The bigger of today’s two is Tableau Software, which specializes in data visualization. Yesterday, the company announced that the shares priced at $31, raising north of $254 million in the process.

The company will be listing on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol DATA. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are running the deal. Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan, UBS Investment Bank, BMO Capital Markets and JMP Securities are also underwriting.

Tableau’s biggest shareholder is the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, which led two investment rounds for a combined $15 million, the last being a $10 million series B in 2008 in a deal led by Forest Baskett. NEA’s stake amounted to about 37 percent before the sale, worth more than $607 million at the share offering price.

Founder and chief scientist Pat Hanrahan has about 18 percent of the company, worth about $295 million at the offering price. His co-founders — Christian Chabot, chairman and CEO, and Christopher Stolte, chief development officer — have about 15 percent each, with both stakes worth north of $235 million. Meritech Capital Partners has a stake amounting to about 6.5 percent, worth more than $102 million at the offering price.

The other one going today is Marketo, the cloud-based marketing software company. Market price yesterday was at $13 a share, raising almost $79 million. It will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol MKTO.

Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse are leading the offering. UBS, Canaccord Genuity, Raymond James and JMP Securities are also underwriting.

Marketo’s biggest shareholder is InterWest Partners, which prior to the sale had a 33.3 percent stake worth more than $302 million. Storm Ventures has a stake of a little more than 17 percent, worth $66 million. Battery Ventures, which led a $50 million Series F in 2011, has a 7 percent stake, worth about $28 million.

By 7:30 pm ET, Cisco shares had risen to $23.06, having closed at $21.21 during the regular session. Its results, reported earlier today, were only slightly ahead of the consensus view, but as with so many things today, slightly good is good enough.

The better news is that Cisco has historically been a pretty good barometer on the state of the tech economy generally. What it sees in its results, good or bad, is what other companies usually see within a couple of quarters.

“Slow and steady growth” was the phrase of the day. Sales grew by slightly more than 5 percent, but several segments grew faster. Service revenue grew by more than 7 percent year on year, while sales of products grew 5 percent.

Products sold into data centers, mainly servers in Cisco’s UCS line, grew by a healthy 77 percent, but accounted for only $515 million, or slightly more than 4 percent of sales. Wireless sales grew by 27 percent, but at $523 million weren’t much bigger as a percentage of revenue.

Service provider video grew 30 percent, accounting for nearly $1.3 billion in sales. And at least part of that growth can be attributed to NDS, the Israeli software company for which Cisco paid $5 billion last year.

In switching, Cisco’s biggest business segment, sales were $3.4 billion, down 2 percent year on year, but when you compare that to the results of other networking companies like Juniper, Riverbed and F5 Networks that have been reporting more difficult quarters in recent weeks and months, a drop of 2 percent isn’t so bad.

I just got off the phone with Cisco CEO — and D: All Things Digital speaker — John Chambers. A quick summary of our conversation is below:

AllThingsD: John, it felt like a fairly positive quarter in a tough environment. What’s really going on?

Chambers: I’d break it into four pieces. First, it was our ninth consecutive quarter with record revenue. And it was the sixth where earnings grew faster than revenue. That’s a pretty good indicator that we’re growing well in a tough environment. Secondly, we’ve moved from being the No. 1 communications company to having a shot at being the No. 1 IT company at the moment when those two things will actually combine. … It’s that transition that we now have in front of us that’s kind of exciting. It also says that we’re in the right technologies: Cloud, data center, mobility, video. We’re also the thought leader on the Internet of everything, which will be the next major transition for the enterprise and service providers. The fourth one was the geographic breakdown. I don’t think anyone saw as strong a set of numbers in the U.S. as we did, and it was across all market segments. Public sector grew 5 percent, enterprise grew 10 percent, commercial grew 13 percent, service providers grew 10 percent. It means that our relevance is changing. It also means that, barring a surprise, the U.S. economy is going to continue to recover at this pace. And it has to for the rest of the world to come out of all this.

Let’s talk about IT. If you’re becoming more of a general IT player, if you see yourself shaking up that business, then who do you see yourself taking business away from?

In the data center, it’s clearly the IBMs, the Hewlett-Packards and the Dells of the world. In the wireless space, it’s often the startups or some of the traditional players. It wasn’t so long ago that startups like Aruba were awfully tough on us. In the data center with software and hardware and silicon coming together, there’s the people who think it’s going to be a software-only world [like Big Switch --Ed.]. We think it’s an architectural play that we’re going to win on. So our competitors are different in every category, but that’s what you want. If the customers are going to buy an architecture that solves a business problem and you’re the only major supplier that crosses the service provider and the enterprise and commercial segments, and you go from the cloud and hybrid clouds to the data centers, and reach any device and you’re agnostic about whatever device it is, that is a strong position to be in.

And still one of your biggest segments, switching, was down slightly. What’s going on there?

It has been a tough environment there. As you know, our industry peers have had terrible year-to-date numbers on their stocks. When I look at the F5s and Junipers and Riverbeds of the world, you’re seeing them surprising the market and declines in their share prices. Same thing with the IT players. We’re one of the few players that hit and exceed expectations in that category. So it speaks to our relevance changing. If you’re selling standalone products, the market gets really tough. And speaking of our competitors, a lot of them said they never saw us coming. We’re pretty good at flying under the radar at first and then blowing right by, and then being tough. We’re really tough to beat.

