Actifio is growing like a weed—just like the data it tries to help companies tame—and it has just raised one of the bigger Boston-area tech financing rounds of the year.

The Waltham, MA-based data management startup said today it has closed $33.5 million in Series C funding led by new investor Andreessen Horowitz. Previous investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, and Advanced Technology Ventures also participated in the round. The company says the money will be used to expand operations globally and increase awareness and sales of its products. The addition of a West Coast investor like Andreessen Horowitz indicates the startup is pretty serious about going big; whether it will succeed remains to be seen.

Actifio has been roughly doubling the size of its investment rounds over the past couple of years. It closed an $8 million A round in early 2010 and followed that up with a $16 million B round later that year. The startup has grown to about 100 employees, up from 50 in July 2010.

The big idea behind the startup is to virtualize data management—starting with backup, protection, and recovery services—for big companies. That means doing for data storage and protection what VMware, Cisco, and other giants have done for computing power and networking, via a unified software platform. “Virtualization” refers to the important IT trend of separating software from hardware—and applications from operating systems—in big, messy computer systems.

“This financing further empowers our team and clients to completely shift the way we think about traditional, legacy IT solutions and virtualizing the management of data-–-including eliminating backup software,” says Actifio founder and CEO Ash Ashutosh (a veteran of HP and AppIQ), in a statement. “This is a similar paradigm shift ushered in by VMware, Microsoft, Oracle and others, via server virtualization.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

What do you do with stuff that’s just too nerdy to discuss on Facebook? For some technical professionals, the answer still lies in sites that are very Web 1.0—long lists of links, few sharing functions, very basic design.

Doug Brown knows this well. Since 1999 he’s been running the site DABCC, which focuses on a niche audience of professionals interested in nitty-gritty developments in cloud computing and virtualization. Brown, a jack of several trades who previously worked at Citrix, has run DABCC as a business since 2004. It’s grown in popularity, now registering about 5 million unique visitors a year. But something was still lacking.

So Brown started PaperShare, which just opened up its site to the broader public. The idea is relatively simple: Give the existing audience that is consuming white papers and other insider content a much more modern site, with up-front social features that breed a lot of interactivity.

So yes, it’s basically a “Facebook for business,” as CEO David Greschler says. But Greschler, a former director of virtualization for Microsoft and co-founder of Softricity, says he wouldn’t have leapt at the chance to join Brown if this was just another attempt to build a social networking knockoff.

“When you lead with the content, that’s what people come for,” Brown says. “If you want to talk about your dog and what you ate for dinner, go to Facebook.”

Kirkland, WA-based PaperShare’s opportunity is tied to two major trends: The consumerization of business IT and the socialization of content. Brown and Greschler say there’s a big gap there for their targeted niche audiences of professionals.

Business software tools that focus on productivity, storage, or sharing, like Box or Yammer, are mostly private and used within one company, they say. Meanwhile, nobody turns to regular social networks to geek out over the latest developments in hardcore IT.

“Posting stuff about hypervisor on Facebook? It just doesn’t work. It’s like apples and oranges,” Greschler says. “It’s the wrong place to try to engage with people.”

The financial model depends on growing an audience, which is why readers can use the site for free. PaperShare then charges companies annual subscriptions to publish their content and engage with the audience.

The test phase signed up more than 5,000 users and 25 business customers, including Microsoft, Citrix, and Cisco. If it’s successful, PaperShare sees expansion beyond the cloud and virtualization realms—medicine and finance are two examples of industries where professionals are hungry for specialized information, Brown says.

Greschler says the potential is big. That’s why, after seeing Brown’s early version this spring, he decided to leave Microsoft after about five years and jump back into the startup world. “I felt like what he had really done was crack the nut,” Greschler says. “I was looking at a lot of ways to engage Microsoft with social media, and it looked like, wow—this is the way to do it.”

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

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 »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

OK, I had to ask: Did Ellen Rubin tell Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to piss off?

“No comment,” says Rubin, with a laugh.

