Author: Jordan Novet

Application performance management player New Relic, running on a recent $80-million round of funding and aiming for a 2014 public offering, is adding support for native Android and iOS mobile apps, showing further evidence of the importance of mobile devices for business.

In a statement, New Relic called its new native mobile app monitoring capability the first service of its kind. Alongside visualizations of desktop performance, the Software as a Service (SaaS) shows developers in real time what consumers see on their mobile devices. The approach differs from the application performance management for mobile devices available from Compuware and Hewlett-Packard, as “they’re generating fake mobile loads in order to tell you how a fake mobile app is doing,” said Jim Gochee, senior vice president of product at New Relic.

With its mobile monitoring abilities, New Relic also differentiates itself from fellow application performance management vendor AppDynamics, which has been on a capital-raising spree of its own.

New Relic’s new mobile app support highlights the importance of smartphones and tablets in the cloud computing revolution, for consumer and enterprise applications alike. And the trend will likely persist. Forrester Research projects sales of mobile devices will keep growing. A 2012 Pew Research Center survey found that 25 percent of kids aged 12-17 use their phones — as opposed to PCs — as their primary means of accessing the internet. That figure is 15 percent for adults. In other words, mobile apps could become the main route for customers to communicate with businesses. That’s why providing better monitoring for them is a smart move.

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On the same day VMware said it would roll out its public cloud, the company also announced plans to release software that virtualizes networks with help from Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform product, in another example of the company’s shift beyond server hypervisors as its chief innovation.

It also marks VMware’s commitment to working with other players in the industry regardless of the underlying hypervisor and even networking protocols they might be using, as it seeks to move up the software stack in the data center.

VMware’s NSX software, which draws from the company’s existing vCloud Networking and Security software in addition to the Nicira offering, will let customers spin up virtual switches, firewalls, routers and other network elements in conjunction with hypervisors, regardless of whether they come from VMware. The NSX controller cluster will expand or contract customers’ virtual networks in harmony with changes in computing power that are reported by way of northbound API requests, according to a VMware blog post describing the many abilities of the new software.

NSX will ship in the second half of 2013, about a year after VMware said it would buy Nicira for $1.26 billion. Nicira has not named more than a handful of customers, large though they may be, and now its software-defined networking innovations could enter many more data centers.

Gains for VMware with NSX could negatively impact Cisco, F5, Riverbed and other vendors of network appliances that take time to deploy and can’t scale as quickly as modern storage and compute resources. It also puts VMware in competition with the ecosystem that Big Switch is trying to build around OpenFlow and its own controller software called Floodlight.

Big Switch open sourced Floodlight in January, and several startups and a few large companies are building products using that software. So while VMware is opening up to other hypervisors and promising customers that it will support a variety of protocols including OpenFlow, it is building its software-defined data centers play around a closed system.

That’s not a bad thing, and VMware’s ability to offer tested integration and the possibility of a more controlled experience will undoubtedly win over some customers, especially those already using VMware’s software. Meanwhile the more open approach from Big Switch will win its own adherents. With a $35 billion market cap, VMware has to not only keep innovating beyond its core business, but it also needs to protect its IP and margins while selling more software. The NSX product and strategy offers a way to do this. Now we just need to wait and see if customers bite.

Stacey Higginbotham contributed to this report.

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HG Data, a company that takes a big-data approach in providing salespeople with lists of potential leads on enterprise technology customers, has raised $2 million in venture funding. Epic Ventures led the round, which brings the total capital raised to around $3.5 million.

The company’s approach aims at disrupting the business of legacy IT market information vendors such as IDG and TechTarget, which count on employees to conduct phone surveys with IT people and generate statistics and reports. HG Data uses machine learning to update databases based on information that is or was available to the public and unstructured data from press releases, case studies, white papers and other documents. Customers can buy slices of the cleaned-up databases that HG Data keeps on its public cloud. For example, customers can drill down to see which companies use the 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010 editions of the Microsoft Exchange.

