Kung Fu Apps

Double-Take Prices

One analyst for the Yankee group recently referred to their IPO as risky given the current finances. In reference to the company’s profitability, Laura DiDio, analyst for the Yankee Group, said “It’s clearly a risk. “You want to be profitable and on solid ground to attract investors.”

Donna Scott, an analyst at Gartner Research, also commented that “I think it’s going to be tough for them. “In this kind of competitive market, there are so many other replication options … but are you going to become a $1 billion company out of it? No.”

Replication is a tough market to be in for a stand-alone company competing against giants who sell an entire suite. Luckily, Double-Take has a solid track record of selling well accepted products.

Oracle Courting Ubuntu

Oracle is back in the news about possibly rolling their own Linux distro. In August the rumor was that they were going to fork Fedora. Now the news is that they’re courting Ubuntu, the pioneering distro based on Debian Linux backed by Thawte founder Mark Shuttleworth. Thawte was sold to VeriSign in December 1999 for almost $600M.

A Ubuntu spokesman confirms that they’re considering releasing official support for Oracle, but didn’t offer many more details. Ubuntu certainly doesn’t have the enterprise clout associated with Fedora/Red Hat so it’s not exactly clear why Oracle would consider Ubuntu in such a light. Ubuntu is my preferred desktop Linux distribution for a number of reasons over Fedora, but primarily because Shuttleworth has publicly stated that the update service would remain freely available to anyone.

I think it’s smart business sense for Oracle to offer their own Linux distribution regardless of whether it’s Fedora or Ubuntu based. Database server appliances in general make good technical sense as well. Paying one vendor for support of the infrastructure from the OS up is good for the customer and great for the database vendor.

DeviceVM Raises Series A

DeviceVM, a San Jose-based steath startup, raised $10M in a Series A round for their yet-to-be detailed consumer virtualization play.

Their vague, stealth-stylee description certainly peaks my curiosity as to what they’re planning for the consumer space as it relates to virtualization. moka5, who recently released to the general public, is in the business of virtual machine distribution. We can only speculate as to what gaps DeviceVM is attempting to fill in terms of consumer virtualization.

When we last wrote about moka5, I mused that distribution of managed virtual machines for consumers could be an interesting business for internet service providers. A completely managed operating system to actively guard against viruses, trojans, and other malware distributed through an RSS enabled delivery mechanism could finally bring a more meaningful business to the service providers other than just the pipes and bandwidth they have provided to date.

Enterprise Blogging

Six Apart, developer of blogging software, released an update to their MovableType Enterprise offering this week. Support for Oracle, SQL Server, and LDAP authentication are certainly a step in the right direction to serve business needs, but it doesn’t move the needle enough for most enterprises I know. If it doesn’t integrate with the core applications that drive the business, then all the noise about collaboration using blogs is wasted.

Enterprise blogging has to evolve further into a business than it currently has. I’m not referring to business blogging for the public or semi-privately either. I’m referring to blogging becoming core parts of enterprise applications. I’m referring to trackbacks inside of disparate applications that drive core functions of a business like accounts payable. New posts should show up in business applications tagged with certain categories using feeds. Business widgets will be a viable business. An SAP or Oracle Financials widget for MovableType? I bet it will happen — it has to happen for enteprise blogging to really be meaningful.

Enterprise blogging, as a semi-private collaborative application, is currently a bit of a collaborative vacuum without integration with line-of-business applications. It has to be transparently built into the fabric of enterprise applications to add significant value.

Collaborating on core business problems isn’t necessarily a new story to sell either, but it’s the best one going in reference to enterprise blogging in my opinion. Sell companies on how collaboration using blogs can positively affect the bottom line. Six Apart is certainly the most capable company of driving blogging integration further into the business world, but they’ll be competing with the old collaboration mainstays: Documentum, FileNet, Interwoven, Open Text, and the list goes on.

Attensa Reads Enterprise Inflection

Enterprises will be slow to adopt RSS on large scales in my opinion, but it will happen. Adoption of email wasn’t overnight. Plenty of businesses still use mainframe computers if you can believe that. Switching costs become very high once business users become reliant on systems.

More and more vendors are beginning to offer private RSS output from their applications. But I know of at least two software vendors who feel slightly threatened by the adoption of RSS because of its disintermediation. RSS disintermediates in the sense that some functionality may shift the end-user’s primary user interface to an aggregator of feeds such as one offered by Attensa. Change is on the horizon and rather than taking a defensive posture with an “enterprise walled garden,” developers of business applications could even create and license an RSS module for private, authenticated output. In other words, software vendors should view RSS as an opportunity to differentiate themselves rather than continue the Enterprise 1.0 mentality of proprietary silos.

The predominant use of RSS for knowledge workers will be related to process in my opinion. Getting notification that an order has been received, an invoice needs approval, or that parties have reached agreement on a contract is more important than an RSS feed of a persistent search using Google or Technorati for the company’s ticker symbol. As valuable as it might be to follow news stories about a company, it doesn’t necessarily improve their business processes and thus doesn’t really matter to the knowledge worker.

Attensa2Attensa gets this. And they understand the value of tracking “attention data,” a fancy term indicating that a user’s behavior in reference to feeds is tracked for purposes of reporting. What feeds users pay attention to can translate into “which projects are getting attention from a particular group of users.” But extend this concept one step further by considering that a report can be generated based upon the attention stream of a given set of users to see metrics on ALL the systems that have RSS output. One could essentially make correlations between systems that are otherwise not integrated by using the attention data. That’s a difficult, if not impossible, metric to track when email is the messaging medium.

Attensa4There’s a standard set of functionality that’s required of any application that attempts to serve the enterprise market and Attensa seems to have a good grip on this. They have integration with LDAP and they supply a management interface to make default subscriptions easier to deploy. They also have an Outlook plug-in and web client in addition to an optional hook into Microsoft Exchange.

Besides the attention data, what sets Attensa apart is their architecture. Attensa is built on the LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl/PHP/Python) stack and ships as an appliance using Dell hardware. Newsgator, their nearest competitor who recently updated their enterprise offering, uses Microsoft .NET. Most customers have their own preference depending on whether they consider themselves a “Microsoft shop” or not. I have visited plenty of organizations that refuse to implement IIS, colleges and universities in particular. But then many small-to-medium businesses will hesistate from anything *NIX related because of perceived administrative difficulty. Choice of architecture is especially important to very large enterprises who typically prefer non-Windows based server deployments.

The appliance delivery method allows Attensa to hide the complexity of the underlying support infrastructure in terms of the operating system and database without sacrificing performance. Shipping a virtual machine appliance would also be beneficial (I think it’s the future) for customers who would prefer to run VMWare ESX or XenSource.

Attensa is currently selling the product directly, but I think that their product is perfect for reseller and channel distribution. It doesn’t appear to be entirely complicated, has integration into existing directory providers, and provides users with a familiar experience when using their Outlook plug-in. Best of all, users will see value in the product very soon after deployment and that’s key to success with any business application.

Trusted Edge Secures Desktop Data

Trusted Edge, a startup based in McLean, VA, develops software to manage data at the “edge” of corporate networks. Laptop computers are especially vulnerable points because they are prone to loss and theft. Aside from a physical loss, unmanaged data on laptops can be a significant liability since no server based policies apply to management of data at the edge.

This is where Trusted Edge steps in. They develop an application that is installed on client machines that listens for the creation of data and prompts users to identify or categorize the data for purposes of enforcing server-based policies that governs retention and disposition. Unique identifiers and metadata are stored “inside” of the file, either in the property fields of Office documents or in the extended atttribute block of NTFS, that is also referenced in their server application’s database. This then allows for programmatic policies to be enacted that governs management of such data elements.

I was able to speak to Ed Sullivan, Director of Business Develoment, recently to get a sense of the company’s focus. Trusted Edge gets the fact that corporate assets can also be stored in a Content Management repository and not just unmanaged in a file system. I was able to see a demo of their application with OpenText’s LiveLink and the result is impressive. Integration with OpenText and relationships with IBM and Symantec are strategic to the Trusted Edge offering.

Securing desktop data is an incredibly imporant application. Look no further than the stories of lost or stolen super-secret government organization laptops containing unencrypted data or misplaced laptops from accounting firms containing tens of thousands of Social Security numbers. Having mobile workforces encourages the mobility of data, but it can’t be at the expense of compliance guidelines.

Securing desktop data is an incredibly difficult objective as well. The task is not without inherent challenges related to proprietary files and legacy data. As such, Trusted Edge plans on being able to perform a “file system sweep” in future versions to gain insight into existing desktop data.

Documents that fall under regulatory compliance guidelines need to be managed with the same level of granularity and attention that is being applied to email management and retention. Trusted Edge currently supports integration with email clients such as Outlook and Lotus Notes. David Golgschlag, CTO of Trusted Edge, tells me that future versions will support PDAs, Outlook Web Access, and Notes Web Access. “Branding” of metadata into Adobe PDF, one of the most proprietary file formats known to mankind, is on their roadmap for support as well.

There are a few interesting technical similarities between Trusted Edge and NextPage, another company that is tackling the related problem of document versioning from a very different angle. Sending contracts back and forth between firms for agreement typically results in not being able to easily identify specific versions of documents. Like Trusted Edge, the NextPage client application also writes a unique identifier into the extended attributes of files. Trusted Edge is an internally installed solution to desktop data management, whereas NextPage deploys a public facing web service that tracks the movement and changes to documents throughout the internet using their client application.

Trusted Edge is funded by Novak Biddle Venture Partners, a Bethesda, MD based firm, and other private investors.

Isilon: Storage For New Media, Files For IPO

Isilon Systems, developer of clustered NAS systems, filed S1 registration documents with the SEC on September 1st signaling their intent to raise $86M in an IPO. Both Isilon and competitor PolyServe, who we wrote about recently, have raised significant amounts of venture capital totaling about $70M each.

Though Isilon is not profitable yet, the company has been able to bring in the revenue. Customers such as Kodak (EasyShare Gallery) and MySpace have contributed to the company’s $26.8M in revenue for the first half of the year. The new era of internet applications with demanding storage requirements for management of such things as photographs, video, and social networking platforms seems to be part of the company’s focus. Isilon announced recently that DNA Productions, an animated film developer, was using 70 terabytes of their storage platform to create “The Ant Bully.”

I certainly buy into the need for better clustered storage for the new demands that multimedia is having on many type of businesses, but I get disappointed when I read about Islilon’s replication architecture. They’re knocking the entrenched vendors like NetApp and EMC that “force companies to satisfy their data replication needs with brute force techniques and limited policy-based intelligence,” referring to the fact that block level replication is too low in the food chain to know much about the value of data. While that statement is true, Isilon is insinuating that a file based approach that allows replication by “file type, file size or geographic location” is much better —– it’s not.

Business value is not always stored in the file system. It’s not even in the files themselves. The pertinent metadata regarding files might be in a repository if the data is important enough to fall under regulatory compliance requirements that guide storage practices. Storage services that act upon files without considering this metadata are missing the boat (and the opportunity for that matter). Not surprisingly, it’s rather typical of infrastructure vendors to fail to get the importance of the business applications that created the data and instead focus on the back-end. In other words, Isilon is not alone in their approach to file based replication.