On Thursday solar installer SolarCity announced that it has signed up Goldman Sachs, and other investors, to create a $500 million fund to support leases for solar panels for home and business owners. With that much money, SolarCity can install some 110 MW worth of solar panels.

Solar leases are a contract between the building owner and SolarCity, whereby SolarCity pays the upfront cost of installing the system, owns and maintains the panels, and the building owner pays for the monthly electricity for the power from the panels over around 20 years. As Ucilia noted on GigaOM Pro today, the residential solar leasing market alone is expected to grow from $1.3 billion in 2012 to $5.7 billion in 2016, according to GTM Research.

Some banks and even companies like Google have been willing to put hundreds of millions into these types of funds. SolarCity has been able to raise $1.7 billion in funding over its lifetime to finance installations from groups like U.S. Bancorp, Google, PG&E and Credit Suisse. Other solar financing companies — and the competition is now getting fierce — include Sungevity, OneRoof Energy, Sunrun and Clean Power Finance.

There’s such a demand for solar leases and financing that even some companies are falling behind on getting funding for these businesses. SunPower said earlier this month that demand for its residential solar leases is far greater than the money available to finance them. Power company NRG Energy also wants to retry getting into this space, after trying out this market awhile back.

It’s not just banks and corporate do-gooders that want the opportunity to make a decent return — some 10 to 12 percent in some cases. Crowd-funding is starting to appear as an interesting blip on the radar. Startup Solar Mosaic says that it’s now raised $1 million from its crowd-funders for its solar panel systems, which offer around a 4.5 percent annual yield. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that commercial‐scale solar panel systems can reach returns of 8 percent to 14 percent in states like Hawaii, Texas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

As big power players, upstart solar financiers and even everyday crowd-funders grow these funds and receive the returns, this market will start to expand significantly. As a boom of solar panels continues to hit the U.S., various parties can make significant money off this transition. Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects that residential solar panels could be installed on 2.4 percent of U.S. houses by 2020.

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On Thursday, Goldman Sachs downgraded Microsoft shares to “Sell” from “Neutral” and Nomura Securities cut its call to “Neutral” from “Buy.” The moves came a day after  IDC called the first quarter of 2013 “the worst quarter” ever, with PC sales down 14 percent from the year-ago quarter. (Gartner numbers were slightly better: it had PC sales only off 11.4 percent year over year for the quarter.)

“At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only didn’t provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market,”  Bob O’Donnell, IDC Program Vice President, Clients and Displays said in a statement. (Full IDC statement here.)

Long-time Microsoft watcher Rick Sherlund at Nomura Securities wrote that the combination of “sluggish” Windows 8 adoption and the “lack of compelling new hardware is disappointing with no relief likely” until later this year when Intel releases the new Haswell notebook processor.

As if on cue, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reported that Microsoft plans a new 7-inch Surface tablet to come later this year.

Updated: To be fair, for the first quarter, IDC also acknowledged that industry darling Apple also faded. While it did better than the overall U.S. market, IDC said shipments of Apple PCs  slipped 7.5 percent — apparently because more people are opting for iPad tablets as PC replacements.

MSFT data by YCharts

This story was updated at 6:54 a.m. PST with Apple PC share decline.

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By far the biggest challenge was faced by Tamara Budec, VP of critical systems and engineering at Goldman Sachs & Co., who had to deal with tracking the weather, but also preparing to move the data and software systems that in some cases are on decades-old legacy systems. In the aftermath of Sandy she faced a different challenge, namely wondering if the stock exchange would open or if banks would end up trading electronically from their back office.

Whatever they decided would affect the capacity she needed to plan for the day. As for Facebook, it was on alert, but its capacity planning issues are tied more to planning out for the next 18 months and supporting the growth in users and new products. Heather Marquez, manager asset strategy and optimization at Facebook, said, “Granted we are surprised by last-minute product launches,” but in general she and the Facebook team work hard to be ahead of the demand.

Massive scale means bigger data and more opportunities

The panelists also addressed the new challenges associated with massive scale. Amaya Souarez, director of data center services at Microsoft, started off philosophically, “When you’re building a cloud scale infrastructure you need to start with acceptance … and build a cloud software that is resilient in and of itself.”

She quickly got practical when it came to the topic of tracking data and metrics that Microsoft uses to charge business units for use of the data centers. She said the computing company now charges people based on the kilowatts of power used. “We track all performance on a per watt per performance basis, and so we look at this data and come up with more efficient models,” said Souarez.

She added that they are charging back carbon emissions to the business as well, with the goal of using the data about the operations to improve the world. For example she said, “We still have older systems and want to transition them to the most effective overall platform.”