HG Data stands out from other data-focused IT market data providers, such as DiscoverOrg, iProfile and RainKing, because of the granular detail on the specific products used at enterprises, CEO Craig Harris said. The company has signed up around 50 customers, including Fortune 100 tech companies and marketing companies such as Harte-Hanks, Harris said. Use cases include identifying the best venues to place ads that target users of certain enterprise software and hardware and pitch them on an alternative. Looking forward, Harris said the company will enter other markets.

If HG Data can gain more traction while adding support for other industries and in other countries, the company could more quickly turn lead generation into yet another business function that’s done best with computers storing and processing information in the cloud. For now, though, old-school practices still play a role in lead generation.

Data scientists, chief technology officers and founders will take the stage to discuss myriad use cases for data science at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York next week.

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Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an algorithm that aims to make database cloud infrastructure more efficient by pushing more similar workloads onto fewer servers, rather than distributing them as widely as possible.

The premise is surprising, given that many database companies make a point of divvying up the responsibility of processing to keep latency low. But if cloud providers build on and adopt the researchers’ DBSeer algorithm, it could improve cloud database performance.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers run virtual machines on servers. That might not be the most efficient approach for databases, because resources aren’t shared among the applications running on any given server, the researchers argued in a recent paper. It might be better to observe current workloads, predict the needs of future workloads and bring together the different sorts of loads on different servers. Then cloud providers could adjust service-level agreements to promise a certain level of latency rather than charge customers based on the number and size of virtual machines, the researchers noted.

DBSeer might also be of interest to database appliance and server vendors. Teradata is incorporating the algorithm into proprietary software. Meanwhile, one of the MIT researchers, Carlo Curino, now works at Microsoft, and Chinese webscale server vendor Quanta funded the research.

So far, DBSeer, which is available on GitHub, has only been shown to accurately predict workload needs for transactional MySQL databases. More research would be necessary to apply the algorithm to other database management systems.

The change in thinking could make good financial sense. The more hardware in use inside a cloud provider’s data centers, the more expensive it is for customers. If the appliances could work more efficiently, costs could drop.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Johann Helgason.

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Software-defined storage vendor SwiftStack has taken on $6.1 million in Series A venture funding, giving more momentum to the movement to make object storage in the data center more flexible.

Mayfield Fund led the round, bringing the total raised to $7.6 million and enabling San Francisco-based SwiftStack to add employees and further build out its software.

Software like SwiftStack’s, which can run on hardware inside a company’s data centers and in private clouds, offers the public cloud’s advantage of easy and quick scalability inside private clouds, similar to what Amazon Web Services uses to power its S3 public-cloud storage product. It works with OpenStack Swift.

A handful of other software-defined storage startups with varying specialties have taken on venture capital in recent months including ScaleIO, Convergent.io and Nutanix. Last month Jeda Networks, a company that wants to move storage around the data center using virtualized networks, said it had raised venture capital, too.

SwiftStack thinks it can stand out in the software-defined storage space by catering its product to the needs of companies developing web, mobile and as-a-service applications, CEO Joe Arnold said. Those types of companies can benefit from being able to easily distribute storage on commodity hardware during usage and enrollment peaks.

Don’t expect the area to fade into the background. Navin Chaddha, managing director of the Mayfield Fund told me he thinks “it is the beginning of an era” for software-defined storage as a whole.

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Nipendo, a company with a business-to-business Software-as-a-Service network for managing invoices and other processes, has taken on $8 million in Series B venture funding. Horizon Ventures led the round. The money, which brings the total the company has raised to $12 million, will help Nipendo add business in the United States. It already operates in France, India and Israel.

In addition to invoices, the Nipendo network lets companies exchange requests for proposal, purchase orders, delivery information, feedback about suppliers and other information.

The first version of the product became available in 2010, Co-founder and CEO Eyal Rosenberg said. Now several enterprises in Israel use the product, along with some in the United States, such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Pfizer. The customer count has passed 3,500, Rosenberg said.

Nipendo faces competition from IBM’s Sterling Commerce and SAP’s Ariba. But legacy systems can take months to connect a vendor and a supplier, Rosenberg said, and Nipendo can do that in just a few hours, and it can also cooperate with enterprise-resource planning products from legacy vendors. As for newer competitors, such as Tradeshift, Rosenberg said, “The competitive advantage … is that we cover a much deeper space of this area, where we manage the whole process and we validate everything.”

