or required for the remote deletion? Is my personal data retained in case of automatic or remote wipe?  Does the company provide a mean to recover the personal data deleted? Am I entitled to any reimbursement for the loss of personal content such as songs, videos or applications?

Privacy

From a legal standpoint, the fact that you own the device is irrelevant in case of a litigation. To discover and preserve evidence, the court may require forensic review of all devices in connection with the litigation. Employees participating in the BYOD program may be asked to produce their personal devices for 3^rd party examination.

You will have to make any personal information stored in your devices accessible. This includes the history of the websites visited, songs and movies downloaded and played, copy of financial transactions or statements, the list of your personal contacts and your electronic communications with them including personal emails, personal phone call, text messages and various social media activities including Facebook, Twitter and VoIP services such as Skype and similar. This extends to the personal information of any other family member or third party who may share the use of that device.

Personal data stored in the device is not the only privacy concern. Your location and your online activity may be exposed to your employer too. A main feature of Mobile Device Management software is the ability to track in real time the location of the device. The feature is intended to help determine whether a device is lost rather than stolen before initiating a remote lock or remote wipe.  It can also be used to selectively disable camera and microphone when the device enters restricted company areas to prevent sensitive data loss.

Modern devices can get quite accurate at pinpointing location even when inside buildings where GPS technology is typically complemented with Wi-Fi access point detection. Although not intended for this use, your IT department may be able to track your whereabouts anywhere and anytime, deliberately or accidentally, and you may not even be aware of this. In addition, when your personal device connects on-campus to the corporate Wi-Fi network, there is a good chance that your online activity is monitored and filtered to comply with various regulation and to protect the company from any liability arising from an improper use of corporate resources.

What you should ask if you are not too afraid of the answer: May I be required to produce my personal devices for forensic analysis? Does this apply to devices shared with other family members? Who will then get access to the personal information stored in my device? Is my company able to track my location? Under what circumstances can this happen? Is my approval sought and required to track my location? Do I get notified? Are these systems active outside regular work hours? Is my personal online activity on-campus monitored and logged? Is this information retained when I leave the company?

Device seizure and loss of use

Mobile devices are small and you take them with you everywhere. No surprise they are the most likely to get lost or stolen. But when you use your gadgets for work related activities, you have a couple more reasons to worry about. Your device may become unusable as a result of a company initiated remote lock or wipe. Or you may be asked to surrender your inseparable smartphone for legal examination in conjunction with litigation. Either case you could lose the use of your device for some time and likely find yourself in need for a temporary or permanent replacement.

What you should ask if you are not too afraid of the answer: Under what circumstances may I be asked to surrender my personal device? Is the company going to provide a replacement? Who is responsible for backing up and restoring personal data and applications if the device is seized? Under what circumstances can the company initiate a remote lock of the device? Is my approval sought and required? What is the process to regain use of my device?

Former Vice President of Mobile Security at Trend Micro, Cesare Garlati currently serves as Co-Chair of the CSA Mobile Working Group – Cloud Security Alliance. Prior to Trend Micro, he held director positions within leading mobility companies such as iPass, Smith Micro Software, and WaveMarket. 

Photo: blakespot via photopin cc

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

Dror Oren is the executive director at SRI Ventures.

In case you haven’t been reading technology news, 2013 is being heralded as the year of the enterprise renaissance.

And while I believe that to be true, the trend begs a bigger question of exactly what it means to be “enterprise” today. The lines between enterprise and consumer are increasingly blurred, and only becoming more so.

The conventional wisdom is that the innovative forces in the consumer market are now being redirected to the enterprise and “consumerizing” it. There is even a Harvard Business School class on the topic.

When people talk about the blurring lines, they typically think about things like ubiquity of consumer platforms (amplified by the Bring Your Own Device phenomenon) and consumerization of enterprise software’s user experience. But there’s something more fundamental going on here.

What we’re seeing today is not a swingback to the enterprise with the add-on of consumer models. What we’re seeing today is a swingback to more diversified revenue models and a refreshing change to the traditional go-to-market approaches … a head fake if I ever saw one.

Many of us have the inclination to track what investments are winning each year, pitting consumer against enterprise tech. But we’d be wrong to do that today. Over the last few years these two categories have become non-exclusive and less correlated, as once believed. To say, if one is projected to do well, it doesn’t necessarily mean the other will do poorly. So why is enterprise so appealing to investors right now?

First, this is all happening after 2012 investment levels dropped from 2011, and VC’s are being a lot more discriminating with where they’re placing their bets. That was more than confirmed according to the most recent report from Moneytree.

There’s less appetite for risk in the market.  Yet the traditionally risky investment in enterprise is, all of a sudden, the safer bet.

Here are my reasons why VC’s and entrepreneurs are flocking (for good reason) towards enterprise in 2013.

Consumer (and prosumer) first models have been fully validated

Consumer-first and prosumer-first models have shown to be very successful entries into the enterprise market over the last few years.

Prosumer success stories like Dropbox, for example, first started out as a consumer app that then later became widely adopted in the enterprise and were one of the first startups to show how you can get into the enterprise without employing a huge salesforce.

Other companies like Basecamp and Evernote have both lived very similar lives. And the list of examples goes on with Google Apps, Box, and more.

What investors are looking for is the next Evernote or Dropbox, where an app gains bottom-up traction in the enterprise and spreads quickly amongst professionals.  Most investors don’t like laying their money out for businesses that need to enlist a big salesforce. But taking the leap to the consumer-first enterprise model five years ago was even more frightening than a salesforce, so things have definitely evolved.

Now that the model has enjoyed so much success, it’s clear that investors and entrepreneurs alike have gotten over their fears, and in truth, are starting to look at enterprise as the next great, golden calf.

