Mozilla, long the champion of modern web technologies in extremely modern use cases, has taken its nerd game to the next level. In partnership with Mozilla, realtime 3D rendering company Otoy has just unveiled ORBX.js.

ORBX.js is a JavaScript library for virtualization. To the layperson, it sounds pretty dry. But what it enables is truly fascinating: It lets developers stream desktop apps for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X onto any browser — even mobile browsers.

So, hypothetically, you could run a full version of Photoshop on a Kindle Fire. Or Autodesk 3ds Max on an iPhone.

There’s also a big focus on graphics and gaming with today’s announcement. The HTML5 client behind the library is powered by ORBX, a high-performance media codec for decoding 1080p video entirely in JavaScript. This allows CPU and GPU draw commands to be virtualized then rendered in any HTML5 web page using the ORBX.js library.

No plugins are required, and no native code extensions are needed. The apps can run in any modern browser, including the more recent builds of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

“Mozilla’s goal is to promote an open ecosystem for content and media on the Web, so that a website looks and runs the same on any device,” said Javascript creator Brendan Eich (pictured above), who is also CTO and SVP of engineering at Mozilla, in a release on the news.

“Thanks to our ongoing efforts in making the web browser faster, JavaScript performance now rivals that of safe native code, allowing Otoy to bring frameworks like this to the Web. The addition of ORBX.js, asm.js and Emscripten continues to accelerate movement away from native, PC apps to Web apps and validates Mozilla’s mission of making the Web the leading platform for app development and distribution.”

Mozilla has for a long time now been a strong advocate for the mobile web in an ongoing battle between idealists and big thinkers and those who demand performance and distribution in the here-and-now.

In a previous in-person chat, Eich talked about and demonstrated on the new Firefox OS how important the mobile web will be for new operating systems and future ways of thinking about mobile computing.

“We will close this gap with the native stack,” he said. “We do expect that with a little bit of effort, the web can continue to evolve into what we call the third ecosystem — after Apple and Android — for mobile.”

And better technologies for rendering better software in mobile browsers are just one more step in the right direction.

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A stealthy startup called Armor5 wants to alleviate fears about employees and remote workers bringing their own devices to work.

The Santa Clara, Calif., based Armor5 has a new way for mobile workers to access their company’s applications without sensitive data hitting their handset. The beta version is available for free as of today with a self-service sign up.

Chief executive Suresh Balasubramanian, a former general manager of antipiracy at Adobe, believes that BYOD (employees bringing their own devices to work) is a big problem for IT departments; they have “no choice but to deal with the issue,” he said. But it also raises “significant security, compliance and cost problems.”

You’ve been living under a rock if you’re not concerned about the security risks of BYOD. The topic was the center of discussions at the RSA Security conference, particularly given that the sophistication of attacks on corporate firewalls are increasing.

Balasubramanian told VentureBeat that competitors — including mobile device management and desktop virtualization (VDI) vendors — don’t address IT’s growing needs. MDM software used by an IT department to manage employee’s mobile devices is hard to administer, he explained, and VDI can’t deliver on all app functions.

A lot of companies have attempted to solve this problem by locking down certain apps or enabling IT to access specific parts of a personal device.

But Amor5′s approach is a bit different: The technology connects to a company network via an existing VPN, virtualizes Intranet data and cloud apps, and generates a URL for mobile workers to access content safely from a personal or company-issued device. The entire process takes just a few minutes.

Balasubramanian was brought on as CEO after the company incorporated in 2011. Its founders are former engineers from Microsoft, Adobe, and Motorola.

“CIOs are understandably concerned with data security given the rise of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices inside their organizations,” said Fred Wang, the general partner at Trinity Ventures, the firm that led the seed round.  ”Its [Armor5's] singular focus on the intersection of data security and BYOD, and its unique approach to solving the problem, is the reason we are investing.”

The startup has emerged from stealth mode today with $2 million in funding from Trinity Ventures, Citrix, and Nexus Venture Partners. 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Infrastructure may not be the sexiest space, but Silicon Valley’s investors see ample opportunity to fund startups and chip away at dominant players like VMware and EMC.

One such startup is PernixData, a company that provides software to virtualize server-side flash memory. The first product will be launched in the next three months, and is aimed at large enterprises that use virtualization in their data center.

The company raised its first round of financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Bipul Sinha last year. Sinha and I discussed VMware’s shift back to infrastructure in a recent interview. He warned that the virtualization giant now faces competition “that will come up and disrupt them,” particularly from startups like PernixData.

The company was founded by CEO Poojan Kumar (pictured, left), a one-time head of data products at VMware and the cofounder of Oracle Exadata, and CTO Satyam Vaghani, the former technology lead for VMware’s storage solution.

Kumar said in an interview that the problem they are trying to address is that storage and performance barriers limited the penetration of virtualization within data centers. PernixData can help with that — and it embeds itself in the existing environment, so customers can leverage their existing data center investments.

“We allow enterprises to overcome the biggest impediments for fulfilling their vision for virtualized data centers and we do it with zero disruption,” said Kumar. PernixData addresses this using software rather than proprietary hardware, which can cause vendor lock-in. Its solution stitches together flash memory across many servers.  

“It was time to continue where VMware left off,” Kumar explained, adding that he hopes the startup is considered to be the “VMware of server flash.”

PernixData competes with myriad existing players, including Netapp and EMC, but the founders are confident given the positive response from the first 20 customers signed on to the beta.

The San Jose-based company has raised $7 million to date from investors including Sinha, who is also on the board, Mark Leslie, the co-founder and CEO of Veritas and early board member at VMware, John Thompson, former CEO of Symantec, and Lane Bess, the former CEO of Palo Alto Networks.

Top image via Shutterstock

Just weeks after we reported a shift in strategy at VMware, the virtualization giant has announced its intent to acquire Virsto Software, a provider of storage performance optimization software.

VMware is refocussing its efforts to what it knows best: infrastructure. The company had intended to branch out to provide products at every layer of the entire software stack, including cloud-based applications. But with competition from scrappy startups and legacy vendors, VMware is concentrating its energies on the virtualized data center.

John Gilmartin, vice president of VMware’s storage and availability unit, said the company intends to extend the “benefits of virtualization to every domain of the datacenter — compute, network, and storage.” VMware has made a number of strategic acquisitions to bolster its technology in each of these domains, including the high-profile purchase of Nicira for $1.26 billion.

The buy-up, which the company announced in a blog post today, is expected to close at the end of the quarter. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Virsto has raised over $24 million in venture capital from investors, including August Capital, Canaan Partners, Interwest Partners, Southern Cross Venture Partners and Correlation Ventures.

Ravello Systems has raised $26 million from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners to launch its Cloud Application Hypervisor.

