“We like the community behind it, and the broad support,” Shinn said about his company’s reasoning for using OpenStack. Shinn said that Fidelity is primarily using OpenStack for its private cloud, but that the company wants to eventually transition to a hybrid cloud environment.

That delicate balance between public, private and hybrid cloud was also echoed by HubSpot CIO Jim O’Neill, who joined the duo on stage to talk about his company’s experience with OpenStack. “We love the public cloud,” said O’Neill. However, it turned out that public infrastructure isn’t the best tool for all problems.

Engates said that this was a major theme he is hearing when talking to companies who utilize OpenStack. “The public cloud was supposed to solve all of our problems, Engates said, adding: “People are telling us that it’s not all what it was cracked up to be.” Many companies have been realizing that it takes a lot of engineering to bring private cloud-style security and reliability to the public cloud, which is why it makes sense for them to utilize hybrid cloud approaches like the one offered by OpenStack. “The killer feature is that OpenStack powers private and hybrid clouds,” Engates said.

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

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The company’s pitch:

HubSpot loves developers. Like, heart-pounding, chest-thumping, breathless love. Care to play matchmaker?

We’ll give you $30,000 if you refer us to a developer who makes us feel that way.

The company has openings in its Cambridge and Dublin locations and has cash to spend. It netted $35 million in a financing round last November, bringing total funding to about $100 million. One of the priorities for that money was staffing up, CEO Brian Halligan said at the time.

We know that great developers and engineers can write their own tickets, but $30,000 is a big number to give to a friend of a developer. It’s also a great way for any software developer to build a database of potential hires for down the road. I’ve heard of smaller incentives before – Hubspot itself once offered $10,000 — but this is a lotta scratch.

If you know of others please let me know in the comments section below.

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If you’ve taken part in CSA (community-assisted agriculture) program you know you get a bin of in-season fruits and veggies every other week or so — hopefully from a local farm. In that bin will be a few tomatoes, radishes, whatever and a ton of kale, which grows easily and big and is forgiving of bad weather. It’s prolific and it’s cheap. Then you find dishes and recipes to use that kale.

And this is where the fun begins: Kale, it turns out, can be used in everything. In chicken soup, in salads. It can be coated with sesame oil and roasted to make kale chips (my favorite). It can be sliced and diced in myriad ways. It can be boiled, fried (or sauteed, if you’re a fancypants) and baked. And it’s good for you.

Proponents would like to say the same about OpenStack.

OpenStack — in cable, in marketing, on a stick

Look at the various packages and delivery modes coming online: Red Hat this week announced the rollout of its RDO OpenStack distribution, “a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives.” Piston Cloud (see disclosure) offers what InformationWeek called OpenStack on a stick, the software packed on a memory stick for easy deployment. Nebula just brought out its OpenStack-in-a-box controller for linking legacy applications into the OpenStack arena. HP cloud guru Saar Gillai talked up his company’s “hardened” OpenStack for enterprise use. Cloudscaling offers an OpenStack cloud that will burst into Amazon or Google public clouds as needed.

More to the point is that end-user organizations — not just the usual tech vendor suspects —  showed off some ways they actually use OpenStack. These included a new Comcast online interactive cable TV guide that helps users quickly navigate their hundreds of channels to find the sporting event they want to see and bring it up on screen for a quick score check. There’s also Hubspot’s use of OpenStack to build a hybrid cloud that powers and helps target its inbound marketing campaigns. Whether or not you want to get targeted in-bound marketing, these are real use cases for the technologies that will impact actual users.

Key to OpenStack success? Making it disappear

As Florian Otel, head of HP Cloud Services in EMEA, told a session on enterprise use of OpenStack, that many of the technical gaps in the software have been filled over the past year and folks now have to focus on real customer value.

“Remember how many years we heard this would be the year of Linux on the desktop? That never happened. Android is what it took to make Linux attractive to desktop users,” he said. By bundling the underlying technology with hardware and a problem to solve and an application to solve it, Linux in another guise is hugely popular, he said. For those who would quibble with his Linux analogy, he added: “Linux has as much to do with Android as iOS has to do with BSD.

