Well, those startups now have seriously heavyweight competition in the form of LogMeIn, the remote connectivity specialist, and ARM, the British firm whose low-power chip designs underpin the vast majority of mobile devices, and which is now competing with Intel to own the IoT space.

LogMeIn has just launched its own PaaS for the internet of things, calling it Xively (the beta version was known as Cosm). And developers wanting to start creating connected devices on this platform are being offered the Xively Jumpstart Kit, which combines Xively with ARM’s mbed platform, for building devices using ARM’s microcontrollers. With this kit, the companies promise, developers can “rapidly progress from prototyping to volume deployment”.

Xively is based on LogMeIn’s Gravity infrastructure – the same one used to support the company’s cloud storage offering, Cubby — and it comes with development tools for writing and prototyping services, a provisioning engine for deployment and a scalable management console. It supports real-time messaging and directory and data services, as well as analytics, and it uses a “pay-as-you-grow” pricing model that should make the platform attractive to startups.

The directory services extend to a “commons” named the Xively Connected Object Cloud, through which different companies’ devices can interconnect. According to LogMeIn, a “fundamental philosophy” baked into the Xively terms of service states that “customers own their data and can choose whether or not to share all, part, or none [of] it.”

A showcase page for the platform shows early projects built on Xively that include the Visualight smart lightbulb and even some of the post-Fukushima crowdsourced radiation-monitoring efforts (which used an earlier iteration of the platform, called Pachube at the time).

While the Xively Jumpstart Kit should help inventors and developers gravitate in ARM’s direction, it’s not like Intel is sleeping. Intel said in February that its own Intelligent Systems Framework – a set of specifications for connecting, managing and securing IoT devices – had been used to support more than 50 products. The company also released new software tools for, you guessed it, reducing time to market.

Although ARM does benefit from a much broader ecosystem than Intel, it’s too early to call that race. However, those startups trying to build their own PaaSes for the internet of things had better get a move on. LogMeIn’s offering is already pretty mature for this space and, given the momentum rapidly building behind the IoT movement, its timing is exquisite.

(Incidentally, the internet of things is a subject that will be discussed at our Structure 2013 event in San Francisco on 19-20 June, so be there.)

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LogMeIn, the company behind  Cubby, a business-oriented Dropbox competitor, prefers the term Bring Your Own Apps (BYOA) to the more common bring your own device (or BYOD) terminology.

• Perhaps most surprising is that 39 percent of productivity applications — the word processors and spreadsheets that do the heavy lifting in businesses — were introduced by employees. Google Apps is probably a big beneficiary here.
• And, 44 percent of collaboration apps — Skype, GotoMeeting etc. — were brought in by workers, not IT departments.
• Twenty-six percent of those productivity and collaborative applications ended up being okayed by IT departments for corporate use.
• Sixty-nine percent of “social” applications used across the surveyed businesses were brought in by employees.  LogMeIn categorizes things like Yammer and LinkedIn as social apps which indicates a pretty straight-laced view of social apps.
• And, more than half (52 percent) of cloud sync-and-storage applications now in use in these businesses likewise came in the door via employees. That would be the Dropboxes, iClouds, Skydrives of the world.

Other key findings:

• 70 percent of companies surveyed said employees “actively” use non-business applications in a work context.
• 67 percent of IT pros cited data security of these apps as a primary concern.
• 47 percent of respondents indicated that BYOA can increase business flexibility
• 89 percent of IT pros said BYOA will require different skills for managing IT environments.

For this research, LogMeIn and Edge Strategies surveyed more than 1,200 companies with up to 1,000 employees in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zeeland.

These findings, along with earlier research sponsored by Nasuni and others, shows that the line between personal and workplace technologies has become all but invisible. That poses real challenges to IT departments that have to deal with all sorts of technology coming in over the transom. But it also opens up opportunities for vendors that design easy-to-use consumer apps to enter the business realm as well.

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One out of five of 1,300 business users surveyed said they use the consumer file-sync-and-share system with work documents, according to new research by Nasuni, an enterprise storage management company. And, half of those Dropbox users do this even though they know it’s against the rules.

