ParElastic, a developer of middleware for running big data applications more efficiently on the cloud, said it has closed a $1.5 million seed funding round, led by CommonAngels, with participation from Launch Capital and other investors. John Landry will be joining the company’s board of directors.

The company is setting up a development center in Toronto and is also looking for permanent office space in the Boston area, CTO and founder Amrith Kumar told me on a phone call today. Kumar previously worked at data technology companies such as Dataupia, Netezza, and Sepaton. Co-founder Ken Rugg had previous stints at Progress Software and eXcelon.

ParElastic’s technology is designed to enable cloud-based applications running on relational databases to better respond to spikes in demand, without having to run on high-capacity continuously. The idea is to cut down on operating costs and make it easier for developers to create database applications for the cloud.

“Big data is not only analytics, big data is there for everybody,” Kumar says. “That’s really what we’re trying to do—bring big data to the general purpose cloud, so everyone can benefit.”

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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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[Corrected July 8, 2010, 10:20 a.m.; see below] Boston is already a powerhouse in “big data.” It’s home to companies like Netezza, Dataupia, Vertica, and Lightwolf Technologies, which all help enterprises manage and mine the huge databases used in business intelligence applications. It was the site of the first “Boston Big Data Summit” last fall. And now, with the acquisition of San Mateo, CA-based Greenplum by Hopkinton, MA-based EMC, the region will be even bigger into big data.

Greenplum is probably best known as the provider of the multi-petabyte data warehouse that auction site eBay formerly used to analyze the behavior of site visitors. EBay users generate a reported 150 billion individual event records per day as they skim the site and place bids. That’s information eBay can use to optimize the site’s performance and serve customers better—but doing so requires sifting through trillions of records overall. This huge task requires a massively parallel processing approach, which is what Greenplum’s database software, built on top of the open-source Postgres object-relational database system, is optimized to do. [Update and correction: Oliver Ratzesberger, who is in charge of the analytics platform at eBay, wrote to say that the company now uses a different technology for analytics.]

The main difference between Greenplum’s technology and other database software schemes has to do with how data is accessed. In traditional database management systems built by companies like Oracle and Microsoft, different query processing jobs generally share access to the same hard-drive disks, which can slow down individual queries. But Greenplum’s so-called “shared-nothing” system divides data across multiple servers or segments, each of which has its own connection to a disk drive. That means a single database query can be run against many segments of data simultaneously—perfect for the analytics applications run by Greenplum customers like eBay, Fox Interactive Media, NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange, Skype, and T-Mobile.

Announced Tuesday, the all-cash acquisition of Greenplum (terms weren’t given) means that EMC will now have a data computing product division that allows it to compete directly with suppliers of large-scale data warehousing systems like Netezza and Vertica, not to mention database giants like Oracle and Teradata. It’s perhaps surprising that EMC would reach all the way to California for an acquisition in the big-data sector, given that there were several options within Route 128. But it’s easy to understand why EMC would want to be a player in this area, considering that … Next Page »

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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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Judging from an IDG News report published in PC World on Friday, Cambridge, MA-based Dataupia is spinning down permanently. The maker of high-speed computing appliances for handling large business datasets has gone through yet another round of staff cuts and is putting its assets up for sale, the report says.

Xconomy reported in June that Dataupia had laid off nearly two-thirds of its staff in an attempt to conserve cash while it sought new investors. At the time, Dataupia representatives denied that the company—which has raised approximately $40 million in venture capital from the likes of Polaris Venture Partners, Fairhaven Capital, and Valhalla Partners—was in the process of shutting down. Samantha Stone, then the company’s vice president of marketing, said the existing investors had advised Dataupia to “to seek out additional funding from other sources” and that the company was scaling back operations in the meantime.

Apparently, that search has failed. Stone told Chris Kanaracus of the IDG News Service that the company’s assets are for sale, and that the staff has been reduced to a “small team” working on customer support and searching for potential acquirers. Stone was one of those laid off.

Dataupia did not immediately respond to Xconomy’s request today for confirmation and comment.

Dataupia’s servers are designed to support large-scale data warehousing and data analysis. The company’s founder, Foster Hinshaw, also founded Cambridge, MA-based Netezza, which unveiled a new line of data warehousing appliances this month that are far cheaper than its previous products. Dataupia’s most recent venture infusion, a $10 million extension of the company’s B round, came at the end of 2008.

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Cambridge, MA-based data warehousing appliance maker Dataupia has laid off nearly two-thirds of its staff and scaled back its operations while it seeks new funders, Xconomy has learned.