Ravello bridges the gap between the private datacenter and the public cloud. The technology helps developers overcome their “internal resource constraints” by replicating their existing applications in a public cloud environment. From there, they can collaborate on projects, create blueprints, make changes, and QA test more efficiently.

“Enterprises cannot use the public cloud the way that they would like to which is to be able to rent capacity on demand and simply spill-over bursty workloads,” said CEO Rami Tamir in a statement. “That’s not possible today because the public cloud environment is completely different from the enterprises’ internal data center. The industry needs a solution to normalize the application environment across the private and public cloud, so that enterprises can truly begin using the public cloud.”

Tamir and his cofounder Benny Schnaider were on the Qumranet team, an early developer of virtualization technology known as the KVM hypervisor. Open source provider Red Hat acquired Qumranet in 2008. The duo’s extensive experience in this field is attractive to top tier investors like Sequoia, who invested in Ravello’s first round in 2011.

Now with $35 million in capital under its belt, Ravello is announcing the public beta of its service. The company’s headquarters are in Palo Alto, which is significantly less scenic than the Amalfi Coast.

[Apologies to our copy editor Jason Wilson who has a strict no-rhetorical-questions-in-ledes policy.]

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.

Cellrox has raised $4.7 million to keep our business selves, our personal selves, and any other selves we may have, separate.

Employees are increasingly conducting work from mobile devices. They are using their personal devices for work purposes, their work devices for personal purposes, or some ambiguious amalgamation of the two which can present significant challenges for security, as well as corporate transparency.

Cellrox has developed virtualization technology for smart phones that enables two or more “individual, completely independent, and secure personas to coexist seamlessly on one device.” It does this by creating a virtual wall between an employee’s applications and corporate applications. This not only eliminates the need for multiple devices but also helps maintains a clear dividing line between personal and professional activities.

Its flagship product is called ThinVisor and is currently available for Android-powered devices. The financing, led by Runa Capital with commitments from existing investor Previz Venture Partners and  Columbia Technology Ventures, will go toward forming partnerships with equipment manufactures (OEMs) and operators to spread the product’s reach.

Read the press release.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Talk about irony: With the latest version of Bluestacks’ mobile app player, Mac users will be able to run just about any Android app — even though Apple fans still have no method for running iOS apps on OS X.

Bluestacks is today releasing a free beta version of its mobile app player on Macs, which lets Mac users download and install every Android app on the Google Play store. A previous version of Bluestacks for Macs only ran a few preinstalled Android apps.

The company’s Windows client for running Android apps landed last March, and it has been installed on more than five million Windows PCs so far.

Bluestacks’ virtualizes Android to run the platform’s mobile apps, similar to how VMWare lets you run a virtualized version of desktop operating systems. The company calls its patent-pending virtualization technology Layercake, and it’s also partnered up with Asus and AMD to bring Android apps to their devices.

While most people probably aren’t clamoring to run mobile apps on their desktops, Bluestacks is useful for those rare occasions where you need to run an app with no desktop equivalent. For example, there’s currently no way to use Instagram without an iOS or Android device. I haven’t had a chance to test out Bluestacks’ Mac player yet, but I found its Windows sibling to be fast and seamless.

The Campbell, Calif.-based BlueStacks has raised $15 million so far from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Venture Management, Citrix Systems, and others.

Image via Rob Bumahn/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Even though Microsoft still hasn’t gotten its act together when it comes to bringing Microsoft Office to mobile devices, that’s not stopping CloudOn, a company that has developed apps to create, edit, and share Offices files on tablets.

Today, with the launch of CloudOn 3.0, the company is bringing the power of Microsoft Office to your pocket with support for the iPhone. Additionally, CloudOn has added support for Microsoft SkyDrive (on top of cloud storage options from Box, Google Drive, and Dropbox), and optimization for the Nexus 7 and iPad Mini.

“The iPhone really gives us the true delivery of mobile productivity,” said Milind Gadekar, CloudOn’s founder and chief executive, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Each of the devices we support provides specific functions, the iPhone is more around reviewing and annotating, with some editing.”

Just like all of CloudOn’s previous apps, the iPhone app lets you run virtualized versions of Microsoft Office programs. The apps aren’t running on your phone — instead they’re being streamed from CloudOn’s servers.

Obviously, you won’t be able to see the full Office interface on the iPhone — CloudOn customized the Ribbon for the phone’s smaller screen by highlighting features like font size and enabling tracked changes. While a handful of Office document viewers already exist for the iPhone, CloudOn lets you make minor edits and supports other productivity software like Adobe Reader.

CloudOn now has more than 2 million registered users, and engagement is “literally doubling every quarter” in terms of active users, time spent, and files edited, Gadekar said.

In my brief time with the app, I found it worked just as well as CloudOn’s iPad offering. While the optimized interface takes some getting used to, I was able to open and edit Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files easily. And most importantly, it’s fast.

Palo Ato, Calif.-based CloudOn has raised more than $33 million in funding, most recently in a $16 million second round in June. Investors include The Social+Capital Partnership, Translink Capital, Foundation Capital, and Rembrandt Venture Partners.

The company is in the process of building a mobile web client that would let other platforms, including Windows 8, access CloudOn’s service. Gadekar notes that, even though he’s been in touch with Microsoft, he isn’t sure how Microsoft views CloudOn. At the very least, Microsoft may view the proliferation of even more Office clients favorably. But with the impending release of official Office iOS apps, CloudOn may have a bumpy road ahead.

Today, almost every mid to large-size company is grappling with storing massive amounts of data cheaply.

This has led to a resurgence in interest in the once-stodgy enterprise data storage market. Exablox, a stealthy startup that just raised $22 million in a highly-oversubscribed funding round, is one of the hot startups in this space.

“Nearly every company has a multi-terabyte storage problem,” said Doug Brockett, the company’s CEO in an interview.

The Mountain View, Calif. based company has been heads down for two years developing its cloud-based solution to securely store unstructured data — texts, emails, documents and so on. The founding team is currently working with a small number of customers and partners to better understand their pain-points. The founders claim the suite of current suite of products are often tricky for IT departments to install and manage, and do not adequately protect sensitive data.

According to the founding team, the emphasis will be on user experience. “Existing storage products require intimate knowledge,” said Tad Hunt, the company’s CTO. “We’ve started from scratch and we’ve written a new school storage stack that will enable customers to manage and protect their information without having a PhD.”

The founders will not reveal further details of the technology until the public launch early next year.

Investors see major opportunities in software defined storage – in a recent interview, Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Bipul Sinha said the space had undergone a “tectonic shift” away the old guard, primarily due to virtualization. “The incumbents [companies like EMC and NetApp] are slow to respond and the startup activity is at an all-time high,” he said. Likewise, Norwest Venture Partners’ Matthew Howard said the firm has evaluated “several opportunities in this sector.” He added, “The NAS [network attached storage] market is expected to grow to more than $12 billion by 2016.”