Data also is helping Microsoft reduce spending on unneeded equipment. For example Souarez said that the firm’s Boyton, Va. data center expansion doesn’t come with backup generators, because a look at the preceding six years of data showed that the power didn’t go out often enough and that the services hosted in that area were able to be switched over to another site in case of failure.

Data isn’t everything

Yet, the data can’t help in every situation. Budec noted that the firm is interested in pursing the flexibility and resiliency offered by software defined networks and software defined data centers, but that she is having a tough time coming up with return on investment metrics. Yet, she knows that the transition would have advantages for the company, but still isn’t sure of the metrics she needs to prove it.

“Basically you’ll let an OS run your facility,” Budec said. “It’s coming to be more of a trend … but engineers are not ready to let go with manually running that equipment.”

She also said, “With a scale out distributed compute model, which is becoming more and more how we operate, we’re abstracting the physical from the infrastructure, so capacity and asset tracking is harder and more challenging.” For example she said that you have an increase in the number of servers, despite the physical decrease in machines.

Beyond the increasing complexity and more data generated by their operations, the three panelists ended with the observation that data doesn’t always mean everything. Souarez noted that while data will help you in your discussions, it takes a lot of personal committment and interactions. “Even though you may have the data that doesn’t mean you will always win the argument … It does take personal influence as well.”

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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The Chandler, Ariz.-based company, which offers a SaaS suite comprising both CRM and marketing automation to small companies, will use the new money to educate small businesses about the value of an all-in-one SaaS suite and to add functions to CRM and lead generation services, Infusionsoft CEO and Co-Founder Clate Mask told me.

Infusionsoft CEO and co-founder Clate Mask.

In November, Hubspot, another marketing automation player, netted $35 million in mezzanine funding and just before Christmas, Oracle said it was shelling out $871 million to buy Eloqua, another, more enterprise-focused, marketing automation vendor. All of these vendors aimto help customers find and qualify leads — from online or other ads, from Facebook, from Twitter and other sources and convert them into actual sales. Many companies now use a hodgepodge of different processes and products for this purpose.

While there is some contention with Hubspot, Infusionsoft targets smaller companies — those with 25 employees or fewer and more than $100,000 in annual revenue — of which there are an estimated 27 million in the US alone — while Hubspot focuses on the bigger companies in the small and medium business (SMB) market, Mask said.

Infusionsoft offers these companies CRM integrated with marketing automation — the practice of culling and promoting leads. “On the CRM side we compete with Salesforce.com and Zoho while on the marketing automation side we see Marketo, Eloqua and Hubspot. “But we’re the only sales and marketing company that is 100 percent focused on truly small businesses — of which there are 27 million in the US alone,” Mask told me in an interview.

Doug Burgum, founding partner of Arthur Ventures and the executive who led Microsoft’s business applications group, will advise Infusionsoft, Mask said. The company has 350 employees but plans to staff up to more than 1,000 over three years .

This round brings total funding to about $74 million. Other, earlier, investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures and Signal Peak Ventures.

There’s been a lot of talk that chief marketing officers (CMOs) will soon control more IT spending than CIOs. I’m not necessarily buying that contention — especially since many of those stories seem to be written by CMOs, but it’s clear that marketing departments have their own budgets so tech vendors that can speak their language and offer value could do well. As long as that’s the case, don’t expect this category to calm down anytime soon. Feeding that fire, Mask said to stay tuned for an Infusionsoft acquisition in the coming months.

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As I previously pointed out, it’s pretty rare these days that a cleantech startup can close on such a large round — investors are far less willing to put big rounds into cleantech startups in 2012 (see GigaOM Pro’s Q3 wrap up). But some cleantech startup outliers — able to raise sizable rounds — are still out there.

BrightSource develops solar thermal plants and its design uses fields of large mirrors to concentrate sun light onto the top of large towers. The tower has a boiler at the top that heats liquid, which in turn runs steam turbines and produces electricity. BrightSource is building a solar farm called Ivanpah near Las Vegas on 3,600 acres, and currently has 2,100 workers installing about one mirror a minute onto poles in the desert ground.

BrightSource’s investors include power company Alstom and venture firm VantagePoint Capital Partners, and additional investors included DFJ, CalSTRS, DBL Investors, Goldman Sachs, Chevron Technology Ventures and BP Ventures.

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Founded two years ago by Appenzeller and Kyle Forster, Big Switch’s big bet is that companies want to be able to add nifty new features — even applications — to their network infrastructure without buying expensive, often proprietary hardware. In that arena, it is seen as a rival to Nicira, the SDN company that VMware bought for nearly $1.3 billion in July.

