Author: Barb Darrow

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Big data 2013: key trends and companies to watch
• 2012: The Hadoop infrastructure market booms
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud

We all know based on M&A activity that marketing automation is big. Now, Marketo has filed for an initial public offering valued at $75 million, according to an SEC filing.

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization
• 2012: The Hadoop infrastructure market booms
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises

MuleSoft wants to be the hub that connects your legacy on-premises applications with their mobile and web-based counterparts and now it has $37 million more in funding to achieve that mission.  The Series E round, led by new investor NEA, brings total venture investment in the San Francisco company to $81 million.

MuleSoft also announced its new “Anypoint Platform” which it paints as the hub for connecting elderly on-premises applications to the shiny, newer mobile and web-based apps that companies increasingly turn to.

The company supports all the major  publicly available application programming interfaces (APIs) — no mean feat since by its count there are about 13,000 of them now, up from about 100 in 2006. Back then, only new-fangled companies like Yahoo Amazon, and eBay offered APIs as a standard way to interact with their applications.

“The new enterprise feels different. You still have legacy stuff that needs to be connected to your newer SaaS and mobile platforms. Anypoint provides the blueprint to connect all that up,” said Ross Mason, MuleSoft founder and CTO said in an interview.

MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott siad the business of connecting all these enterprise applications represents a $500 billion opportunity, but one for which it must compete with a bunch of legacy vendors including Tibco and IBM (with its wild world of WebSphere). In some areas it also competes with newer companies like Apigee, but mostly it means that companies won’t have to turn as much to third-party systems integrators or hand code connections between its applications.

Salesforce.com is also a new investor in this round joining previous funders  Hummer Winblad, Morganthaler Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Bay Partners.

The latest cash infusion will help the company build up its sales and marketing presence and to keep building up its product. “We’re investing extremely heavily, this is all subscription based revenue which means this is a cash-consuming businesses,” Schott said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• New challenges for the IT organization
• A near-term outlook for big data
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Amazon Web Services is by far the biggest and most experienced public cloud provider. Accepting that, the next question is: what cloud vendor can give AWS a run for its money? Increasingly the money is on Google  – at least in compute capacity where Google Compute Engine is becoming a force to be reckoned with even though it only launched (in beta of course) just last June.

Scalr is clearly a big fan, but even if you don’t buy its rather impressive report card , there are other reasons that Google Compute Engine should be considered the biggest potential rival to AWS.

Google knows from scale

Even Google bashers will concede that the company understands massive scale. It has the data center fire power; it has the software tools to harness that power; and it has a deep engineering bench that includes several key hires from — you guessed it — AWS. A quick LinkedIn search shows some of these hires, but omits many. One of those is Sunhil James, who worked on the AWS Virtual Private Cloud and Direct Connect and who now heads up networking services and technologies for the Google Cloud Platform.

Multi-cloud strategies demand a back-up cloud

As big and great as AWS is, most existing and potential business customers will not lock into a single cloud provider. They are still bruised from the current generation of vendor lock in. On the other hand, they can’t afford to support too many. “You can only make so many bets, and it’s clear that Google is in this public cloud game to stay,” said one vendor exec who would not be named because his company does business with Amazon.

Companies who made early bets on GCE are Cloudscaling, the OpenStack player which said last fall it will support both the AWS and GCE APIs, and RightScale, a pioneer in cloud management and monitoring that signed up as GCE’s first reseller in February.

Google is serious about GCE

Let’s face it: Google does have a bit of a credibility problem for launching, then deep-sixing services. (Hello, er, goodbye Google Reader.) But no one can seriously doubt that GCE is a priority.

“This is no skunkworks. This is not some little company they acquired. There’s a big team on the engineering side and if you look at the data center footprint, the fiber, the tech expertise, the internal platform and tools, they are serious about this,” said the vendor exec.

Dan Belcher, co-founder of Stackdriver, a Boston startup, said the time is ripe for an AWS contender to surface. The industry, he said, appears to be waiting for someone — Google? Rackspace? Someone else? to challenge AWS.

“Clearly, Google’s strategy is to differentiate on performance (overall and consistency thereof,)” he said via email. “Our first test suggests that they are delivering on that promise … so far,” he noted. He also pointed out that GCE’s admin console UI needs work and that less than a year in, there are limited services and features compared to AWS. A new Stackdriver blog details its first impressions of GCE.

