The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with participation from original investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and individual investors including Mark Leslie, co-founder  of Veritas; John Thompson, former CEO of Symantec and Lane Bess, former CEO of Palo Alto Networks. It brings total funding to about $27 million.

The company plans to use the cash to build out its enterprise support, sales and marketing staff and to add capabilities as the software heads for general availability. That should happen in about two months, company CEO Poojan Kumar said in an interview. There are about 30 employees now, with the goal to add 70 to 80 more in the next 9 to 12 months, he said.

“Enterprise software requires staffing and expertise,” he said. He should know — Kumar led Exadata development for Oracle and then headed up data products for VMware. His co-founder Satyam Vaghani was principal engineer at VMware, where he worked on the vSphere kernel and the clustered file system.

PernixData says its software-only approach makes a disruptive technology a non-disruptive install that will run with a company’s existing server and storage hardware, take all the server flash available and virtualize it into a shareable pool. The company’s goal is to become “the VMware of server-side flash.”

As more servers ship with on-board flash, there’s a desire to make the most of that resource — especially for tier 1 applications like database and ERP applications that have proven difficult to virtualize.

San Jose-based PernixData is early to this battle but it won’t be alone for long. It’s safe to say that legacy storage  and server players — ranging from EMC and NetApp to Hewlett-Packard and Dell, as well as flash storage players like Fusion-io and Violin Systems — are scrambling for traction here.

PernixData is betting that its product — now in beta at 50 companies — will beat them to market by a good two years and build from there.

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From the movie’s web site:

“Awe-inspiring boats that reflect the unlimited reach of human ingenuity, breathtaking views, action, tension, excitement, consummate skill, the pursuit of lifelong dreams and the tempestuous romance between sailors and the sea, set against a soaring musical score: this is The Wind God’s, the story of the 33rd America’s Cup race.”

Thank God, MarketWatch‘s Therese Poletti has the scoop on the red carpet event. The movie, she reports, will be “great PR for Ellison and the sailing team that would ultimately prevail in what became a major grudge-match involving the America’s Cup, where billionaire faced off billionaire in Valencia, Spain.” San Francisco Business Times has another account.

Forbes Magazine estimates Ellison is worth $43 billion and he’s not averse to spending it. The America’s Cup chase reportedly cost him $100 million.

And, he is not new to show biz. He appeared in Iron Man 2 (seen in screen grab above.) And two of his children have gone Hollywood.  Son David Ellison is an actor, writer and producer (he produced The Wind Gods) and daughter  Megan Ellison is a producer with more than a dozen titles to her credit including Jack Reacher and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Ellison has also bought up a sizeable chunk of pricey real estate in the star-studded Malibu beach community.

It’s unclear if any mention was made about the death Thursday afternoon of another America’s Cup competitor, Andrew Simpson. A member of the Artemis Racing team, Simpson apparently drowned, after his catamaran capsized in the bay.

Oracle Team Racing’s defense of the America’s Cup will begin July 4 in San Francisco Bay.

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There weren’t a ton of details on pricing and dates which could come at the company’s annual SAPPHIRE conference, next week, but according to the release, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud will be delivered by SAP and its partners:

 ”SAP intends to adapt this open ecosystem strategy with its managed service providers to offer the capabilities of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud from their data centers, as well as from multiple SAP data centers worldwide.”

In a research note, Nomura Securities analyst Rick Sherlund wrote:

“SAP indicates it will price its elastic cloud-computing service based size, scale of data, and application usage. The advantages are faster time to market and time to value, with lower total cost of ownership. Offering a service that delivers quick value and easy implementation should be a nice complement to the real-time capabilities users seek from HANA for a wide variety of new, real-time business processes, in addition to the Business Suite.”

SAP will continue to offer HANA via AWS, a spokesman said. But it’s clear that more contention is arising between legacy enterprise IT players and Amazon which is starting to compete with them by offering more higher-end services that compete with their products.  AWS has made no secret about its ambitions here —  it all but called out IBM, HP, Teradata, and Oracle by name when it announced its RedShift data warehousing service last November.

Meanwhile, SAP — along with these other legacy enterprise IT giants — has rushed to embrace cloud. Better to cannibalize your own on-premises business than to let Amazon do it after all. But, SAP got a rocky start in cloud. It launched Business ByDesign as a SaaS product four years ago to underwhelming response. But it vowed to do better and started buying up cloud expertise, with its $3.4 billion  acquisition of SuccessFactors, a SaaS provider of human resources management, two years later. But HANA, the hot in-memory database and analytics product  has become the company’s focal point in  cloud and big data efforts.

What would really be surprising is if SAP didn’t offer HANA from its own cloud.

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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 DataStax Enterprise 3 big data bundle fuses Hadoop with the Apache Cassandra database and Apache Solr enterprise search platform, creating what CEO Billy Bosworth claims is “the first viable alternative to Oracle since Oracle.” The big selling points here are linear scalability, operational simplicity and an emphasis on business continuity.