This funding round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, DCM and US Venture Partners.

Building blocks image // Maxx-Studio, Shutterstock

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VMWare chief technology officer Stephen Herrod believes in a future filled with choices. And he thinks networking companies better start embracing choice, especially open-source software, or face steep consequences.

“There’s not a networking company in the world that doesn’t realize things need to change dramatically,” Herrod said on-stage today at CloudBeat 2012.

VMWare currently has its hands tied to many different projects, trying to find a way forward in software-defined networking, trying to virtualize every piece of the data center, and embracing platform-as-a-service with Cloud Foundry. Herrod cited VMWare’s acquisitions of Nicira and DynamicOps as big wins that will help them continue to innovate in the virtualization space.

Herrod is so dedicated to choice that half of VMWare’s engineers are working on open-source software and the other half are on closed-source software.

“The approach we’re taking is the one that will win in the long term,” Herrod said.

Check out the great full interview with Herrod in the video below.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Dave DeWalt — known for his big personality, top-secret government clearance, and work as former chief executive at McAfee — is taking over as chief executive for security company FireEye today.

“I’ve had a lot of CEO opportunities since  McAfee and this was the best I’ve seen,” said DeWalt in an interview with VentureBeat. “I’ve watched FireEye for many years. From McAfee, I thought it was tremendous technology. It made me a little nervous.”

DeWalt has served as chairman for FireEye since June and says he wanted to spend some time close to the company before jumping on as chief executive. Prior to this, he helped steer Intel’s acquisition of McAfee during his time at the antivirus company and has since advised the White House on the National Security Technology Advisory Council. Ashar Aziz, the founder and former chief executive of FireEye will step into the chief technology officer role.

DeWalt told me he wants to lead the company to an initial public offering as soon as possible. When I asked if he’d like that to happen by the end of 2013, DeWalt said, “Or sooner, it all depends. I believe the company is prepared for an IPO as soon as now. [But] with the fiscal cliff going on … probably not right now. First half of 2013, maybe we wait until the second half of 2013.”

FireEye protects businesses from malware and protects emails and files by watching viruses’ behavior. Traditionally, businesses used antivirus software that only looked at a signature, or a part of the malware that identified what it was. It then blocked known malware and kept the system safe from the threat. The only problem with this sort of protection is that malware changes quickly. Malware writers are well aware that if they change the identifier of their virus, they can easily slip through the anti-virus cracks.

What FireEye does is it connects your company’s network up to virtual machines, or separate computers that live in the same physical servers. The technology learns how your systems and apps work, what a normal day is like for them, and then watches for anything weird. Before anything is allowed into your network it passes through the virtual machines. If something is, in fact, weird, FireEye blocks it from ever entering the system.

“FireEye in a lot of ways has done with Palo Alto [Networks] has done, created an uber-box that sits on the perimiter, sits in the cloud, that lets us watch behavior in real time,” said DeWalt.

Palo Alto Networks is a firewall company that recently went public. The company’s technology also sits on the perimeter (as firewalls do) and only allows certain parts of an application to enter the network based on the IT department’s permissions.

“We’ve got tremendous head room and growth. We even announced some faster numbers than they had,” DeWalt said.

FireEye was founded in 2004 and is based in Milpitas, Calif. The company has taken funding from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, and Juniper Networks.

Dave DeWalt photo via FireEye

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With all of the migration to cloud-based services in the enterprise, it’s worth noticing that server spending has been flat at about $50 billion a year. But managing and administering to the cloud and all of the virtualized apps that it spawns has become a huge expense and the cost is growing at an alarming rate.

That’s the problem that SnapVolumes hopes to address with a clever tool for keeping track of everything. The Los Altos, Calif.-based company recently raised $2.3 million from industry executives to attack the problem of managing their apps. It does so by enabling enterprises to run a single copy of a major app, said Raj Parekh (pictured), chief executive of SnapVolumes, in an interview with VentureBeat.

[Editor's note: VentureBeat's CloudBeat conference tomorrow and Thursday is all about showcasing these revolutionary ways companies are managing cloud environments; it'll include presentations from a range of companies of the same ilk of SnapVolumes, from application management companies like NewRelic, to integration specialists such as SnapLogic. Are you an entrepreneur? Click here and come at a discount.]

SnapVolumes was founded by experts on virtualization, Windows kernel, and security: Matthew Conover, Shaun Coleman and Matthieu Suiche. The cloud — or web-connected data centers powered by racks of computers known as servers — allows users and companies to log into their virtual environments, which are supported with dynamic cloud data centers. A single server can be more fully utilized by virtually dividing it up into parts that can handle different tasks. That results in huge capital spending savings, as it reduces the total number of servers an enterprise needs.

But tracking all of those divisions between apps and companies (that is, the number of virtual servers) isn’t something that today’s enterprise information technology tools were designed to do. The result is substantial overhead and costs associated with application deployment, support, management, security, and infrastructure. IDC recently reported that the “virtualization management gap” is costing enterprises $100 billion a year and it is growing at an unprecedented rate.

“The expense is related to the number of virtual machines out there,” Parekh said.

The problem is that for every 1,000 employees, companies have to run about 1,000 copies of apps such as Microsoft Office.

To address the problem, SnapVolumes has developed an entirely new approach, running one app per thousands of virtual machines.When an app has to be updated, the changes are made to one copy.

“No one can do that today,” Parekh said. “There is still no good solution.”

What you need to accomplish this, Parekh said, is talented engineers who understand the nature of physical memory in the infrastructure, and the security associated with each copy being used.

“We build a bridge of the logical (virtual server) and the physical, and our software operates on both sides at the same time,” Parekh said. “We set up a control network that can scale to tens of thousands of virtual machines.”

SnapVolumes inserts a small piece of its software in every virtual machine, with another piece in the physical world handling control procedures. It’s almost like a watermark for virtual servers in the cloud. The company supports all server, desktop and other apps without requiring too much effort. It costs $600 per year to manage each virtual machine today. Parekh hopes to cut $200 a year out of that cost.

SnapVolumes is led by CEO Raj Parekh, former CEO of Virident and a former chief technology officer and vice president of engineering at Sun Microsystems. He has recruited engineers who worked at VMware, Citrix, EMC, Symantec, Microsoft and Trend Micro. Suiche, a former Microsoft MVP (most valuable programmer) and Conover, a security expert and former technical director at Symantec Research Labs, have focused on a creating a system that is secure. The company was founded in early 2011.