It’s at this point that I pick a song that I think best portrays Cisco’s results. It has become a little tradition that I began when Cisco started to turn around after another sequence of disappointing quarters, and when we talk, Chambers always asks about it.

With the phrase “slow and steady” appearing so much in Chambers’ comments, and with the quarter’s results generally feeling upbeat, I thought the muscular 1971 Aretha Franklin classic “Rock Steady” fit the bill. Here it is.

The company announced a short while ago that it had landed a $45 million Series E round of financing led by Janus Capital; the Hillman Company, the investment firm run by Pittsburgh billionaire Henry Hillman; and a third party that was not named. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Shasta Ventures also participated, as did a few accounts managed by investment firm T. Rowe Price. Cisco Systems is also an investor.

The round brings Apptio’s total capital raised to $136 million. Its last reported implied valuation was about $600 million. CEO Sunny Gupta wouldn’t tell me the new valuation, but said it was a “considerable improvement.” You can probably do the math yourself.

When I last checked in with Gupta in mid-2011, Apptio, which is based outside Seattle in Bellevue, Wash., had 60 customers, including Facebook, and was managing about $50 billion in tech investments. Now it has 125 customers, including Boeing, Target and Xerox.

Managing IT costs and investments is all Apptio does. Gupta is a former partner exec with Opsware, the company that venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz famously sold to Hewlett-Packard.

He spotted a shift in priorities: CIOs were increasingly focused not on managing technology, but on getting the best bang out of that technology for the dollar, and on keeping costs as low as possible.

Taking a round from institutional investors like Janus is usually a sign that an IPO is coming next. That’s the trajectory that both Facebook and Workday followed. Gupta was a little evasive when I asked him about his IPO plans. There’s nothing imminent, but he didn’t say anything to imply that we shouldn’t be watching for an S-1 filing within the next year or so. I certainly will be.

At its SuiteWorld conference in San Jose, Calif., today, CEO Zach Nelson announced that cookware retailer Williams-Sonoma had picked NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce product as the backbone of its expansion into Australia.

If you think back, it was a year ago tomorrow that NetSuite moved into what it called at the time commerce-as-a-service, adding another option to the blank-as-a-service meme that tends to crop up in discussions around companies that offer pretty much anything via cloud infrastructure.

Nelson told me that Williams-Sonoma was able to roll the entire service out to four brands in three months. “It’s a very important win for us,” he said.

The point of SuiteCommerce is to create a seamless experience for customers, whether they’re buying something online or on the Web. As customers have essentially come to expect to be able to buy anything and everything online, the traditional back-end commerce engines like Microsoft’s Dynamics, Sage and others have tended to be imperfectly combined with patchwork products for selling on the Web.

The combination has never been ideal. Customer-facing bits have rarely if ever been unified with the ones that also face suppliers. That has a way of complicating things like managing inventory and supply chains. And things are getting even more complicated as machines are programmed to automatically buy things from other machines based on a predefined set of circumstances.

NetSuite built SuiteCommerce to speak directly to the core enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) functions that are already its bread and butter. In English, that means that the new engine comes into the process already knowing everything it needs to know about the business.

Separately NetSuite announced a partnership with AutoDesk, the design software company, that it says will speed up the process of designing and manufacturing a product, and also help take costs out along the way.

It’s also worth noting that NetSuite shares are trading at their highest levels ever today. They’re up 2.5 percent to $94.42.

CEO Aaron Levie just announced the deal in a corporate blog post. Crocodoc is a seven-person team hailing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its technology has powered the document sharing and embedding capabilities of Yammer, LinkedIn and SAP.

The company had raised a small amount of capital from Y Combinator and Dave McClure, among others. Box isn’t disclosing the financial terms of the deal, though Levie just told me in a phone conversation that “everyone concerned is happy with the deal.”

Crocodoc, Levie said, has gone deeper into the experience of rendering documents on the Web and on mobile devices using HTML5 than other companies that are involved in presenting and sharing documents, like, say, Scribd and DocStoc.

If you think of Scribd as sort of a YouTube for documents, then Crocodoc, Levie says, is comparable to Brightcove. Where YouTube presents video in a consumer friendly way, Brightcove powers video experiences for other companies. “They’re going out and powering the experience of presenting documents. We do this now when it comes to collaboration and content, but we don’t do it yet for documents.”

Crocodoc CEO Ryan Damico will become Box’s director of platform, and the rest of the Crocodoc team will be joining Box. Eventually the Crocodoc brand will fade away inside Box, Levie said.

The deal is Box’s second acquisition. In 2009 it acquired Incredo, a company focused on document and media viewing. Levie said that as Box continues to expand, it will occasionally make opportunistic acquisitions of small companies.

It can probably afford to do more deals. Box has raised a combined total of $312 million. Its most recent round was $150 million, led by private equity firm General Atlantic. It also has strategic investments from Salesforce.com and SAP. Levie has said publicly that Box is eyeing an IPO sometime in 2014.

Other investors in the round include Kernel Capital and ACT Venture Capital (two Irish VC firms) and Enterprise Ireland, a government-backed development outfit. Cloud software company VMware is also an investor.

FeedHenry specializes in providing a cloud-based platform-as-a-service for developing and deploying mobile applications aimed at large organizations. It also runs what it describes as a “backend as a service” that helps get mobile apps working with existing enterprise applications. Its partners include Rackspace, Telefonica, Hewlett-Packard and VMware’s open source platform service, Cloud Foundry.

