Category Archives: Enterprise

Sailpoint Continues Growth, Acquires CloudMasons

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SailPoint, the leading provider of governance-based identity management solutions, today announced it has continued to grow at a record pace, nearly doubling its bookings in Q1 of 2012 compared to the same time last year. In the last six months, the company has added dozens of Global 1000 customers, including three of the United States’ 10 largest companies. SailPoint now counts eight Fortune 20 companies and a fifth of the Forbes Global 100 companies as customers. As part of the company’s accelerated investment in cloud identity solutions, SailPoint announced that in January it acquired Cloudmasons, a developer of cloud and mobile access management solutions.

“Identity management has become a key requirement for successful adoption of cloud computing. Enterprises that adopt a cloud computing strategy face more complexity and less control,” said Jackie Gilbert, VP and GM of SailPoint’s Cloud Identity Business Unit. “We are helping our enterprise customers achieve the security, compliance and risk management capabilities they require as they navigate the choppier waters many will encounter in the cloud.”

SailPoint delivered the industry’s first risk-based identity management solution, SailPoint IdentityIQ, in 2007. As the recognized leader in governance-based identity management, SailPoint has posted triple digit growth each year since. The company now has more than 150 customers spanning 25 countries and more than a dozen industries; has quadrupled its headcount to more than 200 employees; and has opened offices in Great Britain, Germany, India, Israel and the Netherlands. The Cloudmasons acquisition is the latest corporate expansion announced by SailPoint, following the 2010 acquisition of Beacon Professional Services to supplement the company’s identity management consulting services, and the transition of the BMC Control-SA product line and customer base to SailPoint in early 2011.

“Today’s business requirements for identity management are evolving rapidly. With cloud and mobile technologies becoming pervasive in the enterprise, those requirements continue to grow and change,” said Kevin Cunningham, president of SailPoint. “SailPoint has always been focused on providing the most innovative solutions that deliver real value to our customers, and at the same time we’re committed to maintaining the very high customer satisfaction levels we have today. As we continue to innovate to stay ahead of customer requirements, our Cloud Identity Business Unit and the Cloudmasons acquisition give us an additional, dedicated team to solve those emerging challenges.”

Polygraph Media Announces Launch of its Big Data Analysis Tool for Facebook Marketing

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Polygraph Media is launching their Facebook data mining reports product today. It’s great to see company founder Chris Treadaway bring this product to market, after seeing many of the early versions over the past several months. With all the hoopla surrounding the Facbeook IPO, it’s a great time to remember that Facebook is really the platform where brands engage with their constituents. As such, analysis of your brand’s engagement on Facebook is key. With a data science approach, Polygraph works in real-time to collect data from Facebook Pages and subscriber-enabled Profiles, and quantifies it in over 40 charts, graphs, and data visualizations to give marketers actionable intelligence to inform marketing campaigns and strategies.  As a “truth detector” for Facebook marketing, Polygraph Reports are ideal for brands with a major Facebook presence and the agencies or consultants who work with them.

To try to understand the power of their platform, we asked for an example report of the top luxury resorts in Las Vegas. You can see that report here.

“Facebook has grown so fast that companies are now significantly increasing their marketing spend on Facebook Pages and Advertising,” said Polygraph founder, Chris Treadaway, who is also the book author of “Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day.”  “But increasingly, we are hearing that marketers need to justify the increased attention and budget.  Is it all worthwhile?  If we spend more money or human resources on Facebook, what will we get out of it?  The answers lie in the data — every social interaction that takes place on a Page is a discrete and important data point that can be mined for information.  We created Polygraph to serve this need — an analytics solution that can look at your Pages and those in your competitive environment, and can clearly survey the Facebook battlefield for marketers, executives and agencies.”

Polygraph brings the power of data science (mining, analysis and reporting) to anyone who wants to analyze business to consumer activity on Facebook.  Polygraph Reports cover all major Facebook marketing scenarios, including community management, content marketing, top content and competitive benchmarking. Additionally, Polygraph can identify the Top 1,000 Fans of any Page on Facebook — essentially a “Klout” for Facebook Pages.  The result is a concise report that not only shows marketers the “cause and effect” of Facebook marketing strategies and tactics, but also allows innovative agencies the opportunity to create custom campaigns based on the data.