We contacted Dataupia today after hearing a rumor that the four-year-old startup had shut down—a rumor that turns out to be exaggerated but not wholly unfounded. “Dataupia is very much still here, still operating, and supporting customers and growing our business,” says Samantha Stone, the company’s vice president of marketing. “We did, unfortunately, lay off a significant number of people, and we did that just a few weeks ago, but we have not closed down operations by any means, and we don’t have intentions of closing down operations.”

Stone said 23 people remain on active duty at Dataupia. She would not comment on how many people were laid off. But a data sheet published by the company in April indicated that Dataupia had 60 employees at that time, indicating that about 37 people have lost their jobs. (We’ve updated the Boston Tech Layoff Tracker accordingly.)

Dataupia sells servers specially designed to handle very large datasets that can be mined for business-intelligence purposes. (An e-retailer or a wireless provider might buy a Dataupia server to help plumb customer transaction records in order to create customized discount offers or rate plans, for example.) The startup’s backers include Polaris Venture Partners of Waltham, MA, Fairhaven Capital of Cambridge, MA, and Valhalla Partners of Vienna, VA. Altogether, the venture firms have put about $40 million into Dataupia; the most recent infusion was a $10 million extension of the company’s B round, closing in the fourth quarter of last year.

The cutbacks at Dataupia are evidently part of what’s becoming a familiar story among venture-backed technology startups: cash runs short, and the original funders aren’t willing to pony up more without seeing some changes, or without having a new investor to help share the load.

“What happened was that some of our investors have asked us to seek out additional funding from other sources,” Stone says. As a result, she says, “We have scaled back our operations so we can continue to support customers and continue to invest in some of the strategic development we had in place. But we basically scaled back all of our marketing initiatives and some of our development stuff, and we’re seeking additional new funding sources so that we can get back on track and grow again.”

The changes at Dataupia are also a marker of how quickly a startup’s financial fortunes can shift. When I last interviewed Dataupia CEO Tony Sirianni in late March, I specifically asked him how much of a financial runway the company had, and whether it would be able to raise a Series C round, should that become necessary.

The investors “would not have brought me on board without giving me the proper ramp-up to make the company successful,” Sirianni answered at that time. “The company brought me on board to scale the organization, and that takes money, and I believe the VCs are going to finance the company appropriately to give me the opportunity to succeed with that. I believe the story is so compelling that if we need to go to yet another [venture] round, whenever that might be, I’m confident we’ll be able to secure whatever we need. That is not a problem I am waking up each morning worrying about.”

Stone says Sirianni was speaking in earnest about the company’s growth plans at that time. “It was our intention to continue doing that and he said that with all honestness,” she says. But as it turns out, some of the company’s backers are now unwilling to contribute further venture funding unless Dataupia can line up additional new investors. Others, meanwhile, may be unwilling to join the round at all. (Stone didn’t identify which investors are which.) “Polaris as well as Valhalla and Fairhaven have been our investors, and some of those would like to continue to invest and are looking for new partners to do that, and others are looking at their whole portfolios,” she says.

Stone asserted that from a sales and marketing perspective, Dataupia has been performing well. The company exceeded its revenue goals for the first quarter of this year, and its server technology has recently won awards from publications such as RedHerring.com and Information Week. “We have accomplished a great deal, and we are looking forward to a chance to augment our financing and get back on track,” she says.

Customers who have bought Dataupia hardware still have a customer support and engineering team to service them, Stone adds.

In other company news, Stone confirmed information obtained by Xconomy that former CEO Foster Hinshaw, who now serves on Dataupia’s board, recently underwent serious surgery for a heart condition. “He has recovered from that and is doing remarkably well, and is an active member of the board of directors,” Stone says.

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Foster Hinshaw has a theory. The most successful consumer-oriented companies—the Wal-Marts, Amazons, L.L. Beans, and Staples of the world—are successful not just because they understand their customers, but because they can operationalize that understanding. They collect massive amounts of information about past transactions and store it in data warehouses, and they actively mine those warehouses using business intelligence software.

Hinshaw illustrates with a story. “I called up L.L. Bean an hour before the cutoff time for FedEx Christmas delivery. I said, ‘I want this green sweater for my wife.’ This great customer rep says, ‘I’m sorry, that sweater is not in stock in green.’ So I was ready to run out to the mall. But then she said, ‘However, we see that your wife also likes teal, and we do have that sweater in stock in teal.’ Now, I won’t admit it in public, but I didn’t know that my wife liked teal. But somehow L.L. Bean did know that, and once she said it, it was obvious. So she was able to help me with the stuff I needed. That is what you call operational data warehousing and business intelligence.”