The most blatant offenders are near the top of the corporate heap — VPs and directors are most likely to use Dropbox despite the documented risks and despite corporate edicts. C-level and other execs are the people who brought their personal iPads and iPhones into the office in the first place and demanded they be supported.

These findings should not be news to anyone who’s been paying attention. Dropbox, the popular service that consumers use to store and share photos, files and other documents, has become the proxy for “shadow IT” — technology that comes inside a corporation but is beyond the control and tracking of corporate IT departments.

Dropbox claims a whopping 100 million users — and its popularity is driven by the exploding use of smart phones and tablets to send, sync and share documents. This whole bring your own device (BYOD) movement causes huge headaches for corporate IT departments which are supposed to keep company data secure. The problem with many corporate file-share-and-sync solutions, is they aren’t as easy to use as Dropbox and don’t necessarily support personal smartphones or tablets. So if you’re trying to work and need your document, you take the path of least resistance: Dropbox.

Here’s the problem: if corporate workers put sensitive internal files up there, the door is open to abuse. According to the survey:

“The sensitive data stored in Dropbox is not secure and just as importantly, not controlled by IT. This means that if an employee leaves the company, the information that [a] user has stored goes with them, creating a significant risk of data loss or exposure. Furthermore, as the amount of sensitive corporate data stored in Dropbox increases, the online file-sharing service will become a
more attractive target for hackers and other malicious groups.”

Companies like Nasuni — or rivals like TwinStrata and StorSimple as well as companies like Box, OwnCloud and LogMeIn — pitch their services as enterprise-class secure cloud storage. So, the survey is self-serving for Nasuni, but that doesn’t mean the results aren’t worth noting.

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Accellion kitepoint lets data stay where it is

Accellion, for example, says it will bring universal mobile access to your data and content with kitepoint, now in beta. The first iteration of the service will let customers access their Microsoft Sharepoint files from iOS or Android devices (Windows Phone support will come, according to VP of product Jon Pincus.) There’s big pent-up demand for elegant mobile access to SharePoint, said Terri McClure, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. Accellion will add support for other Windows file systems and more enterprise content management (ECM) systems starting next year.

While Box’s focus is to take all user files and duplicate them into Box’s content repository, the goal here is to let files stay where they are but provide mobile access to them, Pincus said.

InfraScale targets micro businesses

Second, InfraScale says its new FileLocker service offers more secure cloud sync-and storage than Box or Dropbox, the consumer-focused cloud storage service with more than 50 million users.

Some cloud-based services use deduplication on the back end to sweat the data down to size and save on storage costs. The downside of that is that dedupe only works on unencrypted files, so if the files come in encrypted, they have to be de-encrypted, deduped and then re-encrypted. That gap in coverage poses a possible security vulnerability, according to InfraScale CEO Ken Shaw Jr. Dedupe thus helps the storage vendor but doesn’t really add customer value, he said.

(For the record, a spokesman for Los Altos, Calif.-based Box said the company does not dedupe user data.) InfraScale’s service is free for up to five employees.

Lots of offerings …

There are lots of players vying for a piece of this pie. SugarSync is launching the beta of its updated cloud-based  file-share and sync service  with updated user interface and other perks  here. OwnCloud, an open-source solution, runs on premises but also stores user files in IT’s cloud of choice, and just updated the mobile apps that access its service. OwnCloud also integrates with the customer’s existing active directory, security and intrusion detection systems. And, LogMeIn, the company behind the popular easy-to-use web conferencing service, put its “Cubby” cloud storage service into public beta last week. Other entrants include Egnyte, GroupLogic, SurDoc, Intralinks, YouSendIt (see disclosure below). This is a very, very crowded market.

“We’re still in the land grab stage,” said ESG’s McClure. Right now it’s unclear if any of the companies are turning a profit, but some including Accellion and Box are generating revenue. “At this stage, it’s more important for them to have business customers than turn a profit,” she said.

 … contend for an unsized market

One concern for these scrappy companies going forward is the fact that they not only face each other but will increasingly compete with the Goliaths of the industry in Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Drive and Apple iCloud. Salesforce.com which owns a stake in Box, is also building its own internal — and competitive — Chatterbox product.

