A young Canadian software startup with Boston investors is now part of a big Boston-area company. Ottawa-based Blaze Software has been acquired by Cambridge, MA-based Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) for an undisclosed cash sum.

What’s interesting here is that Akamai, the Web content delivery and networking giant, is making a move into Web performance optimization—basically tackling Web performance at the browser level (what some call “front end”), rather than the network level. Akamai has been positioning itself as a one-stop provider of a secure platform for businesses to reach customers via the Web, mobile, and cloud. That approach also includes, among other things, speeding up Web and mobile applications, as evidenced by the company’s recent acquisition of its California-based rival Cotendo for $268 million.

Today’s deal is no doubt smaller than that, but it could be an important sign of things to come—especially around Boston. Blaze started in 2010, and its seed funding came from local investors CommonAngels and Boston Seed Capital. So why sell now?

“You always have a choice of how you want to grow the business,” says Chris Sheehan, managing director of CommonAngels. “It made a lot of sense for the guys to partner up with Akamai, who’s so strong in the [content delivery network] space. When I made the investment, [Web performance optimization] was just beginning. The timing was sooner than I expected. But in the last 12 months, this whole thing has really started to take off.” [Disclosure: CommonAngels is an investor in Xconomy, and Sheehan is a board member at Xconomy.]

Blaze’s approach is to optimize the code on Web pages so as to speed up the transmission of content and render pages faster on whatever device the customer is browsing on—PC, tablet, or smartphone. This is particularly useful for e-commerce and media sites, which tend to get gummed up by lots of different pieces of code loading on them. The company’s technology (and team) will be integrated into Akamai’s cloud platform, said Rick McConnell, executive vice president of products and development at Akamai, in a statement.

In speeding up websites, Blaze competes directly with Boston-based companies Yottaa (which is also in Boston Seed’s portfolio) and SiteSpect. Google’s team in Kendall Square also released a free tool for Web page optimization in the fall of 2010.

It’s not just about making websites faster, however. All of the above companies have been trying to combine Web optimization with business analytics so as to help businesses track things like sales and customer behavior more effectively. Now Akamai is firmly in the game, and we’ll see how that affects the competitive landscape.

“It’s going to make it a lot harder,” Sheehan says. “It puts a lot of pressure on the other startups.”

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As we wind down the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take the pulse of some of the bigger technology companies around town. In addition to tracking startups and entrepreneurship, this is an important measure of the health and well-being of the Boston tech community.

So here’s a list of 10 well-known public companies, their stock price (as of Friday’s close), most recent financials, and other tidbits. Not comprehensive, of course. But of these firms, you might be surprised whose stock is the highest right now.

Most of these companies will announce their end-of-year financials in the next two weeks…

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Stock price: $32.01
2011 stats: Q3 profit of $63M on $282M in revenue; coming off $1B+ revenue in 2010.
Recent news: The company has acquired rival Cotendo and is positioning itself as a platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud.
Big question: Why doesn’t Akamai own the cloud (like Amazon)?

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB)
Stock price: $10.30
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $15.9M (net loss of $7.4M); will announce full-year stats on Feb. 9.
Recent news: Coming off its IPO in August, Carbonite is adjusting to life as a public company.
Big question: Is online backup a big enough growth market?

Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT)
Stock price: $25.11
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $54.3M ($5.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 2.
Recent news: Constant Contact is moving into mobile/social rewards programs with its acquisitions of CardStar and Bantam Networks.
Big question: Can it make a full transition from e-mail to broader online marketing?

EMC (NYSE: EMC)
Stock price: $25.83
2011 stats: Full-year revenue of $20B ($3.4B profit), showing record growth.
Recent news: CEO and chairman Joe Tucci isn’t stepping down this year as planned. (Pat Gelsinger is rumored to be his successor.)
Big question: What is the ultimate future of EMC? In storage, big data, and cloud computing, as EMC goes, so will Massachusetts.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT)
Stock price: $32.88
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $120.4M ($14.1M profit)
Recent news: iRobot laid off 8 percent of its staff in October but continues to grow.
Big question: Will consumer robotics ever really take off?

LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM)
Stock price: $41.51
2011 stats: Q3 revenues of $31M ($4.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 15.
Recent news: LogMeIn has been expanding to new devices, markets, and geographies.
Big question: Is this still a lifestyle business?

Monster.com (NYSE: MWW)
Stock price: $7.35
2011 stats: $46M profit on roughly $1B revenue, compared to a $9M loss in 2010.
Recent news: Monster Worldwide had layoffs and is restructuring as it continues to expand globally and move into social/mobile technologies.
Big question: Is there a better job site out there?