It’s also a would-be rival to Parse, the mobile development firm that was acquired by Facebook last month.

A little less than an hour ago, NetSuite reported a 32 percent jump in revenue to $91.6 million, while recurring revenue — a key metric for cloud companies that sell their software on a subscription basis — grew by 28 percent to $74 million. Cash flow from operations was also up by 39 percent to $14.7 million.

On a non-GAAP basis, NetSuite earned $2.8 million, or 4 cents a share, which was down slightly from the year-ago period of 6 cents, but it also beat the expectations of analysts, who had forecast EPS of 3 cents on sales of $90.9 million. On a GAAP basis, it lost $13 million, or 18 cents a share, versus $7.7 million, or 11 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter.

While NetSuite has traditionally served small and medium businesses, the company started going after bigger fish last year, selling its ERP software that competes with offerings from software giant SAP and Oracle to global subsidiaries. In time, enough of those subsidiaries will come to rely on NetSuite that some will standardize on it across the entire company. “We have a lot of pilot projects going, and those pilots are starting to expand,” Nelson told me in a call earlier today. “As they begin to see the product and start to like it, a lot of those large enterprises are beginning to look for other places within the organization that they can deploy NetSuite.”

That’s probably why NetSuite just raised its guidance for the rest of the year. On a conference call with analysts moments ago, CEO Zach Nelson just boosted the company’s outlook on fiscal 2013 sales. The company now expects to report FY13 sales in the range of $404 million to $408 million. The old range was $397 million to $402 million. A bad sign of doings in the cloud business it is not.

Following through on a plan they first announced last year, the two companies said that Box’s content-sharing capabilities would be integrated with Jive’s software. If your company happens to be a customer of both — not uncommon — content in Box will from now on be easily accessible from within Jive and vice versa.

Yesterday I got Box CEO and D11 speaker Aaron Levie on the phone with Jive CEO Tony Zingale to talk about why they’re pairing up and which competitors they share in common.

Here are some highlights from our conversation.

AllThingsD: So you said last year you were going to team up in this way. What exactly have you done here and why is it important?

Zingale: Back in October we announced our intent to go to market together. It had a lot to do with the complementary nature of our products and the huge shift we were seeing in the marketplace as enterprises retool around collaboration and social and mobile. And being the two market leaders in those areas, it makes sense we would get together and connect our two systems. We think it’s a huge deal between the two companies and can now demonstrate the functionality now that it’s shipping.

Aaron, Box was sort of built from the ground up with working with other companies in mind. And now here you are working a little more closely with one in particular. Is there any other outside company with which Box has so close a relationship?

Levie: This is critical to our strategy. We feel that content needs to extend into all sorts of business applications that you may want to use. As you look at the social enterprise and collaboration space more broadly, Jive is the clear leader. So the deeper that we can combine our products and services, it creates one unified experience for customers. And true to Tony being the master of the enterprise, they are in a very big number of large companies that we’re now starting to serve. This will only accelerate that. At a more meta-level, it represents a bigger trend. Five or 10 years ago you were forced to buy all your technology as a single large stack from an Oracle or an SAP. But now because of collaborations like this, and because of open APIs, you can mix and match the best IT products and services. That will fundamentally change the IT landscape. Startups and disruptors will be highly favored over established players.

One big competitor you share is Salesforce.com. Salesforce has Chatter, which competes with Jive, and it has also announced plans to build a product that it says will compete with Box, though Salesforce is also an investor in Box. Can you unpack that shared dynamic for me?

Zingale: The intent to compete with Jive has existed there for years now. The second thing is that I would riff off what Aaron just said. The Salesforce solution is a stack of their own. If you want to use all the Salesforce apps for sales and marketing and service, go have a nice day. But Chatter has morphed into sort of a front-end user interface for its stack of vertically integrated applications. Box and Jive are both agnostic and we’re both going to integrate with whatever is there and present in the customer’s environment. In our case that includes Salesforce. We add a lot of value on top of the CRM (customer relationship management) app, both inside and outside the enterprise. Their position is very much confined to their three silos. And yes they’re open, but I don’t see many enterprises embracing that as the way to integrate how they get things done. We sit on top of and really don’t any more compete head to head with Chatter as much as we once did.

Levie: I would posit that for Tony and myself, the bigger shared enemy for us is probably Microsoft.

Zingale: Same for us.

Levie: I think that in the land of Microsoft, we are all disruptors collectively. Salesforce included. The big opportunity is the legacy spend on collaboration tools. For those companies moving to the cloud, that is the big opportunity for this kind of service.

Aaron, does Box work as closely with any other company as it is now doing with Jive?

Levie: The only other one where we have this depth of integration is NetSuite. We go pretty deep on the Salesforce CRM. But we certainly look for areas where we have a shared customer base, or where customers want to extend the content from Box into something else.

How much do your customers overlap?

Zingale: As we both disrupt the new wave of enterprise applications, Jive has always attacked the larger companies, the ones with thousands of knowledge workers. The attraction for us is that Box has a huge reach within small companies, but also small groups within large companies like American Express or Fidelity or Procter and Gamble using Box is very interesting to us.

Levie: There probably isn’t an enterprise over 1,000 employees that we talk with that isn’t either on Jive or exploring Jive, mainly because social is the type of product where you want it to go across the entire company and not just be integrated with your sales applications.

SoftBank Capital and Yahoo Japan said they had created an unusual $20 million fund to help U.S. startups break into the Japanese market, while also upping a presence in the U.S.

