The company reported a profit of 54 cents per share on $8.8 billion. The results fell short of the consensus view that Oracle would report sales of $9.23 billion and a per-share profit of 57 cents. Oracle shares, which had risen by 56 cents, or 2 percent, during the regular trading session, to close at $29.17, fell sharply in after-hours trading. As of 4:15 pm ET, Oracle shares were trading down $1.72, or 6 percent, on the news.

In the plus column, Oracle said its operating margin on a non-GAAP basis improved to 45 percent, and that it expects those margins to keep rising. Operating cash flow grew by 45 percent, as well, to $13.1 billion.

The company boosted its salesforce by 1,700 during the first half of the year, in an effort to boost sales of its Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management software products. Co-President Mark Hurd said the additional sales personnel should help sales improve in the second half of the fiscal year. (The quarter was Oracle’s fiscal second.)

The company said its board of directors approved a $5 billion share buyback and a 6-cent-per-share dividend.

CEO Larry Ellison said in a statement that sales of so-called engineered systems — essentially hardware that contains a lot of exclusive Oracle technology — surged versus the year ago period. Sales of Exadata database hardware and Exalogic servers both grew by 100 percent, he said. He also said that Oracle shipped its first SPARC SuperCluster during the quarter, and expects to commence deliveries of Exalytics Business Intelligence machines this quarter.

Oracle’s statement is below. I’ll be adding more to this post as I go through the press release, and will call out some highlights. The company is hosting a conference call shortly.

(The pitch-perfect image of the Team Oracle plane doing a dive during San Francisco’s Fleet Week was taken by Ingrid Taylar for About.com.)

Oracle Reports Q2 GAAP EPS Up 17% to 43 Cents; Q2 Non-GAAP EPS Up 6% to 54 Cents

Trailing Twelve Month Operating Cash Flow Up 45% to $13.1 Billion

REDWOOD SHORES, CA–(Marketwire -12/20/11)- Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL – News) today announced fiscal 2012 Q2 GAAP and non-GAAP total revenues were up 2% to $8.8 billion. Both GAAP and non-GAAP new software license revenues were up 2% to $2.0 billion. Both GAAP and non-GAAP software license updates and product support revenues were up 9% to $4.0 billion. Both GAAP and non-GAAP hardware systems products revenues were down 14% to $953 million. GAAP operating income was up 12% to $3.1 billion, and GAAP operating margin was 35%. Non-GAAP operating income was up 3% to $3.9 billion, and non-GAAP operating margin was 45%. GAAP net income was up 17% to $2.2 billion, while non-GAAP net income was up 6% to $2.8 billion. GAAP earnings per share were $0.43, up 17% compared to last year while non-GAAP earnings per share were up 6% to $0.54. GAAP operating cash flow on a trailing twelve-month basis was $13.1 billion.

“Non-GAAP operating margins increased to 45% in Q2,” said Oracle President and CFO, Safra Catz, “and we expect those margins to keep growing. Operating cash flow over the last twelve months grew to $13.1 billion; that’s up a remarkable 45% compared to the preceding twelve month period.”

“We have expanded our worldwide sales capacity by adding over 1,700 sales professionals in the first half of this fiscal year,” said Oracle President, Mark Hurd. “We believe that this increase in our field organization combined with innovative new products like Fusion Cloud ERP and Cloud CRM will enable solid organic growth in the second half of this year.”

“Sales of our engineered systems accelerated in Q2,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Exadata growth was well over 100% compared to last year, and Exalogic grew more than 100% on a sequential basis. We shipped our first SPARC SuperCluster in Q2 and expect to begin deliveries of our Exalytics system and the Oracle Big Data Appliance in Q3.”

Oracle announced that its Board of Directors authorized the repurchase of up to an additional $5.0 billion of common stock under its existing share repurchase program in future quarters.

The Board of Directors also declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.06 per share of outstanding common stock. This dividend will be paid to stockholders of record as of the close of business on January 11, 2012, with a payment date of February 1, 2012.

