Earlier this week, Seattle’s Tableau Software announced a big jump in annual sales and major hiring plans—something that’s becoming almost routine for those watching the Stanford-bred data-analysis software company’s growth.

Now entering its tenth year, Tableau recently opened a London office and has started to expand into the Asia-Pacific region. By the end of the year, Tableau’s data-visualization software should be available in nearly a half-dozen more languages, from Portuguese to Korean.

And, after years of offering its products as downloadable software, Tableau is now working on a transition to the software-as-a-service model that has become so prevalent in the industry—its first stab at such a product was Tableau Public, a free-to-use version aimed at journalists, students, and other new categories of users outside of the enterprise customers who traditionally use what’s called business intelligence software.

With revenue bookings of about $72 million in 2011, up some 94 percent from a year earlier, Tableau could be on its way to becoming one of the next generation of publicly traded tech companies from Seattle. “Tableau’s intention as part of its business plan is to be a big, independent, global, publicly traded company. I mean, there’s no doubt about that. This company is not for sale,” CEO and co-founder Christian Chabot says.

Tableau CEO Christian Chabot

But it wasn’t always going gangbusters. In the early years, before big shifts in the ways businesses purchased and used data software, there were some pretty lonely sales calls for the young company. Here’s a story from Chabot that explains how he was banging his head against the wall with an innovative product that was getting started just a little bit ahead of its time—and why sticking with it is so important for entrepreneurs.

“When we started, I would walk into rooms at companies and universities and government agencies—and nonprofits, too, by the way … the same thing would happen in all of them.

“We would finally work ourselves up to a big pitch meeting—one where you did more than open the door, you got all the decision-makers in a room. And the IT guys are there, and the business guys are there, and the CIO’s in the back of the room with his arms crossed with a sour look on his face—I’ve done these meetings so many times!

“And in ’03, ’04, ’05 when I did that meeting, I would stand up in the front of the room and, being the entrepreneurial company, the disruptor company that we are, we would make the following bold claim to try and get people’s attention and try to get them to think different.

“I would say, ‘The technologies you guys are using today to access and understand your data—those technologies are heavy, complicated, inflexible, slow-moving, and expensive. And Tableau can change that for you.’ And in those years, when I made that statement, it didn’t go very well. I would be escorted from the building, so to speak. It just didn’t stick.

“You would not believe what happens when you do that today. When I do that exact same meeting today—exact same line, exact same crowd, exact same room size—and I make the exact same statement, the room is nodding. You know what I mean? I can literally see the sea change that’s occurred.

“And it’s not a Groupon, where it happened overnight. Over the course of those five years, sensibilities changed right underneath us.

“As a startup story, it’s hopefully inspirational for people out there laboring. Because when we founded the company, people did not want to hear our message. We believed it. We just knew it felt good and we were excited about what we’d invented.

“But, boy, when the market sensibilities change under you as you’re working and laboring and they change to your advantage—wow, does that feel good.”

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

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

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

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

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

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Mellmo began life on the move. Now the Solana Beach, CA-based startup is going global.

Mellmo, as we’ve explained before, provides business intelligence for mobile users. Its flagship product, Roambi Analytics, is a Web-based service that converts mind-numbing business data from spreadsheets and databases into simple-but-compelling graphic displays—pie charts, bar charts, list views, card index views—for iPhone and iPad users.

Since mid-September, when Mellmo secured $30 million in its first round of institutional funding, the four-year-old startup has announced the opening of a new London headquarters to oversee business in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, as well as new offices in France, Spain, and Italy. The company also established a beachhead in Shanghai, and formed strategic partnerships with Hitachi Consulting, and Deloitte China Consulting—businesses that provide IT services to big companies in Asia.

“Before we even opened our office in London, we had five or six customers in Europe who had purchased our product through the [Apple] app store,” says Mellmo co-founder Quinton Alsbury. “The realization we came to was that the opportunity was much larger than we had anticipated ourselves.”

Mobile business intelligence is an idea that suddenly took off, Alsbury says, especially among the businesses listed in the Fortune Global 500 annual ranking of biggest companies in the world. “The concept of mobile BI in general just exploded after the iPad came out,” he says, adding that tablets are expected to surpass PCs as access points to business intelligence data by 2013. Instead of making business decisions from a desk, executives can access data on the factory floor, warehouse, or while traveling.