We were talking about her startup, Burlington, MA-based CloudSwitch, getting bought by Verizon (NYSE: VZ) yesterday for an undisclosed sum—and being integrated into the New York City telecom giant’s Terremark division. It turns out CloudSwitch had received other acquisition offers earlier this year, Rubin says. Since the startup had developed its software, which bridges corporate computing systems and outside cloud services, to work with both Amazon and Terremark’s clouds, I had to wonder if Amazon (which also has a competing offering) might be a jilted suitor.

Without naming names, Rubin, the co-founder and vice president of products for CloudSwitch, says other potential acquirers would have folded her startup into a technology group, or turned CloudSwitch into a feature, or made it work only for proprietary clouds. Instead, the startup’s software will continue to support Amazon and other clouds in an open arrangement. “The opportunity with Verizon was just different,” Rubin says. “The companies that have bigger global reach are the [telecommunications] service providers.”

CloudSwitch’s entire 30-person team is joining Verizon’s Terremark IT services subsidiary, a 2,500-person organization with offices and data centers stretching from Florida, Texas, and California to Brazil, England, and Turkey. The Burlington office will remain intact and will probably expand, the companies say. Verizon isn’t saying anything specific yet about new hires or headcount, but it clearly values CloudSwitch for its software expertise and leadership, and views the firm as a beachhead for software talent in Boston.

“The goal is to grow this and make this a hub,” says Chris Gesell, Terremark’s chief innovation and strategy officer. “Terremark is a growth engine for Verizon.” Gesell says that from his perspective, CloudSwitch has the “simplest to use, most mature, and most elegant” technology out there among many competitors.

Yet the deal would have been unlikely until recently. In January, Verizon acquired Terremark for $1.4 billion, signaling its big move into cloud-based services. As Rubin and others put it, Verizon is not just a phone company anymore—now it’s trying hard to be about software and services for businesses.

But did CloudSwitch sell too early? After all, this is a three-year-old startup with only … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Sunnyvale, CA-based Hotlink, maker of a “virtual integration” system that allows enterprise data centers to use virtualization technology from multiple vendors including VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and Red Hat, emerged from stealth mode today and announced that it has collected $10 million in Series A financing. Foundation Capital led the round, which was joined by Leapfrog Ventures. Former FastScale CEO Lynn LeBlanc founded Hotlink in 2010.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

DynamicOps, a Burlington, MA-based developer of technology for virtualizing IT environments for businesses, has brought in another $5 million in equity-based funding, according to an SEC filing. The document for the newest investment lists members of Sierra Ventures and Credit Suisse, which spun out DynamicOps in 2008, as directors at the company. DynamicOps raised $11.3 million in funding earlier this year.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

San Jose-based IO Turbine, which makes software that speeds up input/output operations in virtualized computer systems using flash storage, has been acquired by memory systems maker Fusion-io (NYSE: FIO) for $95 million in cash and stock, the Salt Lake City, UT, company announced today. “IO Turbine’s software is uniquely architected to take advantage of flash memory in the server to solve the I/O bottlenecks, the inhibitor to the adoption of enterprise virtualization,” Fusion-io chairman and CEO David Flynn said in a statement. “We believe integrating ioMemory [Fusio-io's memory module] and IO Turbine adds a critical and previously missing performance component to virtualized IT environments that will accelerate the adoption of Fusion-io technology.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

One of the newer venture capitalists plying his trade in Seattle isn’t really all that new. How’s that? I’m talking about Frank Artale, who joined Ignition Partners earlier this year as a managing director.

Artale’s a pretty familiar face around the Puget Sound region, having worked at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) for nearly a decade—he was one of the general managers on a little project called Windows 2000. Artale kept a home base here after leaving Redmond in 2000, but focused his professional energies toward Silicon Valley in stints as an entrepreneur, executive, and investor.

Now that he’s back in one place, Artale’s leveraging his experience and connections to target cloud computing, security, virtualization, and storage investments for the $400 million Ignition Partners IV fund. But on top of just finding good deals for the firm, Artale says he also sees the job as a chance to help build up the entrepreneurship scene here in the Northwest.

“The thing that I felt I could add the most value to was in the area of building entrepreneurship in a place wehre the startup culture was still a bit more emerging as opposed to mature. And the Valley culture is a mature one,” Artale says. We chewed over that idea and lots more in a recent chat, and these were the three big takeaways for me:

Seattle Grows Up
Having spent several years in the thick of Silicon Valley dealmaking, Artale says he can see some of the things needed for long-term success developing back here in the Puget Sound region. Chief among those factors, he says, is probably the links between big tech companies and the startup scene, with VCs often acting as the bridge-builders.

