saas

Developer tool maker Atlassian readies for IPO

With 460 full-time employees worldwide, 18,000 customers, and plans for an initial public offering on the horizon, Atlassian's revenue has grown from $17 million in 2007 to more than $100 million five years later.

Possibly more interesting is that the company doesn't have salespeople, was founded in Australia instead of Silicon Valley, and largely saw this enormous growth selling behind-the-firewall tools to development teams.

Let me put this out there upfront: developer tools are boring. And yet, you talk to Atlassian execs and its customers, and it seems to be a big lovefest for the company and … Read more

McAfee to plug 'spammer' hole this week

McAfee will release a fix this week for a bug in its SaaS for Total Protection anti-malware service that scammers were using to distribute spam, the company said today.

The problem came to light after McAfee customers reported in blog posts and forum sites that spammers were using a hole in McAfee's RumorServer relay service to secretly send spam from their machines. The customers said they noticed the problem after their e-mails were blocked by e-mail providers and their IP addresses appeared on blacklists.

The problem is isolated to the SaaS Total Protection service, according to David Marcus, director … Read more

McAfee software lets scammers hijack PCs to send spam

McAfee is looking into a problem with a service in its SaaS Endpoint Protection software that appears to be allowing computers to serve as open proxies for sending spam, the company told CNET today.

"We are aware of the issue and have both threat analytics and development teams diligently analyzing the problem and possible solutions," the company said in a statement. "We will have more information on the issue shortly."

A public relations representative said she was attempting to get more information on the matter but did not get back to CNET by the end of … Read more

Is software customization passe?

The ability to customize purchases has become the norm across so many industries, but it wasn't always so.

In the PC industry, for example, small local retailers built custom "white box" PCs going back to the fairly early days. But it wasn't until Dell went the build-to-order route in the 1990s (PDF) that it became commonplace. Today, although retail stores stock standard configurations, the option to order a custom config online is the norm.

It's therefore notable that the increasing shift, for some types of applications from on-premise software to software-as-a-service (SaaS) reverses this customization … Read more

Serial acquisitions vs. serial innovation

Gaining market share by buying up smaller companies in key tech sectors is an established practice in the software industry and has been for years. But is it the future?

In the past three years Oracle, CA, and Hewlett-Packard have been on acquisition sprees, buying their way into markets that they felt rounded out their product portfolios.

CA spent almost $1 billion rounding out its cloud computing capabilities in a series of buying sprees in 2009 and 2010. HP dropped a bomb on the software world with its hotly debated $12 billion purchase of Autonomy this August. And Oracle has … Read more

Opera Solutions nabs $84M for 'big data' analytics

This week Opera Solutions, a provider of "big data" analytics tools, announced that the company has taken in an $84 million investment to expand its rapidly growing business. The investment round, the company's first, was led by Silver Lake Sumeru, with participation from Accel-KKR, Invus Financial Advisors, JGE Capital Management, and Tola Capital.

Founded in 2004, Opera has grown from 10 people to more than 600 staffers globally with development locations in New York, Shanghai, and New Delhi. The staff includes 180 scientists working to solve data-oriented challenges.

I spoke with CEO and founder Arnab Gupta today … Read more

BMC's vision for the cloud

For a company with an $8 billion market cap, we really don't hear too much about BMC. And yet, when I met CTO Kia Behnia this week, I couldn't help but be very impressed by the company's focus on the cloud and its vision for where much of enterprise IT is likely to be heading.

According to Behnia, BMC currently has more than 85 customers for its cloud services products, primarily large companies looking into both public and private clouds as ways to enhance their environments.

From Behnia's perspective, the primary opportunity for the private cloud … Read more

Totango set to enhance SaaS sales tools

As enterprise users grew tired of installing massive suites of on-premise customer relation management software and Internet-oriented businesses began to rise, Salesforce.com came along and turned hosted applications, or software-as-a-service (SaaS), into a multi-billion dollar market.

Following in Salesforce's wake came lead-nurturing tools like Constant Contact, Eloqua, HubSpot, and Marketo that have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding, and have ostensibly added value to their customers' relationship.

This week we see the launch of Totango (pronounced like "to tango"), which bills itself as a "real-time customer usage analysis platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) … Read more

A field guide to the cloud

A gargantuan new GigaOm Pro report titled "A field guide to the cloud: current trends and future opportunities" (subscription only) was released today as part of the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco.

The report examines the cloud-computing landscape with a focus on five specific areas: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), cloud storage, and private/internal clouds. And despite the relative newness of the cloud market, there is quite a bit going on.

According to the report, IaaS is driving the cloud-computing discussion but has yet to reach … Read more