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN)
Stock price: $27.91
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $400M, and $1.4B revenue for the fiscal year ($38.2M profit).
Recent news: Nuance acquired rival Vlingo in mobile speech recognition; mobile/consumer and healthcare continue to be its biggest markets.
Big question: Can it compete with the big boys (Apple, Google)?

TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP)
Stock price: $31.24
2011 stats: $3B+ market cap. Year-end stats coming Feb. 8. (2010 revenue of $486M.)
Recent news: After spinning out of Expedia last month, TripAdvisor is New England’s biggest consumer Web company.
Big question: Will it outcompete Google and others in travel search and content?

Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP)
Stock price: $16.14
2011 stats: Small profit in Q3 on $68M revenue. Full-year revenue expected to be 240M+ with net loss in $10M range (tune in Feb. 14).
Recent news: Coming off its IPO last spring, Zipcar has been expanding carefully in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.
Big question: Can it reduce costs enough to make a real profit?

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Brayden Olson was frustrated. After a couple of years spent beating the bushes for successful young entrepreneurs in the Seattle area, the 24-year-old says he could only find a few people he considered peers.

And even worse, Olson says, was the lack of generosity he found among the 30-something generation of Seattle entrepreneurs that came up before him.

“A lot of them are doing great things. But it surprises me that the way they’re looking at this next generation is, ‘I’m going to help you out so that I make more money,’ when they’re already successful,” says Olson, who leads Novel, a startup that aims to bring game mechanics to business recruiting.

That attitude, he says, went something like this: “‘We’ll incubate you for a significant amount of your company, and we’ll make connections for you for a significant amount of your company, and we’ll give you our expertise for a significant amount of your company.’”

Olson’s answer is a new organization called the Young Entrepreneur Social, a group aimed at bringing successful under-30 entrepreneurs together for networking events and mentorship programs—particularly reaching out to other promising twentysomething entrepreneurs, and even high-schoolers who have an entrepreneurial bent.

The group already has thrown a pair of events, drawing 50 people to the first gathering on a yacht and about 80 to a “mansion party” in the North Bend area. They’re planning a third event for February, and hope to hit about 100 attendees.

Membership is free, but restricted mostly to entrepreneurs under 30 who have built business with either venture backing or $1 million in annual revenues. The idea is to have half of the crowd at a Young Entrepreneur Social event made up of those successful young businesspeople, with the balance representing promising up-and-comers who need connections, advice, and support to get to the next level.

The focus on the under-30 crowd isn’t just by chance, or because they’re feeling bruised from those mean married guys with mortgages. Olson says there are studies that bear out the anecdotal observation that big, world-changing tech companies are typically started by people in their 20s. (It’s a theory that brand-name investors like Ron Conway and Vinod Khosla also endorse.)

“There are some organizations that are out there that are really great for people entering their 30s or in their mid-30s. But they’re dealing with their houses and their spouses and having kids for the first time,” Olson says, leaving younger entrepreneurs feeling disconnected. “I know from some of these events, they started with younger membership but now they don’t really want the younger members anymore.”

Olson says he put up the money to get the events started, and the nonprofit seeks sponsorships to cover its mission. An annual budget in the neighborhood of $200,000 is envisioned to support the various programs, which will call on young entrepreneurs to give back.

The event side of the Young Entrepreneur Social is headed up by Colin Christianson, founder of the Seattle digital marketing startup Tenacious Ventures. Mentorship programs, including incubating selected startups at member businesses, will be headed by Morgan Carson, founder and designer of fashion startup Rene Ropas. The volunteer program, including outreach to young student-entrepreneurs, will be led by Jacquie Brown, a former Miss Washington and aspiring singer.

It’s another interesting idea for Seattle’s startup community, which is in the midst of one of those moments that can move a region into a higher echelon. As the big Silicon Valley companies come to town and raid talent from Microsoft or Amazon, they add more diverse company cultures and skills, which can enrich the DNA in the local tech gene pool. At the same time, we’re also seeing the continued growth of the TechStars incubator, fuel for more seed-stage investment, and a drive to recruit more angel investors.

Olson says that building the bridge for the youngest entrepreneurs is one of the missing ingredients in turning up the volume in Seattle’s startup scene. And he hopes it will help prevent more stories of the ones that got away—companies like Box, the hot enterprise storage startup that moved to the Bay Area in early 2006, a few years after being birthed by two Seattle-based college students.

“The bottom line is, if we want to see another Microsoft or another Amazon in our community, it is this audience that YES is targeting that we have to focus our attention on,” he says. “In every statistic, every time it’s happened it has been this demographic. “Cities can be a startup hub for a while and go away. And that’s what we’re at risk of doing.”

