It can be pretty dizzying to tally up the scope of Amazon Web Services, a potentially $1 billion business that serves up critical cloud computing infrastructure for a big slice of the digital economy. Even keeping up with the number of individual services the company offers can be a challenge—and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels wants you to know that he’s sorry about that part.

“That might make it seem somewhat chaotic at times, and I apologize for that,” Vogels said last night, prompting chuckles from the crowd at an open house in Seattle. “But as an advantage, you get stuff really fast.”

That rapid-fire release of services is one of the three key elements that, in Vogels’ view, makes Amazon Web Services so successful.

Amazon is not known for releasing meaningful statistics, but you can get a sense of AWS’ reach from the huge reaction to last year’s multi-day crash of some AWS offerings. And, of course, the number of tech companies big and small in the market continues to grow.

Werner Vogels

In that crowded and competitive environment, Vogels said, Amazon hopes to stand apart with a “relentless focus on very fast, iterative innovation.”

“We will not build a thing with the whole kitchen sink, with all features in it,” Vogels said. “We will put something in your hands really quickly with a new feature set, and work very closely with customers to actually iterate really fast in a direction where the customers want the product to go.”

“That’s why you don’t see massive marketing events from us where, in one big thing, we will just announce everything that’s going to happen,” he said. “As soon as we have features ready, teams have the mandate to get it into the hands of their customers as quickly as possible.”

Vogels also said he thinks AWS has found success by being flexible: “You could be on any operating system, any programming language, any interface—whatever you want. We do not lock anybody in,” he said.

And sharing the price-conscious DNA of a retail company doesn’t hurt either. Vogels said a recently announced price cut for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service was the 18th price reduction for AWS offerings, with more to come. “Some of our customers are getting 12 to 13 percent lower bills in February and we’ll continue to focus on that,” he said.

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Seattle file-sharing startup TappIn, formerly known as Homepipe Networks, has been acquired by San Antonio, TX-based GlobalSCAPE (AMEX: GSB), a company that provides file transfer software.

GlobalSCAPE is paying $9 million up front for TappIn, with another $8 million in possible payments over the next three years if the new property hits revenue and development targets, the companies said in their announcement.

TappIn had raised about $2 million since its founding in 2009. It originally focused on a consumer service that would let users store their digital files on a home computer or drive and access them remotely, but changed the company’s name earlier this year after extending the service to businesses.

TappIn has distinguished itself from other file-storage companies, including big names like Dropbox and Box, by emphasizing that files remain on a user’s personal storage system rather than being uploaded to cloud storage. TappIn is, however, now adding some cloud-storage features to its offering.

GlobalSCAPE says TappIn will be a wholly owned subsidiary, with all of TappIn’s employees remaining in Seattle. TappIn executives Chris Hopen, Parvez Anandam, Doug Wheeler, and Andrew Tull will also remain on the job. The acquisition closed Dec. 2.

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Box, the Palo Alto file-sharing startup that recently snagged another $81 million in venture funding, has started to throw around the “E” word: ecosystem. At a media event in San Francisco last Thursday night, the company announced the formation of a community program called the Box Innovation Network—abbreviated /bin, a clever reference to a common name for a Unix directory containing executable files.

The bottom line here is that Box wants more outside developers and companies to build apps that take advantage of Box’s own cloud-based file storage system. So it’s getting serious about creating and sharing the application programming interfaces, or APIs, needed to do that. And it’s ready to put some money behind the program—Box said it has set aside $2 million to support faster software development by selected /bin members.

Box CEO Aaron Levie calls /bin an “open ecosystem,” in contrast to supposedly closed systems, such as Microsoft’s Sharepoint, that aren’t as easily accessible to third-party developers who want to add their own features. “Slow-moving enterprise software giants have produced very little innovation in recent years, and their closed ecosystems have made it all but impossible for outside players to create compelling experiences for customers on legacy systems,” said Levie, who never misses an opportunity to criticize Microsoft, Oracle, and other big incumbents.

But what kinds of “compelling experiences” does Box think its own partners will create using the company’s APIs? To find out, I talked Friday with Chris Yeh, whose title at Box is vice president of platform. Yeh joined Box this summer from Yahoo, where he spent four years running developer programs and managing community products such as Yahoo Groups and the Delicious social boomarking tool. Here’s an edited writeup of our chat.

