Time for an update on Boston’s marketing tech cluster. It’s one of the real strengths of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. And it looks like it’s getting stronger, with a couple of leaders making news this week. Here is a tale of two companies that have become competitors:

—Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT), the Waltham, MA-based online marketing firm, has seen its stock price jump nearly 30 percent—from about $24 to just over $30—since Facebook filed for its IPO last week (coincidence?). Constant Contact has been positioning itself as a leader in digital marketing for small businesses across e-mail, social media, and Web platforms—especially social campaigns. The company also released some promising stats on its revenues and profits for 2011 and its most recent quarter.

—HubSpot, the Cambridge, MA-based marketing tech firm, said it has hired J.D. Sherman, Akamai’s former chief financial officer (also a former IBM exec). The company says Sherman is being brought in partly to help it prepare for a future IPO. HubSpot has been hiring aggressively and working on new products, while it pares away others (like Oneforty.com, which it acquired last summer). It remains to be seen whether the company will actually make it to an IPO before getting snapped up by Salesforce.com or some other suitor.

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In the fast-evolving advertising arena, Spongecell is a prime example of how a hard pivot with different technology in place can transform a company’s fortunes.

On Tuesday the New York company, which adds interactive functions such as video and Twitter feeds to banner ads, announced it raised $10 million in a Series B round led by Safeguard Scientifics. Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman says the new funding will go towards product development and other needs. More importantly, though, Kartzman also says Spongecell more than doubled its revenue last year compared with 2010, as he previously expected.

As Spongecell fills its coffers, grows its staff, and expands into new territory, it is hard to imagine that four years ago the company was running out of cash, letting employees go, and searching for a new direction.

Spongecell’s current technology transforms static banner ads into more interactive tools to engage consumers. In addition to Twitter and other social feeds, Spongecell can insert video, maps, coupons, and other features in the ads to grab attention. For example, when users mouse over banner ads for the Mini Cooper the ad plays a video clip that promotes the car. “Video is the fastest-growing segment of the online ad space,” Kartzman says.

Including the latest funding, Spongecell has raised about $14 million in total from backers that include Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt. In 2010, Spongecell generated $3.8 million in revenue and Kartzman says the company more than doubled that figure in 2011, though he declined to give specific numbers.

That is a much different tale compared with Spongecell’s early history. The company, founded in 2006, initially offered a widget platform for ad agencies to use for online promotions. When that did not bring in enough business and Spongecell’s cash ran … Next Page »

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How are companies spying on each other these days? One of the surprising ways I’ve heard about recently is through the webcam in boardrooms.

That’s right, apparently it’s easy to hack into some companies’ video conference systems, because they lie outside typical security measures. Companies sometimes set up video conferences so they can be accessed directly on the Internet—leaving the door open for eavesdroppers to listen in on meetings, or even remotely monitor a conference room via the camera.

One local software company is helping organizations guard against this threat—and many others. Boston-based Rapid7 is one of the leaders in the growing cluster of IT security companies around town. Rapid7’s approach is complementary to firms like NitroSecurity (recently acquired by Intel/McAfee) and Q1 Labs (bought by IBM), which help organizations guard against security threats in their computer networks and systems.

What Rapid7 does is help organizations find security flaws throughout their IT infrastructure, and then test whether they’ve been corrected. To fuel its growth, the company raised a $50 million Series C round from Technology Crossover Ventures in November—one of the largest tech venture rounds in the Boston area lately. (Rapid7 has raised $59 million to date.)

“There’s a lot of cyber-espionage going on in business,” says Mike Tuchen, Rapid7’s CEO (see photo, left). The activity ranges from stealing sales plans, financial information, and intellectual property, to the aforementioned boardroom eavesdropping, he says. And, of course, it’s not just companies spying on each other; it’s governments and nation states as well, all trying to get their hands on everything from Citibank credit card numbers to the special sauce in Apple’s iPad design.

What’s a CEO to do? If you’re Mike Tuchen, you take a promising company and try to make it better. Tuchen joined Rapid7 as chief executive in 2008. (The company has been around since 2000.) Previously he worked at Microsoft as a group program manager and general manager of SQL server marketing. An engineer by training, he also worked at Sun Microsystems and co-founded Paramark, a dot-com-era online advertising startup.