The big question is how performance will hold up when the service actually leaves beta and opens up to the real world. There are reportedly tens of thousands of users queued up and ready to jump in when that happens. “Sure it feels fast with my six instances in limited preview. How will it feel when I am sharing with the rest of the world? And what has Google done to limit the host, network and API contention that plague large AWS customers?” Belcher asked.

Lack of legacy baggage helps GCE

Microsoft Windows Azure is paying the price now for Microsoft’s huge installed base of Windows and .NET legacy applications. While it’s done a good job incorporating support for open-source technologies under the Azure umbrella, that support is not on par with Windows, at least when you ask developers outside the .NET world. “They are still waited down by their Windows and Office mentality,” said one vendor who weighed supporting Azure but decided against it. “There are aspects of Azure that are technically superior but then their APIs are attrocious,” he said.

On the other hand …

Skeptics will always wonder if Google’s heart is in anything other than internet search and advertising. And, Google, like AWS is not particularly known for working well with others in the partner community.

The other issue is that while Google Apps has gained traction in business accounts — largely because it’s so much cheaper than Microsoft Office —  one long-time Google watcher wonders if it will ever “get its enterprise act together.”  In his view, Google Enterprise Search appliance never got traction so Google has to prove its credibility outside internet search.

Going forward, Google will also have to offer a more comprehensive menu of services. And, most importantly, it will have to bring more enterprise workloads on board so all of those companies looking for an AWS backup (or alternative) can really put GCE through its paces.

We will be talking about public and private cloud adoption, gating factors to that adoption, and other hot-button topics at GigaOM Structure in San Francisco in June.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Forecasting the future cloud computing market

Many developers like to cobble together their own software-development-test-and-deployment platform(s) to take their code from inception to adoption.  Give them a Github account, a Jenkins server for continuous integration and their tool set of choice and they’re happy. But Cloudmunch, a Seattle-based startup is banking that many developers would be perfectly  happy to pay for a service that integrates and manages all of that for them so they can just — well just build software.

Cloudmunch portrays its offering as a “full stack continuous delivery” system that handles continuous integration, automated testing and continuous deployment. It supports both Github and Opscode Chef. Users can sign in with their Github ID to start what it now promises will be an integrated process to take their code from cradle to end user device.

This is part of the whole trend toward “democratizing” pieces of IT so that developers can develop what they want without having to wrestle with the set up and maintenance and updates of their tools.

“This illustrates the rather sexy notion of continuous development and delivery of code,” said Bryan Hale, VP of online services for Opscode.

Right now developers at smaller companies probably look at things like Werker which won GigaOM’s Launchpad Europe competition, Electric Cloud, CloudBees, CircleCI and Atlassian Bamboo to attack the continuous integration part of this problem. Larger companies might look at Nolio or legacy offerings from BMC and IBM for deployment and release automation.

Cloudmunch CEO Pradeep Prabhu acknowledges all of that competition, but maintains that his platform puts all the pieces of the puzzle together.  And, he notes, for $25  per month for one code repo and five nodes, CloudMunch lets developers focus just on their code by providing a “complete continuous delivery platform hosted, managed and maintained.”

If it’s as easy as advertised, that could be a compelling story.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Continuous delivery and the world of devops
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• How devops can reduce cycle times

In a departure from the standard cloud company playbook,  Nebula likes to tout a hardware component of its newly available Nebula One cloud solution. That core component — the Nebula Cloud Controller — plugs into existing standard servers and can connect to existing services, speeding deployment and lets Nebula position itself as a plug-and-play cloud provider. 

“We’re a computer systems company,” CEO and founder and OpenStack pioneer Chris Kemp told me recently. “We provide enterprises with a system that includes the standard servers they’re used to buying. They plug it in and can be up in running fast.” The controller yokes together “certified standard” servers from Dell, HP and IBM and ZT into a scalable cloud system, he said.

“To add capacity you just add a rack or two of servers,”Kemp said. The controller handles provisioning of the workload . That plug-in scenario could be attractive to many companies that want to implement cloud with minimal muss and fuss.

