GigaOM » Ignition Partners

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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Cloud services startup Tier 3 nets $10M in new funding

Barb Darrow — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 17:57:54 +0000

Cloud startup Tier 3 has raised $10 million in new venture funding, according to new SEC filings.

New investor Intel Capital led the round. Current investors Ignition Partners and Madrona Ventures ponied up $8.5 million in an initial funding round in March, 2011.

The Bellevue, Wash. based company is one of a growing number of players chasing the enterprise platform as a service (PaaS) market.

Developers — both within and outside companies — like to use these platforms to build and test out applications. But not all corporate IT executives are thrilled about actually deploying mission critical applications on PaaSes — especially those running on public cloud infrastructure.

That’s the kind of thinking companies like Tier 3, ActiveState, Appfog, Red Hat (with OpenShift) would love to blow up.

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Opscode nets $19.5M in new funding, adds Connors to board

Barb Darrow — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 07:01:30 +0000

Opscode CEO Mitch Hill

Configuration management specialist Opscode plans to use $19.5 million in new funding to build up its engineering staff and fuel its push into the enterprise. The Series C round was led by new investor Ignition Partners and, along with the money, Opscode gets a new director in Ignition’s John Connors, a former CFO of Microsoft.

Ignition joins previous investors Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson in a round that brings total venture investment to about $31 million for the four-year-old Seattle company.

Systems administrators and developers use Opscode’s Chef tool — available in open source and commercial form — to configure and manage their servers.

Chef, and Puppet from Opscode rival Puppet Labs (see disclosure), are next-gen tools that perform jobs that in another era would have been performed by more monolithic toolsets from companies like IBM/Tivoli, BMC, CA or Hewlett-Packard.

Opscode CEO Mitch Hill said that Chef usually ends up replacing a collection of configuration and management tools from other vendors or built in house.

The company will use the new VC money to staff up and to push Chef harder to enterprise customers, Hill said in an interview last week.“We’re aggressively hiring in Seattle and in our engineering hub in Raleigh [N.C.] We’re really ready to staff up both engineering and support,” Hill said in an interview last week. Opscode has 50 employees now and plans to add about 30 more this year.

Opscode launched the Chef enterprise attack last summer. ”Our commercial business is divided between SaaS and the enterprise Private Chef, announced last summer, and which started selling in Q4. We’ve now got our first dozen or so Private Chef customers.” Among the new customers are Ancestry.com, South America’s LAN Airlines, Marshall University and SolutionSet, he said.

As more companies put more of their workload in the cloud, the need to specify, build out, and manage servers, wherever they reside, will get more important. And Opscode, Puppet Labs and others will try to position themselves as top-of-the-heap in cloud deployment.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs 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 jonathanjonl

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Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:50:52 +0000

Gentlemen, start your engines. Facebook filed for its initial public offering on Feb. 1. Expectations are that in May it wants to raise $5 billion, which would make it the biggest tech IPO since Google’s in 2004. Valuations and timing may shift, but as Om says, Facebook will be doing the mother of all IPOs, with effects on hiring and acquisitions that will ripple throughout the startup and tech communities and at Facebook itself. This report outlines the myriad issues at play in such a big move, from examining how CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to rewire the world to understanding the changing implications for the company’s infrastructure dependency. But no matter the angle, one thing is clear: The company’s filing has the potential to change the game for the tech industry. Companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Zynga and Google. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Flotype garners more seed funding for enterprise Bridge

Barb Darrow — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:34:34 +0000

Flotype just scored $1.4 million in seed money for ramping up an ambitious enterprise software push. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, Yuri Milner and Salesforce.com.

The Berkeley, Calif.-based startup has set quite a goal for itself. It’s building, as GigaOM reported earlier, “massive scale, enterprise-grade bidirectional communication between any server and any device,” in the words of CEO Darshan Shankar, CEO and co-founder. Now that technology has a name: “Bridge.”

Bridge, which Shankar said is already being tested in the field by unnamed businesses, aims to make it easier for software developers to build applications that flow from any end-user device to and from corporate server-based applications. To do that, it has to handle all the heavy lifting and complicated work of real-time communications so developers can focus on what they do best. Theoretically, developers could also use Bridge to rebuild back end applications, but the initial push is to foster fast communication, borrowing on lessons learned from massively scaled web applications like Facebook and Twitter, Shankar said.

Flotype, a 2011 Ycombinator company, will provide developers with an API and native libraries for virtually every device, Shankar said. Flotype itself will host a set of server-side libraries that handle the hook between a business’s servers and devices and the Flotype’s own infrastructure. All of [the] communications between the customer’s servers and devices is all abstracted away,” Shankar said.

Floytype isn’t totally new on the scene; it fostered NowJS software, which eases the creation of JavaScript-based web applications.

Bridge, however, is Flotype’s first real product, a technology that enables real-time communication between any server, any device, on any platform. Bridge abstracts away the complexity of large real-time applications. This helps developers using cloud or on-premise platforms to build their mobile, web, or embedded applications faster.

The company includes several University of California-Berkeley engineers and Amazon and Dropbox alums. It will need their expertise: fostering secure, real-time communication that has to cross all the barriers between users’ browsers and company-owned enterprise applications isn’t trivial. There is a bewildering array of programming languages on all those devices, so Bridge must take all that into account and somehow abstract it so developers won’t have to worry about it and offer a developers a single API to handle all that.