Hinshaw pays attention to such episodes because data warehousing has been his life for much of the last decade. In 2000 he founded Marlborough, MA-based Netezza to build data-warehousing appliances that speed up certain kinds of business-intelligence (BI) queries. Netezza’s devices are best for “deep analytics,” Hinshaw says—the kinds of questions that only a handful of PhD statisticians at each big company would even know how to ask. “They represent about 5 percent of the usage pattern in the large data market,” he says.

“But while I was at Netezza, people started asking, what about the mainstream, the other 95 percent, the guys doing routine BI?” Even before Hinshaw left Netezza (which eventually went public, in one of the top-grossing IPOs in Massachusetts in 2007), he started thinking about a new kind of appliance that would be optimized for more mainstream BI queries—questions that don’t require heavy modeling, but do require culling through terabytes of data.

And the result was Dataupia (pronounced day-TOE-pia). The Cambridge company, founded in 2005 and funded by Polaris Venture Partners, Valhalla Partners, and Fairhaven Capital, makes massively parallel data warehousing appliances that combine servers and storage with software designed to speed up BI-type queries. I got an introduction to Dataupia’s technology and its business last September during a visit with Hinshaw, and received an update a few weeks ago from Tony Sirianni, who replaced Hinshaw as CEO in early March. (Hinshaw remains active in the company as chairman of its board and its “main technical visionary,” in Sirianni’s words.)

Hinshaw’s key vision was that BI questions could be answered faster if … Next Page »

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Many of New England’s IT firms were heard from this past week. Those, and the rest of the week’s tech and life sciences deals, below.

—The Scuderi Group of West Springfield, MA, raised $20 million in private funding from undisclosed investors. The firm is developing a fuel-efficient internal combustion engine.

—The year-end data on U.S. venture deals are in and, predictably, ugly. Ryan got the lowdown on the low numbers, and highlighted New England’s most active venture firms and biggest transactions.

—Needham, MA-based Extreme Reach, a developer of software for tracking, managing, and delivering video ads across several media, raised $1.5 million in a Series A round from Village Ventures and Long River Ventures.

—Digital-effects-software maker GenArts of Cambridge, MA acquired British startup SpeedSix Software, producer of the graphics plug-in Monsters and Raptors.

—EIQnetworks, a security software firm in Acton, MA, closed a $10 million first round of institutional financing led by Venrock.

—Waltham, MA- and Palo Alto, CA-based Advanced Technology Ventures reportedly joined Morgenthaler Ventures and St. Paul Venture Capital in investing $30 million in Palo Alto medical-device firm Ardian.

—Panacos Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:PANC) of Watertown, MA, sold its lead HIV drug candidate, bevirimat, for $7 million to Utah’s Myriad Pharmaceuticals.

—Server appliance maker Dataupia closed a Series B-1 financing round reportedly totaling $10 million. Backers of the Cambridge, MA-based firm, which raised $16 million in its B round in October 2007, include Polaris Venture Partners, Valhalla Partners, and Fairhaven Capital.

—Software maker Mazu Networks of Cambridge, MA, will be acquired by San Francisco-based Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD) for $25 million up front and up to $22 million in performance-based payments. Mazu has reportedly raised $47 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Matrix Partners, Pilot House Ventures, StarVest Partners, Symantec, and other investors.

—Boston-based Enlight Biosciences forged an alliance with Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) under which the healthcare giant will invest up to $13 million in Enlight’s programs, which are aimed at developing technologies in such fields as molecular imaging, drug formulation, and drug synthesis. Partners such as Eli Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer have now promised Enlight a total of $52 million.

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Cambridge, MA-based Dataupia, which makes server appliances designed to handle large volumes of business-intelligence queries, said yesterday that it recently closed a “Series B-1″ financing round building on its $16 million B round in October 2007. The company didn’t say how much extra money it had raised, but a report today in Private Equity Hub, based on a regulatory filing, puts the figure at $10 million.

The company is backed by Polaris Venture Partners, Valhalla Partners, and Fairhaven Capital, and has now raised some $40 million all told. In its announcement, Dataupia (pronounced “day-toe-pia”) highlighted its successes in 2008, which included a doubling of its customer base and enhancements to its Satori Server, which is designed to help companies spot trends in large collections of data such as e-commerce records.

