Isaac Saldana is co-founder and president of SendGrid. The roots of the company were born of his frustration in getting emails delivered through apps he was building, he tells us. So he started a company with the snappy name SMTPAPI.com, which as one might expect, featured an SMTP API. He applied and was accepted to the Techstars program, which calls itself the “#1 startup accelerator in the world” and is based in Boulder, CO. Techstars receive mentorship and $118,000 in funding in exchange for a 7-10% share in their company.

After completing the Techstars program in July 2009, Isaac got seed funding for the re-named company SendGrid in November of that year and Series A funding in April 2010. He also met Jim Franklin through Techstars co-founder Brad Feld, and Franklin now serves as SendGrid’s CEO.

Once briefed on this history, we had a couple of other questions for him:

Cloud Computing Journal: So can you give us an idea of the scale of the services SendGrid provides today?

Isaac Saldana: Delivering wanted email to the inbox is increasingly complex for businesses who rely on it as a primary vehicle to grow and retain their customer base. SendGrid is the global leader in providing technology solutions that dramatically increase the deliverability of application-generated and customer engagement email.

SendGrid has built a trusted, globally-distributed cloud platform that successfully delivers over 13 billion emails each month. To date, the company has sent over 250 billion emails, representing 2% of global non-spam email traffic.

CCJ: And who is your customer base?

Isaac: SendGrid’s customer base includes best-of-breed Internet and mobile-based applications such as Pinterest, Airbnb, Pandora, Hubspot, Spotify, Uber, Linkedin and FourSquare as well as more traditional enterprises.

SendGrid’s customers also include a large community of developers who build cloud-based applications that leverage our platform. In total, SendGrid has had over 175,000 customers.

CCJ: How do you see email evolving in an era of mobile devices?

Isaac: According to data from the U.S. Consumer Device Preference Report from Movable Ink, 65 percent of email is now being accessed via mobile devices in the US.

As a result, email is becoming an important tool for customer engagement via mobile devices.

But, while email opens on mobile devices have gone up, the time spent reading emails has decreases and as such the content, frequency and messages in email must be customized and optimized for mobile. SendGrid has several recommendations has for optimizing an email campaign on a mobile device and has conducted its own recent study in the US and UK about which devices are being used to open email.

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In 2013, there was increasing demand for cloud computing, with enterprise after enterprise committing to a rapid and vigorous redeployment of resources toward cloud-based solutions. Gigaom Research conducted surveys of both mainstream and leading-edge users in the second quarter of 2014 and results suggest that another wave of cloud technology investment is anticipated over the next 1-2 years.
In Gigaom’s analysis of the survey, there were evident key drivers and inhibitors for cloud adoption, as well as workload migration patterns.

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Launched this June at the Javits Center in New York City with over 6,000 delegate attendance, the largest IoT event in the world, 2nd international Internet of @ThingsExpo will take place November 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara ConventionCenter in Santa Clara, California with estimated 7,000 plus attendance over three days. @ThingsExpo is co-located with 15th international Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading IoT industry players in the world. In 2014, more than 200 companies will be present at the @ThingsExpo show floor, including global players, and hottest new technology pioneers.

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Numerex has been reported as an “IoT company to watch,” and that seems to be a reasonable statement. The company does its work in the cloud, of course, delivering its IoT DNA to devices, networks, and application tools for M2M customers. We had a few questions for Numerex’s Chief Innovation & Technology Officer Jeffrey O. Smith, and here’s what he told us:

IoT Journal: Numerex has been around for about 20 years, with a background in telemetry, as I understand it. How has that migrated to what’s known as M2M today?

Jeffrey O. Smith: I have referred to a Maslow’s hierarchy of telemetry needs as a tongue-in-cheek way of helping people understand the evolution the M2M market isgoing through. “Just get me the data, stupid” is the first layer, and the hierarchy’s top layer is optimization.

Supply chain is a good example of that evolution. Initial supply chain deployments were Œdots on a map most of our deployments lately are in optimizing things like dwell time in the supply chain utilizing location data with higher level data analytics and visualization.

IoT Journal: How much data will M2M be producing within a few years, and how should
IT managers plan for it?

Jeffrey: Most M2M applications do not create that much data, except for possibly fleet management, which has location reports continuously. But who really needs to know the address of a delivery van or other fleet asset with 15 seconds resolution from six months ago?