When he arrived at Rapid7, brought in by Bain Capital Ventures (the firm’s original VC investor), Tuchen saw a company that had “a great engineering and sales team” but not much else. He says he didn’t have to tear up the company, just bring in some key additions: marketing, channel partners, new processes, and a broader product roadmap, including a more international market focus.

So far the effort seems to be paying off. The company has grown to about 240 employees (about half in Boston), and Tuchen says revenues … Next Page »

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Sometimes the most interesting gatherings have the strangest names. What does “Boston Hadoop Meetup Group” say to you? To me, it says “future of big data in Boston.”

Hadoop is an open source data-analysis platform that is gaining popularity for helping companies and IT departments crunch huge amounts of information. The Hadoop meetup group in Boston, like those in other cities, has been around for a couple of years, but until now it hasn’t been very active. That’s about to change on February 15, from 6:00-9:00 pm, when the group is getting together at Fidelity in Boston to talk about the technology and how it can be used.

Spearheading the new effort is Hadapt, a big-data software startup in Cambridge, MA, that combines Hadoop with advanced database technology. Hadapt moved to the Boston area from New Haven, CT, in early November after raising a Series A venture round from Bessemer Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.

Hadapt will join Cloudera and MapR, other players in the sector, in giving informal talks at the meetup, which is expected to draw upwards of 50 developers, entrepreneurs, and folks from big companies like Akamai, IBM, and EMC/VMware. “It’s important to build awareness about Hadoop and bring together people already working on it,” says Justin Borgman, the CEO of Hadapt. “We don’t yet have a community built around it in this city.”

The meetup is the latest sign of a critical mass of interest building around Boston in big data and analytics. Earlier that same day (the 15th), MassTLC is organizing an event around the impact of big data on the tech industry. Last month, startups Chart.io, Kinvey, and Session M organized a very well attended meetup around data analytics and visualization. And earlier this week, Vertica (acquired by HP last year) said it is relocating to Cambridge and setting up a center for big data analytics and community outreach.

Bryan Stevenson, chief technology officer at Cambridge-based startup InsightSquared, says he has just joined the Hadoop meetup group and that “there’s a lot of buzz around the technology in general.” InsightSquared, which helps staffing, recruiting, and software businesses analyze and display their data, has been experimenting with Hadoop. Stevenson, who’s relatively new to Boston, says it’s important to have a peer group so he (and others) can “ask the stupid questions.”

Hadapt, for its part, has grown to about 20 employees and is currently hiring. The Yale University spinout’s software is in late-stage beta trials now and will be generally available later this year, Borgman says.

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There’s a new big tech company in town. In fact, it’s arguably the world’s biggest technology company (by revenue), and it’s joining the ranks of IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Google, and, most recently, Amazon, in expanding to the Boston-Cambridge area.

Palo Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has set up a new office in Cambridge, MA. The operation will serve as a center for technology development, licensing, and outreach to local startups, investors, and researchers. The 37,000-square-foot facility at 150 CambridgePark Drive, near the Alewife subway station, is spread over two floors. The building serves as the new headquarters for Vertica, the Boston-area big-data analytics firm that HP bought last winter. Vertica is in the process of moving its 150 employees from its offices in Billerica to the Cambridge facility this month, and it is currently hiring.

HP already had a sizable presence in Massachusetts, with its campus in Andover. But the new Cambridge office represents an unprecedented investment by HP in outreach and partnerships with local entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, and the academic research community in the Boston area. The company hasn’t specified a firm commitment of future dollars, but just setting up the new space—including a state-of the art lab and all its associated infrastructure—has cost more than $10 million, says Chris Lynch, the chief executive of Vertica. (His HP title is vice president and general manager.)

Lynch, who is leading the new facility, calls it a “big-data center of excellence” for HP. The idea is it will be a technology hub for the firm, a bit like HP Labs in Palo Alto—but different. (Lynch wouldn’t go so far as to call it “HP Labs East.”) The center will be a base from which HP could make deals to license its technology or invest in early-stage startups alongside venture firms, he says. The center also plans to bring in students and early-stage entrepreneurs for hackathons and other tech-themed events. And it will serve as a base for other types of outreach, such as to local K-12 schools, Lynch says.