PARC has beta tested the Nebula One system for months (running with ZT servers). The research facility is predisposed to OpenStack because it prefers open source technologies and it went with Nebula because it wanted to minimize time and energy spent on set up. “We don’t want to do too much of the plumbing [work.] All that racking and stacking takes a lot of time. We want to push one button and deploy on demand,” said Surendra Reddy, CTO for cloud and big data futures at PARC.

How many OpenStack choices do we really need?

At this point — we’re in year four of the OpenStack journey — the various OpenStack providers — Rackspace, Internap, HP, Cloudscaling, IBM, Red Hat and others need to differentiate themselves both from each other and from other cloud provider using other technology. Even the most hard-core cloud booster will admit privately that there’s no need for dozens of slightly different OpenStack flavors in this market and some say consolidation is inevitable — the only question is when.

Nebula One’s ability to plug into existing systems and services adds a comfort factor for many IT buyers that other OpenStack releases lack.

“If you bring software into an enterprise, you end up in a conversation with the server people who want to know what the management system is, then you have to deal with the storage people and then the virtualization people who all hate each other,” he said. But, if you can bring in an appliance that plugs into existing systems, you can minimize the dissonance and blowback from those constituencies. And that could prove valuable.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map
• Infrastructure Q3: OpenStack and flash step into the spotlight
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud

No wonder Michael Dell (and friends) want to take his company private.  According to the company’s proxy, Dell must invest heavily in tablets — where Dell has thus far fallen short — and other areas to get competitive. But investing heavily is just the sort of thing that spooks shareholders of the beleaguered PC-and-server maker. Big time.

In a research note UBS analyst Steven Milunovich wrote:

“Mr. Dell and Silver Lake intend to pursue a more aggressive PC/tablet strategy and invest significantly in the enterprise segment. Consequently, earnings could be weak for two or more years, which would not please the public market.”

The Dell proxy lays out a raft of problems besetting the company including a “deteriorating outlook for the PC market” due  in part to the cannibalization of PC sales by smartphones and tablets. It also mentioned a faster-than-expected decline of PC sales into emerging markets, uncertainties around Windows 8 adoption and slower Windows 7 upgrades. As a result of all that, Milunovich is reducing his earnings estimate for Dell’s 2014 fiscal year from $1.70 to $1.30 and cut his estimate for the following year to $1.12.

The proxy also said that Boston Consulting Group  (BCG) warned Dell management of a shift to lower-margin products and services in its “end user computing” (EUC) business. And BCG concluded that “as a result of a likely persistent decline in the premium segment of the EUC business, unless the Company changed its strategy to become more competitive in the lower-argin segment… [it] would require years of aggressive restructuring in order to maintain its value, and would face the risk that its decreasing scale would render it less competitive.”

BCG said Dell’s Enterprise Solution and Services (ESS) business also to invest in research and development and hire a bigger sales force. As we all know R&D and enterprise sales folks are pricey. All Things Digital has more on the proxy’s depressing take.

DELL data by YCharts

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• A near-term outlook for big data
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

A Google April Fool’s Day post on Google Nose, a new service in beta that “leverages new and existing technologies to offer the sharpest olfactory experience available” may have been a joke, but it’s not that far from reality.

Just ask IBM which last December said technologies that endow computers with a sense of smell are on the cusp of reality, if not broad adoption. Or  Cyrano Sciences,  which the Washington Post points out, is working to give machines a sense of smell. An electronic nose that could sniff out explosives and food contaminants, could be hugely useful.

IBM, which fields a prodigious research organization, is convinced that endowing computers with human-like senses is a key focus and outlined its thoughts in its annual list of five technologies to watch last December.

Such technologies include chemical sensors that emit an odor when they detect some sort of pattern. “You can paint chemical sensors on a surface and when they detect a pattern, they give off a smell — you could make a rich paint with all sorts of sensors that mimic things that you like,”  IBM fellow and VP of innovation Bernie Meyerson told me at the time.

If integrated with a smartphone, for example, these technologies could tell from your breath that you have or are about to get a cold and enable your doctor to diagnose you remotely based on that information and prescribe treatment.

So a computing device with a nose that knows is really not all that crazy.

 

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space

Amazon mobilizes

Amazon Web Services, which has focused a ton of resources on wooing enterprise developers with higher end services is apparently staffing up a broader mobile development effort as well, as evidenced by job posts signaling the creation of a new group to be based in Palo Alto, Calif.

