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Swedes say no to Google Apps for government use

Jordan Novet — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 22:41:49 +0000

A division of the Swedish government has prohibited government offices from using Google Apps, according to a report Thursday from privacy blogger Simon Davies.

The ruling on the case involving the Swedish city of Salem, dating to a case originally considered in 2011 involving compliance with 1998 legislation, is binding to all municipal bodies and federal agencies, Davies wrote.

The news of clamping down on government employees’ use of document storage, spreadsheets, calendars, collaborative documents, email and other services, the Swedish government’s Data Inspection Board comes as a result of issues surrounding Google’s contract policies, Davies wrote.

Davies wondered if schools might end up becoming disillusioned with cloud applications, too.

It’s fair to view the news as the latest proof point in the resistance to relying on shared infrastructure certain United States companies run because the U.S. government can access data. The revelations on the PRISM program got that ball rolling again in recent days, sparking renewed curiosity about what the European Union will end up doing to protect citizens’ personal data, and this news arguably contributes to the sentiment.

On top of that, the news could heighten further the divide between U.S. cloud and European cloud and shows the need for more infrastructure catering to the needs of smaller populations — say, for the European Union.

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Cloud security market landscape, 2013–2017

Keren Elazari — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 06:55:57 +0000

Cyber threats are now a critical issue affecting the national security of nation countries worldwide. At the same time, the IT world is witnessing a wave of new innovation, and there are numerous business opportunities for technologies built around the emerging market sectors of mobile and cloud computing. These technologies and the companies creating with them will form the future of cloud security over the next several years.

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Box launches $rev program to entice app developers and make customers happy

Jordan Novet — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 14:00:49 +0000

Cloud-storage provider Box wants to keep its paying customers happy, because if their experience degrades, customers will take their documents, and money, elsewhere. Mobile applications using Box files in the OneCloud ecosystem are critical here, and Box on Wednesday is starting a program called $rev to throw money at app developers to keep them focused on providing great service and in turn maintaining Box’s health.

“For us, it’s all about how users are enjoying our products and using them or not,” said Chris Yeh, Box’s senior vice president of platform (pictured). That’s why business- and enterprise-tier customers’ usage of applications determines just how much money developers can make in $rev. Box will provide up to 15 percent of a Box seat price to developers with applications inside of OneCloud, which now has more than 500 apps. Going forward, metrics in addition to usage will also factor in to developer compensation.

The business model differs from those in place at app stores from other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. Google Apps Marketplace asks app vendors to pay $100 up front, and that’s it. Developers putting their apps on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange have to share their revenues with Salesforce.

Box’s approach gets good marks from Alan Lepofsky, principal analyst at Constellation Research. “What I like about the compensation model … is that it goes beyond simple pay-per-download, and instead rewards partners based on a detailed analysis of which add-ons are actually being used,” he said via email.

The $rev program initially applies for 10 popular pilot apps, including CamScanner, CloudOn and SmartOffice. In six weeks or so, it will roll out to many more mobile apps inside OneCloud.

Box wants to make it easier for mobile developers to come up with apps for Box, with iOS and Android software-development kits (SDKs) that include code for key functions such as accessing files within Box and implementing single-sign-on support. As for Windows Phone, Box is in the process of extending OneCloud to the platform, Yeh said.

Windows Phone or not, the broader concept underlying $rev — tying developer payout to usage — does sound smart, because it compels developers to get solidly behind ongoing efforts to make Box the Dropbox of the enterprise. Box could use all the help it can get there, but if the program succeeds, competitors could institute me-too app stores with similar models.

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Panzura gets $25M to staff up global sales presence

Barb Darrow — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 12:15:43 +0000

Panzura, the company that puts and manages enterprise data in third-party clouds, has netted $25 million in Series C funding, which it will use to set up and staff an Asia Pacific presence and to double staff over all. New investor Meritech Capital Partners took part in this round and Meritech managing director Paul Madera joins Panzura’s board.