As the company has noticed that much of its new customer base was sited in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), its latest move makes sense: DataStax has opened up a London office, and it’s a full-on subsidiary rather than just a branch office.

As Bosworth told me, the idea here is to be able to respond quickly to European market demands, which range from language variation to a different style of partnership:

“Without any presence in EMEA, we ended up in 2012 with 10 percent of our customers located in the EMEA region – that was 100 percent inbound; we didn’t do any programs or outbound activity. We have Scoreloop in Germany, the mobile gaming platform, and Trademob, the mobile app platform. We have mobile carriers who are decommissioning Oracle because they have to have a multi-data-center solution, and a London-based bank chose DataStax over Oracle for their ecommerce platform.

“In the UK, the business aspect of it is not that different from the U.S. … but as you move into the European continent, you do want to have some local language skills. And when you move into France and Spain and Italy, now you’re into a very boutique partner network. Those partners have very good relationships with their customers but are often not on the same scale as a big [systems integrator] like Accenture. The only way to really get close enough to that partner network is for us to be in the region as well.”

With a portfolio as open-source-centric as DataStax’s is, Bosworth added, the company is also looking forward to hosting “a ton of meet-ups in the region” in the coming months.

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Reports surfaced last week that Hurd, who is co-president of Oracle, was on the short list of prospective Dell CEOs from Blackstone Partners, a private equity firm interested in buying Dell. Blackstone, presumably, would need to install its own guy if its bid against the current Dell guy, Michael Dell, wins the day.

Asked about the issue in Japan at a press event, Hurd said: “I’m very happy at Oracle. No interest.”

Mark Hurd in Japan goes on the record on #Dell: “I’m very happy at Oracle. No interest." #oracle http://t.co/pYsKAM9fDK—
deborah hellinger (@dhellinger) March 25, 2013

Of course, that doesn’t mean Blackstone didn’t ask.

The timing must have been awkward for Hurd. Later today, his boss, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and systems guy John Fowler will unveil the latest-and-greatest Oracle server. If you want to sit in, you can register here. 

It doesn’t help when a humongous software company is trying to build hardware credibility for there to be rumors about one of your top guys — a hardware guy — jumping ship to another hardware company. Hurd is the former chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard who exited under a cloud in August, 2010.  A month later he was  snapped up by Ellison as Oracle co-president (with Safra Catz)

First line of Blackstone/Michael Dell meeting: "So, yeah… sorry for calling Mark Hurd before we called you."—
  (@danprimack) March 26, 2013

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For the period ending February 28, Oracle reported earnings of 65 cents per share on revenue of $9 billion, just short of the 66 cents on $9.4 billion in revenue that analysts had expected. Oracle co-president Safra Catz said sales were likely hurt by the prospect of government spending cuts.

“It didn’t help that our quarter ended on the same day as the sequester deadline,” she noted on the company’s earnings call Wednesday night. But, overall, Oracle’s sales people took the fall. “What we really saw is the lack of urgency we sometimes see in the salesforce as Q3 deals fall into Q4,” Catz said.

Oracle, HP, Microsoft tread treacherous path

Skeptics maintain that Oracle faces something much more critical than an unmotivated sales force. Rather, they say it, and other legacy IT players must confront a fundamental shift in how companies buy enterprise IT and a shift in the database mix to more NoSQL products and a similar transition to distributed data stores.

Oracle’s bread-and-butter product remains its market-leading relational database which is entrenched in financial services, healthcare and many government and academic accounts. But that dominance is under fire as more companies see the need to add non-relational database capabilities to the mix.

Many of these same enterprise and government accounts are also sick of paying huge fees for yearly software and hardware upgrades in an era where they can easily move at least non-mission critical workloads to Amazon Web Services or some other cloud provider.

Oracle isn’t the only company affected —  Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, HP, and other legacy IT vendors — will continue to face tough times as these transitions play out.

Sunil Dhaliwal, founder of VC firm Amplify Partners, concur that this is a massive “multiyear” transformation that will shake legacy IT providers to their core as more workloads go to Software as a Service offerings which negate the need for massive in-house server upgrades.

Can the giants shrink-down and speed up?

That, and the solid acceptance of open source software is still something the legacy players have yet to deal with, although most of them have made huge acquisitions to bolster their SaaS and open source stories. (Oracle bought RightNow and others as a response to Salesforce.com and Workday, and its acquisition of Sun Microsystems put it into the MySQL and Java business.)

The thinking is that more enterprise players are buying compute, storage, networking and software like they “buy” electricity. While the traditional players see this change coming, it’s unclear if they will be able to adapt fast enough beat lower-cost, younger and more nimble players that were built for this new market.

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Revenue for Oracle’s “exa boxes” fell again, 23 percent year over year to $671 million from $869 million. Revenue on hardware systems support was  also down — 6 percent — from the year ago quarter.