Tonight at 1 am PT, techies who have nothing else to do — that would be me! — can click onto a brand new tech site called The Verge.

Well, kind of — it’s the result of many months of work by the gang that defected from AOL’s popular Engadget tech powerhouse, set up temporary shop under the Web site name This Is My Next and busied themselves with creating The Verge.

I have another screenshot below of the new site that will be focused on news, reviews and features about tech, and which has been getting a final tweaking all today.

From my quick perusal, it has a vibrant and slick design, with a lot of packed boxes, swooshy movement and plenty of content.

Along with the launch, The Verge’s parent company — formerly doing business as SB Nation, focused on sports — will also transform into Vox Media.

In a chit-chat with Vox’s CEO Jim Bankoff, top exec Marty Moe and Josh Topolsky, The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief, the trio of former AOLers all said they were going to for the big time.

“We want to build the platform for talented native Web voices, in sports and tech for now, and then we plan to grow more verticals,” said Bankoff.

“We want to create more than a news site or blog about tech — the frustration at AOL was that we did not get the resources or manpower to realize that bigger vision,” said Topolsky.

(You’re speaking to the choir, brother!)

Said Moe: “We think this category has not had a large enough vision…not enough has been innovated over the years and we think it is a big opportunity.”

Topolsky said the site, along with a mass of original content from 30 writers, will also be helped by a strong database of information about all its topics and gadgets and also focus a lot on community input.

“What we want to do was graduate beyond the blog,” he said.

(Hmm…and here I just got the hang of this blog thing.)

Bankoff, who would not say how much Vox spent on launching The Verge — my back-of-the-envelope guess, several million dollars — said that costs were spread out between the tech and sports sites with centralized sales and product teams.

Initial launch sponsors are BMW, Sony and Samsung, said Moe, who is aiming to sell “major brand advertisers on the idea that we will be the premiere destination of consumer tech coverage.”

It has to grow past big sites like Engadget to do so, but Topolsky said that This Is My Next had three million unique visitors in the last month and more than 10 million page views.

“We have done that with a lot of editorials and in-depth reviews,” he said. “I think people are really hungry for great content and stories.”

As to competitors, Topolsky said that “this not to necessarily I win if you lose,” although his clear aim is to unseat sites like CBS-owned CNET, Engadget and Gawker Media’s Gizmodo and perhaps even newsier sites such as TechCrunch and AllThingsD (as if!).

“We are going to do the nuts and bolts stuff,” he said. “Somewhere between Engadget and Wired.”

Topolsky compared The Verge to a “boutique hotel — we have the same stuff everyone else has, but it is a much more elegant experience.”

Later, that will change, he promised, noting that “this is only version 1.0.”

Of course — but what else would you expect from a gadget site?

(Good luck and congrats to the entire The Verge team from AllThingsD!)

And here is another lovely screenshot, as promised:

But apparently it all did lead up to something. For those just tuning in, here’s how it went down.

About two weeks ago, on Oracle’s quarterly earnings conference call, Ellison was asked by an analyst about Oracle’s position in the market for analyzing and pulling useful intelligence from unstructured data — transcripts of videos and contents of emails, and scores of other things that aren’t neatly arranged in databases. It’s kind of a big deal, as companies grapple with the so-called “big data” problem, and the question was a natural jumping-off point to discussing Hewlett-Packard’s $11.7 billion acquisition of Autonomy. Ellison, by way of an answer, portrayed unstructured data as a feature of the existing Oracle database software, called it “nothing new,” and then slammed HP for paying too much for Autonomy, the British software firm whose specialty happens to be — you guessed it — unstructured data. And, oh, by the way, Ellison said he took a pass on Autonomy when it had been shopped to Oracle because he thought the price was too high.

Much drama then ensued. Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch said his company had never been shopped to Oracle. Not so, said Oracle — and oh, by the way, you left your PowerPoint slides behind. “Those slides?” Lynch countered. “Never seen ’em before in my life. Maybe you need some help with your unstructured data, because you seem confused at the sequence of events.”