“The ever-expanding virtualization management gap will simply stall cloud momentum,” Parekh said. “A solution must be fully automated, fit seamlessly with all clouds, hypervisors, operating systems and apps. It must be secure, easy to use and fit with existing tools from major players like VMware, Citrix, Dell and Microsoft. There exists no such product in the market today with these attributes. At SnapVolumes, we are developing a patent-pending solution to address critical issues, reduce CIO headaches and save millions of dollars in operational expenses ‘in a snap.’ Due to the size of the opportunity and urgent need from customers, we plan to form key partnerships with industry leaders as we complement their solutions.”

Board members at SnapVolumes include Henrik Rosendahl, former CEO of Thinstall (acquired by VMware in 2008); Klaus Oestermann, an executive at Citrix Systems; and Prashant Shah, former managing director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Investors include TiE Angels of Silicon Valley and former industry executives who worked at Brocade, SAP Labs, Infoblox, Symantec, EMC, Citrix, and Tibco also participated in the round.

“SnapVolumes has the potential to fundamentally change the way that enterprise desktops, server and cloud platforms are managed,” said Simon Bramfitt, founder and principal analyst with Entelechy Associates. “The ability for IT to easily adapt their enterprise applications to the dynamic and elastic nature of cloud computing is a remarkable benefit. SnapVolumes technology is the closest thing to magic I’ve ever seen.”

CloudBeat 2012 assembles the biggest names in the cloud’s evolving story to uncover real cases of revolutionary adoption. Unlike other cloud events, the customers themselves are front and center. Their discussions with vendors and other experts give you rare insights into what really works, who’s buying what, and where the industry is going. CloudBeat takes place Nov. 28-29 in Redwood City, Calif. Register today!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image via Shutterstock

Monolithic rocks may have been the go-to construction materials in the days of Stonehenge, but today, we build with more flexible materials. A similar evolution is happening with data storage.

Gridstore has raised $12.5 million in its first round of funding. The company manufactures The Grid, a physical box that stores data using “simple building blocks” rather than mainframe-style monolithic storage. As companies scale, they can add layers to the box. This allows for scaling and cuts down on wasted capacity, as well as cost.

Functioning on its vController technology, Gridstore leverages virtualization to distribute data across networks and more powerfully process information. It offers solutions for backup and recovery, file sharing, storage consolidation, and cloud storage.

Gridstore claims to be the first to market with this type of product, and founder Kelly Murphy foresees the ushering in of a new era.

“It’s the end of big storage,” he said in a statement. “The dynamics of enterprise storage requirements are changing, and 30 year-old legacy technology doesn’t cut it anymore.”

GGV Capital and Onset Ventures led this investment. It brings the total funding to $15 million. Gridstore is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Read the press release.

“Big data” company CloudPhysics rolled on to the bright sky of the tech scene today, blown by $2.5 million and a powerful wind of technical jargon.

Founder John Blumenthal said his company “combines big data analytics with deep insight into virtualization and resource management to simplify and automate virtualized datacenters.”

Ding ding ding ding ding!

What this means is for those of us on Earth is that the company creates tools that analyze how virtualized data centers function. Database virtualization spreads out where data is stored, over multiple systems, platforms, and locations, but it allows users to access all of it centrally.

Virtualization has been a hot trend in the IT world because it can provide a more efficient, scaleable, and reliable alternative to other structures of servers, networks, storage, and data. Companies that use a virtualized datacenter may be interested in learning how the virtualization affects their operations.

CloudPhysics provides just such insight.

This service will officially debut in San Francisco on Monday at VMWorld, a global conference on virtualization and cloud computing.

It’s funded by Mayfield Fund and angel investors.

Pure Storage, a flash player that aims to disrupt the business of storage arrays, has received a $40 million fourth round of funding, led by Index Ventures.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, founded in 2009, claims to offer an enterprise flash array that can drive down the cost of server storage. Pure Storage’s technology works by maximizing the amount of data that can be stored on solid state drives. The company uses a number of methods to reduce the amount of space on a hard disk, including deduplication and additional compression.

Pure Storage faces strong competition from XtremeIO, an Israeli flash company recently acquired by EMC.

At VMworld, an upcoming virtualization and cloud computing conference, the company will announce an update to its flagship product, FlashArray, which it claims will rival XtremeIO. The new features will tightly integrate with VMware, so it should come as no surprise that Helen Greene, cofounder and CEO of VMware, is a participating investor in the company’s Series D.

Pure Storage said it would use the funds to expand its operations to Europe and continue to scale operations in the U.S.

The latest funding round was led by Mike Volpi at Index Ventures, with participation from Greylock, Redpoint, Sutter Hill, angels from VMware and DataDomain, and others.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VentureBeat has teamed up with Citrix Startup Accelerator to lead a discussion on May 9 at Startup.Synergy about the massive opportunities for startups in the enterprise sector.

First, if you’re an emerging startup focused on cloud, mobile, desktop, or collaboration, this event is your opportunity to learn about the Accelerator as a potential investor in your company.

In fact, in the middle of the day’s event, Citrix will make a new, on-the-spot $100,000 investment to the winner of the Startup.Synergy Challenge.

The winner will also be included in the company’s next accelerator class, which can include up to $250K in seed investment, an office in Silicon Valley, and help with customer development.

Applications to the Challenge are now closed, but applications to the Acclerator will remain open as more investments are placed this year.

The Startup.Synergy event will also include an overview of the innovation landscape at Citrix, startup demos from existing Citrix accelerator portfolio companies, and an investor panel. I’ll be moderating the panel, 4:30-5:15pm, titled: “From Silicon Valley to cloud-covered continents: What this means for startups and corporate venturing.”

Panelists include Paul Weinstein (Azure Capital), Jonathan Siegel (RightVentures), Frank Artale (Ignition Partners), and Carl Showalter (Opus Ventures). Topics will include the following:

• It takes less time and less capital to build meaningful web technologies today; what are the implications?
• As networked computing capabilities scale and open, code becomes more intuitive and agile, and big data becomes more readily available; what does it mean for startups?
• What does all this mean for more mature enterprises and for the world we live in?

If you’d like to attend Startup.Synergy, please register for a One Day Pass on Wednesday, May 9, 2012 (regularly $695) using the code 150WEDF to receive the special rate of $150.  Additionally, all attendees will receive annual subscriptions to GoToMeeting and Sharefile Pro (regularly $1,100).

Look forward to seeing you there!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VentureBeat has teamed up with Citrix, a major company specialized in networking and virtualization, to lead a discussion on May 9 at Startup.Synergy about the massive opportunities for startups in the cloud sector.

First, if you’re an emerging startup focused on the cloud, this is your last chance to enter a competition to win an immediate $100K investment from Citrix. The winner will be announced after a pitch session to be held on the day of the San Francisco event. Full competition details here. The winner will also be included in the company’s next accelerator class, which can include up to $250K in seed investment, an office in Silicon Valley, and help with customer development.