The partnership between Japan’s largest Internet company — which is also a joint venture with Yahoo — and the venture arm of the giant SoftBank Corp. will invest in companies from early-stage funding to later-stage expansion and focus on mobile applications, social media, e-commerce, online advertising, gaming and cloud computing.

The new funds for that are being put into SoftBank Capital’s $100 million Technology Fund ’10. As part of the deal, Toshiaki Chiku will become head of U.S. operations in Manhattan. SoftBank Capital also recently announced a $250 million PrinceVille Fund, aimed at growth-stage startups in Asia.

Among the firm’s recent exits: Bluefin Labs went to Twitter, Buddy Media to Salesforce.com, Huffington Post to AOL, Hyperpublic to Groupon and OMGPOP to Zynga.

Now, it will be focusing even more on helping U.S. startups in Asia.

“Japan can be challenging for many U.S. companies, and given our scale and affiliation with SoftBank Corp., we’re in a great position to help them grow and succeed,” said Chiku in a statement.

SoftBank Capital and Yahoo Japan used performance display advertising company Criteo as an example of a successful investment, in which it also helped the company enter the Asian market (although, technically, Criteo is HQed in France).

Sales were up 6 percent to $5.39 billion, about $30 million below the consensus of $5.42 billion. Earnings per share were 39 cents, a penny off the expected 40 cents.

Never fear, though. EMC says it will still meet its guidance for the fiscal year. It still expects to earn $1.85 a share on sales of $23.5 billion. In the meantime, it will buy back $1 billion worth of stock this year.

EMC shares fell by 2 percent in pre-market trading.

Meanwhile, VMware, the cloud computing software company in which EMC is a majority shareholder, is getting whacked this morning on disappointing outlook. It reported earnings yesterday. VMware said it now expects sales in the range of $1.21 billion to $1.24 billion, below the consensus view of $1.25 billion. VMware shares are falling in pre-market trading. As of 8:45 am ET, the price was $71.51, down $4.19 or 5.5 percent.

You can’t say you weren’t warned. IBM’s first earnings miss in eight years certainly had all the appearances of a big red flag about the IT industry generally, and hardware sales specifically. Now we have to see whether or not Big Blue turns out to be an accurate read-through for NetApp and Hewlett-Packard.

Facebook officially confirmed what the Des Moines Register reported over the weekend. The small community of Altoona, Iowa, will be home to its next data center.

The facility will be Facebook’s fourth data center, joining those in Prineville, Ore.; Forest City, N.C.; and Luleå, Sweden.

In a corporate blog post, Jay Parikh, vice president of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, said the new facility will incorporate a lot of the features in the other data centers, but will also include some “evolutionary improvements” to the design of the building, networking and other elements

According to a statement from the office of Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, Facebook will invest nearly $300 million in the project, and that will create “hundreds” of construction jobs right away. If typical, when completed, the 476,000-square-foot facility will require only a low two-digit number of employees to keep it running. Facebook got $18 million in state tax breaks in exchange for a commitment to hire at least 31 people and pay them at least $23.12 an hour.

It will be built on a 194-acre site that could accommodate at least two more data centers of similar size.

But even so, for all the talk about cyberwar, it didn’t come close to eclipsing the amount of financially motivated crime that took place in the digital realm, a new study by telecom giant Verizon has found.

In its ninth annual survey of data breach investigations, which will be formally released tomorrow, Verizon found that old-fashioned financial motivations accounted for 75 percent of computer security incidents. State-sponsored attacks accounted for 20 percent. And, as you might expect, the victims are the organizations that move or hold a lot of money: Financial organizations were targets 37 percent of the time, followed by retailers (24 percent) and manufacturing, transportation and utilities (20 percent).

The study’s sample size included 621 confirmed data breaches and more than 47,000 reported computer security incidents in 27 countries and territories. Verizon has been gathering the data for nine years, and now has records encompassing 2,500 data breaches and 1.2 billion compromised records.

Attacks by outside entities accounted for the majority of breaches, while only 14 percent were attributed to insiders and 1 percent to business partners; 71 percent of breaches targeted user devices and 54 percent were aimed at servers. Perhaps most troubling: Two thirds of the breaches reported required a month or more to discover.

The benefit of a study like this is that it happens at all. Since most large companies and organizations aren’t usually willing to disclose when they’ve been attacked — most have — and suffered a breach that actually cost them some money, it’s rare to see this sort of trend data gathered up in one place.

One interesting thing I noted as I scanned the report. For all the security-related anxiety that seems to have arisen during the two years or so around the “bring your own device” trend in the enterprise — where employers let workers use their personal smartphones or tablets or notebooks to access corporate networks — there seem to have been practically no BYOD-related security incidents. As one sidebar in the report put it:

“The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend is a current topic of debate and planning in many organizations. Unfortunately, we don’t have much hard evidence to offer from our breach data. We saw only one breach involving personally-owned devices in 2011 and a couple more in 2012. We’ll keep watching.”

The Register says the data center will be 1.4 million square feet. There’s no word yet about what incentives, if any — tax breaks and the like — the state of Iowa is expected to provide. And there’s no word on how many jobs the facility will provide. Facebook is also said to want some tax credits for using wind power; that will require a vote by the state legislature.

State officials have been kind of hush-hush about the whole thing, and apparently there was pretty stiff competition between Iowa and Nebraska to win the deal. Google and Microsoft have recently opened data centers in the state, as well.