Perhaps the biggest question here is just how big the overall pie is. IDC said cloud file sharing and collaboration services generated about $213.5 million in revenue last year, up 15.8 percent from the previous year, but still a fairly small number iven all the vendors jumping in. Interestingly the company has no plans to forecast the market size this year, until it grows and more companies jump in, an IDC spokesman said.

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

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In early April, reports surfaced that the current CEO, Ivan Koon would be leaving YouSendIt (see disclosure) after six years at the Campbell, Calif.-based company.  Now we know who will fill his shoes. Garlinghouse will also be chairman of the board.

In a statement released Tuesday, Brian Jacobs, general partner of Emergence Capital, one of YouSendIt’s backers said:

“Brad’s capabilities are well known to Silicon Valley, public market investors and the leading technology companies worldwide. He appreciates the loyalty of our users, our contagious growth and the massive global opportunity for YouSendIt.”

The company is in a white-hot market judging by the number of cloud storage, file sharing-and-sync companies duking it out for paying customers. There it contends with Box, Accellion, OwnCloud, LogMein, Egnyte and dozens of others all trying to convert non-paying “fremium” users to paid customers. They all want to be “the Dropbox of the Enterprise.”

Most of these companies are adding more than file storage and sync as they go along, forging into cloud-based collaboration. Early this year, YouSendIt launched Workstream to address that market and claims The Absolut Company, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, and Pernod Ricard as Workstream customers.

Forrester Analyst Ted Schadler said YouSendIt’s longevity and experience gives it an edge. “Box wants to store all your stuff. YouSendIt can store your stuff but they really want to send, distribute all your stuff,” he said. Given that they’ve been around for awhile, they’ve got a pretty strong security model that makes them attractive to businesses which, face it, are run by people who share and collaborate using documents, he said.

YouSendIt claims 585,000 paid subscribers out of 30 million registered users overall.

Garlinghouse, a former product guy at both AOL and Yahoo, as GigaOM has reported, is best known for the 2006 Peanut Butter Manifesto, which he wrote at Yahoo  and which outlined the challenges faced by the struggling Internet company. Now he’s bringing his talents to a much smaller company, but one that boasts paying customers.

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

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The company just added Dana Evans, former CFO of Verisign, to its board and named her head of its audit committee.

In an interview with Reuters, Box CEO Aaron Levie ruled out a public offering this year, but left the door wide open beyond that. From that report:

“It won’t be a 2012 exercise,” Levie told Reuters, referring to the IPO. “Even though the market is pretty amazing right now, there are some things we want to get done as a company. We see these moves as ways of building a strong foundation.”

In addition to Ms. Evans, Box also tapped Peter McGoff the former SVP and general counsel at Informatica, as its general counsel. And it brought on  Tom Addis, a sales veteran of Salesforce.com, Siebel Systems, and IBM to head operations and to expand Box’s own enterprise sales unit.

Box, based in Los Altos, Calif., characterized the new hires as part of a plan to grow that enterprise sales effort, but the news also smacks of a startup bringing on “adult supervision” in advance of an IPO.

Box claims a hefty 11 million users of its cloud storage service, but never discloses how many of those are paying customers. It does, however, list a pretty compelling list of big customers including Proctor & Gamble, Netflix, MGM Resorts, Avaya, and Dow Chemical.

Here’s the thing though: The landscape is littered with would-be Dropboxes of the Enterprise, including Egnyte — which recently signed a big deal with Young & Rubicam and LogMeIn, which has a huge installed base of businesses already using its  remote access and web conferencing software. Add to that Google with Google Drive, Microsoft, with Azure-based storage services and literally dozens of others, this is going to be a bloody battle.

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In the past few months, the jockeying among cloud storage vendors — newbies like LogMeIn and more established players like SpiderOak, Box, Microsoft, and others — has been off the charts. All of these companies are trying to make themselves the Dropbox of the enterprise, Dropbox being the cloud storage choice for millions of consumers.

