Archive for the 'Venture Capital' Category

Sharpcast SugarSync Launch Statistics

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 18, 2008
in Mobile, Startups and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

image The folks at Sharpcast have taken notice of the articles that I have written recently about the online file synchronization market. They contacted me and shared some of the statistics for the SugarSync launch that happened on Mar 20. The stats were interesting, so I asked if I could share them with you all on my blog, and they agreed. Here’s the quote:

Only two weeks into our launch, we have a 15% conversion rate and have already doubled our first month’s expectations in trials, and we are only half-way to the end if the initial 45-day free trial period. 75% of our customers sign up for 30GB or more.  A quarter of them are on 100 GB and 250 GB plans. And the country’s most influential publications and analysts by and large are showing unanimous support that SugarSync is a new standard-bearer for the category.

Sharpcast added that since the launch, SugarSync has synchronized over 75 Million files.

It’s always great to get some statistics - especially straight from the company. I would love to hear more (like the breakout of mobile users, for example). Many thanks for sharing!

Comments?

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Cassatt: The Green Data Center As A Step To Utility Computing

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 14, 2008
in Software, Startups, Technology, Venture Capital and Virtualization
. 0 Comments

image ComputerWorld did a nice video interview with Bill Coleman, CEO of Cassatt Corporation, on the positioning of Cassatt as a "Green Data Center" software company as opposed to a "Utility Computing" software company. You should watch it. Some selected points raised by Bill include:

  • Cassatt is trying to build the company around what people are willing to buy today.
  • Cassatt is still a Utility Computing company. The Policy Management that we have built and is needed to do Active Power Management is the same as that needed to build a Utility Compute environment.
  • Cassatt has 25 Patents Pending (23 utility and 2 method patents - I hold one of the utility patents).
  • Inflection point in Utility Computing, going beyond Active Power Management, is 2009-2011.
  • This is a platform because it is the Policy Management Framework by which end user customers define their success in using IT.
  • The Web 2.0 stuff will be built out and there will be a huge bust - just like every decade there is a bust at the end of it.
  • During the whole next decade, utility computing will be proved, and we will have a huge consolidation of industries providing utility vanilla services.
  • What I want to be is the arms supplier. I want to pay all the utilities to take my software and run their systems, and I want to sell to the end users a policy management framework by which they succeed.

Back in 2003, Bill Coleman, Dave McAllister, and I wrote the Cassatt Business Plan that led to the Series A funding by Warburg Pincus. At that time, we wrote a 10-year business plan, which was pretty much unheard of - especially during the funding doldrums of 2002-2004. Cassatt was always set up as an unusual Silicon Valley startup, in that we knew it would take 10 years for the Utility Computing marketplace to play out. Most VC-funded startups need to get to an exit well before that time, else things get messy for the VC fund (as they start to shut it down). Warburg Pincus brought the long-term perspective to the table. Very unusual, and highly respected.

The next 5 years should be very interesting as Utility Computing slams with Platform As A Service (PaaS) slams with highly scalable/reliable systems. What Cassatt has built is not particularly "sexy", but Bill is right that there is a huge need for a Platform to facilitate all the complexity and heterogeneity. In essence, a Utility OS.

Disclaimer: I am Co-Founder, Founding EVP/CTO, and a shareholder of Cassatt Corporation.

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Nuova Systems & Cisco: Sealing The Deal

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 10, 2008
in Startups, Technology, Venture Capital and Virtualization
. 0 Comments

I wrote a detailed look into the economics of the Nuova Systems and Cisco "M&A" deal (way back in October 2006) in the article: Nuova Systems & Cisco: New Corporate VC Model? Many thanks to my friend Tom Lyon for giving me an early look into what the Nuova Systems folks were up to. And congratulations to the team for completing this deal!

Fast-forward to today (April 2008) and we find that Cisco has announced that they will acquire the remaining 20% of Nuova Systems, as per their original deal. I missed it, but apparently the two firms renegotiated the deal in April 2007 in Nuova Systems’ favor "and raised the maximum potential payout of the transaction to $678 million". It was originally set to $578M. The latest announcement included additional information about the milestones of the payout:

The Nuova transaction is success-based with the total value primarily determined by the revenue of Nuova products over three measurement periods. The first measurement period will commence in early fiscal year 2010, the second measurement period will commence in late fiscal year 2010, and the third measurement period will commence in mid fiscal year 2011.

As I mentioned in my original article, I really do like this "Corporate VC"-ish model that they have created with the structure of this deal.

Everybody wins, and risk is dramatically reduced. Hats off to Cisco’s Business Development group.

I look forward to hearing more details about the payouts, as the milestones tick by (and the success of the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series).

Final note from their announcement:

Nuova was founded by Ed Bugnion, Luca Cafiero, Prem Jain, Soni Jiandani, Tom Lyon and Mario Mazzola. Bugnion is a former co-founder of VMware and Lyon formerly founded Ipsilion Networks. Cafiero, Jain, Jiandani and Mazzola are all former Cisco executives. All six founders and the company’s approximately 200 employees in San Jose and in Beaverton, OR are expected to join Cisco to continue working on data center-related projects.

Nuova will operate as an independent business unit led by Cafiero, Jain and Mazzola who will all report into John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO and chairman. In addition, to help ensure alignment with Cisco’s development priorities, Jain has been appointed as the ninth member of the development council in Cisco’s Development Organization, joining Tony Bates, Marthin DeBeer, Kathy Hill, Ned Hooper, Pankaj Patel, Don Proctor, Manny Rivelo and Jayshree Ullal.

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IDC Virtualization Forum West - Simon Crosby

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 8, 2008
in Open Source, Software, Startups, Technology, Venture Capital and Virtualization
. 1 Comment

image Simon Crosby, formerly the Founder & CTO of XenSource and, since the acquisition, now the CTO of the Virtualization & Management Division at Citrix, did a very nice job with the morning’s kick-off sponsor presentation at the IDC Virtualization Forum West conference.

Some takeaways that I found interesting:

  • Virtualization is not an end-goal in and of itself. Virtualization is a feature set and simply serves a role in IT Application Delivery.
  • Simon took a few jabs at VMware and, why not? Citrix/XenSource is now squarely positioned as the #2 contender. When you have the chance, you take a shot at the big boy. And, VMware is a big boy, to be sure. Simon said, “This is the year the world strikes back” (against VMware, I presume).
  • Simon also said, of one of the sleeping dogs in the Virtualization space, “Microsoft is going to radically change the environment for virtualization”. Presumably with their Hyper-V solution and their partner muscle.
  • About the movement of the hypervisor into the firmware of server (and at some point), client computers: “Where this feature ends up is still in play — in the OS, or in the hardware”. Personally, I think the answer is clear. Hypervisors are becoming commoditized and will become a component of the hardware/firmware/BIOS. It can’t be stopped.
  • Citrix will create a set of Open Extension API’s for Value Added Dynamic Infrastructure Services. Basically a way for third-parties to interact with the lower layers as part of building a truly dynamic data center (which, EVERYONE is talking about getting to at the conference) - Something that we predicted while building the business plan for Cassatt in 2003. The industry/market is absolutely catching up.
  • I think I heard that XenDesktop will be released in Q2 of this year (i.e., soon).
  • On the issue of scaling the virtual desktop infrastructure: “When I talk about scale, the Desktop scales way worse than any Data Center”. He cited a customer example where the customer has 250,000 desktop PC’s. They absolutely DO NOT want to have 250,000 Virtual Machines! The Citrix approach to scale here is intriguing (and quite likely correct): Break the OS from the Configuration from the Applications. Assemble them in real time for the desktop virtual machine. Result is 1 (or a handful) of OS images that you have to deal with and patch in order to update thousands of desktop machines. Much better scale solution.

I liked what Simon had to say about the virtualization landscape. It is very clear that the choice of Citrix as their acquirer was a good one. Lots of good synergies between the companies.

I had lunch with Simon as well, and we continued the discussion. I was impressed with his understanding of the customer requirements and political challenges to the rollout of a virtualized infrastructure.

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Y Combinator + RescueTime: Lessons Learned

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 2, 2008
in Software, Startups and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

image Tony Wright wrote a nice article over at FoundRead about his experience with the folks at Y Combinator in getting his most recent company, RescueTime, to market. Definitely worth a read.

I like the Y Combinator model that Paul Graham has put together. And, they’re getting lots of great companies built (on the cheap, as it should be).

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Sun Microsystems Acquires Parallels For $205M???

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 31, 2008
in Startups and Venture Capital
. 5 Comments

Just saw the story over at Virtualization.com.

I hope for the sake of the Parallels folks that this is an April Fool’s joke.

Parallels would be able to build a company valued much higher than the reported price. And, we all know what the Sun stock has been doing: Pretty much flat over the last 5 years.

A heck of a deal for Sun, however, if it’s true.

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Universal Parallel Computing Research Center

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 27, 2008
in Software, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

image

My good friend and advisor, Dave Patterson, has been selected to lead the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at UC Berkeley.

Patterson has been an advisor for three of the startup companies that I have founded. He’s a great guy and has a brilliant mind. He has a knack for doing research with immensely practical applications. He gets ahead of problems in Computer Science, and addresses them with the end result in mind. I just can’t say enough nice things about him. Brilliant.

The UPCRC is a joint venture between UC Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, funded by Intel and Microsoft. These two universities will spend the next 5 years trying to figure out how we build computing systems that can fully utilize the coming wave of multicore and manycore systems.

This is absolutely critical stuff.

Take a look at some of the coverage:

This is a very interesting project to me, and I will be writing more about it later. Why? Well:

  • I know David Patterson well, and have always admired his work
  • I am a graduate of the UIUC Computer Science department
  • Much of my career has been spent on HPC and supercomputer systems
  • Multicore and manycore systems are coming. You can’t stop it or deny it. There’s a solid reason why Intel and Microsoft are sponsoring this research.
  • I’ve been thinking about this topic of late.

You will absolutely hear more from me about this.

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BeInSync Synchronizes With Phoenix Technologies

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 27, 2008
in Software, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

image In the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked about the file synchronization market. Products and companies like FolderShare, Dropbox, Syncplicity, and Sharpcast.

In a timely moment, BeInSync has been acquired by Phoenix Technologies for $25M. TechCrunch covers it well.

BeInSync looks to be most similar to Sharpcast’s SugarSync product in terms of functionality. Sharpcast has support for Mobile devices, while BeInSync does not. BeInSync may only work on Windows (no Mac) in fact. BeInSync charges $39.95 for 50GB of storage per year, while SugarSync charges $199.99 for 60GB of storage per year. BeInSync certainly has the more attractive price!

I must admit that I don’t fully get why Phoenix Technologies was interested, except that Woody Hobbs, current President/CEO and previous President/CEO of IntelliSync, clearly knows what he’s looking for.

And, the $25M price tag can’t be sitting well with the Sharpcast folks, since they’ve already taken down $16.5M in VC money. Sharpcast would need a significantly higher exit for an acquisition to make financial sense.

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Sharpcast Puts $16.5M To Good Use: Releases SugarSync

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 26, 2008
in Gadgets, Software, Startups and Venture Capital
. 1 Comment

image Sharpcast, founded in 2004 and funded in 2006, has just announced the launch of their SugarSync product (formerly known as Project Hummingbird).

Similar to the products I talked about last week in the article, "FolderShare, Dropbox, Syncplicity, Oh My…", SugarSync is a tool that keeps your files synchronized across multiple computers (PC & Mac today, maybe Linux as well someday), including mobile devices.

One of the things that sets Sharpcast apart from the others is the support for many mobile platforms. They support Brew, J2ME, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian (coming soon). I don’t really think that the mobile aspect of this is where the market is right now, but I could be wrong. And, Sharpcast certainly has enough VC money to address the perceived needs of the mobile users. In any case, Sharpcast certainly has a big enough market with just the Universal Sync service.

Sharpcast charges $9.99/month or $99.99/year for their basic plan, which includes 30GB of storage in the cloud. I have 40GB of music, 30GB of photos, and 50GB of documents, so for me to use the service for just that (not counting my 450GB of camcorder video), I would need the Business Plan, which runs $499.99 yearly and covers 250GB of storage in the cloud.

Yikes! That’s pricey.

For data protection, I think I’ll just buy another Time Machine drive.

A Note About Sharpcast Photos:

Sharpcast has had a product in the market for a couple years now known as Sharpcast Photos. Focused on synchronizing just your photos between your computers and mobile devices. A subset of what SugarSync provides, to be sure. However, it does not appear that Sharpcast Photos has gained many subscribers. The site https://www.sharpcastphotos.com/ doesn’t even register traffic on Quantcast or Compete.com. Does anyone have any paid subscriber data for Sharpcast Photos?

When Sharpcast Photos was first released, my feeling was that they had priced themselves out of the market. The cost is $5.99/month or $64.99/year, which is a bit steep for just photo protection - especially since the sharing part was limited to their photo sharing service. Perhaps the limited subscriber base backs that up. Anyone?

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Bug Labs at EclipseCon 2008

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 19, 2008
in Mobile, Open Source, Software, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

bug_labs I enjoyed the presentation done by Bug Labs at EclipseCon 2008, titled BUG: A Customizable Hardware and Software Platform using Linux, Java, and OSGi. If you haven’t seen the BUG device, you should check out their Products page.

It’s Geek Candy.

And, it’s entirely built with Open Source goodness - both software AND hardware. Bug Labs gets it!

Start with a BUGbase (which is a full-fledged Linux box on an ARM processor), combine it with a variety of BUGmodules to add various hardware capabilities (like LCD screens, video cameras, GPS devices, accelerometers and the like), and snap it all together to do something interesting. Or, make your own hardware to their spec, and use their software stack. Or, run a different software stack on their hardware. Or, create your own BUGmodule hardware. It’s all open. Knock yourself out.

While I find the hardware interesting, I think the truly exciting part of the business is the software components and the dynamic nature that binds it all together.

Yes, it’s got OSGi at it’s core, including a version of the Concierge runtime!

I think that was a very smart, and bold move. This company may be doing some of the most practical and interesting work in the OSGi space.

This will be a fun company to watch.

spark-capital They are good guys.

Bug Labs is a Spark Capital portfolio company (shout out to Bijan Sabet!).

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