In the Bay Area, that ecosystem is well-developed, with plenty of large companies that are accustomed to partnering with (and often acquiring) innovative small companies. It’s getting better in the Seattle area, Artale says, on both ends of the equation.

“The difference now … which has always been in existence in the Valley, is that there are more people at the larger techs that have specific responsibility for outreach, both to the venture community and the companies that venture supports,” Artale says. “When you have the larger companies putting their own resources specifically on working with early stage companies and their backers, that’s a key ingredient.”

Atale says that shift is noticeable even in the past year or so, and is catching on at companies across the Northwest, from Vancouver, BC, down to Portland, OR. What’s driving that change? The … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Big Blue celebrated 100 years of success in the tech industry earlier this month. It’s a rare feat in an industry where companies are often rendered obsolete in a decade, oftentimes sooner. In fact, IBM has managed to stay relevant while literally thousands of tech companies have come and gone. So, what’s its secret recipe? One reason for its success is its aggressive attitude toward buying companies with great technology that integrate well into its portfolio.

As an ERP (enterprise resource planning) market analyst at Software Advice, I was intrigued by all the fanfare that’s been showered upon IBM this month. I also wanted to know more about its mergers and acquisitions strategy and which companies it might buy next. So, to predict the future, I rolled up my sleeves and went digging into the past. Since IBM is an acquisition machine, I limited my search to the last decade of deals.

After I culled the data, it became obvious that there are three markets that IBM likes to go shopping: professional services, middleware, and business analytics. For anyone familiar with IBM’s company profile, this isn’t really a shocker, but the sheer volume of purchases is surprising. In the past decade, IBM bought 14 companies in services, 13 companies in middleware, and made a couple of multi-billion-dollar deals in business analytics.

The Massachusetts Connection

There’s one more trend that I noticed in its purchasing history: IBM loves to buy companies in Massachusetts. Since 2003, it has picked up some 18 companies in the Massachusetts area (these 17 plus Netezza). Massachusetts is an obvious place to shop, with world-class tech universities; it’s a hotbed of technology innovation; and there are dozens of successful companies. In thinking about the Massachusetts connection, there is one company in particular that I couldn’t help but think about IBM buying: EMC.

EMC is the Holy Grail of Massachusetts technology. Its data storage and warehousing business is a multi-billion-dollar operation, and it has one of the most successful virtualization companies on the market (VMware). IBM is already involved in data storage—and is a competitor of EMC—but it has yet to make an aggressive move into the virtualization market. An IBM-EMC combination would create an utterly dominant force in the data storage industry.

IBM’s strategy in the virtualization market has been to play it safe on the sidelines and funnel money and support into things like the Linux KVM hypervisor, hoping that it could compete with VMware. It hasn’t worked. Instead VMware has become the go-to name for all things related to virtualization technology. But that’s exactly what makes buying EMC such an enticing proposition.

Would IBM Buy EMC?

So, what would IBM have to give up? The short answer is: a heckuva lot. IBM’s market cap hovers right at $207 billion, and EMC’s sits at a comparatively modest $55 billion. That means that IBM would have to give up about 20 percent of its company and then some to land EMC. It’s a massive sum of money, but IBM is one of the tech companies that can actually pull off an EMC purchase. While it’s a huge investment, there are massive revenues to realize from a deal of this magnitude. In 2010, EMC brought in $17 billion. If you throw in IBM’s scale on top of that, there’s no telling what kind of revenue they could do together after a deal.

Personally, I think IBM could make it happen. But the move may be a bit too bold for a company that prides itself on focus and on being fairly conservative. On top of that, IBM has already said that it intends to spend “only” $20 billion on mergers and acquisitions in the next five years. An EMC purchase would tear through that and then some. In some respects, however, it’s a deal that might be too good, and pricey, to make happen.

But that’s just my opinion. What’s yours? I’m currently hosting a poll on my blog at Software Advice. Come vote and make your voice heard at: IBM Mergers & Acquisitions: Who’s Next? For reference, EMC is currently in third place. I look forward to hearing from you.