Consumer-first reduces risk and increases odds of disruption

While some of the assumed downsides of the consumer-first model have been disproven, there is an emerging understanding of the upsides of this new approach and why we’re all reading more headlines with the words “mobile-first, consumer-driven enterprise” in them.

The consumer-first approach creates two revenue models within one startup (over several phases in the lifecycle of the company) and allows companies to naturally expand their revenue streams when the time is right.

On one hand, you aren’t excluding yourself from the potential of hockey-stick growth and viral adoption with a consumer product. And on the enterprise side, you’re creating a direct path to near-term revenue and major long-term growth (enterprises are still spending way more money on IT than consumers).

Even more importantly, the startup can parlay early consumer traction into the enterprise offering, which is an advantage that most incumbent vendors have traditionally struggled to achieve. These startups can iterate on the product with real end-users long before they demo it to an enterprise. The time between MVP and a mature enterprise product is shrinking by the day. The new paradigm replaces a long lead time for an enterprise-level product with an early consumer product that evolves to a mature enterprise product with the help of early consumer adoption.

The consumer-first approach also increases the odds of enterprise disruption.

Typically enterprise software sales has required you to go through the CIO, which is a hard won process for even the savviest salesperson. With a consumer-first approach you immediately throw the formal processes out the window and enter the enterprise through the back door.

Every CIO on the planet struggles with consumerization, but the decision to buy back control when 60 percent of your employees are already using the free version of a SaaS application is a no brainer. Add security and BYOD to the mix, and the CIO almost has no other choice but to formally adopt a SaaS application that becomes popular.

In essence, you have a better chance of disrupting incumbent vendors by changing the rules of the game.

While they’re going door-to-door glad-handing CIO’s to get a pilot going, the savvy startup has skipped straight to end-user adoption. Hence, what seems like a shift from consumer to enterprise is just the result of a smart go-to-market decision by enterprise companies.

Lastly, barriers to entry are plummeting

Creating software, hosting it and deploying it is easier today than it ever has been in the history of technology. The inevitable merging of cloud, SaaS and mobile over the past year has caught the IT market by storm, and most importantly, lowered the barriers to entry not only for the startups but for investors too.

Ten years ago an enterprise Series A was a hefty round of funding by any measure.  Today, you can start that company for a fraction of the price.  Enterprise is finally becoming as lean as consumer.

More importantly, IT buying habits are changing rapidly.  The enterprise is getting more comfortable with SaaS and cloud technology, and the spending priorities have shifted. Even traditional and heavily regulated industries are joining the party.

Furthermore, the IT department isn’t the only group with IT buying power.

Historically, whenever the marketing or customer support department of a big business needed a piece of software, they had to literally walk to the IT department and make their case to the CIO.

Today, however, the marketing department has quickly become one of the fastest growing buyers of IT and are increasingly Chief Marketing Officers are buying the technology they need directly from enterprise service providers. In this 2013 IT spending report, it’s obvious that every budget has become an IT budget. All of a sudden, the enterprise startup is selling to a market that’s the same size as their consumer counterparts.

How this will continue to evolve is uncertain. All we know for sure is that the lines between the two will continue to blur, giving way to never-before-seen opportunities in the enterprise as walls continue fall and rules continue to get broken.

Dror Oren is the executive director at SRI Ventures, leading venture efforts from raw business concepts through to value proposition and the creation of a stand-alone companies.

Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Bizness Apps, a do-it-yourself mobile app & mobile website platform for small businesses, and Bizness CRM, a CRM platform designed to make selling to small businesses easy.

With all the buzz these days about how sexy and cool the enterprise has become, there is a segment of business customers that startups are overlooking: small businesses. Small businesses tend to have far less capital than large enterprises, but as customers, they offer startups a number of advantages that make them ideal customers to focus on.

Below are some of the advantages that make small businesses such desirable customers to have:

1. The market is massive

In the U.S. alone, there are over 5 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees. For startups looking for a global reach, the worldwide number of small businesses is far greater than the number of big companies.
The number of big companies in the U.S. with over 1,000 employees is around 10,000, and the worldwide number is correspondingly small. Accordingly, chasing the small business market enables a startup to address an audience that is orders of magnitude larger than the enterprise audience.

2. It’s rewarding

Small businesses are generally one-person shops run by someone chasing a dream. Helping them succeed can be extremely rewarding, and along the way you can meet some very interesting people.

When serving the enterprise, it can be hard to make the connection between your work and the end product. But when you serve small businesses, you can often see a direct impact on the lives of others. Building your startup can be daunting, but this model can help motivate you in your day to day.

The folks over at 37signals, makers of Basecamp, have demonstrated this point pretty well.  They serve the “Fortune 5,000,000,” a term they use to refer to all of their small business customers.  In an insightful post, they highlight the fact that, when you serve small businesses, your buyers and your end users are the same people.  They interact regularly with their end users, and the effort to keep them happy is, in the words of 37signals co-founder Jason Fried, “An absolute pleasure.” Sounds pretty rewarding, right?  Compare this to selling to the enterprise, where the software buyers are not necessarily the company’s end users, and a painful disconnect can arise that makes development a sad affair.

3. Small businesses may be “sexier” than enterprises

You may take part in your share of exciting, high profile projects when working with enterprise-level clients, but small businesses can offer the exact same thing. Indeed, the “common wisdom” says that large businesses, due to bureaucratic slowdown, may be less likely to innovate and work on “sexy” projects. Whether this is a myth or not is up for debate. It has been suggested, however, that likelihood to innovate is controlled by culture and policies, not size.

If this is the case, you’ll find interesting, forward-looking projects when working with small businesses. In my experience, small businesses are more likely to adopt a strategy of innovation in order to break into the market, as opposed to adopting a strategy of trying to marginally improve on current offerings. This is because differentiation and taking market share from the market leader are often too difficult without some kind of advancement to promote.

