All posts by Richard

Andreessen Horowitz, Business Intelligence, General Catalyst Partners, GoodData, Tenaya Capital, Venture Funding, Windcrest Partners

GoodData Gets $25 Million for Business Intelligence Tools

Image representing GoodData as depicted in Cru...

GoodData announced today that it has closed $25 million in Series C funding led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from new investor Next World Capital, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners. The company has raised $53.5 million in total to date.

Brian Paul, Managing Director at Tenaya Capital will join the board of directors. Other existing board members include John O’Farrell, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz; Larry Bohn, Managing Director of General Catalyst Partners; James Gellert, Partner at Windcrest Partners, Dave Girouard, former General Manager of Google Enterprise, and Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of GoodData.

Since the company was founded, more than 6,000 customers have adopted GoodData to monetize their data. In 2011, the company posted 600 percent bookings growth and more than doubled employees and customers, making GoodData one of the fastest growing companies in the space.

GoodData will use the new funding to continue to invest in technology innovation as well as build sales and marketing programs to raise awareness and accelerate adoption of its disruptive, cloud-based platform.

“It’s time to pull the plug on the old business intelligence model — it’s clear that it is obsolete,” said Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of GoodData. “We are pioneering a new approach to business intelligence that will monetize and bring big data to life.”


BMC, IT Management, User experience, Wayfair

BMC Software Delivers Chart and Compass to Help IT Map the User Experience in the Cloud

Image representing BMC Software as depicted in...

BMC Software has created a “chart and compass” to quickly map and navigate the end user experience. BMC End User Experience Management is a  solution that helps IT organizations rapidly diagnose and improve customer satisfaction rates. The latest release includes applications running in the cloud, with visibility from the end user all the way back to the code.

“End user experience monitoring is a critical criterion of the interaction between the human, device, and customer-facing software applications,” said Jonah Kowall, research director at Gartner. “While this criterion is only one part of a complete application performance monitoring strategy, this one criterion will have an ever increasing role in which applications are successfully deployed and sticky – particularly in the cloud.”

“The BMC solution has really increased the pace at which we identify problems,” said Steve Conine, CTO and co-founder, Wayfair, the largest online retailer of home furnishings. “We don’t want customer service calling us up, walking over and telling us something is down. We want to know it is down before they call us.”


Big Data, eDiscovery, Electronic discovery, Information Management, Retention period, Unstructured data

DataIQ Aims for Big Data Visualization Simplicity at Low Cost

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StoredIQ today announced DataIQ, designed to give organizations a simple, low-cost, visualization solution to understand their unstructured data — without first moving it to a repository — to help answer data intelligence questions that challenge many of today’s IT organizations such as:

“Every company has more data than it can manage. But few can precisely locate it, assess the value of it, or make much sense out of it when they need to,” said Ted Friedman, vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner. “Information management projects can be very intimidating. To set a course for success, organizations need to build insight regarding the whereabouts, meaning, and usage of their data.”

Designed to run on the StoredIQ Platform, DataIQ scales from terabytes to petabytes, from single corporate offices to global enterprises, and provides a single, holistic view across a multitude of enterprise data sources and hundreds of file types — without moving any data from its native location. With DataIQ, organizations have the power to make informed decisions before starting any information management initiative including: data migration, storage optimization, records management, eDiscovery, data clean up, and information governance. DataIQ gives companies the ability to:

  • Identify – interesting subsets of information without moving
    any data across the corporate network
  • Analyze – data using advanced visualizations to spot compliance
    violations, get out in front of the eDiscovery process, make
    infrastructure planning decisions, jump start records initiatives, etc.
  • Act – copy, collect, and move data that requires further
    processing or retention; defensibly delete data that provides negative
    value to the company

“As we worked with customers on information management initiatives from eDiscovery, information governance, storage, and records retention, one common theme bubbled up over and over…customers needed a simple tool to give them a comprehensive understanding of their unstructured data,” said Phil Myers, CEO of StoredIQ. “DataIQ was designed as a quick start data intelligence application that empowers customers with knowledge about their data to better plan and prepare for any information management project.”


Alpha Exchange, Business Intelligence, Market data, Mobile, Partnerships, Xignite

Alpha Exchange Partners with Xignite to Deliver Canadian Securities Market Data

Image representing Xignite as depicted in Crun...

Xignite Inc. and Alpha Market Services Inc., the data distributor for Toronto Based Alpha Exchange, today announced their agreement to launch new services offering access to Alpha Exchange real-time and historical market data via the Internet. Alpha Exchange trades securities listed on the TSX, TSX Venture and Alpha Exchange listing markets. Alpha Exchange has roughly 20% of Canadian market share and will leverage Xignite’s leading financial market data cloud solutions to deliver data through easy to consume application programming interfaces (APIs). These services are ideally suited to fuel the next generation enterprise and mobile applications, increasing the Exchange’s global reach.

“Alpha Exchange prides itself in being a leader in innovation, an enabler of technological initiatives and a proponent of market data democratization,” stated Jos Schmitt, CEO of Alpha Exchange. “Putting in place a market data cloud solution with Xignite as well as being its first non-US exchange partner is a natural but also a very exciting step forward for the Exchange.”

The first phase, scheduled for the beginning of August, will include the addition of Alpha Exchange’s last sale data to the award winning Xignite Market Data Cloud platform available via Xignite.com. The data will include real-time last sale prices and minute-level tick bars for all securities trading on Alpha Exchange. For pricing and availability, call 1(650)655-3700 or email dataexperts@xignite.com.

