Pressroom
  • Tue
    05
    Feb
    2013

    Mon Feb 4, 2013 7:30pm EST

    SAN JOSE, CA, Feb 04 (Marketwire) -- InMage(R), leading provider of backup, application recovery, disaster recovery and cloud computing announced today that SIFY(R), a leader in IT Solutions and Services space with its core offerings on Enterprise IT Transformation, Managed IT and Cloud Services in India with a growing global market, has chosen its ScoutCloud platform to help bring Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to their customers in India. "SIFY's cloud services bouquet offers a true service aggregation platform and business solutions that are powered by best-of-breed technology providers. As we aim to be leaders in the Enterprise Cloud space, InMage partnership will bring its own set of unique and complimentary advantages to our platform," said Mr. Sanjay Kamboj, President - International Business, Cloud & Managed Services. "By partnering with InMage, a pioneer and proven leader in the fast growing DRaaS space, we have built a complete and robust eco-system of cloud services, with the industry leader in disaster recovery solutions." SIFY selected InMage's ScoutCloud platform after an extensive proof of concept process. ScoutCloud combines best in class data protection, a comprehensive physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual recovery engine that supports failover/failback for all applications, and automated provisioning of virtual machines and associated storage. This enables near zero RPO and RTO capable Recovery as a Service (RaaS). ScoutCloud protects any customer server (physical or virtual) and can recover it nearly instantaneously as a virtual machine in the cloud. It bundles P2V with remote replication, delivering true application-consistent data availability and block-level continuous data protection with failover/failback for any application. "As India's leading integrated information, communications and technology organization, SIFY will leverage ScoutCloud to help enterprise customers manage their businesses better and maintain a competitive edge," said Kumar Malavalli, CEO, InMage. "This partnership is yet another validation of InMage's commitment to the success of our partners in delivering proven technology as a whole, and we are honored to be working with such a progressive organization as SIFY."

    For more information, please visit www.inmage.com Media Contact: Jennifer Sparks Bocchino Sparks & Associates 949-388-9322 Copyright 2013, Marketwire, All rights reserved. -0-

  • Thu
    14
    Mar
    2013

    Real-time just got a whole lot easier for .NET developers everywhere as the super-fast PubNub Real-Time Network is now available as an add-on through the Windows Azure Mobile Services platform.

    Now Windows Azure users can leverage the PubNub Network to add real-time experiences to both new and existing apps. Using a simple API, with just a few lines of code, any app has instant access to powerful real-time features such as:

    Real-Time Data – Broadcast to millions of users at a time or to individual devices all in less than .25 seconds

    Presence Detection – Instantly know everyone using an app and automatically detect when additional users join or other users leave

    Data Visualization – Get better insights with streaming real-time data visualization

    azure-dashboard2

    Some of the many uses for PubNub include deepening second screen interactions in Social TV apps like Viggle, powering new wave telecommunications services like Rebtel and improving engagement with the real-time voting associated with many new advertising campaigns. In fact, millions of users today use thousands of PubNub-powered apps across social, ecommerce, business collaboration, advertising and multi-player gaming. This new integration with Windows Azure means that number is sure to grow.

    To get started:
    If you are using Visual Studio and have NuGet installed, getting started is just as easy as searching for the PubNub package and installing it. Some great walkthrough screencasts for using PubNub with NuGet can be found here.

    Otherwise, if you’d prefer to manually install the PubNub client code for C# on Visual Studio (or any other IDE, platform, and language), just visit our GitHub site at https://github.com/pubnub/pubnub-api, and peruse for the client of your choice!

    In addition to this partnership, PubNub is simultaneously releasing an updated C# library as part of a continual effort to provide the easiest API and best development experience.

    Built something cool with PubNub and Window’s Azure? Let us know so we can help get the word out to our fans. Please let us know if you have any questions.

  • Thu
    21
    Mar
    2013

    It is celebration hour for Indus International School students who were awarded diploma for successful completion of their two years of International Baccalaureate Diploma Program in Indus International School today. It was also a proud moment for Indus International School when the head boy of the school Siddarth Patil bagged Kofi Annan Scholarship of $33000 and got a choice to accept admission offers made by Macalester College and McGill University. Class of 2013 Valedictorian Grusha Prasad was elated too as she won the Hampshire College Bell Ringers Merit Scholarship worth $16000 per year. Local boy Sai Harsha Reddy, the boarding house caption at the school has received the opportunity to accept Clarkson University (Scholarship $ 8000 Per Year) or Valparaiso University (Scholarship $ 9000 Per Year).

    In all 38 students graduated from the school. SIDDARTH PATIL & SON HEE YEONG won the Principal’s BEST ACHIEVER AWARD. Other achievers awards were given in the category of Visual Aesthetics, Entrepreneurship, Authorship, Global Citizenship and Creative Action Service. Indus International School, Hyderabad came into existence in July 2008 at Mokila near Shankarpally, a brainchild of the Indus Trust which is globally acknowledged for its Leadership Programs. Speaking after winning the award Siddarth Patil said the unique part of IB is the Theory of knowledge (TOK), which too had a great role in shaping me as a person. It wasn’t until almost half way into 12th grade that I realized the true purpose of TOK. Up until that point, I only thought of it is “Just discussing and debating over topics using all “AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE””.

    Speaking on the occasion Lt. General (Retired) Arjun Ray, PVSM, VSM. Chief Executive Indus Trust said "It is a moment of pride of all of us in the school when students pass out with such outstanding achievements. Our focus is to nurture Leadership skills and enable the students to think critically, synthesize knowledge, reflect on their own thought processes and excel in multi disciplinary thinking."

    The medium of instruction at Indus is English and the curricula offered was the International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary year’s program from Prep to Grade 5, the Middle School Curriculum from Grade 6 to Grade 8 culminating in the University of Cambridge's International Examination in Grades 9 & 10. Students are awarded the International Certificate of Education (ICE) after Grade 10. The school offers the IB Diploma Program for grades 11 and 12.

    Omkar Joshi the principal of the school in his statement said what is unique about our school is the way we facilitate/coach students by using interactive discussions and "hands-on" approach to learn and apply concepts in subjects. What we also do is continuously interact and collaborate with students and the parent community to build an environment that maximizes student learning, academic performance, and social growth.

    Spread over a sprawling 27-acre campus in Hyderabad, India’s technology capital, Indus International School provides state-of-the-art facilities for academics and sports, and a truly world-class ambience.

    The school is nurtured by CEO Lt Gen (Retd) Arjun Ray and the Board of Trustees comprising thought leaders in various fields ranging from Engineering, Information Technology and Manufacturing to Real Estate and Hospitality, among others.

    http://indiaeducationdiary.in/Shownews.asp?newsid=21016

  • Wed
    01
    May
    2013

    12 Hours of Separation

    Did you know anyone around the world can be found on social media in about 12 hours? And what is the cost of getting a new fan on your fanpage?

    This week’s social media must-reads talks about the true value of your network:

    12 Hours of Separation
    Researchers say any single person is just 12 hours of separation from each other. Mashable.

    Cost Per Like
    What is the cost of getting a new fan for a Facebook page? This article helps determine the value of a fan. Mashable.

    Content to Build Community
    Community managers and companies are creating impactful content to build their communities. The Community Manager.

    Introducing the Community Director
    The community manager has no way of climbing up the corporate ladder — until now. CMS Wire.

    Practice Makes Perfect
    Here’s some great insight into the best practices of community management. Business2Community.

    A New Breed of Marketer
    Gartner predicts by 2015, 25 percent of organizations will have a Chief Digital Officer. Business2Community.

    http://blog.sumazi.com/12-hours-of-separation/

  • Wed
    01
    May
    2013

    card makerseducational appskidaptiveLeo’s Birthday Card MakerLeo’s Pad: Preschool Learning Series

    b3

    From developer Kidaptive, the recently released Leo’s Birthday Card Maker is a great way to help young artists craft that perfect handmade card.

    Leo first made an appearance in the educational iPad app Leo’s Pad: Preschool Learning Series. And he is now helping kids create and personalize a birthday card for family and friends.

    The app is simple and easy to use. Users start by entering the to and from information for the card. After that, kids start with a blank palette and a number of colors, brushes, and stickers. As a nice touch, Leo helps collaborate with your child during the creation of the card. He offers some encouraging words and helps with color recognition.

    After the card is complete, it can be saved in Photos to email or print.

    While I think the app is a really nice start, I’d like to see Kidaptive expand it for more than just birthdays. I think both of my kids would enjoy making a Mother’s Day card for their mom with the app, but “Happy Birthday” appears on every creation. It would also be nice to add a few more stickers as well.

    Leo’s Birthday Card Maker is a universal app for the iPhone/iPod touch and iPad/iPad mini. It can be downloaded in the App Store now for free.

    You can also check out Leo’s Pad: Preschool Learning Series for free in the App Store.

    appadvice.com

  • Tue
    07
    May
    2013

    Zynga and NewSchools Venture Fund Team Up for Learning Games Accelerator

    SCHOOLVILLE? No, that's not what Mark Pincus is announcing at the NewSchools Summit. But instead, a partnership with NewSchools Venture Fund for a learning games accelerator. The social gaming giant's non-profit affiliate, Zynga.org, will be committing $1 million for the first year of the program, which will be hosted at its San Francisco headquarters.

    Some of that money will be going directly to companies in the first cohort, which include Kidaptive, LocoMotive Labs, and Motion Math. Edmodo will be joining as a "charter partner." (Sources say that one of its recent acquisitions, Root-1, was originally asked to join the group.)

    Zynga employees will be "encouraged" to volunteer and collaborate on game design, testing, analytics, marketing, and distribution.

    With many edtech startups--especially those in gaming--still searching ways to build scalable business models, it's no surprise that many are open to this offer of help. Both Dylan Arena, co-founder and Chief Learning Officer at Kidaptive, and MotionMath CEO and co-founder, Jacob Klein, expressed to EdSurge their enthusiasm at the opportunity to leverage Zynga's expertise on crunching data on user adoption, retention, and monetization that has driven its dominance in the social gaming industry.

    https://www.edsurge.com/

  • Tue
    14
    May
    2013

    App Maker Kidaptive Debuts “Parent’s Pad,” A New Way To Track A Child’s Educational Development On iPad

    leos-pad-a-lg

    Parents of preschoolers can finally let go of “iPad guilt” – the term that refers to that terrible feeling you get when you use the iPad as babysitter. Today, a company called Kidaptive is launching one of the most comprehensive feedback systems for parents to date, allowing them to get a hand of their child’s learning and development by simply handing over the iPad and letting their child play.

    It’s a shame that despite the wide variety of educational apps out there, too many parents still treat the iPad as a toy, letting kids rot their minds with time-wasting games and goofs, instead of using screen time to learn. But as any kid will tell you, learning is just sooooo boring. That’s why Kidaptive has so much promise – it merges the lean-back experience of watching TV with mini games kids actually think are fun.

    The company first launched its “edu-tainment” iPad application called “Leo’s Pad” back in fall 2012. The app was designed by a team that includes CEO P.J. Gunsagar, who also co-founded and served as president of Prana Studios, a 3D visual effects studio with 1,000 employees in L.A. and Mumbai, India; “Chief Learning Officer” Dylan Arena, whose background is in cognitive science, philosophy and statistics, with multiple degrees in all three from Stanford; and Creative Director Dan Danko, who has written for a number of children’s TV shows including “Rugrats,” “Fresh Beat Band,” and PBS’ “Word World.”

    leos-pad-gally-marie-leo-lg-f

    The combination of skill sets has paid off. The resulting creation has been a huge hit (well, in our household at least), as well as with over 350,000 parents who have downloaded Leo’s Pad for their children.

    Leo’s Pad features the adventures of a young Leonardo da Vinci, his pet dragon, and friends Galileo and Marie, and has children doing puzzles (to build telescopes and rocket ships, e.g.), flying through clouds, identifying colors and shapes, drawing, finding letters in the stars, and much more. The games appear amid high-quality animation that rivals what you would find on TV. Even better, kids don’t seem to realize that they’re learning as they play – as far as they know, they’re just having fun.

    Speaking as a parent myself, that’s a combination that’s tougher to find than you might think.

    But the iPad babysitter scenario often means that parents don’t know exactly what a child is learning or where they stand. Today, Kidaptive changes that with the debut of what it’s calling “Parent’s Pad,” an in-app, parents-only area that shows their child’s progress in reading comprehension and math skills, as well as in cognitive, emotional and social functions, meaning things like “being patient” or “taking turns,” for example.

    leos-pad-parents-pad-1a

    In Parent’s Pad, you can see what “appisodes” (as these TV-like apps and games are called) the child has started watching, and what activities they’ve performed so far.

    “We took our curriculum framework which is comprehensive – that is to say, it covers everything a child needs to be ready for kindergarten and prepared for learning – and it’s a hierarchy,” explains Arena. ”The structure of the curriculum is that there are high-level categories, and there are children of those categories, all the way down to the dimensions we actually measure,” he says. These learning dimensions are explained and measured in the Parent’s Pad section.

    Today Leo’s Pad has released three of these appisodes that it can measure, but the long-term plan is to release 25 appisodes in total, creating a year’s worth of curriculum with over 80 dimensions of learning. The plan is to have at least 10 more appisodes out this year, with all 25 completed by 2014.

    The goal is to not only inform parents of a child’s progress using an easy-to-read, color-coded framework detailing their activities, but also to offer suggestions and tips as to how to help a child in an area where they’re struggling.

    leos-pad-parents-pad-4

    For instance, the app might offer a tip to parents whose child doesn’t yet know his or her colors, to begin referring to colors in a specific way when speaking. (e.g. “the chair is blue” instead of “the blue chair,” which research has shown to help a child acquiring color words.)

    Longer term, the company might start offering “offline” activities – like a telescope you assemble in real life to accompany the one the child puts together in the app – as an additional revenue stream.

    As the child plays the Leo’s Pad apps for longer, their profile becomes more filled out in Kidaptive’s assessment framework, and eventually that sort of thing could be shared with teachers upon the child entering the classroom. Over time, the same framework could be adapted to work with other apps – like those focused on older kids.

    leos-pad-parents-pad-3

    Kidaptive isn’t the first company to think of how parents can track a child’s progress in apps. Fingerprint’s “mom-comm” system lets parent and child communicate upon the completion of levels or other achievements in its own “edu-tainment” suite of apps, and other apps like iLearnWith, Stickery, and many more, do something similar.

    However, Kidaptive is the most comprehensive system, based on curriculum, which we’ve come across to date. For that reason, it’s enough to assuage a parent’s “iPad guilt”…well, as least temporarily. At some point, you’ll still want to yank that thing from their hands and shout “go play outside.”

    But at least the child will have learned something in the meantime.

    Kidaptive is seed funded by Menlo Ventures, CrunchFund (disclosure: TechCrunch’s founder Michael Arrington runs CrunchFund), Veddis Ventures, S-Cubed Capital, Krantz Holdings, VKRM Ventures, iCamp, and Prana Holdings, which is also Kidaptive’s animation partner.

    http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/14/app-maker-kidaptive-debuts-parents-pad-a-new-way-to-track-a-childs-educational-development-on-ipad/

  • Wed
    15
    May
    2013

    May 15, 2013

    CloudVolumes Delivers Industry’s First Instant Workload Management Solutions to Reduce Complexity, Increase Efficiency and Provide Mobility within the Datacenter and Cloud

    Formerly known as SnapVolumes, CloudVolumes today announced the availability of its suite of enterprise-class Instant Workload Management (IWM) products for enterprise server, desktop, and cloud environments. CloudVolumes also is introducing integration with VMware vFabric Application Director. By virtualizing above the operating system (OS), CloudVolumes is eliminating per virtual machine (VM) management, significantly reducing management requirements and costs. Virtualization at and above the operating system can massively benefit enterprise datacenters," said Paul Burns, president of cloud research firm Neovise. "CloudVolumes is breaking new ground here, resulting in improved server and cloud delivery, capacity creation and mobility from one cloud to another, as well as enhanced virtual desktop delivery, configuration management, patch management and more."

    CloudVolumes products are engineered for enterprise-class workloads with a single point of administration and ability to virtually transport workloads without using physical resources, by nativelyattaching volumes to thousands of running VMs. Additionally companies have a choice to move their workloads to the best available resources in the datacenter or cloud without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. CloudVolumes IWM solution requires no changes to existing infrastructure, OS, hypervisor, application, licensing, policy or infrastructure and delivers:

    Instant deployment of complex multi-tier server workloads into a running VM
    Scaling, relocation and recovery instantly across thousands of virtual machines within seconds
    Migration of workloads between the cloud and datacenter, independent of VM or hypervisor
    Single image management of applications, dependencies, data and settings
    Patches, updates and upgrades that are applied once and delivered dynamically to many VMs
    Department and user installed apps, including personalization for desktop
    Support for all Windows desktop and server apps including custom developed ones

    “The CloudVolumes product is truly a differentiator in the industry by allowing users to change the way IT provisions applications to specific workgroups or change the personality of a server-build to rapidly provisionworkloads such as an SQL server or Citrix Server. Instead of spendinghours building unique server and virtual desktop workloads, we are able to simply assign the right AppStack to the given server or application workgroup,” said Cory Merritt, president, Sage Infrastructure Solutions Group. “At Sage, we have leveraged CloudVolumes to take a base Windows Server 2008 R2 build, and by applying the appropriate AppStack, turned the base server into a SQL Serverwith a simple reboot.”

    The CloudVolumes suite of products provides solutions for critical use cases intoday’s enterprise datacenter and cloud:

    cv-Enterprise Server – With CloudVolumes servers no longer need to be dedicated to a specific workload, and can be managed as a generic pool enabling rule based dynamic provisioning in seconds. CloudVolumes allows IT to relocate, reconfigure and update servers to perform new tasks on demand with no downtime, even for custom apps and complex multi-tier services. Additionally it enables servers to be seamlessly managed and upgraded to deliver future applications and updates, while continuing to operate current the workload as is. Demo: http://vimeo.com/65594851

    cv-Enterprise Desktop -- Virtual Hosted Desktop, VDI, Microsoft RDS, Citrix XenApp – CloudVolumes Desktop solution provides a persistent desktop feel with non-persistent pools including UIA/DIA and complete user personalization, while having a single point of administration and control for all applications. IT costs are reduced with 1:N storage compression and storage tiering. Users will experience native performance that can be further enhanced by “virtually sharing single SSD” across all VMs. All without recreating VMs, packaging, streaming or modification to the app. Demo: http://vimeo.com/65604027

    cv-Cloud – Server and Desktop – Manage your datacenter together with the cloud, using CloudVolumes. Enterprises can now dynamically scale and move, as demand increases without the costly conversion and migration of virtual machines. VMs no longer need to be moved and enterprises can move only what is important, the workload. AdditionallyDesktop as a Service (DaaS) providers will be able to provide fully installed applications on-demand allowing users to practically manage themselves. Demo: http://vimeo.com/65624256

    cv-Cloud – for VMware vFabric Application Director – IWM enables customers of VMware vCloud and AppDirector to realize unique and significant additional benefits, such as being able to instantly deploy blueprints and single image manage/update of apps across hundreds or thousands of provisioned virtual machines (VMs). CloudVolumes’ services are available at the VMware Cloud Applications Marketplace Demo: http://vimeo.com/65620067 and https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/category_groups/application-management

    CloudVolumes is also Citrix Ready certified for Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop, and XenServer, as well as Cisco UCS compatible.

    “IT is still managing, migrating, and installing apps one-at-a-time in VMs as if they were physical machines. In today’s virtual world, workloads should not be locked-in to a given hypervisor or cloud,” said Raj Parekh, president and CEO of CloudVolumes. “We created Instant Workload Management solutions to virtualize everything above the OS to allow the industry to simply think in terms of what they care most about – workloads.

    CloudVolumes Product Availability

    CloudVolumes IWM products are available now to qualified customers for trials, and production deployments. For more information, please contact CloudVolumes at sales@cloudvolumes.com

    About CloudVolumes

    Formerlyknown as SnapVolumes, CloudVolumes was founded in early 2011 by virtualization, security and datacenter luminaries from VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Symantec, RSA, Sun (Oracle) and Virident to provide IT with new enterprise class solutions for instant-workload management that takes full advantage of virtualization, supports legacy applications, eliminates the need for re-architecting or rewriting existing software, and works with existing policies and management solutions in datacenter and clouds by virtualizing everything above the OS. The company is headquartered in Los Altos, California. For more information, visit http://www.cloudvolumes.com.

    http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=25618

  • Wed
    24
    Jul
    2013

    Jul 24, 2013, 8:47am PDT

    Data protection company InMage Systems disclosed this week that it sold about $7.5 million in private equity in a round in which it hopes to sell $10.5 million.

    The San Jose company founded by Brocade co-founder Kumar Malavalli and Rajeev Atluri didn't say in the Securities and Exchange Commission filing who the funders are. It did say there were 30 investors involved, though.

    It also said that about $5.5 million in the sale involved the conversion of debt.

    The company's previous funding included Intel Capital and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners as investors.

    In addition to InMage's Silicon Valley headquarters, it has engineering operations in Hyderabad, India.

    Click here to read the SEC filing by InMage Systems.

    Click here to subscribe to TechFlash Silicon Valley, the free daily email newsletter about the region's founders and funders.

    Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1823

    Related links:

    Industries:
    Technology

  • Tue
    30
    Jul
    2013

    Growing Ecosystem of Customers and Partners Share Best Practices in Turning Complex Machine Data Into Actionable Intelligence

    MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA, Jul 30, 2013 (Marketwired via COMTEX) -- Glassbeam, Inc., an innovator in the Big Data applications market for machine data analytics, today announced the success of the company's inaugural customer summit, held in Mountain View on July 23, 2013. More than 30 customers, partners and prospects gathered to network and exchange best practices for converting raw machine data into actionable intelligence. The one-day event featured interactive panels and customer presentations featuring Aruba Networks, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Fusion-io, Meru Networks and IBM, and an open Q&A with the Glassbeam management team.

    With the advent of smartphones, wireless devices and objects that connect to the Internet, machine data analytics is a growing area of importance. As these devices emit and transmit multi-structured data with an ever-increasing velocity, the "Internet of Things" is creating a new urgency around predictive analytics and IT automation. The recent Glassbeam customer summit provided attendees with a comprehensive understanding of emerging Big Data challenges and strategies for parsing and mining this data using an innovative cloud-based solution.

    Event highlights included:

    "Next Generation Analytics on Machine Data" keynote presentation from Glen Allmendinger, founder and president of Harbor Research Customer panel discussing key business challenges and value of log analytics for the enterprise featuring Aruba Networks, Fusion-io and Meru Networks

    Fusion-io, HDS and IBM use-case presentations Product roadmap previewed by Srikanth Desikan, vice president of products at Glassbeam "We are committed to the success of our customers, and the recent summit provided an invaluable opportunity to exchange ideas about using Glassbeam, how it can impact their business and the future potential of the technology," said Puneet Pandit, CEO and founder of Glassbeam. "We look forward to making this a regular event to share tips, tricks and best practices around machine data analytics, and use this information and customer feedback to help shape future products and services."

    Glassbeam's technology enables customers to parse and mine machine data to make better strategic and operational business decisions. Glassbeam customers and partners include Fortune 500 companies and enterprises across a variety of markets including storage, wireless, networking and medical devices.

    Resources Company: http://www.glassbeam.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/glassbeam

    Blog: http://www.glassbeam.com/blogs

    About Glassbeam Glassbeam Inc. is a Big Data applications company specializing in multi-structured machine data analytics for IT and business users. Glassbeam's Big Data applications for customer support, product development and sales leverage the company's breakthrough Semiotic Parsing Language (SPL) that can quickly extract strategic intelligence from complex operational data contained in multi-structured machine data.

    Media Contact
    Danielle Salvato-Earl
    Kulesa Faul for Glassbeam
    (650) 340-1982

  • Thu
    15
    Aug
    2013

    Top Silicon Valley Investors Bet on Punchh's One-Stop Shop Mobile Solution for Restaurants

    SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 15, 2013) - Punchh, a leader in mobile solutions for the restaurant industry, announced that it has raised $3 million in venture capital funding to further expand its market leadership position and accelerate growth in the $20 billion U.S. restaurant marketing segment. This brings the total funding raised by Punchh to $4 million.

    The three-year-old company, whose patent-pending technology is helping operators of more than 1,000 restaurant locations realize groundbreaking customer participation and loyalty results, has received backing from Cervin Ventures, Green Span Ventures, VKRM, Sandhill Group, Garnett Ventures, and multiple other leading Silicon Valley angel investors.

    "By building the first mobile solution for the restaurant industry, Punchh's cutting-edge technology has made it the segment leader," said Jitendra Gupta, founder and CEO of Punchh. "This round of funding will fuel our already solid momentum and allow us to tap deep expertise and guidance from our investors and advisory board. We will aggressively scale our sales, product and customer success organizations to meet the exploding demand in the restaurant marketplace."

    Punchh is a one-stop shop mobile solution for restaurants that delivers branded mobile apps for games, gift cards, loyalty, online ordering, payments, referrals, surveys, and marketing campaigns. Punchh drives word of mouth (WOM) interaction between customers through restaurant reviews, measurable referrals and social interaction campaigns. Its solution gathers and manages 360-degree insights on customer purchasing habits and social network activity by integrating with restaurant point-of-sale systems (POS) and Facebook. Punchh's turnkey integration works with leading online ordering, payments, online ordering, reservations, and wait-list management solutions, ensuring restaurants need to maintain only one mobile app to engage their customers.

    Punchh's WOM technology has helped brands such as, Earl of Sandwich, Hungry Howie's, Mama Fu's, Max's Restaurant, Rita's Italian Ice, Vino Volo, and Voodoo BBQ and Grill, achieve customer participation results far exceeding previous efforts. By replacing cumbersome, easy-to-lose paper punch cards and magnetic stripe loyalty cards, operators using Punchh have realized five- to six-fold customer participation rates, three to four times greater repeat purchase rates and tenfold increases in customer reviews over Yelp!. Punchh users also report same-store sales increases of 7 to 10 percent.

    "We know our customers are more mobile and social than ever before," said Steve Heeley, president and CEO, Earl of Sandwich. "So we want to transform our customers into ambassadors who spread the word about our brand and refer friends to our stores. Punchh allows us to achieve that by engaging them right on their mobile devices and rewarding them for their loyalty and referrals."

    Preetish Nijhawan, managing director at Cervin Ventures, which led the funding, said Punchh's mastery of these emerging trends and solid marketplace position led his group to invest in the young firm.

    "Punchh is addressing a huge market and a key problem that most restaurants are struggling with: how to engage mobile customers, drive brand awareness and growth using customers' real-life social networks," Nijhawan said. "Today when you go to a restaurant, the operator doesn't know who you are and how to engage you and leverage your influence within your social group. Punchh solves that for a restaurant and engages customers in a way that is differentiated. This market solution requires a unique combination of enterprise software expertise and consumer application knowledge. We like to invest in the best platforms in a space, and we are excited to work with Punchh to help them grow."

    About Punchh

    Punchh is a one-stop shop mobile solution that includes branded mobile apps for campaigns, games, gift cards, loyalty, online ordering, payments, referrals, surveys, and integrates with social networks and operators' POS systems to gather 360° customer insights. Punchh helps restaurants increase repeat visits, word of mouth, new customer referrals, and return on investment from marketing campaigns. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Punchh's patent-pending technology operates in more than 1,000 restaurant locations under brands such as Church's Chicken, Earl of Sandwich, Hungry Howie's, Mama Fu's, Max's Restaurant, Pacific Catch, Rita's Italian Ice, Vino Volo, and Voodoo BBQ & Grill. For more information, visit www.punchh.com.

    About Cervin Ventures
    Cervin Ventures is an early-stage fund focused on investments focused on B2B software businesses. Its managing partners and network of advisors are experienced entrepreneurs with extensive experience in B2B technology including engineering, product management, finance, operations, sales and marketing. Cervin Ventures helps entrepreneurs establish a strong foundation for long-term success.

  • Tue
    27
    Aug
    2013

    New Cloud Solution Enables Product Manufacturers to Increase Service Revenues and Monetize Machine Data

    August 27, 2013

    64249_glassbeam

    MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 08/27/13 -- Glassbeam, Inc., an innovator in the Big Data applications market for machine data analytics, today announced Glassbeam Health Check, a cloud-based OEM solution that delivers a continuous pulse on the "health" of products. Leveraging Glassbeam's patent-pending Semiotic Parsing Language (SPL), Glassbeam Health Check is designed to help product manufacturers better understand product usage and increase customer support revenues by offering new value-added services to their end users.

    Customer support is a critical business function that provides endless value in building customer relationships and loyalty. Quality of support services can heavily influence the monetization of a long-term relationship between product supplier and user. However, many companies continue to view customer support as a cost center rather than an incubator for innovation and profit.

    Partners Gain New Revenue Streams Using Machine Data Analytics
    The key to providing proactive support services is unlocking the Big Data gold mine, turning machine data into valuable insights into how products are used, potential problems and the overall user experience. With Glassbeam Health Check, world-class companies, such as Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), partner with Glassbeam to access a new breed of machine data analytics, which helps product managers, engineers and customer support teams alike to improve their understanding of how products perform across customer environments.

    "Effective support services don't simply respond to customer problems; they must be proactive by spotting customer issues before they surface," said Phil Townsend, Vice President of business operations, global services at Hitachi Data Systems. "Glassbeam Health Check enables us to provide our Hitachi NAS Platform customers with a premium support experience by collecting, analyzing and transforming large volumes of raw data, generated by the products themselves, and then deliver actionable intelligence into how products are actually being used."

    Click Here

    Glassbeam Health Check collects and analyzes machine data from every enabled product, every day -- a volume of data that would not be possible for administrators to analyze themselves. Glassbeam employs its core SPL technology, providing capabilities that would otherwise take years for a product manufacturer to duplicate.

    Glassbeam Health Check delivers:

    Proactive capacity planning - At a quick glance, customers can tell what percentage of a product is being used, and whether it is time to add or reallocate resources well in advance of capacity overload.

    Event analysis - Problems, errors or other potential concerns can be viewed in summary fashion, alerting administrators to situations that require attention.

    License summary - Software versions are tracked automatically, ensuring that all products are up-to-date.

    "Traditionally, solutions on the market have focused on improving operational and business efficiency, but haven't yet made the leap to an entirely new breed of analytics capabilities custom made for machine data -- until now," said Puneet Pandit, CEO and founder of Glassbeam. "Glassbeam Health Check delivers an industry-first analytics solution that actually helps drive new revenues for our partners. Our unique technology converts unstructured data into actionable insights, enabling product manufacturers to glean a wealth of information that can be used to better understand product behavior and use, improve customer support and create a whole new revenue stream."

    Availability and Pricing
    Glassbeam Health Check can be sold as a separate line item or packaged as part of a premium support plan. As a cloud-based solution, Glassbeam Health Check requires no capital investment by product suppliers or their customers, and can be easily accessed via standard web browser. Pricing is available upon request.

    Glassbeam's technology enables customers to parse and mine machine data to make better strategic and operational business decisions. Glassbeam customers and partners include Fortune 500 companies and enterprises across a variety of markets including storage, wireless, networking and medical devices.

    About Glassbeam
    Glassbeam Inc. is a Big Data applications company specializing in multi-structured machine data analytics for IT and business users. Glassbeam's Big Data applications for customer support, product development and sales leverage the company's breakthrough Semiotic Parsing Language (SPL) that can quickly extract strategic intelligence from complex operational data contained in multi-structured machine data.

    Media Contact
    Danielle Salvato-Earl
    Kulesa Faul for Glassbeam
    (650) 340-1982

  • Fri
    20
    Sep
    2013

    September 19, 2013

    • Machine Data Analytics Pioneer Attracts Investment from VKRM Group to Accelerate Growth and Innovation

    • New U.S. and India Offices to Support Company Growth

    MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Sept. 19, 2013 – Glassbeam, Inc., the machine data analytics company, today announced that the company has secured $3 million in additional equity funding. The investment will be used to fuel next-generation product innovation, expand the customer and partner ecosystem, and build a dedicated Data Science team to help customers improve intelligence and analytics through the use of machine data. Additionally, Glassbeam is expanding its offices in the U.S. and India to new locations by end of year to accommodate its double employee capacity and facilitate overall global expansion.

    The new funding was led by VKRM Group, a boutique venture capital firm investing in entrepreneurs building innovative and industry-leading businesses in the enterprise services and software, education and Internet sectors. Kumar Malavalli, lead investor at VKRM Group and co-founder of Brocade Communications and InMage Systems, is chairman of the Glassbeam board of directors.

    “Since inception, I've been pleased with Glassbeam's growth and traction in the market,” said Kumar Malavalli, principle at VKRM Investment Group. “The company is committed to its customers, maintaining a high degree of innovation and transformation for turning complex machine data analytics into actionable intelligence. The promise of Glassbeam's core technology, coupled with the management team's pedigree and success, provide exciting growth prospects.”

    Glassbeam’s patent-pending technology enables customers to parse and mine multi-structured machine data to make better strategic and operational business decisions. Glassbeam customers and partners include Fortune 500 companies and enterprises across a variety of markets including storage, wireless, networking and medical devices.

    “Our investors’ confidence in Glassbeam validates our strategy and the pioneering work we have done over the last four years building machine data analytics for the Internet of Things,” said Puneet Pandit, CEO and founder of Glassbeam. “This funding will enable us to bring new structure and meaning to data, building on this foundation by accelerating product engineering, delivering on new solutions and domain expertise and expanding our industry partnerships and customer base.”

    About Glassbeam
    Glassbeam Inc. is a Big Data applications company specializing in multi-structured machine data analytics for IT and business users. Glassbeam’s Big Data applications for customer support, product development and sales leverage the company’s breakthrough Semiotic Parsing Language (SPL) that can quickly extract strategic intelligence from complex operational data contained in multi-structured machine data.

    Media Contact
    Danielle Salvato-Earl
    Kulesa Faul for Glassbeam
    (650) 340-1982 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (650) 340-1982 FREE end_of_the_skype_highlighting
    glassbeam@kulesafaul.com

  • Thu
    26
    Sep
    2013

    PubNub wants to knock down the barriers to real-time app development. To further its goal, the company, which offers a real time app development platform through an API, closed $11 million in Series B funding last week.

    If you are still not sure what a real time app is, think instant messaging, multiplayer games (where you need to see the other players’ locations), document sharing and enterprise collaboration. All these apps involve two-way live communication and synchronization.

    The problem is that companies who offer real times apps, like Skype or Google Docs, typically invest a lot of money into developing core infrastructures to support and deploy those apps across a global audience. Small businesses don’t necessarily have the funds to do that.

    That’s where PubNub steps in. The San Francisco firm offers a cloud platform with all the ready-made building blocks (data push, presence, storage and playback, analytics and security) for real time app development along with a globally distributed network of 11 data centers. By removing the complexity and cost out from creating real-time apps, PubNub hopes it will allow more developers to take risks and try new concepts.

    So far, the idea seems to be working. PubNub, which was founded in 2010, says it now streams three million messages per second to over 100 million devices each month. It has powered real-time apps for the Olympics, Eurocup, Super Bowl, Grammys and American Music Awards (AMAs) that sync millions of devices simultaneously for real time voting, sentiment analysis, second screen ad sync and more.

    The founding round was led by Scale Venture Partners along with Relay Ventures and TiE Angels. As part of the investment, Andy Vitus from ScaleVPI will join PubNub’s board of directors. PubNub says it plans to use the money to expand worldwide sales and marketing to increase demand for its product.

  • Fri
    27
    Sep
    2013

    Employees are increasingly turning to consumer grade file sharing services such as Dropbox for business activities, and even if that use is sanctioned by IT, custody remains a challenge because, although the enterprise still owns the data, custody moves to the cloud provider. It is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain visibility and control over data in the cloud and prove chain of custody. Complicating the situation, data can be compromised without IT’s knowledge, since they may not even be aware that documents are being stored and shared in the cloud.

    What’s needed is a trustworthy cloud. Trust in the physical world is achieved through relationships and contracts, and enforced using oversight and punitive action in response to a breach of trust. Building on the concept of trust, trustworthiness is a model that uses carefully designed and implemented technology, policies and reputation networks to achieve data security. Applied to the cloud, it means that even though organizations no longer have physical custody of their files, by embedding security into the document itself they have the means to secure sensitive documents so that they can be shared and still remain private.

    Trustworthiness uses low-level cryptographic algorithms to enforce policies, revoke access rights and monitor access activities. It is defined and controlled exclusively by the data owner without any intervention from the cloud service provider. In a trustworthy cloud scenario, authorized users have visibility into groups and documents—limited by their role—but in a manner that doesn’t weaken the cryptography or open the system to additional attacks. This approach prevents the misuse of cloud data from going undetected by creating a comprehensive audit trail of who is accessing files.

    When content is stored in a trustworthy cloud, policies set up by the data owner are enforced by a solution provider without the solution or cloud provider ever having access to the data itself. This is called zero knowledge and relies on advanced federated key management technology.

    Zero knowledge-based document sharing enables collaboration across organizational boundaries using any cloud storage provider, since federated cryptography is attached to the content rather than depending on the cloud container. For IT, it provides the ability to accommodate the growing popularity of BYOC (bring your own cloud) for business document sharing, while maintaining the visibility and control required for Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance. As an added benefit, the Trustworthy Cloud does not force users to adopt new tools or impose changes to an organization’s existing security and audit infrastructures.

    Implementing a Trustworthy Cloud

    A trustworthy cloud establishes a provable separation of authority between the custodian of the information (the service provider) and the content owner and others who may have varying degrees of authorization to view or modify this information. The aggregate cryptographic algorithms and protocols provide strong guarantees of data privacy and chain of custody.

    In this context, privacy is the ability of participants to control disclosure of sensitive business data. Confidentiality, meanwhile, refers to the commitment by the service provider to refrain from accessing or disclosing the data. A trustworthy cloud solution replaces the conventional need to rely on confidentiality on the part of a cloud service provider with the ability to rely on technological controls to enforce data privacy. This is made possible by implementing an emerging approach that places security on the content instead of on the container itself.

    A trustworthy cloud has the all-inclusive ability to establish an electronic chain of custody record. This indelible record captures where the data originated, who may have accessed or modified it during its lifetime, and where and when there was a transfer of possession, no matter where it resides. In addition, content owners or the parties with fiduciary responsibilities for its lifecycle management can specify, monitor, and enforce fine-grain retention, disposition, and hold policies on data that is not in their possession. In practice, these records and policies can be carried as metadata that is based on the content but may be stored and encrypted separately from it.

    A trustworthy cloud also provides scalable security federation to enable the secure sharing of documents across organizational trust boundaries (e.g. outside their firewall) in a manner that is as simple for employees as using consumer solutions such as Dropbox. This capability is especially important for companies in regulated industries such as Healthcare, Accounting, Pharmaceutical and Finance where data privacy and provenance control are mandated.

    For example, a trustworthy cloud would enable a publicly traded company to comply with SOX 404 even when a third party cloud provider possesses the data. In HIPAA- or FDA-regulated environments, a trustworthy cloud would allow an organization that uses public cloud services to meet the requirements of HIPAA/HITECH or Business Associate Agreement (BAA) contracts.

    With the rapid authorized and unauthorized use of public cloud sharing by their employees, organizations can no longer afford to ignore the data privacy issues these services engender. A trustworthy cloud approach that enforces security on the content itself eliminates the cloud container as a potential point of compromise. This enables organizations to implement and enforce “zero knowledge” encryption that is transparent to employees, and prevents both the cloud service provider and the security vendor from accessing business information.

    AlephCloud is a provider of cloud content privacy solutions.

    Read more about cloud computing in Network World's Cloud Computing section.
    http://www.networkworld.com/news

  • Mon
    07
    Oct
    2013

    Business is increasingly taking place outside the corporate firewall. Employees are using their own devices and turning to consumer-grade cloud file sharing services to allow for access across multiple devices and to collaborate with each other or with outside partners, consultants, prospects, and clients.

    Even when the use of services such as Box, Dropbox, SkyDrive, and other similar services is sanctioned by the IT department, businesses have nearly zero assurance of confidentiality when their employees store documents in the cloud. Not only are there few publically documented vendor controls, there is no way for a business to continuously audit the cloud vendor’s entire infrastructure and administrative procedures to ensure that documents remain private.

    A troubling example was recently brought to light by WNC Infosec (Western North Carolina InfoSec Community), which found that the Dropbox file sharing service opens certain files after they are uploaded.

    While it may be fine for individuals to trust cloud vendors with their everyday material, businesses must adhere to a higher security standard if they are to retain control over sensitive data and meet regulatory compliance requirements. What can be done?

    Cloud security requirements

    In order to enforce corporate security policies in the cloud, IT needs to know (1) who is accessing and sharing (2) what documents (3) in which cloud storage service, and (4) that the cloud provider cannot override policies established by the business or access the data itself.

    Here are four steps for implementing a cloud security strategy:

    a) Take a risk-based approach: It is not realistic to “secure everything”. Look at business processes and quantify the risk associated with each one, then match them up with an appropriate level of security and controls.

    b) Clearly document the policy and communicate it to employees.

    c) Make the security solution easy to use, so that employees will not try to circumvent it in order to get their jobs done. The days of forcing staff to accept whatever IT deems acceptable are long gone!

    d) Implement content-based security to eliminate the risk of the cloud provider failing to implement proper security protocols and controls.

    http://www.net-security.org/article.php?id=1890

  • Wed
    09
    Oct
    2013

    Stanford startup and StartX alum Dylan Arena talks c-level executive life

    In a new series, The Dish Daily is talking to startup entrepreneurs who have already made an impact in their industry. Whether they’ve just finished an accelerator program or garnered their first round of seed funding, we want to ask them about being their own boss, running a company, and facing unexpected challenges along the way.

    Our first chat was with Dylan Arena, Kidaptive co-founder and Chief Learning Scientist, who is a Stanford alumnus (BS in Symbolic Systems, ’01, MA in Philosophy, ’01, MS in Statistics, ’12, and PhD in LSTD, ’12) and launched Kidaptive with co-founder P.J. Gunsagar through the StartX program. Kidaptive’s team has been working for two years on their first product, Leo’s Pad, an episode series made for the iPad and aimed at three- to five-year olds. The startup hopes to leverage the iPad’s technology for interactive storytelling with a curriculum that engages early learners.

    The Dish Daily: Tell me about your StartX experience.

    Arena: When the StartX application came to our inbox, [co-founder Gunsagar] thought it might do me some good to apply, but as it turned out we both learned a lot from the StartX experience. (Gunsager, who is the son of an entrepreneur, already had started two companies before Kidaptive). Our first few months at Kidaptive had been dedicated to building our app prototype. We were able to bring that first prototype into StartX, but that was all we had. We didn’t have a clear marketing strategy or business model—we were a bit naïve, thinking that we were going to build something awesome and everything else would sort of fall into place.

    StartX really helped us think through all the other aspects of how to run a business. We were given access to a tremendous group of advisors who were simply interested in helping new companies because they’d done well themselves. By giving talks and holding office hours, and even joining a few advisory boards without the incentive of pay or equity, these people made for an awesome community.

    StartX also introduced us to a number of companies that were doing great things. It had a great peer-to-peer collaboration system. The community knowledge in certain areas speeds up the process of building a real community, and speed is really the only thing a startup has going for it, so anything that can reduce friction is a huge asset.

    The Dish Daily: What did you learn specifically at StartX?

    Arena: We learned how important distribution is, especially in an ecosystem like Apple’s App Store. You can make the best app around, but if nobody sees it, quality doesn’t matter. Apple’s App Store isn’t great for discovery, so you need a coherent plan for user acquisition.

    Also, when I first started Kidaptive, I didn’t know the difference between a VC and an angel, or what the term “valuation” meant. StartX taught me about the financing process and what that ecosystem is like.

    The Dish Daily: How has your participation in StartX enabled you to grow?

    Arena: I’m not sure we would even be a company without StartX. I think they are responsible for our existence. They introduced us to our lead investor in our seed round, and one of the StartX mentors gave us an introduction to a senior person at Apple that opened several doors there (the advisor decided to use a one-time “silver bullet,” an introductory email that he was willing to use on behalf of Kidaptive because he believes in the startup’s potential).

    Apple controls distribution on their App Store, so we’ve met with Apple several times and gotten great feedback about how to improve our products. It’s huge to have them understand and appreciate what you’re doing.

    The Dish Daily: How is your day-to-day different than what it used to be?

    Arena: As a grad student, you’re focused on coming up with interesting things to test, and then testing them. That’s true as an entrepreneur, too. (Lean Startup movement creator) Steve Blank says the difference between a startup and an established company is that a startup is still trying to find a business model, so there’s a ton of research and investigation that needs to happen. So in that sense, being a grad student isn’t that different from being an entrepreneur.

    What is different is that I spend most of my time in meetings, either with internal people (helping to solve problems, plan things, and make decisions) or with external people and partners, as well as recruiting or speaking at conferences. It’s a lot less hands-on, and there’s lot more decision-making by talking with other people who are the ones actually doing things. It’s kind of frustrating to feel removed from the actual work.

    I also thought that as Chief Learning Scientist my role would be narrowly constrained to curriculum and assessment, but I’ve got my hand in everything, from HR to fundraising. I was naïve in not realizing that founders are in it all, but it’s eye-opening to see all aspects of a company. Just as (Stanford’s computer science course) 106A allows you to get behind the curtain of computers, being an entrepreneur gets you behind the curtain of businesses. It’s illuminating and powerful.

    The Dish Daily: What are some of the daily struggles?

    Arena: A startup will never have the resources it needs to operate; imagine trying to bake in a kitchen where you only have half the ingredients necessary to finish the cake. Essentially, you just have to be creative to achieve the results you want. As a startup, you always have the speed, but you’re lacking in everything else.

    Also, as a founder, you have a strong vision that touches all aspects of the company. Much of founders’ work is to externalize your vision, to communicate all those nuances that are in your head, ideas that you aren’t really aware you know until somebody asks and you have a clear answer. When a question gets asked that seems obvious to me, I have to remind myself that that’s only because I’ve been living and breathing this concept for two years, and my job is to continually bring everyone closer to a fuller understanding of what is being built and why.

    thedishdaily.com/news

  • Mon
    21
    Oct
    2013

    Glassbeam is hoping to carve out a slice of the Splunk-dominated machine data analytics market with a new cloud-based service for tapping operational data. Dubbed SCALAR, the software brings structure to the Internet of Everything with a proprietary language that helps engineers describe information in large-scale data warehouse environments.

    SCALAR runs Glassbeam’s Semiotic Parsing Language on a stack of open source components that couples Cassandra with Solr to analyze both unstructured and multi-structured machine data. The solution doubles as an application platform that supports several tools and dashboards, including the newly unveiled Explorer log management solution.

    Explorer features search and visualization capabilities that can be utilized to integrate different types data and identify patterns across multiple information sources. According to the company, users can leverage this functionality to improve troubleshooting and create a central data repository for compliance and audit purposes. Explorer is joined by Glassbeam Studio, a visual development environment that aims to make it easier for developers to map data streams and generate meta definitions inside SCALAR.

    Puneet Pandit, the chief executive officer of Glassbeam, said that his company’s solutions help organizations unlock the true value of machine data.

    “Our solutions are already deployed and trusted by some of the world’s largest Fortune 500 companies. There is more to log analysis than IT logs and operational intelligence, and our ultra scalable platform takes the next step to unlocking the value of machine data – product and customer intelligence for the entire enterprise,” Pandit stated. “We are proudly at the forefront of machine data analytics for the next era and the Internet of Things.”

    Like Glassbeam, Splunk is working to expand its machine data solution beyond log analysis. The company recently allied with Pentaho to deliver a platform for extracting information from a wide range of connected devices, including sensors and smart machinery. The latter segment has drawn the attention of GE, which is also partnering aggressively to usher in what it calls the Industrial Internet.

    siliconangle.com/blog

  • Mon
    28
    Oct
    2013

    Data protection and security specialist InMage Systems has introduced the 4000 Series, a backup and disaster recovery appliance designed for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) to enterprises with petabyte-size deployments.

    The 4000 Series, which starts at $8,000 and is currently shipping, is based on a self-contained architecture that includes compute, networking and storage and is designed to occupy minimal space and power requirements.
    The appliance's data protection technology captures data changes in real time at the byte level and allows for continuous backup with near zero impact on primary servers and storage.

    "We are always looking to provide market-leading solutions to our corporate customers that will complement their existing IT infrastructure," Max Migel, managing director at DataCorp, said in a statement. "When it comes to heterogeneous backup and recovery, partnering with InMage on their new 4000 Series was an easy decision because its technology is easy to use and affordable."

    Features such as compression, encryption, wide area network (WAN) acceleration and bandwidth management are designed to enable replication across geographic distances while minimizing bandwidth costs, maximizing capacity and increasing security.

    Additional features include flash-accelerated hybrid storage pools that leverage SAS drives in redundant, higher performance 1+0 configuration and thin provisioning, zero overhead copy on write, pipelined input/output (IO), dynamic striping and variable block size.

    The 4000 Series also provides the ability to recover to any point in time, at the level of granularity required, such as mails or mailboxes, files and folders, volumes, full server or even the entire site, and addresses hybrid cloud-based disaster recovery, replicating from appliance-to-appliance to a secondary data center or to a range of cloud providers.

    In addition, the platform enables secondary workloads such as reporting, analytics, test and development, as well as granular recovery, including individual email recovery for Microsoft Exchange. Integrated low-latency, high-throughput 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces for storage access eliminate the need to purchase external storage networking switches.

    High-density compute and memory allows running hundreds of recovered server instances, and data lifecycle management provides light retention policies. Rounding out the package are native storage capacity optimization features, in-line compression and deduplication.

    "We chose the InMage 4000 because it is a cost effective backup and DR solution all rolled into one magic box," Pat Smith, CIO at Our Kids, a nonprofit provider of child welfare services to Florida's Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, said in a statement.

    Many small businesses are experiencing significant issues with the cost, complexity and lack of capabilities of their data protection, according to a report earlier this year by backup and replication specialist Veeam Software.

    In particular, 85 percent of SMBs are experiencing cost-related challenges with backup and recovery, including high ongoing management costs (51 percent), expensive licensing models (48 percent), and backups either requiring or using too much storage (44 percent).

    According to the report, 80 percent of SMBs are facing complexity-related challenges with their data protection, including backups needing ongoing management (52 percent), too many virtual servers to back up (35 percent), and backup tools being difficult to configure and use (32 percent). More than half (55 percent) of SMBs surveyed said they are planning to change their backup tool for virtual servers by 2014.

    Originally published on eWeek.

    infostor.com

  • Mon
    28
    Oct
    2013

    439536_InMageLogo

    Leading Hybrid Cloud Platform Provider Listed Among World's Most Promising Technology Companies

    SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 25, 2013) - InMage has been named to the 2013 Red Herring Global 100 list of the world's top private technology companies.

    InMage continues to address the growing market for hybrid cloud services. InMage's comprehensive hybrid cloud platform enables customers to leverage the Cloud seamlessly for secondary services including Cloud Migration, DR as a Service, Development and Test, Reporting and Analytics. As such, InMage combines four key enablers into one solution that typically take years to develop in house, or must be procured from different vendors. These include: best in class data protection; a comprehensive physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual recovery engine that enables server workload mobility for enterprises; automated provisioning, with a full-fledged multi-tenant portal for deployment and management.

    The Red Herring Global 100 award is given to the top 100 global technology companies selected from over 1000 companies and over 40 nations. The selection is based on the company's technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, and financial health.

    Previous winners include Google, Yahoo, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, YouTube and eBay.

    "2013 has demonstrated the sector's vibrant activity and its contribution to the global economic recovery. InMage is performing exceptionally in its field and strongly deserved to be one of those companies awarded this distinction," stated Alex Vieux, Chairman of Red Herring.

    "We are proud to be part of this impressive group," said InMage CEO, Kumar Malavalli. "Being recognized as one of the top global IT companies is an honor for InMage, and affirms our commitment and global role in providing the best recovery and cloud based work load migration capabilities available in the market today."

    For more information, please visit www.redherring.com or www.inmage.com

  • Tue
    05
    Nov
    2013

    AIISF award winners (l-r): Sintao Ng, Kumar Malavalli, Alla Efimova of the Magnes, and Catherine Eusebio

    Legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Kumar Malavalli was one of four recipients of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation’s fourth annual Immigrant Heritage Awards at a gala event held Sept. 27 at the Westin St. Francis here.

    He was joined by Next Generation winner Catherine Eusebio, philanthropists Lit and Sintao Ng, and education awardee the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life of the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

    In 1995, Malavalli founded Brocade Communications, which revolutionized and exploited the power of network storage, and is currently CEO, co-founder and chair of InMage Systems, a firm that has pioneered the development of event-based disaster recovery and affordable data protection software.

    He was honored by AIISF for his accomplishments in business and his philanthropic endeavors in the United States and India.

    The Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation celebrated its 30th anniversary at the event. The AIISF tells the story of Pacific Coast immigration, including the period when the U.S. Immigration Station at Angel Island was operating from 1910 to 1940.

    Working with the California State Parks, the AIISF has raised millions of dollars to preserve the Immigration Station and tell its story to hundreds of thousands of people.

    Read more at indiawest.com/news

  • Thu
    14
    Nov
    2013

    Going into 2014, a whirlwind of security start-ups are looking to have an impact on the enterprise world. Most of these new ventures are focused on securing data in the cloud and on mobile devices. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Illumio, for example, founded earlier this year, is only hinting about what it will be doing in cloud security. But already it's the darling of Silicon Valley investors, pulling in over $42 million from backer Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Formation 8 and others.

    The cloud's lure is easy to see. More businesses continue to adopt a wide range of cloud services -- whether software-as-service, infrastructure-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service. That means the enterprise IT department needs more visibility, monitoring and security controls for what employees are doing and evidence their data is safe. In addition, employees today increasingly use smartphones and tablets they personally own for work in "Bring Your Own Device" mode, leading to other management and security questions. When there are perceived security "gaps," start-ups see opportunities, as the 12 firms we identify here do.

    Security is increasingly delivered not as on premises software or hardware but at least partly if not wholly as a cloud-based service. Gartner is predicting security-as-a-service will grow from about $2.13 billion now to $3.17 billion in 2015.

    Gartner: Cloud-based security as a service set to take off

    With all of that in mind, here's our slate of security start-ups worth watching in the near future:

    Adallom is based in Menlo Park, Calif., but has its research and development roots in Israel, where its three co-founders, Assaf Rappaport, vice president of R&D Roy Reznik and CTO Ami Luttwak have backgrounds in the Israel cyber-defense forces. Adallom -- a word which means "last line of defense" in Hebrew -- is taking on the problem in monitoring user actions related to software-as-a-service (SaaS) usage. The firm's proxy-based technology announced this month is offered to the enterprise either as a security service in the cloud or server-based software for on premises.

    The goal is to provide real-time analysis and a clear audit trail and reporting related to SaaS-based application usage by the enterprise. The monitoring can allows options for automating or manually terminating sessions or blocking content download. Though not wholly similar, its closest competitors could be considered to be two other start-ups, SkyHigh Networks and Netskope. The venture has gotten $4.5 million in funding from Sequoia Capital.

    AlephCloud hasn't yet made its software and service called AlephCloud Content Canopy generally available, but its purpose is to provide controlled encryption and decryption of documents transmitted business-to-business via cloud-based file synchronization and sharing services such as Dropbox, SkyDrive and Amazon S3. The company was founded in 2011by CEO Jieming Zhu and CTO Roy D'Souza. Zhu says Content Canopy works by means of the "federated key management" process AlephCloud developed that can use existing enterprise public-key infrastructures used in identity management. For the end user, though, who is permitted to retrieve and decrypt the encrypted document via Dropbox or SkyDrive, it's all transparent. AlephCloud says its "zero-knowledge" encryption process means the company never holds the private encryption key. AlephCloud will first be supporting PCs, Macs, and Apple iOS devices, and Android next year, and specific file-sharing services. Zhu says the underlying technology can be expanded further to other applications as well. AlephCloud has received $9.5 million in venture-capital funding, including $7.5 million from Handbag LLC and the remainder from angel investors.

    BitSight Technologies has a simple proposition. It's not uncommon for companies to want to try and evaluate the IT security of another business before entering into an e-commerce arrangement where networks may be interconnected in some way. BitSight, co-founded in 2011 by CTO Stephen Boyer and COO Nagarjuna Venna, has a security "rating" service to do this, though there are limits on how far it can go at this point. The BitSight approach, says vice president of marketing Sonali Shah, relies on an analysis of Internet traffic by BitSight sensors on the Internet to detect if the company's IT assets, such as computers, server or network, have been commandeered by threats such as botnets or denial-of-service attacks. But she acknowledges there's not yet a way for BitSight to determine what security issues might arise in a company's use of cloud services. Cambridge, Mass.-based BitSight has received $24 million in venture-capital funding from investors that include Menlo Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners, Commonwealth Capital and Flybridge Capital partners.

    Defense.net is focusing on stopping denial-of-service attacks aimed by attackers at both enterprises and cloud service providers. Founded by its CTO Barrett Lyon, who started another anti-distributed denial-of-service firm called Prolexic in 2003, Defense.net relies on a cloud service without the need for an appliance to mitigate against large-scale DDoS assaults. Many in the industry say DDoS attacks are growing worse in scale and number. For his part, Lyon says he thinks the average DDoS attack is probably 16 times larger and "significantly more sophisticated than it was a year earlier." Defense.net has received $9.5 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners.

    Illumio, founded by its CEO Andrew Rubin earlier this year, is still in stealth mode, maintaining a discrete silence about its intentions. But the little hints sprinkled across its website indicate the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's focus is likely to be tackling cloud-based security with an emphasis on virtualization. Illumio has brought in former VMware techies and execs. As for Rubin himself, he was formerly CEO at Cymtec Systems, a security firm providing the means for visibility, protection and control by the enterprise of Web content and mobile devices, plus a means for intrusion-detection analysis. Illumio has received more than $42 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Formation 8 and others.

    Lacoon Mobile Security has come up with a sandboxing approach to detect zero-day malware targeting Android and Apple iOS devices by means of a small lightweight agent that examines mobile applications through behavior analysis and a process tied to the Lacoon cloud gateway. The start-up was founded by CEO Michael Shaulov, vice president of research and development Ohad Bobrov, and Emanuel Avner, the CFO. The company has its R&D arm in Israel and its headquarters in San Francisco. It's backed by $8 million in venture-capital funding led by Index Ventures, plus $2.7 million in angel investing, including from Shlomo Kramer, CEO at Imperva.

    Malcovery Security, based in Pittsburgh, was basically spun out in 2012 from research on phishing done at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, according to its CEO Greg Coticchia. Targeted phishing attacks can have disastrous outcomes when devices are targeted to infiltrate organizations and steal data. Coticchia says the Malcovery technologies offered to businesses include ways to identify phishing websites and a service that can detect phishing e-mail. The company's founders include Gary Warner, director of research in cyber forensics at the University of Alabama, and the start-up has received about $3 million in funding from patents and research from the university.

    Netskope wants to help businesses monitor how their employees are using cloud-based applications and apply security controls to it, such as giving IT managers the ability to block data transfers or receive alerts. The Netskope service can apply security controls to about 3,000 different cloud-based applications, whether they be SaaS, PaaS or Iaas. The Netskope service is meant to let IT divisions get a grip on cloud usage and avoid the "shadow IT" issue of business people initiating cloud services without informing IT at all. The Los Altos, Calif.-based start-up was founded in 2012 by CEO Sanjay Beri along with chief architect Ravi Ithal, chief scientist Krishna Narayanaswami, and Lebin Chang, head of application engineering teams, all who bring tech industry experience ranging from Juniper to Palo Alto Networks to VMware. Netskope has amassed $21 million in venture funding from Social+Capital Partnership and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

    PrivateCore is a crypto-based security play, focusing on making use of the central processing unit (CPU) as the trusted component to encrypt data in use. PrivateCore has come up with what it calls its vCage software that relies on the Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge CPU for secure processing through means of Intel Sandy Bridge-based servers in cloud environments, first off in IaaS. The challenge in processing encrypted data is "the problem with having to decrypt to do processing," says Oded Horovitz, CEO of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up he co-founded with Steve Weis, CTO, and Carl Waldspurger as adviser. The vCage approach, based on Intel CPU Sandy Bridge, makes use of the Intel Trusted Execution Technologies and Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm to perform the processing in RAM. This can be done with Intel Sandy Bridge because there's now about 20MB of cache available, he points out, enough to get the job done. The data in question is only unencrypted in the CPU. This encryption approach is being tested now by IaaS providers and some enterprises, and PrivateCore expects to have its first product in general release early next year. The start-up has received $2.4 million in venture capital from Foundation Capital.

    SkycureA is all about mobile-device security, with its initial focus on Apple iOS iPhones and iPads. It recently introduced what's described as an intrusion-detection and prevention package for mobile devices, which Skycure's co-founder and CTO Yair Amit says relies on the Skycure cloud service for security purposes. He says the goal is to prevent and mitigate any impact from attackers exploiting configuration profiles on mobile devices. Skycure, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, was co-founded by CEO Adi Sharabani and the company has received about $3 million in venture-capital funding from Pitango Venture Capital and angel investors.

    Synack was founded by two former National Security Agency (NSA) computer network operations analysts, CEO Jay Kaplan and CTO Mark Kuhr. According to them, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based start-up is bringing together security experts with expertise in finding zero-day bugs in software, particularly in websites and applications of Synack customers. "We pay researchers for vulnerabilities found," explained Kaplan last August as Synack officially debuted. He says bug bounty rates typically run a minimum of $500 to several thousand for serious vulnerabilities in databases, for example. Synack says it has cultivated relationships with several bug hunters around the world, including at the NSA, who would be available to take on specific assignments. Synack A has received $1.5 million in venture-capital funding from a combination of investors that A include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Wing Venture Partners, Allegis Capital and Derek Smith, CEO of start-up Shape Security.

    Threat Stack, founded by CEO Dustin Webber with Jennifer Andre, wants to give enterprises a way to know if hackers are breaking into Linux-based servers that they may use in their cloud services. To monitor for hacker activity, the start-up's Cloud Sight agent software for Linux needs to be installed on the Linux server under administrative control in the cloud environment, says Webber. "We look for the behavior of the hacker," he points out, noting the enterprise will get an alert if a hacker break-in is underway and a measure of forensics about incidents can be obtained if needed. Cloud Sight could also be potentially used by cloud service providers as well but the initial focus is on monitoring for the enterprise, he says. Threat Stack, founded in Cambridge, Mass., in 2012, has obtained $1.2 million in funding from Atlas Venture and .406 Ventures. The start-up is yet another example of why there's new energy directed toward finding ways to provide visibility, monitoring and security for businesses adopting cloud services.

    Ellen Messmer is senior editor at Network World, part of IDG, where she covers news and technology trends related to information security. Twitter: MessmerE. E-mail: emessmer@nww.com

    Read Morewww.pcadvisor.co.uk/news

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    Being able to connect a lot of things to the Internet is one thing; being able to build applications that actually do something useful with them is quite another. While the Internet of Things (IoT) is all the rage these days, few organizations have any actual capability to take advantage of it. With that in mind, Glassbeam has launched SCALAR, a cloud-based platform for creating analytics applications based on machine data.

    According to Glassbeam CEO Puneet Pandit, SCALAR allows developers to create applications against a central repository of machine data in the cloud. These applications can be integrated with other enterprise applications via a set of defined RESTful APIs that Glassbeam has deployed on its own Infoserver, which is based on the PLAY framework.

    10Img Credit: Glassbeam.com

    SCALAR is an analytics application in the cloud that’s based on a proprietary language that Glassbeam developed on top of the Cassandra NoSQL database and Solr search engine platform to structure machine data. The company’s Glassbeam Studio allows organizations to map all that data, and the Glassbeam Explorer application enables search and log management.

    Glassbeam Studio allows developers to map data and define metadata definitions. Applications created via Glassbeam Studio can then be exposed via a set of consistent APIs that makes it easier to integrate analytics applications with other applications in the enterprise, Pandit says.

    IoT’s potential won’t become meaningful reality without applications that makes sense of that data. Even then, these applications must find a way for other applications to easily invoke the analytics generated on the SCALAR platform.

    What makes SCALAR different from an IoT perspective is that instead of requiring developers to bolt on APIs after an application is built, the tools for supporting APIs are baked into the platform.

    Glassbeam recently raised another $3 million in funding that the company is using to fuel additional product development and create an ecosystem around SCALAR. It remains to be seen whether developers take to a platform for building analytics applications that are optimized for IoT. But from a business perspective, the value of IoT investments is not in all the machine data being created, but rather, the insights into all the data that is generated by the analytics application.

    Read more: blog.programmableweb.com
    Follow us: @programmableweb on Twitter | ProgrammableWeb on Facebook

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    Machine Data Analytics Company Honored With a Bronze Win in the Enterprise Service of the Year Category for Glassbeam Health Check

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    SANTA CLARA, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 11/22/13 -- Glassbeam, Inc., the machine data analytics company, today announced that Glassbeam Health Check, a cloud-based, white-label solution that delivers a continuous pulse on the "health" of products, has been named a bronze winner in the Enterprise Service of the Year category for the Best in Biz Awards. The Best in Biz Awards are the only independent business awards judged by members of the media from top-tier news, business and technology publications, as well as broadcast outlets and analyst firms.

    "Glassbeam Health Check was recognized in the enterprise category for helping product manufacturers to drive new revenues and monetize machine data, ultimately creating new revenue streams for our partners," said Puneet Pandit, founder and CEO of Glassbeam. "Winning a Best in Biz Award reflects Glassbeam's growing presence and leadership in the market."

    Glassbeam Health Check collects and analyzes machine data from every enabled product, every day -- a volume of data that would not be possible for administrators to analyze themselves. Glassbeam employs its core patent-pending SCALAR technology with Semiotic Parsing Language (SPL) as its underpinning language to provide analytics capabilities that would otherwise take years for a product manufacturer to duplicate.

    "The winners were selected based on the companies with the boldest, most innovative ideas," said Best in Biz Awards judge Brian Bandell, senior reporter at South Florida Business Journal. "Many companies rely on copying the inventions of others or releasing minor tweaks of products that were revolutionary years ago, but these companies are truly breaking new ground."

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    2013_11$largeimg229_Nov_2013_185141300

    SAN FRANCISCO, Calif, United States

    The San Francisco-Bangalore Sister City Initiative announced Nov. 25 that a new trade mission will depart San Francisco Nov. 29 to visit sister city Bangalore led by San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee.

    To further an important exchange of information, 54 senior business leaders from construction, engineering, healthcare, technology and other verticals as well as civic leaders in the Bay area will join Lee to discuss important human welfare issues such as recycling, waste management, water management and world ecology with officials in Bangalore.

    “Our Sister City is keen to learn from and collaborate with San Francisco and the Bay Area which has successfully implemented multi-billion dollar infrastructure improvement programs. They have built world class water, waste management, recycling, civic administration, transportation, health care and other public services,” Madhav Misra, co-chair of the San Francisco-Bangalore Sister City Initiative, stated in a press release.

    During the trip, a Memorandum of Understanding will be signed to establish help desks where respective business people in their cities can get assistance working with or launching their products and services into the other country.

    "Our goal is engagement. We ask corporate leaders here in the States to take a closer look at mutually beneficial exchanges and resources in India and how we can leverage these resources here in the States and for global welfare and economy," said Kumar Malavalli, Development Chair/ Director for the San Francisco-Bangalore Sister City Initiative and CEO, InMage Systems.

    Nandini Tandon, vice chair of the El Camino Hospital's Board of Directors, will be co-chairing a health care delegation of local business, civic and physician leaders as part of the mission.