If you’re looking for “sexy” projects, small businesses are more open to approach things in new ways and take big risks as they fight for a place in the market.

Take SquareSpace, for example.  If anything needs to be beautified and sexied up, it’s small business websites.  When websites are done hastily by someone who has their mind on a thousand other things (hello, small business owners!), they can actually wind up hurting a business more than helping it.  SquareSpace has clearly decided to bring sexy back, and they didn’t have to target massive enterprises to do it.

4. The path can be easier

It doesn’t take a year to complete a sale to a small business. Many deals can be completed with a few phone calls. This means you don’t need an enterprise-level sales team to get a deal done. Selling to a small business also means you can keep your first products or services simple. There aren’t complex systems that you have to integrate into, there aren’t multi-layered policies to comply with, and there aren’t a bunch of departments that all need to approve the deal.

Small business deals are very streamlined – you can simply find a need and meet it. This simplicity can be a huge help when the tasks involved in getting a startup off the ground demand a lot of attention and are distracting you from attending to your main mission.

5. Product opportunities are endless

Small businesses, by definition, have a small staff and many gaps in their operation that they need help with. That is, almost every aspect of their business has room for development. There are opportunities to help small businesses with mobile strategy, social marketing, web technology, communications, transaction processing, and more. Want examples? Here’s a small sampling of successful companies that have addressed small business needs.

Save small businesses time, money, or both, and you’ve got a startup with a ton of potential!

Another take on this point comes from Bigcommerce, a company that helps small businesses create online stores with enterprise-level features and functionality.  What’s interesting here is that small business had a gap to fill once upon a time – selling online – and it was filled, by companies like eBay and Amazon … but at a price.  Bigcommerce is able to disrupt this setup, or perhaps offer a supplemental solution, which tells us that even where solutions already exist, there tends to be room for variation.

6. You can serve a greater purpose

What makes technology startups so special is that you have the opportunity to help people and businesses of every size at an unimaginable scale. If your product or service is useful to small businesses in your area, it may be useful to others around the world. And since the percentage of businesses that are small may be quite high in certain developing countries, your company can be a major force for the global good.

At the end of the day, small businesses offer many, many advantages to startups looking to develop their first customers. Compared to enterprises, it’s easier to design a quality offering, reach a decision maker, make a sale, and administer a working relationship going forward. Small businesses let you be flexible, obtain immediate success, and provide learning and development opportunities that are virtually endless.

Essentially, my point is this: When you chase the biggest game, you may spend a ton of time, money, and effort, and still go home with nothing. If you go after small game, on the other hand, and you’ll almost always come home with something.

And for a startup, obtaining “something” is cause for celebration.

photo credit: Robert Scoble via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Storage may not be the sexiest space, but it’s catching the attention of Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists.

Mayfield Fund has led an investment in SwiftStack, which helps large companies roll out their provide cloud storage. Mayfield investor Navin Chaddha said the firm has a long history of investing in storage startups; most recently, StorSimple.

Cofounder and CEO Joe Arnold said companies see benefits of using the public cloud, but want to deploy storage on-premise in their own data center. “The reason why is they want more control over their data,” he said. SwiftStack’s software defined storage solution can run on commodity hardware, and is cheaper than building a storage system from scratch.

Arnold and a few other members of the founding team previously worked at San Francisco-based Engine Yard, and built out the first widely used platform as a service (PaaS) products, which ran on top of Amazon. “We had a front row seat to see how the cloud could be used,” Arnold explained.

The current project is based on OpenStack, and core contributors have joined the team. OpenStack is a cloud operating system that kicked off two-and-a-half years ago to enable any organization to create, and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware.

SwiftStack is attacking incumbent players like EMC and NetApp, but Arnold admits that it’s a “very early market.”

With the funding, the company will expand its sales and marketing team, and continue to build out the product.

Today, the startup closed a $6.1 million funding round led by Mayfield with additional participation from Storm Ventures and UMC Capital, bringing its total funding to $7.6 million.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Perhaps because the marriage between the ThinkPad and BlackBerry seems so natural, another Lenovo executive is hinting that the company would be open to purchasing the beleaguered smartphone company.

Lenovo chief executive Yang Yuanqing told the French financial paper Les Echos that a BlackBerry deal “could possibly make sense, but first I need to analyze the market and understand what exactly the importance of this company is,” as reported and translated by Bloomberg.

The statement comes after Lenovo chief financial officer Wong Wai Ming told Bloomberg in January that the company was looking at a variety of opportunities to expand its mobile presence, including BlackBerry. At the time, BlackBerry chief executive Thorsten Heins seemed baffled by Ming’s statement.

BlackBerry’s stock price jumped 14 percent this afternoon following the Lenovo chatter, closing at $14.90.

BlackBerry is betting the entire company on the success of its new BlackBerry 10 smartphones, but my review of the company’s flagship Z10 phone didn’t bode well for BlackBerry’s future. Heins hasn’t ruled out selling the company, but he’s also discussed other options, like potentially licensing BlackBerry’s software to others.

A BlackBerry purchase would make little sense for most, but given that Lenovo currently holds the popular ThinkPad business PC brand, it could potentially capitalize on having two enterprise-friendly businesses. Lenovo has released Android smartphones of its own, but it has mostly catered to China and other Asian countries. Buying BlackBerry would give Lenovo the ticket to potentially make a huge splash in the global smartphone market (assuming it can fix the many problems BlackBerry is currently facing).

CDW, hardware/software retailer to the Big Guys, is getting ready to go public in a $750 million offering.

Interestingly, the company, which was founded by businessman Michael Krasny in 1984, already had an IPO a decade ago.

Krasny led CDW to its first initial public offering in 1993. He then sold it to Madison Dearborn Partners and Providence Equity Partners in 2007; that particular deal netted him $7.3 billion and made the company privately held once more.