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Some big acquisition news before the holidays here. Cambridge, MA-based Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), the Web delivery and networking giant, said today it is acquiring a competitor, Sunnyvale, CA-based Cotendo, for $268 million in cash. The deal, which has been rumored for the past month, is expected to close in the first half of 2012.

Akamai has been positioning itself as a provider of a secure software platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud. Cotendo competes with Akamai in the realm of accelerating Web and mobile applications. The California-based company started in 2008 and has about 100 employees, more than half of them based in Israel.

About a year ago, Akamai and MIT filed a lawsuit against Cotendo alleging patent infringement. Presumably that case is resolved now.

This is a relatively rare case of a Boston tech company acquiring a Silicon Valley company. Most of the other big deals this year have gone the other way (such as Oracle-Endeca, Google-ITA, eBay-Where, and HP-Vertica).

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Y Combinator has a brilliant franchise. It is called Startup School.

This year it is at Stanford University on October 29 and co-hosted with BASES, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students.

Some of Silicon Valley’s elite used to poo-poo Startup School as being too basic. I have always been in the camp supporting it. By “supporting,” I mean crashing. Remember, I only crash the best stuff. And I have been to every Startup School at Stanford University.

I don’t like when blog posts come out after an event, so I want to crystal-ball this event by examining and revealing what happened in the past. I hope this prepares you for Saturday at Dinkelspiel.

Here are the best morsels learned from Startup Schools of Yesteryear.

1. Just Ask

Garry Tan posted about asking for stuff after you are turned down for venture money. There are numerous case studies that document entrepreneurs failing forward after getting turned down for VC money.

Garry’s blog articles relating to Y Combinator are here. Almost any speaker at Startup School is a good candidate for an ask. Asking is the tough part of executing all the knowledge that volcanoes out from Startup School. So just ask, and ask some more.

2. Pre- Networking Involves Reaching Out Via E-mail

How do you email a person when you don’t know them or their email address? Well according to Evan Reas, CEO/founder of LikeALittle, the first step is just to guess at their address. You hack the email algorithm. “There are only so many combinations of email addresses. First name only. First initial, last name. Initials only.”

Reas is a master at guessing an email and hammering it until there is interaction. For example, he e-mailed an industry titan 30+ times before he got interaction. Evan is a GSB alum and a computer scientist who codes and codes.

3. Be a Cockroach

You only die if you choose to die.

Paul Graham values people who stick with it. “We know that startups only die when the founders give up,” he says. He said of the AirBnb guys, “You guys are like cockroaches. You will never die.”

4. Learn from OPE (Other People’s Experience)

Y Combinator has legendary office hours for its startups, and make them public during TechCrunch Disrupt in New York and San Francisco. There are blog articles and video available that contain over 60 minutes of entrepreneurship content, mentorship, and tips. I paid over $4k cash, but you can have them free if you use some Google smarts. Or just e-mail me.

5. Be Young. Or Inexperienced. Just Start.

Max Swisher is 12. He is getting mentored by Spencer Schoeben and they were at Cory Levy’s Stanford Next Generation conference. At last year’s YC Startup School, Max started to execute entrepreneurship and asked Ron Conway to fund him.

Welcome to Startup School and the wild ride that is entrepreneurship.

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The West Coast roll-up of Boston-area tech companies continues.

On the heels of Oracle’s acquisition of Endeca this week, networking and communications giant Cisco Systems said today it plans to acquire Boxborough, MA-based BNI Video for $99 million in cash and retention-based incentives. Cisco is one of the startup’s investors. The deal is expected to be complete by the end of this year, at which time BNI’s employees will join Cisco’s service provider video technology group.

BNI Video started in early 2009, originally known as Beaumaris Networks, to develop technology for video service providers. About a year ago, my colleague Erin reported on the company’s software, which is aimed at helping cable companies compete better with Internet video providers.

The startup’s cloud-based software manages how cable content is organized on the back end so that consumers can search and browse their programs across various Internet-connected devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The company is led by CEO Conrad Clemson.

BNI raised nearly $17 million in venture capital over two rounds, from Charles River Ventures, Comcast Interactive Capital, Cisco, TIme Warner Cable, and Castile Ventures. So this looks like a pretty healthy return for the startup’s investors. BNI had 50 employees as of a year ago.

San Jose, CA-based Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) says it plans to use BNI’s technology to advance its own Videoscape TV platform, which lets service providers deliver video to Internet-connected devices. Cisco recently acquired ExtendMedia and Inlet Technologies in the video sector, and also previously bought Starent Networks and LineSider Technologies in Massachusetts.

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A Boston-area security tech company and the University of Michigan are involved in one of the most ambitious—and potentially controversial—transportation projects of our time. It could have major impact on federal legislation, and almost everyone you know.