“We’ve all heard how if Facebook were a nation, it would be the third largest country on Earth. So it’s common sense that brands have focused so much attention here,” says Brad B McCormick, principal at 10 Louder Strategies and a former senior digital leader at Ruder Finn, Porter Novelli and Cohn & Wolfe global agencies. “But just because a company can be on Facebook doesn’t mean they know how to be on Facebook and measure success. Acquiring Facebook “likes” is just the first step for brands.  Ongoing engagement that builds brand equity is the holy grail of Facebook.  But all too often today, brands and agencies are measuring success with empty platitudes and without data or relevant benchmarks,” McCormick continued. “Polygraph Media offers by far the most robust Facebook analytics I have ever seen. It not only gives brands new insights into their own performance, it allows them to compare each of their KPIs against their competitors, in real time. It’s a game changer.”

Polygraph is available to any interested users, but the largest pockets of interest to date, and strongest beta testing feedback, have come from three different groups:

  • Agencies like those McCormick has worked with, whether public relations, advertising, marketing or new social agencies, who are supporting clients in their social marketing endeavors, and often challenged to buy – or build – tools that can pull actual data and actionable analytics.
  • Social consultants and independents who are experts in social media, with the same sort of clients and needs.
  • And Brands themselves, who are ending the road on “just do social,” and moving to the next phase in which they must determine real ROI on social initiatives and strategically manage their social programs.

These brands – or their agencies and consultants – use data-science-based Polygraph insights to achieve numerous strategic objectives, including:

  • Deepening relationships with customers – identifying most influential customers; understanding likes and dislikes, patterns, commonalities; activating these influentials with relevant offers, promotions, messages.
  • Delivering relevant, timely and impactful content – understanding what interactions are taking place on a page; see what content is most engaging; know what time of day, days of the week the audience interacts with the brand most frequently.
  • Monitoring and benchmarking against the competition – a real-time lens on what the competition is doing when; insights into competitive positioning; a clear comparative of the metrics of the brand and their competitors

A SaaS solution built entirely on Microsoft’s cloud services, the Windows Azure cloud platform, Polygraph is one of the first major big data applications built on Azure.  “We have been working with Polygraph on the development of its social data mining tools and are very pleased with how quickly Polygraph Media embraced and adapted to the Windows Azure platform,” says Rodney Sloan, Principle Platform Strategy Advisor, Microsoft. “Equally exciting for Microsoft and its customers is to have an innovative company like Polygraph Media become a Windows Azure Platform partner.  Polygraph is putting the value of Azure into action.”

While Polygraph will offer data mining tools – and analysis – for all social platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube) later in 2012, the company deliberately is starting with Facebook, where critical information has, to date, been inaccessible, locked away in individual comments, sentiments.  In beta since November, the Polygraph Facebook marketing truth detector is already being used by over 25 brands, major agencies and consultants.  Customers can buy one-time Polygraph Reports or subscriptions for automatic updates and ongoing access.  Pricing is based on the size of Facebook Pages that are analyzed.

Startup Showdown A Welcome Addition To ATC’s Second CEO Summit

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The second day of ATC’s CEO Summit wrapped up last Friday with the Startup Showdown, featuring Baytan Labs, MapMyFitness, Convergence Wireless, VivoGig, and Toopher. We captured some tweets along with commentary and have more coverage planned this week, so stay tuned. We used Storify’s tool to craft the original piece. You can see that version here.

Baytan Labs kicked things off by showcasing their Guardian Trace app, a local positioning service (LPS) for the iOS platform that addresses personal security. It uses Google maps and provides emergency contacts with the users last known location. I caught up with the Baytan team and heard from CEO Mike Davis on markets outside of personal security. They plan to market to enterprise customers as well, providing a cloud-based offering that employees can use to set up monitoring through their department, on a per-seat basis. As good as that sounds, the consumer is still the main focus, with a commercialization strategy that hinges on the home monitoring market.