The company, based in Walldorf, Germany, outshone main rival Oracle Corp., posting a 17 percent rise in net profit to €520 million ($678.7 million) and a 7 percent increase in revenue. Oracle’s net profit, in contrast, was flat in the December-to-February quarter as revenue declined slightly.

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In an announcement set to be made later today, Somaini, whose title will be VP and chief trust officer, is one of three high-profile hires at Box that will be announced later today. The other two are Niall Wall, who will be SVP and head of business development, and Jeff Mannie, who will be VP, controller and chief accounting officer. Wall will take over for Karen Appleton, who has been promoted to senior VP in charge of global alliances.

What does the new title — chief trust officer — mean? “Two things,” Somaini told me in a brief conversation yesterday. “Really driving a trust strategy for the company around the products and services we provide and how that relates to internal functions of how we perform. Second, we have to make sure there’s a tight integration with our customer to base to really understand their needs. And it’s not only that we’re able to respond to their pain points, but that we’re able to predict them.”

He should have a pretty good appreciation for their pain points. Before creating the CISO job at Yahoo, he held the same title at security software giant Symantec. Before that, he was director of information security at VeriSign and an adviser to Palo Alto Networks. He also writes a widely read blog on computer security.

Wall is also a Symantec alum. Most recently, he was VP and general manager of the Norton Data Services business unit. Before Symantec, he worked at Oracle and Digital Equipment Corp., now a part of Hewlett-Packard. At Box, he’ll be overseeing the company’s efforts to create partnerships and strategic alliances.

Mannie hails from PayPal, the payments unit at online sales giant eBay. He’ll be in charge of external financial reporting, policies and controls. He’s probably going to be busy as Box heads toward its long-talked-about initial public offering next year.

Box has been aggressively raising money, and in January quietly increased its funding to $150 million from a previous $125 million in a round led by private equity firm General Atlantic, at a valuation of about $1.2 billion. CEO Aaron Levie, the 27-year-old wunderkind who started the company in a dorm room at the University of Southern California in 2005, has said on the record that Box will likely go public in 2014, and it has started hiring more execs with time at publicly held companies on their resumes.

The expanded round brought Box’s total capital raised to $312 million. Other investors include Salesforce.com, SAP Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners.

First reported by ReadWrite, the deal will bring Mashery’s 125 employees into Intel’s services division. APIs are the keys to working with different cloud services and software. For developers, access to an API is usually the first step to building enhancements and ancillary services and features, or getting two services working together.

Mashery had raised more than $34 million, according to Crunchbase, the most recent of which was a $12 million venture round led by OpenView Ventures and Cisco Systems. Prior investors include First Round Capital and Formative Ventures. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The deal represents another example of Intel’s shift toward software development and away from a pure focus on building chips. In 2010 Intel acquired the software security firm McAfee for $7.7 billion. The idea behind that deal was to marry Intel chips that go into PCs and servers and other devices with McAfee’s various security capabilities.

The software and services group, which includes both McAfee and Wind River Systems, which Intel acquired in 2009 and which is run by Renée James, is a relatively small unit within Intel. In 2012, the company reported sales just under $2.4 billion, or about 4.5 percent of revenue. The group reported an $11 million operating loss according to Intel’s latest 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Intel shares have traded lower since last Thursday, when the market research firms IDC and Gartner said they had tracked one of the largest year-on-year declines in sales of personal computers since records have been kept. Intel is the largest supplier of microprocessors to PC manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple, and it’s hard to see how much good news it can possibly bring to the table today.

Analysts are expecting Intel to report a profit of 41 cents per share on sales of $12.6 billion, and missing either would be seen as more or less proving that the PC market is in a state of permanent decline. So would a weak outlook for the current quarter, for which analysts currently expect earnings of 40 cents on $12.9 billion in sales.

There are other aspects to Intel’s business. It has a healthy data center business selling chips for use in servers, but out of more than $53 billion in sales last year, $34 billion, or more than 61 percent, was in its “client,” or PC, unit, while the data center group accounted for about $10.7 billion.

In the past, Intel executives have quarreled with the analyst firms, and said it was seeing more promising conditions in emerging markets. Indeed, in prior years there has been a disconnect between the dour pronouncements of Gartner and IDC and the peppier market conditions that Intel would later describe in its financial results in places like Brazil, Indonesia and Russia. In more recent quarters, the differences between their views have narrowed.

Aside from PCs, Intel has some new ideas that it hopes will kick its data center business into a higher gear. And it certainly has higher hopes about selling more chips for use in phones and tablets, but as yet they’re only hopes. It also plans to launch a TV product later this year.

Aside from the numbers, expect some questions — and maybe even some answers, but probably nothing conclusive yet — about the search for a replacement for CEO Paul Otellini. The smart money says the choice will be an internal one (here’s a rundown on the contenders), though there’s a slim chance that Intel’s board might be in the mood to surprise everyone and name an outsider. But don’t bet any money you can’t afford to lose on that.

Aneel Bhusri

Few people in Silicon Valley wear as many hats as Aneel Bhusri. Currently known primarily for his role as co-CEO of Workday, the cloud-based human resources software company that floated in an IPO last year, he also maintains an active role as a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners. He also finds time to sit on the boards of many interesting startups, including Sumo Logic.

Workday is the company that caused a lot of consternation at the large enterprise software firms. As it raised money and marched toward its IPO, SAP acquired Workday rival SuccessFactors in late 2011, forcing Oracle to make a similar move to acquire Taleo.