As GigaOM has reported, Oracle has yet to hit on a winning formula for its highly engineered boxes although the company and its proponents maintain that the company makes good profit on each box it sells. It’s just that the revenue it makes on these high end boxes does not make up for revenue it had made on lower end “commodity” servers in the past.

On the earnings call Wednesday night, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison said the company plans to launch its next SPARC-based servers next week.

Said Ellison:

“Our new T5 servers have up to eight processors, and are more than twice as fast as the T4 systems that they replace. Even more important is our new M5 server, which has up to 32 processors and runs its Oracle Database over 10 times faster than the similarly priced old M9000 server it replaces. With the delivery of the M5 server next week, Oracle will finish upgrading every server in the SPARC product line dating from the time we acquired Sun.

He also said that Oracle’s delivery of lower-end boxes last year dinged average selling price.

“… we announced some lower-end Exadata systems, in our engineered space, and new customers have been beginning with the smaller systems, now that they’re available, eighth rack rather than quarter racks. And that’s somewhat lowered our ASP…” Ellison said.

Seeking Alpha has the full earnings call transcript.

Oracle’s server revenue was off 18 percent year over year in the previous quarter.

Overall, Oracle results came in below consensus expectations on license revenue and earnings per share, according to Nomura Securities analyst Rick Sherlund. “After robust 17% reported license and subscription revenues growth in Q2, this was down 2% y/y in Q3 (or down about 6% organic, constant currency), below the Street’s growth estimate of 8% y/y,” Sherlund wrote in a research note, adding: “The long anticipated hardware turnaround remains elusive.”

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Open-Xchange has around 70 million users through its contracts with roughly 80 providers such as 1&1 Internet and Strato. Its OX App Suite takes the form of a virtual desktop of sorts, that lets users centralize their email and file storage accounts and view all sorts of documents through a unified portal. However, as of an early April release it will also include OX Text, a non-destructive, collaborative document editor that rivals Google Docs, and that has an interesting heritage of its own.

The team that created the HTML5- and JavaScript-based OX Text includes some of the core developers behind OpenOffice, the free alternative to Microsoft Office that passed from Sun Microsystems to Oracle before morphing into LibreOffice. The German developers we’re talking about hived off the project before LibreOffice happened, and ended up getting hired by Open-Xchange.

“To them it was a once in a lifetime event, because we allowed them to start from scratch,” Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna told me. “We said we wanted a fresh office productivity suite that runs inside the browser. In terms of the architecture and principles for the product, we wanted to make it fully round-trip capable, meaning whatever file format we run into needs to be retained.”

This is an extremely handy formatting and version control feature. Changes made to a document in OX Text get pushed through to Open-Xchange’s backend, where a changelog is maintained. “Power” Word features such as Smart Art or Charts, which are not necessarily supported by other productivity suites, are replaced with placeholders during editing and are there, as before, when the edited document is eventually downloaded. As the OX Text blurb says, “OX Text never damages your valuable work even if it does not understand it”.

“[This avoids] the big disadvantage of anything other than Microsoft Office,” Laguna said. “If you use OpenOffice with a .docx file, the whole document is converted, creating artefacts, then you convert it back. That’s one of the major reasons not everyone is using OpenOffice, and the same is true for Google Apps.”

OX Text will be available as an extension to OX App Suite, which also includes calendaring and other productivity tools. However, it will also come out as a standalone product under both commercial licenses – effectively support-based subscriptions for Open-Xchange’s service provider customers – and open-source licenses, namely the GNU General Public License 2 and Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, which will allow free personal, non-commercial use.

You can find a demo of App Suite, including the OX Text functionality, here, and there’s a video too:

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From the blog post by Microsoft Corporate VP Bob Stutz outlining the Netbreeze deal:

“[Netbreeze]… combines modern methods from Natural Language Processing (NLP), data mining and semantic text analysis to support 28 different writing systems including German, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Traditional Chinese or Mandarin.  This is a huge benefit over competing solutions that translate to a common language then analyze sentiment from there. Additionally, they offer their customers the ability to monitor a wide array of social channels including Facebook, YouTubeand Twitter, as well as 6,000 online news websites, 18 million blogs and 500,000 message boards.”

Netbreeze combines this native language analytics with data mining and transactional and text analysis capabilities, Microsoft said in a statement announcing the deal. It plans to provide that data via its Dynamics CRM software, so customers’ marketing, sales and service teams will have more information at — if you’re pardon the cliche — their fingertips.

InterArbor Solutions principal and GigaOM PRO analyst Dana Gardner says vendors need to help their business customers better grok what’s being said about them online and react quickly. And that takes significant technological prowess given the sheer amount of Tweets, Facebook likes and the like floating around out there.

“The true picture or critical information about a business’s actual performance can’t be had without including social media data. But to make that social data into good, clean — and, therefore, actionable — data means you have to capture it at scale and integrate it swiftly, to make it something your systems can digest to analyze it. And so we’re seeing a rush to build, buy or partner to gain the means to do just that,” Gardner said via email.

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