The next pitch came from Convergence Wireless. They’re in the red hot energy efficiency sector, focusing on tech that delivers wireless-based automation around things like lighting controls. Local startup advisor Ben Dyer told us the company is well positioned with a solid portfolio of IP. We’re hearing it might skip the company build-out and license its IP to someone like Schneider Electric.

The third pitch was from MapMyFitness, a company positioning itself in the health and wellness industry. The guys did a great job conveying the market potential for its approach. They’ve built a solid social network around fitness enthusiasts but were quick to point out the other areas ripe for expansion. They emphasized the fact that there’s really no companies addressing the fitness and diet market on large scale. Their CEO said the number one thing prescribed by doctors to combat illness is 30 minutes of exercise. The other most prescribed was diet.

Needto.com was next up, a company positioning itself to disrupt a few spaces. Their marketplace serves the adhoc tasks and jobs market. At first glance, you’d think the company’s competitors are solely the Craigslists and Angie Lists of the world. But if you grasp where they’re headed, the competition is actually closer to companies like ServiceMagic and RedBeacon. They plan to take the best of what traditional directory services do, and throw in some Craiglsist-esque features to drive user participation and scale. If they can fill in some voids that some of the incumbents aren’t providing — like richer profiles and commerce, watch out. This space is ripe for disruption.

If you were there, there wasn’t any doubt who put on the best show. It’s tough to beat a guy that pulls out a blender. But it wasn’t all show for Toopher’s mobile authentication technology — they pulled out the win. Like some of its peers, Toopher’s market spans across a few sweet spots: identity theft and the broader market for newer security apps. Replacing older methods for logging into apps and services — like USB fobs — is the obvious one. They’re taking that further, though. Because they piggyback on existing logins with location services, your mobile essentially becomes an extra level of security by pushing each request to your phone and giving you the option to approve. Toopher likely has some additional work to do as it moves upstream, especially in larger enterprises and public sector environments. Simplicity and a strong mobile and security combination seem to working for them now, with more visibility sure to come with the ATC win..congratulations.

The last pitch came from Daniel Senyard and the Vivogig team.They describe themselves as a live music photography platform, but hearing Senyard and their head of strategy pitch, you can see the broader opportunities. They’re a content company that enables a huge audience segment (music fans) to create content. And increasingly that creation is happening in real-time and on mobile devices. Musicians and artists are in dire need of tools to get closer to fans, so while that might carry them, it’s easy to see how brands, events, and even sports franchises could tap into VivoGig’s stream. They’ve built a nice web front-end, but more importantly their capturing data. And that data is gold to companies building businesses around advertising and content. You might think of Facebook first, but I heard them mention a linkage to Billboard’s music group. That seems like a viable match. Being the source of data for artists to grow their brand is attractive, but the better bet might be providing real-time fan sentiment and content to the business side of the music industry.

We’ll be publishing some pieces on a few of the other panels, but before that, here’s a few items that were relevant to the competition. John Stockton (not the hoopster) at Mayfield Fund had a few zingers during the VC panel, not the least of which was captured by Doug Bain below.

One of the more colorful VCs was NEA’s Jimmy Treybig. His quote below was particularly timely as much of the second day’s discussion focused on how big the market opportunities need to be to even get the attention of many venture capitalists.

Lastly, let’s not forget the ATC Council team and their hard work. It’s these kinds of events that help connect the ecosystem of entrepreneurs, business leaders and passionate Austinites. Great job on a great event.

NextIO Secures $12.3 Million in Series F Financing

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NextIO, the pioneer in I/O consolidation and next-generation networking solutions, today announced it has closed a Series F funding round of $12.3 million. This round included investment by existing investors and an undisclosed strategic investor. NextIO, which demonstrated significant growth in 2011, will use the new funds to further expand sales and marketing efforts and to further expand NextIO’s family of I/O consolidation solutions.