AllThingsD caught up with Bhusri at a San Francisco restaurant recently to learn of the latest doings at Workday, and to chat about his view of the fundamental shifts that are rocking the enterprise from so many directions and creating opportunity in the process.

AllThingsD: Aneel, you sit in a position with sort of a unique point of view, being both a CEO of a cloud software company that’s by definition riding one of the fundamental shifts in the enterprise, and also you’re a partner at Greylock, with a history of leading investments in enterprise-focused companies. So, from a high level, how do see the changes happening in the enterprise landscape right now?

Bhusri: When you think about what’s happening in the enterprise, it’s the most disruptive time in 25 years. Apps are moving to the cloud. Arguably, the relational database is going to look like a mainframe in 10 years, as transactions move into in-memory databases and Hadoop and other noSQL databases for Analytics. Storage is going from disk to flash. The legacy enterprise companies aren’t innovating, but they have cash and they have distribution, so they can buy their way into this new generation of innovation. To me, the one big question is whether or not this generation of entrepreneurs sells out to the big guys, or do they go it alone? This is going to be a conundrum for this wave of entrepreneurs. The large companies will put such large valuations in front of you that it’s hard not to sell out. Some will go it alone, and some won’t.

Do the new companies stand a chance? I mean, you’re talking about some pretty formidable companies being attacked.

One big change that has occurred over the last few years, that if you look back to the period from 2000 to 2006, with the exception of Salesforce.com, everyone was trying to compete at the edges with the big guys. No one wanted to take them head-on. No one wanted to take on Oracle or SAP or EMC or any of these guys, because they knew they would lose. Then, with the explosion of new technologies like the cloud, like Hadoop, like flash memory, you’re seeing a new set of companies that are not trying to compete at the edges, but are going right for the jugular. We haven’t seen these in 15 years or so, when new companies are trying to disrupt the established players rather than just coexist. So the big companies have not been threatened for a long time. Salesforce is going right after Siebel, a.k.a. Oracle. Palo Alto Networks is going right after Checkpoint Systems and Cisco. Pure Storage is going right after EMC and Hewlett-Packard. This is why the enterprise space is doing well: Because the companies that are becoming public are going after big markets.

To follow your example, then, is Workday going for the jugular versus SAP and Oracle?

We have the advantage in product, and they have the advantage of distribution. And that race is going on in every key segment: Distribution channels versus innovation. Oracle and SAP have the advantage of distribution. It’s not about money. We have a lot of money in the bank. It’s more about investing it smartly and building out the distribution to bring out our market-leading product faster than they can build a market-leading product using their distribution.

So how is business at Workday generally? You recently landed HP as your biggest customer. Have you landed anyone else like that?

There’s nothing slowing down about the shift to the cloud. I don’t see anything on the horizon that is changing that. But, yes, we’ve landed a big customer and, no, I’m not allowed to talk about it yet.

Did having HP name you as a vendor help bring in more business?

Anytime you land a big company like that, it gives people more comfort that the cloud is real. It’s hard to measure. But it helps other large companies to see that another one of their peers is shifting an application to the cloud.

So, what are your priorities at Workday this year?

I would consider this to be a really key transitional year for Workday. If we’re really successful, three or four years down the road we’ll look and see this was the year where we put the foundation in place. If you look back historically, we were a one-product company and in only one geography, and that was the human resources product in the U.S. In the next 18 months, we’re going multi-product and multi-geography. We’re expanding into Europe, and the financial products are doing really well. We will continue work on the financial product, but this is the beauty of the cloud: With every update, we add more functionality, and we land more customers. And in 18 months, we become a company that is both global and has multiple products, then I think we’ll have Oracle and SAP back on their heels for the next five to seven years. As for HR in the U.S., the other guys have a really long way to go to catch up to us. We have to build out a global distribution channel over the next 24 months. And as we build that channel, we’ll also be building financials, which is a market that’s two to three times the size of the HR market. What comes out the other end is the next large enterprise ERP company.

Is there a third leg to the stool after financials?

Analytics. We announced a big data product, and it doesn’t go into general availability until the second half of the year. What I did not realize as much as I do now is that there are companies that have a variety of different data that they want to co-mingle from a lot of different sources. Also, they’re looking for a home for third-party data. Most production systems don’t want you to bring third-party data into them. They want a way to import all of the third-party data they had from either HR or financial. And our big-data product is a way to help them do that, and I expect a pretty strong attach rate with that. So I think that is the third leg, right there. Take those together, and you’re looking at a pretty big market.

Image copyright Maksym Darakchi

According to “new replaces old” assumptions, the mainframe computer would be long deceased. We all know that’s not the case. I recently met with the CIO of a large, well-known insurance company, who said that for 20 years the company has tried to reduce its reliance on mainframes. The problem is that the company runs several complex processes and algorithms, built by people who have since retired, on those systems. Everybody knows that they work, but nobody really knows how they work, which is why they’re still around two decades later.

Shocking as it may seem, enterprise software giant BMC’s mainframe software revenue is on the rise, thanks largely to scenarios such as the one my friend at the insurance company is dealing with. And remember Lotus Notes? According to The Wall Street Journal, it’s still a $1 billion business, too rooted for large companies to walk away from, and too large for IBM to ignore as it expands into cloud and social software. BMC and Lotus Notes are important lessons for investors, CEOs, strategists and anyone tempted to write off the old guard, at least in the near-term. There’s a rhythm to when and how quickly technologies are replaced — and it’s driven by three factors: product cycle, adoption time and entrenchment.