Panzura CEO Randy Chou

“Our priorities are expansion all around but most importantly internationally. Last round we opened an office in EMEA and now will do so in Asia Pacific. We will probably double our team overall,” Ranajit Nevatia, Panzura VP of marketing, said in an interview.

Broadly, Panzura competes with companies like Nasuni, TwinStrata and StorSimple, which Microsoft purchased last year, all of which take business data and pump it into third-party clouds where it manages that data securely. But Panzura targets large accounts while the others focus more on small and medium businesses. Panzura works with Amazon Web Services, HP Cloud, Nirvanix and other clouds. “Our differentiator is our global file system that lets users at multiple sites share data at the same time,” he added.

The San Jose, Calif.-company was founded in 2008 by two Aruba Networks veterans Randy Chou and John Taylor. Customers include Dreamworks, the University of Southern California and an unnamed gaming company, Nevatia said.

Panzura delivers its technology either as a virtual machine or bundled with a 1u or 2u appliance configured with SSDs or disk drives.

This round brings total Panzura funding to about $58 million from Meritech and existing backers Matrix Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Opus Capital and Chevron Technology Ventures.

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Box acquires Folders technology to enrich iOS offering

Jordan Novet — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:14:16 +0000

Box indicated on its blog Thursday that the cloud-storage company has “acquired the technology” for the Folders iOS app enabling users to open many kinds of files on the iPhone. The deal marks Box’s third acquisition, closely following on news of the Crocodoc deal.

While Box has been taking an industry-by-industry approach to enterprise adoption, the Crocodoc buy showed that Box is also serious about serving up a slick and intuitive consumer-grade user experience for the enterprise. The Folders deal is more proof of that, and offers important capabilities that keep Box competitive as enterprises let employees bring their own devices — many are iOS based — into the workplace.

Folders code viewer. Source: Folders

In picking up Folders, Box gets an app that can do a bunch of neat tricks. Files can be copied and deleted. The app can work with the Mail app, upload files to a cloud and download pictures to an iPhone’s Camera Roll. Offline access is available. Users can search and flip through pages of PDFs. The app opens Microsoft Office files in full screen. A text editor has support for markdown, and a code viewer lets developers highlight code in preview mode.

Users can also search files stored across Box, Dropbox or Google Drive. But perhaps this support for multiple clouds could fall away as Folders gets absorbed into Box — Google and Dropbox, after all, are key competitors against Box in the fight to be the Dropbox of the enterprise.

The Folders technology will be worked into “the next generation Box for iOS” that’s currently in the works, according to the Box blog post from Sam Schillace, Box’s vice president of engineering. (Schillace will talk with my colleague Derrick Harris at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on June 20.)

The Folders app was designed by Martin Destagnol, the CEO of Reedian. It’s unclear how Reedian will be affected by the acquisition.

Even though getting enterprise adoption is important, in day-to-day reality, sometimes it’s the small things that matter to people. If enterprise employees see that they can open certain documents on their mobile phones, they might be less likely to get annoyed. And if employee discontent is minimal, companies could end up sticking with Box instead of flocking to other cloud-storage providers. The Folders deal looks like it will help Box move closer in that direction.

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Exclusive: Dropbox seeks partners to convert free users to paying customers

Barb Darrow — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:15:40 +0000

Dropbox wants to convert more of the millions of users of its free file-sync-and-share service into paying customers — and it’s banking that select IT consultants and managed service providers (MSPs) will help it do so.

Kevin Egan, VP of sales for Dropbox.

The San Francisco company says it has more than 100 million users overall. More to the point, it claims a presence in more than 2 million businesses, including 95 percent of the Fortune 500. But like other vendors that led with a free version of its service to win mindshare, it won’t disclose how many pay for the Dropbox for Business version. Dropbox execs say its name recognition among consumers — many of whom brought it to work — is a draw for these resellers that can provide services around Dropbox for Business.

