Monthly Archives: May 2008

What Makes Us Austin

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The weekly paper in Lexington Kentucky ran an interesting story by Bill Bishop. Bill is co-author of a book named The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing us Apart. The article tells the story about the beginnings of IBM in Austin, and how the split up the typewriter division in Lexington (which became LexMark) and the Austin facility. We all know the fate of dot matrix printers and LexMark. And most people know that IBM’s Austin plant produces tons of innovation, as measured by patent applications. So how is it that the Lexington folks didn’t fare so well, and the Austin folks thrived? Read the article here.

FiveRuns Launches TuneUp Public Beta

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FiveRuns LogoFiveRuns, the application monitoring and systems management company for Ruby on Rails, today released the public beta for FiveRuns TuneUp, a free, socially networked application profiling tool for Ruby on Rails developers that provides rapid application performance analysis in development. The company also announced general availability of FiveRuns Manage 2.0, the subscription-based application performance management tool for production Ruby on Rails applications. FiveRuns now offers three products for Ruby on Rails developers and operations teams: the new FiveRuns TuneUp, Manage 2.0, and Install, a free, production-ready Ruby on Rails stack. The company will also contribute open source components to the Ruby on Rails community, starting with a Ruby instrumentation library, the first in a series of open source components made public today on FiveRuns.org, RubyForge, and Github.

RedMonk analyst Michael Coté has a video interview with them about TuneUp.

Six Austin Companies in JMP Securities Hot 100

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JP Morgan JMP Securities recently published their list of the “Best Privately Held Software Companies.” I’m sure they have criteria for what they mean by “best.” As we searched, we found several Austin-based companies.

  • Bazaarvoice
  • CoreMetrics
  • NetQoS
  • ReachForce
  • Solarwinds
  • Zilliant

Yes, we know that technically CoreMetrics is headquartered in the valley, but they started here and still have major operations here. Six out of 100, that’s pretty good! Congratulations to all the Austin companies mentioned in the report!

Q2 and Yodlee Partner

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Yodlee, Inc., and Q2 Software, Inc. today announced a partnership to enhance Q2’s electronic banking platform with personal financial management and bill pay capabilities from Yodlee. The integrated Yodlee PersonalFinance and Yodlee BillPay components will be available for all Q2 customers as value-added features for the Q2 online banking experience.

“Q2 Software is helping to set the standard for excellence and innovation in online banking for financial institutions,” said Anil Arora, president and CEO of Yodlee, Inc. “By adding Yodlee’s proprietary personal financial management (PFM) and revenue-generating bill pay capabilities to the Q2 platform, we believe we can deliver a powerful and differentiated banking experience. We’re pleased to be part of Q2 Software’s growing presence in the banking industry.””

“There is clear demand from both consumers and financial institutions for more functionality from the banking experience – more insights, more personalization, more value,” said Hank Seale, CEO of Q2 Software. “Yodlee’s PFM and bill pay capabilities, we believe, lead the market in innovation and value creation for both audiences, blending perfectly with our strategy to empower our customers to compete with the national banks by providing an integrated and flexible technology platform, and unmatched customer service.”

Uplogix On The GSA Schedule

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Uplogix, a provider of secure remote management (SRM) solutions, today announced the award of a five-year General Services Administration (GSA) contract. Uplogix’ inclusion on the GSA schedule is enabled by an agreement with government contractor EC America enabling federal agencies to purchase and deploy Uplogix remote management solutions from authorized Uplogix Government Channel Partners.

“With demands on the network increasing, our customers have been showing a great interest in remote management technology,” said Peter Schwartz, executive vice president, EC America. “Uplogix is an essential asset to the public sector community because they understand the needs IT staff require to maintain network availability and performance while also keeping security and compliance standards in check. By adding Uplogix to the GSA schedule, we are poised to deliver a viable solution for IT staff forced to do more with less. The product serves as a virtual administrator in remote sites.”

Public sector agencies tend to house a limited amount of IT staff to manage a widely distributed LAN or WAN infrastructure. The challenges faced with splitting time between manually making network enhancements and reacting to service outages or performance problems is overwhelming and costly. In either case, efforts to maintain network availability and performance are a major drain on an administrator’s time and often require a physical visit to an affected remote site to resolve problems or make routine changes.

“Being awarded this GSA contract is a milestone for Uplogix, and marks significant expansion into a market that has been approaching us for quite some time,” said Tom Goldman, CEO, Uplogix. “We recognize this opportunity as one that will strengthen our government channel program to continue delivering a solid product to public sector customers.”

Links for Monday

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There’s never any news when a holiday falls on a Monday. So here’s some links to interesting posts in the blogosphere over the weekend.

 

Fluid Innovation a "Cool Vendor"

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Fluid Innovation has been included in the list of “Cool Vendors” in the “Cool Vendors in Intellectual Property, 2008″ report by Gartner, Inc. Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

“We are honored to have Fluid Innovation selected by Gartner as a top vendor in intellectual property,” says Chris McKinzie, Fluid Innovation Founder and CEO. “Gartner not only has selected us as a leader, they share this opinion with our Fortune 500 and academic clients including:
Microsoft, Science Application International Corporation (SAIC), Boeing and Texas A&M, to name a few. We worked hard to study the hurdles facing this industry and develop processes and tools to leap those hurdles.”