This year’s IPO will be led by JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, and Goldman Sachs, Reuters reports.

CDW is short for Computer Discount Warehouse. The company provides tech of all kinds — Chromebooks, tablets, copies of Microsoft Office, keyboards and mice, you name it — to large businesses and IT departments.

In addition to providing technology software and hardware to the enterprise, CDW also does a boatload of business with federal, state, and local governments and educational institutions (including schools and universities).

Altogether, this line of business added up to $10.1 billion in sales across a quarter of a million companies last year.

The company is based in Vernon Hills, Ill., and employs 6,800 people in 25 locations around the U.S. and Canada.

Image credit: CDW

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I always get asked, “What was the big theme at MWC this year?”

It’s a hard question to answer, since there is so much going on. But there is one way to gauge it, by looking at who is exhibiting, how big the space is that they rented, and where the are booths in relation to each other.

This is not a perfect analysis, because some companies choose not to attend (Apple being the prime example). But there is a message even in absence. Two years ago, Nokia decided not to have a booth, but Samsung took its spot and then a year later overtook its market share.

At this point, you probably know more about the specific news coming out of Barcelona than I do. From the ground, there’s no way to keep track of all the press releases and keynotes. Every once and while someone mentions some tidbit. And I start every meeting by asking each company what they are announcing at the show. But that’s just a small sliver of the data flow.

Its hard to keep up because this show is crowded. Its a giant space, but at times the walkways are complete gridlock. First conclusion: This is a healthy industry.

The big handset vendor booths are crowded. Samsung’s sprawling expense feels like a high end department store, there’s so much on offer. Huawei, LG, Sony and ZTE all have some nice phones on display, and their smaller ‘booths’ are buzzing. The HTC booth features gymnasts, and what is often mentioned as the best phone introduced at the show. The Nokia booth features a massive conga line every hour. They have some phones too. The only exception to the merriment is the Motorola booth. For some reason they decided to decorate their showspace with high walls and climbing vines, so it’s hard not to think of Ancient Roman ruins. They have two models on display, the Droid RAZR HD and RAZRi, both of which are at six months old at least. And neither was running the latest version of Android, even though Motorola is now part of Google’s corporate family. The assumption is that Motorola is saving its best for Google I/O in May, which is odd because carriers buy phones in bulk at MWC, not at I/O.

Different halls focus on different types of companies. This year Hall 3 seems to have the largest booths. Qualcomm, Intel, Samsung, Nokia, and Alcatel all seem to have a half acre apiece there. The smaller networking and backhaul equipment vendors congregate in Hall 7. Hall 8 is where you find the app and monetization companies. This is not a perfect system, but it helps to keep track of what’s what.

It is hard to do a precise analysis because this venue is bigger than that of past shows, but you could probably learn something meaningful by comparing the amount of floor space reserved for each kind of company.

For instance, “App Planet” used to be lots of small stands from dozens of app and game vendors. Now it is home to large exhibitions from ad networks, analytics companies, and gaming studios like Gree.

Big telco vendors like Alcatel, Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia Siemens all have huge spaces, but the antenna, base station component, power system and cabling companies now consume far less square footage than in the past.

One thing that has not changed is that the biggest exhibitors, notably Ericsson, still maintain gigantic facilities set apart from the main building. These companies sell to carriers and need a lot of space to host big operator entourages, display big pieces of hardware, and sign big deals. I heard one guesstimate that Ericsson spent $15 million on the exhibition this year, but signed $5 billion in contracts at the show. Seems like a good investment. In fact, Ericsson’s ‘booth’ really seems to be a village, or a show in its own right, complete with its own entertainment, restaurant-scale catering, and numerous sub-sections.

Looked at in this light, one of the more notable themes this year is the growing importance of the enterprise in mobile. Typically MWC does not attract a lot of non-carrier corporate buyers.

But that does not seem to have stopped Airwatch. This provider of Mobile Device Management (MDM) and enterprise mobility software had a space in Hall 3 that appears to be larger than even that of its neighbors, Qualcomm and Intel.

Set aside the fact that Airwatch could probably hold all of its employees in a quarter of that space, its presence is a pretty clear sign that software is now a major force at MWC.

Photo credit: VentureBeat/Jonathan Goldberg

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Seventy-seven percent of all new smartphones and tablets activated in the enterprise last quarter were Apple devices, according to a new report from Good Technology.

The most popular device was Apple’s new iPhone 5, with 32 percent of all activations. The top five devices activated also included the iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPad 3, and iPad2. Out of the top 10, eight were Apple devices, including the iPad 4, the aged iPad 1, and the equally venerable iPhone 3GS.

Essentially, it’s utter enterprise domination by Apple’s iOS:

Source: Good Technologies

Top 10 devices activated in the enterprise: Q4 2012

Android’s first foray into the enterprise comes at number six, with the Samsung Galaxy S III, and its only other contestant is the S III’s baby brother, the Galaxy S II, which clocks in at number 10. iOS activations were up 8.5 percent year-over-year.

Good Technologies offers solution for secure collaboration, communication, and data. With 4,000 enterprise customers and half of the Fortune 500 in its stable, it has fairly good insight into what the enterprise is doing in mobility.

One place Android is gaining somewhat? Tablets.

“Between Q1 and the end of Q4 2012, Android tablet activations jumped from 2.7 percent to nearly 7 percent of total activations,” Good says in its report, attributing the spike in part to the rise of fablets: hybrid phone-tablet devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note.

Source: Good Technologies

Tablet activations in the enterprise: Q4 2012

Windows reigns, of course, on the enterprise desktop, but it is a marginal, niche player so far in enterprise mobility. Only .5 percent of enterprise device activations in the fourth quarter were Windows phones or tablets. That may, of course, change as Windows 8 edges into the enterprise and CIOs look at the potential benefits of a more unified desktop-mobile operating system environment.