New API aims to ease integration with third party apps

Box aims to accomplish this, in part, by making it easier for third-party ISVs to make Box their de facto back-end storage with a new “V2″ API, said Chris Yeh, VP of platform for Los Altos, Calif.-based Box. With the new API, it will be much easier for companies to deploy Box behind their apps –so the file-sharing and collaboration happen in Box, Yeh said.

A new “instant on” capability will also make it easier for users to opt for Box as the backend storage when they use other, affiliated applications. For example, up until now,  each LinkedIn user had to create a Box account and log into it from LinkedIn. “With Instant Mode, LinkedIn sends Box the user’s email address and if we don’t have an account for you, we autocreate the account and a folder for you in LinkedIn,” Yeh said. “If the user approves it, it will show up to them as a Box folder within the LinkedIn account.

Finally, Box is working with TechStars and General Assembly, two New York-based groups that focus on tech startups. Box will sponsor TechStars’ HackStars program — which brings on experienced developers and designers to work with TechStars portfolio companies. And it will make Box resources available for members of both the TechStars and GA communities. General Assembly is a co-working effort that recently garnered a $4.25 million investment from DST Global’s Yuri Milner.

Whistling past Google Drive

The appearance of Google Drive, after many fits and starts, looms over any and all cloud storage efforts now.  And, while most of the reverbs about the new arrival focused on its impact on Dropbox,  the rest of the market, including Box, is on high alert.

While Box CEO Aaron Levie downplayed the Google threat in some arenas, he also posted  a blog called “When elephants attack”  that deals with the Google threat. In the post, Levie took pains to point out less-than-stellar Google projects like Google Wallet, Wave and Google Health.

Seelie wrote that it’s impossible for smaller, innovative companies to avoid the “elephants” in technology which need to enter any and all large markets. But he said Box’s history of focusing on business users — especially CIOs who pay for value-added storage and collaboration services — will keep it in good stead. Levie wrote:

“If we avoided all markets with competitors that are larger or better funded, the world would be all but devoid of innovation. So we’re taking a different, yet highly recommended approach:  “Climb a large tree. Preferably one without thorns, stinging ants, or lions.” Our tree just happens to be filled with CIOs.

The one problem with that statement is that of all of the 10 million users Box claims, it’s far from clear how many actually pay for the service. Box does not break out that information.

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LogMeIn CEO Michael Simon

And the latest entry into the cloud storage sweepstakes is …  LogMeIn, the company that built its business around its popular, easy-to-use remote access service.

LogMeIn will woo both consumers and businesses with a beta of its Cubby service, according to Michael Simon, CEO and chairman of the Woburn, Mass.-based company.

The move comes at a time when dozens of companies are jumping into cloud storage, many of them offering free storage for a limited amount of data in hopes of converting free accounts into paying customers. Dropbox is the fan favorite in the consumer arena and Box is a big player in the business segment where it faces many other contenders, many of whom offer digital signatures and other ancillary services with storage.

It’s off to the races in cloud storage

Simon acknowledged that the field is crowded but said LogMeIn, as a profitable company, has a leg up. Many of the “freemium” cloud storage companies claim multiple millions of customers but will not disclose how many of them pay. LogMeIn ended its fourth quarter with 1 million paid accounts with multiple paid licenses per account, which gives it a good foundation on which to build, Simon said. Cloud storage is the most requested feature among those customers, Simon said.

Cubby, now in beta, will automatically save multiple versions of your document —  and those versions will not count against your quota, Simon said in an interview.

LogMeIn has built its own cloud over the past few years, Simon said. “Not a lot of players have the wherewithal to create their own elastic storage component. It runs on low-cost hardware but the entire stack is proprietary and we can offer a price advantage,” Simon said. Dropbox, the consumer giant in this space, relies on Amazon for its raw storage, but other players like Spideroak and Backblaze have also built their own storage infrastructure, which they say lets them beat Amazon — widely perceived as the low-cost leader — on price.

LogMeIn is not ready to talk price yet — a beta of the Cubby service goes live on Thursday.

Challenge: converting freemium to paid accounts

While it’s hard to transition non-paid to paid accounts — most companies cite a 2 to 3 percent conversion rate — LogMeIn’s installed base of remote access users may give it a leg up here. Simon said the company will market Cubby to its existing base, which includes lots of small and medium businesses — and IT service providers that offer them remote support.