“Our investors have a strong history of successful investments in companies at the forefront of a number of technologies. This investment is important not only as a source of capital, but as a vote of confidence in our strategy for datacenter I/O consolidation,” said K.C. Murphy, President and CEO of NextIO. “After a very successful 2011 built around our vCORE and vNET product lines, we intend to double our revenue in 2012. Closing this funding is a critical step to achieving that goal, as it allows us to take our I/O consolidation solutions and marketing strategies to the next level in the U.S. and throughout the world.”

NextIO’s customer base includes technology leaders in a variety of markets, including managed service providers, internet service providers, aerospace, automotive technologies, oil and gas, government, and finance. In 2011 alone, several hundred NextIO I/O consolidation systems were installed into these customers worldwide. NextIO will use the capital from the Series F funding round to grow both its worldwide go-to-market efforts and its product portfolio to further increase revenue and market penetration in 2012 and 2013.

“NextIO’s I/O consolidation products are achieving impressive market penetration in the multi-billion dollar datacenter networking market,” said George Ugras, General Partner at Adams Capital Management. “The explosion of data and the migration to the cloud presents a great opportunity in this market, and NextIO is uniquely positioned to capitalize on these trends as customers look for next-generation networking solutions. The customer adoption to date has validated the value proposition for NextIO’s products, so we felt this was the right time to further invest in the company and capitalize on the tremendous demand we are seeing.”

NextIO’s portfolio of rack-level I/O consolidation solutions includes products for datacenter network consolidation, GPGPU computing, and high-performance storage. The newest product in the NextIO portfolio is the vNET I/O Maestro, which provides server connectivity at the rack level to both Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks without the need for changes in governance models or proprietary, hard to support I/O drivers. The result is the elimination of expensive 10Gb Ethernet NICs, Fibre Channel HBA, multiple top-of-rack leaf switches, and an up to 80% reduction in the number of cables at the back of the rack. By simplifying server I/O, the vNET I/O Maestro significantly reduces CapEx, power consumption and cooling, while providing the ability to dynamically reconfigure I/O resources across servers as the needs in the datacenter evolve due to business conditions.

Mass Relevance Secures $3.3 Million Series A

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Mass Relevance, the technology leader in social curation and integration, today announced that it has closed $3.3 million in venture capital funding.  The Series A round is led by Austin Ventures and includes new investor Battery Ventures as well as existing investors Floodgate Fund, Allegro Venture Partners and Metamorphic Ventures.  Mass Relevance will use the new financing to accelerate growth for the company’s platform among media, entertainment, consumer brands and retailers.

The financing comes as leading brands, ranging from Madonna and MTV through Target and Purina, turn to Mass Relevance to use real-time social content to drive engagement on television, web and mobile.  Fifteen months after its launch with two customers, the company now serves 120 clients and more than doubled revenue expectations in fiscal year 2011 and the first quarter of 2012. Mass Relevance clients include the “Big Four” television networks, 7 of the top 10 2011 cable networks, as well as top brands like Target, Cisco, Ford, Samsung, New York Giants, Pepsi, Purell and Victoria’s Secret.

“People around the world are actively participating in social conversations about brands, media and entertainment, and this content is passing us by faster than ever before,” said Sam Decker, founder and CEO of Mass Relevance.  ”Brands are realizing the opportunity to capture these conversations and integrate them across their marketing efforts in order to engage and activate their audiences – ultimately driving social buzz and sales for their brand. With the Mass Relevance platform brands can aggregate and filter the world’s social conversations to build safe and controlled social experiences that integrate anywhere the brand lives.”

In the past 9 months alone, Mass Relevance has delivered more than 3 billion pieces of social content to multiple digital surfaces (curated from over 9 billion pieces flowing through the Mass Relevance platform) to support iconic events like the Super Bowl and Academy Awards, launches such as The Avengers and Madonna MDNA, and television phenoms American Idol, X-Factor, 80 Plates and The Voice. Mass Relevance has also seen significant traction with innovative global brands, such as Pepsi who is currently using the Mass Relevance platform to bring fresh #livefornow content across the Pepsi.com homepage.