Source: Good Technologies

Q4 2012 activations by device type

One interesting note: The business sector that is driving down Apple’s stock valuation is the same industry that is purchasing the most of Apple’s products. According to Good Technologies, between 30 percent and 36 percent of all iPads activated in enterprise where purchased by the financial services industry. The next closest sector is business and professional services, at under 20 percent.

Curious, no?

Source: Good Technologies

iPad activations by industry

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Enterprise solid-state drive maker Skyera has raised $51.6 million in its second round of funding, with hopes that it can make a dent in a crowded flash storage field.

Skyera wants to offer big enterprise companies super-fast storage for their data centers on the promise that its storage is affordable, has low power consumption, and will greatly boost software performance. Its flagship product, skyHawk, claims to deliver next-gen performance and density at a similar price point to high-end traditional spinning-disk hard drives. Basically, these are some of the cheapest SSDs you should be able to buy for your company’s data center.

Gartner projects the market for enterprise flash storage will grow from $393 million in 2012 to about $4.2 billion in 2016, so betting on this type of service isn’t a bad idea. That said, the market for enterprise SSDs is a little crowded, with EMC, Pure Storage, Nimble Storage, Violin Memory, Nimbus Data, NetApp, IBM, and SolidFire all trying to attract customers.

The new funding was led by Dell Ventures with participation from other unnamed investors. The $51.6 million actually includes $6.5 million from a prior investment from the same firms, but this is the first time the company has announced any funding numbers.

“We view the investment in Skyera as a validation of the disruptiveness of the technology we are bringing to enterprise organizations seeking to take advantage of both the technical and cost benefits of the latest generation of flash,” Skyera CEO Radoslav Danilak said in a statement. “Moreover, Dell and the investment syndicate bring deep knowledge of the storage sector that will be beneficial to Skyera as we take our next steps.”

Data center image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by technology executive Roman Stanek 

Despite all the inroads cloud computing has made among business users, it still hasn’t broken through the enterprise IT logjam. I see it as a cultural issue: IT organizations love control and complexity. They love being able to code, flip switches and grab control of their systems. And they love complexity because, frankly, they think it saves their jobs.

Unable to free themselves of this anachronistic mindset, IT departments live in the land of the “no.” That’s “no,” as in: “No, you can’t bring in your own device,” and “no, we can’t build this new function you need because we’re too busy just keeping the lights on.”

So while business people are bypassing IT and subscribing to cloud-based apps that help them manage customer relationship management (CRM) functions with Salesforce.com, connect with customers using Zendesk, and collaborate with Box, most IT organizations remain focused on the mundane. And the irony? By embracing control and complexity, IT organizations have effectively isolated themselves within a technology ghetto. They are the opposite of strategic. And that means they aren’t protecting their jobs — they have become expendable.

I believe it’s imperative for SaaS providers to help IT people accept a new mindset and help them make the transition to what I like to call the age of IT enlightenment. Instead of owning the infrastructure — and spending 90 percent of their time just to “keep the lights on” — they need to assume new responsibilities related to governance, capacity planning, security, workflow across apps, and the rise of BYOD.

How we as an industry handle this challenge — in essence, how we help IT folks into the age of IT enlightenment — could reshape the entire market. Some IT organizations have already begun this transition, and are seeing the rewards. But for the rest…..

It starts with psychology: convincing IT folks that that they are not abdicating responsibility. They are delegating it. This will be easier said than done, since IT craves control especially when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will. The solution?

Deliver excellent SLA: Google Gmail, the world’s biggest cloud-based e-mail system, has an average uptime of 99.99 percent. Amazon targets 99.95 percent uptime for AWS. I challenge any IT organization to come close to those levels of reliability. Even so, we as SaaS providers need to show customers that our levels of reliability are at least the match of their legacy systems. Statistics like these are our friends.

Be as secure as a bank: Make sure you’ve checked off all the legal, security and governance requirements: SOC2, ISO/IEC 27000, PCI. Certificates like these are the best way to clear away the misperception that cloud computing isn’t secure. People put their money in a bank and not under their mattress because they trust a bank’s security system. As an industry, we have to show we’re just as trustworthy when safeguarding customers’ data.

Show IT how cloud computing can make them heroes: The days of touting cloud computing as the way to save money or increase flexibility are behind us. Cloud computing will replace legacy systems because it can transform IT into a strategic arm of business. The successful SaaS companies are fluent in explaining how that can happen. And that fluency can help bring more IT organizations out of the land of “no” and into the promise land of cloud computing.

My hope is that SaaS providers will be able to more easily sell to IT; as they’ll both be speaking the same language: the language of business.

Roman Stanek is the founder and CEO of GoodData, a company that offers a range of business intelligence software and reporting tools to help companies monetize big data. Prior to this, he was the founder of NetBeans.org, sold to Sun Microsystems, and Systinet, which was acquired by HP.

Follow him on Twitter @RomanStanek

Top image via © grafvision, Shutterstock

But let’s face it: That train is in the station. What’s next?

Also see: Forrester’s top 10 mobile trends for 2013

Analyst Bryan Hopkins gave us a peek into what Forrester thinks is next, and much of it builds on those four horseman of disruptive change. “We went a level deeper in our research by examining how today’s hot technolog[ies] create platforms for future disruption,” he wrote this morning in a blog post.

Here they are, in four groups:

End user computing technologies

1. Next-generation devices and UIs
   New sensors and new user interfaces. Think Leap Motion
2. Advanced collaboration and communication
   Think social inside, like Yammer or other social-inside-the-enterprise solutions
3. Systems of engagement
   Real-time data, in everyone’s hands. Think Roambi

Sensors and remote computing technologies

1. Smart products
   Thing that can sense, react, and communicate. Think operating system for places and buildings
2. In-location positioning
   GPS and in-building location sensors
3. Machine-to-machine networks
   Background intelligence on people and things. Think ReelyActive

Process data management technologies

1. Smart process applications and semantics
   Real business processes are a lot messier than your flow charts. Smart process apps know that.
2. Advanced analytics
   Smarter, more predictive data. Think Cloudera’s Impala tool for Hadoop
3. Pervasive BI
   People need business intelligence that comes every hour, not at the end of the month
4. Process and data cloud services
   Scalable, burstable, and cheap computing capability. PaaS, BaaS, etc. 

Infrastructure and application platforms

1. Big data platforms
   Infrastructure to handle big data and high speed … and use all that data you’ve been uselessly storing
2. Breakthrough storage and compute
   Yes, hardware may still be necessary, even if you’re never going to be like Google
3. Software-defined infrastructure
   Software that dynamically routes your networking and data center capabilities
4. Cloud application frameworks
   Technologies for deploying and running distributed apps in the cloud, like, perhaps, a multi-continent-spanning database
5. New identity and trust models
   New federated trust and identity models for a changing world of jobs and careers … and maybe even killing all usernames and passwords

An interesting thought for executives:

If you want a good look at the future of end user computing technologies and sensor and remote computing devices, check winning Kickstarter and IndieGoGo campaigns in the technology and gadget categories. And for a picture of the future for the last two groups above, process data management and infrastructure and application platforms, look at Google and Facebook.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s tough to be in IT these days. Everyone wants to Bring Their Own Device (or two), get the company to pay for it, and beg the front-line geeks for help when it goes on the fritz.

A massive majority of companies, 81 percent, now allow employees to bring and user their own devices, and 56 percent of companies have codified that into their corporate guidelines, according to a new study by iPass and MobileIron.

“As more personal mobile devices with multiple platforms and operating systems are used for work, IT managers are challenged to safeguard corporate data and keep roaming costs low,” iPass CTO Barbara Nelson said in a statement. “And when mobility budgets are managed by departments rather than IT, data roaming costs can be hard to control.”

For the first time the majority of companies now manage their mobile costs outside of the IT department — only 48 percent of organizations give IT control of mobile costs and devices, down from 53 percent in 2011. And most IT execs see mobility costs rising in 2013, with almost one in ten saying they’ll go up more than 25 percent.

The average cost for a mobile worker is about $97 a month in fees for 3G and 4G data and voice plans. That’s partly due to expensive roaming plans, but also due to the fact that most workers now have multiple mobile devices: tablets, phones, and MiFi sticks.

All of those devices in all those hands also mean security and data loss can become an issue.

Over half of the companies surveyed – 477 in total, half with more than 1,000 employees — had some sort of security breach or data loss in the last year. In most of those cases, it was a lost or stolen phone that was not adequately secured … and presumably was not capable of being remotely managed and remotely wiped.

It doesn’t help when companies adopt BYOD without a plan in place. But even when there is, most IT pros think it’s insufficient.

“Of the 72 percent of enterprises with enterprise mobility strategies in place, only 37 percent of IT managers thought their own company’s mobile strategy was effective, while 35 percent felt that their company had an insufficient approach,” the study says.

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Former Cisco executive Tim Danford has joined Lightspeed Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm.

Danford is focusing on building the firm’s incubation program for exceptionally early-stage startups and exploring new opportunities in the mobile and enterprise security space.

“I am working to identify very fundamental problems in the enterprise,” he said by phone. Danford is particularly curious about how chief executives will respond to the growing trend for employees to bring their own devices (BYOD) to work. At first, they will adopt new technologies that would enable BYOD, which may result in a drop in productivity.

“At some point in the not too distant future, CEOs will turn around and question whether these BYOD platforms are bringing any real ROI to their business,” he explained. For this reason, Danford will invest in startups that would enable cloud-based collaboration and boost employee productivity.

Prior to joining Lightspeed, Danford was the managing director at Storm Ventures, where he served a board adviser (and cowrote the patent) for hot mobile device management company MobileIron.

In the late 1990s, he led mergers and acquisitions at Cisco. In 2001, Danford was bit by the entrepreneurial bug and formed an idea for wireless networking hardware, which was considered a “dumb idea.” He ultimately left Cisco to form a company, later called Airespace, which his former employer bought for $450 million.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In Silicon Valley, a growing number of venture capitalists are breaking away from the larger firms to form smaller, highly specialized funds.

Sunil Dhaliwal, managing partner of Amplify Partners.

The newest is Amplify Partners; its managing partner Sunil Dhaliwal is formerly of Battery Ventures, where he invested in hot enterprise companies like Splunk and Netezza (acquired by IBM). Dhaliwal has succeeded in raising a $40 million fund to invest solely in emerging IT infrastructure companies.

“Technical founders working on IT infrastructure startups have far fewer options for funding compared to digital media, consumer Internet, or even application software startups,” said Dhaliwal in an interview. He was inspired to start the firm after meeting entrepreneurs in this space who felt that angel investors and larger firms didn’t have the time to provide “senior level attention.”

Dhaliwal believes that incumbent IT infrastructure vendors are “vulnerable” in a way the industry hasn’t seen for 25 years. And with hundreds of billions of dollars to be made, “it was pretty clear that I should fill that gap,” he said.

Amplify’s startups are all led by “technical founders who would rather write code than PowerPoint.” The three key themes the firm is looking for are scale-out architectures, data growth, and real-time infrastructure. The entrepreneurs tackling these problems must be focused on efficient business models from day one.