So why Alewife instead of, say, Kendall Square? “We wanted to bridge the gap between getting access to the younger people living in Cambridge … Next Page »

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[Updated 12:20 pm] Here are a couple of notable Boston-area deals in digital advertising and marketing, each with a certain je-ne-sais-quoi European flair. Plus one more local company worth watching…

—Neolane, a social marketing tech company based in Paris with North American headquarters in Newton, MA, has closed a $27 million financing round led by Battery Ventures. The company’s previous investors also participated in the round. Neolane, which has 240 employees globally—just under 50 in New England—says it will use the money to expand its operations, particularly in North America. Neolane says it competes with IBM/Unica, Aprimo, and SAS.

—DataXu, the Boston-based digital advertising and marketing startup, has acquired U.K.- and Germany-based Mexad, a top European “demand-side platform” provider (meaning it gives advertisers tools to optimize when and where they place ads). Terms of the deal weren’t given. DataXu makes a software platform for advertisers who want real-time information and insights on consumer behavior across Web, mobile, and video channels. I spoke with CEO Mike Baker last year about DataXu’s recent growth and strategy in the ad-tech sector.

—ClickSquared, a Boston marketing software startup, has closed $9 million in equity financing led by Staley Capital, with existing investors also participating. The company, which started in 1999, does e-mail marketing and delivery, customer analytics, and campaign management, among other things. [This deal was added to the roundup after the first two were published---Eds.]

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A lot has happened in the technology world in the past year. So let’s take a minute to reflect on the defining moments of 2011 and where we stand now, as a local tech community with increasingly global impact.

This is by no means comprehensive, or even a summary of the most important stories of the year. It’s just a select few of the biggest highlights and lowlights, organized in spaghetti western fashion (cliché alert).

The Good: Oracle Buys Endeca

Some might argue this wasn’t necessarily “good” for the local tech scene, but Oracle’s $1B+ purchase of Cambridge, MA-based Endeca, the enterprise search and business intelligence firm, was one of the biggest deals of the year, and was kept under wraps pretty well. It will be interesting to watch whether Endeca’s technology and talent give Oracle a leg up in its competition with IBM, SAP, Microsoft, and Google. Endeca, which started in 1999, stands as a testament to the notion that billion-dollar tech companies can be built—and are being built—in Massachusetts. (See Acme Packet, Progress Software, Wayfair, and others on their way.)

Honorable mention: Carbonite, TripAdvisor, and Zipcar each went public with successful IPOs in 2011. That’s three more publicly traded tech companies in Boston that seem to be thriving in a tough market. Who will join them in 2012?

The Bad: RSA Gets Hacked

No one would argue this isn’t bad—and not just for local companies. In March, RSA Security reported a data breach involving its authentication products, which are widely used by big companies and government agencies. The Bedford, MA-based division of data storage giant EMC said it had … Next Page »

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Acquisitions and IPO announcements dominated the deals news in New England this week.

—Boston-based Third Rock Ventures put $34 million in Series A funding into Ember Therapeutics, a startup that’s developing drugs to fight obesity in a new way. Ember, also of Boston, is harnessing new understanding of the bodily tissue known as brown fat, which can help mammals burn off the more commonly known white fat tissue.

—Cerulean Pharma inked a $15 million Series D investment from new investor CVF, an affiliate of Henry Crown and Company, as well as existing backers Polaris Venture Partners, Venrock, Lilly Ventures, Lux Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Cambridge, MA-based Cerulean’s lead drug is a so-called nanoparticle, a tiny chemical package designed to work its way into cancer cells and kill them.

—IBM made its 20th acquisition in the Bay State since 2003, with the purchase of Burlington, MA-based Emptoris, a maker of supply and contract management software. Emptoris has 725 employees across the globe and will become part of IBM’s software group. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

—Coronado Biosciences  (NASDAQ: CNDO) started trading on the Nasdaq on Monday at an opening price of $6.50 per share. The formerly New York-based biotech, which moved to Burlington, MA in August, took an unconventional path to going public, by registering its private shares as common stock, rather than undergoing an IPO.