“Mass Relevance is a strategic partner who can meet the technology and creative challenges of bringing the voices of millions into our brand,” said Shiv Singh, head of Digital at PepsiCo Beverages.  ”As a platform, they offer the scalability, functionality and reliability that we need to be successful – and the strong design sensibility to make these engagement really stand out.”

Infoglide and BusinessForensics Partner

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BusinessForensics, the new leader in risk, fraud and compliance management software for financial institutions, Government agencies and corporations today announced it is enhancing its core application sets by incorporating Infoglide’s market-leading Identity Resolution Engine® (IRE) software. Infoglide’s IRE will serve as the identity resolution engine to enhance information intelligence and Social Network Analysis capabilities across BusinessForensic’s suite of fraud detection and risk management products, which includes their flagship HeadQuarters™ offering.

Business Forensics addresses the need from financial institutions, Government Agencies and corporations to analyze big data to minimize risk and fraud and to achieve full insight and transparency by visualizing and analyzing large amounts of data. The BusinessForensics suite and services allow organizations to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and monitor mission-critical operations and services by providing advanced information analysis, real-time monitoring, and profiling from both internal and external information sources.

Now, with the added functionality of Infoglide’s IRE, organizations can identify customers with greater precision during the due diligence process or the Know-Your-Customer (KYC) client on-boarding, and find connections between transactions, people, third parties and discrete fraud events that can reveal previously hidden risk. Combining these capabilities enables organizations to identify more complicated fraud patterns, criminal fraud rings, carrousels and networks of collusive participants that might otherwise appear disconnected from a fraud or compliance problems.

“BusinessForensics’ solutions have a huge impact in minimizing the cost of fraud across industries,” said Douglas Wood, senior vice president at Infoglide. “Combining Infoglide’s innovation with their incredible analytics brings powerful capabilities to a market that is inundated with fraud and compliance-related issues.” Infoglide’s IRE combines a robust identity resolution capability that resolves common variations in spellings, nicknames, and other personal identification elements, with a sophisticated linking engine that weighs the relevance of multiple identity elements in order to determine the likelihood that individuals and events are related. A key differentiator for the Infoglide technology is the ability to analyze data in situ, without normalizing it and without requiring that it be moved into any proprietary database. This capability leaves the full power of the source data intact, strengthening the information value of the resulting analysis. As relationships exposed through the analysis can be quite complicated, Infoglide’s IRE also provides a clear, browser-based user-interface that allows a user to quickly visualize and understand the nature of the relationships between individual actors and events.

After careful research we have selected Infoglide’s IRE to enhance our product suite” says Frank Kurstjens, COO at BusinessForensics. “IRE’s capabilities are the best in the marketplace, and they have an impressive customer base to prove it.”

CopperEgg Announces $2.1Million in Funding, New CEO

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CopperEgg, a cloud monitoring and analytics company, today announced the addition of tech industry veteran Bob Quillin as CEO, as well as an additional $2.1M to complete their Series A Funding round. Silverton Partners was the lead investor and is joined by a group of new venture and corporate investors including Webb Investment Network, the investment fund of former eBay COO Maynard Webb, and several private investors including Asana executive Kenny Van Zant; bringing total financing to $4.1M.

Quillin brings over 28 years of technology experience and entrepreneurship to CopperEgg.

With deep domain knowledge in IT management, cloud computing, and virtualization plus his background in low-touch, high-velocity marketing and sales, he has successfully managed the launch and adoption of innovative products and services that span the IT stack across application, virtual, cloud, server, network and storage layers.

“Cloud computing has grown dramatically over the last few years to address a broader base of customers who have ever increasing demands for speed, simplicity, quality of service and value,” said Quillin. “CopperEgg is at the forefront of a second generation of companies who are enabling this mass adoption, through SaaS-based solutions that are smarter, faster, lighter weight, and more accessible than the previous generation of cloud monitoring tools.  I’m excited to join CopperEgg to help our customers accelerate their cloud adoption and optimize their infrastructure.  This round of investment will expand our product development efforts and go-to-market programs.”