Comments (6) | Reprints | Share:          

Palo Alto, CA-based VMware (NYSE: VMW), the virtualization subsidiary of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC), announced today that it has agreed to acquire Shavlik Technologies of New Brighton, MN, a Minneapolis suburb. The company makes software that helps small and medium sized businesses track, manage, and install software security updates and other patches. Shavlik has assisted VMware with the deployment of its vSphere private cloud management software, and VMware senior vice president and general manager Raghu Raghuram said in a statement that the acquisition will allow his company “to provide simple to use and affordable management services developed to address the specific demands of SMBs.” The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

How far the mighty fall. Investments in Massachusetts startups soared to $242.5 million in January, but last month tech and life sciences companies raised just over half that, $130.9 million, in 24 equity-based deals, according to data provided by CB Insights’ FundingFlash, a daily roundup of companies receiving venture capital, angel investment, and growth equity funding.

Healthcare companies raised the most money for the month, but dollars invested in those companies fell by roughly 50 percent from January levels. The sector nabbed $73.6 million across seven deals in February, and accounted for the three largest financings of the month. CardioFocus, a Marlborough, MA-based medical devices firm, nabbed the top deal at $30.6 million.

If there was a bright spot last month, it was for non-Internet software startups, whose technology focuses on things like virtualization, data storage, and design of electronic components. Last month software sector took the second place spot for dollars raised, with $23.4 million raised in five financings—a jump from the $9 million it pulled in through two deals in January. The top software deal went to Burlington, MA-based DynamicOps, a Credit Suisse virtualization software spinout, which raised $11.3 million in a Series B financing.

The Internet sector led for the total number of deals inked last month (nine) but came in third place for the dollar total that those financings amounted to ($16.5 million). Five of those nine deals each rang in at under $1 million.

I’m fairly certain that the March numbers will be a bit more promising when they come in next month. In the past two weeks alone we’ve seen $51.7 million for waste-to-energy startup Harvest Power of Waltham, MA, $15 million for Lexington, MA-based online jewelry customization startup Gemvara, and $32 million for HubSpot, a Cambridge, MA-based developer of online marketing software.

Meanwhile, read below to see what added up to February’s slim funding total.

It was a fairly big month for non-equity-based deals last month, with 12 startups pulling in $15.4 million through a mix of debt- and rights-based offerings.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

This week we’ve seen financings and acquisitions news spanning the life sciences, IT, and cleantech sectors in New England.

—OpenMile, a Boston- and Chicago-based developer of Web and mobile technology for optimizing shipping, said it raised $6 million in a Series B deal led by Globespan Capital Partners, with participation from existing investor Charles River Ventures.

—Waltham, MA-based Bluespec, a maker of software for designing electronics components, grabbed $1 million in equity-based funding from four investors, an SEC filing showed. The company’s previous investors include Atlas Venture and North Bridge Venture Partners.

—DynamicOps, a Burlington, MA-based maker of software for cloud infrastructures and IT virtualization, snapped up an $11.3 million equity-based financing. The company was spun out of Credit Suisse in 2008.

—Marlborough, MA-based CardioFocus brought in $30.6 million to put toward its medical devices, which include a product for treating an irregular heart rhythm known as atrial fibrillation. The money comes from new investors First Alliance & Capital Invest, Fletcher Spaght Ventures, and Manatuck Hill Partners, as well as all of the startup’s previous investors.

—Boston non-profit Diagnostics For All nabbed a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department for International Development to fund the creation of three new tests aimed at improving safety and productivity in agriculture. Diagnostics For All first spun out of Harvard to focus on diagnostic products in the human health space, and is led by veteran biotech executive Una Ryan.

