PagerDuty provides IT alerting and incident tracking software. In this era of cloud computing, sites need to be fully functional at all times. Issues can arise at any time of the day or night, leaving IT teams scrambling to respond to the problem.

A number of companies provide monitoring tools, such as Nagios, Zenoss, Pingdom, monit, Munin, Splunk, and BasicState, which send out notifications when something is going wrong. Many of these services focus on just one part of IT infrastructure.  As a result, companies have to cobble together monitoring systems that can be disorganized and generate too much noise.

PagerDuty integrates with these systems and aggregates the alerts. When an incident is triggered, notifications are sent via email, SMS, and phone. PagerDuty has developed a unique set of tools to ensure that the right person receives the right notifications (database administrators don’t get pinged about application problems), and 4 am alerts are only sent when absolutely urgent. IT teams can use the software to set up escalation systems, meaning that if one person doesn’t respond, someone else is notified until there is a response. This prevents problems from slipping through the cracks. Scheduling features make it easier to divvy up on-call responsibilities, which also prevents lapses.

“Today, we are the “9-1-1 dispatch” system for IT,” said CEO Alex Solomon in a blog post about the funding. “The next major step in the vision is to expand beyond just the critical incidents. We ultimately will become the central nervous system of IT: we’ll provide the interconnecting fabric between your systems and the people responsible for managing them. Our big audacious goal is to reduce the noise. In other words, only the critical issues should wake you up at 4am, false alerts should be automatically filtered out, and low priority incidents should be surfaced in aggregate in summary reports.”

Clients include high-profile customers like Microsoft, Adobe, EA, Square, Github, Pinterest, Braintree, Heroku, Intuit, 37signals, and Etsy. This first round of investment will go towards hiring more “crazy-smart engineers” for product development and fuel global expansion. In addition to Andreessen Horowitz, the Webb Investment Network, Opscore founder Jesse Robbins, and existing seed investors Harrison Metal, Baseline Ventures, and Ignition Partners contributed.

PagerDuty was founded in 2009 and is based in San Francisco. Read the press release

SevOne, the Deleware-based startup that is growing rapidly in a market of IT giants, is proving that tools to monitor the health of a network are big business.

Formed in 2005, the company provides a suite of IT monitoring and reporting tools to its customers — primarily large enterprises. Today, it has pulled in an impressive $150 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures.

Ben Nye, managing director of Bain Capital Ventures, the firm that led the round, said in a statement that this is the “only solution that enables its customers to see all services in real-time within global distributed networks of any scale.” The firm sees an opportunity for SevOne to tap a growing market of mid-size companies.

As with any business software release, SevOne references “big data” in its positioning, and claims to scale to address this level of network growth.

According to the company’s CEO, Mike Phelan, bookings have doubled year over year, and the customer base has doubled. SevOne competes with legacy players like EMC, BMC and IBM, but Phelan claims its ability to get up and running in seconds is unique. “What SevOne can achieve in 1 second, takes legacy solutions 6.3 hours,” he told us. “SevOne is capable of monitoring our customers’ networks within minutes of installation.”

Analysts and the media have been impressed by the technology, which was developed by a group of network architects that worked at major financial institutions. As Alex Williams over at TechCrunch put it, this “is the new face of the cloud.” The SevOne technology is able to predict if there will be problems on the network by monitoring the data from thousands of points. For big-name companies like Thompson Reuters, SevOne can deliver financial information in seconds to a variety of financial services firms.

Prior to raising funding from Bain capital, the company pulled in $3.5 million to build-out its product.

Road infrastructure image // Shutterstock 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Halloween night is scary, and not just because the dead come back to haunt the living. People are out on the streets, drinking alcohol, wearing disguises, and the line between safe and unsafe is blurry. On this night, as on all other nights, it is important to arm yourself against dangerous situations. A startup called MyForce is offering you its protection.

MyForce is a personal security service you activate through your smartphone. After subscribing to MyForce, you fill out a profile with personal information, a physical description, and known safety issues, then download the app to your smartphone. You can activate MyForce whenever you are walking alone, encounter a potentially dangerous situation, or simply feel uncomfortable.

If something like an assault or a robbery occurs, you hit the alarm button to alert a monitoring team that you are in danger. Live agents then respond accordingly based on your profile information, GPS location, and an audio feed that relays the noise around you. In the event of an emergency situation, a police team can be dispatched to your aid immediately.