Picture this: You’re driving in your car, approaching an intersection. Maybe you’re speeding a little, going 40 mph in a 35 zone, say. Unbeknownst to you, another driver is racing down the cross street and is about to run a red light (probably texting or something). This could spell disaster. But instead, your car picks up a wireless signal from the other vehicle. A beeping sound or flashing light on your dashboard alerts you to slow down, so you hit the brakes. Disaster averted.

Now let’s take it a step further. Maybe the alert is hooked into your car’s control system, so if you don’t put on the brakes, your car does it automatically. And maybe that’s fine with you. But you might be a little worried about giving up that kind of control in life-and-death situations. After all, computers get hacked and software crashes. Not to mention, you might not want your car broadcasting its speed and location out there for all to see (especially not the cops, since you were speeding).

This scenario isn’t the future. It’s happening already—at least the driver-alert part. In six cities around the U.S., trials of about 100 drivers each are underway to see how people react to in-car alerts (such as collision warnings, do not pass, and vehicle stopped ahead). But the next step is bigger. In Ann Arbor, MI, some 3,000 cars will be equipped with onboard wireless devices for communicating with each other and signaling to drivers when there’s an imminent hazard. This 12-month pilot study, which was announced recently and starts next August, is being led by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) through a $14.9 million contract from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The state of Michigan has been heavily involved as well.

The goal of the federal initiative is, ultimately, to save lives. In the U.S., auto accidents are the leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 34; more than 30,000 people are killed on the nation’s roadways each year. The hope is that with new early-warning systems in place, a sizable fraction of would-be victims could be saved—some say 80 percent of non-alcohol-related cases—especially when high speed is involved.

The idea of wirelessly connected cars isn’t new, of course. The field of vehicle telematics has been around for years, with applications in fleet management, tracking, and safety. But advances in GPS location technologies, wireless communications, sensors, hardware, and algorithms are enabling smarter, better-connected vehicles to be tested on a bigger scale. And recent breakthroughs such as autonomous road-racing vehicles and Google’s self-driving car are starting to propel the technology into the mainstream.

Nevertheless, the Michigan study raises some serious real-world concerns. “This is a massive system with tremendous security and privacy implications,” says Ed Adams, the chief executive of Security Innovation in Wilmington, MA. And that’s exactly where his software security firm comes in.

Security Innovation developed the mobile software being used in the U-M study to … Next Page »

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VCs are wrong most of the time—and often it’s because they over-think a deal. That’s just one of the points I took away from our event this past Monday night, Xconomy Xchange: Consumers, the Cloud, and Beyond — New Rules for Innovation. If you want to catch some more themes from the panel—which featured venture capitalists Rich Levandov, Jeff Fagnan, and Larry Bohn, and moderator David Patrick—read this. For pictures of the speakers and attendees milling about the great WilmerHale venue, work your way through the slideshow below.

	NEXT IMAGE >>
	Xconomy Xchange 9/26 – Networking at Consumers, the Cloud, and Beyond—New Rules for Innovation
	photo by Keith Spiro of Kendall Press

… Next Page »

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We’re gearing up for our first Boston event of the fall: a chat with some prominent venture capitalists around the theme of “Consumers, the Cloud, and Beyond—New Rules for Innovation.” It’s happening this Monday from 6:00-8:00 pm in downtown Boston. We have just a few tickets left, so get yours today…

I know what you’re thinking. What can I learn from these guys?

Personally, I’m interested to hear what Larry Bohn of General Catalyst has to say about the changing landscape for cloud-based analytics startups—and how long it’ll be before HubSpot gets bought by Salesforce.com. I want to hear Jeff Fagnan from Atlas Venture talk about bringing more startups and talent to the Boston area—see Hopper, PowerInbox, GrabCAD, and others. And I’d like to hear Rich Levandov of Avalon Ventures talk about opportunities for consumer Web companies—and engage in a little Boston vs. New York smack talk.

Your moderator for the evening will be David Patrick, the CEO of Boston-based mobile firm Apperian, which is venture-backed, but not by any of the above investors. So I expect some good ribbing to take place. David will approach the chat from an entrepreneur’s perspective, asking the VCs deep questions about what they look for in investments, valuations, geography, competitive landscape, and so on.

And then we shall bring forth the startups (release the Kraken)… We’ve got four Boston-area tech entrepreneurs presenting short “bursts” about their company stories: Coach Wei from Yottaa, Healy Jones from OfficeDrop, Mike Salguero from CustomMade, and Fred Lalonde from Hopper. These talks are always energizing, and often the highlight of our events.

Well, the real highlight will be the networking and beer. Lots of beer (and wine). Please join us—if you dare.

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Two years ago, we took a close look at Boston-based Black Coral Capital, just as Rob Day was joining the newly formed, cleantech-focused private equity firm as partner. Since then, both the Day and Black Coral names have shown up as part of investments in some innovative cleantech plays in Boston—several that go beyond traditional materials and dabble in the services and IT realms.

On a recent visit, Day had a lot to say about how and why traditional, materials-based cleantech firms should innovate, and the sprouting up of new companies using IT to solve cleantech challenges such as energy efficiency. He’s also pretty rosy on Boston’s up-and-coming (and pretty gritty) cleantech incubators, and the city’s potential to become a center for innovations in energy controls.

Read below for an edited transcript of a chat I had with him at Black Coral’s offices last week.

Xconomy: Tell me about some of your existing area investments, in companies like Next Step Living and Digital Lumens.

Rob Day: With Next Step Living, the business model is coming into homes. It has a full set of options. The idea is, “Hey, what do we have to do to get this home to be more energy efficient and get the homeowner to save more money? What makes most financial sense to homeowners?” They’re establishing themselves as a trusted energy advisor to them.

I see them as a channel, solution provider to the home. I keep not being excited about residential energy efficiency technology and products because there aren’t any good channels. That’s where Next Step Living can solve a major problem.

Digital Lumens is much more your classic technology play. They’re putting together what LEDs can do and what controls can do with LEDs. That’s much more of a hardcore tech play.

The similarity is, in all of these markets you need to provide a full solution.

X: What do you see as some of the next big plays in energy efficiency?

RD: There’s a good opportunity to continue to take building energy intelligence downstream. Energy intelligence for buildings has been aimed at homes, like smart thermostats, or it’s been aimed at very large buildings. But there are hundreds of thousands of buildings out there that are too small to use the existing solutions. There is an opportunity there. Ninety-plus percent of commercial buildings don’t have any intelligence out there.

The key is going to be coming up with something that is very flexible [for buildings between 25k - 50k square feet]. They’re going to need to come up with hundreds of thousands of solutions, and they’ll have to be a little bit more cookie cutter-ish. Because the buildings are all different, it has to be highly flexible and easy to configure. Even EnerNOC is starting to get involved in this. I think Boston has a particular opportunity to be an area of expertise of energy controls for buildings.

X: Is the popular notion that cleantech startups are having trouble getting money true?

RD: It’s certainly out of favor right now with investors, at least … Next Page »

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Burlington, MA-based Bluesocket, which produces wireless networking and security technology, has been acquired by ADTRAN in a transaction effective August 4, the companies announced today. ADTRAN (NASDAQ: ADTN), a provider of networking and communications equipment, will roll Bluesocket into its enterprise networks business. Bluesocket—whose investors include Ascent Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Menlo Ventures, and Vesbridge Partners—raised $8 million in January 2010.

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Plexxi, an aggravatingly stealthy networking startup in Nashua, NH, said today it has raised a $20 million Series B equity round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Previous investors Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners also participated in the financing. The company has raised a little over $28 million to date.

According to its sparse website, the company is trying to solve “the problems faced in building state-of-the-art enterprise and cloud datacenter networks with 20th-century networking technology.”

So it sounds like the team is working on a more efficient technology to help businesses and IT departments manage the growing mess that is the modern data center. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.

Plexxi is led by founders Dave Husak (formerly of Reva Systems) and Ephraim Dobbins (formerly at Acme Packet). Perhaps their past companies serve as clues to what the future holds.

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Lexington, MA-based Imprivata, a security tech company focused on health IT applications, said today it has landed a multimillion-dollar deal with NHS Scotland to provide secure access technology to that country’s healthcare workers. No further financial details were given in the release, but another report puts the price at 1.8 million pounds (just under U.S. $3 million) over five years. The product will be delivered in partnership with Northgate Managed Services, an IT services firm. Imprivata, which is backed by a number of Boston venture firms, has developed a system that lets clinicians and other users sign on to their computer once, instead of needing multiple passwords for different applications, to do things like access health records. Xconomy first wrote about Imprivata’s single sign-on technology in 2007.

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We’ve got a trio of quick Seattle-area technology fundraising items today, fresh from the SEC filings.

Livemocha reports that it has raised about $5 million in a Series C round, which appears like it could grow to the $7.5 million range with warrants and options. I tried to get more details on that aspect from Livemocha, but it instead dispatched a PR person to say the company is holding back the information so it can come out with a larger pre-packaged story of some kind later this month.

Anyway: Livemocha runs an online language-learning network that hooks people up virtually with native speakers. They’ve been entertainingly pugnacious about their rivalry with Rosetta Stone, the publicly traded language-instruction company whose product is traditionally based around CD-ROMs. Previous investors in Livemocha include Maveron and August Capital. I didn’t see any new VC board members in the latest paperwork.

Seattle-based Telecom Transport Management has sold $4 million in equity. The company provides “backhaul” networking to major wireless carriers, helping them build out from the main spine of a network into all the smaller sections on its way to consumers. TTM says it has networks in 15 metropolitan areas, concentrated in the Midwest and eastern U.S., with offices in Virginia, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Minnesota. This newest fundraising round is kind of small potatoes—TTM raised about $40 million in a previous fundraising round that spanned 2009 and 2010.

And finally, Bellevue, WA-based RootMetrics (still known by former brand name Root Wireless in government filings) has sold $1 million of an equity round that could be worth up to $5 million. RootMetrics tracks and analyzes wireless network speeds through consumer smartphone apps and commercial data-collection from the carriers. That allows it to publish maps of mobile network strength for consumers, and sell the sliced and diced data back to the carriers. RootMetrics told GeekWire that the new money was from existing investors.

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Santa Clara, CA-based OpSource, a nine-year-old managed Internet hosting provider, said today that it has been acquired by telecommunications firm Dimension Data, an NTT Holdings subsidiary based in Johannesburg, South Africa. OpSource’s 150 employees will become part of a new “Cloud Solutions Business Unit” at Dimension Data, the companies said. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

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It’s not every day I get to dine with the CEO of a public company worth $5 billion. Last month I sat down with Andy Ory, founder and chief exec at Bedford, MA-based Acme Packet (NASDAQ: APKT), for an in-depth chat about his company’s strategy and outlook in the area of networking technology.

The setting was The Friendly Toast in Cambridge, MA. Ory has a soft spot in his heart for the Kendall Square area—back in the late ‘80s, he worked at Boston Technology, the voice-mail pioneer whose office was next to where Friendly Toast sits today. (If you ever get a chance, ask him about the story of using the local pay phone for product testing.)

Over a BLT and huevos rancheros (if I recall correctly), we talked about everything from Ory’s startup lessons to big-company concerns and business regulations, from Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype to how Acme Packet is like Cisco back in 1993. (Ory is speaking tonight at a Boston-area event with Founder Collective’s Eric Paley; he will talk about Acme Packet’s story and his broader experiences in building companies.)

Ory is a leading light in the tech entrepreneurship scene. Before founding Acme Packet in 2000, he cut his teeth at Boston Technology and then founded Priority Call Management, which sold to LHS Group for over $160 million in 1999. Over the past decade, he and his team have built Acme Packet into a leader in session border control—technology that helps telecom network operators and big companies manage voice-over-IP (VoIP) and other communications and services over the Internet in an efficient and secure manner.

Yet things have not always been rosy for Acme Packet, which went public in 2006 and now has roughly 700 employees (about 450 in Bedford). The company’s stock fell below $4 in late 2008, before rebounding and rising strongly in the past year and a half, to around $70 in recent months. I wanted to hear about that dramatic comeback too.

Ory didn’t disappoint as either a lunch companion or an interview subject. It helps that he is a charmer and a natural-born storyteller. Consider how he explains where Acme Packet sits today:

“Imagine you were visiting a company back in 1993 called Cisco Network Systems. ‘What do you guys do?’ We make a router. You might say, ‘what’s a router?’ It’s a piece of hardware and software. The reason is enterprises are converting their infrastructure to IP [Internet protocol] because of e-mail. If enterprise A wants to send e-mail to enterprise B, they need a router between them. Well, you might say, ‘what percentage of enterprises are going to do e-mail?’ And they’d say, every single one on the planet. ‘And how many e-mail messages fill up a router?’ To figure out how many routers you’re going to sell. What was really interesting is, when you connect all these networks together, a network effect ensues. Of course I couldn’t say to you, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Napster—I wish I could have,” Ory says.

“Now let’s fast forward 18 years and you’re visiting my company,” he says. “We make a session border controller. Enterprises and service providers are converting their service infrastructure to IP so they can do voice over IP. When they want to make a VoIP call from one enterprise to another, they need a session border controller to connect those two enterprises. So you’d say, ‘what percentage of enterprises and service providers are going to do VoIP?’ And of course my answer is, every single one. … Next Page »

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Ladies and gentlemen, after last week I hereby declare the end of high season for tech events in Boston. We’ve had our celebrations, drunk our grain, and talked our heads off. Now, before we start getting some things done around here, let’s reflect just a little more.

The following took place during a 24-hour period last week:

—Coolio performed at the DartBoston/TechStars Demo Day party.

—The Boston Bruins beat the favored Vancouver Canucks in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals for their first title since 1972.