Pent-up demand?

“We’ve seen a lot of inbound requests from MSPs and IT consultants who want to bring Dropbox to customers and at this point we feel Dropbox for Business is ready,” Kevin Egan, VP of sales for Dropbox said in an interview.

Dropbox for Business, once known as Dropbox for Teams, adds IT-friendly features including Active Directory integration, single sign-on and an admin console for managing corporate users — and pricing starts at $795 per year for 5 users.

Neither Egan or Adam Nelson, the Dropbox executive in charge of the partner push, would share details about the number of partners Dropbox seeks or what sort of incentives they can expect. Nelson said the goal is to select MSP, IT consultant and VAR partners to work collaboratively with the company’s own sales team. “We view partners as an extension of our sales force, evangelists who go out and fulfill demand externally and create a great customer experience,” he said.

Of course, that’s the pitch most tech vendors make, but the reality is that inside sales teams and third-party partners often end up competing for sales and for the incentives they bring. The rationale here seems to be that there is so much demand for Dropbox and related services, that there will be enough work for everyone.

A couple of partners familiar with Dropbox’s plans — both of whom requested anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak about them — said the company has a shot.

One MSP said he gets “a ton” of requests for Dropbox and he sees huge opportunity moving small and medium businesses over to the service instead of updating aging file servers. In return he will get recurring revenue from a service that requires little or no end-user training and will be easy to support.

An IT consultant said Dropbox inside sales can provide a list of employees in any given account that are already on the free Dropbox version. He can then use that data to convince IT it’s time to go to the paid version that will give admins more control. [Update: According to a spokesman, Dropbox will not provide partners a list of names but would offer information about the number of employees using Dropbox on a given domain.]

‘Dropbox of the Enterprise’ wannabes on the rise

Dropbox has huge name recognition and a devoted consumer base, no question.

But this is a hotly contested space. Microsoft hopes to parlay its Office-and-Windows-and-SkyDrive play here while Google does the same with Google Apps and Google Drive. At the same time, Box has staked its claim as an IT-sanctioned cloud storage and file sharing service and then there’s an array of other players including Accellion, LogMeIn and OwnCloud vying for share.

All of those companies would love to become the “Dropbox for the enterprise.” As Dropbox rolls out more IT-friendly features and a business-focused partner program, it’s clear that it plans to assume that title for itself.

Note: This story was updated at 11:57 a.m. PDT with Dropbox’s clarification of what customer information it will provide partners.

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Survey: How apps can solve photo management

suite48 — Wed, 15 May 2013 06:55:09 +0000

A recent survey found that 76 percent of respondents store their digital photos on multiple devices using multiple services.That means ample opportunity exists for companies offering solutions that tackle this “dispersed photo problem.” This report analyzes the aforementioned survey’s results, and also measures 18 different vendors against what respondents value most when it comes to photo-organizing solutions.

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Google Drive document lists go down, then come back up

Jordan Novet — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:50:52 +0000

Google Drive had some issues midday Friday, as users took to Twitter to report that they were finding their Drive file containers empty.

Google Drive is down … I goofed off too long and was about to get some work started and now it's not there. Figures!—
Karen Groves (@grovesdesign) May 10, 2013

Google Drive seems to be down. Damn!—
Elise Descamps (@elidesc) May 10, 2013

Obligatory "Google Drive is Down" tweet.—
Steven Cary (@sjcary) May 10, 2013

Google acknowledged that issues were afoot by indicating a “service disruption on its Apps Status Dashboard.

Google Drive service disruption reported on Google’s App Status Dashboard

“We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly,” Google reported.

Google PR had no further information to share.

According to the dashboard, the last time Drive service was disrupted was on April 17, for around three hours. Gmail, Talk, Groups, Contacts and other Google products were also affected. The day before that, there had been “a misconfiguration of (the) user authentication system,” which prompted login requests to ping fewer servers than what is normal. The problem turned out to be a capacity issue, as opposed to a heavy influx of traffic.