You see, the spat occurred just a few days before Oracle OpenWorld, and got Oracle in stories containing the phrase “unstructured data” numerous times.

And what did Ellison talk about in his keynote address Sunday night? Lots of things. One of them was an appliance called the Exalytics Intelligence Machine that does — guess what? — unstructured data. It’s designed, Ellison said, to do all its analysis while the data is loaded into the machine’s main memory, while four 10-core Intel Xeon chips make it scream on the processor side. “Databases run faster, everything runs faster if you keep it in DRAM, if you keep it in main memory,” he said, describing it as data analysis at the “speed of thought.” Structured data, relational data, unstructured data — it does it all, Ellison said. Now all that mishegas makes sense. It’s all about having the last word.

Ellison’s keynote — an hour and change long — is below. If you want to skip forward to the Exalytics stuff, it starts at about the 57-minute mark.

It was a pretty fast turnaround for Hurd, who resigned at HP following an unpleasant flap. But at the time, Oracle was in the process of acquiring Sun Microsystems and adding a sizable IT hardware business to its portfolio. Hurd, having earned a reputation for running a tight operational ship during five years at HP, was available and had already built a friendship with CEO Larry Ellison, who had publicly castigated HP’s board for acting rashly in dismissing Hurd.

Hurd has been quietly working away inside Oracle since then, getting to know its business and regularly speaking at small Oracle customer events, like one in New York in March. He’s also been a regular on Oracle’s earnings conference calls.

Now Hurd’s public profile at Oracle is about to rise considerably. With Oracle set to hold its annual Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco next month, Hurd will be delivering a keynote address of his own and will from here on be taking on generally more public roles at Oracle. Make no mistake: He won’t be standing in for CEO Larry Ellison — what mere mortal could? — and Ellison will be doing two keynotes of his own at the Oracle event. But Oracle customers and investors will be seeing more of Hurd than they have before.

Hurd today granted AllThingsD his first on-the-record interview since joining Oracle. (We published a few highlights earlier today.) It comes on the heels of last week’s surprisingly strong earnings report by Oracle, which is what we talked about first. Hurd declined to offer any good-natured advice to Meg Whitman, HP’s newly named CEO, and also declined to answer any questions whatsoever about the circumstances surrounding his departure from that company 13 months ago. (I did ask, I swear!).

He also sort of diplomatically avoided naming competitors, so I’ll do that on his behalf. When he mentions database and middleware competitors, he means IBM. When he refers to “point products” and “boutique companies,” he’s referring to Salesforce.com and Workday, both cloud-based applications that compete with Oracle offerings.

The full transcript of our conversation is below.

AllThingsD: You had a pretty good quarter, in a tough environment. What in your view is going well at Oracle, and what could be better?

Hurd: Well listen, we released a quarter, that I think was a great quarter, that had 17 percent new license growth which is outstanding. In Q1 of 2011 we had 25 percent license growth. The good news is that it was 25 percent, and the bad news was that it was this year’s comparison, so when we grow 17 on top of 25 it’s just outstanding license fee growth. When you remember that last year we had 33 percent revenue growth and 33 percent earnings growth, these numbers we just posted are coming against a really good 2011. So they’re just outstanding. Also, we had Exadata growth that was just outstanding. We talked about that on the conference call. We had a good launch for Exalogic during the quarter. We had a growth in the T-series and M-series, which are the traditional Sun servers, during the quarter. Then I’d add that our industry verticals grew faster than Oracle overall. That’s an important strategy for us. We get deeper into these industry verticals, and they solve our customers’ most difficult problems. They’re very industry- and business-specific, and when you add to them the rest of our portfolio, it made for a strong quarter all the way around.

The other thing about the quarter is that you were strong in Europe at a moment when Europe seems to be melting down. Why is Oracle so strong when others would be seeing weaknesses? What is Oracle doing differently in Europe that others aren’t?