—Fashion guru Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder of Gilt Groupe, shared the stage with me at our XSITE 2011 conference at Babson College (photo gallery here).

I’m not sure which of these pairings was least likely—fashion and I have rarely shared the same sentence—but the fact that all three happened in the span of a day suggests Armageddon is upon us. And, given the collective lack of sleep in this region (or at least this office) during that time, I will refer to it as Hell Week—after the Navy SEAL training where candidates are pushed to their limit, sleep less than four hours over 5.5 days, and emerge on the other side stronger than they thought they could be. I mean it in a good way, really.

All of this calls for a retrospective of highlights I’m able to remember through the haze of last week. Let’s get right to it:

1. I remember TechStars Demo Day kicking off with “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys blasting from the speakers of the Royale nightclub—and all the startup teams joining managing director Katie Rae on stage, clapping, wearing a mix of company T-shirts, camouflage tuxedo suits, and other hipster items.

2. I remember a lot of raucous whooping and cheering for the startups (before, after, and sometimes during their pitches), and intro music for each speaker. A bit over the top, but I understand the need to build excitement. One investor called the format distracting, but he was in the minority.

3. I remember a mix of presentation styles, which was nice—from “here’s my life story” to “let’s get right to the business,” from laid-back to in-your-face. Also I remember Walt Doyle from Where (now PayPal) looking like a veteran stand-up comic as he introduced the first TechStars startup, EverTrue.

4. I remember angel investor Bill Warner introducing Ginger.io’s Anmol Madan by saying he was “fearless.” Case in point: some of Madan’s research work at the MIT Media Lab was on “trying to understand women with a computer.”

5. I remember lots more financing being announced by lots more companies than usual over the past couple of years (see this updated list of TechStars Boston financings for the current class). Perhaps Y Combinator’s $150K guaranteed investment for graduates of the program is not so big an advantage anymore.

6. I remember Hardi Meybaum of GrabCAD saying he likes Boston because … Next Page »

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James Hamilton is obsessed with efficiency. As vice president and distinguished engineer for Amazon Web Services, Hamilton is at the forefront of the Seattle company’s massive cloud computing effort, from software and switches to air conditioning and building design. Kind of fitting for a veteran of Microsoft and IBM who also used to fix high-end European sportscars—”and just to keep the bills paid, Fiats,” as he writes on his personal website.

Earlier this week, I dropped by an Amazon Technology Open House at the company’s new campus in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, as Hamilton told a roomful of people about the ways the AWS team is trying to wring efficiency out of data centers, where the rest of the industry is getting it wrong, and how big the company’s infrastructure growth looks. Here’s a link to the short deck of slides from his presentation.

Hamilton gave a fascinating idea of the scale and speed in play. As a point of comparison, Hamilton said he wanted to see how often the company adds the amount of computer capacity needed to run Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) back in the year 2000—as Hamiton pointed out, about a $2.7 billion company.

“I thought, I bet you I know how fast we’re growing right now. I bet you we bring on enough capacity to build a new Amazon every, say, three to four weeks. We went through the history, we dug through it, and found out, God—we do that every day. Every day, we bring on enough new capacity to support all of Amazon as a $2.7 billion company. Tomorrow, we’ll do the same thing again, and by the end of the week, we’ll have brought on the equivalent of five Amazons, $2.7 billion e-commerce companies—fairly big IT infrastructure at that time.”

That mind-boggling scale gets to Hamilton’s overall point, which was that the past five years have seen more data center innovation than in the previous 15 years. A major reason, of course, is that you now have enormous businesses like Amazon Web Services whose entire focus is finding infrastructure improvements—much different than when the work was an add-on at some other company specializing in a completely different business. Those people would never hire server designers or people specializing in power distribution. But for something like AWS, “the only thing that matters is the efficiency in the infrastructure.”

“The difference between AWS being a very, very boring business, possibly even a money-loser, and a phenomenally successful business that is able to reinvest back into the business, reinvest back into growth, reduce prices 11 times in four years—what makes that possible is the cost of the infrastructure,” Hamilton said. “That’s really the dominant cost. Research and development—it matters, but it’s the infrastructure cost that’s more relevant. When you make that problem job one, what happens is, you start to see some innovation.”

One of the foundational points Hamilton made was that servers are by far the largest cost in data centers. That seemed logical to me as an outsider, but he said that actually counters some conventional wisdom in the IT industry, where buildings, power, and staff sometimes get a lot of emphasis.

Hamilton puts the whole thing in perspective with a slide from his presentation called “Where does the money go?” that includes the pie chart displayed here, slicing up estimated costs for a hypothetical no-name data center of about 50,000 servers. The chart is from this page at Hamilton’s blog, which includes a detailed explanation of how he arrived at the estimates for his model data center.