“We are delighted that Alpha has recognized the Market Data Cloud’s potential to grow its global business,” stated Stephane Dubois, CEO and founder of Xignite Inc. “This relationship marks an important step in expanding access to global financial market data.”

The second phase includes the launch of the Alpha Data Cloud, a rich suite of cloud-based market data services powered by the XigniteOnDemand platform, and is slated for Q4 2012. The Alpha Data Cloud will provide easy and cost effective access to real-time data via Internet for customers around the world, and provide a one-stop shop for all Alpha Exchange historical and reference data. The service will allow customers to access the data via APIs, to download custom subsets of historical data, to subscribe to reoccurring data delivery or to replay a full day of trades and quotes.


AppNeta, Business transaction management, IT Management, Network performance, PathView Cloud, Tools

AppNeta Enhances Web Application Performance Monitoring

AppNeta today announced the launch of PathView Cloud with AppView Web for insight into Web application performance for end users. PathView Cloud automatically delivers Web performance visibility from the perspective of remote enterprise users, and also delivers network performance insight.

“When the Electronic Health Record (EHR) applications don’t perform well, end users get frustrated, adoption decreases, and the value of the application is never realized,” said Bob Dupuis, Director, Technical Services, Arcadia Solutions. “By using PathView Cloud with AppView Web as part of our EHR optimization services we can quickly determine root cause and resolution to performance problems. AppView Web also enables our managed services team to proactively manage EHR infrastructures, increasing physician satisfaction and adoption. This results in more meaningful use of the critical application.”

As more and more organizations transition to Web-based technology for business critical applications, it is necessary for IT teams to have 24/7 visibility from the end user’s perspective, and be able to understand and troubleshoot performance issues wherever they are occurring in the network or the application. When critical business applications such as CRM systems, hosted email, collaboration tools or healthcare and financial record services stop working, so do the employees.

“Poor end-user performance of critical Web applications like Netsuite, Salesforce.com, Google Apps and hosted email seriously disrupts business operations,” said Jim Melvin, CEO of AppNeta. “Unlike traditional Web performance tools available today, PathView Cloud with AppView Web enables you to see the performance of these applications within your own network and how they are impacting service delivery to your end users.”

With the newest AppView Web enhancements, PathView Cloud now provides a continuous view of the actual application performance with unprecedented network performance insight. This integrated performance visibility enables IT operations teams to monitor and troubleshoot performance of Web applications more quickly and easily than ever before. With a simple click within the PathView Cloud reporting interface, users can drill down from the overall performance of their Web application into the specific application steps and a detailed view of the Web pages involved to understand the cause of poor performance. AppView Web is compatible with Web applications that require authentication and performs multi-step scripted actions to accurately assess the application performance experienced by the user.


Android, appMobi, Free, iOS, Mobile, PhoneGap, Tools

storeView Offers Free Cross Platform App Store Analytics Service for HTML5, PhoneGap Developers

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appMobi today announced storeView, a new, free, cloud-based reporting service for PhoneGap and hybrid HTML5 app developers that aggregates and displays detailed app analytics across all the most popular app stores in a single dashboard.“As game and app developers have begun to leverage HTML5’s ‘write once, deploy everywhere’ power, the issue of app store fragmentation has emerged as these apps have become successful across multiple stores and platforms”

With the explosion of new cross platform app development, developers are increasingly posting their apps to multiple app stores. Each of the app stores uses a different method to report sales and activity, creating massive fragmentation. This “App Store Fragmentation” issue prevents developers from understanding app performance and trends information that every developer needs to achieve maximum profitability. With the release of storeView, appMobi has stepped up to provide a completely free service that solves this issue for PhoneGap and HTML5 hybrid app developers.

“As game and app developers have begun to leverage HTML5’s ‘write once, deploy everywhere’ power, the issue of app store fragmentation has emerged as these apps have become successful across multiple stores and platforms,” said Sam Abadir, appMobi CTO. “We experienced this issue ourselves with Boom Town, the first massively cross platform HTML5 game, currently available in 7 different app stores. We also realized just how little information is provided by many of the app stores. For example, the only analytic provided by Apple’s App Store and Google Play is download count – that’s all they can tell you about your app! We created storeView for internal use and found it to be an invaluable tool. Now we’re giving it away for anyone who’s using HTML5 to create apps.”

storeView is a completely free cloud service. There will never be any charge for setting up an account, for adding apps to the system, nor for the number of users a particular app has. Adding storeView analytics to any HTML5-based app is extremely easy, with the addition of a single include file and just one line of JavaScript code. storeView provides deep, granular insight into the performance and activity of developers’ apps in each of today’s leading app stores, including Apple, Android (Google Play), Facebook, Amazon, Chrome, Mozilla and Barnes & Noble.

To view storeView analytics, developers simply log into their account and select from a variety of reports. The available reports include monthly uniques on all platforms, iOS starts by device, Android starts by device, app starts by platform, and 30 day uniques vs. app starts. Armed with this important data, developers can make informed decisions on allocating development and marketing resources, uncover unseen relationships between devices and platforms, and most importantly, optimize app store profits.

PhoneGap and HTML5 Developers can sign up for storeView free at http://www.appmobi.com/storeView.