I wouldn’t comment on what others are seeing, because I only know what Oracle is seeing. It may be that it’s just Oracle-specific momentum more than anything else, but when I look at each segment of our business in Europe, if I actually read to you the growth rates of each of our product segments, it would sound very consistent. We didn’t have any one big deal in Europe, no big transaction. We didn’t have any one country that stood out. It was just broad-based, across-segments, across-countries performance. And the performance in Exadata, Exalogic, overall hardware growth, all very strong in the quarter. So forgetting the macro environment, Europe was a bright spot for Oracle last quarter and very strong. Also one quick note: Whenever you have a quarter in Europe where the applications growth in the quarter was 63 percent — when you grow like that it’s just great stuff.

Let’s talk about the hardware business a bit, which is still relatively new. You talked on the conference call last week about how you’re focusing more on hardware with higher content of Oracle intellectual property, and less on commodity stuff, what we often call the x86 servers that use chips from Intel and are less distinguished from what other companies offer. Where are you in that process and how long do you think it will take to get where you want to be?

I think you’ve got it right. We’re very focused on growth in Exadata and growth in Exalogic. You know this but it bears repeating, Exadata is a combination of server and storage and software technology integrated into a single solution that we think gives our customers a better total cost of ownership, or TCO. Some of the performance gains our customers are seeing are 30 or 40 or 50 even 70 times the performance improvement. Not 30 or 70 percent performance gains, but 30 or 70 times better than before. On top of all that we support them remotely, diagnose their problems remotely, sometimes before they even know they have them. And so growing that Exa line is very important to us. Now, next week at Oracle Openworld, we’re going to release more Exa lines and more technology than you’ve ever seen from the company at any one time. Last week we introduced an Oracle database appliance, which is very much an Oracle intellectual property stack focusing on mid-market and departmental solutions. While it’s not as big a system as an Exadata, it’s a manifestion of the same strategic directions we’ve had before. They’re integrated systems where we can bring a stack of value to our customers.

Your CEO Larry Ellison made a comment on the conference call last week that got a lot of attention: Essentially that Oracle would be okay with the x86 business going to zero. Now I know it’s a little more complicated than that. Would you care to revise and extend his remarks on that subject a bit?

What I would say is that we don’t have interest in selling products where there’s no Oracle intellectual property. We’re very focused on adding value to customers. If there’s no Oracle intellectual property in it, then you ought to buy it from someone else. We’re very focused on getting our technology into the market. We think we can do two things. All of our products are designed to be the best-of-breed, the best in the markets they serve, to work in heterogenous environments, to be open. That is clearly our strategy at every layer of our architecture. In addition to that, we vertically integrate some of these systems like we do in Exadata and like we do in Exalogic and like you’ll see in other manifestations over the next week, where we think we can deliver extreme performance, extreme TCO and extreme serviceability. If there’s some product that comes from a third party that just comes through Oracle where we add no value, that’s the stuff we have no interest in. If we add no value to it, you ought to buy it from someone else.

So that doesn’t mean you intend to get out of the x86 business entirely, only that you’ll want to sell hardware that is sold in combination with Oracle IP whether it’s software or something else.

Yes. We still have an x86 line. But Larry was trying to make a point.

Let’s talk about competitors. Who do you see showing up on deals you’re competing on? Who keeps you up at night?

We have competitors in the industry vertical markets that are really point products, and horizontal apps, there are some that are boutique companies that provide certain functional applications whether it’s in HR [Human Resources] or something like that. We certainly have competitors in database and middleware.

So it’s been a year since you joined Oracle. What’s it like working with Larry Ellison?

It’s great. It’s just great.

What defines success for you at Oracle? If we talk at this time next year, where do you want Oracle to be?

We’re releasing a whole new set of technology next week. Our opportunity is to drive that into the market and increase customer awareness of the portfolio. You’ve got all these smartphones running around the market. They’re basically computers in people’s hands, and they’re begging for data from enterprise applications, and those applications need to be modernized to make that happen. We can help our customers on innovation whether it’s e-commerce or any other environment they want to innovate in and at the same time we get the opportunity to make them more efficient. These engineered systems solutions deliver tremendous performance that help our customers server their customers better and help them get better efficiency at the same time. So we’ve just got a tremendous hand to play and that’s what we’re going to do.