Before the April 17 incident, there were “disruptions” to Google Drive on March 18, 19 and 21.

Despite Friday’s disruption, files did show up back on the main drive at around noon Pacific time, though, so the disruption did not last long.

Nevertheless, this sort of event doesn’t help Google’s efforts to bring enterprises on board with Google Apps. It might also hurt Google prospects at gaining customers on Google Compute Engine and the Google Cloud Platform, as more enterprises flock to and expand their use of Amazon Web Services and other public clouds.

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Box acquires Crocodoc to make document previews richer

Jordan Novet — Thu, 09 May 2013 19:00:58 +0000

While Box seems to be among the leaders in the race to become the Dropbox of the enterprise, it wants to be easy for individuals to use, as to get their companies to sign up as paying customers. In order to make that happen, Box is acquiring Crocodoc, which lets developers convert PDFs, Word documents and other files into HTML5 for clear display in web browsers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“We have to build a consumer-grade experience,” Aaron Levie, Box’s co-founder and CEO, said at a Thursday meeting at its San Francisco office. The deal will be Box’s second acquisition; it acquired Increo in 2009, a company representative said.

Crocodoc already takes care of this type of document conversion for files on several sites, including the recruiting function on LinkedIn and document sharing on Yammer. Once a document is there, users can see the details of fancy typefaces and add comments on desktops and mobile devices, without Flash or plugins required. Other document functions, like editing, are not yet available.

“We want to bite off different pieces of that puzzle,” said Ryan Damico, Crocodoc’s co-founder and CEO. “In the end game, we want to cover all of them.”

Yammer document previewing via Crocodoc technology

Box will swap out its existing previewing mechanisms with the Crocodoc technology in the next few months. Also coming are new versions of previewing, such a carousel with pages passing by, a sliding option, a scrolling option and perhaps a page-flipping option, Damico said. Box will also enable developers to keep using the Crocodoc API to upload documents, spin them around into HTML5 and then do things with HTML5-enabled content to embed in their own websites.

“This is what Instagram is to Facebook,” Levie said. “Photos are important to them; documents are deeply important to us, and they’re deeply important to business use cases.”

While it’s been four years since the previous Box acquisition, Box does want to keep building out its product lineup. “We intend on being very acquisitive,” Levie told me. Box has raised $312 million to date, including contributions from Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and NEA. Crocodoc has raised more than $1 million, with investors at SV Angel and 500 Startups.

As Box makes itself into more of a platform than simply a venue for document storage and sharing — last month I wrote about its health care applications and compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — it also needs to make sure documents show up clearly. It does seem like a no-brainer, which is why it seems like this acquisition should have come earlier.

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Dropbox to host first-ever developers conference this summer

Barb Darrow — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:00:20 +0000

Dropbox, the file-sync-store-and-share provider to the masses, will host its inaugural developers conference this summer. The event — called DBX — will take place July 9 at San Francisco’s Fort Mason.

Details other than that are sparse but in a blog post the company said it hopes to draw developers and partners wanting to learn about the “Dropbox Platform” and to meet the engineering and design team behind the Dropbox APIs.

Dropbox now modestly claims “more than 100 million users” and has caused considerable angst among IT heavyweights including Microsoft and IBM, but not necessarily for the same reasons. Microsoft launched SkyDrive — which as of Monday claims 250 million users – in part to catch some of that Dropbox lightning in a bottle.

IBM forbid the use of Dropbox by its employees, citing security concerns. In fact, many IT staffs across the board view Dropbox and other consumer-grade storage services with anxiety. Their worst nightmare is that employees will send and store sensitive corporate data to this public service. Dropbox has become the epitome of shadow IT.

Those concerns sparked an explosion of startups angling to be the “Dropbox of the Enterprise.

Dropbox has been making moves to make its business version more IT friendly. But the vast bulk of the company’s hundred million users are no doubt on the consumer service.

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