Enterprises certainly can benefit from software that brings together invoices and other kinds of paperwork, instead of keeping it spread out on paper and in emails. The question is whether Nipendo will stand out as the top SaaS choice internationally.

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Sorry, Justin Bieber, your YouTube got hacked. Again.

The page was working fine at around 5:30 PT, but a couple of hours earlier, reports surfaced on Twitter about Justin Bieber’s YouTube channel, Kidrauhl, appeared to be hacked, sending fans running to Twitter:

someone hacked justin’s account (kidrauhl) on youtube omg

—nadia(@fredoswifey) March 8, 2013

Kidrauhl was hacked on YouTube. I’m praying nothing gets deleted. That’s where the memories are and where his journey started

— Smile Justin (@ForOurKidrauhl) March 9, 2013

NOW SOMEONE HACKED JUSTIN’S YOUTUBE?? If they delete any videos….. I’m doing to scream.

— smile justin∞ (@ShakeItForMeJDB) March 8, 2013

Other YouTube channels might have been hacked, too, according to some tweets:

Can’t believe most of the big YouTube channels have been hacked :O

— T-Dawg (@Tahmidhasnat) March 8, 2013

We’ve sent an inquiry to Google and will update this post as soon as we hear back.

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Data analysis didn’t start with Hadoop. Companies have been working with data to get insights for decades. While technology has changed, some of the rules from the past still apply, or ought to, as data gets bigger and bigger.

Jack Rivkin, an occasional blogger with deep investment experience, recently shared some of the best practices he was exposed to early in his career working on economic forecasts. He shared some sage suggestions for enterprises to bear in mind as they consider and implement big data strategies. Among his insights:

• Forecasting models can only be as good as the data inputs.
• Be skeptical and hedge when sharing the models by noting factors that could lead to different results.
• The less time it takes to process data, the more valuable it is.
• Constantly improve models and inputs.

Of course, big data isn’t wholly evolutionary — it does bring its own all-new opporunities and risks. Some of the world’s leading data scientists, IT executives and business users will address them at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York on March 20-21.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user luckey_sun.

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Server vendor Boston is releasing a platform of servers that use cell phone chips that developers can use to test their software for future ARM-based enterprise applications. Boston built the platform using Calxeda’s ARM-based servers, and has dubbed it ARM as a Service, or AaaS. the idea behind the product is to help developers move software from servers with brawny x86 cores to microservers with plenty of low-power wimpy cores.

With its AaaS, United Kingdom-based Boston will use software from Ellexus to essentially provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to customers. Once enrolled, developers will be able to spin up or down multiple nodes on Boston’s Viridis microservers, which use the low-power Calxeda systems.

The impact of the Boston AaaS could trickle down the supply chain to Calxeda and AMD as well as other companies making or planning microservers and, naturally, ARM itself.

As I reported last month, the microserver market is expected to keep growing, and the new ARM cloud could bump up the growth rate. One might say it could help kick some AaaS.

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A California company has an ambitious plan to capitalize on all the idle compute cores in the small Canadian city of Stratford, Ontario, and make them work together as a distributed data center, according to an article that appeared Thursday on VentureBeat.

The concept of distributed computing is not new. People in computer science circles have discussed it for decades. Implementations include Folding@home for medical research and SETI@home for discovering aliens. More recently, a Texas company came up with a way to harness compute power when gamers play certain games and pay users for compute cycles.

Still, if the project goes off without a hitch and spans not just personal computers but other connected devices as well, it would be an impressive feat. Success could cause people to rethink how, when and where data can be processed. It could even disrupt the data center construction industry. For now, though, some technical hurdles could lie ahead.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company behind the project, LeoNovus, envisions using the “dark cores” to form what it calls SMART Networks in press releases. To do so, LeoNovus is employing technology licensed from a company THAT LeoNovus’ CEO, Gordon Campbell, is involved in, Sviral, according to the VentureBeat article.