A user can click on any files or folders on his or her desktop, iPhone or Android device to make it a “Cubby” folder. Cubby will tie into a business customers existing Active Directory policies for security and rights purposes.  With Cubby, the user also controls the encryption keys meaning that LogMeIn does not “see” their data at all. Users will not be barraged with ads, a trend that some see a scourge of the freemium market.

There are two ways to share that data — The user can designate another “trusted person” to have bidirectional access to the data or  can share a link that would let the recipient see the data but not modify it.

And so, with LogMeIn Cubby, the battle for cloud storage continues. Don’t expect it to end any time soon.

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I wouldn’t call this a new phenomenon: There have been remote access solutions on mobile devices for several years. Think of Citrix’s GoToMyPC  or LogMeIn’s  Ignition. These and similar services allow you to use a mobile devices to interact with the desktop of a Windows PC at home, so you could work on a Word document from an Android tablet, for example.

But virtualization is maturing, as are the mobile chips that power smartphones and tablets. This week at CES, I played a graphic-intensive PC game with stunning visuals and fast action on an Android tablet. But the game itself was actually running on a Windows desktop. Using remote access software from Splashtop on the Asus Transformer Prime tablet, you couldn’t tell. See for yourself in the video demo I captured showing the zero-lag.

Connecting a tablet or phone to remotely use your own computer is just one part of the virtualization story. OnLive has a virtualization service that lets you connect a Windows machine in the cloud. That’s not your PC, but a “PC running on the web,” so to speak. I’ve done this myself with EC2 on Amazon’s Web Services and it only cost me a few dollars a month to run an instance of Windows on a PC I can use, but don’t own: Far cheaper than buying, maintaining and powering a physical computer.

Between this new cloud streaming of computer applications and improved remote access apps, there’s less incentive to buy a new computer. Instead, you can either get more mileage out of an old computer or “rent” one that’s available in the cloud. And either of these can now be accessed by a tablet or smartphone that’s far cheaper than a new computer.

I’m not suggesting the PC industry is dead, but it is bleeding: Sales have started stagnating, and last year smartphones outsold computers, a trend that’s likely to continue, if not accelerate.

In this light, it makes sense that Intel is trying to push some smartphone activities to its new Ultrabooks. As PCs go from physical to virtual over time, consumers will have less reason to buy Intel-powered laptops and desktops, provided they have the connectivity needed to remotely access a PC from a tablet or handset.

Image credit: OnLive

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Along with free remote control of an unlimited number of Macs or PCs from your iOS device with LogMeIn, LogMeIn Pro (a paid upgrade available in-app for $39.99 per year) also provides access to your computer’s entire file structure, where you can grab files and copy them to local storage, other computers, or to cloud-based storage via online services like Dropbox, Google Docs or any WebDav server. You can even move or copy entire folders at once, and open a variety of file types right within LogMeIn, including audio, video, image and document files.

Getting set up is a breeze, and the LogMeIn app walks you through the process. You’ll have to sign up for an account, then download a client application on the computers you want to be able to access remotely. It’s the simplest solution I’ve seen for getting remote access set up both within and outside of your own home Wi-Fi network, and testing over 3G shows it works great even on cellular connections. By default, the app uses a somewhat strange navigation system that moves the screen instead of the cursor, but you can switch to cursor mode relatively easily if the default mode isn’t working for you.

The free version of LogMeIn is probably all most people need, especially if you just want to check on a download or video rendering progress, or control a media center PC from the comfort of the couch without the added hassle of wireless mice and keyboards. But LogMeIn has wisely thrown in a Pro trial with each new sign up, and the file management features and cloud service access are mighty tempting. Also, the Pro subscription provides HD video and audio playback from PCs, with a Mac implementation of the same feature planned for the near future.

If you’ve previously purchased LogMeIn Ignition, you’re lucky; you get grandfathered in to the new Pro features automatically. This is a smart move for LogMeIn in general, though, since it should introduce many more people to the service’s remote viewing functions, which is tempting bait for the new recurring Pro subscription.

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