The Startup.Synergy event will also include an overview of the innovation landscape at Citrix, startup demos from existing Citrix accelerator portfolio companies, and an investor panel. I’ll be moderating the panel, 4:30-5:15pm, titled: “From Silicon Valley to cloud-covered continents: What this means for startups and corporate venturing.”

Panelists include Paul Weinstein (Azure Capital), Jonathan Siegel (RightVentures), Frank Artale (Ignition Partners), and Carl Showalter (Opus Ventures). Topics will include the following:

• It takes less time and less capital to build meaningful web technologies today; what are the implications?
• As networked computing capabilities scale and open, code becomes more intuitive and agile, and big data becomes more readily available; what does it mean for startups?
• What does all this mean for more mature enterprises and for the world we live in?

If you’d like to attend Startup.Synergy, please register for a One Day Pass on Wednesday, May 9, 2012 (regularly $695) using the code 295WEDF to receive the special rate of $295.  Please visit the Synergy registration site to do so.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Three security startups caught our eye at the RSA Conference here in San Francisco today. Impermium, Pindrop Security, and MokaFive all showed off their technology as part of the conference’s Innovation Sandbox competition for startups.

10 startups got the chance to strut their wares on stage, solving all sorts of issues from the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend to telecommunications. Enterprise application security company Appthority won the competition – the company determines whether an application is safe by teaming up with enterprise Mobility Management and Mobile Device Management solutions such as BoxTone to review and rate each application that enters a company’s app store — but we wanted to shine the spotlight on our three favorites.

Impermium

As Internet users become more and more discerning of which online offers are legit and which are phishing scams, cyber criminals are in need of new avenues to dupe their victims. Focusing on securing social media, Impermium promises to weed out social spam before it affects your business. Impermium’s “Zaru” engine analyzes what’s happening on a business’s website. Social spam can exist in a company’s blog posts, comments, account sign-ups and more. Based on regular user activity, Impermium can detect whether an action is spam-y or legitimate. This can turn up false positives, however, and annoy customers who are actually trying to engage with your company. Impermium says its engine is getting smarter due to its growing “Threat Network,” which provides insight from all different websites on how humans interact on the Internet.

Impermium was founded in 2010 and has received funding from Greylock Partners, Accel Partners, Highland Capital Partners, and The Social+Capital Partnership.

Pindrop Security

Pindrop Security almost seems old school. The company is solving the lesser-known problem of caller-ID spoofing. That is, rigging your caller information to give another’s identity. Caller-ID spoofing is dangerous because sensitive information is often communicated over the phone. For instance, if your bank calls you and a criminal spoofs the call, he or she can then use your information to access accounts or open credit cards. Pindrop protects customers from caller-ID spoofing by reading the call’s audio-fingerprint, or a set of tones that define a caller’s location, phone type, and identity. The company provides a SaaS model as well as an on-premise model that acts on the receiving end of the call and does not tamper with telecommunications infrastructure.

Pindrop is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and has received funding from Andreessen-Horowitz and Sigma Partners.

MokaFive

MokaFive wants to help bring Apple to the enterprise. It has created software that lets your company’s IT distribute and control virtual desktops to any employee’s device. MokaFive does this by installing a hypervisor, or a layer of software that allows any computer to run any operating system, onto an employee’s computer. That hypervisor once had to live on the server-side, costing a lot of money implement and maintain. MokaFive attempts to eliminate time and financial cost by keeping the virtual desktops as “golden image” files on MokaFive’s servers. There, MokaFive piles on security features that allow IT to wipe a computer if it is stolen, update desktops, and more. The software takes up five gigabytes on the person’s computer and is otherwise fairly quiet.

MokaFive was founded in 2006 and has received funding from Fuller, Vinod Khosla, Highland Capital, Khosla Ventures, and NGEN.

Image via RSA Conference

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

BYOM, or bring your own mobile, is the new mantra at virtualization software-maker VMware. The 10,000-person strong organization, founded in 1998, has chucked its company-issued phone policy in favor of something more hip to the modern mobile times.

VMware told all employees to BYOM a few weeks ago, Javier Soltero, CTO of SaaS and application services, said at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif. (We’re livestreaming the event. You can watch it here.)

The radical change is actually a logical one for VMware, even if it does present new challenges in bill management, Soltero said.

“The rapid adoption of tablets and smartphones clearly means that employees have a different type of computer,” Soltero said. “The point of the post-PC era is that we’re working a little differently; we’re not tethered to a desk … and there’s got to be room for digital devices to lead that transformation.”

But aren’t there inherent security risks in letting employees BYOM? “We’re at a point today that you do have the ability to revoke access to email, exchange and calendaring environments for a device that isn’t in your control,” Soltero said. “Solving this problem has created tremendous opportunity [for VMware].”

He’s right. The company released a new product called Horizon Mobile Manager designed to help corporate IT departments effectively manage employee-owned smartphones. The product, in essence, virtualizes the employee’s mobile device by letting the organization run a separate, corporate-managed environment on the phone, and secure access to centrally managed data, apps and services.

Clearly the BYOM policy is less about winning favor with employees — but that’s a nice bonus, we’re sure — and more about showing potential clients the advantages of VMware’s Horizon Mobile Manager.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud automation startup VMTurbo has raised a second round of funding worth $10 million, which will be used to expand sales and marketing, product development and customer support.

VMTurbo provides virtualization management solutions that combine real-time operations performance data with customized analytics. Companies that want to move their workloads to the cloud can seek out VMTurbo’s automation software, which comes in three flavors — Community Edition (free), Enterprise Operations Manager ($399/socket) or Cloud Operations Manager ($799/socket).

The new funding round was provided by Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners, both of which are previous investors. VMTurbo’s total funding now sits at $17.5 million, including the new investment.

“Customers are finding that VMTurbo’s unique solution is the only holistic means of managing all resources in virtualized environments,” said Ben Nye, Managing Director at Bain Capital, in a statement. “These businesses depend on their applications, and their applications depend on VMTurbo.”

Waltham, Mass.-based VMTurbo was founded in 2009. The firm’s customers include NASA, Akamai, LexisNexus, L3 Communications, Orange, Omnicare and 6Fusion.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Earlier this year, VentureBeat sat down with Kyle Forster, the co-founder of Big Switch Networks, to talk about network virtualization, a key cloud technology.

The company’s technology is built on OpenFlow, a platform for network virtualization that gives network administrators more control over the behavior of network devices, such as routers and switches.

“We like to think of our company as a VMware for networks,” Forster says.

Big Switch’s software can make it so that people sharing the same physical network never see one another’s traffic — it looks to each one as if they’ve got exclusive access to the same 24-port switch, for example.

It also enables companies to virtually integrate multiple data centers, often widely separated by geography, so that it looks like they’re all sitting on one big switch — thus the company’s name.