Given the huge Nicira valuation, Big Switch’s $25 million round (which brings its total venture funding to about $39 million) seems small, but Appenzeller said he is thrilled with the funding and with the opportunity to work with Redpoint General Partner Satish Dharmaraj, who will advise the company. Existing backers Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures also participated in this round.

There were rumors a few months ago that EMC Ventures wanted to make a large investment in Big Switch. And given that EMC owns 80 percent of VMware — which now controls Nicira — that would have given EMC considerable sway in the SDN market. No one at Big Switch would comment on EMC but they did say there was considerable interest by many parties who wanted to participate in this round. The company still considers itself in stealth mode with several unnamed companies using an early version of its SDN controller.

Appenzeller, who started Big Switch after an academic career at Stanford, is bullish about the prospects for this technology and the ability for small, lean startups to compete with even big companies. (Perhaps big companies like VMware?)

“We have a good head start. When we initially launched we had to apologize for starting a networking company. That’s definitely changed — networking is a vibrant sector,” he said. “This is completely different from the past. Big Switch is a very deceptive name — we build controllers for SDN but we don’t build or ship any hardware,” he said.

Dharmaraj concurred. Big Switch “could have raised a lot more money if they wanted … but this is not a traditional networking play like a Juniper or a Cisco, which required $50 million to $100 million. They’re building software! They don’t need to build special ASICs or other hardware,” he said.

After the Nicira deal, the conventional wisdom was that Big Switch – or maybe Embrane — would be the next SDN company on the block. That may or not be case but in the short term, it looks like Big Switch will forge ahead on its own, with a little help from its new VCs.

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The new round, led by Redpoint Ventures, boasts some big names: Goldman Sachs, Silicon Valley Bank, Index Ventures and GGV Capital, with existing investors Benchmark Capital, Matrix Partners and Charles River Ventures all taking part as well. It’s by far the biggest injection Zendesk has received, taking the firm’s total funding to date up to $86m.

As for the UI revamp, Zendesk EMEA chief Matt Price told me it was very much a reflection of the consumerization trend – it’s around 18 months since the company rolled out its iPad app, and the positive feedback from that apparently stimulated the browser interface refresh.

“For us that meant we really had to make it beautifully simple,” Price said. “We needed to make sure that when an agent logs in, they see everything they need in one place, and when an enquiry comes in from a customer, everything related to that is in one place.”

That related data can come from a variety of sources, from social media to live chat sessions. Zendesk has had these features for a while, as customers these days tend to have their own communications channel preferences, but older versions required the agent to keep switching tools.

And there’s more on the unification front too: another key feature of the new product is the Zendesk Apps application framework, which provides 75 prebuilt integration points for the likes of Salesforce.com and JIRA.

“We found many people integrate Zendesk into other systems to gather information,” Price said. “They might want to get information out of a CRM system, or on a particular technical issue from an internal system.”

Apart from all the talk of big bucks and sleek UIs, one of the quieter parts of Zendesk’s announcement was the expansion of the platform’s number of supported languages to 12.

That’s very much geared towards a revitalised push into the European market, Price suggested. And to back that up, he added that Zendesk will shortly be opening a Berlin office.

It’s not like Zendesk was lacking a European base before – it was after all founded in Denmark and also has a London office – but it’s clearly targeting an expansion of its existing user base on the continent.

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That’s a lot of money for a storage startup, especially one that’s pursuing the appliance model in an era of build-it-yourself- commodity hardware, but investors are so confident the round was “massively oversubscribed,” and the valuation led the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to hold up the financing while it investigated the round, confirmed Nutanix President and CEO Dheeraj Pandey.

So what has investors so excited? Nutanix’s appliance allows companies to do two things that are important to companies on the leading edge of the scale out and virtualization shift: it allows companies to eliminate separate storage networks by virtualizing them and allows companies to move their storage closer to their compute power, which speeds up a company’s applications or response times. As my colleague Derrick Harris wrote in April of 2011 when Nutanix launched:

The key to Nutanix is virtualization, which provides the abstraction and the additional storage connections necessary to give Nutanix the performance edge it claims. The company is big on solid-state drives for performance and consolidation, but Pandey says legacy storage systems are limited to the amount of SSDs they can handle. With a virtualized computing layer, however, each virtual server and each physical node provide the requisite housing and connection to an additional SSD. The Nutanix appliance combines both SSDs and hard disk drives to achieve maximum levels of performance and affordability, Pandey said.