Hamiton said these calculations show a couple of interesting points. First of all, a really popular type of server in the industry right now is a more expensive model that can pack data more densely, saving expensive building space for IT managers.

“They’re very focused on, ‘Hey, if I can spend more on the server but I can get a little more density, it’s a great thing.’ And you look at this chart and say, well, wait a second, wait a second—the number one cost, the dominant cost is the cost of the servers and storage,” Hamilton said. “So almost certainly … Next Page »

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Votes are in for the second class of Pivotal Leaders—the peer-selected group of cleantech business leaders in the Pacific Northwest, created by Portland, OR-based venture firm Pivotal Investments. This year’s honors were whittled from a field of more than 700 nominations for leaders from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia.
One interesting thing about the criteria for the Pivotal Leaders is that they reach beyond just the world of business to include notable people from higher education, government, and the nonprofit sector. As we discussed when the program was launched, the founding idea is to formalize a network of top people who can build connections and grow the regional cleantech industry.
This year’s honorees include folks from outfits like Microsoft, McKinstry, Nike, Climate Solutions, SeQuential Biofuels, and much more. Go check out the list of nearly 50 people identified by the regional the cleantech community as poised to make a big impact in the next few years.

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[Updated 5/8/11. See below] It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of events, it was the age of allergies, it was the epoch of objectivity, it was the epoch of PR and self-promotion, it was the season of writing stories, it was the season of prescription drugs and nasal spray, it was the spring of big financing rounds, it was the winter of boring software acquisitions. (I’m not actually a Dickens fan, in case you couldn’t tell, though his career is one of the first things I wrote about as a journalist.)

My point is there’s a lot going on around town—at Xconomy and beyond. You can always find a current run-down on goings on at our local events page. But to help you sort through some of the key events going on in the innovation community in this particularly busy month, I’ve prepared a quick cheat sheet (in chronological order):

—Next week, on May 11, you’ll have your choice of hearing about the future of search and online services (and Bing vs. Google) from Microsoft president Qi Lu, or watching the grand finale of the MIT $100K business plan competition (with Vinod Khosla speaking). We’ll be at both events, which are free to attend. I’ll be moderating a Q&A with Qi Lu at Microsoft NERD in Kendall Square, and my colleague Erin will be at the $100K finale at Kresge Auditorium.

—On May 13, Health Tech 2011 is taking place at Bingham McCutchen in downtown Boston. Regina Herzlinger, Jay Parkinson, and Esther Dyson lead an all-star cast of innovators who will be speaking about the latest opportunities and strategies in healthcare delivery, mobile health, wellness and behavior change, and investing in all of the above. The event is organized by careinnovators, a healthcare website and networking-resource organization. [We meant to list this event in the original version of the article---Eds.]

—A big mobile event from MassTLC on May 13 at the Kendall Square Marriott will focus on the global impact of the wireless industry. Kara Swisher from WSJ and senior execs from Akamai, Cisco, Groupon, Jumptap, Movik, Where, and other top tech companies will be on hand.

—On May 18, the 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is happening at Kresge. The theme this year is “beyond the crossroads”—how chief information officers and senior managers must adapt to the digital business world, and what the latest opportunities and strategies are across industries. I’ll be moderating a CEO keynote panel featuring Brian Halligan of HubSpot, David Castellani of New York Life Retirement Plan Services, Tianwen Liu of iSoftStone, and Eric Openshaw of Deloitte.

—Angel Bootcamp is happening June 14, organized by Jon Pierce. This event, now in its second year, brings together the top people in early-stage startup investing, plus entrepreneurs and those who want to learn more about the field. Everyone from TechStars to Bill Warner to Founder Collective to Dharmesh Shah to CommonAngels will be there. But it’s invitation-only, so go to the site to request yours.

—Last but not least, XSITE 2011, Xconomy’s third annual flagship conference, is at Babson College on June 16 (whew—still lots to do). Our theme this year is “the entrepreneurship era,” the challenges and opportunities that are evolving fast as startups—and entrepreneurial practices in general—go increasingly mainstream. Our speakers include Desh Deshpande, Edward Jung, Phil Sharp, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, David Cancel, Nicholas Christakis, Joe Chung, Todd Dagres, Paul Sellew, Katie Rae, and many others. More to come soon.

We are getting a critical mass of startups, entrepreneurs, students, and investors involved, and we want to make sure everyone has a blast while making lots of great connections. If you have feedback or suggestions about how we can make XSITE more valuable to the innovation community, please contact me at gthuang@xconomy.com or @gthuang on Twitter.

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