The market for network switching is $16 billion, Forster says. Because equipment quickly goes out of date, networking virtualization technologies let companies adapt more quickly.

“We’ll see a whole OpenFlow ecosystem come together. I think the next few quarters are going to be a very interesting time,” Forster said.

The video was conducted by Matthew Lynley, who until earlier this year was a writer with VentureBeat.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Major cloud computing services provider Xtium has raised $11.5 million to expand its reach in helping mid-size companies with private cloud computing, virtual hosting and virtual disaster recovery.

Xtium is one of the leading infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers in the U.S., but it has to compete with major players like Amazon and IBM. The company offers as pay-as-you-grow model to businesses that allows for more flexibility when companies need back-end solutions like virtualization, servers and storage. Xtium said it often attracts customers with its “cloud disaster recovery service” and then eases them into further services after they like what they see.

The company plans to use its new capital for expansion, hiring more employees and further investing in its cloud technologies.

“Xtium is having another strong growth year and we are excited to continue building for aggressive execution,” said Peter Ritz, president of Xtium, in a statement. “Scores of mid-market enterprise customers have chosen Xtium to migrate and manage their cloud and network, as we provide everything they need to plan, migrate, and manage their systems and network at a significantly lower cost and higher service level than their current model.”

Valley Forge, Penn.-based Xtium was founded in 2004 and started managing cloud customers in 2007. Its first round of funding was led by OpenView Venture Partners, a Boston-based firm that has backed startups such as Mashery, Monetate, nextdocs, Skytap, Balihoo and Instructure.

The Torrance, Calif.-based company says it can simplify computer management, slash costs, and make users happy without forcing them to adopt brain-dead thin clients.

Zirtu does this by creating what it calls a Type 0 hypervisor (see illustration below). A hypervisor (or virtual machine) allows a computer to run multiple operating systems, allowing a user to work with one operating system and a corporate administrator to manage the machine using a different software layer.

Zirtu creates what it calls a Virtual DNA Container. That is, it takes all of the personalization data of the user (the user’s DNA, so to speak), as well as the applications installed on the user’s machine, and puts it in a virtual container, a sealed-off part of the corporation’s central storage system that is dedicated to that user alone. When the user logs in, he or she accesses that container, which runs on the user’s machine.

Jake Liff, customer advocate and co-founder for Zirtu, said in an interview that the company’s hypervisor removes some of the usual software layers and eliminates the need for management servers in the central data center. It uses centralized storage instead, running the centrally-stored user containers directly on the user machines. And it doesn’t need a secondary operating system or centralized server hardware to run.

“This market is ready for disruption,” Liff said. “We remove the barriers to desktop virtualization.”

Nothing is actually installed on the user’s own computer. In computer lingo, that means it’s “stateless.” A user could log into the corporate network from another computer and get access to his or her personal data. Users can bring their own computers to work, too. The computer is protected via the corporate management layer. And you can get easy disaster recovery.

The benefits add up. Users can work online or offline and still get access to their corporate software. Mobile workers can work while connected; if the machine becomes disconnected, the computer still functions and has access to the corporate software. The next time they connect, the computer is synchronized with the cloud. Users also get the benefit of using the full power of their PCs and laptops. They don’t have to put up with handicapped thin-client machines that function only when connected.

Corporations like it because it lowers their computing costs dramatically, without driving up the costs of centralized computing functions. The company can get by with fewer software licenses. Best of all, the corporation can get by with significantly fewer servers, eliminating costs in the data center.

“We remove servers from the equation,” Liff said.

Zirtu was founded in 2009 and now has under 100 employees. The company is self-funded.

The space has so much potential that it has drawn a lot of rivals. Citrix and VMware are attacking the virtualization market, but they generally have drawbacks of high costs, higher data center requirements, constant connectivity requirements, and limited performance. Other rivals include Mokafive, RingCube, Wanova, AppSense, and Kaviza (which was acquired by Citrix). The rivals are all using software layering to get the best of both worlds, accommodating users and lowering overall information technology costs.

But Liff said that Zirtu has advantages over those rivals with its Virtual DNA Containers. Zirtu has spent a considerable amount of time creating its Type 0 hypervisor and doesn’t believe anyone can easily duplicate it. Zirtu charges $120 per user per year.

Zirtu is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

ioCache integrates flash memory and caching, or saving data in the cache for later use, to free up otherwise redundant actions in servers. This allows for faster data communication and more room for virtual computers on one server.

The product was born out of Fusion-io’s purchase of IO Turbine, a company specializing in caching for “virtual environments,” or multiple computers living on one physical device. The company purchased IO Turbine for $95 million in early August. The purchase was intended to further Fusion-io’s data center optimization goals.

Now, ioCache is allowing enterprises to do just that: squeeze as much virtualization juice out of their servers as possible.

When more virtual computers live one one server, costs go down even in the physical realm. When we think of virtualization, most people don’t consider the tangible toll of server upkeep. Cooling, powering and managing servers requires man hours, which can be expensive, not to mention how expensive servers themselves are. These costs are reduced when companies are able to downsize server purchases simply by adding more virtual computers to one closet.

According to Fusion-io chief executive David Flynn, the company was created for the era of cloud computing, replacing outdated computer storage technology. With “cloud” on the rise, the virtualization space getting attention with companies like Hotlink receiving funding for virtualization managment. Competitors  associated with Fusion-io’s enterprise storage business include EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, and NetApp.

Jay Phillips, Fusion-io’s vice president of virtualization solutions, will present ioCache at the VMWorld, a virtualization conference, this Thursday.

Fusion-io was founded in 2006 and raised $115.5 million before its initial public offering of $233 million in June. The company’s founders David Flynn and Rick White are accompanied by Fusion-io chief scientist and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.  Fusion-io launched its first solid state memory disk at the DEMO conference in Fall 2008.

Come to DEMO in Silicon Valley Sept. 12-14 to see new product launches from a worldwide selection of disruptive companies. Register Today and take advantage of our special VentureBeat Partner rate of $995.00.

Wanova, a startup that makes it easy for enterprises to manage a fleet of PCs, has raised $10 million in a second round of funding.

San Jose, Calif.-based Wanova has created the Wanova Mirage software that combines several different technologies to make it far easier for companies to keep their computers updated, backed up, and free of nasty viruses. Thin clients, where the computing is handled in servers, can also achieve this kind of result. But Wanova enables employees to hang on to their full-fledged PCs and still take advantage of their full computing power, without the disadvantages of thin clients. With its design, Wanova says it can give users and companies the best of all worlds: low computing costs, easy management, and powerful computers for employees to use. The company calls this solution a “desktop as a service.”