“We have all been in those situations where we are walking down the street and feel uncomfortable,” said founder Brad Zotti. “MyForce should be walking with you. People will call their parents, friends, or partners on their cell phones, but those are the situations where they should use this service. A lot of experts say talking on you mobile phone while in an unsafe environment is more dangerous because it makes you less aware of your surroundings. Also, what can that person do if something happens to you?”

Calling 911 is the obvious answer, but this approach can be insufficient. If they are being attacked, victims may not be able to communicate with the police about what is happening or their location. The benefit of a monitoring service is it already knows essential information that can mean assistance as quickly as possible.  

The inspiration for the service first came to Zotti on a college campus. He observed that a large number of female students were walking around alone at night with their phones in hand. It occurred to him that the Blue Light service, available on most college campuses, would be far more effective on mobile devices.

He began testing the product at universities but quickly saw that the demand extended further. Parents wanted to arm their children with the technology, and demand was high among women, particularly those living in cities. People whose jobs involve house calls also expressed a need, like nurses, real estate agents, technicians, and people with medical conditions.

Many early adopters of MyForce were victims of domestic violence. Zotti shared the story of a young woman with an abusive boyfriend. When they got in a heated argument one night, she opened the app on her phone and put it discreetly on the counter. A monitoring team was able to listen in on their conversation and knew that she lived with a violent partner based on her profile.

MyForce operated in beta for about 18 months and is now available for public use. Users can sign up for a 30-day free trial, after which the service costs $11.99 a month, or $9.99 a month with an annual subscription. While this price is higher than many other personal safety apps, like StaySafe, Guard My Angel, 5Star Urgent Response, LifeLine, bSafe, and StreetSafe, Zotti said the additional layer of security makes the extra money worth the investment.

“We have a professionally-trained staff around 24/7 that can handle calls that come in anytime, anywhere and make sure our users get help when they need it,” he said.

There are times when people accidentally send an alert, and for these occasions, MyForce has a cancel option. Users also set a safe word. Sometimes if the danger level of a situation is unclear, a MyForce team member will personally call your phone to check in. The safe words can be used to express need, or defuse the response.

MyForce was founded in 2010 and has raised $2 million. It is based in Denver, Colo.

HootSuite Command Center allows you to listen and monitor social mentions, publish and engage with fans and consumers, and analyze and measure the results. In addition, it’ll allow you to easily display a simple dashboard in key areas of your company.

Or on mobile devices from from iPhone to Android.

The goal, according to HootSuite chief executive Ryan Holmes, is to give companies “a hub where every social interaction can be seen, studied and spread.”

HootSuite Command Center

For example, a marketing team could monitor the virality of their every campaign in realtime. Public relations executives could see trending sentiment to recent announcements, and social media teams can see and react to trending topics as they surface. And companies can ensure internal audiences are up-to-speed with and engaged in external social media initiatives.

All of which is possible today, of course, with a variety of tools.

But Command Center’s goal is to integrate crisis management, campaign execution, executive reporting, and market research, and other capabilities into one single engine. And it continues HootSuite’s recently more-aggressive push into the enterprise, which includes internal corporate social networking with HootSuite Conversations, introduced just six weeks ago.

That’s a reality echoed by Holmes, who said that “HootSuite continues to develop and acquire tools to support the growing needs of today’s social businesses.”

No evil laugh or dictator suite required.

photo credit: SkinheadSportBiker1 via photopin cc

That’s why AppFirst has built the DevOps Dashboard.

Launching today, DevOps Dashboard combines in one view data from your web applications, your corporate database, and all your internal applications. I spoke with AppFirst chief marketing officer Pamela Roussos to learn more.

“The problem is that most data is in different silos,” Roussos says. “That contributes to IT often being the last ones to know about a problem.”

A DevOps dashboard showing data for an e-commerce vendor.

AppFirst’s solution is to install a little piece of software on every piece of a company’s computing stack. The lightweight sentinels collect data continuously and stream it to AppFirst every 20 seconds, creating a single repository of performance data for you in the cloud. Then AppFirst “dashboards” the data, showing you in one screen what previously you might have needed to check for in 10 or more places.

And it’s not just about server uptime.