The new group appears to be dedicated to building client-side functionality — but observers say it’s likely that it will do more than that. Most developers access their AWS goodies from their PCs, but we’ve seen more users of all types supplementing or even replacing their laptop and desktop PCs with smartphones and tablets so it makes sense for Amazon to respond to that trend. (It already lets folks access the AWS management console with Android and iOS devices. 

And, as GigaOM PRO analyst Janakiram MSV had already noted in a post (subscription required) last month,  AWS already offers many of the building blocks– Amazon EC2, S3, DynamoDB, and RDS – needed to expose mobile backend services. And its Android and iOS software development kits (SDKs) make it easy for developers to consume these services, he said.

Google inks patent non-aggression pact

In hopes of staving off the sort of patent litigation that has embroiled the mobile phone market, Google last week unveiled a sort of nonagression pact – a patent pledge under which it says developers  can use or sell the technology described in the patents without fear of future lawsuits, as GigaOM’s Jeff Roberts reported. The pledge includes a  controversial patent issued last year that covers a form of parallel processing known as MapReduce. That particular patent provoked concern that Google could monopolize tools like Hadoop, which is an integral part of the “big data” revolution.

PayPal caught in cross fire

The notion that any large company will completely rip-and-replace one technology stack for another came under the microscope this week after reports surfaced that PayPal was doing just that — yanking out VMware technology in favor of OpenStack. As it turns out, PayPal, a unit of eBay is building out a big project with OpenStack, with help from OpenStack integrator Mirantis, but stressed that it would also continue to use VMware — whether that’s vSphere and associated management tools; vCloud Director; or just VMware’s hypervisor.

It’s interesting that the clarification came via a VMware blog post by a VMware executive quoting a PayPal exec. Let’s face it — companies rarely yank any technology that’s working. They usually launch new projects with new technologies and keep running whatever works in tandem. But clearly these reports hit a nerve at a time when VMware is struggling to show that its new “hybrid public” cloud strategy has legs and when OpenStack appears to be gaining momentum as a cloud platform.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises

It may be a cliche, but it’s also true: VMware is at a crossroads. The company, which dominates server virtualization in company data centers, continues to struggle for credibility in the cloud — and it’s new plans for hybrid vCloud service hasn’t done much to fix that.

This “VMware vCloud Hybrid Service,” to be run from partner data centers and sold by VMware’s channel but managed by VMware, is slated to come online later this year. VMware pitches it as a way for the company’s 480,000 customers “to reap the benefits of the public cloud without changing their existing applications while using a common management, orchestration, networking and security model.”

But VMware faces a raft of challenges.

Too little too late?

First of all, many of those VMware customers have already tested out other cloud offerings — Amazon Web Services, or a third party service provider, MSP or hosting company, they’re already in the cloud in some way. AWS, for better or worse, has set the bar high when it comes to pay-as-you-go services for developers and higher-level managed services for other constituencies in the enterprise. Even solid VMware shops are testing out alternatives for different use cases, as we learned in last week’s big PayPal does/doesn’t dump VMware for OpenStack kerfuffle.

Fractious partner relationships

Second, VMware’s existing cloud partners — including big service providers and telcos offer VMware’s vCloud Director as an option but several of those partners, speaking privately, aren’t wild about it. They say it’s under-featured and expensive. And, nearly all of them offer other — less costly — options to vCloud Director including OpenStack.

The fact that VMware will pick certain service providers over others to host this cloud means it will tick off others.

“Nearly all of the service providers were already hedging on vCloud Director because of cost issues and now all those that weren’t already hedging are aggressively moving in that direction,” said an exec with one vCloud Director partner who requested anonymity for obvious reasons.

Forrester cloud analyst James Staten agreed that VMware stepped on “xSP” partner toes, but said it had no choice.  ”None of its partners — not even the vCloud Data Center partners —  were really offering the full vCloud Director cloud experience as VMware views it. And it felt it needed to do this to really help educate buyers on the full capabilities of vCloud Director,” he said via email.

