GigaOM’s Structure event this week reminds me of the well-documented relationship between economic crises and technological innovation: Hard times bring out the best in entrepreneurs, precipitating a creative destruction that resets the technology infrastructure and transforms business. From my vantage point here in the Silicon Valley, […] Read more »
A startup called Datahero launched on Thursday with a new cloud service that makes visualizing data as simple as a few mouse clicks, and $1 million in seed funding. The company’s ultimate goal is to make big data something you or I could do. Read more »
According to some doomsayers, innovation is dead and Silicon Valley is just a muck pond where social media companies breed and reproduce like mosquitoes. That’s not entirely true, but the face of innovation has changed. Cloud computing has made innovation something anyone can do. Read more »
Who needs a Ph.D. in statistics when you have the cloud? Machine learning is high data science, and it’s fast becoming something that anyone leverage to sell more handbags, or solve a research problem, or build the next LinkedIn or Facebook. Read more »
Farmeron isn’t your typical software-as-a-service business — it’s based in a small town in Croatia, and its customers are dairy farmers, not tech-savvy startups. Still, founder Matija Kopic’s just raised another $1.4 million to help take its big data services to farms around the world. Read more »
With more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Legacy IT vendors used to dealing with one or two ways of delivering their products and services to market, now must handle four, five, maybe more business models as cloud computing takes off. And many, according to Accenture, are not prepared for that complexity. Read more »
Just because a company is not a huge enterprise, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have big IT management headaches. That’s the problem SaaS startup Panorama9 seeks to solve with its eponymous Web dashboard launching in the U.S. now. Read more »
Cloud computing and big data are in the enterprise to stay, but making the most of them presents challenges for IT decision makers. The future belongs to those companies who can work through legacy tools, ongoing security issues and the data scientist shortage. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Intuit is plunking down $423.5 million for software firm Demandforce, in a bid to build out its services for small and medium-sized businesses. The deal provides Intuit with an automated marketing and customer communications offering that complements its existing business and accounting software. Read more »
DataPop, a startup using big data to deliver custom online ads, has raised a $7 million Series B round. The company’s technology uses big data techniques such as natural-language processing and semantic association to automatically generate online ads based on what a web user has searched for. Read more »
This quarter saw Amazon Web Services finally relaxing its public-cloud-only stance and launching services to support hybrid-cloud deployments. Meanwhile, Hadoop players moved to make their platforms more accessible to mainstream BI analysts and database administrators. A new quarterly report analyzes these trends and provides a near-term outlook. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
UK-based Notion Capital has announced a new fund focused on European cloud and software-as-a-service startups. So what will happen to it? We found out where — and how — that money is likely to be spent. Read more »
This quarter the EV market struggled to find its footing. Meanwhile, the smart-grid sector solidified and low-power technology proved itself important in the data center. Read more to learn what these news pieces and others mean for the larger space over the next few months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The recruiting ecosystem is changing, led by professional social networks like LinkedIn and Viadeo and companies like Jobvite and BranchOut, which are building Facebook apps for hiring and career development. The bottom line is that technology enables the recruiting process to be more streamlined, scientific and democratic. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The headline might sound like buzzword stew, but it couldn’t be any truer. For companies willing to make the leap to cloud services, there will be a lot of companies willing to make big data as easy as paying your bill every month. Read more »
Cloud computing is at the top of virtually every CIO’s interest list and is expected to grow 126.5 percent over the next two years. A new report on GigaOM Pro details each sector of cloud computing and forecasts a shift toward hybrid models in the enterprise community. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud video production platform provider Aframe has raised a Series A round to expand internationally. The funding was led by Octopus Investments and Eden Ventures, with participation from existing investor Northstar Ventures, and will be used to open new offices in Boston, NYC and L.A. Read more »
Five key technology sectors are enabling the smart city: smart grids, smart transport, smart water and waste management, smart building systems, and the enabling ICT platforms for the smart city. Key players like IT companies, telcos and utilities must learn how to harness those technologies, and quickly. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
We lift the lid on stealth startup Ezeep, which wants to reinvent printing for the mobile generation by using a cloud portal that gives businesses a simple and secure way to let guests carry out one of life’s mundane but necessary tasks Read more »
Precise’s Zohar Gilad explains how his company shaved more than $2 million from its annual IT budget by migrating its IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud. Read more »
As more companies put workloads on Amazon Web Services or other public cloud platforms, many are paying for more cloud than they need. That overprovisioning is the problem Cloudyn, an Israeli startup, is taking on with its new software as a service. Read more »
It looks like some of the bloom is off the SaaS rose. New numbers show the booming growth in valuations of SaaS companies is slowing after a long run-up as pure-play SaaS companies face more competition from legacy players. Read more »
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
All startup activity around cloud computing in the past few years has been great, but it also means there’s precious little room on the playing field for newcomers. Here are 10 cloud startups launched in 2011 that have a chance to make it big in 2012. Read more »
How does the cloud market for the next year look? There will be no silver linings or lemonade. This research note, part of GigaOM Pro’s outlook for 2012, examines startups’ chances to challenge traditional enterprise IT practices, cloud pricing models, the true state of federated clouds, and how IT jobs will change in the coming months. Expect plenty of defensive M&A, cloud lock-in, phantom data discovery, outages, availability headaches, pricing confusion and job displacement over the next 12 months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloudability, a startup that bills itself as “Mint.com for the cloud,” has raised $1.1 million in seed funding for its service that helps companies keep an eye on their cloud-computing spending. It recently let one user spot an exploit that could have cost the company dearly. Read more »
Ask Box.net CEO Aaron Levie about his company’s cloud storage business, and you’ll hear a long, excited answer that probably won’t include the word “storage” at all. He’ll talk about sharing, collaboration and universal access — anything but the core storage infrastructure that makes Box’s service possible. Read more »
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Up-and-coming Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Tier3 has made a significant contribution to the Platform-as-a-Service world by releasing a .NET implementation of the Cloud Foundry PaaS project. A fork project called Iron Foundry will serve as the primary source of .NET development within Cloud Foundry. Read more »
According to a new survey by CSC, cloud computing is not the money saver it’s sometimes made out to be. But don’t fret — it’s still a very valuable delivery model for IT resources. The cloud brings with a wealth of benefits around mobility, efficiency and jobs. Read more »
If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
SAP America’s decision to buy SuccessFactors and its human capital management expertise for $3.4 billion in cash, is just the latest acquisition of a vertically-focused SaaS player by a legacy software giant. Look for that trend to continue. Read more »
Analyst powerhouses IDC and Gartner both rolled out their latest cloud computing and big data predictions and statistics Thursday morning, and while some are bold, others should have you saying “Duh.” Here’s what they have to say, and how that squares with what I’m seeing. Read more »
Bessemer Venture Partners’ Byron Deeter shares his firm’s Cloudscape, a visualization of the leading companies in the cloud computing revolution, which Bessemer presented at its annual CEO Conference on cloud computing. Read more »
Retroficiency, a startup out of MIT that uses software and big data to create energy retrofits for buildings, has raised a round of $3.2 million from Point Judith Capital and has acquired the energy efficiency division of Nexamp, called Clean Energy Solutions. Read more »
Call it M2M, the Internet of Things, or a web that talks back, but once we start connecting devices and sensors we’re adding complexity to a system that’s already highly complex. Axeda wants to deliver a cloud with the intelligence capable of managing the connected world. Read more »
New research shows that software-as-a-service companies, which have been valued (much) higher than legacy software players, will continue to reap price premiums over the next 12 to 24 months. The numbers come from Martin Wolf’s M&A Advisors’ MW Index. Read more »
New Relic, the cloud-based startup that has become synonymous with the term “lean startup,” has raised a $15 million expansion round. It actually closed a $10 million round in October 2010 and has now raised $35 million in total, the venture funding belies New Relic’s success. Read more »
Marketo, a SaaS startup focusing on revenue performance management, has raised a $50 million round with Battery Ventures leading the way. Marketo has been on a roll, totaling $107 million in VC investment, and now earning upward of $40 million a year in revenue. Read more »