Nutanix has proved that customers want its appliances, noting that it has shipped 150 systems, including 600 servers attached with more than 3.3 PBs of spindle and Fusion-io storage. The additional money gives it the wherewithal to continue selling its product to more and more companies, likely with the aim for going public in the not-too-distant future.

“This round takes us to $50 million-plus in the bank, and that means we can build a company of lasting value,” said Pandey. “That’s why Goldman is involved.” Of course, when I asked Pandey about the timing of the IPO he declined to speculate.

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The California company said it’s sold nearly 9 million shares at $6 a piece, raising about $54 million. That was at the low end of the $6-$7 price range that it announced only earlier this week, and Enphase initially set its share price at between $10 and $12 per share, aiming to sell 7.3 million shares.

The last solar IPO before Enphase was the October 2010 debut of Daqo New Energy on the New York Stock Exchange. Daqo makes silicon that is found in most of the solar panels today. Jinko Solar, a solar panel maker, went public on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2010. Solyndra was planning an IPO that year as well, but it ditched the plan in June that year.

Does Enphase’s IPO bode well for other solar or other cleantech companies that want to go public soon? Hard to say. It certainly raises hopes. Goldman Sachs’ head of renewable energy business, Stuart Bernstein, told a cleantech crowd in San Francisco this week that the market is in recovery and things are looking up. Solar power plant developer BrightSource Energy is expected to carry out its IPO in the next few weeks.

Enphase develops microinverters, which are attached to each solar panel to monitor power output and convert the direct current from the solar cells inside the panel to alternating current for feeding the grid. The company is a pioneer in carving out a market for microinverters, which also has gained more converts thanks to a growing number of microinverter makers. The conventional design of a solar electric system calls for pairing an inverter with about a dozen solar panels, which is a centralized approach that Enphase and other microinverter developers say is less effective at tracking and improving the power output of each solar panel.

Microinverters are more expensive than central inverters, so a key to popularizing them involves convincing installers that adding the cost of microinverters is a worthy upfront investment because they can get more power out of the solar electric system during its lifetime.

Since its IPO filing last year, Enphase has raised a private round of $21.86 million to support its expansion plans while waiting for an optimal time to go public. Though it was early to the market with an innovative product, it’s since facing a growing challenge from not just startups but also major inverter makers such as SMA Technology and Power-One. SMA plans to launch a microinverter this year. Power-One introduced its own version last year.SunPower plans to package microinverters from SolarBridge Technologies to its solar panels starting this year.

Enphase doubled its sales in 2011 but has yet to make a profit. Investors RockPort Capital Partners and Bay Partners agreed to purchase 2.5 million shares of common stock in the IPO.

Photo courtesy of Enphase Energy

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Bernstein recalled the difficulties of doing an IPO last summer when uncertainties about the economy grew as the U.S. credit rating took a dive and the sovereign crisis gripped Europe. But two companies, Renewable Energy Group and Ceres, went public this year, and that bodes well for other IPO candidates, he said. Renewable Energy Group makes biofuel while Ceres sells seeds for growing crops for biofuel feedstock.

“It’s hard to know whether we are half way up the contraction or above the line, but we are certainly in the recovery period,” he said.

Rising oil price in recent months has helped to make investors consider cleantech IPOs, at least those in the biofuel business. But cheap natural gas continues to temper interest in solar and wind companies, Bernstein said. Natural gas proponents have cleverly positioned this energy source as cleaner than coal and oil and cheaper and more readily available than wind and solar.

In recent weeks a variety of greentech IPO hopefuls have make progress toward planned IPOs. Solar electronic maker Enphase Energy, biofuel producer Enerkem and solar power plant developer BrightSource Energy all recently set the price range for their shares. On Wednesday, Enphase lowered the expected price range to $6 to $7 per share from $10 to $12 per share.

A lot of cleantech companies have — or tried — to go public in the past two years. Some of them have generated little (or no) revenues but turned to the public markets to try to raise money. Bernstein said those companies “are circling and waiting to land on the aircraft carrier, and they are nervous because their fuel is running out. We said not yet, not yet.”

Goldman, by the way, advised Solyndra, which tried to go public but abandoned that plan in mid 2010 when it couldn’t drum up enough interest. That was a little over a year before the solar panel maker filed for bankruptcy.

Bernstein drew a parallel between the cleantech sector and the general tech industry during his talk. By throwing up many charts, he pointed out that many tech companies also had trouble attracting enough interest to make their public market debuts during economic downturns in the past two decades. At the same time, some tech companies managed to pull off IPOs in some of these tough times, including eBay, Qualcomm and Netflix, he said. He ended his talk on that positive note.

Photo courtesy of Richard Allaway via Flickr

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