Mellmo enables customers to upload data from their corporate database (the company supports SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and others) to the Roambi website. Customers can select the graphic views they want to use, add customizations, and make the information available internally to their workforce. Under Mellmo’s freemium business model, a basic personal account is free, and the service can be upgraded to Pro or Enterprise subscriptions, depending on customer needs.

I met with Alsbury last month, during the CTIA’s annual Enterprise & Applications conference at the San Diego Convention Center. As Mellmo’s president of product innovation, Alsbury leads the interactive design, user experience, functionality, and art design of Roambi. He was at the CTIA to demonstrate Roambi Flow, a wholly new software as a service that enables corporate customers to wrap text around their Roambi graphics to produce print-like reports. With Roambi Flow, users can embed their graphic displays in documents to create a platform that publishes much more comprehensive reports for the iPad.

“Imagine what The Wall Street Journal would be if it showed up on your doorstep with just the charts and graphics,” Alsbury says. “Roambi Flow enables customers to add editorial copy with their graphics to create an iPad-style magazine.”

“It’s the first thing I’ve seen in which the output is optimized for the iPad instead of a pdf,” Asbury says. Mellmo has some customers, such as the financial services giant Primerica, that are looking at Roambi Flow as a platform for their external communications.

Aside from Primerica, Alsbury says Mellmo now has about 160 enterprise customers, including San Diego’s Life Technologies, Novartis, and Dow Corning.

Mellmo also has expanded its workforce to roughly 100 full-time employees, and moved its corporate headquarters from Del Mar, CA, into a distinctive building in Solana Beach that was previously occupied by ServiceNow—which is now an established Web-based services provider on a fast-growth track. Alsbury says that’s good karma for Mellmo, and a sign of things to come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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San Francisco-based GoodData, which offers a cloud-based business intelligence software platform, said yesterday that it has collected $15 million in new venture funding. New investor Andreessen Horowitz led the Series B round, which was joined by existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners, and Windcrest Partners. The firm, which was founded by Czech-born serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek and was originally based in Cambridge, MA, has raised $28.5 million to date.

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Vivek Ranadivé is one of those CEOs who was born with a silver quote in his mouth. He’s great on television, he gives entertaining speeches, and interviewing him is like bathing in a river of aphorisms and metaphors. I enjoy visiting Ranadivé at his company’s Palo Alto, CA, headquarters not just in order to catch up on the news about his software firm TIBCO, but to hear which directions his thoughts have been taking him. Lately those thoughts have had a lot to do with books and basketball.

On September 5, Crown Business will release The Two-Second Advantage, co-written by Ranadivé and Kevin Maney, which, as its subtitle explains, is about “how we succeed by anticipating the future—just enough.” In the book, as in most of his public remarks, you can see Ranadivé taking the fundamental idea that unifies TIBCO’s software products—-the value of sharing information within and between computer systems in real time, the better to identify and act upon significant events and trends—and stretching it to see how it applies to a growing range of real-world problems, from telecommunications to macroeconomics to managing a professional sports team.

Which leads to Ranadivé’s other current obsession. Last year the software magnate became co-owner of the Golden State Warriors, the San Francisco Bay Area’s NBA basketball team, joining a new ownership group that includes movie producer Peter Guber, Kleiner Perkins partner Joe Lacob, and real estate investor Erika Glazer. Ranadivé was already known for his interest in basketball—see Malcolm Gladwell’s 2009 New Yorker article on underdogs, which largely focuses on Ranadivé’s strategies for coaching his daughter’s National Junior Basketball team—and it’s no surprise at all that his theories about the best way to run a professional team reflect his theories about the best way to run a business, i.e., gaining an advantage through data analysis.

Those subjects and others ran through my last conversation with Ranadivé in July. Here’s an edited summary.

Xconomy: So, what have you been thinking about lately?

Vivek Ranadivé: I’m really excited, because I have a mission, which is to say that if you get the right information to the right place at the right time and put it in the right context, you can make the world a better place. Every day I see more and more evidence of that. So the theme continues.

One of the things I like to say is that science is dead. You can spend a lot of time trying to understand why something happened, or you can just know that if A, B, and C happened, then D will happen. Examples of this are frequent. That plane that crashed of the coast of Brazil—if they had connected the dots, they would have known that the flight was going to end in disaster and made a turn and avoided the crash. In cybersecurity, you can try to build a better lock, but somebody will also find a way to pick it, or you can do what the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security have done, which is to … Next Page »

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San Jose, CA-based BVI Networks, a maker of business intelligence visualization software for consumer retailers, said today that it has raised $8 million in a Series B funding round. New investor August Capital led the round, which was joined by the startup’s existing investors. “While physical stores generate over 95% of all retail business in the US, the existing analytics and business intelligence tools are woefully inadequate compared to e-commerce,” said August Capital partner Vivek Mehra in a statement. “We were impressed with BVI Networks’ technology and customer traction and are excited to lead their round of financing.”