Xconomy: At what point did Box start to think of itself as a platform or an ecosystem, not just a service?

Box Vice President of Platform Chris Yeh

Chris Yeh: I think Aaron has been talking about Box as a platform company for quite some time now, whether internally or externally. I think what Aaron realized is that Box’s core business has a long runway of growth, but you look at what the company really needs to do in the long run to become dominant, it needs to evolve toward being a platform company. Now is the right time to invest in this part of the business.

If you think about what we do at the very lowest level—storage of files for sharing purposes in the cloud—that is a function that is fairly low on the stack of functions that people need. We think there is a real opportunity to bring in third-party developers in a way that grows the ecosystem around us and drives business value for the company. When I came aboard, the mission was to push the pedal to the floor. That means my responsibility at Box is to do a few things. First, I own the product roadmap for our platform. We’re hiring engineers as fast as we can into the platform team. We have grown by 3x or 4x already. So we are starting to add some muscle. The other side of my job is to get out into the ecosystem and meet as many people as possible and make people aware of what we are doing and how they can integrate. So you are seeing the push within Box to start doing this.

X: How are companies using Box in their applications? Give me some of your favorite examples.

CY: The first /bin member we announced is a company called LiveOffice. They are an e-mail and file archiving company down in L.A., and they have built a legal e-discovery solution against Box. E-discovery isn’t everyone’s favorite example, but it’s one of my favorites, and somebody really needs this. We had a pharma customer who, when they heard this was even possible, asked if they could … Next Page »

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The Seattle area is an undeniable leader in the rapidly growing cloud-computing sector, from tech mega-companies like Microsoft and Amazon, to local branches like the expanding EMC Isilon division, and active investors.

We know it’s big. We know it’s important. We know it will change the way things are done. But if you’re not an insider, conversing with cloud experts can leave your head reeling with references to platforms-as-a-service, Hadoop, CouchDB, virtualization, spot instances, noSQL, and so on.

There’s apparently no shortage of bluster within the industry, either. As Scott Sanchez, who works for OpenStack, tweeted on his personal account:

So, for those non-experts out there who have been pretending to know more than you do, please take heart in this awesome video from the folks at tech consulting firm Avanade. During a recent kids-at-work day, they decided to have a little fun and ask the office youngsters what they thought of this critical new trend in business.

(For the record, I’m with Sophia, who breaks it down as simply “technology in the sky.”)

Oh, and talent recruiters should keep their eye on the last kid, in the (very) junior executive outfit. I see a CEO in the making.

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Big-data company EMC plans to add 200 jobs at its Seattle-based Isilon branch through 2012, filling out spacious new offices in the city’s Pioneer Square neighborhood—and leading to another hunt for office space in the not-too-distant future.

Add those 200 new jobs to the 430 Isilon workers already in Seattle, and some additional people from other divisions of EMC (NYSE: EMC) in the area, and the new 140,000 square-foot offices just north of the Seahawks and Mariners stadiums will fill up fast, EMC Isilon president Sujal Patel said Wednesday.

“Certainly, more space is already on our mind,” Patel said. “Our intention is to build out this facility and our Pioneer Square presence. For us, this is an ideal hub for building great technology and there’s lots of innovative companies in this area. It’s a great place to be.”

The jobs announcement, which also featured comments from EMC CEO Joe Tucci and Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, also served as a bit of an update to Hopkinton, MA-based EMC’s blockbuster $2.25 billion acquision of Isilon, which was officially announced late last year.

Isilon would have reported about $200 million in revenue last year if it had remained a standalone company, Patel said, and recently doubled in size year-over-year as a unit of EMC.

When the acquisition closed, Patel said, Isilon had just over 500 employees, mostly based in Seattle. Now, Isilon has more than 850 people, with 430 in the Seattle office. And the 200 new jobs on the table for Seattle over the next 15 months “is really just a fraction of the jobs that in the Isilon division we’ll be adding worldwide,” Patel said.

Tucci said the ramp-up of EMC’s Seattle center fits with the company’s strategy of building large tech hubs around the country. It already has major centers in the Boston area, the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Seattle will probably be the fastest-growing of those centers, he said.

“Our model is to take the great things that Isilon is doing and invest more cash,” Tucci said. “It’s a terrific city, and you can count on that we’ll continue our expansion here.”

