Behind every successful mobile startup is a handful of power players guiding the founders. Smart and savvy investors may give you a kick start, or a corporate strategic partner might chip in some expansion capital and join your board. In celebration of these key insiders, AlwaysOn is seeking nominations for your favorite Mobile Power Players.
The folks that have made the Mobile Power Players list so far are listed below.
This is a follow-on blog post on HP’s OpenFlow announcement (HP Takes a Shot at the Hardware-Centric Network) as it relates to the impact that OpenFlow and the subsequent commoditization of network hardware could have on overall data center demand.
Many of today’s production data centers are static by nature. They are filled with a myriad of specialized appliances that are all potential bottlenecks to the flow of data between ever powerful servers and devices.
AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its second annual OnMobile Top 100 Private Companies Competition. We're looking for the top emerging mobile companies that are creating new business opportunities in the high-growth mobile markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:
I didn’t know whether I should chuckle cynically or slow clap the recent hubris of an Amazon executive, quoted in InformationWeek, with a tech prediction set to be fulfilled in a mere ten years: Amazon: Era Of Data Centers Ending:
The era in which most big companies operate their own data centers is coming to a close. Instead they’ll turn, slowly but surely, to the cloud. That’s the bold prediction Amazon’s Adam Selipsky, VP of product marketing, sales, and product management, made Thursday at Amazon’s Web Service Summit 2012 in New York.
A recent and rather ambitious outlook on Cisco at Motley Fool entitled “Cisco and the Golden Age of the Internet “ talks about the rise in internet traffic and the growth potential it holds for companies like Cisco. While the article does mention competitive pressures (from the likes of IBM, HP, DELL and JNPR), it underestimates the impact of disruptive technologies on the burgeoning networking equipment space.
AlwaysOn is proud introduce the third annual OnDemand 100-the top emerging Internet companies disrupting the established enterprise, reinventing legacy data streams, and pioneering cloud computing and SaaS.
The AlwaysOn editorial team, along with partners at Battery Ventures, KPMG, Hewlett-Packard, KPCB, Greycroft Partners, International Venture Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Emergence Capital Partners, SAP, Intel, Meritech Capital Partners, Advanced Technology Ventures, Bridge Bank, Fenwick & West, Silicon Valley Bank, and industry experts across the globe scoured the entrepreneurial community to identify the top 100 private companies that are recreating data management, customer relationships, and infrastructure and building solutions that will shake up the industry and lead to huge value creation opportunities.
The AlwaysOn Power Players in the Cloud list honors the most influential people in the banking, venture capital, legal, and accounting world who support on-demand entrepreneurs that are bringing massive technology breakthroughs to the cloud, on-demand, and SaaS world. These individuals and their firms are the infrastructure workhorses behind the ideas that make the Global Siliconn Valley an incubator for success, creating strong digital media companies that are building forward-thinking, indispensable products.
Zuora is an enterprise software company that designs and sells SaaS applications for companies with a subscription-based business model. Zuora's applications are designed to automate billing, commerce, and finance operations, and are deployed on-demand, in the cloud, giving the company a unique understanding of the SaaS model and the demands of companies delivering subscription-based products and services in today's fast-paced cloud environment.
Last week, I had the opportunity to watch the simulcast of IBM’s unveiling of its latest Smarter Analytics offerings aimed at helping organizations contend with their escalating ‘Big Data’ needs. I was particularly interested in this event because of THINKstrategies’ upcoming Cloud Analytics Summit which will examine this same topic.
IDC estimates enterprises will invest more than $120 billion to capture the business implications of their burgeoning internal and external data sources by acquiring a combination of analytics software, systems and services by 2015.
The IT thought leaders of tomorrow are today building hybrid clouds spanning extremely efficient, vertically scalable data centers with powerful and increasingly software-centric infrastructure. They’re building private clouds as their base and then renting public clouds for the spike. Today they are experiencing the challenges that will be rippling through Fortune 500 companies during the next 5 years as enterprises become more IT-centric and data centers replace ever more factories and file cabinets.
Today’s news of the merger of Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne not only adds a major new player to the rapidly growing Cloud consulting world, but also shows that there are plenty of new business opportunities for consulting and other value-added service providers in the Cloud.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with Cloud Sherpas, it is one the largest consultancies focused exclusively on helping organizations adopt Google Apps and was recently named the Google Enterprise 2011 Partner of the Year. (Disclosure: I did a webinar in 2011 on behalf of Exoprise in conjunction with Cloud Sherpas.) GlobalOne has been quietly building a multinational consulting practice focused on salesforce.com, and is a salesforce.com platinum consulting partner.
Back in October, Techcrunch announced that Dropbox had raised $250mm at a seemingly absurd valuation. Many firms, including my firm Benchmark Capital, participated. When this happened, many people asked us why this was a special company that would cause us to break our standard investment paradigm. They didn’t quite understand why this was a company that deserved once-in-a-generation special attention.
The recent outage of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has reopened a persistent question about the reliability of Cloud services.
Microsoft’s most recent service disruption is just the latest evidence that Cloud alternatives are not immune to problems. Last year’s Amazon Web Services debacle was far worse and lasted much longer.
For years, I’ve been pointing to ADP payroll services as a model for successfully delivering data-sensitive, shared services that should give corporate decision-makers in small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs) greater confidence in the new generation of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions emerging in the market.
For a while, ADP was hesitant to assume the mantle of major SaaS vendor. But, it has recently embraced the concept of the Cloud and is actively promoting its Cloud-based services.
AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its third annual OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies Competition. We're looking for the top emerging on-demand and SaaS companies that are creating new business opportunities in high-growth markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:
Last summer a CIO for a high profile ecommerce company told me that the smartest way to play the cloud was to rent the spike. I just read the same thing from Zynga’s Infrastructure CTO Allan Leinwand in Inside Zynga’s Big Move To Private Cloud by InformationWeek’s Charles Babcock:
“We own the base, rent the spike. We want a hybrid operation. We love knowing that shock absorber is there.” – Allan Leinwand
Last year on Earth Day Vantage Data Centers launched its Smart Data Center Revolution , heralding a shift in the wholesale data center industry from vanilla “one design fits all” space to highly custom and highly energy efficient data centers strategically aligned to specific enterprise needs. While there will always be vanilla data center space, it seems likely that private clouds will increasingly be located in spaces at least partly designed by their occupants.
Read a great opinion piece last week in the Wall Street Journal that talks about how we “stand on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century.” If you haven’t read Mark Mills and Julio Ottino: The Coming Tech-led Boom – WSJ.com it compares the potential impact of the rise of big data, smart manufacturing and wireless connectivity to the rise of twentieth century innovations from electricity to the radio:
I had an opportunity to speak to the Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum at Towson University last week about new strategies and tactics for fully capitalizing on today’s Cloud alternatives. Because the group is composed of CIOs primarily from mid-size and large-scale enterprises with a lot of custom built applications and systems already in place, their biggest challenge is determining how to integrate the latest Cloud services into their legacy operations. Managing ‘hybrid’ Clouds is becoming a common challenge.
For a fresh perspective on data center obsolescence check out The Coming Colocation Crunch by Nemertes Principal Analyst Ted Ritter writing for Data Center Knowledge this week (Jan 18, 2012):
“Nemertes Research predicts a shortage of colocation space in the U.S. beginning this year, growing to a $1.9 billion facilities gap by 2015.”