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PivotLink, a business intelligence software firm with offices in San Francisco and Bellevue, WA, has collected $8.1 million in an equity-based financing round that could go as high as $10.3 million, according to an August 4 regulatory filing. The company, formerly known as SeaTab Software, raised $10 million in Series C funding in February 2009. Backers then included StarVest Partners, Trident Capital, and Emergence Capital.

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San Mateo, CA-based Datameer, which offers data analytics and business intelligence software for companies using the open source Hadoop distributed computing framework, said today it has raised $9.25 million in a Series B financing round led by new investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Existing investor Redpoint Ventures also chipped in. “We are impressed with Datameer and the innovation they have demonstrated in a very short period of time,” said Kleiner Perkins partner Ellen Pao, who has joined Datameer’s board, in a statement. “Datameer’s ability to open up the power of Hadoop to business users is key to this next wave of business intelligence known as big data analytics.”

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Bellevue-based Visible Technologies, which provides a social media monitoring service for businesses, announced this week that it has raised an additional $6 million in financing. The company said previous investors re-upped, including Investor Growth Capital, Joe Grano, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel, and WPP. Chief Executive Kelly Pennock says the money will help Visible ramp up the Visible Intelligence product it rolled out last fall. The company has offices in Seattle, London and New York, and touts relationships with companies including Microsoft, Xerox, and Boost Mobile. Pennock recently blogged about Salesforce.com’s acquisition of competitor Radian6, calling it “an extremely exciting event for everyone in this space.”

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Big data, schmig data. I know, you’re sick of it. Too bad.

Let’s get right to the trash talk, shall we? A few weeks ago, Netezza CEO Jim Baum (who’s now part of IBM) was telling me about the competitive landscape in “big data” analytics—the software and machinery that businesses are using these days to analyze increasingly huge amounts of data on customers, sales, logistics, and so forth.

While touting Netezza’s products, Baum dished on the shortcomings of other players in the sector like EMC/Greenplum, Oracle, and especially Hewlett-Packard, which acquired Billerica, MA-based Vertica in the data analytics arena last month. Baum pointed out some of HP’s recent struggles in data warehousing and business intelligence. He said the company has suffered “a tremendous brain drain” and that its “talent pool is gone.” He concluded that “HP has completely missed the boat” on big data analytics.

Vertica, whose acquisition by Palo Alto, CA-based HP (NYSE: HPQ) officially closed last week, would beg to differ. Chris Lynch, Vertica’s chief executive, started out by giving me a quip of his own about Netezza. “Their tag line is ‘The power to question everything,’” Lynch says. “So the first question is: why do they need proprietary hardware? The second question is: why are they using a database engine that’s based on technology from 1982?”

Netezza would probably dispute those assertions, but let’s hear Lynch out. In comparison to Vertica’s software-only “next generation architecture,” Lynch says, Netezza’s technology is “like taking an AMC Pacer and putting a turbocharger in it.” He also says Netezza faces “challenges architecturally” and, in its integration with IBM, will have to navigate the “politics of five competing databases” at Big Blue.

Lynch (see left) also defended his own house, pointing out (in response to Baum’s remark about HP’s talent) that Vertica hasn’t lost a single engineer during his year-long tenure or as a result of the acquisition. In that regard, he says, HP’s talent pool is quite strong, thank you very much. What’s more, Vertica is currently hiring top talent across sales, engineering, and product management, he says, and is looking to more than double the size of its Boston-area headquarters to more than 200 workers sometime later this year.

It also sounds like HP is letting Vertica run pretty autonomously, as its own … Next Page »

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If you don’t know Hadoop from a hole in the wall, please meet Justin Borgman. He’ll break it all down for you.

Borgman is the co-founder and CEO of Hadapt, a New Haven, CT-based startup that is coming out of stealth today at GigaOm’s Structure Big Data conference in New York City. Hadapt calls its product “the adaptive analytical platform for big data,” but trust me, it isn’t that boring.

The company is trying to merge the best features of advanced databases with a software platform called Hadoop to enable business customers to analyze enormous amounts of data, both structured (e.g., spreadsheets) and unstructured (e.g., free text), in a super-fast and efficient way.