Quillin has held executive positions at both startup and public companies, including Hyper9 (acquired by SolarWinds in 2011), EMC Lonix (acquired by VMware in 2010), and nLayers (acquired by EMC in 2005). He has a BA in Mathematical Science from The Johns Hopkins University and a MSEE from George Washington University.

“The Webb Investment Network focuses on helping build transformational companies that leverage cloud applications and infrastructure,” said Maynard Webb, founder of Webb Investment Network.  “The CopperEgg team has identified a significant and growing pain point and built a broad customer base through their real-time cloud analytics platform – which they deliver as a simple, affordable, and easy to deploy SaaS offering.   We’re excited to welcome them to the WIN family.”

Ziften Announces BLISS, and a $5.5 Million Series B

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Today, Ziften Technologies launches the much anticipated release of its first product and announces Series B financing of $5.5 M.  Ziften’s initial funding fueled development of a new class of software that reverses the degradation of enterprise desktops, making them easier to manage.  Behavioral Lightweight Intelligence for Stressed Systems (BLISS) enables organizations to understand, prioritize, and control applications running across physical and virtual Windows desktops.  Ziften has pioneered Desktop Quality of Service (QoS), leading to improved uptime, business alignment, performance, security, and reduction of errors and annoyances.

The additional funding enables Ziften to expand core technologies while bringing BLISS to a wider audience of enterprise customers.  “We are ready to deliver BLISS to IT organizations everywhere,” said Ziften’s chief executive, Mark Obrecht.  “We have an unrelenting focus on innovating solutions for costly enterprise problems and delivering exceptional results for our customers.”

To tackle this untouched market opportunity, Ziften assembled impressive expertise in behavioral classification and machine learning from technology’s most regarded brands, including AMD, Caltech, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Tivoli, and Symantec (and its acquisition of WholeSecurity).

Founded in 2010, Ziften has raised $11.3 Million to date.  The $5.5 Million Series B round is led by Fayez Sarofim & Co., who also led Ziften’s Series A funding.  Additional investors include proven tech executives such as Andrew Busey, former CEO of Challenge Games (acquired by Zynga).

“I invested in Ziften because it has a very large addressable market that comes from tackling this problem, which has created a significant productivity cost at organizations running many PCs,” said Busey, Ziften investor, venture capitalist, and former exec of several technology companies. “Creating great benefits by reducing moving parts is a classic concept now applied to dramatically improve the performance of enterprise desktops.”

Desktop QoS for the Enterprise

Ziften is the first to provide Desktop QoS.  QoS has existed in the data center, on the network, and for web applications for years – but never on the desktop.  BLISS monitors resource consumption of processes on desktops and automatically prioritizes them based on relative business value, with near-zero administration.  Founded in lightweight behavioral algorithms, BLISS makes dynamic decisions regarding the operating state of desktops enterprise wide.

“The enormous cost and complexity of managing desktops are widely recognized problems in large organizations,” added Obrecht.  “It‘s counterintuitive for businesses to allow a one-size-fits-all operating system to allocate system resources.  Wasted and misallocated resources and other inefficiencies need to be enumerated and controlled in real time.”

Software Talent Tops The List In Door64′s First Hiring Survey

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Austin’s burgeoning ecosystem of startups is in high gear, buoyed by the rise of cloud-based infrastructure, mobile development, and cleaner technologies. Behind that growth is a vibrant tech community of software engineers, analysts and project managers. But what about more established companies? What types of skills are hiring managers seeking? That’s what Austin’s largest tech community, Door64, wants to answer with the initial release of its Hiring Priority Survey.

“We all know, it is often one or two key holes in a company that can impede growth,” said Door64 founder, Matt Genovese. “We are stepping up and surveying the hiring managers of a set of sizable Austin area technology companies every quarter starting now with today’s survey results, to get deliberately granular about what these hiring shortages are.”

Door64 gathered more than 100 responses and whittled down the results to represent more than 50 managers with companies in full business operations. When polled on their top 3 hiring priorities from 15 specific categories, 56% cited software as number one, more than hardware, semiconductor and Information Technology (IT) skills – combined.

The IT component was the closest category after software, tallying a meager 20%. That shows enterprises are eager to get new apps and toolsets to market, with extra lift coming from the mobile space as iPads and smartphones continue to proliferate.

Digging deeper into the software category, four skills accounted for 40% of hiring priorities, with Java, User Interface / User Experience (UI/UX), Software Quality Assurance, and .NET skills topping all others. The UX needs aren’t surprising with the challenges of adoption in large enterprises, and as Door64 notes, neither is the Ruby on Rails results.

“Ruby is often used in the earliest stage build of technology companies, and startups were not included in the survey,” it said in a prepared statement.

Conversely, the data showed Java is still the front-runner in Austin’s enterprise market, as it garnered 16% of responses in the software category, good enough for 30% of total software needs. That seems to mesh with what’s happening on a larger scale. The bigger companies are tying together applications, building private and public clouds, and launching all sorts of mobile capabilities. Enterprise java is often the glue that unifies these disparate systems. And java demand likely won’t see a slow-down as business units continue push the consumerization of IT.

One other thing that jumped out was the SharePoint piece, Microsoft’s 800-pound gorilla for corporate collaboration. Door64 says only one or two companies even mentioned it. Some of that can be attributed to an organization’s size, but the cloud is also eating away at SharePoint. I’d guess companies are realizing the cloud model works pretty well for breaking off pieces of your collaboration needs, not to mention easing the the maintenance and integration often associated with SharePoint.

Two other skills, Database Architects (DBA), and PHP developers, also sparked little interest. It would be interesting to hear more details from the respondents on this one. With big data’s rise, I’d wager most good DBAs are transitioning to some of the open source data engines and honing in on the demand to make sense of unstructured data. Just a hunch.

Lastly, and highly welcomed, Door64 says it’s planning to formalize its findings and poll 100 or so local technology companies each quarter and publish those results to an Austin Index of sorts.

But wait, there’s more. They’re also applying the findings to the Austin Pain-point Job Fair coming up June 29 at the AT&T Conference Center at University of Texas. You might call it a data-driven job fair. How fitting. :)

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Gazzang Selected for MIT Sloan CIO Symposium’s Innovation Showcase

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The 9th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium today announced Gazzang as one of ten vendors chosen for the 2012 Innovation Showcase. In selecting Gazzang for the prestigious event, judges noted that the company’s cloud-based Encryption Platform for Big Data represents a cutting edge B2B solution that combines strong value and innovation and has the potential to impact both the top and bottom lines.

“Despite all the hype, big data is still in the early stages and is a market ripe for innovation. As the volume of data continues to grow, organizations are now turning their heads towards big data security and looking for solutions that can protect the massive amounts of sensitive information being generated, while maintaining a high level of availability,” said Larry Warnock, president and CEO of Gazzang. “We are honored to be selected as an MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Innovation Showcase finalist and look forward to sharing our strategy and solutions with industry thought leaders at the event.”

The Gazzang Encryption Platform for Big Data works as a last line of defense for protecting data within Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB, non-relational, distributed and horizontally scalable data stores that have become common management tools for big data initiatives. These data stores are known for their ability to process petabytes of data in real time, but they lack many of the built-in security controls associated with traditional database solutions. The Encryption Platform transparently encrypts and secures data “on the fly,” whether in the cloud or on premises and includes advanced key management that meets compliance regulations and allows users to store their cryptographic keys separate from the encrypted data.

“We are very impressed with these top ten Innovation Showcase finalists, as their technologies demonstrate incredible state of the art thinking applied toward today’s and tomorrow’s challenges,” said David L. Verrill, Executive Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and the Co-chair of the Innovation Showcase. “The Innovation Showcase provides a terrific one-of-a-kind opportunity for these start ups to gain a larger visibility in front of IT executives, key stakeholders, and venture capitalists.”