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Fairhaven Capital Partners announced today that it has closed its second investing fund—and its first since TD Capital spun out the firm in June 2007. Known for their earlier investments in companies with successful exits, including Third Screen Media, Softricity, and EqualLogic, the seven partners at Cambridge, MA-based Fairhaven say they’ll use the $250 million fund to continue investing in early-stage technologies.

“We are bullish on innovation,” even in the face of economic turmoil, Fairhaven managing director Paul Ciriello told me yesterday. “We think it drives the U.S. and the world economy, and technology is certainly one of the key factors in innovation.”

The institutions and individual investors who contributed to Fairhaven’s fund are evidently bullish as well: the firm says it raised $50 million more than its target number. It’s already put money from the fund into several startups, including speech-to-text company EveryZing and data warehouse appliance maker Dataupia, both located in Cambridge, as well as Boulder, CO-based Cocona, a maker of eco-friendly fabrics, and Montreal-based Xtranormal, which is developing some cool tools that consumers can use to create animated movies.

Ciriello says Fairhaven invests based on broad opinions its partners have formed about how market demand is likely to evolve in four “theme” areas: enterprise information technology (including security), consumer technology, high-performance materials, and digital media infrastructure. In enterprise technology, for example, the firm sees an ongoing demand for technologies such as server virtualization that make operating the IT backroom easier and cheaper. If there isn’t a company serving what the firm sees as a market need, says Ciriello, it will start one. (That’s how Third Screen Media, a mobile advertising company founded in 2004 and purchased last year by AOL/Time-Warner, got off the ground.)

Located in the Draper Laboratory building at One Hampshire Street, the firm is about to lose its sliver of a view of downtown Boston, thanks to construction on the eastern reaches of the MIT campus. But that’s okay—Ciriello and his colleagues will probably be too busy filling up their portfolio with startups that exemplify their themes to look outside.

Here’s a transcript of my brief interview with Ciriello yesterday.

Xconomy: Why did you spin out of TD Capital? What investing approach did you pitch to the prospective investors as you were raising the new fund?

Paul Ciriello: TD Capital had five investing groups; we were the fifth one. A few years ago, the bank decided it didn’t want to be in the direct investing game anymore, so it spun out three groups. We were the last in and the last out. They spun us out as Fairhaven Capital, and TD Capital is an investor. The entire team came over.

Under the TD Capital flag, we made 20 investments from 2001 to 2006, and we continue to manage those investments here. Of the 20 investments during that period we realized eight, including several interesting ones. Third Screen Media was acquired by Time Warner. EqualLogic was acquired by Dell. Softricity was acquired by Microsoft. IPhrase was acquired by IBM. And Cloakware was acquired by Irdeto, a Canadian division of a South African company.

So the platform we had built was a good platform. We have developed an approach to investing in early-stage companies which we would describe as ‘market-driven.’ All venture capital firms look at market dynamics, but we overweight that exercise. Before we develop a deal, we develop opinions about what are the dynamics of a market in an existing space. Then we find companies that are consistent with our view about how the dynamics of a given market will behave.

When it came time to start Fairhaven and raise the second fund, our limited partners, which include some very strong institutional investors from North America, Europe, and Asia, saw in Fairhaven an approach they believed was repeatable, that had produced good returns in a period without a lot of strong performers, and they liked the fact that we had demonstrated we could be good partners. So it was performance, plus the fact that we played well with others.

X: The technology areas where you’ve invested, like mobile advertising with Third Screen Media and storage hardware with EqualLogic, are pretty different. How do you master the ‘market dynamics’ in each separate area?

PC: We spend time up front developing specific themes and market opinions. If you remember the end of 2000, Time magazine was publishing a cover story called “Technology is Dead.” And most people didn’t know what the next best thing would be. We thought the enterprise market would continue to buy technology, but what would it buy, and why? Our view was that … Next Page »

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At a ceremony at the Cambridge Royal Sonesta that was briefly interrupted by a fire alarm last night, the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX) announced the winners of its fifth annual MITX Technology Awards, which are intended to recognize innovative technologies developed in New England.

The organization gave out awards in 14 categories. Some represented qualities such as “innovative business strategy” and “usability,” while others represented areas of strength for the New England technology economy, such as enterprise technology, data protection, and mobile and video software.