OK, first things first. Hadoop is an open-source version of a software platform originally built by Google to store and analyze data generated from search indexes. But Hadoop is primarily used for unstructured data, and mostly by technical geeks. So, what Hadapt is trying to do is broaden the market for Hadoop by opening it up to all types of data and queries, by linking it to what’s called a relational database (which handles structured data).

“We’ve built a true hybrid,” says Borgman, a Yale MBA with Boston-area engineering roots. “You can have both structured and unstructured data in one platform, and do analytics across both.”

If you’re wondering how it’s different from the dozens of other companies trying to harness Hadoop, or otherwise help companies crunch huge amounts of data faster, well, it gets a bit … Next Page »

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The name’s Baum. James Baum.

OK, he might not be a dead ringer for 007, but I get the feeling Baum could handle himself in a firefight, high-stakes poker game, or dinner with the Queen, all with equal aplomb. He is a highly skilled pilot. He’s also pretty good with business intelligence, data warehouse appliances, and “big data”—all of which sound like tools of the trade for any self-respecting spy.

Except he’s not a spy, of course. Baum is the president and CEO of Netezza, the Marlborough, MA-based business analytics firm that was snapped up by IBM for $1.7 billion last September. He has helped lead Netezza since 2006, so his experience includes taking the firm public (in 2007) and managing big teams through tough economic times. He also has a unique perspective on building business software companies over the past couple of decades, working on startups in the dot-com era, and fending off competitors in crowded spaces. (He talks some pretty good trash about these competitors too, as you’ll see towards the end of this story.)

I sat down with Baum last week to talk about the IBM (NYSE: IBM) deal and integration, but also about his broader tech experience and the dramatic rise of big data. Lately, the term has become a buzzword for the skyrocketing amounts of information that businesses are trying to harness to better serve their customers. The field is certainly hopping in Massachusetts, as evidenced by EMC’s acquisition of Greenplum, Hewlett-Packard’s purchase of Vertica, and, of course, the Big Blue-Netezza deal last fall.

“Big data is here to stay,” Baum says. “This is a really important trend in the technology industry. There’s still a lot to be done. We haven’t figured all of this out yet.”

If you don’t know big data from pig data, don’t worry. Baum, 47, is adept at explaining its significance to experts and novices alike. He grew up in Burnt Hills, NY, the son of a Skidmore College professor and the head of a hospital nursing department. Baum studied engineering at WPI in Massachusetts and RPI in New York before starting his career at Boston-area-based Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) in 1989. And that’s where things got interesting.

(In case you were wondering, PTC (NASDAQ: PMTC) is the computer-aided design and product development software firm that grew into a billion-dollar giant in the late ‘90s, slipped in the early 2000s, and is back to raking in $1 billion in annual revenues since 2008. It’s one of the underrated success stories of the Boston tech scene.)

Read below for Baum’s deeper insights and perspective on big data and business intelligence, as well as broader lessons for entrepreneurs and executives. I’ve edited the interview for length and clarity:

Xconomy: So tell me about your early career and how it shaped you.

Jim Baum: It was an interesting time in 1988. The tech industry as we understand it today was pretty young. It was a very formative time, with Data General, Digital, and Oracle was just getting going. I went to a small startup in Waltham, called Parametric Technology, or PTC. Sam Geisberg started it in 1985 with $50,000.

I joined PTC in 1989 as employee 95. It was a great, great experience. I worked for some of the best leaders I’ve ever met. I was there 11 years. The company went public [in 1989] on about $11 million in revenue. We had 40 quarters of growth in earnings and revenue. It was a rocket ship, … Next Page »

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Don’t look now, but there’s a “big data” war brewing in our backyard—one that involves several technology giants.

Vertica, a database management and analytics software company based in Billerica, MA, confirmed today it is being acquired by Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ). Financial terms of the deal haven’t been released, but I’m hearing that the price could be more than $200 million. Palo Alto, CA-based HP expects the acquisition to close in the second quarter of its fiscal year 2011.

The deal goes to show that IBM isn’t the only big company interested in scooping up Boston-area business intelligence software firms. Vertica has been the subject of acquisition rumors since at least last fall; the word on the street was that Oracle and HP would be the most likely suitors. Hopkinton, MA-based data storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC) recently strengthened its database and business intelligence offerings by acquiring California-based Greenplum last summer. Meanwhile, IBM has been on an acquisition tear in Massachusetts, having bought some 18 area companies since 2003, including business intelligence and analytics firms Cognos, Guardium, Unica, and, most significantly, Netezza. (IBM buying Netezza probably accelerated the HP-Vertica deal.)