—Coskata, a cellulosic ethanol developer backed by Boston-area venture firms Advanced Technology Ventures and Greatpoint Ventures, filed documents with the SEC indicating its intent to raise $100 million in an initial public offering. The Warrenville, IL-based startup has raised $80 million in venture funding since founding in 2008, and is also backed by GE, Khosla Ventures, and Blackstone Group.

—Woburn, MA-based Excelimmune took in $12 million in financing from an undisclosed private investor to help fund the development of its molecules focused on fighting infectious diseases, like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

—And in the week’s more shocking news, two speech software makers that had been battling in court over allegations like patent infringement and commercial bribery announced they would become one force. Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) is acquiring Cambridge-based startup Vlingo for an undisclosed sum. The deal enables the two to team up as players like Apple and Google and are focusing more on voice-enabled applications for mobile phones.

—A deal that had been talked about for more than half of this year finally went live. Newton, MA-based online travel company TripAdvisor officially began trading on the Nasdaq on its own (NASDAQ: TRIP), after being spun out by Bellevue, WA-based Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE).

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Strange name. Big money. Newton, MA-based Cyber-Ark Software said today it has raised $40 million in investment led by Goldman Sachs and Jerusalem Venture Partners. The deal includes the purchase of stock from existing shareholders as well as growth capital. Cyber-Ark had previously raised $25 million in venture and angel capital.

Cyber-Ark works in the field of information security and identity management software. Basically it helps businesses, banks, and other organizations manage user privileges, sensitive data, and applications security, while protecting against insider threats. Cyber-Ark has been profitable, with 37 percent revenue growth in 2010. The company, which started in 1999, has 170 employees worldwide. It also has the distinction of making my top 10 “boring companies that are actually interesting” list from earlier this year.

This has been a busy fall for New England security software companies. Back in October, IBM acquired Waltham, MA-based Q1 Labs the same Intel’s McAfee snapped up New Hampshire-based NitroSecurity. And last month, Boston-based Rapid7 said it raised a $50 million round on the same day as CounterTack said it had raised $9.5 million and was moving to the Boston area from Virginia.

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News flash: Another Massachusetts software company is joining Big Blue. Armonk, NY-based IBM (NYSE: IBM) said today it is acquiring Emptoris, a Burlington, MA-based maker of supply and contract management software. Terms of the deal weren’t given, but it is expected to close in the first quarter of next year. This will be the 20th acquisition IBM has made of a company based in (or with major operations in) Massachusetts since 2003, out of a total of 70-plus acquisitions since then.

Emptoris has 725 employees worldwide, and IBM says the company will be integrated into its software group. A Big Blue spokesman declined to comment on whether Emptoris will move into IBM’s Mass Lab in Littleton, MA, since the acquisition hasn’t closed yet. Prior to this deal, Emptoris was majority-owned by Marlin Equity Partners. The software firm is led by CEO Patrick Quirk.

The deal is being spun as part of IBM’s “smarter commerce” initiative, which seeks to help businesses adapt to shifting customer buying patterns. Emptoris’s software includes cloud-based analytics tools that are specialized for procurement and supply chain operations.

IBM’s recent Massachusetts acquisitions include Netezza in business analytics and data warehousing, Q1 Labs in software security, and Unica in marketing and e-commerce software.

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Waltham, MA-based VMTurbo, a maker of virtualization management software, said today it has closed $10 million in Series B financing led by previous investors Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. The company says it will use the new money to expand its product development, customer support, sales, and marketing. It has raised $17.5 million to date.

VMTurbo gives businesses and IT departments real-time performance metrics and analytics tools to help them run their applications and virtualized/cloud environments efficiently.

The company, which also has an office in Valhalla, NY, was founded there in 2008 by EMC and IBM veteran Shmuel Kliger. It is now led by CEO Lou Shipley, formerly of Citrix and Avid.

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Last week was the storm before the calm, as a warm front of high-tech news moved through the San Diego region before the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ve got the details here.