Plenty of solutions are out there to tell businesses how their applications are running or what their network utilization is or how hard servers are working. One of the new things AppFirst is doing is connecting application and services data with business data.

That enables the company to display metrics such as return on investment, cost per customer, time on site, and a vast array of financial and profitability data — in conjunction with, and relationship to hardware and applications performance.

“One e-commerce customer of ours was looking at 14 different monitoring solutions,” Roussos told me. “They thought they could narrow it down to four, and ended with just one [AppFirst].”

Now, she says, the company displays the dashboard on  50-inch monitors for everyone in the company to see all their core indicators.

Another DevOps Dashboard view.

Having all their data in multiple places can make it difficult for businesses to correlate information and detect relationships and trends, says Roussos. Seeing critical metrics connected surfaces those relationships and enables quick response — and initiative.

For example, a company might see how better website speed impacts sales. Or how greater reliability of internal application delivery impacts customer response times and, ultimately, ROI.

One key benefit of the company’s cloud-based approach, according to AppFirst, is the incredible speed of implementation. Enterprise customers, of course, are familiar with implementation and integration periods calculated in weeks and months and “don’t believe” Roussos sometimes when she tells them that AppFirst can be up and running hours or days.

“As quickly as you can install the apps and authenticate them,” says Roussos, “you’re up and running.”

Those apps are MSIs on Windows servers and RPMs on Linux servers. One a collector is installed, it starts collecting data instantly, sending it up to the cloud. Within minutes a client’s metrics are being populated, and as soon as enough data is collected to provide meaningful reports, the results are visible online. According to AppFirst, running the DevOpps Dashboard apps incurs a performance penalty of only 1 percent or less.

The DevOps Dashboard is new, as is an enhanced capability to auto-detect the app stack running within a company’s production environment. Two other new announcements today include auto-configuration of data sources and the addition of business metrics data.

Pricing starts at free and ends up at only $25 per server for up to 2,000 business metrics.

That may be where the sports stats analogy breaks down — A-Rod doesn’t even tie his shoes for $25.

photo credit: laffy4k via photo pin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Behind every cloud, there’s  … a cloud. Cloud services may not always be saving you money.

Irish startup CloudVertical monitors how its 2,500 customers use Amazon web services, VMWare, and Heroku. “Looking across our user base, ” says CEO Ed Byrne, “from companies spending less than $50,000 a year to those spending millions, people are only using about 30 percent of the resources they pay for. This is really remarkable, considering that for the past decade, the sales pitch for virtualization has been ‘physical servers only get about 30 percent usage.’”

In a recent Google survey, 58 percent of 800 CFOs said they believe that cloud computing reduces IT costs, while a whopping 96 percent agreed that “cloud computing provides their business with quantifiable benefits.” Admittedly, Google included services like Gmail and Google apps in its definition of cloud services, which may have skewed the results to some degree.

Byrne explains that the key to using cloud services efficiently is the ratio between the total computing power paid for vs. power used, the catchily titled Cloud Usage Efficiency Metric. “The cloud is not pay-as-you-go but pay-as-you-provision. People still fire up lots of servers and leave them there,” explains Byrne. “Companies need to monitor three things — capacity, usage, and cost. We help people answer the questions of who is doing what, with what resources, at what usage, and at what cost.”

CloudVertical provides KPIs (Key performance indicators) for the cloud. Byrne previously ran a cloud provider. Customers were always telling him that they were going to switch to Amazon because it was cheaper but could never tell him exactly what Amazon’s pricing was. He says that there is still a lack of transparency and accountability when it comes to cloud usage. That’s the problem CloudVertical sets out to solve.

The company tracks cloud cost on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, predicts future cost, and benchmarks your usage against other companies. Amazon, VMWare, and Heroku are currently tracked.

CloudVertical’s customer is “the guy who cares about the cost”, whether that is a developer who is using the company credit card for a new project or the CFO of a larger enterprise. Most often compared to Cloudability, Byrne insists that CloudVertical’s real competitors are enterprise tools like IBM’s Tivoli or HP OpenView.

Cloud Vertical has received over $1 million in funding from Irish VC Delta Partners and Enterprise Ireland. The company is based in Dublin and has seven employees.

Note: Byrne is a common name in Ireland so Ed Byrne is no relation of mine (as far as I know).

New Relic calls it the App Speed Index, and it measures how fast your site works for end users — from their perspective. The index shows companies how they are performing relative to their peers in 12 industry categories, including commerce, mobile, social networking, and online games.

Average site speed in 12 industry categories

VentureBeat talked to Bill Hodak, director of product marketing at New Relic, to get the details.

“At New Relic, we’re sitting on a lot of customer data,” Hodak explained. “With 25,000 active customers on our platform, they’re sending us 55 billion individual metrics on a daily basis.”

Those metrics are individual touch points of customers on a website or web application: a page loaded, an image viewed, a button clicked, an error, or any other trackable action being taken. With over 1.5 billion pages loaded per day, that’s a lot of data to learn from.

“We wanted to take that data and turn it into an actionable feature for our customers,” said Hodak.

In addition, the app speed index reveals the fastest sites across all business categories. In the inaugural ranking, small business software provider Intuit took second place, while Groupon took fifth. Additional factors in the index include site reliability or uptime, and error rate.

The competitive ranking is both unusual and helpful, said Lew Cirne, New Relic’s founder and chief executive:

“Right now, most companies measure speed and performance against their own subjective benchmarks, but they’re operating in a vacuum because they don’t have insight into how other companies in their industry compare. With New Relic’s massive big data collection and our new app speed index capability, we’re giving companies a huge competitive edge by providing a real benchmark that they can measure against day after day.”

Participating companies will gain access to a dashboard with speed, responsiveness, and ranking data that includes a percentile ranking in their industry grouping and daily charts of their performance:

Hodak stressed that the data is not just server-based or theoretical data: “We’re leveraging our real user monitoring data — these are real people using our customers’ apps.”

This results in more valuable data, according to Gartner analyst Jonah Kowell, who explained that standard “benchmarking reports are typically driven by synthetic transactions, which can assume connectivity that is often uncertain in today’s mobile workforce.” By using live customer data, New Relic is giving companies better insight into how their sites perform in real-world conditions.

The ranking service is free and included with New Relic’s entry-level product offering.

Image credit: ShutterStock

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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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Seesmic

The company helps users to manage their social networks both on the desktop and mobile devices, including Windows, Macs, iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Through a single dashboard, users can add their Facebook, Twitter and other social networks as streams and monitor or engage in real-time. Seesmic made a bunch of product updates in 2010, including adding support for multiple accounts on Android and acquiring social posting service Ping.fm.

The investment by Salesforce.com makes sense as the two companies have been working together recently to integrate Salesforce Chatter, a collaboration tool for enterprises, with Seesmic. Users will now be able to see Salesforce.com customer’s comments on Facebook and Twitter.

Seesmic has a host of competitors offering very similar services, including Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Yoono. Though none have integrated with an enterprise collaboration tool like Salesforce Chatter.

The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2008, has secured a total funding of $16 million. Past investors Omidyar Network, the firm created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Wellington Partners also participated in the round.

Some of the most widely used sites on the Internet are attracting negative attention these days for neglecting to attend to the user experience. But for many, that’s not their biggest problem.

Ten years ago, web site owners simply needed to attend to safety issues like secure servers and shopping carts. That changed with the advent of social media. Today, people are not simply interacting with the web sites; they are just as often interacting with other users through comments, sharing functions, online chat and even games.

This means that user safety and privacy have become everyone’s business. Yet too many site owners protest that they can’t protect their users from the ever growing assortment of online scams and crime.

This is, of course, nonsense. Everything from site architecture to the way accounts receivable works can be set up to protect users and customers. Here’s my advice for creating a safe user experience:

Start with a solid system - The best time to think about security and safety is before your site goes live. You need to know, at least in broad strokes, who your users will be and the kinds of protections they will need. Just a few of the many needs to consider are: secure financial transactions, payment verification, your own site vulnerabilities, user-to-user crime, scams, hate speech, and the security of user-controlled components – including off-site activities that originate from, link to, or refer back to your site.

For particularly vulnerable content areas, you may want to consider setting up paid accounts. Generally, situations in which you are paid are likely to provide you with a way to track the source of that content on your site.

Don’t depend on user monitoring - A flagging system, which depends on users to police a site’s pages after the fact, often opens up almost as many problems as it attempts to resolve. In theory, it works. In practice, perfectly good ads get flagged while scams, hate speech, and criminal activity can go unflagged.

Some large bidding sites use buyer and seller ratings, but this is also a difficult way to separate the creeps from the honest sellers. Unscrupulous sellers have posed as the competitors’ buyers in order to leave poor ratings and nasty feedback. The end result is a loss in total traffic volume. The upshot is clear: you – the site owner – need to take responsibility for monitoring your content. Make it easy on yourself by using a queue system.

Shore up weak points. Make sure someone in a position of responsibility is auditing your pages frequently to see what’s happening there. A scam I came across many years ago involved the posting of innocuous photos that were later modified to include illegal content. It wasn’t difficult to end this practice. We simply made it impossible to modify photos after the content goes live.

Keep connected to visitors and users. Many site operators are tempted to put their whole enterprise on auto-pilot. For most businesses, this is a huge mistake. It means missing out on a wealth of opportunities to improve both safety and other aspects of the user experience. It’s also likely to affect your bottom line. Provide live customer service if possible – and always solicit feedback from your users.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social gives customers a single Web-based dashboard to manage and grow all their social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. The tool monitors the web for social brand mentions and then alerts the user of potential customers. A contact center and promotional tool then allows users to engage those potential customers. Engagement features include being able to cross-post across all networks and schedule messages. An analysis tool allows users to track the progress of their outreach.

The company joins a whole host of social media management and monitoring tools, including Radian6, Visible Technology and Scout Labs, which was recently purchased by Lithium Technologies. Though Sprout Social appears to have a leg up on the competition as it pairs social monitoring with promotional tools to turn potential customers into actual customers.

The Chicago-based company, founded in 2009, previously raised an undisclosed amount from Lightbank, which also invested in Facebook application Where I’ve Been and Poggled, a social aggregation site.

Marketwire

Sysomos is a typical social monitoring and analytics service offering customers the ability to track their social presence across sites like Facebook and Twitter. The company’s two main products — Map and Heartbeat — effectively help a client keep track of who’s talking about them and what they’re saying online in real-time. The tools also help to aggregate and measure for clients who are implementing social media campaigns.

According to a Sysomos’ blog post, the company is profitable and working with a host of popular brands, including Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Disney.

The acquisition by Marketwire makes sense as more and more brands are looking to promote, measure and analyze their social media campaigns. Sysomos’s tools would be an easy way for Marketwire to offer brands the ability to not only distribute content around their social campaigns, but also monitor and measure their reach or “impressions” (a traditional term used in public relations and advertising agencies to measure the effectiveness of a campaign) all in one place.

Competition around social media analytics and monitoring has really heated up over the past year as well as acquisitions of these companies. Recently, data analysis company Attensity acquired social monitoring software company Biz360 to provide deeper analytics. Several direct competitors received investment rounds, including Visible Technologies, landing $22 million, and Klout, grabbing $1.5 million.

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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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Attensity

According to Venturewire, Attensity plans to provide deeper analytics through the Biz360 platform, which have already been integrated through a previous co-selling arrangement. Now dubbed Attensity360, the monitoring tool will continue to track social conversations, including sentiment, topic trends and competitive analysis. The tool gives businesses the opportunity to engage and react to those conversations in real-time. Additional features are planned to be available this summer. Price packages for the new product range from basic at $399 to Premium at $2,799.

The market for social media monitoring companies has been steadily growing since 2008, back when the more popular term was “Internet reputation”. Traditional research power-houses, like Nielsen and J.D Power, have been to get a handle on the Internet. For example, J.D. Power snapped up reputation tracker Umbria to monitor and analyze message boards and blogs and Nielsen bought Telephia for mobile phone traffic measurement.

While others tried to catch-up, Biz360 continued to be a pioneer in the social monitoring space. Focusing on not just collecting of data, but analysis and what it meant. At the time, this was a major differentiator between itself and competitors who lacked this detail for customers. 

Meanwhile, investors continue to see the growth potential in social media monitoring companies. Klout, which measures Twitter influencer, today announced a first round of funding for $1.5 million according to TechCrunch. Visible Technologies also recently announced a $22 million fourth round of funding for $22 million. Bringing its total funding to $34 million. Radian6, another earlier adopter of tracking and measuring social media, announced its first profitable year and is looking to increase its research and development spending by 50 percent this year.