Dhaliwal revealed that Amplify Partners will make initial investments ranging from $50,000 to $1.5 million, and retains the necessary capital to fund its entrepreneurs through several rounds. Current portfolio companies include AppNeta, Continuuity, Datadog, Fastly, Wibidata, and several startups in stealth mode. Amplify Partners has offices in Cambridge and at Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto.

A stealth startup called Tomfoolery closed a $1.7 million seed round to make work “awesome.” It does this by developing user-friendly mobile enterprise applications that are as easy and enjoyable to use as many consumer-facing applications.

“In your personal life, social mobile applications are beautiful, their functionality is meaningful, and they let you to make real, human connections,” said CEO Kakul Srivastava in a statement.  “At work, today’s enterprise software makes us feel about as close to our coworkers as strapping spreadsheets to carrier pigeons.”

Startup land is all about fostering company culture, and multiple studies have found that a positive atmosphere in the workplace encourages productivity. Furthermore, the growth of Bring-Your-Own-Device and the distributed workforce has created a growing need for mobile applications that let employees work on the go. Tomfoolery designs its application with these principles in mind.

The founders have impressive backgrounds in management and consumer technology. CEO Kakul Srivastava is a former VP at Yahoo and worked as the General Manager at Flickr. Her cofounder, Sol Lipman, is a former VP of mobile at AOL and previously founded startups Rally Up, 12seconds.tv, and Sticky Inc. With Tomfoolery, they combined forces and applied their expertise to the enterprise world.

“Anyone with a smartphone and a job should care about the quality of apps they use in the workplace,” said Srivastava in a Q&A. “Tomfoolery is focused on enabling the spirit of fun and play that’s the hallmark of great team culture. Work doesn’t have to feel tough, or hard, or serious. In the best teams, work is awesome, it’s something fun and creative — and you can’t wait to get started when you wake up in the morning.”

There are many competitors in the social enterprise space, most notably Asana, Endesk, Jive, Yammer, Workday, Podio, and Chatter. Tomfoolery is distinguished by its mobile-first focus.

Investors include big names like Ash Patel of Morado Venture Partners, Sam Pullara from Sutter Hill Ventures, Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang through AME Cloud Ventures, Andresseen Horowitz, YouSendIt CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and Tech Stars NY cofounder David Tisch.

Tomfoolery is still in stealth mode. The team of six is based in San Francisco.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As if $125 million were not enough, Box has expanded its gargantuan funding round to $150 million, according to an SEC filing.

A company spokesperson said this will allow existing investors to “make additional investments.” The cloud storage startup had not filed the paperwork for its fifth funding round until today — although the news was announced in late July. The news was originally reported in AllThingsD. 

Since it closed its series E round, Box opened an office in Europe and brought on Google Docs’ founder Sam Schillace as its VP of Engineering, among other strategic hires. It also unveiled a host of new product features that make it easier for third-party developers to integrate with Box’s API.

The previous round was led by General Atlantic with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, New Enterprise Associates, SAP Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and new investor Social+Capital Partnership.

Box’s CEO Aaron Levie (pictured, above) recently revealed plans to file for an initial public offering in 2014.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Big changes are afoot at VMware as it refocusses its efforts on what it knows best: infrastructure.

The virtualization giant recently lost its founder and CTO, and yesterday it revealed that it will cut 900 jobs and shutter certain business units in a bid to streamline its operations.

The company released an SEC filing announcing a “planned exit of certain lines of business and consolidation of facilities” by the end of 2013. This will put VMware in a position to focus on its more “compelling” products.

According to Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Bipul Sinha, these compelling products will probably not include its cloud-based applications, as the company has realized that it can’t do “the whole shebang.” He explained, “The reason for the changes are likely because they want to go back to the basics of infrastructure and not the whole stack.”

Three or four years ago, VMware intended to offer software tools and services at every layer — including applications and infrastructure — in a manner akin to Microsoft. An aggressive acquisition strategy followed: VMware picked up hot cloud startups like SlideRocket, a software-as-a-service app for building business presentations stored online.

But as we reported in December, VMware and its parent company, EMC, launched a new cloud and “big data” unit led by former chief strategy officer Paul Maritz. The new organization is semi-autonomous, and sources tell us that in future, it will most likely spin out into a separate company focused on the application layer.

With competition from scrappy startups and legacy vendors on all fronts, it is a pragmatic move for VMware to shift its product focus to the virtualized data center. And it will bolster its core offering thanks to a $1.05 billion acquisition of software-defined networking startup Nicira.

VMware expects to incur costs of $20 million to $30 million to execute these planned changes. A company spokesperson declined to comment.

“The core reason for the deal is that we have a killer Facebook advertising solution, and they have a killer Facebook analytics solution,” Unified VP of corporate communications Dave Donohue told me this morning.

Unified, which will have Mayor Ed Lee cut the ribbon on its San Francisco office tomorrow, wants to provide a holistic solution for marketers that bring together “paid, owned, and earned media,” Unified CEO Sheldon Owen said in a statement. It currently offers solutions for building social audiences, encounrage customer actions, and measuring the value of social marketing. Unified launched just a year ago in January and boostrapped to 35 employees, Donohue said, before bringing in outside investment.

The goal in adding PageLever’s analytics and management tools is to deliver the industry’s “deepest and broadest” real-time audience insights, audience engagement, and social advertising. PageLever offers a solution for maximizing fan engagement inside the Facebook news feed by targeting posts, identifying what is most viral or engaging, and managing multiple pages.

Owen said that the result would be the “most complete social advertising platform to access all major social networks.”

PageLever’s seven employees will be joining Unified’s 50 in both their new San Francisco and existing New York offices, the company said, and all existing PageLever clients will continue to be able to use PageLever’s solutions as standalone products, although an integrated product roadmap will become available shortly.

Terms of the deal were not announced.

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This guest post is written by Eyal Bino, founder of the Worldwide Investor Network, a NYC-based ecosystem focused on helping early stage, non-US-based technology startups shorten the path to funding and acceleration in the US market.