—San Diego-based DriveCam said it raised $85 million through a private placement that will be used mostly for its acquisition of RAIR Technologies. As I explained a couple of years ago, DriveCam puts its video data technology on the dashboards of fleet vehicles. Brookfield, WI-based RAIR provides technology that helps U.S. Department of Transportation-regulated fleet operators manage driver qualification requirements, vehicle inspection requirements, hours-of-service logs, and scoring for compliance, safety, and accountability. A New York private equity firm, Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe, provided the $85 million in investment capital.

—The San Diego Venture Group awarded top honors—and $10,000 in startup capital—to San Diego-based SwoopThat at its annual PitchFest event. More than 70 early stage startups applied for the PitchFest competition, which ended last week in final presentations by SwoopThat, Gamer Grub, and Deal Current Network. SwoopThat helps college students at 2,347 schools nationwide save both time and money by purchasing their textbooks through Web-based technology that matches buyers with sellers of used textbooks. SwoopThat also operates a search engine that provides price comparisons for over 15 million products.

—A model fuels consortium formed six years ago by San Diego-based Reaction Design has developed software that can accurately simulate the formation of soot particulates during internal combustion. The modeling software was developed in anticipation of new engine exhaust regulations aimed to dramatically reduce the size and number of soot particles in gasoline and diesel-powered engines. As I had previously explained, Reaction Design develops software that models gaseous chemical reactions.

—A new San Diego startup, Swarmology, said it has raised $1.2 million as part of its emerging Web-based business, which mines social media as part of an integrated marketing approach for healthcare clients. Pharmaceutical and health IT executive Malcolm Bohm founded Swarmology to analyze online conversations about specific health concerns.

—Austin, TX-based car2go, a subsidiary of Daimler North America, announced the debut of its all-electric car-sharing program in San Diego—the first in North America. The company began deploying 300 zero-emission smart “fortwo” electric-drive vehicles here Friday, and said they are now in service.

—First, IBM’s Watson beat the best players on TV’s Jeopardy! game show. At last week’s SuperData Summit, IBM executive Christine Kretz said the company is now working on … Next Page »

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His last name means “forest” in Norwegian. Which is appropriate, because this guy sees the forest for the trees.

David Skok of Matrix Partners is one of the most talked-about venture capitalists in town, among young entrepreneurs and experienced ones alike. He is best known for his investments in JBoss, the open source middleware company (acquired by Red Hat for $420 million in 2006); AppIQ, the network and storage management firm (bought by HP in 2005); Diligent Technologies, a data protection company (bought by IBM in 2008); and CloudSwitch, a cloud infrastructure startup (acquired by Verizon this year). He currently serves on the boards of tech companies such as HubSpot, CloudBees, Digium, Enservio, and Solidworks.

Critics say he hasn’t had a big exit in a while. Supporters say he has a real knack for building companies and getting them acquired for good prices—and that what he touches often turns to gold.

Whatever you think of him, Skok has carved out a reputation as a hard-working investor with both technical expertise in business software and a deep understanding of sales and marketing from a customer’s perspective. For the past decade, he has been a general partner with Matrix. But when I sat down with him recently, I was more interested to hear about his previous life as an entrepreneur and five-time CEO, and how that shaped who he is today—both the decisions he makes as a VC, and the kind of mentorship he provides to startups.

It’s not quite Batman Begins or Casino Royale, but here is the David Skok origin story—and its lessons—in three parts.

Act I: A New Hope (Software)

The story opens in Johannesburg, South Africa, where Skok was born to an English mother and Norwegian father. His parents didn’t want him to grow up with apartheid, so they sent him to school in England, where he lived from age 8 to 20, in London. From there he went to college at University of Sussex, where he was part of the first class of graduates in England to be awarded computer science degrees. That was 1976.

His father made him come back and join the blue-collar family business, which involved machining equipment. He went to apprentice training school and survived his first week when all the tough guys tried to haze him. By the end of the course, he knew how to use a new tool for machining parts that followed a program stored on punched paper tape. The problem was, if there was a tiny error in the tape, the part would be ruined and “you’d have a huge wreck on your hands,” he says.