By contrast, I have said that control and BSS/OSS data and metadata will far outweigh the data from a device. Part of the reason for this is that devices which generate large amounts of data will have local
intelligence.

For example, cavitation detection in large pumps generate a tremendous amount of real-time vibration, pressure, etc. data. But that data is usually analyzed using high-level frequency analysis locally and
only one bit of info is needed to transmit—are we in cavitation or not? You will be able to drill down to the device to get at a particular moments raw data, but it should not be transmitted and analyzed in the
cloud if it can be done on the edge.

A second example is video. In this case, it can be filtered locally—motion detection and capture—or
transmitted through out of wireless-band medium, ie a land line.

IoT Journal: I wanted to say next that massive dataflows are of no value without monitoring, analysis,
collaborative tools, and a strategy, and you’ve pointed out that the non-local dataflows may not even be that massive. In any case, how does Numerex address these issues with its customers?

Jeffrey: Numerex has had an approach to “big data for real-time streaming” of data for several years. We have PhD¹s with specialization in this area.

Most of our initial success has been in internal projects to determine areas for cost savings and determining anomalistic behavior of network elements and devices. We use some pretty-leading edge technologies to do machine learning and real-time classification on streaming data (in terabytes) and use the cloud for processing this data in real-time.

We have only recently been commercializing these capabilities. The most interesting opportunity is what we have down lately in deep packet content analysis of live streams in coordination with network and billing data.

IoT Journal: What similarities and what differences do you find in M2M challenges
within the large vertical markets that you serve?

Jeffrey: Differences are usually in how the data is presented or the action that is taken. The similarities of challenges are in devices—which our new NX platform through licensing and off-the-shelf solutions can solve—by eliminating or reducing certification, for example.

Other similarities that we leverage are services like LBS. Indoor location is needed across verticals and the integration of those capabilities like advanced Kalman filtering to disparate tea-time data to infer good indoor location is helpful in most domains.

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Racemi announced an update to its DynaCenter cloud migration software that synchronizes changed data between source and target to minimize data latency prior to migration cut over. This new delta-data synchronization feature is especially useful for migrating large enterprise applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Process Management (BPM), and other enterprise applications, which are often performed by system integrators.

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Amazon, Google and Facebook are household names in part because of their mastery of Big Data. But what about organizations without billions of dollars to spend on Big Data tools – how can they extract value from their data? In his session at 6th Big Data Expo®, Ion Stoica, CEO and co-founder of Databricks, will discuss how the zero management cost and scalability of the cloud is addressing the challenges and pain points that data engineers face when working with Big Data. He will share how the growing demand for cloud-based Big Data workloads and frameworks is shaping the future of Big Data analysis.

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Dell announced the opening of the Dell Internet of Things (IoT) Lab to partner with customers to help them explore, test and deploy IoT solutions that help drive business outcomes and accelerate time to market. The Dell IoT Lab is located in the Dell Silicon Valley Solution Center in Santa Clara, Calif. and demonstrates Dell’s expanding IoT solutions and service capabilities.

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The problem with web application performance is directly related to the increasing page size and number of objects comprising pages today. Increasing corporate bandwidth (the pipe between the Internet and the organization) doesn’t generally help. The law of diminishing returns is at work; at some point more bandwidth (like more hardware) just isn’t enough because the problem isn’t in how fast bits are traveling, but how many times bits are traversing the network.

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Target. Home Depot. Community Health Systems. Nieman Marcus. Their names have been all in the news over the past year, though probably not in a way they would like. All have had very public data breaches affecting anywhere from 350,000 (Nieman Marcus) to 4.5 million (Community Health Systems) customers. Add the recent high-profile celebrity nude photo hacking scandal and cloud security has become the trending topic in all the news and social media. Some of the discussions reminded me of a line from a short-lived TV show called ‘Almost Human’ (yes I watched it, and since it was not renewed, apparently I was part of a small group). In the opening sequence of the show was the line ‘technology has forever altered the criminal landscape.’ Is that where we are? Are the barbarians at the gate? Will this, or should this, impact decisions about migrating to the cloud?

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Hybrid cloud refers to the federation of a public and private cloud environment for the purpose of extending the elastic and flexibility of compute, storage and network capabilities, in an on-demand, pay-as-you go basis. The hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities.

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