The bigger problem, is that VMware is behind the curve when it comes to full pay-as-you-go cloud capabilities. And the claim that customers running vSphere internally and vCloud Director in the cloud get fully interoperable elastic cloud services across sites,  is, untrue, said Carl Brooks,  internet infrastructure services analyst at The 451 Group.

“If you run vSphere in house and vCloud outside, you can get very basic capabilities — virtual storage and virtual servers– but that’s very little compared to what you get from any other hoster these days,” Brooks said. With vCloud director, “it’s like VMware is giving you a 1978 Pinto and saying it’s a Formula 1 car.”

VMware would argue that the level and type of services that a third party service provider offers depends on the service provider itself, not on VMware, which supplies the software stack and tools. That’s one big reason that VMware will manage and run this new hybrid cloud, but proof will be in the pudding.

And VMware’s biggest problem — the perception that its software is a proprietary and expensive — remains unchanged.

Banking on the brand

But, VMware has its advantages. For one thing, there are all those customers. If it can stem defections to OpenStack or other cloud technologies and convince enterprise customers that its cloud is a more secure but also cost competitive alternative to AWS, it has a shot. VMware also spun off a bunch of projects to the Pivotal Initiative so it can better focus on its priorities — although Pivotal is also focusing on cloud initiatives.

The problem there is AWS has a 7-year head start and rolls out new services (and price cuts) practically every week. And it’s getting more enterprise savvy and is showing more interest in co-existence with private clouds preferred by regulation-constrained industries.

OpenStack remains a wild card. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger was careful to talk about the company’s commitment to heterogeneous environments when he outlined the new strategy. And, after all, VMware is a member of OpenStack now, a development that caused a lot of head scratching.  One big reason for OpenStack momentum is that VMware’s rivals and enterprise customers alike have vested interest in preventing VMware from parlaying its on-site virtualization dominance into the cloud.

Staten maintains that VMware’s hybrid-public cloud is trying to be bold without being too bold. ”Any way you look at this, it seems like a half-hearted effort which means its likelihood of success is low,” Staten said.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user fontplaydotcom

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Federated clouds: for when one cloud isn’t good enough
• There is more to Node.js than buzz
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses

Cumulogic, the erstwhile Java Platform-as-a-Service company that is morphing into a broader cloud platform services provider, has new seed funding from Crunchfund that it will use to build out its sales channels. CEO Michael Soby would not disclose the amount of the round but said it brings total funding to about $1 million.

The Santa Clara, Calif. company has also signed deals with a handful of integration partners that give it broad geographic coverage. They are: Redapt, based in Redmond, Wash.; Cloud Technology Partners out of Boston: CloudOps of Montreal; Shapeblue in London; Cloud Niners in Egypt with another integrator in Asia to be announced soon, Soby said.

Cumulogic’s rather ambitious pitch is that it will enable companies to mix and match cloud services from many providers and run them on the cloud infrastructure of the customers’ choice whether it’s VMware’s vCloud Director, Cloudstack (Citrix was an early investor), OpenStack or Amazon Web Services. Cumulogic also claims that service providers or enterprises themselves can manage all of those choices from the proverbial “single pane of glass.” That’s a big promise.

“If a developer wants to deploy MongoDB against Amazon and a load balancer against Rackspace, he can do that through our platform,” Soby said in an interview.

And, for the many companies still nervous about deploying critical applications in the public cloud, it will also let them re-create AWS-style pay-as-you-go services inside their firewalls, Soby said. A pre-release version of Cumulogic Cloud running on HPCloud is available here.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q4: Big data gets bigger and SaaS startups shine
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud

Rackspace says it’s making its cloud more developer-friendly with its acquisition of Exceptional Tool Services, a provider of error tracking and Redis To Go.

The buyout, terms of which were not disclosed, will help Rackspace better serve developers who want to easily set up and tear down their test-and-dev environments without sweating the details, according to a company executive.

“We built out our infrastructure for system administrators to begin with  – and sys admins are comfortable setting up their own email servers, databases and hardware while developers would prefer to talk to an API and launch MySQL as a service,” said Bret Piatt, director of corporate strategy and development for San Antonio-based Rackspace.

“Developers like their technologies to be delivered as a service,” he added.

San Francisco-based Exceptional offers Exceptional.io, which tracks errors in web applications and reports errors back in real time; Airbrake.io, which does the same for other applications; and Redis To Go, which makes it simpler to manage instances of the popular Redis key value store.