You’ll be speaking at Oracle Openworld in San Francisco next week. What’s on your agenda?

I’ll be doing a lot of stuff. Larry has a keynote Sunday, and he’ll do another Wednesday, and I’ll be doing one Monday. But they’ll all be centered on our innovations and systems and software that we’re bringing to market, so that will be the primary agenda for the week.

Will we be seeing you in a much more public role at Oracle generally? Are you going to be more of a public face of Oracle going forward?

I have a job to do, so it won’t be to the exclusion of that. I spend most of my time working on customers and making sure we have the best team in the industry. Last year I’ve spent time on customers, people and products. I don’t see that changing. To the extent that we have things to announce I’m clearly going to be doing all that in addition. I’ve been seeing lots and lots of customers, and will be continuing to work on building our team and making sure I’m participating in the product process in every way possible. That’s what I’ll be focused on.

What are you hearing from those customers? What are they worried about? What are they telling you about their business?

They love our products, they love our people and want to get more deeply engaged with Oracle. It’s a huge opportunity for us, but it’s also a challenge, because frankly there’s a lot to be done. And frankly we can’t do everything, so we have to pick our spots to engage properly. It’s important for us to focus.

At least when it comes to Oracle software, they’re not cutting back at all, says Brian Schwartz of ThinkEquity research, in a note to clients out today. Sales of application licenses at Oracle saw their fastest growth rate during an Oracle Q1 since before the recession, making for a “sign of healthy Enterprise IT demand,” Schwartz wrote.

Overall, Oracle beat the consensus view of analysts on several metrics, including revenue ($8.4 billion, or $50 million ahead of the street) and per-share earnings (48 cents a share, two cents above consensus). On top of that, Oracle issued guidance that license revenue would continue to grow at a rate of six to 16 percent, which was also above consensus. Also: Free cash flow grew 42 percent to $5.3 billion in the quarter, a big improvement over the year-ago quarter when Oracle’s free cash flow was flat.

All good news, right? Not quite, Schwartz writes. Oracle’s hardware business is still on the comeback trail. Hardware systems product revenue declined five percent year over year, because of a shift toward higher-margin products and away from higher-volume, less profitable ones. Oracle’s plan is to essentially phase out the higher-volume servers that came with its Sun Microsystems acquisition from last year. The plan is to focus on higher-end hardware that commands a higher profit margin at sale and to phase out the less-profitable stuff. As CEO Larry Ellison said during a conference call with analysts last night: “I don’t care if our commodity x86 business goes to zero,” he said. “We don’t make any money selling those things. We have no interest in selling other people’s [intellectual property]. … We have interest in selling systems that include our IP.” By systems with “other people’s IP,” he’s referring to mainstream servers that use chips from Intel — hence the reference to x86, Intel’s DNA — and operating systems from Microsoft.

The end result, Schwartz says, is that hardware sales came in $200 million short of the consensus expectation, while the profitability of hardware sales was, at 54 percent, much better than a year ago. Clearly it’s taking awhile to turn the battleship. Oracle said that unit sales of Exadata and Exalogic hardware almost tripled; the company added 100 new customers and promised to triple the number of deployments yet again in 2012.

All that leads Schwartz to rate Oracle a Buy, with a price target of $36. As of this morning, the shares were already headed in that direction: Oracle rose by more than $2 a share — or more than seven percent, to $30.38 a share — after about a half hour of trading.

That was around that time of the initial public offering of Fusion-io, the Utah-based start-up that speeds up servers and storage networks. Having opened trading at $25.30 a share on June 9, its first day of trading, its share price has held steady since, and it closed Tuesday at $28.35. It will report quarterly earnings for the first time as a public company on Thursday.