In Stratford, deployment began this week and should go across the entire network over the next few months. To sweeten the deal for consumers at home who might be reluctant to relinquish their dormant compute power, LeoNovus might give everyone a laptop and free internet access.

The LeoNovus project aims to provide more power by letting end users of all sorts of devices with compute cores give up their compute cycles. Presumably, enterprises could find value in the resources if it can become available. But implementation could be a bumpy road.

Different cores have different architectures and might not be able to easily work together. Uniting the compute power with a customer’s storage could take longer than it might in a more traditional data-center setting. There would be an abundance of compute power to use, but moving to use fewer cores or none at all might not be as straightforward for a customer as on, say, Amazon Web Services. And the business model cited in the article — the part about giving away computers and internet access — might not be the best way for LeoNovus to generate enough revenue to build out more SMART networks.

If the project works, LeoNovus could become a household name, and Stratford could become as widely known as data-center cities such as Prineville, Ore., and Quincy, Wash. And if it flops, well, it will keep being Stratford, just another corner of the world that dreams of becoming a tech hub.

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Software-defined-networking (SDN) player Pertino, whose software on public clouds enables wide-area networks (WAN) for users anywhere, has taken on $20 million in Series B funding, helping the company gear up to add more network services and customers.

Jafco Ventures led the funding round, while previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners also contributed. The company has now raised a total of $28.85 million.

Pertino has more than 700 customers. It has aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, and in time it will look to add enterprise customers, Pertino Co-founder and CEO Craig Elliott said.

The software lets customers easily spin networks up or down to meet operational needs, just as they can do with compute or storage power on Amazon Web Services and other public clouds. Also, the virtualized networks can move around to other clouds Pertino runs, in case of a natural disaster. The virtual WAN is designed to be as secure as the local-area network (LAN) that employees use inside a single office.

Software-defined networking (SDN) remains hot. But it isn’t necessarily one big market. While Big Switch Networks, Embrane and Nicira target SDN deployments in the data center, Pertino works on servers elsewhere. That’s why Elliott said doesn’t believe Pertino will take away business from those other SDN businesses and vice-versa. However, all of those companies focus on separating the control plane and the data plane with software that precludes the need for appliances that take up space and require considerable capital expenditures.

Cisco, Juniper Networks and other companies also are using SDN to optimize wide-area network (WAN) traffic, according to a GigaOM Research report (subscription required).

With plenty of SDN hype still hanging around, it’s not hard to imagine more companies jumping into the SDN-via-cloud market. But use cases are few and far between, and that could mean new entrants might have to wait before racking up a long list of production-scale clients. Pertino, meanwhile, could maintain its lead.

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Facebook engineers posted more details Wednesday on the back end of its Graph Search function, showing how the social network assigns numbers to users, places and other reference points and then lets users form queries and find answers using those numbers.

Unicorn, the software and search engine that makes Graph Search possible for at least hundreds of thousands of users, starts by giving every user a number. In the example cited by Facebook Engineering in a blog post, a fictitious person named David has a number, or fbid, of 10003. His home, New York, is 111. And “Downton Abbey,” a television show David has liked on Facebook, is 222. Friends of David get called up with the search term “friend:10003.” People who live in New York are at “lives-in:111,” and people who like “Downton Abbey” live at “like:222.” Put those three strings together, and you’ll get other friends of David who live in New York and like “Downton Abbey.”

In each search string, sequence is important. The post states that Unicorn serves up quick results by quantifying the importance of each element of a search string and then sequencing those elements in order of importance. But at a whiteboard session last month at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Facebook engineers said they want to automate the process of flipping around users’ search strings to trigger better search results. It’s one of a handful of things the engineers are looking to do to further improve Graph Search in order to live up to the company’s lofty goals for it, as I reported after attending the whiteboard session.

New likes per day alone number more than 2.7 billion, according to Wednesday’s blog post. At that rate, the number of possible fbids clearly will continue to grow, and the search strings will get longer, too. Turning out good search results in a couple of seconds could become more of a challenge.

It’s a good thing Facebook is innovating on the hardware side through the Open Compute Project. That work could become a higher priority if Facebook grows at a faster clip, although at least a few users are quitting for a slew of reasons.

Wednesday’s post does not mention advancements on Graph Search since the whiteboard session, even though the engineers said they would improve Graph Search in the months ahead.

Facebook engineers work with big data sets in several other ways, often with Hadoop. Facebook’s engineering manager of analytics infrastructure, Ravi Murthy, will moderate a panel on the future of Hadoop and business intelligence at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York in two weeks.

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If you keep documents in several clouds and if you like the simplicity and speed of the Mac’s Finder application for pulling up the stuff on your hard drive, then you may love a new approach for bringing all your clouds together in one elegant place: the Jolidrive.

Jolicloud, the company behind Jolidrive, now will allow users to access their spreadsheets, status updates, articles from one place. The company, which previously developed a cloud-based operating system, is informing its million-strong user base that it has added to the list of sites users can connect to store in one place files ranging from spreadsheets to status updates, from articles to albums, said Tariq Krim, CEO and founder of the Paris-based company. Last year the company came out with a more limited version that could pull from fewer sites, including Twitter and Facebook.

Sign up for the site now, and you’ll be able to connect your current Box, Dropbox, Flickr, Google Drive, Instagram, Skydrive, SoundCloud and YouTube accounts, for starters. Once multiple clouds are connected, signing in to Jolicloud means signing into them all — no more logging in to one at a time or having eight different tabs open for where your stuff is stored.

Krim talked again and again about making the user experience easy. Rather than trying to provide massive computing power or analytics, the company decided to focus on offering a simple product that users can connect with on an emotional level to simplify life.

Easy on the eyes

Indeed, the app is easy on the eyes — mine, at least. The main document-browsing screen expands and contracts, and a separate pane shows the data use of document-storage clouds. Plus, it’s nice to be able to quickly switch between clouds to check out different documents while staying in the same browser tab.

I found a few shortcomings while playing with it briefly on Wednesday. It can take three or four seconds to load lists of available documents, which is slower than Google Drive. I can’t search across multiple clouds, which is somewhat understandable, given that different document types have different categories of words to search for. Also, I can’t create, say, a Google Drive document on the fly. And when I click certain kinds of documents in Dropbox, at least, my browser opens a new tab and shows my Dropbox folder.

What’s more, I keep stuff in a few widely adopted silos that are not supported. (Quick examples: Google Mail, Twitter, WordPress. They might not be called clouds, but they do store content. Fortunately, Jolicloud will roll out an API soon, so other clouds can give Jolidrive users access to their other documents inside Jolicloud.

Aggregating your clouds

The site is free to all users — for now. Krim said the company could add a pro version, and it might make an option for business users, who might want to maintain personal clouds alongside separate accounts for work.

Other products or services, such as Facebook and Google+, let users bring together different kinds of content in one place. And Jolicloud bears some resemblance to cloud aggregators from startups Primadesk and Otixo. CloudMagic lets users search across many clouds.

Without a doubt, the Jolidrive can help users bring together disparate silos of their clouds. The Jolidrive API likely will prove more crucial as more clouds pop up, the cloud-storage wars rage on and more aspects of life move from the desktop to the cloud. It’s only a matter of time before some company — maybe Jolidrive, maybe not — takes this achievement in simplification, builds a comparable product for the enterprise with features hordes of business users could appreciate, and monetizes it.

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Looking to make it easier for more enterprise employees to drill down on sales data with a web-based product, Looker Data Services has raised $2 million from First Round Capital and PivotNorth Capital.

Based in San Francisco and Santa Cruz, Calif., Looker has developed LookML, a proprietary language based on the SQL programming language for relational data, to enable users with little to no development background to make their own custom SQL queries of sales data. Once a customer signs up, Looker’s analysts review the customer’s data and, over a few days, custom-build the tool with options for querying the customer’s various databases in specific ways, said Lloyd Tabb, Looker’s founder and CEO. Once in place, Looker can run on a customer’s on-premise hardware or on hosted servers.

Many companies offer business analytics tools, and they come in different flavors. Oracle, IBM and other legacy IT vendors offer data warehouse appliances, although those can take engineers months to implement, Tabb said. Other BI vendors, including GoodData, Mixpanel and Tableau, can store customer data in the clouds, but those display bigger-picture trends in event data and don’t correlate well with user data, which aren’t in clouds, Tabb said. And then there’s Redshift, Amazon Web Services’ new data warehouse product.

Despite all the competition, Tabb believes Looker has a place in the market. The company, which is emerging from stealth mode about a year after its establishment, has more than 20 customers, including Simply Hired.

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Bloomfire, a company based in Austin, Texas, has received $8 million in Series A funding from existing investors to continue to get enterprises to sign up for the Bloomfire’s web-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for sharing internal videos, quick answers, files and other information among a given company’s employees.

The new investment, from Austin Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, brings the total venture funding to $18 million. The company counts more than 200 companies as customers.

Along with the funding news, Bloomfire is announcing new features for its SaaS product, including the ability for multiple users to produce a single item, such as a post, and drag-and-drop functionality to quickly add content from outside the site.

The competitor question for Bloomfire, which identifies itself as a knowledge-sharing tool, is an interesting one. Because the site can do so many things, different kinds of companies can compete with different parts of the site, said the company’s CEO, Craig Malloy. Socialcast (see disclosure), Yammer and others let users maintain their own social pages and share information internally. With Jive Software, users can collaborate on products and projects and post updates. Quora-like companies for the enterprise, such as AnswerHub and Quandora, specialize in the internal Q-and-A component. And enterprises can share and store documents on Box, Dropbox and other sites.

Malloy looks forward to seeing how all the various technologies shake out in the next couple of years. It could be, he said, that even more blending will occur, with companies pulling in web conferencing. In any case, it’s worth wondering if it’s wiser to support a long of technologies or go big on just one.

Disclosure: SocialCast was backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Just a day after Violin Memory announced a new line of PCI-Express flash memory cards to provide quick-to-access storage inside servers, EMC said Tuesday it will offer new PCIe cards of its own.

EMC’s new XtremSF PCIe cards come in a few sizes. Enterprise multi-level-cell models with 550GB and a 2.2TB capacities are now available, and 700GB and 1.4TB models will come in the second quarter of the year. More sizes will follow. Last year EMC introduced two PCIe cards — 350GB and 700GB — under the name VFCache. Those two have joined the XtremSF line alongside the four new cards, said Barry Ader, general manager of EMC’s flash business unit.

EMC and others in the data center storage market have turned nearly 180 degrees from where they were just a few years ago, when they decried in-server flash memory from such companies as Fusion-io and sang the praises of separate flash memory arrays instead. Server-side storage eliminates the bottleneck between the processor and storage in separate boxes, decreasing latency.

It’s also a reaction to a fast-growing market, with webscale companies such as Facebook spending for fast-acting server-side flash storage. Fusion-io reported a 43 percent gain in year-to-year revenue for the fourth quarter of 2012, coming in at $120.5 million, according to figures on file with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

With more products coming into the flash PCIe market, prices could fall further, accelerating enterprise adoption. Then again, companies could still find a way to compete in this new market by offering different capabilities, which mean other companies would need to jump in before prices race to the bottom.

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Appcore, a company with on-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, has landed a $6 million round of Series B venture funding, showing that on-premise deployments can still play a role for enterprise IT.

Private investors, including some of Appcore’s first customers — Iowa-based telecommunications companies — led the round. A previous investor, Telephone Acquisition Co., also contributed. The investments brings the company’s total venture funding to $11 million and will go toward bringing on more business in North America and Asia.

Founded in 2008 and based in Des Moines, Iowa, Appcore has gained experience in renting racks and delivering software and cloud-based applications — one app provides off-site disaster recovery — to telecoms that already provide their customers with television, internet and phone service. Last year Appcore started expanding its market to other industries, said Jeff Tegethoff, the company’s president. Along with the Des Moines headquarters, the company has operations in Australia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore and New Zealand.

Appcore delivers its package “anywhere in the world in about 30 days,” Tegethoff said. On-premise deployments can help customers cut latency and protect data, and those advantages have proved more appealing to customers than public-cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services or Rackspace, he said.

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Anaplan, whose web-based sales- and financial-planning applications rely on in-memory database technology, plans to announce Tuesday that it has closed $30 million in Series C venture funding, and an additional $3 million will be announced later as part of the Series C round.

Anaplan will use its new funding to expand its customer base, improve its products and build out more data centers, said Fred Lalayaux, Anaplan’s president and CEO. Currently Anaplan runs one data center in Virginia and one in the San Francisco Bay Area. More will come online later this year in Amsterdam, Las Vegas and Singapore, he said.

Lalayaux acknowledges an abundance of competition. But he believes the company can deliver answers to simple business questions more quickly than in-memory databases from legacy vendors such as Oracle and SAP, while also providing employees with fresh information more quickly than Microsoft spreadsheets and databases. And smaller cloud-based financial-planning companies, such as Adaptive and Host Analytics, can’t predict the implications of complex problems as well as Anaplan’s software, he said.

Anaplan has racked up around 60 customers, including McAfee, Pandora and Salesforce. The new funding could help Anaplan chip away at still more of the market.

As Anaplan expands its own infrastructure to support its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business, it has begun talking about building a custom appliance for its own data centers and possibly for clients to have on premise as well, Lalayaux said. On the software end, he said, an application exchange for users to share among themselves is in the works.

Meritech Capital Partners led the new investment, and previous investors Granite Ventures and Shasta Ventures contributed as well. With the new funding, Anaplan has raised a total of around $49 million.

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The flash-storage world keeps getting hotter. Ahead of its expected IPO, Violin Memory, which already offers flash memory arrays, is adding solid-state PCI-Express cards for servers to its lineup.

As the company branches out with four PCIe cards, with memory capacity ranging from 1.37 terabytes to 11 terabytes, it will bump up against several competitors, including Fusion-io, LSI and Virident.

The Violin Memory cards are bootable, which can save time and minimize frustration. They also use less air flow than other flash memory cards, so customers can pack more cards onto servers. The lowest-capacity card costs $3 per gigabyte, and the price goes up to $6 per gigabyte for the others.

“We believe this (1.37 terabyte) card, with its price-performance level density, will allow the industry to start a broad adoption over the next several years,” said Don Basile, Violin Memory’s CEO.

The company can rest assured of a market for the new cards. Toshiba, already a major flash memory vendor for consumer products, will have licensing and distribution rights for the new Violin Memory intellectual property.

Violin Memory is planning to go public at the beginning of May, All Things D reported. Basile declined to discuss the timing of the product launch in relation to the IPO.

The flash storage market is nothing if not active. Last May, EMC acquired XtremIO; two months later, IBM bought Texas Memory Systems, and Pure Storage said it had secured a $40 million Series D investment. Just two weeks ago, flash storage array vendor Skyera announced a $51.6 million Series B round of funding.

Widespread enterprise adoption of flash memory seems to be a matter of time. With its new products, Violin Memory appears to be in a better position to ride the market wave.

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No-name server makers posted stronger year-to-year revenue growth than traditional powers such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to new Gartner data. The news, which falls in line with a trend going back to the third quarter of 2011, makes sense as webscale companies — Google, Facebook, etc. — demand inexpensive but custom-tailored servers for their data centers.

According to Gartner, the “other vendors” increased revenue almost 22 percent year over year for the quarter, beating out Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Oracle. HP, a perennial leader in servers, saw its worldwide server revenue decline 3.3 percent during the same period, while Oracle’s dropped 18 percent.

“Application-as-a-business data centers such as Baidu, Facebook and Google were the real drivers of significant volume growth for the year,” Gartner Research Vice President Jeffrey Hewitt said in a statement.

HP and Dell lost some business from cloud and hosting provider Rackspace, which turned to Quanta and Wistron for custom servers based on Open Compute Project designs. Quanta also captured business from Amazon and Facebook.

The Chinese search giant Baidu, which might be planning the world’s largest data center, with 100,000 servers, is reportedly giving its server business to Marvell Technologies.

If the trend continues, and smaller server makers such as Quanta keep gaining ground, Gartner might want to start breaking out the “other vendors” in its reports.

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