So Skok wrote a piece of software to get around this. “If you designed the part on the computer, you’d be able to do the machining without worrying about the geometry,” he says. That led him to start his first company, Skok Systems, which became a computer-aided design (CAD) firm.

“I’m accidentally an entrepreneur,” Skok says. “I didn’t plan to be an entrepreneur, I didn’t have any training in it, I didn’t have any mentors to turn to to teach me how to be an entrepreneur. I’m trying to figure out all the sales and marketing stuff that’s going on.”

The company went through a few shifts, but the pivotal moment happened in … Next Page »

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This year’s MassTLC Innovation UnConference, in Boston on Friday, was as overwhelming—and inspiring—as ever. Apart from the “secrets of scaling startups” session, which I recapped in a separate story, there was a lot going on. Far too much for any one person to take in.

There were sessions on picking the right startup accelerator; building the right company culture; choosing board directors; common mistakes startups make; the talent and recruiting crunch; and the interplay between the New York and Boston innovation scenes, as well as sector-focused sessions on gaming, big data, analytics, mobile cloud, social marketing, and so forth.

To keep track of the main themes this year, I benefited from random chats with Lawrence Schwartz of Tokutek; Michael Raybman of WaySavvy; Gus Weber of Dogpatch Labs and Polaris Venture Partners; Semyon Dukach of SMTP; Vineet Sinha of Architexa; Jeremy Levine of StarStreet; Josh Bob from Textaurant; Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot; and many others. My colleagues Erin Kutz and Lilly O’Flaherty roamed the halls and sessions as well, so I will include some of their observations too.

Here’s a quick sampling of what we all learned about:

1. There are about 100 “big data” companies around Boston. That was the count given at one of several sessions focusing on big data and analytics, led by Steve O’Leary of Aeris Partners and Bob Zurek of Endeca (nice exit). For comparison, earlier this year MassTLC estimated the huge mobile/wireless cluster around Boston to be about 400 companies strong. Big data encompasses big companies like Netezza (part of IBM), Oracle, EMC, ITA Software (Google), Vertica (HP), and Progress Software, as well as upstarts like Hadapt, Jana, Ginger.io, Hopper, Kyruus, and Tokutek. The common thread is technology to help people and companies manage and make sense of tremendous amounts of data so they can make better business decisions.

2. If you’re tired of SoLoMo (social-local-mobile media) as a tech theme, try SoMoClo…the social mobile cloud. In case your eyes just glazed over, think of it this way: Google is mobile plus cloud (see Android). So is Apple (more mobile than cloud, but getting there). Facebook is social plus cloud. Whoever gets all three wins. Beyond consumers, an emerging sector for this technology is healthcare. Jeffrey Tingle of PolyRemedy talked about opportunities in making electronic medical records accessible by patients and doctors—along with the major challenges of privacy, security, and compliance.

3. Web content and advertising are becoming much more interactive—and that interplay leaves an opening for startups. “Traditional church-and-state separation of content and commerce is dying,” says Michael Raybman from travel site WaySavvy. “Sidebar display ads are totally 2005. Commerce and advertising are becoming personalized and contextual, while content is becoming increasingly actionable, where ‘share with friends’ is not the only action. This brings immense opportunities for the travel vertical.”

4. Just when you thought the engineering talent crunch couldn’t get much worse: Undergrads aren’t coming out of school with the right coding experience, and startups can’t afford the time or … Next Page »

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On Tuesday, IBM (NYSE: IBM) in Armonk, NY, said in a press statement there would be a changing of the guard at the onset of 2012. The company’s board elected Virginia Rometty to serve as CEO and president—as well as take a seat on the board—effective January 1. She succeeds Samuel J. Palmisano, who will remain IBM’s chairman. Rometty is currently senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing, and strategy with the company. She joined IBM in 1981 as a systems engineer.

Palmisano became CEO in 2002 and was elected chairman in 2003. Under his watch, the company exited such businesses as PCs and hard disk drives. He also launched IBM’s Smarter Planet strategy, an effort to connect technology and leverage data to make industries and infrastructure more efficient.