Product Cycle: The longer it takes for a company or industry to release the next version that is significantly different, the more staying power the technology will have. Product cycles in PC operating systems are a great example. Windows XP was current for more than six years, and Oracle releases a new database every four years or so. All of those technologies endure in business today.

Adoption Time: If something takes a long time to deploy or adopt, it usually takes a long time to replace. SAP is notoriously long to implement, which means it takes companies an agonizingly long time to replace the software with cloud-based alternatives, no matter how superior they may be.

Entrenchment: The large insurance company stuck with the mainframe that I mentioned earlier is the perfect example of entrenchment. Those mainframes are so complex and pervasive throughout the company, they’re difficult — and sometimes impossible — to abandon. It’s not just the old guard that is entrenched, however. Salesforce.com is relatively quick to deploy, but businesses quickly integrate it deeply in the sales process and with various applications — many built on the Force.com platform, making Salesforce.com much stickier than many people originally thought it would be.

Cloud computing, the industry I’ve worked in for the past decade, is another cautionary example. It’s common in my industry to predict the “death” of legacy on-premises technologies such as Oracle and SAP. This is overly simplistic thinking, the result of people who try to fit a complex world into a convenient narrative. The cloud is undoubtedly marching toward pervasiveness in all layers of the IT stack. It will take longer than people think, however, and the old guard won’t die. In reality, they’ll gradually become less relevant, until some day, in some blog post, people will be surprised by how much legacy software remains in the world even though the new guard has long surpassed it.

At Okta, we’ve learned this lesson from our customers, many of which are larger enterprises experimenting with the cloud but that have legacy software that won’t disappear overnight. The software is too entrenched in the system, as it typically takes months — and often years — of accumulated consulting, training and implementation hours to install.

Eventually, the cloud will be home to all of the innovation and profit, but it won’t be the whole pie. Investors looking to place bets on where technology is headed (and when) and vendors plotting strategy shouldn’t get caught up in the hype. The SAPs and Oracles of the world will linger and limp along.

They won’t go gently — no matter how hard we might try.

Todd McKinnon is CEO of Okta, an enterprise-grade identity management service that addresses the challenges of a cloud, mobile and interconnected business world. You can follow him on Twitter at @ToddMcKinnon.

Reserving judgment, two analysts wondered in notes to clients today if even the most optimistic outcome for Moonshot is enough to get HP on track.

Moonshot is a “step in the right direction,” wrote Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee, but he wondered if large Web companies could be persuaded to buy from HP rather than have their own custom servers built for them. “But we are not sure if big customers including Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter would switch from their current model where they procure customized server and storage components from Quanta and Compal.”

And even if successful, Moonshot might not have a big enough impact to nudge HP sales upward, Wu wrote, noting that servers account for roughly 25 percent of sales, versus PCs and printers, both in decline, which combined account for about half. “We believe the company’s turnaround remains tough as it remains to be seen whether its enterprise efforts are enough to offset continued challenges in its PC, printer, and services businesses,” he wrote.

It’s also going to take a while for revenue from Moonshot sales to start showing up in HP’s results, says Brian Marshall of ISI. “While we do not anticipate meaningful revenue from Moonshot in the next few quarters, we see it as a positive step towards maintaining HPQ’s number one share position in servers longer-term.”

Not all voices were so reserved. Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights and Strategy who was on stage with HP execs at the launch today, said the most interesting thing about the Moonshot line is not the fact that it uses less energy or takes up less space than conventional servers, but that it works with all sorts of different chips to attack the computing job at hand. Yes, it supports conventional CPU chips like Intel’s Atom and ARM-based server chips like those from Calxeda, but also GPU chips from Nvidia; digital signal processor chips, like those made by Texas Instruments; and field-programmable gate arrays, the software-defined chips turned out by companies like Altera and Xilinx. That, he says, gives it “the potential to change the game in scale-out data centers.”

Today is the day HP will formally unveil a product upon which a lot of its hopes for transformation and a return to health have been placed. It’s called Project Moonshot, and HP has been talking about it for about 18 months.

Basically, it’s a server, a very small server that consumes very little energy. During a conversation earlier this year, Dave Donatelli, HP’s executive VP and head of its enterprise, showed me one. Smaller than a typical hardcover book, it consumes 89 percent less energy to operate, and takes up 94 percent less space than a typical server. And, when packed into a large rack with many more servers like it, the amount of computing power that can be harnessed in one relatively small place is pretty impressive.

It’s also highly customizable, in a nearly endless series of mix-and-match combinations: It supports Intel’s Atom line of small and light microprocessors, as well as new up-and-coming server chips based on designs from the British firm ARM. It can also support graphics processing units from companies like Nvidia, as well as standard hard drives or flash-memory based solid-state storage.

HP’s argument to the marketplace is that Moonshot is unique. In a world where companies maintain data centers either for their own operations or as a means of reselling cloud computing capacity, HP’s hope is that the appeal of lower operating costs over time — energy consumption is a big one — will appeal to customers looking to swap out older machines.

And by at least one simple metric, it is. HP’s rivals, including Dell, IBM and Oracle, have nothing quite like it. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t. It is increasingly popular — companies like Google and Facebook do a lot of this — for a company to assemble their own servers from off-the-shelf components. Indeed, chipmaker Intel will be discussing new reference designs — essentially a basic blueprint — for what it calls “micro servers,” based on new versions of its Atom processors, later this week.

