GigaOM » enterprise IT

Ignition raises $150M fund, opens Silicon Valley office, to back enterprise IT

Barb Darrow — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:00:38 +0000

More evidence that boring enterprise IT is not so boring anymore: Ignition Partners has launched (and already closed) a new $150 million fund focused on technologies that businesses will buy and implement.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based early-stage VC firm will also open an office in Palo Alto, Calif. to better attack these opportunities, said Frank Artale, general partner who will run this new fund, informally dubbed Ignition V. The company brought on Nick Sturiale, a new partner, to run that office.

“We think that businesses and people who work in businesses have been largely underserved for the past 15 years,” Artale said in a recent interview.

The goal of the dual offices is to promote cross-pollination and collaboration. ”We want to do real social networking here — not just Facebook stuff,” Artale added. “Palo Alto and the Bay Area are super important as great entrepreneurial engines — Cisco, Oracle and other companies down there spit out great entrepreneurs.”

Goal: Apps that combine consumer ease of use with enterprise utility

Ignition has some credibility in the enterprise. Several team members – including Artale, John Connors, and Cameron Myhrvold — are former Microsoft executives. And previous investments include Cloudera, Splunk, Zenprise, DocuSign, Opscode, Parse and Bromium.

New enterprise applications have to work well and look good on laptops and PCs, but also on tablets and phones as the consumerization of IT trend continues, he said.

Artale which described the new fund as “slightly oversubscribed” took three months to fund. Investors include new and existing university endowments, pension funds and investment companies. Ignition V is smaller than the previous fund, which weighed in at $400 million but will also focus more — eschewing investments in telecom and consumer internet companies, Artale said.

The notion that enterprise IT is back as a hot category is cropping up all over. New vendors — large and small — are building consumer-grade products but for business use. Pivotal Initiative chief Paul Maritz spoke in depth about this at the recent Structure: Data conference in New York and the topic will doubtless crop up again at Structure in San Francisco in June.

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Oracle woes add up to more than a slacker salesforce

Barb Darrow — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:00:11 +0000

Oracle execs including CEO Larry Ellison attributed the company’s third-quarter earnings miss to a lackluster sales effort that let big deals slip into the fourth quarter, but others see more ominous signs.

For the period ending February 28, Oracle reported earnings of 65 cents per share on revenue of $9 billion, just short of the 66 cents on $9.4 billion in revenue that analysts had expected. Oracle co-president Safra Catz said sales were likely hurt by the prospect of government spending cuts.

“It didn’t help that our quarter ended on the same day as the sequester deadline,” she noted on the company’s earnings call Wednesday night. But, overall, Oracle’s sales people took the fall. “What we really saw is the lack of urgency we sometimes see in the salesforce as Q3 deals fall into Q4,” Catz said.

Oracle, HP, Microsoft tread treacherous path

Skeptics maintain that Oracle faces something much more critical than an unmotivated sales force. Rather, they say it, and other legacy IT players must confront a fundamental shift in how companies buy enterprise IT and a shift in the database mix to more NoSQL products and a similar transition to distributed data stores.

Oracle’s bread-and-butter product remains its market-leading relational database which is entrenched in financial services, healthcare and many government and academic accounts. But that dominance is under fire as more companies see the need to add non-relational database capabilities to the mix.

Many of these same enterprise and government accounts are also sick of paying huge fees for yearly software and hardware upgrades in an era where they can easily move at least non-mission critical workloads to Amazon Web Services or some other cloud provider.

Oracle isn’t the only company affected — Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, HP, and other legacy IT vendors — will continue to face tough times as these transitions play out.

Sunil Dhaliwal, founder of VC firm Amplify Partners, concur that this is a massive “multiyear” transformation that will shake legacy IT providers to their core as more workloads go to Software as a Service offerings which negate the need for massive in-house server upgrades.

Can the giants shrink-down and speed up?

That, and the solid acceptance of open source software is still something the legacy players have yet to deal with, although most of them have made huge acquisitions to bolster their SaaS and open source stories. (Oracle bought RightNow and others as a response to Salesforce.com and Workday, and its acquisition of Sun Microsystems put it into the MySQL and Java business.)

The thinking is that more enterprise players are buying compute, storage, networking and software like they “buy” electricity. While the traditional players see this change coming, it’s unclear if they will be able to adapt fast enough beat lower-cost, younger and more nimble players that were built for this new market.

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Survey: Which social-technology tools and trends will disrupt the enterprise most?

David Card — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:00:08 +0000

Social technologies are working their way into business IT on a deeper level simply by being front ends for communication and collaboration. They are now evolving into core enterprise functions like ERP, customer service, accounting and finance, and HR. GigaOM Research is conducting a series of analysis reports on different market sectors to gauge the importance of social technologies in the enterprise and to assess tech vendor opportunities.

With that in mind, we invite GigaOM readers to share their thoughts on which of the key social-technology and business-culture forces will be most disruptive in the enterprise. Fill out the survey below to let us know which trends smart vendors can best harness to gain revenue and market share.

Want to read the reports? Fill out your email in the provided field, and we will send copies once they are published.

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Social fourth-quarter 2012 analysis

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 15:49:29 +0000

Interest may be weakening in consumer social media businesses. But social technologies are working their way deeper and deeper into enterprise computing, and social media is playing a bigger role across advertising and marketing sectors. In the fourth quarter social business software went both vertical and horizontal, Adobe and Behance built in community, and Facebook tested new revenue streams.

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The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 07:55:48 +0000

The last quarter of 2012 saw the rise of cloud-based databases, the cloud awakening of software giants such as HP, and many cloud outages that have put question marks around the use of cloud computing. Many enterprises found more IT dollars in their budgets, and they will focus on the cloud for much of that spending. And while the enterprise focused largely on private clouds, interest in public cloud computing is greater than many analysts expected. This fourth-quarter analysis discusses these trends and more.

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How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

cwaxer — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 07:55:46 +0000

Once known for its online job boards and newspaper classified ads, talent management is now a $4 billion industry. Helping to redefine this age-old HR practice is workforce analytics, a powerful combination of highly sophisticated computer algorithms and predictive models. However, HR professionals face an enormous hurdle: how to make a business case for a high-priced technology that can often lead to IT headaches, hardware expenditures, and overturned HR processes. Linking these workforce analytics to business success can help HR professionals convince corporate bean counters to bankroll the crunching of human-capital data.

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How direct-access solutions can speed up cloud adoption

Larry Carvalho — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 07:55:19 +0000

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The role of converged infrastructure in the data center

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 13:55:35 +0000

GigaOM Research projects that the cloud computing market will grow from $70.1 billion in 2012 to $158.8 billion in 2014. This adoption comes with a compensatory need for sustainable performance from cloud service providers. However, this increased performance cannot be sustained if the corresponding cost to the service provider (SP) for delivering this performance also increases. What service providers need is a way of delivering low latency, fast response, and increasing performance while minimizing the cost of the network.

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WAN design for the cloud age

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 07:55:03 +0000

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Big data 2013: key trends and companies to watch

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 16:55:31 +0000

Besides the skyrocketing growth of data itself, there are several key technology trends we will be watching in 2013. That list includes a renaissance in the database market, next-generation SaaS-based BI and visualization tools, and data warehousing as a service. This report examines these trends and others, as well as the companies making a difference in big data that are worth watching as the industry moves into the next year.

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