The tech giants are all fighting over technologies and platforms for making sense of huge amounts of data (in the Internet cloud and elsewhere)—so that companies that buy their products can glean business insights in real time and, presumably, make a lot more money. HP, which calls itself the world’s largest technology company, has generally been less acquisitive than some of its competitors in the sector—which means it also has less experience integrating companies. Today’s news might signal a change in that strategy.

Vertica was founded in 2005 and specializes in databases that store numbers in columns rather than rows, which speeds retrieval in many data mining applications. The company is led by CEO Christopher Lynch, who succeeded former CEO Ralph Breslauer last April. The firm’s customers include Groupon, Twitter, Verizon, AOL, Zynga, Playdom, Bank of America, BlueCross BlueShield, and Comcast. Its revenue growth has been very strong. Vertica has raised in the neighborhood of $30 million from the likes of Highland Capital Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. If the acquisition price is indeed more than $200 million, the deal is a nice win for Vertica’s investors; the question remains, however, whether the company might have sold out too early.

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Four examples is enough for a bona fide trend. Joining its Bay Area neighbors Facebook, Salesforce.com, and Zynga, San Francisco-based Splunk plans to announce this week that it’s opening a satellite office in Seattle. To be led by former Microsoft engineer Brad Lovering, the office will be an R&D outpost for the fast-growing company, whose real-time data center monitoring software bridges the business-intelligence and security markets.

Lovering is a big catch for Splunk. At Microsoft he was one of about 20 Technical Fellows, a distinction saved for senior engineers who drive innovative projects that shape Microsoft’s business strategy. Lovering worked on Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Visual Basic products, Biztalk Server, and the .NET framework. Within .NET, Lovering led work on the Windows Communication Foundation, a programming model for cloud-like applications, and Windows Workflow Foundation, an approach for scaling up server applications. He left the Redmond, WA, giant last October.

The opportunity to hire Lovering was the “immediate driver” for Splunk’s expansion to Seattle, according to John Connors, a partner at Ignition Partners who led that firm’s investment in Splunk and sits on its board of directors. But the move would have come sooner or later anyway. “The company had plans to expand to Seattle, and Brad joining accelerated those plans,” Connors says.

In a statement, Splunk co-founder and chief technology officer Erik Swan said Lovering’s job would be to help Splunk’s customers—which include almost half of the Fortune 100—build new applications on top of the company’s “operational intelligence” software, which can be used to index huge data files and spot business-relevant correlations in the data as soon as they emerge. For that role, “There is no one better suited than the person who helped Microsoft become a leading development platform,” Swan said.

Lovering himself says the focus of the Seattle office will be on “enabling developers to build custom solutions using Splunk technology. That is possible today in some limited ways and our focus will be on systematically enabling Splunk to be used as a platform by developers. The developer work has been on the Splunk roadmap for some time and the creation of the Seattle office puts a team in place that is dedicated to driving it.”

In addition to Silicon Valley companies like Splunk, Facebook, Zynga, and Salesforce.com, Google has been beefing up its presence in Seattle. And meanwhile, Twitter bought Seattle-based startup Cloudhopper last April, so that’s one to watch as well. But there’s movement in the other direction, too: Intel plans to close its research lab near the University of Washington in Seattle and open a new science and technology center at Stanford University.

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MeLLmo, the Del Mar, CA-based startup that specializes in visualization software for displaying business intelligence on mobile devices, says it has closed its third and biggest round of funding—$10 million from private investors. The company has now raised total funding of $20 million since MeLLmo was founded in January 2008.

As MeLLmo founder Santiago Becerra told me in 2009, the company initially focused on developing its Roambi (as in “roaming business intelligence”) graphics and visualization software for use on Apple’s iPhone. The company soon decided to broaden development of its Roambi app for other smart phones, although its business graphics and charts are still particularly impressive when displayed on an iPad or iPhone.

MeLLmo also moved to broaden the versatility of its enterprise server, which play the central role in connecting to an organization’s business-intelligence system, and preparing monthly sales figures and other data for display on Roambi-equipped mobile devices. In an announcement set for later today, MeLLmo says many organizations have invested in multiple business systems, so the company made its technology compatible with a variety of major business intelligence systems and data sources—including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Endeca, Google, and Salesforce.