Fluid Innovation offers the emerging intellectual property industry both a unique solution set to take their internally-developed innovations to market, but also the industry’s most comprehensive solutions to get the job done. These include:

  • Innovation Enterprise – the Fluid Licensing System is a comprehensive licensing work-flow solution that takes innovation from the inventor’s desktop through approval and validation and then to market efficiently and fluidly.
  • Virtual Ventures — combines prediction market science with mass collaboration into a compelling gaming format to quickly establish market value and viability on clients’ innovations.
  • Fluid Innovation Marketplace — the intellectual property world’s largest and most efficient marketplace, which invites innovation sellers and buyers to come together — but more importantly, it invites the public to participate and monetize their own B2B social network.

ShangBy Expands Into Cashmere

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Shangby LogoShangBy.com, an online retailer that takes consumers into the far away shops of Shanghai to find unique and customizable jewelry, is expanding into the Shanghai cashmere and pashmina market. ShangBy.com now brings users live via video feed on the Internet into Woo Scarf and Shawl, an established cashmere retailer in Shanghai that is famous with foreign travelers, allowing shoppers to work directly with designers for custom embroidery and negotiate for great prices on these high-end scarves, blankets and shawls. ShangBy customers experience another element of Shanghai shopping from the comforts of home.

This expansion builds on the overwhelming success of ShangBy.com’s jewelry offering. Shanghai is known for its quality pearls and semiprecious stones and Steve Bell, ShangBy.com founder and CEO, plans to expand ShangBy.com into additional markets in Shanghai with different types of goods and around the globe in markets like Thailand, India, Morocco, Turkey and Argentina.

“There are unique markets and cultures around the world that the average American shopper never gets to be a part of,” said Bell. “ShangBy.com is utilizing live webcast to make online shopping an experience, rather than a chore. Technology is shrinking the globe and ShangBy.com is all about exposing cultures and making connections for people.”

ShangBy.com gives people two ways to shop: 1) visit www.shangby.com and dial into the Shop Live toll-free phone line (1-877-PEARL51) Sunday through Thursday starting at 9 p.m. CDT to shop live in a Shanghai store with hosts Nina Johansson or Claire Bartels or, 2) browse the site 24/7 to buy one of the 1000+ items that other shoppers have already negotiated through live shopping. Every purchase is 100 percent guaranteed forever.

Versata Acquires ETI

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Versata Enterprises, Inc. (Versata), a leading provider of enterprise software solutions, announces today the acquisition of privately held Evolutionary Technologies International, Inc. (ETI), a recognized innovator of data integration products.

Versata will operate ETI within its Business Automation Business Unit. ETI joins Versata’s growing family of enterprise software companies, including Versata Software, Inc., Versata, Inc., Artemis International Solutions Corporation, Nextance Corporation, Gensym Corporation, and Clear Technologies. Versata will rollout its market-leading Customer Success Program to ETI customers, thereby emphasizing Versata’s intense focus on aligning investments with customer priorities. This focus maximizes customer business impact and facilitates multi-decade relationships.

“This acquisition will enable ETI customers worldwide to reap the benefits of a larger, global organization and reinforces our commitment to help enterprises manage data to achieve better results,” said Ron Baker, President and CEO of ETI. “More so than ever, corporations and governments need high performance data integration solutions across their enterprises and the combination of Versata and ETI will drive innovation and enhance value for customers in a wide range of industries.”

Randy Jacops, CEO of Versata Enterprises, commented, “We welcome ETI to the Versata family and look forward to demonstrating how our customer success focus transforms relationships. Versata’s global scale will enable us to advance ETI’s products and become the preeminent provider of lowest cost, highest quality data integration technology. ETI and Versata both have a long history of investment in Austin, stretching back to the foundation of Austin’s high-tech community. Joining forces with another local pioneer demonstrates our commitment to Austin and ensures Versata delivers on the potential of ETI’s technology.”

“The acquisition of ETI provides us with a solution for addressing today’s rapidly escalating data integration performance requirements,” said Frank Kopas, Vice President of Sales, Versata Enterprises. “Our business model centers around solving the most complex business problems by applying advanced technology, and ETI’s high performance data integration solutions are built to handle the dynamic growth and throughput requirements of today’s mission critical business applications.”

“ETI’s technology is an exciting addition to our portfolio of already strong products and will provide additional capabilities critical to all our customers,” Chris Smith, COO of Versata Enterprises, commented, “We have the most efficient and capable global engineering organization in the world, and we leverage that capability to deliver customer success. This enables us to deliver beyond customer expectations on innovation and value. We look forward to proving that to ETI’s customers.”

Versata intends to continue operating ETI as a stand-alone corporation within its group of software businesses. Versata will consolidate ETI’s operations into the Versata Austin headquarters to enable a joint focus on customer success. Additionally, Versata executives will begin meeting immediately with key customers to repeat the company’s commitment to product innovation and customer success.