—CHiL Semiconductor of Tewksbury, MA, said it is being acquired by Los Angeles-based power management firm International Rectifier (NYSE: IRF) in a $75 million cash deal expected to … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

DynamicOps, a Burlington, MA-based company spun out by Credit Suisse in 2008 to commercialize its software for virtualizing IT environments, has brought in $11.3 million in equity-based funding from three investors, according to an SEC filing. The startup, which has distribution agreements with Dell and HP, builds public and private cloud infrastructures and virtual desktop management software.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies, a video processing startup, said today it has received a strategic investment from Citrix Systems (NASDAQ: CTXS) and has added Kevin O’Hara to its board of directors. O’Hara is the former president and co-founder of Level 3 Communications (NASDAQ: LVLT) and the co-founder and executive chairman of Troppus Software. The amount of the Citrix investment was not disclosed, but the virtualization software firm previously has worked with Elemental to deliver high-performance applications like computer-aided design software.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Lots going on in the Northwest tech scene today (though not as much snow as in New England, let me tell you). Let’s get right to it:

—Concur (NASDAQ: CNCR), the Redmond, WA-based travel and expense management software company, said today it has agreed to buy TripIt, a mobile travel firm based in San Francisco, for $82 million in upfront cash and stock, plus subsequent adjustments that could bring the total value to as much as $120 million. Last July, Xconomy did a Q&A with Concur co-founder and chief operating officer Raj Singh about the company’s history—and where it’s headed.

—Corensic, a software startup out of the University of Washington (originally called PetraVM), has secured $4.5 million in Series A-1 financing, led by Madrona Venture Group and WRF Capital. The news was reported by Dow Jones VentureWire. Corensic, which was co-founded by Luis Ceze and Mark Oskin, makes development tools to help companies fix bugs in software running on multi-core processors.

—Teradici, a Burnaby, BC-based developer of desktop virtualization and display technology, announced a strategic investment and development agreement from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and U.S. intelligence community. Terms were not disclosed (duh). Teradici was founded in 2004 and takes advantage of graphics algorithms and high-performance computing to try to reinvent how PCs are used, deployed, and managed.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

EMC, the data storage giant, has lots of irons in the fire when it comes to innovation. The Hopkinton, MA-based firm (NYSE: EMC) pursues an interesting mix of acquisitions and “organic” in-house research and development.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with EMC’s chief technology officer, Jeff Nick, about the company’s broader innovation strategy—which can be a tough thing for an outsider to grasp, especially when you’re talking about a 45,000-person company. But one big piece of EMC’s approach is to acquire other companies in strategic market positions. So I wanted to drill down into the firm’s specific approach when it comes to these mergers and acquisitions.

One potentially huge deal has been widely rumored for the past month: the prospect of EMC acquiring Seattle-based Isilon Systems (NASDAQ: ISLN). A report in the Wall Street Journal late last week said EMC “has cooled its interest” in Isilon, but that an agreement is still possible. It sounds like Isilon’s high stock value ($27.95 at Friday’s close) has driven up its asking price (rumored to be over $2 billion). The companies aren’t talking publicly about any such deal, of course, but outside sources tell me it is still likely to happen, because Isilon’s technology fills an important hole for EMC (networked-attached storage) in its competition with other storage companies like Silicon Valley-based NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP).

EMC wouldn’t make any specific comments about Isilon, but the firm did speak with me about its M&A strategy more broadly—and about its acquisition of Santa Clara, CA-based Data Domain last year, which also went for $2 billion. “EMC has a long acquisition history and track record,” says Matt Olton, vice president of corporate development at EMC. “We’ve learned our lessons about what works and what creates more challenges.”

A caveat: EMC is “often viewed as a very acquisitive company,” Olton says, “but you’ll see investments in R&D equivalent to our acquisition spend.” Not many tech companies can focus on both internally and externally driven innovation on a large scale, says Olton, an 11-year veteran of the firm who works with a core team of about a dozen members, plus a much larger virtual team that cuts across all business functions.

To help frame EMC’s approach, Olton says any successful M&A practice boils down to five points:

—A core strategy that works. It doesn’t have to be the best strategy in the world, so long as it can be executed, he says. (I took this to mean everyone needs to be on the same page, even if it’s not the perfect page.)

—Evaluation discipline. This means having the patience to pursue fewer transactions, … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

[Corrected, see below] Female technologists and CEOs are still rare in Silicon Valley, but Diane Greene has been both—and she’s been far more successful at it than most males.

Trained at MIT and UC Berkeley, Greene was the co-founder and founding CEO of Palo Alto, CA-based VMware, which introduced a layer of virtualization between hardware and software that allowed computer users to do something new—run multiple operating systems on the same machine in a way that makes the machine run more securely and efficiently.