Photo courtesy of reserved Flickr user F H Mira

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2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 08:01:37 +0000

The past year in mobile has been even more eventful than most of us would have predicted. Our appetite for mobile data grew dramatically; Google’s Android continued its march to worldwide dominance; Amazon joined the tablet bandwagon; and AT&T tried and failed to acquire T-Mobile USA, among many other things. All of that activity lays the groundwork for a very promising — and very challenging — 2012. This research note serves both as a review of the major trends and events of 2011 as well as a forecast for the coming year. Companies mentioned in this report include Millennial Media, Quattro Wireless and Samsung. For a full list of companies, and to read the full research note, sign up for a free trial.

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Health 2.0 startup Keas gets $6.5 million in new funds

Om Malik — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:00:11 +0000

Keas, a San Francisco-based startup co-founded by veteran technologist Adam Bosworth and enterprise software entrepreneur George Kassagbi, has raised $6.5 million in new funds from existing investors Atlas Ventures and Ignition Parters. The new funds will be used to expand the company’s sales and marketing efforts.

Bosworth in past life was chief architect of BEA Systems and helped develop XML. He later joined Google to work on Google Health. Bosworth left Google Health to start Keas (where he is chief technology officer) nearly four years ago to build personalized tools for people to improve their health.

There were few takers for the initial version of Keas’ data-driven health and wellness management web app. About a year ago Keas decided to turn wellness into a social game focused on improving health and fitness by being proactive. It also decided to work with companies who were looking for ways to improve employee health.

In this new wellness social game, employees are clubbed into teams of six and they compete against each other by getting points for activities such as exercise and eating well. Over the course of a 12-week challenge, team members motivate each other to develop healthy habits like taking the stairs or putting down the doughnuts. Along the way, each player earns points for their activity. The points add up to team prizes and rewards. Eating veggies, walking and exercising all get you points. Nearly 60,000 workers at companies like Pfizer and Bechtel have started using the system since the September launch. The company expects to add another 20 companies – also paying customers – to its platform.

Here is a video of Bosworth from the GigaOM RoadMap conference held in San Francisco in November 2011.

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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Servicemesh nets $15 million for enterprise software push

Barb Darrow — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:30:28 +0000

Servicemesh snagged $15 million in venture money from Ignition Partners to fuel its enterprise software push. Ignition partner Frank Artale will join Servicemesh’s board.

The four-year-old company focuses on helping large companies use private and public cloud computing services within existing compliance and regulatory frameworks, said Servicemesh CEO and chairman Eric Pulier.

As more large companies want to use cloud services, they’re looking for ways to make sure the new IT scenario falls within existing compliance and regulatory guidelines for their business. They want the same kind of service level agreements (SLAs) and assurances they can get in the traditional on-site data center world.

Servicemesh’s software platform allows organizations to deliver business Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Software-as-a-Service capabilities from outside providers but layers reporting, governance and policy enforcement atop them, Pulier said.

“If you have a business unit that used to take 15 to 20 weeks to fire up a workload and build an app on it, that took massive amounts of steps. With cloud services, the unit can now automatically fire it up, but if that workload has a regulatory mandate where the data can’t leave Vietnam or it can’t leave an internal cloud, Servicemesh can enforce that,” Pulier said. Similarly, if an organization has a cost cap assigned to it, Servicemesh will make sure that if it spends, say, $5,000 in a day, an alert is generated, for example.

Servicemesh’s most direct competitors include legacy systems management companies like BMC and Hewlett-Packard.

This is the company’s first dip into the venture funding pool. ”We spent the last four years building this company through some extremely intense times to 90 people and profitability but we’ve been pretty much under the radar. Now we’re ready to scale with this first round of VC, “Pulier said.

Ignition Partners has built up an impressive array of cloud-oriented investments including Cloudera, Heroku (now owned by Salesforce.com) and Splunk.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user epSos.de.

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Cloud-savvy Ignition Gets Stronger with Franke Artale

Derrick Harris — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:10:37 +0000

Ignition Partners has a reputation for investing in promising cloud computing startups, and that tradition should carry on with the addition of Frank Artale as managing director. Notable recent successes for Ignition include Heroku, which Salesforce.com acquired for $212 million in November, and Splunk, an IT intelligence company that’s planning an IPO next year. Other notable cloud investments include Skytap and StorSimple. It’s an impressive track record that’s matched by Artale’s own.

He has been involved in the infrastructure space as an executive at Ignition-backed companies Consera, XenSource and Rendition Networks — sold to HP, Citrix and Opsware, respectively — and as part of Accel Partners. At Accel, Artale served as an adviser to Hadoop juggernaut Cloudera and NoSQL leader Membase. Most recently, Artale was vice president of business development at Citrix, a company with strong products for virtualization (XenServer) and cloud computing, as well as other network-based applications and management software.

With big data and cloud startups only continuing to proliferate as those technology sectors become increasingly important, Artale and his new team at Ignition will have plenty of opportunities to repeat past successes.

Image courtesy of Flickr user mcclouds.

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