“We had a vision of where overall desktop virtualization was going to go,” said Sebatiano Tevarotto (pictured right), chief executive of Wanova, in an interview. “We run the desktop in the cloud as a service. That gives you all of the advantages of the cloud infrastructure while leaving the experience of the end user unchanged.”

Wanova’s sales have tripled in the current year. Other companies such as Wyse have created easy-to-manage corporate computers with such characters through “thin client” computing, where much of the computing is done in the internet-connected servers. The user’s own machine does very little computing and merely displays what the server has computed. The problem with thin clients is that they can’t be used without an internet connection, and the clients (generally) aren’t powerful enough to run applications such as high-definition video.

With Mirage, a company installs a small two-megabyte software program on the employee’s laptop or desktop. It adds a software layer known as virtualization.

“The layering is one of our secret sauces,” said Barry Phillips, Wanova chief marketing officer and vice president of sales, in an interview. “Because we let the user take advantage of all of the local computing horsepower, you don’t get a user revolt.”

The computer uploads an image — a collection of all of the files, programs, drivers, personal data and operating system settings on the computer — to the company’s data center. The company compresses the data and removes duplicate programs from the data center’s copy of the computer’s contents. This is called “de-duplication” and it vastly reduces the storage requirements for a whole fleet of computers. It means the amount of data stored in the data center is fairly small.

The user can do work on his or her own PC. Every hour or so, the changes are uploaded to the computer, so the data center always has a backup of the employee’s data. If the computer is lost or stolen, it can be restored from the image in the data center.

Because the employee is using a normal desktop PC, its performance won’t be throttled by the speed of an internet connection in the same way that a thin client can be. And the employee can work while offline.

With a thin client, if a user travels to a place where there is weak internet connectivity, then the thin client won’t work. By contrast, a Wanova-based computer will function normally running corporate applications.

If the user wants to access files via a BlackBerry, a Mac or an iPad, they can do so.

Meanwhile, the simplified management enables companies to vastly reduce their total cost of ownership for a whole fleet of computers. When the company changes software or does an update, the system administrators no longer face the nightmare of individually updating all of the computers. Rather, they just make a change to the centralized image, which is then applied to all of the PCs. Upgrading a whole fleet of computers to a new operating system can take a very short time.

Restoring a backed-up image can happen within a matter of minutes. The company can keep images of your data going back as far as 11 months if needed. That’s particularly useful if a computer gets hit with a virus. That means that tasks that now take hours or days can now be done automatically, shaving back management costs. If a company wants to maintain different images for sales people or engineers, it can do so.

“This hugely simplifies management, data recovery, and additional services,” Tevarotto said.

Wanova was founded in 2010 and it launched its first Mirage service in May of last year. Then it launched Mirage 2.0 in January. Tevarotto said the company’s product attacks the market of 50 million to 60 million thin clients out there.

The investors in today’s round include Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures and Opus Capital. Tevarotto said the company would use the money to expand its sales and marketing efforts and to fund future products, Tevarotto said.

“Our plan for this money is to accelerate our push into the market,” he said.

Wanova has 48 employees and a development center in Netanya, Israel. Rivals include Citrix XenDesktop; Microsoft Remote Desktop Services; VMware View, and Moka Five. Some of the rivals use virtualization technology and client-based hypervisors. But Wanova says it gets around some of the limitations of those kinds of solutions. The hypervisors don’t necessarily offer an easy user experience.

The founders are Issy Ben-Shaul (chief technology officer) and Ilan Kessler.

Data center virtualization poses one problem: different virtualization products, or hypervisors, are incompatible. They require separate management systems that become cumbersome to control.

Hotlink’s SuperVisor is a single management system where hypervisors can play together without conflicts.

In order to understand SuperVisor, you must first know hypervisors. Hypervisors allow different applications to run on one server. (It’s a little bit like the software on your laptop that allows different applications, or even operating systems, to run on one physical screen.) But various hypervisors cannot work together. For example, hypervisors such as VMware’s vSphere cannot run with Citrix’s XenServer or Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and each one is controlled through its own branded management software.

“What’s happened in the past is, if you were running a VMware hypervisor, you had to use VMware’s management software in order to manage that hypervisor,” Lynn LeBlanc, chief executive of HotLink, explained to VentureBeat. “If you were going to use Microsoft’s hypervisor, you had to run their management software. You couldn’t mix them.”

SuperVisor was built specifically for VMware’s vCenter (the management system for vSphere) users. Managers using vCenter can also integrate virtualization from a variety of other virtualization products.

But aside from more easily managing your virtualization, it also saves money by eliminating the extra workforce necessary to run multiple management systems.

LeBlanc doesn’t see competitors entering the space anytime soon, however. Companies have tried to lay management over the top of these hypervisors, but SuperVisor was built from the bottom up. And if the company’s patent on this technology is approved, it will be even more difficult for competitors to duplicate its features.

In addition to this product launch, HotLink also received its first round of funding for $10 million led by Foundation Capital. The funding will be used to hire, expanding its employee count from, 18 to 25.

Also in the works is a new product that allows customers to manage on-premise servers in conjunction with cloud servers, such as Amazon’s servers.

The company was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale Calif. Investors in Hotlink include Foundation Capital and Leapfrog Ventures.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Editor’s note: This discussion about enterprise and mobility is one of the five themes we will be focusing on at theVentureBeat Mobile Summit, on April 25-26. We’ve carefully invited the top executives in mobile to discuss the biggest challenges of the day, which, if solved, can lead to much faster growth in the industry. And at our enterprise session, we’ll have top executives around the table from a number of companies, including Verizon, AT&T, Cisco, Salesforce, Box.net, and more. (If you think you should be part of the discussion, you can apply for a ticket.)

Mobile devices are clearly the darlings of business users who are acquiring them in droves, often despite corporate restrictions on doing so. The trend has so much steam behind it that about 25 percent of organizations (and the number is increasing) are now supporting user selected non-corporate provided devices.

To be clear, not all devices are fully supported, nor have access to all of the back office apps available to users of corporate sanctioned devices. But its only a matter of time until this capability expands. And there is no doubt business users’ demands will increase.

But there is a real threat looming on the horizon as organizations expand use of these partially or completely unsecured devices. And the threat expands dramatically when tablets are employed instead of less capable smart phones. Consider the amount of data a 64GB tablet can contain. Think about the amount of personal data (e.g., name, address, credit card, health records that can be compromised, or corporate secrets that can leak out (e.g., business plans, sales figures, product strategies).

Now look at the potential cost of such data loss. Aside from the potential for huge regulatory fines and customer defections, corporate competitive positions can be compromised. The Ponemon Institute estimates it costs a company $258 to remediate each lost personally identifiable record. While some major and highly public data was lost in the past when laptops with 10s or 100s of thousands of exposed records vanished, is there any doubt that soon this amount of data will also be contained on corporate tablets making their way into the workforce with similar types of data?