This deal comes a month after Rackspace bought ObjectRocket for its MongoDB-as-a-service expertise,  another hot button for developers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud
• The role of converged infrastructure in the data center

So this is weird. On Wednesday night, a VMware exec posted a statement from PayPal on his blog outlining PayPal’s plans to pursue a hybrid cloud strategy.

The statement VMware ran (with permission) from Nat Rajesh Natarajan, PayPal’s VP of platform engineering and operations, appeared two days after stories surfaced here and here about PayPal dumping VMware in favor of OpenStack. That juicy tidbit was part of stories outlining Mirantis’ plans to open source some of its own OpenStack technology. Mirantis is the integrator implementing the OpenStack project at VMware. It didn’t take long for the backtracking to begin.

And then, VMware weighed in, on behalf of itself and Paypal, in a blog by Bogomil Balkansky, VMware SVP of cloud infrastructure platform, with a quote from Natarajan:

 “PayPal is focused on delivering agile platforms that seamlessly scale across multiple cloud environments. Our initiative with OpenStack is intended to enable agility, innovation and choice. We’re not interested in a “rip and replace’ approach. In fact, this collaboration will help us utilize robust virtualization technologies such as VMware. They are a valued PayPal partner, and we intend to continue leveraging their core strengths in our cutting edge cloud environment.”

Oooookayyyyy. Does anyone else find it odd that a VMware senior vice president felt the need to quote a customer saying that VMware remains “a valued partner?”  This just shows how fraught the notion of technology changeovers can be for incumbent vendors. I’ve asked PayPal again for further comment on the VMware blog — which was sent to me by PayPal, by the way — and will update when it comes.

Balkansky went on to write: “Yes, PayPal has given us permission to post Nat’s words. We’d never speak on their behalf … this is their story to tell.”

So now I guess we’ll have to wait for PayPal to tell it.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud
• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

The only thing that might be tougher than monitoring all the cloud service and price changes coming out of Amazon Web Services and other providers is keeping track of all the services that track all those cloud services and price changes.

RightScale maintains that its long history of monitoring AWS and other cloud activities for customers gives it an advantage here. It tracks price changes across the major clouds —  Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace and offers a free service to folks wanting to tap into that knowledge.

“We track 11,000 or so cloud prices across six clouds. People can use that data to help forecast their cloud costs into the future and tweak the deployments they already have,” said Kim Weins, VP of marketing for RightScale.

RightScale says there have been 29 price changes across AWS, GCE, Azure and Rackspace Cloud over the past 14 months, and, frankly, that number seems low to me. In November alone, there were something like six cloud storage price cuts between AWS, Google and Microsoft.

And that’s what RightScale will continue to do, pressing into a service technology it acquired last year with its acquisition of ShopforCloud, which it renamed Planforcloud.

In one respect, RightScale is in a good spot because it can claim expertise across the major clouds. Last year it said two-thirds of its customers ran multiple clouds and newer data is tracking the same way, Weins said.  As more business-capable cloud services come out of the OpenStack crowd — Rackspace, HP, IBM, Cloudscaling and others, being able to tap into multiple cloud data and aggregate it on one dashboard could be a draw.

On the other hand, AWS remains by far the largest cloud provider and as we have seen over the past year, Amazon is rolling out more Rightscale-like services of its own, notably OpsWorks.

In other words, hang on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud
• Amazon’s DynamoDB: rattling the cloud market
• Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs

Demandbase, the B2B marketing service, which combines information about your business affiliation from your IP address and other cues, now has $15 million more in funding to beef up its sales and marketing, keep building its database worldwide, and develop new products.

Scale Venture Partners and Omniture, the web site tracking company which is now part of Adobe Systems,  led the round. Existing investors Sigma Partners, Altos Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Adobe, which is also a Demandbase customer.  Total funding for the 7-year-old company now stands t $44 million.

The San Francisco-based company  will use the new money to build out its treasure trove database worldwide; add more sales and marketing muscle; and create new products and features.