McGinn said the Isilon expansion was emblematic of a makeover of the Pioneer Square area, and the city government’s drive to provide a strong base for high-quality, innovative companies to locate and expand in the city.

On that note, Isilon’s Pioneer Square offices are actually just one floor down from the Seattle headquarters of Nuance Communications, which just announced the acquisition of Seattle touchscreen-input startup Swype. (And Swype itself was also in the neighborhood).

“One of the things that Sujal told me … was he wasn’t the only person with the idea that having new ways to manage large amounts of data was going to be a growth industry. A couple hundred companies had that idea. Not many are left,” McGinn said. “So it’s a highly competitive environment out there.”

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That’s “deals” as in funding and M&A announcements, not as in daily deals. (Though there’s news today about Groupon as well.)

—Crowdfunding startup IndieGoGo of San Francisco said that it has raised $1.5 million in new funding. Metamorphic Ventures, MHS Capital, and Zynga co-founder Steve Schoettler led the round, which the company said will help it “enhance the online experience for customers worldwide, with a particular focus on making the site and its analytics more accessible to consumers, strategic partners and the media.” Xconomy profiled IndieGoGo in April.

—Project Frog, a San Francisco-based maker of energy-saving prefabricated buildings, said today (PDF) that it has raised $22 million in a round of equity-based financing led by General Electric Energy Financial Services. Claremont Creek Ventures, Greener Capital Partners, and RockPort Capital Partners also joined the round. One of Project Frog’s buildings—which combine semi-custom components with pre-engineered kits—is under construction at GE’s John F. Welch Leadership Development Center in Ossining, NY; the GE investment is part of its Ecomagination Challenge, announced last summer.

—BlueArc, the San Jose, CA-based maker of networked storage devices for unstructured data such as video and genomic information, has been acquired by Santa Clara, CA-based Hitachi Data Systems, according to an announcement today. The value of the all-cash transaction was not disclosed. Hitachi Data Systems, a California subsidiary of Tokyo-based Hitachi, says the acquisition is part of its strategy to “transform traditional data centers into information centers—where customers can seamlessly store and access all data, content and information.”

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A Santa Clara, CA, maker of chips for storage systems called Link A Media said yesterday that it has closed a $16 million Series D funding round. Participating backers include Itochu Technology Ventures, Keynote Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SunAmerica Ventures, and “several strategic partners,” according to the startup. Link-A-Media makes controllers that handle error checking during read-write operations on both hard drives and Flash-based storage devices. “This infusion of capital allows us to continue to build product momentum and increase our presence in the fast evolving storage market, which is driven by the explosion in content and its delivery across a multitude of platforms,” said Link A Media CEO Hemant Thapar in a statement.

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It’s not your everyday startup CEO who shows up at Xconomy San Francisco’s office in cowboy boots, claims that he’s going to take over a $23 billion industry, and then hints that an IPO is in the offing. But that’s exactly what Donald Basile, CEO of Mountain View, CA-based Violin Memory, did this Tuesday.

The industry in question is external storage arrays—the big disk-based storage devices sold by companies like EMC, Hewlett-Packard, NetApp, Oracle, Dell, and Hitachi. Enterprises use these devices to store virtually all of their primary data—the databases and data warehouses behind their enterprise resource planning system, their human resources system, their customer relationship management software, and all their other critical functions.

Basile wants companies to replace all of those machines with new storage arrays based on Violin’s Flash memory boards, which can read and write data faster than disk drives and therefore have an easier time keeping up with the superfast, multicore processors in today’s corporate data centers. A longtime champion of Flash memory—he was formerly CEO of Fusion-io, the newly public Utah company that makes solid state memory modules for caching data inside servers—Basile is convinced that Violin can outrun the bigger storage vendors in the inevitable transition from disk-based storage to Flash.

Don Basile

And investors and creditors apparently believe him: they’ve handed over more than $250 million since Basile joined Violin in 2009, counting the money raised by Gear6, a caching startup Violin bought in 2010. Violin now has revenues that could zip past $100 million this year, and Basile says an IPO is likely within the next nine months.

That would be a remarkable turnaround for a company that was deep in debt—with no revenue, and facing a skeptical market—as recently as 2009. Violin didn’t even start selling its first enterprise memory array until mid-2010. But if it does reach the $100 million milestone this year, it will have done so in one-third the time it took a comparable startup—storage array vendor 3Par, which was acquired by HP last year—to hit the same revenue level.

That kind of growth is exactly what the startup’s backers, who include Rationalwave Capital Partners and strategic investors Toshiba and Juniper Networks, are pressing for. “We have, in 24 months, put together a quarter-billion dollars for Violin,” says Basile. “That is a lot of money for a company that had zero revenue when we started. It means people believe there is huge opportunity here. On the other side of the equation, it means you have to get pretty big”—and quick.

Flash memory was invented at Toshiba in the early 1980s, and the Japanese giant still makes about half of the world’s supply of the chips. The technology has already transformed consumer computing: if you hadn’t noticed, there isn’t a disk drive inside your … Next Page »

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San Jose, CA-based Nimble Storage, which makes flash- and disk-based backup and storage devices for enterprises, said today that it has closed a $25 million Series D financing round. New investor Artis Capital Management led the round, which was joined by existing investors Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital. The company, which has raised $58 million all told, said it will use the cash to expand international sales efforts.

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Nvelo, a Santa Clara, CA-based startup that makes high-capacity solid state Flash drives for Windows and Linux PCs, has raised $6.55 million in a round of equity and debt financing, according to a regulatory filing. The startup was formed as a spinoff last year during Denali Software’s acquisition by Cadence Systems.

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San Jose, CA-based data and storage management company BlueArc announced Friday that it has restarted the registration process for an initial public offering, on hold since 2008. BlueArc hopes to raise $100 million in the offering, according to its official S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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[Updated at 1:40 p.m. with more pricing info, see below] Apple’s iTunes has become the default music store, playback platform and digital locker for millions of consumers. But the market-owner certainly has limits—chief among them are terrestrial storage and a limited number of machines authorized to use a given account.

Seattle’s Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is moving heavily into this space today with the unveiling of its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, a pair of services that aim to take an iTunes-like experience into the always-there computing ether. And if the target on Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) wasn’t obvious enough, Amazon’s new player also works with chief mobile platform rival Android.

This space has been begging for some innovative cloud-storage options that could go mainstream, and Amazon’s has a decent chance. Integration is the key: iTunes’ dominance has shown that lots of people prefer having all of their digital music arranged in a single place, without having to bridge between buying, storing, and enjoying. Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Player may be able to deliver that same kind of experience, with the additional feature of not having to clog up your hard drive or connect external storage every time you want to play a song.

But the real point here isn’t so much the player and cloud storage as it is Amazon’s MP3 store. The Cloud Drive starts with 5 GB of free storage, and offers a free upgrade to 20 GB if a customer buys an album on Amazon’s digital music marketplace. There are larger storage options, priced at $1 per gigabyte per year, in big chunks up to 1,000 GB. The web-based Player is free, and the Android Cloud Player also is bundled with the Amazon MP3 app, which includes the store. [Added the per-GB pricing info to this paragraph.]

So the free versions are simply loss-leaders to get people in the door of the Amazon MP3 store—somewhat similar to the video-streaming option that Amazon recently tacked onto its Prime premium shipping service. That’s a canny bet, and it’ll be interesting to see how many people make the switch. One thing we’ve learned about Apple is that it tends to go all-in fast enough that it defines a market, and millions of people wind up not even caring about the alternatives.

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Violin Memory, a Mountain View, CA-based maker of Flash memory arrays for enterprise data centers, announced today that it has collected $35 million in Series B funding. Strategic investors Toshiba America Electronic Components and Juniper Networks led the round, which was joined by “other corporate partners, crossover investment funds, high net worth industry leaders and private equity general partners,” the company said.

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San Jose, CA-based Cirtas, which makes storage controllers that connect enterprise data centers to cloud-based storage services such as Amazon S3, said today that it has raised $22.5 million in Series B financing. New investors Shasta Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, which was joined by existing investors NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Amazon. Shasta Ventures partner Ravi Mohan has joined Cirtas’s board. The company has raised $32.5 million all told. In a separate press release today, Cirtas announced the appointment of a new CEO: Gary Messiana, a former entrepreneur-in-residence at Bessemer who had leadership roles at Netli and Diligent Software.

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Redwood City, CA-based Coraid, which makes scalable storage devices for businesses, said today that it has closed a $25 million round of Series C venture funding. Menlo Ventures was in the lead, and all of the company’s existing investors, including Allegis Capital and Azure Capital Partners, also participated. Menlo Ventures managing director John Jarve has joined Coraid’s board. The company previously raised $10 million in late 2009, and was formerly located in San Clemente in California’s Orange County.