So what needs to be done? Clearly data needs to be protected, but the best way to protect that data is transforming. In the past, data at rest on a device was encrypted to protect it from loss (Windows has this built-in and many third-party products exist). Clearly this is an important and necessary security practice.

But with a mingling of personal and corporate apps on the new smart devices, is this really the best way to protect data that could be exposed? No. Its too easy for me to copy the data from my corporate app which I just legally accessed over to my Gmail account and send it on to others. Or to copy it to an online app or cloud storage area once is decrypted and displayed. Encryption is not going away as it serves an important purpose (if the device is lost or stolen), but encryption alone is not sufficient.

There needs to be a better way.

One way to do this is to not allow any data to be resident on the device. The device simply becomes a “Glass Window” to the data which resides in a protected space somewhere else. In fact, although not all users may like it, this is the approach that RIM is taking with the PlayBook, where all data is resident on the BlackBerry device that is “Bridged” to it. But that doesn’t necessarily solve the issue of cutting and pasting data. For this we need another approach that controls what is done with the displayed data.

New security measures will actually identify such cutting and pasting and/or forwarding to non-approved apps and prevent it from happening. The user can view and interact with the information locally, but not move the data without approval. While this seems burdensome to many, it is a good compromise if you are worried that data on the device may find its way to the personal side of the user’s apps and/or off the device and expose corporate assets. Of course this requires a level of control not currently implemented on most devices (like iPhone or Android) but it will make its way there before long in my opinion (and RIM is moving this way as well). I predict in the next 1-2 years, all corporate enhanced devices will have this feature.

Finally, one more level of security needs to be implemented, but will take a bit longer to get integrated. That is a virtualized platform approach whereby the business and personal sides of the device are kept separate in “walled gardens” and the transfer of data between the barriers is highly restricted. These virtualized stacks require a fundamental revamping of the OS (much as it has in the current PC and Server space) by adding hypervisors and specialized hooks into the processors (much easier to do now that we are moving into multi-core processors like those prevalent in tablets and higher end smart phones from NVIDIA, Qualcomm, TI, Intel, etc.). Virtualization is already being demonstrated by VMWare and OK Labs among others, and its popularity will grow quickly.

Security is one of those subjects about which people have many strong feelings and debates. Some want it to be relatively lax and primarily user controlled. Others want the extreme lock-down capability inherent in the most advanced and dedicated solutions used by the likes of President Obama. But what is clear is that organizations have a vested interest (and financial obligation) to protected corporate assets, and users have a vested interest in expanding the number and role of mobile devices they employ. It will be up to technology to find a balance, and corporations to decide what kinds of security to implement.

What is sure is that this market is evolving rapidly driven by the myriad of devices being deployed, and companies will have to stay abreast of the changes for several years to come. And third-party security providers will have lots of challenges ahead.

Jack Gold is the founder and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates, based in Northborough, Mass. He covers the many aspects of business and consumer computing and emerging technologies. He submitted this story to VentureBeat as part of a series leading up to our Mobile Summit later this month.

This post is brought to you by Dell. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

The economics behind thin-client computers — machines designed to run primarily off networked computing resources rather than local processors — are starting to get very interesting. NComputing is proving that today with three announcements that show considerable progress in the market for these devices. The Silicon Valley startup is well on its way toward driving the costs of computing toward zero, democratizing computer hardware by making it accessible to a much wider net of people.

NComputing has sold millions of desktops that use its virtualization software, which allows 10 or so users with their own monitors and keyboards to share a single PC, much like the old time-sharing terminals which spread access to mainframe computers. Today, the company is revealing a campaign called “Classroom in a Box” which makes it easy for distributors such as CDW to deploy virtualized desktops in classrooms.

NComputing is also announcing that Fujitsu Siemens, the largest PC company in Europe, will make monitors with NComputing’s technology built into it. And a 64-bit version of Windows virtualization software will allow many more users to share each PC. These developments will keep NComputing on the growth path in the coming months, said Stephen Dukker, chief executive of Redwood City, Calif.-based NComputing, in an interview.

“We’re rewriting computer lab economics,” Dukker said.

Last year, the company debuted the L300, a little box that connects to a standard Windows computer and uses that PC as a server, allowing a bunch of users to share one computer through NComputing’s distributed computing software. The box, in turn, is connected to a keyboard, mouse and monitor. Such devices are sometimes called “thin clients” — though in the age of netbooks and cloud computing, that seems like a dated term. The client taps the computing power of the PC, just like old terminals shared a slice of the computing power of a mainframe computer decades ago. With the L300, as many as eight clients can share a $700 PC. Each one of those clients can simultaneously run a 1080p high-definition video, and each client uses a few watts of power, far less than a stand-alone PC.

With Classroom in a Box, NComputing packages everything a school computer lab needs to set up virtual desktops running the company’s vSpace virtualization software. It has all the hardware, peripherals, operating system, and services that a school needs to set up a computer lab that uses 90 percent less energy and costs 75 percent less in maintenance and support costs compared to a PC lab, according to NComputing. The labs can be set up to have anywhere from one user to 30 users per virtualized desktop PC, using either Linux or Windows.

The machines are less vulnerable to damage, loss or theft because all of the critical data resides in the desktop, not in the individual monitors, which serve as dumb terminals. NComputing estimates it has about 15 percent of the school market throughout the U.S., and this new Classroom in a Box campaign will help cement that. Worldwide, NComputing is supplying Macedonia schools with 200,000 NComputing devices and it is providing devices for 18,000 schools in India.

NComputing is also announcing that it will debut a 64-bit version of vSpace that runs on Windows. That means NComputing will be able to tap much beefier PCs and servers to power thin clients. Dukker (pictured) isn’t sure exactly how many thin clients can run on the 64-bit version, but it could be thousands of users sharing a single 64-bit server farm (which consists of a bunch of computers), he said. As server technology improves, NComputing can keep on adding more users per server.

Meanwhile, Fujitsu Technology Solutions will join LG as a major computer maker selling NComputing-based monitors. The Japanese company will use NComputing’s software and Numo chip to create monitors that serve as thin clients. Such devices will likely start cutting into PC sales, as it means that enterprise customers only have to buy monitors and keyboards, rather than full PCs, for the work place. The same cost and energy savings that can be achieved in schools will also apply to the enterprise, Dukker said. Fujitsu is now shipping the NComputing-based L300-like clients in volumes. In corporate markets, potential customers range from small branch offices to large corporations.

Dukker said more computer makers will start shipping NComputing-based thin clients in the coming months. Dukker said his company is shipping tens of thousands of NComputing machines per month.

“We going deeper into education and we’re broadening beyond that market into the commercial space,” Dukker said. “This is wonderful validation.”