GigaOM Pro analyst David Card is impressed with Demandbase. “They’re  building a database that translates IP addresses into companies so that you could present content or offers based on who the user likely worked for (which  is probably more useful in most B2B situations than recent behavioral tracking or guessing at their demographics. They claim to use signals other than IP address, too, and they claim what you can get from the registries isn’t timely,” he said.

the company competes with companies like Neustar or Quova, which also use IP targeting; Bizo which works in advertising technology by analyzing cookie information;  adn Gravity which does personalized marketing, but Demandbase would argue it combines all much of this in one service — and it doesn’t use cookies.

Other custmoers include a  list of tech players including Dell, Cisco/Webex,HP/Arcsight Informaticaand NetApp

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Report: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech
• Why the Hoopla About Hadoop?
• The state of cross-platform media measurement

Amazon Web Services runs on tons and tons of shared hardware. That’s a huge benefit in terms of cost but also spooks customers with strict regulatory requirements that prevent them from running their applications on shared infrastructure.

But now, as Amazon tries to woo these picky customers, it’s trying to replicate some of the perks that come with dedicated, on-premises hardware. That’s what the new CloudHSM service is about. Traditionally, a Hardware Security Module is a dedicated, hardened box for storing keys and running cryptography. Amazon says it can bring that dedicated security to its customers within its infrastructure.

.

In a Tuesday night blog post, Amazon said CloudHSM:

“brings the benefits of HSMs to the cloud. You retain full control of the keys and the cryptographic operations performed by the HSM(s) you create, including exclusive, single-tenant access to each one. Your cryptographic keys are protected by a tamper-resistant HSM that is designed to meet a number of international and US Government standards including NIST FIPS 140-2 and Common Criteria EAL4+.”

Each CloudHSM provisioned for the customer incurs an upfront, one-time $5,000 fee and then an hourly rate of $1.88 per hour or $1,373 per month. Pricing is  here.

Bringing on-prem perks to public infrastructure

Amazon has made progress in offering more enterprise-grade cloud capabilities with its GovCloud services and Virtual Private Cloud capabilities. But still, even some of the biggest AWS customers will only put parts of their workloads on the Amazon cloud. The mission-critical goodies stay on premises or on private clouds.

That’s why Amazon has to get more acclimated with private cloud capabilities — observers say one reason that AWS might be building a private cloud for the CIA, as has been reported, is to prove its credibility there.  And that’s why we’ll be seeing more services like this CloudHSM service.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• Microsoft Azure: What It Is, What It Costs and Who Should Care
• How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look

Developers are always on the lookout for new, better, faster, cooler tools, languages, compilers. And the popularity  of these toolsets ebbs and flows. One week Scala is at the top, the next it’s Go language.

Last week it was Sawzall‘s time to shine. The language, named after the popular saw that cuts through anything (and I mean anything), comes out of Google.

Silvius Rus, director of big data platforms for Quantcast, gave Sawzall a shout-out during a Structure Data Guru panel last week. ”It’s a lightweight language developed by Google that ridges procedural and interpretive languages,” Rus said.

Michael Driscoll, CEO of Metamarkets and moderator of the panel, later explained why that’s important. With a declarative language, the programmer tells the computer what to do in almost English-language-like sentences. To tell the computer to draw a circle, a declarative or imperative programmer might say “draw.circle with a size attached,” Driscoll said.

Procedural languages, on the other hand, are much more detailed step-by-step instructions — they sound more like math. A procedural approach would “define the actual pointer and tell it to move one degree to the left and one degree up and the square root of 2 up to the diagonal and repeat X times,” Driscoll said.

Sawzall is a nice blend between a declarative language that might be too high level to do all of what the programmer really wants and procedural, “which is way too in the weeds” to be fully productive, Driscoll said. More broadly, Sawzall is a powerful and compact language for log data aggregation and transformation. And, he added, it plays well with Hadoop MapReduce.

New toolsets for webscale computing

Another tool ranking high on the hit list was YARN (or Yet Another Resource Manager) aka MapReduce 2.0, cited by Todd Papaioannou, founder and CEO of Continuuity is a fan.

Yarn was built to “just think about mass-produced jobs.” Continuity is building a real-time streaming engine called Big Flow and using Yarn for all the resource deployment and management.

He also gave kudos to Weave, a higher-level framework. Weave “allows you to build a much wider class of applications on top of Yarn. So,t Yarn is  … something that we will be going forward with for at least the next half a decade [and] Weave allows you to actually build more wide scale applications on top of that.”