The message of Moonshot is also larger. It’s a signal from CEO Meg Whitman that HP can still launch important, innovative products that are different from anything else on the market. That’s a key message, given the tremendous difficulty the company has found itself in over the last few years. Indeed, just last week, Chairman Ray Lane stepped down from that role, and two other directors resigned in response to a proxy campaign by shareholders unhappy with the botched 2011 acquisition of the British software firm Autonomy.

A successful product launch will help shift the HP narrative away from recurring boardroom and executive office dramas, toward the day-to-day business of being the world’s largest technology company. And that’s just as important as the product itself. The sight of HP experiencing a win in a key market segment will go a long way toward making it look as though the longed-for turnaround — one that seemed unthinkable only months ago — is really getting under way.

It would seem that the cloud — that nebulous place of unseen servers maintained by anonymous humans in huge, remote and unmarked buildings called data centers — can, in theory, have your back. That’s the idea behind Zerto, an Israel-based startup that uses cloud infrastructure for disaster recovery.

The company announced today that it had closed a $13 million Series C led by RTP Ventures, an affiliate of ru-Net Holdings. Also participating in the round were Battery Ventures; Greylock IL, the Israel-based outpost of Greylock Ventures; and U.S. Venture Partners. Murat Bicer, a managing director at RTP, is joining Zerto’s board. The round brings Zerto’s total capital raised to north of $34 million.

The old way of doing disaster recovery was expensive, and only companies willing and able to spend big could do it right. They’d build a redundant copy of their IT infrastructure, the point being to fail over to the copy in the event of a disaster, and keep everything running. Acquiring and maintaining the fail-over stuff effectively doubles the cost and effort.

Zerto’s approach takes advantage of a key cloud technology — virtualization, which is running several virtual computers within the confines of one or more physical computers. Time was, vital applications were too important to entrust to virtual machines, but nowadays pretty much everything is running on VMs.

Zerto moves the business of replication to the hypervisor, the software used to manage virtual machines. This is a key capability missing for enterprises that want to rely more on the cloud.

The company has had a busy year: Its staff has doubled, and lots of new customers have signed on, including Univita Health and University of Louisville Physicians. More than 100 cloud providers are taking advantage of the Zerto Cloud Ecosystem, up from 33 previously.

CEO Ziv Kedem and his brother Oded started Zerto in 2009. They were behind a previous disaster-recovery company called Kashya that was acquired by EMC for $150 million in 2006 and is now known by the EMC brand RecoverPoint.

Seattle-based Tableau Software Inc. will hope to replicate the success of Splunk Inc. which has jumped 133 percent since its April 2012 debut. Tableau is seeking to raise about $150 million in an IPO that could happen in about a month.

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A company called MuleSoft specializes in helping companies do exactly that. It started out as an on-premise platform, but has since shifted to one based in the cloud. A textbook case: Getting data from one cloud-based application — say, Salesforce.com — working with another — say, Workday. You might want information about your sales team’s performance integrated with your human-resources information so you can keep track of who’s performing well and who isn’t.

Typically, you’d do that yourself, taking advantage of APIs provided by both companies. You’d assign a team of developers to create a custom process and workflow. It would take more time than you’d want it to, and would probably cost more than you’d like.

“All those problems about integrating data become exponentially greater in the cloud,” mainly because there are more applications and there’s also just more data, said MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott. There are, he said, something like 2,100 different companies offering software-as-a-service applications, plus a whole bunch of older legacy on-premise enterprise software products. And every company has its own mix-and-match combination.

The good news is that most, if not all, of these applications have their APIs, meaning that, in theory, a programmer can take advantage of them. And that’s where MuleSoft steps in. One API doesn’t natively talk to another API. At a high level, MuleSoft sits as the middleman between them all. It has a repository of 13,000 or more APIs, and has an SaaS platform that connects them all together. The time required to integrate data in two or more applications is cut from weeks or months to hours or days.

The problem isn’t getting smaller. The number of open APIs available is multiplying, and in a few more years will reach into the hundreds of thousands.

Founded in 2003, its timing couldn’t have been better. Companies like Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, SuccessFactors and others all sought to shift important business applications out of the office and into the cloud. And now running things in the cloud is more often than not preferred, because in the long run it’s cheaper — cloud companies tend to charge on a subscription basis — and easier.

So MuleSoft has been on fire. Its customers run the gamut from banks to automakers to media companies: Barclays, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo are all customers, as are BMW and Tesla. Facebook and Box and Intuit are customers, too. More than 150,000 developers at more than 3,200 companies are using MuleSoft’s platform.

Today, the company announced that it has raised $37 million in a Series E round of venture capital funding, led by NEA. Salesforce.com is also investing in this round. Prior investors participating include Hummer Winblad, Morgenthaler Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures (the venture capital arm of software giant SAP) and Bay Partners. The round brings MuleSoft’s total capital raised to $81 million. An IPO is probably not far off.

Here’s one reason for Salesforce’s interest: One of MuleSoft’s newer products is an app called Dataloader.io, that is available on the Salesforce App Exchange. It’s designed to move data from pretty much any application into Salesforce.com. Within weeks, it shot to No. 1 on the App Exchange, and remains the most popular app there today, Schott told me.

Another new product was announced today. It’s called Anypoint, and it’s described as the only complete integration platform to cover applications across the entire spectrum of cloud or on-premise, and to get the data in them working together.