Big Blue has acquired 19 Massachusetts software companies since 2003, on Palmisano’s watch. The most recent was Q1 Labs, announced earlier this month.

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[Updated 12:20pm. See below] A buzz-worthy New England tech startup is relocating from Connecticut to the Boston area after raising a sizable venture capital round, Xconomy has learned.

New Haven, CT-based Hadapt has closed a Series A financing round, according to two sources with knowledge of the company. One source puts the round at $8 million. The other source says that, as part of the deal, the company will move to the Boston area (probably Cambridge)—which it may have wanted to do anyway. I don’t know who the investors are yet, but I’m betting at least one Boston venture firm is involved (and I have my guesses). Hadapt is planning to release the information soon, but declined to speak with Xconomy about any details yet.

[Updated] A new report in GigaOm says the round is $9.5 million—but that might include earlier seed money (see below). The lead investors are Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, according to the report.

Hadapt (pronounced “huh-DAPT”) spun out of Yale University in 2010. It specializes in combining advanced databases with an open source data-analysis platform called Hadoop. The goal is to allow business customers to analyze huge amounts of data, both structured (like spreadsheets) and unstructured (like free text), in a very fast and efficient way. (Hadapt’s name is a play on Hadoop and the startup’s “adaptive analytical platform.”)

The company is led by CEO and co-founder Justin Borgman, a Yale MBA who did his undergraduate work at UMass Amherst and started his career in the Boston area as a software developer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Raytheon. Borgman told me back in March that Hadapt had raised an initial funding round, mostly from angel investors. The company had seven full-time employees back in the spring, but that is bound to increase significantly now.

The move to Boston makes a lot of sense, as Hadapt wants to position itself as a business-intelligence and analytics company among some big players in “big data” and data warehousing like Netezza/IBM, EMC, Oracle, and Vertica/HP, all of which have roots or significant operations in Massachusetts. In the short term, there is plenty of talent and customers to be found here that will help Hadapt build what could be a very solid business.

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New England area security, consumer Web, database, and medical device tech startups have been acquired by firms near and far at a feverish pace in the last week.

—CustomMade, a Cambridge, MA-based provider of an online marketplace for connecting consumers with artisans, raised $2 million in funding from an unnamed group of investors.

—A trio of area Web startups inked financing deals late last week. Cambridge-based education-focused startup BetterLesson nabbed a $1.6 million investment from Highland Capital Partners, General Catalyst Partners, New Markets Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, and angel investors. Wikets, a recommendation technology startup, took in $1.5 million in seed funding from from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, and angel investors. And Newton, MA-based online video delivery startup PeerApp added $8 million in financing from a group of investors that included Summit Partners. Cedar Fund, Evergreen Partners, and Pilot House Ventures Group.

—This week we’ve seen a slew of acquisitions. Boston-based Localocracy (developer of community platforms) was picked up by AOL’s (NYSE: AOL) Huffington Post Media Group, for a price tag of less than $1 million, according to tech media reports. Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NASDAQ: EMC) bought Concord, MA-based Zettapoint, a database management technology developer, for an undisclosed sum. In the medical devices space, Hudson, NH-based Atrium Medical will be acquired by Sweden-based Getinge Group.

—More on that: (NYSE: IBM) announced its acquisition of Waltham, MA-based security software developer Q1 Labs, marking Big Blue’s 19th acquisition of a Bay State company since 2003. Financial terms weren’t disclosed for the deal, which is expected to close this quarter. Q1 CEO Brendan Hannigan will lead IBM’s newly formed Security Systems Division, which includes Q1 and other security technology IBM has acquired in the last decade.

—And still more: Portsmouth, NH-based NitroSecurity will be acquired by Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) subsidiary McAfee for an undisclosed sum. Nitro makes technology enabling organizations to much more quickly protect their IT infrastructure from cyber threats and other intrusions.

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Lots of action in computer security, especially around New England.

On the same day IBM said it’s acquiring Q1 Labs of Waltham, MA, the security firm McAfee, a recent subsidiary of Santa Clara, CA-based Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), said it has agreed to buy NitroSecurity of Portsmouth, NH. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

NitroSecurity specializes in what’s called security information and event management. Basically, its software helps organizations protect their network infrastructure and IT environments against increasing levels of cyber threats and intrusions—and Nitro claims to do it fast, in minutes rather than hours.

