GigaOM » Chatterbox

Hubspot nets $35 million in new cash to fuel hiring and M&A

Barb Darrow — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:11:39 +0000

Hubspot, a Cambridge, Mass. specialist in in-bound marketing technology, snagged $35 million in new venture money which brings its total funding to $100 million.

The company has big plans for that cash including acquisitions and more hiring, CEO and co-founder Brian Halligan told me last week. “We just opened our office in Ireland and we have 70 openings now for software developers, sales and marketing people. Next year, we’ll look at Asia.”

Acquisitions would not be new to Hubspot, which last year bought marketing automation outfit Performable and social media firm oneforty, adding their capabilities into its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering.

The company , which now has 400 employees, says its software suite gives marketers the tools they need to “pull in” customers via blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook and such platforms rather than the old model of broadcast marketing, which often falls on deaf ears. “Marketers need content management, social networking, automation tools; we do all of that,” said Halligan, who co-founded the company with Dharmesh Shah.

Hubspot, to some extent, competes with Salesforce.com, which is also a partner and — interestingly — an investor. Salesforce.com has a habit of investing in companies (e.g. Box) and then launching competitive products — (e.g. Chatterbox). Salesforce started out as a CRM and sales force automation service but has been steadily adding more capabilities and functions. It bought Radian6 and Buddy Media to bolster its own social media savvy.

Halligan characterized this new funding as a mezzanine, pre-IPO round. It includes contributions from a new, unnamed backer as well as Altimeter Capital, Cross Creek Capital and previous investors. That roster is a long list including General Catalyst, Matrix Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures and the aforementioned Salesforce.com.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Box seeks new allies in cloud storage wars with integration framework

Barb Darrow — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 14:00:01 +0000

There’s no way to paint Salesforce.com’s decision to launch Chatterbox — its own cloud file share and storage service — as good news for Box. After all, Salesforce.com is both an investor in and partner with Box.

Still Box is forging ahead with new alliances with other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) players including NetSuite, Concur, DocuSign, Jive, Oracle, SugarCRM and Zendesk as part of its Box Embed program, which CEO Aaron Levie is expected to announce at the Boxworks conference on Tuesday. Box Embed is a new HTML5 framework that can be embedded in the other applications to make Box’s file preview, comments, search and other capabilities available to those users, said Chris Yeh, VP of platform for Los Altos, CA-based Box. As for Salesforce.com’s move, Yeh said Chatterbox won’t be out for several months and Box will have to see how it plays out.

The upside for those other companies is they don’t have to pay to develop their own file-share and storage solution. “It is a big investment for most companies do what we do [which is] manage the security across files, all the UI components … that’s why NetSuite is working with us, they see the benefit,” Yeh told me in an interview.

The upside for Box — which now claims 14 million users — is it gets stickier as users of other SaaS platforms come to rely on it for their business documents. But Box’s problem long-term is that a lot of very large software companies are building their own Box-like capabilities. Alfresco just added centralized file sharing and syncing to its content management suite. Microsoft has Skydrive which it’s integrating tightly into Windows. Google has Google Drive. Apple has iCloud. And there’s also Dropbox — the consumer giant among cloud storage companies — always on the horizon.

In addition, Oracle in particular is a tricky vendor for other vendors to work with given its tendency to compete with its ISV partners. The Oracle relationship pertains only to Oracle CRM on demand, a SaaS product, not its bread-and-butter database and other enterprise applications.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

New share-and-sync file services stoke feature-vs-product debate

Barb Darrow — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 13:00:14 +0000

There seems to be a new cloud-based file sharing and sync service every week. And that doesn’t count the number of big companies that are adding those services to their existing products.

That proliferation — as Microsoft, Apple, Google — launched their Dropbox-like services led to a debate about whether these standalone services constitute a true disruption to the software ecosystem or are just flash in the pan which will disappear as software giants add those capabilities.

This week, updates from Alfresco and Box might renew that debate.

Alfresco adds file sync to content management suite

Alfresco, a London-based provider of open-source content management systems (CMS), announced a new synchronization and sharing platform for its enterprise customers.

The service will be part of the overall Alfresco One subscription service, and lets the company preserve the workflow and metadata of corporate documents in the cloud, then search them for key attributes — for example, all contracts worth over $250,000 — Alfresco CTO John Newton told me recently.

One motivator is that businesses — up to and including IBM – do not want employees using consumer-class file share and sync services like Dropbox for internal documents. But Alfresco’s move also impacts companies like Box, which positions its service as a business-friendly Dropbox for the enterprise.

“We run into Box which works with enterprise systems but loses a lot of the context. It’s fine for social sharing but it doesn’t fit into the business process,” Alfresco’s Newton said.

Box boosts upload speed worldwide

Box would undoubtedly dispute that. It’s been building integrations to various legacy corporate systems and on Monday announced a new global network that will make it much faster for users to upload their documents regardless of where they are, said Stefan Apitz, VP of operations at Los Altos, CA-based Box.

More than half of Box’s use now comes from outside the U.S. but Box has no data centers outside the country and needed a way to boost transfer times for distant customers. New endpoints at data center colos in Amsterdam, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sao Paolo will fill the bill, he said.

Box COO Dan Levin will speak about BYOD and cloud in the Post-PC era at GigaOM’s Structure Europe conference in Amsterdam next month.

The centers make use of Box’s intelligent routing technology that learns from and a user’s previous actions how to best speed up his subsequent updates. “It knows who I am, where I come from, what browser I use and, based on those trends, predicts the best route,” Apitz said in a recent interview.

As it stands now the new Box Accelerator network works with uploads and only with web and desktop apps, but will support downloads and mobile clients over time, Apitz said.

The landscape for file and sync is getting more interesting by the minute. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff last week pre-announced his company’s new Chatterbox sync service last week (the formal news will come later this week at Dreamforce). This is interesting because not only does Box already integrate with Salesforce’s software as a service, but Salesforce.com bought a stake in Box last year.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.