“As the workforce becomes more mobile, MeLLmo is helping enterprises and small to medium sized businesses take full advantage of the iPhone and iPad as business tools,” Becerra says in today’s statement. “Our third round of funding will allow us to expand globally, delivering Roambi to a worldwide market. We will continue to develop strategic reseller, system integrator and technology partnerships with industry-leading companies, and invest in further enhancements to the unparalleled Roambi experience for viewing and interacting with business data on a mobile device.”

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Cambridge, MA-based Endeca Technologies and Del Mar, CA-based Mellmo said today they have formed a strategic partnership to share their respective technologies, which are focused on mobile business intelligence applications. The companies plan to integrate their flagship products, Endeca Latitutde and Roambi ES3, which will give authorized users the ability to query a corporate database from mobile devices. For example, instead of simply viewing reports as Roambi graphic displays on an iPhone or iPad, a user can ask, “How many units were sold in China between January and March?”

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Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE:EMC) announced today that it will acquire Greenplum, a San Mateo, CA-based maker of massively parallel database software for corporate data warehousing and analytics. The size of the all-cash transaction was not disclosed. EMC said Bill Cook, CEO of seven-year-old Greenplum, will head a new data computing product division within the company’s Information Infrastructure business.

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Berkeley, CA-based Magoosh, a developer of low-cost online multimedia materials for the lucrative test preparation industry, is one of two startups to snag the top prize in North Bridge Venture Partners‘ first seed capital competition. Both Magoosh and Pittstown, NJ-based Profitably, a business intelligence software startup focused on small businesses, will receive $50,000 in seed capital from North Bridge, along with $25,000 worth of in-kind software development support and six months of incubation space in the firm’s offices.

The winners were named in an announcement yesterday. It’s the first time North Bridge has run the competition, as the Waltham, MA- and San Mateo, CA-based firm’s answer to the profusion of seed funding and incubator programs springing up across the Bay Area and Boston investing scenes.

There’s no shortage of takers for such programs. North Bridge didn’t publicize the competition widely, but received “an awful lot more” applications than it had expected, according to Cali Tran, the San Mateo-based principal who co-organized the contest. The firm therefore had its pick of the litter across the sectors North Bridge invests in, including software, digital media, wireless and communications technology, materials, and healthcare.

In fact, the firm started off intending to hand out the $50,000 top prize to just one startup, but “based on the quality [of the applications], we opted to double our prize and pick two,” Tran says.

“The top 10 were all pretty amazing,” says Tran. “One of the things we were delighted and surprised about was the level of maturity of the products, even at the seed stage. A fair number of the top 10 were already [earning] revenue.”

The other seven finalists, chosen from entries that consisted simply of 10-slide PowerPoint decks, included the following startups:

—Bizstro, a social media marketing firm
—Cause It’s Cool, ane-commerce product review service
—DPL Health Games, a social gaming service
—Launchtime Mom, a social networking site
—MobileMob, a community for wireless consumers
—Neoflect, acloud-based personal computing startup,
—Ubiqi Health, a mobile health management firm.

Each of these finalists received feedback and criticism from the North Bridge partners who reviewed their entries.

Tran says seed investing is a long tradition at North Bridge. He says more than half of the firm’s deals since its founding in 1994 have been seed investments (meaning investments on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, often in return for convertible notes rather than equity). But despite that, North Bridge isn’t widely known among entrepreneurs as a company that invests at the seed stage, Tran says. “One of the objectives of this competition was to introduce ourselves to a community of entrepreneurs who may not know us,” he says.

The North Bridge competition differs from other venture-incubator programs such as TechStars and Y Combinator in that it anoints fewer startups (just one or two in comparison to about 10 per session for Y Combinator and TechStars) and provides them with quite a bit more cash (TechStars companies get up to $18,000 and Y Combinator companies get … Next Page »

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[Updated 1:00 p.m. May 26, 2010] Waltham, MA-based Xkoto, which makes database virtualization software for businesses, has been acquired by Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the Dayton, OH-based data warehousing and business intelligence giant, PE Hub first reported this morning. In an e-mail to Xconomy, Teradata public relations director Dan Conway confirmed the acquisition, and said the companies have no plans to disclose the financial terms of the deal. We first covered Xkoto back in 2007, when Boston-based GrandBanks Capital arranged to transplant the company’s headquarters from Toronto to Boston. Xkoto raised a $7.5 million Series B round in 2007 and a $3 million Series C round in 2009 from GrandBanks and GrowthWorks Canadian Fund.

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