The company started in 1999 and is led by CEO Ken Levine. A year ago, NitroSecurity announced a $6 million Series B financing round from Brookline Venture Partners, First Analysis, and NewSpring Ventures. The firm also said then that it had acquired the security business of LogMatrix, a Marlborough, MA-based company focused on IT and network management. No word yet on whether NitroSecurity’s staff, which totals about 100, will be moving west or staying put.

Nitro’s software encompasses “network security devices, firewalls, operating system and application logs, vulnerability assessment scans, identity and access management systems and privacy systems,” says Levine in a statement. “It will complement the extensive McAfee security portfolio and help to meet the demanding compliance and protection needs of our joint customers.”

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N-n-n-n-n, n-, n-, n-, n-n-n-n-n-nineteen. Anyone remember that song from the golden age of music and movies?

In any case, IBM has made its 19th acquisition of a Massachusetts software company since 2003. Today Big Blue (NYSE: IBM) announced it is acquiring Waltham, MA-based Q1 Labs, a 10-year-old security software firm that helps businesses see what’s going on in their networks, data centers, and applications. Terms of the deal weren’t given, but it is expected to close this quarter.

Q1 Labs is led by CEO Brendan Hannigan, who will head up IBM’s newly-formed Security Systems Division. The new division will include Q1 and 10 or so other security-related acquisitions IBM has made in the past decade (such as Watchfire, Big Fix, Ounce Labs, Internet Security Systems, and Guardium), as well as IBM’s own research and development in computer security. It’s all part of a broader effort by technology companies to combat sophisticated cyber attacks that increasingly threaten big companies and crucial infrastructure.

Q1 Labs has roughly 150-200 employees, from what I can tell. IBM isn’t saying yet whether those employees will stay in Waltham or move to the IBM Mass Lab in Littleton and Westford. Q1 says it has more than 1,700 customers, including healthcare providers, retail firms, energy and utility companies, financial institutions, government agencies, and wireless service providers.

IBM’s last Massachusetts acquisition was Netezza, a “big data” analytics firm that was snapped up for $1.7 billion a little over a year ago. Former Netezza CEO Jim Baum stayed on at IBM for a year to work on the company transition before leaving the firm last month.

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Former Netezza chief executive Jim Baum has left IBM, Xconomy has learned. Baum was the CEO of Marlborough, MA-based Netezza since early 2009 and oversaw the “big data” analytics company’s $1.7 billion acquisition by IBM almost exactly a year ago.

Baum was not reachable for comment, but a spokesperson for IBM (NYSE: IBM) confirmed that he left the company a few weeks ago. Netezza’s website no longer lists Baum on its executive team page. The top people listed there are senior vice presidents Prat Moghe, Ray Tacoma, and Tricia Cotter, chief technology officer John Metzger, and chief scientist David Flaxman.

I’ve heard that Moghe is now leading Netezza (he came to the company through its purchase of Tizor in 2009), and that Arvind Krishna, the IBM general manager who sponsored the Netezza acquisition, will be spending more time with the subsidiary.

I’m also told that Baum’s next venture is “non-competitive” with Netezza and IBM, but beyond that details are sketchy.

In an extensive interview in March of this year, Baum talked with me about his formative experiences at tech icons Parametric Technology (NASDAQ: PMTC) and Endeca before joining Netezza in 2006 as president and chief operating officer. He also talked about why Netezza sold to IBM, the future of big data analytics, and the competitive dynamics between IBM, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle in that field.

As for the company integration process with Big Blue, Baum said at the time, “IBM is a pro at this. It starts with a business plan. When they acquire a company, they have a well defined, well understood set of measurable business objectives. They expect to create a return on this investment.” He added, “IBM is very focused on wanting to retain and motivate great people, and add great people to their company.”

So no word yet on Baum’s next stop, or whether he is departing for strategic reasons or merely cashing out on the acquisition. But it sounds like IBM didn’t do enough to retain his services for more than a year, in any case.

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