Bhaskar Ghosh,  senior director of engineering at LinkedIn, touted Helix, a generic distribution cluster manager developed at LinkedIn and which is now an Apache incubator project.  Helix simplifies distributed system development by separating cluster management from the primary component tasks of a distributed system, according to LinkedIn.

Kafka, Storm slake the thirst for real-time frameworks

Driscoll also sees traction for Kafka, a real-time framework for ingesting and managing data streams and Storm, out of Twitter, for processing those streams. “Think of Kafka and Storm as the HDFS and MapReduce analogs but for real time — Kafka for storage and Storm for compute,” Driscoll said.

On its blog, LinkedIn describes Kafka as a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system — also now an Apache project. Kafka is used by Twitter and Square for log aggregation, queeuing, and real-time monitoring and event processing.

This list is by no means complete. When I spoke with Github co-founder Tom Preston-Werner a few weeks ago, he said Clojure, heretofore a rather obscure dynamic programming language, is gaining momentum. “It’s getting a lot of buzz round on the enterprise side,” Preston-Werner said.

The continued popularity of the Java Virtual Machine has breathed new life into languages like Clojure and Scala, he added. Indeed, the JVM remains nearly ubiquitous and that is a huge advantage for languages that support it. If you’re a developer, you want the widest possible audience.

“The JVM is still the modern foundation that lets you run everywhere and Clojure has benefited from that,” Driscoll agreed. “It’s certainly gained steam among an elite set of programmers in Silicon Valley.”

Sawzall photo courtesy of Flickr user Charles & Hudson

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back

This is what happens when you’re a high-profile job switcher, especially in the gossip-mad tech world. People talk about you. And that’s what happened to Mark Hurd.

Reports surfaced last week that Hurd, who is co-president of Oracle, was on the short list of prospective Dell CEOs from Blacktone 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

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Will Storage Go the Way of The Server?
• IT spending update, third quarter 2012
• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data

People love the idea of 3-D printers. These devices can build (or print) all kinds of things from toys and (gulp) guns to houses.  And some tech visionaries say as the price of the technology comes down, 3-D printers could reinvigorate the manufacturing sector, even in high-cost economies like the U.S. which is now hard-pressed to compete with China and other lower-cost providers in manufacturing.

New Gartner research shows that the price for “enterprise-class” 3-D printers is falling enough that more businesses can (and should) start experimenting with them. It estimates that by 2016, these big-boy 3-D printers will cost as little as $2,000. But there’s no reason to wait. Companies should start experimenting with the technology now since there is minimal risk of capital or time.

In a statement, Gartner Research Director Pete Basiliere said:

“Businesses must continuously monitor advances to identify where improvements can be leveraged … We see 3D printing as a tool for empowerment, already enabling life-changing parts and products to be built in struggling countries, helping rebuild crisis-hit areas and leading to the democratization of manufacturing.”

Companies that jump in early can get a more realistic grasp of material costs and the time it takes to build parts and components, Gartner said.

To be sure, some affordable technology is already available, at least, to churn out small items. The Makerbot Replicator 2 desktop 3-D printer, which made a splash at SXSW, lists for $2,199. Makerbot is also working on a 3-D scanner to ease the measurement and digitization of what needs to be manufactured. Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis told GigaOM that the Makerbot Digitizer, due this fall, will give creators another way to move designs between the physical and digital worlds. If you want to replicate a physical item, you scan it into the system which digitizes it and builds a 3-D blueprint which can be fed into the printer.

MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito is a huge fan of 3-D printing. At a recent event broadcast by the BBC, Ito reiterated his enthusiasm for the technology which he says can make high-quality manufacturing a key part of the U.S. economy again and boost the “maker movement” overall. As 3-D printing gains traction, more manufacturing may come back to the U.S. Ito is also investing in the sector. He, along with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, has invested in 3-D printing startup FormLabs.

In theory, the availability of inexpensive 3-D printers means that manufacturers can afford to make small lots of goods and then quickly change up their production lines to meet new demands. This technology has spawned a new class of hardware-oriented startups and efforts. With the time-and-cost savings 3-D printing can provide, “hardware really could be the new software.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Themes for a connected world: GigaOM RoadMap review
• The Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters