From all outward appearances, Cambridge, MA-based data warehousing appliance maker Dataupia and its founder Foster Hinshaw have both been through near-death experiences this year. Heart problems forced to Hinshaw to step down as CEO in January. Dataupia’s board brought in not just a new leader, Tony Sirianni, but a new strategy, concentrating on selling software rather than integrated hardware-software packages.

But the strategy didn’t seem to be enough to stave off the effects of the recession: by June, as we reported, the company had laid off the majority of its staff and was seeking new financing in order to stay alive. In August, reports surfaced that the company had been reduced to a skeleton crew and was selling off its assets. Many database industry observers put the company into the dead pool.

But appearances can be deceiving. Hinshaw is back as CEO, the company’s workforce has stabilized at about 30 (half the number from one year ago), and the startup’s difficult period is behind it, according to an announcement set to be released tomorrow. “After taking a hiatus following a medical surgery, [Hinshaw] is back to lead the Company into a high growth phase,” the announcement says.

That “hiatus” language is a bit of a gloss on the actual situation, which I understand much better after having spoken with Hinshaw himself at length today. Most importantly, Hinshaw—who is widely considered to be the father of the data warehousing appliance business—says that he has fully recovered from coronary artery bypass graft surgery. “I’m out hiking now and doing my normal stuff, which is beautiful,” he says. “It was a long recovery, but it’s amazing what they do.”

But Hinshaw also says that while the recession caused some bumps for the company, including the big wave of layoffs, the rumors about Dataupia’s troubles were far out of proportion to reality. “I don’t want to quote Mark Twain, but some folks on their way out may have said some things that were very hypey,” he says.

Like Hinshaw’s previous company, Netezza (which went public in 2007), Dataupia started out selling data warehousing appliances—very fast servers preloaded with the software needed to help companies such as wireless operators sort through terabytes of historical customer data to discern patterns and extract intelligence. And with Hinshaw back in the saddle, that is once again the company’s emphasis.

But under Sirianni’s leadership, Hinshaw explains, the company steered for a while toward selling the software designed for Dataupia’s hardware as a standalone product. The attraction of this strategy was that it necessitated much lower research and development costs, Hinshaw says.

“With an appliance, you can drop it into a customer site and literally within days you are up and running, which is a powerful story, but the R&D costs are fairly high,” he says. “So there is always the question of whether you want to spend on that R&D, or just take the software and let the customer do the integration” into their existing IT systems.

Whether or not the software strategy was justified, it didn’t boost sales in the way the company would have liked, Hinshaw says. A horrid economic climate was at least part of the problem. “I’m not saying that Tony or the board did a bad job. I interviewed Tony myself,” he says. “But the economy certainly didn’t help any of this stuff.”

While there’s ongoing debate within the industry over the “tools” versus “appliances” question, Hinshaw says he’s personally convinced that …Next Page »

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EMC (NYSE: EMC), the Hopkinton, MA-based information infrastructure company that anchors Boston’s infotech industry, today unveiled a series of executive-level changes intended to better integrate its disparate businesses, which range from storage, content management and archiving, security, and IT management to cloud computing services.

Most significantly, the company said it has hired veteran Intel executive Pat Gelsinger away from the giant chipmaker, where he ran its largest business group, and has given him the newly created title of President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products.

Gelsinger will report to EMC chairman and CEO Joe Tucci, and will oversee EMC’s entire information infrastructure business—meaning all of EMC’s product divisions except VMware (NYSE: VMW). (EMC owns an 84 percent stake in the Palo Alto, CA, virtualization software maker, but treats it largely as a separate company; VMware president and chief operating officer Paul Maritz reports directly to Tucci.)

Gelsinger will also join the newly expanded “executive office of the chairman” at EMC, as will Howard Elias, who has been promoted to President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services. Elias was formerly president of EMC’s Global Services division and its Ionix IT management group.

David Goulden, EMC’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, will also join the expanded executive office, which previously included only Tucci and EMC Vice Chairman Bill Teuber.

The existing presidents of EMC’s divisions–for example, Mark Lewis in the content management and archiving division, and Art Coviello in the RSA Security division—all remain in place. In essence, Gelsinger, 48, has been brought in to provide unified leadership for EMC’s entire line of software and hardware products businesses, while Elias, 52, will do the same thing on the services side. But they’ll both do it from within a tight-knit, cross-cutting executive office whose role, in part, will be to look for ways that EMC’s product innovation can benefit its services operations, and vice-versa.

“It’s a reorganization of the structure of how we bring our products and services together,” says Michael Gallant, an EMC analyst and media relations manager. “This is a signal that we will be continuing to deliver more joint solutions and developing long-term road maps with a lot of the different technologies from the different divisions together.”

Such a reorganization may be particularly important for EMC in an age of blending and interoperability, when technologies such as virtualization allow different software and operating systems to run on common hardware, and when large companies have technology from a wide range of vendors under the same roof.

Indeed, EMC may be counting on Gelsinger—who oversaw a panoply of enterprise products at Intel, including PCs, servers, and communications and storage products, not to mention its next-generation Nehalem microprocessor architecture—to …Next Page »

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Battery Ventures of Waltham, MA, said today that it has completed an $8 million Series A funding round for GreenBytes, an Ashaway, RI, startup specializing in energy-efficient storage devices that reduce storage requirements through data deduplication. Xconomy reported the funding in May, based on a regulatory filing. In a second announcement today, GreenBytes unveiled a new line of storage devices, the “GB-X” series, that the company says is designed to make data deduplication technology more affordable.

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[Updated, August 29, 1:40 pm---see below]

Xconomy is saddened to note that Richard Egan, the “E” in EMC, has passed away. The co-founder, with Roger Marino, of the Hopkinton, MA-based data storage and information management giant, Egan was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer in May. He died at his Boston home yesterday, according to an extensive article in the Boston Globe and other press reports.

When Egan and Marino started EMC in 1979, their first product was office desks for computer users. The company began selling memory boards in 1981, for thousands of dollars per megabyte. It grew into a Fortune 500 company with 40,000 employees around the world; its flagship Symmetrix storage systems are found in the data centers of hundreds of large corporations, and its myriad software products are used for everything from data center virtualization to security, document management, and online backup. EMC’s success made Egan a billionaire.

“Thirty years ago this week, Dick founded EMC with his partner, Roger Marino,” EMC president and CEO Joseph Tucci said in a statement quoted by the Globe. “Dick’s vision became one of the world’s top technology companies, and his legacy will live on through the tens of thousands of lives he affected in so many positive ways.’’

A major fund-raiser for the Republican party, Egan was named by President George W. Bush in March 2001 as the United States ambassador to Ireland. He served in the position for 15 months.

[Update, August 29]: The Boston Herald, citing police and other sources, reported on its website today that Egan died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His nurse reportedly heard the shot and called 911, the account said.

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Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM), a Boston-based provider of information storage and protection products, announced today a proposed $450 million notes offering. The notes to be sold in the public offering are due by 2021, and the proceeds will be used in combination with the company’s other funds toward the redemption of certain senior subordinated notes due in 2013 as well as other corporate uses.

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The reality in the IT world, as one executive at Marlborough, MA-based Netezza (NYSE: NZ) puts it, is that “the cost of adding more data to disks is getting closer to zero every day.” That’s not great news if your traditional business is selling high-performing servers at $60,000 per terabyte. So to keep growing, Netezza is getting more competitive on price.

Netezza’s newest data warehousing appliance, set to launch Monday, isn’t a custom-built box with all the elements specified and integrated by Netezza, like the company’s previous generations of machines, but rather an off-the-shelf blade server from IBM that’s got Netezza hardware and software inside. The new product’s price? $20,000 per terabyte, or one-third of what Netezza was charging before. [Update: Thanks to Curt Monash, publisher of the database industry blog DBMS2, for helping with clarifications to this paragraph.]

Called the Netezza TwinFin, this new product can actually hold a lot more data than its predecessors. The company hopes the radical price reduction, and better performance, will open up the market for data warehousing hardware to companies and industries that wouldn’t previously have considered using such specialized and expensive hardware.

In general terms, data warehousing means storing historical data (as opposed to real-time, transactional data) that can be mined for trends or insights to guide business decisions. For example, wireless operators use data warehouses to store cell-phone calling records and identify users who could be invited to switch to more profitable calling plans. The pitch at Netezza—whose 2007 IPO was one of the most successful in New England, raising more than $100 million—has always been that the company’s patented hardware architecture speeds up the database queries that companies must run against such data to draw out trends. The architecture relies on massive parallelism (doing many calculations at once) and some clever filtering of data through chips called field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) as it streams off of hard drives.

The performance of commodity blade servers from IBM and other companies has advanced to the point that they can handle the type of query volumes typically placed on Netezza appliances, says Phil Francisco, Netezza’s vice president of product management and product marketing. Netezza has relied on IBM’s latest blade servers, which include a slot for an expansion card, also known as a “sidecar,” in order to make the product faster and cheaper.

“We’ve used that sidecar technology from IBM to incorporate some of the secret sauce of Netezza, the field programmable gate arrays, which acts essentially as a turbocharger to speed up query processing and the decompression of data as it comes off the disk,” Francisco says. “It allows us to get the best of both worlds—the commodity platform along with the Netezza secret sauce.”

Francisco says the TwinFin is the first in a family of four appliances that will include an even cheaper, entry-level product, a high-capacity version for customers with huge datasets, and a memory-intensive version for “highly interactive or very operational deployments.” This, too, is a departure for Netezza, as the company’s previous appliances have varied only in their storage capacity, not their basic capabilities. The related appliances will be unveiled at the company’s user conference, Enzee Universe, in Boston in September.

By lowering the price of its systems, Netezza wants to get data warehousing appliances into small and mid-sized companies that wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to spend $60,000 per terabyte. “What we are trying to do is open up the market for anyone who has databases sized from a few hundred gigabytes up to a petabyte, which is a pretty wide swath.” The TwinFin will appeal to Netezza’s big customers in the retail, telecommunications, financial, digital media, pharmaceutical, and government sectors, Francisco says, but also will be affordable to smaller players in those niches.

So, at one-third the price, will Netezza be able to make up the revenue difference by selling at least three times as many appliances? “Certainly we anticipate that,” says Francisco. “That’s the whole point of being able to appeal to a wider set of customers.”

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Hewlett-Packard of Palo Alto, CA, will acquire Billerica, MA-based Ibrix, HP said in an announcement today. The nine-year-old company, with 53 employees, makes software used by large enterprises such as AOL, Pixar, and Blizzard Entertainment to manage network file servers holding petabytes of data. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. PE Hub reports that Ibrix had raised at least $45 million in venture capital from firms including JT Venture Partners and Credit Suisse.

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Sunnyvale, CA-based NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) said today it would not try to top EMC’s $33.50 per share offer for Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP), clearing the way for the Hopkinton, MA-based storage and information management giant to acquire the much-sought-after provider of data deduplication software.

NetApp kicked off the competition for Data Domain on May 20 with a $25-per-share offer that Data Domain’s board quickly accepted. But then EMC came along, first offering $30 per share—a price NetApp matched—then $33.50.

In a statement today, NetApp said it couldn’t afford to keep upping its bid. “NetApp applies a disciplined approach to acquisitions, one focused intently on creating long-term value for our stockholders,” said NetApp chairman and CEO Dan Warmenhoven. “We therefore cannot justify engaging in an increasingly expensive and dilutive bidding war that would diminish the deal’s strategic and financial benefits.”

As a result of the termination of their merger agreement, Data Domain has paid its original suitor a $57 million break-up fee, NetApp said.

The $33.50-per-share bid from EMC (NYSE: EMC) came on July 6 and is worth about $2.1 billion overall. “This is a compelling acquisition from both a strategic and financial standpoint,” EMC CEO Joseph Tucci said in a statement. “We look forward to bringing Data Domain together with EMC to form a powerful force in next-generation disk-based backup and archive. I have tremendous respect for Data Domain’s people, technology and business, and anticipate great things ahead for our respective companies, our customers and partners.”

In a July 6 letter to the Data Domain board, Tucci said EMC had already received approval from federal regulators to proceed with an acquisition of Data Domain, and that the transaction could be completed in as little as two weeks. EMC said today it expects to complete the acquisition “before the end of July.”

Deduplication software like that made by Data Domain reduces storage needs by eliminating redundant data before it’s sent to archival servers. EMC already offers deduplication as part of its Avamar family of backup software. But it’s a different kind of deduplication from that offered by Data Domain.

Avamar handles “source” deduplication, meaning that data is filtered out before it’s transmitted to a backup system, which saves bandwidth. But Data Domain offers “target” deduplication, meaning redundancies are identified at the backup location, ultimately saving more space.

EMC wants to offer its customers both forms of deduplication. In repeated missives to Data Domain’s board, EMC argued that target deduplication technology would find a broader market under EMC than under NetApp’s ownership. Now it will have the opportunity to test that theory.

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Dedham, MA-based Sonian, which provides cloud-based e-mail archiving services, has raised $4.1 million out of a planned $6.6 million private stock offering, according to regulatory documents filed yesterday. Prism Ventureworks partner William Kohler is named as a Sonian board member.

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Boston-based online computer backup provider Carbonite announced an agreement yesterday with Sun Microsystems that could broaden the startup’s user base. Computer users who download Sun’s Java runtime environment for the first time, or who upgrade to the newest version of Java, will be offered a 30-day free trial of the Carbonite service. “This program will increase awareness of the importance of data backup among the millions of loyal Java users,” Carbonite president and COO Keith Cooper said in a statement.

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Determined not to be outbid by rival NetApp for data deduplication software maker Data Domain, Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) today increased its takeover offer to $33.50 per share.

In a letter to Data Domain’s board of directors, EMC CEO Joseph Tucci said the EMC offer is “far superior” to the latest $30-per-share bid from Sunnyvale, CA-based NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP)—in part because EMC has received permission from the Federal Trade Commission to acquire Santa Clara, CA-based Data Domain without further regulatory review. That means EMC could complete the acquisition within as little as two weeks, Tucci wrote.

To make it easier for Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP) to say yes, EMC has also removed the “deal-protection” provisions that went along with its earlier offer, including a termination fee.

Both EMC and NetApp would like to acquire Data Domain for its advanced deduplication technology, which removes redundant information from corporate data streams before it’s archived, saving storage space. Data Domain officials have not commented on the latest EMC bid, but in June the company recommended that its shareholders reject EMC’s offer. NetApp, meanwhile, said today that it has received clearance from the Securities and Exchange Commission to proceed with the acquisition.

Data Domain may be in an awkward spot between two aggressive suitors, but the situation has certainly helped the company’s own stock price. Data Domain shares have shot up from about $15 before NetApp’s initial $25-per-share acquisition proposal in late May to more than $34 today—perhaps reflecting shareholder expectations that the bidding will go even higher.

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The board of directors at Santa Clara, CA-based Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP) yesterday recommended that shareholders reject a $1.8 billion, $30-per-share cash tender offer from Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC). The board of the data deduplication software company stuck to its earlier decision to pursue a merger with Sunnyvale, CA-based NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), which is also offering $30 per share in cash and stock but whose offer is valued at $1.9 billion overall. Meanwhile, two law firms said yesterday that they filed a class-action shareholder lawsuit against Data Domain in Delaware on June 12; the firms, Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP of New York, NY, and Grant & Eisenhofer, P.A., of Wilmington, DE, said in a press release that the board members at Data Domain are “breaching their fiduciary duties to their shareholders by refusing to negotiate with a potential acquirer, EMC Corporation…and for agreeing to sell Data Domain to NetApp without taking any steps to maximize the price paid to Data Domain’s shareholders.”

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Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) is prepared to raise its bid for Santa Clara, CA-based Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP) from $30 per share to as much as $35 in order to outbid rival NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), Reuters reported on Friday, citing unnamed sources. The board of Data Domain, whose software is used to reduce storage requirements by eliminating redundant data, has already accepted NetApp’s $30 per share offer (sweetened from $25 after EMC’s surprise bid), but has said it will review EMC’s $30 counteroffer. It’s expected to issue a recommendation to shareholders tomorrow. A higher offer could force NetApp to respond, or could put pressure on board members to accept EMC’s bid.

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In an effort to increase the pressure on the board of Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP) to accept EMC’s $30 per share acquisition offer and reject NetApp’s (NASDAQ: NTAP) competing offer, EMC CEO Joseph Tucci issued an open letter to Data Domain employees today. Under EMC (NYSE: EMC), Data Domain employees would have “a great and exciting future,” Tucci said. As a subsidiary of EMC, Data Domain—whose deduplication technologies are “are important to the future of enterprise IT,” in Tucci’s words—would stay intact as a product division, he said. Tucci added that EMC’s all-cash offer for Data Domain “remains superior” to NetApp’s cash-and-stock offer.

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On Wednesday the board of Santa Clara, CA-based data deduplication company Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP) voted to accept NetApp’s (NASDAQ: NTAP) sweetened $1.9 billion acquisition offer, which had come in response to a $1.8 billion offer earlier this week from Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC). But yesterday Data Domain said its board is “reviewing EMC’s offer” and that stockholders should wait for its analysis before they accept or reject EMC’s $30/share tender offer for all outstanding Data Domain shares, which remains in effect. Observers quoted by the Boston Globe today say that as long as the EMC offer is in play, it could prolong a bidding war that drives up the Data Domain’s stock value.

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Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP) shareholders must be flying high this week. Today Sunnyvale, CA-based storage company NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) announced that it has increased its bid for Santa Clara, CA-based deduplication software provider Data Domain to some $1.9 billion in an effort to fend off EMC’s (NYSE: EMC) $1.8 billion offer, tendered Monday night. NetApp is offering Data Domain sharedholders the same price per share as Hopkinton, MA-based EMC—$30—but said that the deal is worth slightly more than EMC’s offer due to “certain adjustments.” In a reference to the EMC offer, NetApp chairman and CEO Dan Warmenhoven said, “The complementary nature of the Data Domain and NetApp product lines will result in higher aggregate growth compared to the redundancies that would result with the EMC product line.”

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Hopkinton, MA-based data storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC), attempted today to derail competitor NetApp’s proposed acquisition of Data Domain, by launching its own higher-priced bid for the Santa Clara, CA-based data deduplication company.

In an announcement after the close of the markets this afternoon, EMC said that it has offered to acquire all of Data Domain’s outstanding stock for $30 per share, or $5 per share more than NetApp offered. EMC said the net value of the proposed transaction would be around $1.8 billion.

Sunnyvale, CA-based NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) and Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP) announced a definitive agreement to merge on May 20. Data Domain would have to walk away from that agreement—and potentially pay a steep termination fee—in order to accept EMC’s eleventh-hour proposal.

Deduplication is the process of sifting through digital information to identify redundant data before it’s stored, thereby saving storage space and reducing the overall cost of the short-term backup and long-term archiving that most large businesses now perform as a matter of course. EMC already offers a deduplication product under its Avamar brand, which it acquired in 2006 for $165 million. But there are two types of deduplication—”source” and “target”—and Avamar’s technology focuses only on the first. In a conference call today with journalists, EMC CEO Joseph Tucci said bringing Data Domain into his company would strengthen its product lineup in the second key category of target deduplication.

In source deduplication, software combs through data for duplications at the source—meaning, on a server used in a production environment—before it’s transmitted to a backup system, which cuts down on bandwidth costs. In target deduplication, all data is collected at the backup location first, then deduplicated, which ensures that all redundancies can be identified and saves more storage space. Companies hoping to save on storage have flocked to target deduplication over the past year, and specifically to Data Domain, helping the company grow at an annual rate of 30 to 40 percent and making it an attractive acquisition target for storage hardware markers like Dell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and EMC.

But NetApp seemed to take its larger rivals by surprise by beating them to a Data Domain deal—and now EMC wants to roll back the clock. In a letter from EMC to Data Domain released today by EMC, Tucci admonished Data Domain CEO Frank Slootman for accepting NetApp’s proposal before EMC had a chance to make a counteroffer. “We are disappointed that we were not given an opportunity to explore a business combination prior to the announcement of your proposed transaction with NetApp, particularly since I believe you should have been aware of our interest,” Tucci wrote in the letter.

EMC’s offer is an aggressive one: It’s offering cash (NetApp offered a combination of cash and stock), and to make things more difficult for NetApp, it has launched a tender offer, meaning it will start buying up Data Domain shares in the open market from individual stockholders at the $30 price. That could drive up the share price and put pressure on NetApp to accept a higher bid, whether or not Data Domain’s board decides to back out of the NetApp deal.

From the point of view of one local storage-industry CEO, EMC’s move was a predictable one. Shortly after the NetApp-Data Domain announcement, Permabit CEO Tom Cook told Xconomy that the pairing was a “worst fear” scenario for Dell, EMC, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. “The last thing in the world they wanted in the market was another NetApp,” Cook said. “They all had Data Domain in their sights to acquire or beat in the marketplace. They will all spring to aggressive action.” And that’s what EMC is now doing.

Tucci, during the conference call, said EMC’s acquisition offer is “all about growth by executing on a market opportunity.” Data Domain’s technology would fare better under the EMC aegis than it would under NetApp’s, he argued, given EMC’s international presence and its network of business partners. If it joined EMC, Tucci predicted, Data Domain’s predicted standalone revenue of $485 million in 2010 would swell to $1 billion.

But even if EMC can pry Data Domain away from NetApp, achieving such synergies may be more difficult than Tucci predicts. There may be an incipient culture clash between EMC, which more often than not enters markets by acquiring smaller companies, and Data Domain, which prides itself on its extensive engineering effort and experience in the data deduplication market. In a May 21 blog post, Data Domain’s principal technology evangelist, Rich Colbert, chided EMC for failing to develop its own deduplication products, and instead acquiring Avamar’s. “You would think that EMC at least tried to build a dedupe product internally,” he wrote.

During the press conference, one reporter asked Tucci whether the takeover offer was an example of offense or defense—or in the reporter’s words, “Is this technology that you had to own, or technology that you couldn’t allow NetApp to own?” Tucci responded that “You win games through good defense, but you have to put points on the board. This is primarily an offensive move. It’s an opportunity to have leadership with deduplication products on both sides of the equation.”

Tucci also said that in the decision about whether to buy another deduplication company or build its own target deduplication technology, the urgency of the opportunity tilted EMC toward attempting at Data Domain takeover. “We could have built it here, sure,” Tucci said. “But time to market, time to critical mass, is going to be very important.”

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Walk into any biology lab, and you’ll see freezers full of precious biological samples that researchers typically use to gain insights on cancer, heart disease or some other ailment. The freezers run around the clock for years, sucking up lots of electricity.

But what if scientists could store their samples at room temperature by just sticking them on a shelf, in a reasonably dry place? San Diego-based Biomatrica has been pushing this idea since it crafted its prototype technology in 2004. Now Biomatrica has started to gain some market acceptance. President Rolf Muller says sales have doubled in the last year, the company has grown from 13 to 25 employees, and the business became cash-flow positive.

Keeping biological samples cold in the lab, and as they are shipped between researchers around the world, is a big business worth an estimated $38 billion worldwide, Biomatrica says. The volume of samples stored in the freezer is on a steep growth curve as scientists dig deeper into analyzing the DNA, RNA, and proteins in those samples. The Rand Corp. recently estimated there are 307 million tissue specimens stored in the U.S., and 20 million more are added each year. Years of research can literally go down the drain if a freezer breaks down because of a power outage or a mechanical failure. So Biomatrica hopes to build demand for both practical and altruistic reasons among biologists who are looking for ways to both safeguard their specimens and work in a more environmentally-friendly manner.

“The concept is revolutionary,” Muller says. “It’s a new way of preserving biological materials and keeping them stable. It’s like inventing canning for the food industry.”

OK, but before we get too breathless, it’s worth pointing out that neither Biomatrica nor any other company has made the lab freezer obsolete. Muller says Biomatrica has signed up hundreds of customers who are giving the technology a shot, including GlaxoSmithKline, the FBI, and the U.S. Navy.

Muller, a former scientist at The Scripps Research Institute, co-founded the company with his wife, Judy Muller-Cohn in 2005. She’s the CEO, overseeing the finance and operations side of the business, while he manages the scientific side.

Here’s how the technology is supposed to work: Biomatrica’s technology is built on a complex, ancient natural phenomenon called anhydrobiosis, which means “life without water.” It’s a process some organisms use to survive …Next Page »

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There was a lot of discussion about the top trends in energy, biotech, and computing at last week’s technology summit in Seattle hosted by OVP Venture Partners. The afternoon breakout session on information technology, attended by a few dozen IT leaders, focused on the theme of “big data.” This was all about the opportunities and challenges faced by companies, research organizations, and IT departments who need to handle very large amounts of complex data, or sell software and services to do the same.

OVP managing director Mark Ashida kicked things off by talking about how managing data in the Internet cloud fits into OVP’s investment themes. “It has become much easier to link data together at a higher level, and get higher value,” Ashida said. “We’re very excited because big data and biology are converging. Lots of startups are dealing with huge amounts of data.” (By “huge amounts,” think terabytes of data per day, which is roughly the amount of information in a human genome.)

A lively panel discussion ensued, with presentations from a half-dozen tech companies from around the country that are trying to solve different parts of this problem. The list of firms—most of which are not in OVP’s investment portfolio—included Specific Media, Complete Genomics, Cloudera, Vertica Systems, and Aster Data Systems.

Then it was the godfather of cloud services’ turn to speak. Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, gave an overview of where the industry is headed, and what kinds of new problems will be solved. Vogels came to Amazon in 2004 after 10 years as a research scientist in the field of distributed computing at Cornell University, and has led Amazon’s considerable efforts in Web services, among other things.

Vogels first defined “cloud computing” as he sees it—a term that didn’t exist when his company launched Amazon Web Services in 2006. “There is a definition I actually like: cloud computing is a style of computing where you have massively scalable IT-related capabilities that are available as a service, over the Internet, to multiple customers.” He added that the storage and computing resources also …Next Page »

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Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) announced today that its 19-year-old line of Symmetrix storage servers, the company’s flagship product, has been overhauled for the era of virtualization, in which users expect to be able to yoke hundreds or thousand of machines together and manage them as if they were a single resource. The new Symmetrix Virtual Matrix or V-Max servers can be interconnected in pools storing up to hundreds of petabytes (hundreds of millions of gigabytes). The new architecture doesn’t eliminate the need for virtualization software—in fact, EMC says it will work even better in concert with vSphere, an upcoming version of its subsidiary VMware’s virtualization system—but it is designed to make it easier to scale up data centers at lower cost for companies interested in building their own private cloud computing infrastructures.

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