Over the past two years I’ve come across hundreds of international tech startups interested in expanding to the U.S. market and raising funds from New York- or Silicon Valley-based investors.

Many of these startups focus their ventures on consumer-oriented apps or web technology. Some offer new ways to order food online, for example, while others give users yet another way to share photos. The entrepreneurs behind these products are convinced that their solutions are exactly what users have been searching for.

Meanwhile Apple announced in December 2012 that its developer community has created over 775,000 apps for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users worldwide. Look on that number for a moment and then ask yourself: How many of these app makers are getting the market traction and revenue stream they need to survive? Moreover, are any of them attracting any meaningful funding? Some of them are. The vast majority are not.

As RTP Ventures senior managing director Kirill Sheynkman said at a recent conference: “We do not need another music discovery application.” And he’s right. Investors typically look for opportunities in markets where there are no established winners and high potential for growth. Yet many international startups try to recreate the wheel and develop solutions targeted at saturated markets rather than ones with high growth potential and greater opportunity for differentiation.

While there are some noteworthy international startup success stories in the consumer web and mobile apps space – think Waze (Israel), Hootsuite (Canada), Spotify (Sweden), Club Penguin (Canada) – most big success stories coming from outside of the U.S. have focused primarily on enterprise-class solutions.

Here are a few reasons why international startups should keep this focus rather than develop consumer apps.

The evidence speaks for itself – international companies are thriving in the enterprise tech market. From the more prominent success stories like Skype (Estonia), ICQ (Israel), MySQL (Sweden) to recent examples like Anobit (Israel, acquired by Apple for around $400M), startups that develop robust, enterprise-class technologies are well-positioned to produce revenue and in many cases get acquired.

Developing a company around core enterprise technology typically takes more time and effort than what’s required to develop a consumer app, but the return can be significant.  As engineering resources and talent grow increasingly expensive and hard to obtain in NY and Silicon Valley, the value of having great engineers developing strong technologies overseas at reasonable cost becomes very attractive for US and international startups looking to expand their lineup of solutions and grow their talent base.

It’s easier to get meaningful traction in the enterprise market. That’s a big one. With so many consumer applications already available in every conceivable product category, the competition for user adoption is daunting — to say the least. Also, where a year or two ago investors looked for a benchmark of 100,000 downloads to confirm proof of concept at the “A Round” level, today that download number is closer to a million.

In contrast, when an enterprise software startup signs 5-10 key customers, they immediately become more attractive to investors. Typically this also translates into recurring revenue rather than a one-time fee on a download. It makes a big difference.

Make the app the extension of your product, not the core of it. Being focused on the enterprise doesn’t mean you can’t still be creative and mobile-minded. As our world grows increasingly “always on,” enterprise customers expect a level of mobile-optimization that allows them to administer IT systems remotely. This is especially important in the new era of cloud-enabled IT, where virtually every customer-administrated function is performed remotely, and often via a mobile interface.

It’s all about the ecosystem. Ask the teams at Instagram, Evernote, Twitter, and Zynga, and they’re likely to agree that it’s easier to achieve consumer app success in Silicon Valley. Doing so in other parts of the world is much harder. The list of challenges is long, ranging from being geographically removed from target markets to differences in business cultures and ineffective business development.

So if you’re an international tech startup looking to build a consumer app, you might want to increase your odds for success by moving to the Valley and competing with the best. Or you can stay right where you are and focus your efforts on the enterprise market. While not easy, the payoff could be quite rewarding.

The social media marketing platform that competes with the likes of Wildfire, Sprinklr, and Involver grew 440 percent last year, went global, and added companies like Coca-Cola, Amazon, and L’Oreal — you may have heard of them once or twice – to its now 8,000-strong client list.

How? Through the back door.

“We’ve basically built our company around the notion of a self-service platform,” chief executive Wendell Landsford told me from New York today. “People try for free, and if they see value, they keep using the product.”

That started with perhaps humble beginnings with small companies as social marketers created Facebook photo contests and Twitter retweet offers. But it led to massive opportunities at some of the largest corporations in the world.

“As we got success on the self-service product, we started to be adopted bottom-up in enterprise organizations,” Wendell said. “In companies like Unilever, Viacom, or Pepsi, some marketer might try OfferPop. Then we’d reach out, establish a relationship, and get more exposure in these companies, which broadened our footprint.”

Initial success led to Offerpop codifying these opportunities into a sales process, and the company now has a specific division of its sales force dedicated to key enterprise accounts. It’s the new enterprise sales model, Wendell says, with Salesforce.com as its “poster child.”

The model works for upstart young startups. But it also has significant benefits for enterprise companies. As Wendell says, one massive bonus to this model is that a product “has to prove its worth … companies don’t end up with shelfware.”

Offerpop, which closed a $5.7 million series B founding round in December, is now expanding internationally, opening an office in the U.K. and one other to-be-determined location. That’s a direct result of having internationalized the product, translating it to 17 different languages in early 2012. (Which, by the way, is also helpful for major brands, who typically do business internationally.)

Perhaps the most interesting news, however, is the new product suite that Offerpop will be announcing in February. While the company wouldn’t release full details yet, Wendell did give me a sneak peek: “big data.”

“As companies use Offerpop and expand to 350 campaigns or more, there’s a ton of data that gets built up and captured,” he said. “Historically, that’s been kept in individual campaign reports, but it doesn’t provide cohesive, actionable insight.”

So Offerpop is pulling out all the data from all of a company’s campaigns, enriching it with everything that it knows about the company’s fans and customers — including the content they tend to respond to — and making is useable for better marketing on social media, as well as multichannel marketing via email, online marketing, and more.

It’s probably not a coincidence that this product sounds perfect for enterprise as well.

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