When not moonlighting at Chaotic Flow and Cloud Ave, I’ve been toiling away at Xignite for the better part of the last three years, and I’m happy to announce that the company has successfully closed $10 million in B round funding. The round was led by of Starvest Partners‘ Deborah Farrington who is #77 on the Forbes Midas List and was the lead VC for Netsuite, and John L. “Launny” Steffens, former vice chairman of Merrill Lynch. Previous investors Altos Ventures, Startup Capital Ventures and Peter Caswell, CEO of Netbase and former CEO of Advent Software, also participated.

While most of the public Silicon Valley buzz in recent years has gone to B2C startups like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, and the like, I believe we’re at the beginning of a B2B renaissance led by a prominent list of rapidly growing cloud plays like Xignite. B2C startups tend to happen very fast or not at all, and consumers will often forgive their growing pains, even if they’re posting the fail whale on a daily basis. Not so in B2B. B2B startups spend their A rounds very carefully to make sure their offerings are rock solid before they scale. When I joined back in 2008, Xignite had about 150 clients. Today it has more than 900 customers in 47 countries.

The Financial Market Data Cloud

Market data is the life blood of the financial markets Read more »

Recent weeks have brought a bewildering number of competing claims around SaaS and cloud computing. On one hand we are debating whether the SaaS experiment is over, IaaS is just an incremental advance in hosting technology, and the cloud is just hype. While on the other, Gartner estimates SaaS is now 10% of the enterprise market, Amazon AWS is a $500 million dollar business and Jim Cramer is picking his favorite cloud stocks. What’s a person to think? I for one think that recent reports of the cloud’s death are greatly exaggerated, and here is why…

The Cloud is Real. The Cloud is BIG.

It’s absolutely true to say that the cloud is simply the next evolution in computing, but saying it is an incremental change and isn’t all that different from traditional hosting or time sharing is like comparing the Internet to a T1 line. There are lot’s of new technologies and standards, big and small, that go into the cloud. And, there will continue to be others added as it matures. But, you shouldn’t allow the technology to cloud your thinking. The cloud, the REAL cloud, is about bringing any and all of the computing resources available on the Internet together to create Inter-networked applications and computing infrastructures. Consumer mash-ups perhaps being the simplest and earliest of these, but it isn’t that hard to imagine much bigger iron, mission-critical business applications running the same way. Most Internet innovation to date has focused on users and content, and has been strangled by a lack of bandwidth and integration standards. As these constraints erode, the cloud will continue to emerge. The cloud is about the machines. It is as big as all the computers connected to the Internet.

The Cloud is Hard

Security is and will remain the most difficult problem of SaaS and cloud computing, with reliability following close behind. Read more »

This week’s post is a throw down to see just how much cloud wisdom can be packed into a Twitter post of 140 characters or less. I did the best I could, but what have you got? Comment with yours and be sure to re-tweet your favorites to spread the words. I’ve coined a new tag #twisdomofclouds for Twitter tracking, so be sure to tack it on if you have room. Tweet on. JY

• Cloud skeptics think control is safety, but fear of flying doesn’t make you a pilot. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• A-SaaS-in enterprise software has a license to kill. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• Life is better on cloud 99.999%! #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• High customer acquisition costs are a pain in the SaaS. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• Every cloud has an API binding. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• Value your SaaS customers and they’ll last a lifetime. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• GNU’s code-envy. Free is the cloud. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• Hybrid SaaS : A half-SaaSed attempt at on-demand. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• Fans hack Stones virtual tour on Azure private cloud. Jagger warns “Hey! You! Get off of my cloud.” #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• DYJHIW DIY turns N2 WTF? DWBH CUZ SAAS EZ123 w/ OTH TCO!
  #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• Don’t be CRUD on the cloud. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• Get your PaaS in gear and your thread in the clouds. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• Private cloud? Raise your hand if you own the Internet. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• SaaS for hire. Have software. Will travel. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• Need a Web service? There’s an OP for that. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• Without customers, SaaS is vaporware. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• You gotta go viral to stand out from the cloud. #twisdomofclouds tweet it!
• No room to tweet with all these dumb #AaaS acronym-as-a-service tags!
  #SaaS #PaaS #IaaS #DaaS #EaaS #twisdomofclouds tweet it!

To include the retweet link in your comment, just add the following hyperlink:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=RT+your+twisdom+here
+%23twisdomofclouds+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FabbcJu” > tweet it! </a>
Please tack on the #twisdomofclouds hash tag and hyperlink http://bit.ly/abbcJu back to the post if you don’t need all 140 characters, so folks can find your tweet on Twitter and their way back here to your comment.

I’m in the process of updating my blogroll, and I’d like to expand the SaaS-Cloud section. If you write a SaaS, Cloud, Startup, Sales or Marketing blog, or have some favorites that you read, besides Chaotic Flow of course, please leave a comment or send me an email. Looking for active blogs with loyal readers that deliver consistent, well thought out original content, and I’m happy to do a link exchange if your blog meets these criteria. (blogroll located at the lower right sidebar)

Cheers,
JY

It seems that everyone is jumping on the cloud bandwagon.  Cloud this, cloud that, everything cloud.  Salesforce.com has all but rebranded its entire business as cloud.  Instead of sales force automation, we now have “Sales Cloud 2” (and “Service Cloud” and “Custom Cloud” and “Collaboration Cloud” with nice little TM’s attached, so if you were thinking of using them for yourself, you can forget it!).  I suppose it might be a good thing.  Personally, I was getting pretty tired of Salesforce.com trying to “force” this brand, “force” that brand on me.  I really don’t have a problem with the cloud buzz per se.  I think it is good for the industry, because it creates excitement, momentum and funding for B2B Internet companies.  But, I am concerned that all this unbridled rebranding and repositioning is obscuring the underlying technological and economic shifts which characterize this next stage of Internet evolution.

Cover from the Pink Floyd album Obscured by Clouds.
Not really relevant, but I needed a picture.
Retweet if you’re a Pink Floyd fan!

The Web 1.0 Internet revolution, of which classic software-as-a-service is a part, arose as a result of the universal interface offered by the Web browser.  Suddenly, anyone could access any global computing resource over the Internet as long as they had this one, standard client application.  It didn’t really matter what happened on the back end, because everyone was plugging into the same application on the front end.  I like to think of this as application – user interoperability.  The economic implication of this paradigm shift was that you could now aggregate customers around the globe onto a single Internet application.  Say for example, ordering books or sales force automation.

The shift we are seeing now is driven by increased interoperability on the server side, or rather application – application interoperability.  Read more »