The idea was based on research done by her husband, Mendel Rosenblum, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and it turned into a multibillion dollar market for VMware. When the company went public in 2007, it was Silicon Valley’s biggest IPO since Google’s.

Greene left VMware abruptly in 2008 over an apparent disagreement with VMware’s parent company, EMC. She was replaced by Paul Maritz, a former member of Microsoft’s Executive Committee. (Xconomy’s Greg Huang has a piece today about EMC’s merger & acquisition strategy.)

But Greene has continued to invest in companies and to advise entrepreneurs, and she’s now considering starting another company, she said in last night in an interview with Xconomy. Lately she’s been clearing her calendar so she has more time to think.

Greene spoke in San Francisco on November 4 at Women 2.0 PITCH Night—an event for female entrepreneurs to pitch their startups. Her most important achievement at VMware, she told Xconomy, was to create a culture where every employee in the company understood how important their work was and felt compelled to excel—although she wishes she’d introduced employee training earlier.

Here are excerpts from her public conversation on how VMware got started, followed by remarks on what other entrepreneurs could learn from her experience.

Diane Greene: We started the company with some graduate students from Stanford, and right off the bat, one of the grad students was saying, we need a killer app. We need to build a virtualized web server, or get a consulting contract with a server vendor.

But we had this strong vision and knew we had to get to that. It’s a lot of small steps – we couldn’t just jump right to the server. So we explained why we had to start on the desktop.

And then I wanted to get validation from friends I respected. There was a guy I know who has a PhD from Stanford, who had built three companies, and I thought, … Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

It has been a ridiculously busy week for EMC—and for everyone else, it seems. For starters, the Hopkinton, MA-based data storage giant (NYSE: EMC) announced record quarterly revenues for the third quarter of 2010. Yesterday the firm hosted its fourth annual innovation conference from its center in Cork, Ireland—which amounted to a company-wide session on strategy and research, the largest of these gatherings to date, involving 15 EMC facilities worldwide. And in other news, the rumor mill has been buzzing with talk about EMC being a possible acquirer of Seattle-based storage firm Isilon Systems (NASDAQ: ISLN), in a deal that reportedly could be worth upward of $2 billion.

Amid all this activity, EMC chief technology officer Jeff Nick took some time to talk with me last week about the company’s broader innovation strategy—tackling aspects that are internally and externally focused, home-grown and acquisition-based. Like IBM (NYSE: IBM), one of its main competitors, EMC is known as an aggressive acquirer of companies, using new businesses to further its technology and attack new markets—witness its recent purchases of Mozy, Greenplum, and Data Domain. But it’s also known for pursuing some pretty interesting in-house initiatives aimed at turning cutting-edge research into technologies and services that its product groups can use.

Unlike big tech companies such as IBM and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), EMC doesn’t have a big traditional research organization charged with advancing the state of the art in technology. Instead, EMC pursues more of a virtual model—an “innovation network” (run by Burt Kaliski, formerly of RSA) that consists of virtual centers as well as a few physical research facilities, and collaborations and partnerships with academic researchers at places like MIT, Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, University of Michigan, and Tsinghua University in Beijing. The topics of its R&D projects include things like scalable file systems, Internet cloud security, and data availability on peer-to-peer networks.

In our recent chat, Nick didn’t deviate too much from his message about EMC’s innovation network and conference, but I did get him to open up a little about how the firm balances its in-house R&D with its acquisition efforts, how it works with and thinks about startups and smaller businesses, … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Red Bend Software, a Waltham, MA-based company that makes systems for over-the-air management and updating of software on mobile devices, said Tuesday that it has acquired Santa Clara, CA-based VirtualLogix for an undisclosed sum. VirtualLogix makes virtualization software that allows mobile handsets to run multiple operating systems. “Today marks the beginning of a new era for Red Bend Software and a preview of what’s to come in the mobile industry,” Red Bend CEO Yoram Salinger said in a statement. “Mobile software management and mobile virtualization are converging.” Founded in 1999, Red Bend has raised at least $32.5 million in five rounds of venture financing.

Comments | Reprints | Share: