Five years ago, Twilio, a cloud-based communication service provider couldn’t find a penny. Last week it snagged $70 million and is worth half-a-billion dollars and is on track to do $50 million in revenues in 2013. It has IPO ambitions, thanks to CEO/co-founder Jeff Lawson. Read more »
New Morgan Stanley research expects AWS to hit $24 billion in revenue by 2022 and to put the hurt on legacy IT providers in the process. Read more »
“Socialized business process” — the idea of adding social tools to traditional business processes — is unlikely to work in the long term. The enterprise is now transitioning to social network–based communication as introduced by social tools, and there is a fundamental conflict in communication models with business-process-centric business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Gamification is thought of as a hyped buzzword by skeptics, but it’s increasingly being used by corporations to incentivize consumers and motivate employees. As enterprise adoption of gamification grows, that could make gamification startups the next hot acquisition target in the coming years. Read more »
The VC behind big European exits like Skype, MySQL and Lovefilm has been arguing that London should play host to more IPOs. Now Robin Klein, one of its high profile partners, is spearheading the attack with an appeal to government, investors and startups themselves. Read more »
IT is loosening its chokehold on software purchasing decisions and consumer-like products are finding their way into enterprise software. These changes are generating unprecedented opportunities for software startups. GoInstant’s CEO Jevon MacDonald lists the key questions startups should consider before selling into the enterprise market. Read more »
Greylock Partners, seeking more operational experience in the enterprise and cloud computing sector, named Dev Ittyhceria, an operations guy who made his name in enterprise software, as its newest partner. Ittycheria founded Bladelogic and sold it to BMC seven years later for $900 million. Read more »
After years of beating around the bush, SAP declares that it is a database company and will take on the biggest kid on the block. It’s about time. It’s funding startups to build applications for Hana and Sybase. But beating Oracle won’t be easy. Read more »
Businesses can now leverage big data for the benefit of driving marketing insights. According to Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures, this fundamental shift will create several multi-billion dollar winners, and new technology companies will emerge as the marketing equivalents of Salesforce and SAP. Read more »
Leo Apotheker, the Hewlett-Packard CEO ousted so publicly last September, pretty much disappeared from view. Until recently. Now he’s been spotted in Menlo Park and was featured on a conference call with Wall Street analyst Rick Sherlund. Could he be plotting a comeback? Read more »
It looks like some of the bloom is off the SaaS rose. New numbers show the booming growth in valuations of SaaS companies is slowing after a long run-up as pure-play SaaS companies face more competition from legacy players. Read more »
“Cloud first” markets — those where companies’ first serious engagements with information technology are in the form of cloud computing — are beginning to emerge. For the BRIC economies in particular, this might mean a chance to adopt low-cost solutions that will give companies a clear ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Mayfield Fund named Sandeep Johri as its new executive in residence. He willl use his experience in enterprise software to drive the VC’s enterprise strategy. Johri helped drive HP’s cloud and enterprise strategy and also held management posts at Silicon Graphics and Gemini Consulting. Read more »
Despite a tough economy, technology investors expect to fund more cloud-computing-related technologies, according to new research. More than half of those surveyed by Peachtree Capital predicted investment growth in cloud technology going forward. Read more »
Seesmic, the company best known for making consumer-facing social networking apps, has shifted its strategy for the second time in its four-year history, this time to focus on building mobile apps for the enterprise. Can the third iteration of Seesmic finally bring the company success? Read more »
Hewlett-Packard plans to spend some $10.25 billion to acquire Autonomy, the United Kingdom–based software and services company. HP’s balance sheet currently has $13 billion in cash. Why is the company making such a big bet? According to HP’s CEO, Leo Apotheker, it’s now or never. Read more »
In 2011, enterprise will finally get wise to the importance of social media, according to a research paper by Stifel Nicolaus. The biggest areas of growth will be in tools that use consumer technologies and combine internal collaboration with external feedback. Read more »
With the growing recognition that global warming demands a business response, many companies are budgeting for climate-change plans. These plans aim to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions across a wide range of activities, including procurement, manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, retailing, IT, waste disposal, and regulatory compliance. In drawing up and implementing these plans, though, businesses have made an unexpected discovery: The shift to greener operations creates competitive advantages by cutting costs, preparing for regulation of carbon emissions and presenting an attractively green ethos to the market. Sustainable business, it turns out, is good business.
To help implement their plans, companies can choose from a variety of enterprise sustainability software, also known as carbon management software, delivered via a Web browser in the form of Software as a Service. These systems collect resource-consumption data distributed geographically and functionally across the enterprise including electricity metering, transportation fuel costs and emissions from manufacturing and production facilities. The objective is to bring this data into one place where it can be examined and analyzed comprehensively.
Sustainability software covers three broad areas. One category is aimed at IT and helps manage energy consumption in data centers. A second category monitors and analyzes the flow of electricity in smart-grid installations. The third helps enterprises manage resources, emissions and waste. It collects data and offers visualization tools. The most advanced systems offer sophisticated modeling capabilities, which can aid greatly in formulating and implementing strategies for reducing an enterprise’s environmental footprint.
This third category is the subject of this report. While the green IT and smart-grid categories are relatively mature, the enterprise market is still taking shape. Moreover, this area has potential to become the largest by far. While the traditional market for sustainability software consists of Fortune 500 companies, smaller operations are beginning to recognize the benefits. Sustainability software will become attractive to businesses of all sizes and sectors as industries develop standards for tracking, evaluating, and reporting greenhouse gas emissions and as government regulations spur trade in carbon credits and environmental labeling of consumer products.
This report surveys the history of enterprise sustainability software systems, their capabilities, and how they’re being used in a variety of industries. It also offers recommendations for companies interested in using these tools. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Carbon management software is like a sophomore on the cleantech campus: it’s been around for awhile, but it’s just now starting to get noticed by the senior class. This month SAP took over Clear Standards, a carbon management startup that raised $4 million last fall, and […] Read more »
Corporate social responsibility reports are often a company’s beachhead effort on sustainability, and most focus on relatively easy-to-achieve metrics, such as employee volunteerism rates, corporate giving and supplier diversity. Advocates say even this kind of transparency can spur companies to further action. That’s the logic behind […] Read more »