The same will be true for OpenStack he noted. As it becomes a platform or an enabler for higher-level services, it will take off.

Now, to get back to kale: The metaphor unravels a bit because most folks use kale as an adjunct to other foods (although not always) while the goal is for OpenStack to be the basis for a whole realm of services — for enterprise users, for mobile users, for fill-in-the-blank constituencies.

The big question this time next year will be how much of OpenStack is being consumed by the masses — whether they know it or not.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user by Nick Saltmarsh

Disclosure: Piston 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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1: Customer-to-vendor ratio is getting better.

Mark Muehl, Comcast SVP of product engineering at OpenStack Summit.

But just a bit. Tuesday’s keynotes featured real, live OpenStack users Bloomberg, Comcast, HubSpot and Best Buy. Not bad.

Bloomberg’s Pravir Chandra said his team set some high goals for what they were trying to  build — they needed high availability, no cascading failures and smooth scale down and scale up. They were able to get there by deploying OpenStack along with considerable custom work of their own, both above and below that layer. They ended up setting up the high-availability databases and figuring out how to aggregate logs from the hypervisor level, said Chandra who heads the security architecture team in Bloomberg’s CTO office

Comcast SVP Mark Muehl said the cable giant is using OpenStack to provide real-time programming guides and fast program search. One application quickly locates the NCAA tournament basketball game you want — no easy task — and brings it up for a fast score check. “We are integrating real-time sports feeds. That app would have been impossible to do on our own [older] platform,” Muehl said.

2: Ceph is hot, hot, hot

Based on an informal poll of speakers and attendees, Ceph storage is where it’s at. The Swift storage system?  Not so hot. Best Buy moved from Gluster to Ceph because of the latter’s self-healing capabilities. Ceph offers object and block storage all in one integrated product while Swift handles object storage only. Mirantis EVP Boris Renski said Swift, which comes out of Rackspace, has lots of production installs, but Ceph is viewed as having a more “elegant” architecture. “Unlike Swift, you can use Ceph as the backend for both object and block.” Also, because of a better algorithm for handling data replication, it can promise better scaling, he said, although Mirantis has not fully tested that out yet.

3: Grizzly brings more maturity and features

Grizzly, the seventh release of OpenStack in three years, brings more features and functions to the table. HubSpot will use Grizzly (with some of its own tweaks) to run images on “full bare metal,” said CIO Jim O’Neill. “That means the same image can run on your cloud of choice … . The application doesn’t need to know or care where it runs anymore.”

And that cloud agnosticism brings huge payback. “We took this single image, picked it up from public cloud into a Rackspace-powered private cloud and saw a 4X increased efficiency running that workload,” he said.

4: Choice is good

The same meme of large companies opting to deploy their workloads on multiple clouds vs. one cloud continued at the show. And yes — I can sense the eye rolls coming — there remains an uneasiness over cloud lock-in. The Best Buy guys put a local traffic manager in front of multiple (unnamed) clouds specifically because “we don’t want to lock into any one vendor,” said Steve Eastham, director of web architecture for the Minneapolis-based retailer.

And even the speakers at this OpenStack event said they will remain flexible in their technology choices going forward if OpenStack doesn’t meet their needs. Asked why Samsung opted to go with OpenStack over CloudStack two years ago, Kirk Kim, cloud CTO for Samsung SDS, said they thought OpenStack would scale better.  ”But,” he added, “given the situation today, we might look at that again.” Hmmm. He could not be reached for follow-up.

5: The subtext: AWS and VMware 

The OpenStack faithful are obviously proud of what they’ve accomplished over the past three to four years. It’s not nothing that all that hundreds have contributed to this project and that some customers — outside the OpenStack community itself — are starting to put this stuff into production.

What was left  unsaid, for the most part,  is that OpenStack continues to be measured against Amazon Web Services in the public cloud infrastructure sector and VMware in the (mostly) private cloud market, where legacy applications are in play. This despite the fact that VMware is now an OpenStack Foundation member.

OpenStack may be growing, but it does not have the field to itself.

Feature photo courtesy of hockleyphoto.com.

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The news broke just hours after data visualization fan favorite Tableau filed for a $150 million IPO of its own. The public offerings are seen as validation that companies that build business-to-business software are hot right now.

In November, San Mateo, Calif.-based Marketo raised $50 million in venture funding from Battery Ventures, bringing total funding to date for the 7-year-old company. And category leader Hubspot raked in $35 million in mezzanine funding to bring its total trove to $100 million.

In December, Oracle dropped $871 million to buy Eloqua; a month later InfusionSoft, which focuses on marketing automation for smaller companies, netted $54 million in new funding.

Marketing automation vendors aim to help customers find and qualify sales leads — gleaning attractive prospects from sources including online ads but also from Facebook, Twitter and other sources. The goal is to prequalify these prospects and convert them into actual sales.

Many companies now use an inefficient hodgepodge of processes and products for this purpose. Given that chief marketing officers are now seen as having huge influence on IT purchases, vendors are chasing that constituency.

Marketo’s ticker symbol will be “MKTO” and shares will trade on NASDAQ. VentureBeat has more on the offering.

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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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The deal will mean more competition with Oracle rival Salesforce.com which bought Buddy Media for $689 million in June and is adding more marketing expertise to its portfolio as well as help Oracle compete against other companies like Marketo and Hubspot, which recently snagged $35 million in new venture backing. There are differences: Hubspot focuses on inbound marketing — culling likely prospects from  Facebook, Twitter etc. and targeting them. Eloqua’s specialties lie more in lead management and reporting and analysis of marketing programs. Another factor is that many researchers predict that Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) will get have big budgets for IT acquisitions that help them do their jobs better.

And, as is often the case  in Oracle acquisitions, the real end game may be customer acquisition. More customers equals more maintenance and support revenue, and for Oracle, maintenance and support revenue remain crucial. Eloqua claims 1,200 customers including Dow Jones, Aon, Schroders, and SBLI use its software to find and cultivate qualified leads and to target marketing to those potential customers.

In a letter to Eloqua’s customers  Oracle SVP Thomas Kurian said:

Eloqua delivers marketing automation and revenue performance management software that ensures every component of marketing works harder and more efficiently to drive revenue. More than 1,200 organizations across a wide range of industries rely on Eloqua’s modern marketing cloud to automate complex marketing processes across multiple channels, to target and nurture prospects, and to deliver highly qualified leads at a lower cost to sales teams. Customers are better able to track, capture and analyze a potential buyer’s Digital Body Language, including their preferences, behavior and decision-making processes, to more accurately score and qualify leads and identify high quality prospects. Eloqua will become the centerpiece of the Oracle Marketing Cloud.

Oracle’s acquisitions over the past month or so show how eclectic its interests are: It bought DataRaker for its energy analytics expertise last week; invested Engine Yard, the PaaS company earlier in the month, and bought Instantis for its portfolio management just before that.

What’s next? Your guess is as good as mine.

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The company has big plans for that cash including acquisitions and more hiring, CEO and co-founder Brian Halligan told me last week. “We just opened our office in Ireland and we have 70 openings now for software developers, sales and marketing people. Next year, we’ll look at Asia.”

Acquisitions would not be new to Hubspot, which last year bought marketing automation outfit Performable and social media firm oneforty, adding their capabilities into its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering.

The company , which now has 400 employees, says its software suite gives marketers the tools they need to “pull in” customers via blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook and such platforms rather than the old model of broadcast marketing, which often falls on deaf ears. “Marketers need content management, social networking, automation tools; we do all of that,” said Halligan, who co-founded the company with Dharmesh Shah.

Hubspot, to some extent, competes with Salesforce.com, which is also a partner and — interestingly — an investor. Salesforce.com has a habit of investing in companies (e.g. Box) and then launching competitive products — (e.g. Chatterbox). Salesforce started out as a CRM and sales force automation service but has been steadily adding more capabilities and functions. It bought Radian6 and Buddy Media to bolster its own social media savvy.

Halligan characterized this new funding as a mezzanine, pre-IPO round. It  includes contributions from a new, unnamed backer as well as Altimeter Capital, Cross Creek Capital and previous investors. That roster is a long list including General Catalyst, Matrix Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures and the aforementioned Salesforce.com.

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Earlier today, I hit up the Nvidia press event at CES. As expected, the newest Tegra chip was announced and then demonstrated. This ARM Cortex-A9 is poised to kick the mobile market up a notch or two, based on what I saw and heard. It’s a dual-core mobile chip with eight independent processors — Nvidia says that it offers 10 times the performance of a smartphone CPU, four times over the older Tegra and only uses 500 milliwatts of power. Testing on a 5″ tablet yielded 140 hours of music playback, while the same device can play 16 hours of high-definition video on a single charge. That certainly jives with the recurring theme of convenient computing, which Nvidia defines as portability with performance.

Specs and rhetoric aside, what does it mean in real world products?

Quite a bit from what was shown — so much so, that the new Tegra platform is timed perfectly with what they company is calling “the year of the tablet.” Based on the brief demos, we should see portable slates with long battery life and potent performance. One such tablet shown was running Android faster than any smartphone or MID that I’ve ever seen. And that includes the new Nexus One, which I’ve had a chance to play with for a short while. But the real strength of Nvidia products has always been in the graphical area, so I’m on a “wait and see” mission as far as browsing, web apps and such. As far as that graphics performance, Nvidia appears to deliver — a 1080p video stream at 10 Mbps played flawlessly on a Tegra tablet. I have little doubt that such a platform will excel at media playback for hours.

Other related developments include news about Adobe. The company’s cross-platform AIR product will be supported on Tegra, which opens up more opportunities for applications and digital magazines. Adding more appeal is support for high-quality 3D graphical gaming. Today I saw the potent Unreal Engine 3 running on a Tegra demo tablet, which opened my eyes to the likelihood of serious gaming on such devices. The entire tablet demo reminded me of the promise shown in that very first Origami Project video back in 2006: gaming, browsing and media consumption.

What’s different about today as compared to 2006 that make the “year of the tablet” claim more believable? ARM processing power has matured while battery needs have stayed reasonable, for one. Operating systems other than Windows have also gained acceptance, both by consumers and developers as well. The time is simply right for the old Origami concept to arrive — I saw it today on stage and I’m looking forward to seeing again on Saturday. I have some hands-on time scheduled with Nvidia to give you a closer look at the Tegra powered products you’ll be seeing later this year.

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The company crunched the data from more than 4.5 million Twitter accounts over a 9-month period to get a better sense of Twitter growth and report statistics on tweets and the Twitter user base, including user geography. The report, entitled June 2009 State of the Twittersphere, has some astounding findings. Here are some of the key ones:

• 55.5 percent of Twitter users are not following anyone.
• 52.7 percent of Twitter users have no followers.
• 54.9 percent have never tweeted.
• 45.12 have tweeted at least once.
• Over 9 percent of Twitter users are inactive.

In sharp contrast to Facebook, where people tend to share too much personal information, Twitter lacks personal user data.

• Only 24.14 percent of users have a bio in their profile.
• Only 31.32 percent have a location in their profile.
• 20.21 percent of users have a home page URL in their profile.

The good news for Twitter is that people who like Twitter love using the service. For instance, an average Twitter user tweets at least once — actually 0.97 times — a day and thus far has tweeted about 119.34 times total. Well clearly in this one aspect, I am above average. Surprisingly, only 1.44 percent of tweets are re-tweets. That is a much lower number than I thought it would be.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter usage is the highest during the business hours. After all, who wants to work when you can tweet about it?

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