Market Dynamics

As enterprise users grew tired of installing massive suites of on-premise customer relation management software and Internet-oriented businesses began to rise, Salesforce.com came along and turned hosted applications, or software-as-a-service (SaaS), into a multi-billion dollar market.

Following in Salesforce's wake came lead-nurturing tools like Constant Contact, Eloqua, HubSpot, and Marketo that have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding, and have ostensibly added value to their customers' relationship.

This week we see the launch of Totango (pronounced like "to tango"), which bills itself as a "real-time customer usage analysis platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) … Read more

Private company research firm CB Insights today released a new report on the state of venture capital financing for the second quarter of 2011. With $7.6 billion invested in 768 deals in the second quarter, we are on track to see $29 billion to $30 billion invested through all of 2011.

California, Massachusetts, and New York combined to take nearly 75 percent of U.S. venture capital funding in the second quarter of this year, the highest concentration in five quarters. California remained on top with deals in the state up 27 percent and dollars up 19 percent. California'… Read more

The rapid rise of cloud computing and near-ubiquity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) has breathed new life into the integration space, or so says Gaurav Dhillon, chairman and CEO of SnapLogic.

SnapLogic is a cloud integration company making a name for itself with technology that can "containerize" data, making it easier to move in and around disparate cloud and on-premise applications and data sources.

I caught up with Dhillon--perhaps best known as CEO and co-founder of publicly traded data integration pioneer Informatica in the early 1990s--after his cameo at Structure 2011 in San Francisco last month. I wanted to get … Read more

Over the last several years CA Technologies has made a number of cloud-related acquisitions--3Tera, Oblicore, Nimsoft--companies focused on the management and associated necessities of cloud infrastructure, if not direct components or providers of clouds themselves.

At this week's Structure conference in San Francisco, I spoke with Jay Fry, vice president of marketing for cloud computing, about what the company is doing to address the burgeoning cloud marketplace. (The company changed its name last year from CA, and before that it was Computer Associates.)

According to Fry, this year is about figuring out what customers really want--not just from … Read more

A gargantuan new GigaOm Pro report titled "A field guide to the cloud: current trends and future opportunities" (subscription only) was released today as part of the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco.

The report examines the cloud-computing landscape with a focus on five specific areas: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), cloud storage, and private/internal clouds. And despite the relative newness of the cloud market, there is quite a bit going on.

According to the report, IaaS is driving the cloud-computing discussion but has yet to reach … Read more

After nearly 25 years of relative consistency and market dominance by the likes of EMC and NetApp, there's been a recent flurry of activity in the storage industry. In the past few weeks, Fusion-io was valued at nearly $1.95 billion after its first day of public trading and next-generation storage start-ups Pure Storage and Tintri each closed sizable new funding rounds ($28 million for Pure Storage, $18 million for Tintri).

Spurred by the rise of technological innovations like cloud computing and virtualization, storage is undergoing a major transition--the likes of which it hasn't experienced since the rise … Read more

The Amazon Web Services outage in April created uncertainty about the reliability of the cloud. And while the outage may have cast doubt about its ability to handle mission-critical applications, Xeround CEO Razi Sharir, whose MySQL cloud database-as-a-service goes into general availability today, sees the event as an opportunity to better understand the unique characteristics of the cloud environment--namely availability and elasticity.

Via an e-mail interview, Sharir maintained that high availability in the cloud is different from maintaining availability in a traditional data center because there is limited control over the cloud infrastructure. He notes that in the cloud, high … Read more

Most open-source companies rely on business models (and development models) that aim to leverage large global communities of users and developers. The goal? Monetize some percentage of a very large number of community members. So it's hard to imagine a more unlikely candidate for an open source play than Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), an industry dominated by big enterprise proprietary vendors such as Oracle and SAP that sell to Global 2000 organizations.

Openbravo, a Spanish-based ERP start-up, recently expanded its sales and executive footprint to the United States (the company's third largest market), with new CEO Paolo Juvara … Read more

New Relic is one of those unusual companies where an entrepreneur who helped create an entire product category--application performance management (APM), a billion-dollar industry--comes back for a do-over that aims to put his first company, Wily, out of business.

New Relic CEO and founder Lew Cirne (the company name "New Relic" is an anagram of his name), spawned the first SaaS-based APM start-up in 2008 as an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital. Today, New Relic is announcing what it says is the first Real User Monitoring solution from a SaaS vendor.

Cirne compares real user monitoring with … Read more