Elasticsearch, the real-time Big Data search and analytics concern formed to commercialize the eponymous open source project that one of its founders started, has gotten a $10 million A round.
The financing was led by Benchmark Capital with Rod Johnson, the creator of Spring and co-founder of SpringSource, and Data Collective kicking in.
The company says it will use the money to build out the organization in all functional areas and expand into key geographic regions to support the adoption of Elasticsearch.
The Amsterdam-base start-up means to open an office in Silicon Valley with the money.

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Server virtualization was, for many in IT, a major win. IT departments and data centers were suddenly able to do a whole lot more with a whole lot fewer resources. Naturally, as time goes on, it’s become more and more attractive for IT to consider desktop virtualization.
Yet, the virtual desktop requires an infrastructure that’s simply not in place for many companies, and the ROI isn’t always clear from the start.

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As I am writing this, I am crossing the Atlantic for the seventh time in about two months. I’m on my way to CloudExpo West in Santa Clara, one of the few technology trade shows that are still growing. At the event I will be sitting on the last Object Storage for Big Data panel of the season. Robin Harris – aka StorageMojo – and I have been working hard this fall educating the industry on the benefits, challenges and opportunities of Object Storage. We’ve been trying to explain how the current generation of Object Storage platforms is so much different from the first attempt at it (EMC’s Centera), how it enables companies cope with the massive amounts of unstructured data that we are all generating and how companies can even monetize archived data by re-activating their archives.

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Sears plus its acquired entity Kmart belong to Sears Holdings whose goal is to get closer to its customers. That requires big time analytic capabilities. While revenue at Sears has declined from $50B in 2008 to $42B in 2011, rivals like Wal-Mart. Target and Amazon have grown steadily with better profit. Amazon’s retail business has gone from $19B in revenue in 2008 to $48B in 2011, passing Sears for the first time.

Sears used IMS (IBM’s first generation database product) on mainframe plus Teradata. Its ETL process using IBM DataStage software on a cluster of distributed servers took 20 hours to run. Since their adoption of Hadoop back in 2010, one of the steps (taking 10 hours out of the 20 hours) ran at 17 minutes. Their slogan is “ETL must die”, as they would like to load raw data directly to Hadoop. The old systems consisted of EMC Greenplum, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle Exadata (four boxes) for analytical workload. That is all being replaced by Hadoop, Datameer, MySQL, InfoBright, and Teradata.

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This free application migration offer is available to Go Daddy customers through the end of the year. Additional migrations, if any, will be priced on a case-by-case basis.
Commenting on the program, Greg O’Connor, AppZero CEO notes, «The Go Daddy situation is a great example of why there is a real business need to avoid cloud lock-in. AppZero’s Zapp application migration software will identify, extract, and migrate server applications from/to any cloud and will do it in minutes. In this case, for each Go Daddy customer, we will do the first two migrations no charge and deliver those applications to any cloud of choice. At the very least, this offer gives Go Daddy cloud customers the breathing room to make strategic decisions.»

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As a follow up to my article on Infrastructure as a Service, here is a four minute video:

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Walking around Cloud Expo in Santa Clara yesterday, sitting in on various sessions, grabbing conversations with old friends and new acquaintances, I learned a few things:

The technologists are still ahead of the customers. Although AWS has been around since 2006, the impression here is that most enterprises are still migrating to the cloud very slowly. I take this as a good sign, as the best is yet to come. I wrote last year that it was still only Year One for the cloud; this may still be true.

I love PaaS and its potential, but this seems be a mystery still to many companies. I think it’s because decades of legacy, stovepiped architecture, applications, and data have resulted in 80-90% of IT budgets and time to be spent on routine operations rather than innovation. This habit is hard to change, especially so since most people, to be honest, would rather focus on the routine rather than the innovative, because the innovative is hard.

Green continues to emerge. At Cloud Expo and what I’ve seen in the industry in general, it’s taking a sensible, efficiency-oriented approach, rather than cast in apocalyptic global warming or nanny-state terms.

There’s been a lot of consolidation in the industry lately. I’m seeing dozens more companies who seem to be staking their claim to a single area of superior core competence, and are waiting for someone to buy them out.

Great to see the Holland pavilion in full swing. Lots of fresh ideas in the areas of collaboration, cloud management, and real-time monitoring.

Cloud’s inevitability is as strong as ever, even if most people’s day-to-day routine may not pick up on this. But one speaker said the amount of data on the Internet continues to double every five years or so, and I’m starting to hear the word “yottabyte” thrown around. The disconnect is that grand, abstract visions don’t help anyone get the milk delivered today. But we need to know that, even with a perpetual Moore’s Law, data storage and transmission does have a price (eg, 18 cents a gigabyte for bandwidth delivered by Rackspace), and as we start to think in terms of billions and trillions of gigabytes we simply must have the means to deal with this amount of data. Cloud computing is the one, true path.

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To showcase what Holland and the Dutch Cloud Computing Industry have to offer, the Dutch government invited 10 selected companies with international experience and ambition to present their software and services at the Holland Pavilion during Cloud Expo Silicon Valley in Santa Clara, November 5-8. The ten exhibiting companies at the Holland Pavilion are: IS Channels, Interxion, Cameramanager.com , Servoy, Stealth Software, Workvoices, Pangaea, 2020 Vision, Silver Solutions and TBlox.

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Arrived at Cloud Expo for its opening in Santa Clara, and pleasantly surprised to see JETRO on the exhibitor’s program. This is the Japan External Trade Organization, a group that held a lot of sway in the 70s and 80s, when Americans thought Japan was going to take over the US economy.

Despite two economic “lost decades,” Japan remains the world’s third largest economy, and a far wealther nation than China, which superseded its overall economy a few years ago.

Japan has scored well in the research we’ve conducted at our Tau Institute over the past several months.Even though our algorithms tend to highlight developing nations rather than the highly developed places such as Japan, the country nonetheless ranks in the Top 20 among the 102 countries we’ve studied. It does perform in the middle of the pack amongst its closest peers, as its Internet speed and broadband access could be higher, and its very high cost of living works against it.

Cloud computing is being deployed in its financial sector, telcos, and increasingly in its transportation and manufacturing sectors, according to reports from colleagues. I’ll see what I can find out from the JETRO reps. Ironically, it seems the United States would likely favor a stronger Japan these days; certainly the purchase of lots of US cloud technology and services could be a new bright spot for the industry.

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CA Technologies has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against New Relic
in district court in New York seeking an injunction for patent infringement.
It wants damages for lost profits and legal costs. It alleges that New Relic,
which was founded by Lew Cirne, a former CA employee, infringes three
CA Application Performance Management (APM) patents.

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