Just over half of the winners were companies we’ve covered here at Xconomy. Burlington, MA-based Veracode, which we profiled in January, took home two awards, for “Data Protection” and “Sector Impact.” Boston’s Visible Measures, also covered in January, won for “Analytics & Business Intelligence.” Cambridge-based Stylefeeder, which won for “Collaboration & Social Networking,” was the subject of yet another January profile. Everyzing, which is also based Cambridge and won in the “Content Management/Search” category, has turned up in our pages quite a few times. We’ve mentioned Cambridge-based Brightcove, which won in the “Video” category, several times in the course of our coverage of Boston’s Internet video cluster. We profiled Cambridge’s Hubspot, which won for “Innovative Business Strategy,” back in August, and we covered Natick-based Punchbowl, which won in the “Usability” category, in October.

Amar Bose—the founder, chairman, and technical director of Framingham, MA-based audio equipment maker Bose Corporation–gave a keynote speech at the award ceremony. He was later inducted into MITX’s “Innovation Hall of Fame.”

Here’s the complete list of the Technology Award winners:

Analytics & Business Intelligence
Measuring the Consumption and Distribution of Internet Video
Visible Measures

Collaboration & Social Networking
StyleFeeder – Personalized Shopping Engine
StyleFeeder

Content Management/Search
Unlocking the Contents of Online Multimedia
EveryZing

Data Management
Dataupia Satori Server – Free Your Data
Dataupia

Data Protection
SecurityReview
Veracode

Enterprise Technology
GotVMail Virtual Phone System
GotVMail Communications

Marketing/Customer Relationship
Merchant-Funded Loyalty Shopping Solutions
Mall Networks

Mobile
iSkoot for Skype
iSkoot

Video
Brightcove Internet TV Platform
Brightcove

Customer Impact/Support
Azimuth Systems ACE 400WB MIMO Channel Emulator
Azimuth Systems

Innovative Business Strategy
HubSpot Internet Marketing System
HubSpot

Sector Impact
SecurityReview
Veracode

Usability
MyPunchbowl.com
Punchbowl Software

Implementation
VidShield Physical Security Information Management System and Platform
VidSys

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Regular readers may have noticed that from time to time we like to give you a roundup of the last week’s worth of biz/tech news (and from time to time—like when we’re too busy with this week’s news—we skip it).

This time a couple of things are different, though. First, I’m going to focus only on deals news—because there was a whole lot of it last week. And second, this is our first roundup since we launched our News Xpress section, which covers on a more real-time basis many of the items we previously would have saved for the roundup. (The most recent News Xpress headlines are in the green box at the top of our homepage, or if you prefer we also have a complete full-text listing of all News Xpress items.)

So let us know, dear readers: Is it helpful to have both the real-time and roundup options for following the news, especially deal news? If not, which do you prefer and why? We’re at editors@xconomy.com.

Now, here’s the deal with those deals…

—Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) partnered with Shanghai Sunway Biotech to commercialize its lead gene therapy product candidate in China.

—OwnerIQ of Newton, MA, raised a first round worth $2 million for a network of websites containing consumer-device user manuals.

—Somerville, MA’s Dataupia—a data warehousing firm—raised $16 million in a Series B funding round.

—Acceleron Pharma of Cambridge, MA, closed its third big venture round, worth $31 million, led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

—Storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC), of Hopkinton, MA, announced it would acquire a Richardson, TX, data-center-software firm called Voyence for an undisclosed sum. Wade offers some nice perspective on how the deal fits into EMC’s strategy and the data industry in general.

—Cambridge, MA’s Zipcar and Seattle’s Flexcar announced they would merge.

—Boston-based document storage and data protection company Iron Mountain announced it would pay $158 million in cash for Mountain View, CA’s Stratify.

—SoundBite Communications (NASDAQ: SDBT), a voice-messaging firm in Bedford, MA, priced its IPO well below expectations in the wake of a rival’s claim of patent infringement.

—Waltham, MA-based Tego, an RFID firm, raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Bainco International Investors.

—And on Friday came the news that four Massachusetts firms—Newton’s HemaQuest Pharmaceuticals ($20 million), Sherborn’s Ascent Therapeutics ($8 million), Cambridge’s Bikam Pharmaceuticals ($3.6 million), and Lowell’s Virtual Iron ($13 million)—had collectively closed venture deals worth $44.6 million.

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Fairhaven Capital Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, and Valhalla Partners have joined in a $16 million Series B funding round for Dataupia, according to a report yesterday at peHUB. The Somerville, MA, startup sells a data warehousing appliance—called “Satori,” from the Zen Buddhist term for deep or lasting satisfaction—that consists of an exandable rack of AMD blade servers, Seagate hard drives, and a massively parallel database engine that connects to standard database management systems from Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft. Dataupia president and CEO Foster Hinshaw is a veteran of Netezza, another data warehousing company that raised $108 million in its July IPO.

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