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Index Ventures is the lead investor in an $8.5 million Series B financing round for Milpitas, CA-based Gluster, the company announced today. Existing investor Nexus Venture Partners also took part in the round. Gluster makes an open-source platform for managing network-attached storage devices like those used in corporate data centers and public and private storage clouds.

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If you live or work in Silicon Valley, you’ve probably driven past the Box.net billboard on U.S. 101, near the Ralston Avenue exit (aka the Oracle exit). It says “No Hardware. No Software. No SharePoint.” A brazen dig at Microsoft, the billboard makes the point that Box.net’s system for sharing business documents works in the cloud, without requiring customers to buy their own servers or install special software such as SharePoint, Microsoft’s business collaboration and Web publishing suite.

If Box.net had really wanted to rub it in, it could have added “No cost.” The Palo Alto, CA-based startup offers a free personal version of its online service with up to a gigabyte of storage. Licensing SharePoint, by contrast, is so complex and expensive that the details aren’t even published on the SharePoint website. (You have to call Microsoft to get a price quote.)

Box.net is one of the many Silicon Valley startups gleefully pounding older enterprise-software incumbents over the head with the flexibility and viral appeal of cloud services. But just five years ago, when it was founded by high school buddies Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith from Levie’s USC dorm room with a $350,000 angel investment from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Box.net was just another online file sharing service, alongside Xdrive, Omnidrive, Streamload, and many others vying to help consumers and office workers offload local files to Web-based servers, where they were supposedly safer and more accessible.

Since those days, however, many of Box.net’s competitors have disappeared or imploded. To take one spectacular example, Streamload—renamed MediaMax, then renamed again as The Linkup—went out of business 2007 after permanently losing data for 20,000 customers. Meanwhile Box.net has soared, winning more than 60,000 business customers and raising nearly $30 million in venture funding from top-tier firms like Draper Fisher Jurvetson, U.S. Venture Partners, and Scale Venture Partners.

So how did Box.net grow to the point where CEO Levie and chief financial officer Smith—both Seattle natives, and both just 25 years old—feel ready for a head-to-head battle with Microsoft? And just as interesting, why did Levie and Smith decide to focus on the traditionally stodgy enterprise services market at a time when virtually all of their twenty-something peers in the world of Silicon Valley Internet entrepreneurship are building consumer-facing services like social networks, online games, and mobile apps?

I sat down with Levie recently to go through those questions and many more. While part of the message of Box.net’s Silicon Valley billboard can probably be ascribed to the youthful CEO’s brashness, it’s clear that business software incumbents like Microsoft, with SharePoint, and EMC, with its Documentum system, will have to come to terms with cloud-based sharing technology. When a 100-employee startup can come out of nowhere to win 4 million users—offering a collaboration service that requires no initial investment and can be up and running in minutes rather than weeks—that’s what you might call a game changer.

Box.net “is our file system in the cloud,” says Scale Venture Partners managing director Rory O’Driscoll, using words that must strike fear into the hearts of … Next Page »

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San Jose, CA-based Cirtas Systems, which makes storage appliances that seamlessly link on-site enterprise storage servers to cloud storage services, emerged from stealth mode today and said it has collected $10 million in Series A venture financing. New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Amazon provided the funding. The company’s $70,000 BlueJet Cloud Storage Controller appliances allow companies to access and manage cloud storage resources from companies like Amazon and Iron Mountain as if they were part of a local enterprise storage array.

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Saratoga, CA-based SandForce, which makes Flash-based “solid state drives” for enterprise data storage, said Tuesday that it has raised $25 million in Series D funding. The round was led by Canaan Partners, wit existing investors DCM, Storm Ventures, Translink Capital, LSI Corporation, and UMC Capital joining. SandForce president and CEO Michael Raam said the new funding “will help us bring our next-generation products to market, expand our customer and partner support infrastructure, and accelerate our core technology development that will extend our market leadership.”

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Santa Clara, CA-based StorSimple, maker of an appliance that helps enterprises store data across both public and private cloud storage systems, said Monday that it has raised $13 million in a Series B venture round led by Mayfield Fund. New investor Ignition Partners and existing investors Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures also participated. The latest round brings the company’s total venture funding to $21 million.

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