Okta is part of the cohort of companies that have seen the shift to the cloud as an opportunity to rethink the way legacy enterprise software is built. Other players include Boundary, Aryaka and Workday. Each of these firms has seen the way that cloud computing and software as a service can disrupt the enterprise IT market and have made bold bets building out new services that take advantage of the decentralized nature of the cloud, cheaper compute or new business models. The real question as the startups gain customers and credibility is which of the IT giants will buy them and for how much of a premium?

Okta, for example, offers a centralized identity management platform that competes with services such as Microsoft’s Active Directory and Oracle’s Identity Management suite. Okta’s software works to establish user identity on both cloud applications but also for legacy and on-premise programs. This saves Okta’s customers from having to use two different identity management products for employees. Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta told me in an interview ahead of the announcement that it has seen a lot of success recently stealing customers from the established vendors, and that the funding will help it continue to invest in connecting its platform to older, legacy applications that its customers want integrated into the Okta software.

Otka says it has added more than 140 enterprise customers and 300,000 users to its service in 2012, including Allergan, BMC Software, Clorox, Groupon and National Geographic. Okta has developed relationships with more than 2,000 cloud applications, all of which come pre-integrated in the Okta Application Network, and counts leading enterprise SaaS companies such as Jive, Lithium and SuccessFactors as customers.

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ScaleIO joins other startups that have launched in the latter half of the year hoping to create pools of storage that can be used by any application in a virtualized environment. Those startups include Nutanix and Convergent.io. Fusion-io has a software product in this space as well.

The idea behind this growing number of products is to help address the problems that virtualization has caused for the storage market by making a storage area network (SAN) look more like direct attached storage. In traditional networks someone would configure a server to point to a SAN but these products take advantage of the ever-growing use of SSDs in the data center and overlay software on top to make a more flexible pool of storage. Most of these products, including ScaleIO’s, also let organizations tie in their existing hard disks and SANs into this pool of storage as well.

The result is that IT organizations can take advantage of fast RAM or nearby flash-based SSDs for applications that need a lot of speed. They can also stitch together several nearby SSDs or RAM to scale out as needed while still using existing storage infrastructure comprised of hard drives as well. ScaleIO also touts that its software can move storage resources around even if a node in its pool goes dark like for example, if a systems administrator shuts down the server. That’s a good indication that the team here recognizes that while the virtual servers in a cloud may be ephemeral but underneath it all are physical machines that must be taken into account.

That’s a good understanding to have when you’re building out software that is designed to create an abstraction layer to manage physical devices. ScaleIO’s team has worked at a huge number of scaled-out storage companies including IBM, Topio (acquired by NetApp), NetApp, LSI, and Xtremio (acquired by EMC). The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup already has 24 pilot customers and five customers in production including SAP and Colt (a Fidelity company).

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user getinet

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An SEC filing, first noted by Venturebeat, shows that the company recently raised $11.5 million as part of the Series A. The company earlier raised a $4 million seed round that was led by Greylock Partners and included First Round Capital, True Ventures (see disclosure) and a number of angel investors, the Toy Talk spokeswoman confirmed.

Toy Talk, which has been described as “Teddy Ruxpin meets Siri,” recently released a teaser video showing the concept behind the startup, which is still in stealth mode. Speaking at GigaOm’s RoadMap conference this week about the importance of good design in building a message, Jacob said the concept behind the company, launching in 2013, should be clear.

Jacob worked for Pixar on Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2 and Finding Nemo, and fellow co-founder Martin Reddy, who worked on artificial intelligence at SRI International, also worked at Pixar on films including Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, and WALL-E.

“Toy Talk is the name of the company – I think it should be pretty obvious what we’re trying to do,” Jacob said at RoadMap.

Disclosure: Toy Talk is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Tuttle was the founder of video search company Truveo and Jheeta built the infrastructure for Truveo, which is now part of AOL. Vince Vannelli, managing partner of KPG Ventures, is joining Tuttle and Jheeta on the company’s board of directors. Alex Rosen, managing director of IDG Ventures, has joined as a board observer.

Expect launched their app last month and Tuttle outlined his vision of anticipatory computing in a recent conversation. MindMeld app’s demo impressed me a lot and I believe that Tuttle & co are on to something big. Here is what I wrote about the company last month:

Tuttle started the company two years ago to develop a platform that would “continuously pay attention to what happens in your life and pick up ambient information and then start to surface relevant information.” Why? Because be believed that our computing habits were going from being desktop bound to completely mobile, and that would essentially mean a different usage behavior.

With more devices and more sensors coming into our lives, the amount of data being generated will reach a point where the machines need to start anticipating our needs. Search as a way to access information doesn’t and won’t work — mostly because search can only respond to questions we ask. Also, if most of our computing is shifting to devices that are always with us, the idea of how to compute also has to change.

Of course, in order for them to realize their long-term vision of offering its core Anticipatory Computing Engine as a developer platform, the company is going to need a lot more than $2.4 million. The company is expected to launch its MindMeld app sometime this fall.

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Bessemer’s Byron Deeter and  John M. Jack, former CEO of Fortify Software, are joining the board of the company. ClearSlide had raised $11 million in Series A funding last September. With new money under its belt, the company wants to double its team of 110 people.

ClearSlide co-founder Al Lieb.

ClearSlide is one of the growing number of collaboration upstarts that are taking on Cisco-owned WebEx. The growing popularity of iPad inside corporations is opening up opportunities for founders to rethink WebEx and take a new approach to collaboration-oriented communications.

ClearSlide, with customers including CareerBuilder, Expedia, Gannett and The Weather Channel has developed technology that allows sales people to easily share documents via a single URL and use the same URL to  initiate phone or chat sessions. The company offers that technology as a web service akin to Salesforce.

Lieb who previously co-founded Evite in 1998, believes there is a real need for really easy to use tools for sales people who now use a mix of WebEx or GoToMeeting type web conferences, email and USB sticks to make their sales pitches. With ClearSlide, “you pop the link into an email, it opens immediately for the recipient– you don’t need Flash or any downloads — and it’ll work on your iPad and iPhone,” Lieb said.

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Many utilities across the country are replacing dumb analog meters with digital meters that automatically and frequently transmit energy consumption data of their customers. That data is piling up on servers somewhere, waiting to be made useful. Pacific Gas & Electric, for example, collects 3 terabytes of data from its 9 million smart meters each month.

Utilities also are being asked to share all that energy use data with their customers to help them figure out ways to reduce energy use, particularly during hot summer or cold winter days when energy demand is high and lowering that demand helps utilities to manage their energy supply. Some utilities are launching websites and mobile apps to make it easier for their customers to access their own energy data.

But consumers don’t want to wade through lots of numbers and figure about why they should care, said Patil, citing Facebook, Google and LinkedIn as role models for presenting data. He noted that consumers don’t have to take a lesson or read some wordy instruction about how to use Facebook or Google, so why make consumers work hard to figure out how to navigate their energy data?

“The trick is we put data in a form that doesn’t seem like data,” Patil said. “Your dashboard should look nice, with nice colors and contrast. You should make the data sexy and fun. People don’t like to look at crap.”

Using data to create social connections also keeps people interested in revisiting a site. Patil pointed to the “people you may know” widget on Facebook as a feature that gets a lot of clicks. Offering unexpected but helpful information is another way to keep consumers’ interest.

A good example is the feature on Amazon that shows a shopper a list of items that other people with similar tastes and product preferences also bought, Patil said. A LinkedIn feature that tells people who in their networks have gotten new jobs demonstrates another way of packing personal data in a compelling way, he added.

The idea of using a social network to promote energy conservation isn’t new and is being put to use by a growing number of energy software developer and utilities. Opower, working with the Natural Resources Defense Council, launched a social energy app on Facebook earlier this year that compares a Facebook user’s energy consumption patterns with those of her friends. The app is part of a trend in which utilities and businesses use games and contests to retain their customers’ interest in conserving energy. The idea is that people will more likely pay attention to their energy use and change their behavior for good over a long haul if their peers are doing the same and there are rewards involved for hitting conservation goals.

The folks at Facebook also thought they could help reign in wasteful energy use, and they hired Bill Weihl, the former Green Energy Czar at Google, to figure out ways to promote sustainability and energy efficiency.

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VCs and startups alike have been in the hunt for operational smarts in the enterprise arena of late. That demand likely will keep growing as the big data wave builds. Splunk went public with much ballyhoo a few weeks ago; Greylock portfolio companies Palo Alto Networks and Service-Now are expected to follow in the near future. Sumo Logic, another Greylock-funded company, emerged from stealth mode in January and will take on Splunk in the big data analysis arena. Other Greylock enterprise-oriented companies include SaaS startup Workday, founded by former PeopleSoft CEO Dave Duffield and Hadoop fan favorite Cloudera.

Ittycheria co-founded BladeLogic — a provider of server-and-storage configuration and management tools – in 2001. He led it as CEO and president and sold it to BMC seven years later for $900 million. He stayed on to lead BMC’s $1.4 billion enterprise service management business. He is also a board member for AthenaHealth and AppDynamics, a Greylock-backed company. Before BladeLogic, he co-founded Applica, an early cloud computing company.

Ittycheria will work out of Greylock’s Menlo Park, Calif., office and focus on enterprise-focused cloud-based services and IT infrastructure. Greylock partner Asheem Chandna said Ittycheria’s expertise will be invaluable to the company. In a blog post, Chandna wrote:

“Having founded two companies, Dev understands that building great technology is not enough, and that equal effort needs to go into the design, construction and management of the company’s distribution channel.”

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As more companies virtualize their workloads to get the best use of their hardware, concern remains about a lack of enterprise-worthy tools to protect those applications and data.

This product, which integrates with VMware vCloud Director, takes aim at applications that run “in and between private, public and hybrid clouds,” according to the company. Zerto’s goal, as reported by GigaOM last summer, was to make backup in virtualized environments as easy as it is with Apple’s Time Machine in the consumer realm.

While the product is just emerging publicly, it’s already in use by Terremark, the big cloud-hosting provider now owned by Verizon. Zerto’s target market is large cloud services providers (like Terremark) and enterprises that want to virtualize but demand a high level of protection for those bread-and-butter workloads.

“Cloud is becoming a key part of enterprise IT plans, and BC/DR [business continuity and disaster recovery] is an integral part of that,” Ziv Kedem, Zerto’s CEO said in a statement.

Among Zerto Virtual Replication 2.0′s key features is its ability to replicate between multiple sites so that cloud providers can support many customers, and enterprises can protect more than one data center as well as remote offices, the company said. The software is also storage-array-agnostic. The product supports VMware only at present, but given VMware’s penetration in enterprise accounts, that’s not a huge drawback.

Zerto was a LaunchPad Finalist last year at GigaOM’s Structure Conference.

The company is backed  by U.S. Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, and Greylock Partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Anonymous Account.

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The London-based company has quietly closed a fresh injection of funding from Scandinavian VC Northzone, UK/German venture firm Wellington and Silicon Valley’s Greylock Partners — all with an eye to helping build out its online catalog of paintings from artists, galleries and museums all over the world.

The company is remaining tight-lipped on the deal, and the terms are not being disclosed, but I’ve confirmed that the round took place at the end of last year.

The company, which started in 2010, is sometimes described as a “Last.fm for art” — in no small part because of CEO Spencer Hyman’s previous job running the popular online radio service.

But it’s also because, at its heart, Artfinder is a service for discovering and sharing creative work.

As I described in an interview with Hyman last summer, its gamble is that there is enough money in the art market that it can provide a valuable, profitable service to the millions of people who visit museums and galleries each week. It hopes to become the IMDB — or even the Amazon — of art, providing a home for art, and perhaps selling art, on the Web.

To do this, it has developed a smart visual search thats allows it to identify paintings using an iPhone app, while users can use the website to find works they like or share their tastes with others. They’re also able to browse specific collections using one of the bespoke iPad apps that the company has developed in partnership with the likes of London’s Royal Academy.

Those have been doing pretty well — the Quentin Blake catalog for the Foundling Museum is one that did particularly well — and it’s also been expanding its footprint on social networks with an app that integrates the artworks you look at into your Facebook Timeline:

The move represents a follow-on investment for both Wellington and Greylock, who participated in the company’s first round back last year, which brought LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and London angel Sherry Coutu into the fold. Northzone’s Lea Bajc has joined the board as a result, and the involvement of her company — probably best known for its stake in super hot music service Spotify — gives Artfinder some extra punch.

It’s not alone in this market — there is competition of varying kinds, both from smaller upstarts like ArtSpotter and major names like Google, which has its own Art Project.

But this fresh funding should enable Artfinder to stay ahead of the pack, and I’m told that it plans to do that by revamping its offering to drive up engagement and usage.

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Sumo Logic emerged from the shadows on Tuesday with $15 million in Series B funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, Greylock Partners and Shlomo Kramer, bringing its total to $20.5 million since its founding in April 2010. Greylock and Kramer also participated in the Series A round.

The company, founded by Arcsight veterans Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen, aims to bring log monitoring and analytics to cloud computing environments via a Software-as-a-Service model. In that arena, Sumo Logic is bound to face off against Splunk, which filed for a $125 million IPO two weeks ago, as well as Loggly, a company that spun out of Splunk (see disclosure).

Computer logs — and other machine data — are an important component of the big data phenomenon. This machine data, if collected, analyzed and searched — provides important insights into how systems and applications are working (or not) and can pinpoint bottlenecks, server errors and other glitches before they get out of hand.

“As infrastructure gets more complex, there are not only more systems and more heterogeneous systems but not everything sits in the customer data center anymore,” said Beedgen, who is also Sumo Logic’s chief architect and director of engineering. That means on-premises logging systems — which he contended are expensive to maintain and upgrade — are on their way out.

“The idea of sitting in a data center with a nice perimeter around it and just listening to what’s happening there isn’t going to cut it anymore,” Beedgen said in an interview on Monday. The trick is to see into a customer’s computing infrastructure regardless of where it is running. Once those logs can be viewed and monitored, forensics can be applied to pinpoint and trace security threats or other problems.

The service has been in use by select customers including Roblox and Ooyala for a few months. Roblox, an online gaming company, integrates Sumo’s service into the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) it uses to run its business. These “instrumented” AMIs give Roblox visibility into its Amazon infrastructure, Beedgen said.

The ability for companies to have a window into their compute infrastructure, wherever that is, will only get more important as more workloads move out of the customer’s own data centers and into the cloud. For more on this big data phenomenon, be sure to check out GigaOM’s Structure:Data Conference in New York City on March 21 and 22.

Disclosure: Loggly is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user 401K

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