The summer is proving equally interesting for Violin Memory, another company with flash memory based technology that is intended to replace the traditional hard drive based storage arrays that allow enterprise applications like those made by Oracle to run fast. Having raised a $40 million Series C funding round from Toshiba and Juniper Networks at an implied valuation of $440 million in June, the company has been bulking up its staff.

Today Violin will announce that it has named Jonathan Goldick — the former CTO of OnStor, now a unit of chipmaker LSI — as its CTO of Software. Goldick has been knocking around the computing industry for about two decades as an expert on file systems and storage, and his resume includes stints at IBM and Microsoft.

So what does it mean to be CTO of Software at a chip company? Goldick’s job will focus on solving problems related to data management that go beyond the speeding-up that Violin’s technology offers. Once hard drives (which, for all the progress they’ve made in five decades, are still essentially platters of glass; even when spinning at the speed of sound, they are subject to errors and inefficiencies that make them still too slow for the fastest computers) are out of the picture, new problems arise.

“The early adopters, they care about speed because they’re in application hell. But once you get past that, the problem becomes one of data management,” Goldick told me. “Once you make anything 100 times faster or cheaper, you have to revisit how you manage data.”

It’s a big enough problem that Goldick was being heavily recruited by other companies working on bringing flash technology to their own hardware. Goldick wouldn’t name the companies directly, but the hints he dropped suggest he turned down offers from both EMC and Oracle.

Goldick is Violin’s second recent hire. Last month it quietly hired Garry Veale, a former vice president at Hewlett-Packard’s StorageWorks division, as its new managing director for the EMEA region.

There’s a reason that Violin is bulking up its team: The opportunity is potentially huge. Remember, if you will, the December day that Oracle CEO declared that its SPARC T3-4 Supercluster had achieved something of a land speed record of more than 30 million transactions per minute. This was the same speech in which Ellison, in one of his numerous bits of trash-talking, likened HP’s competing product to a turtle. It’s often called “the turtle speech.”

That speech got Violin CEO Don Basile all excited. One of the things that made that Oracle machine so fast was that it was packed with a couple hundred terabytes worth of flash memory. As Basile told me last week: “We loved that speech because they proved us right. It was a big validation for what we want to do.” It also means there’s no end in sight to the flash madness.

The two most obvious examples are NetSuite, where Ellison was a founding investor, and Salesforce.com where CEO Marc Benioff is an Oracle alum — and where, come to think of it, Ellison was a founding investor, too. When you start considering the numerous Oracle alumni who have gone on to other things, Ellison’s reach becomes longer still.

The graphic below comes from the folks at Software Advice and aims to illustrate via these numerous connections the impact that Ellison and Oracle have had throughout the tech and software industry.

The top half represents independent companies where former Oracle execs either run the show or are in senior roles, while the bottom half shows companies that Oracle has acquired — and, let’s admit it, there have been a lot of them — where Oracle alumni in senior roles have found themselves re-integrated back into the mother ship.

While I can’t help but think the graphic is incomplete — it sure seems like there must be other companies that could be on it — it sure is interesting to look at.

We’ve done a lot of onstage interviews at our D: All Things Digital conferences with the leaders of tech.

That includes Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google smartphone kingpin Andy Rubin, both of whom are now dealing with the fallout over a series of reports that iOS and Android smartphones regularly transmit their locations back to both companies.

The privacy implications are obvious.

As Mobilized’s Ina Fried wrote last week:

Questions about what location-based information Android makes use of followed reports that Apple’s iPhone and 3G-equipped iPads are storing a history of location information in an unencrypted database on the device. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday noted that both Android and Apple devices are sending certain location information back to the companies.

In addition to that issue, there are separate issues over the length of time such information is stored, both on the device and by Apple and Google. The iPhone (and 3G-equipped iPads) appear to be storing a long-term directory of where a device has been and keeping that information in an unencrypted database. Google keeps a small cache of such information, to allow mapping and search to work even if a device temporarily loses GPS signal. However, it doesn’t keep a long-term record on the device.

That’s why we cut this video of Jobs and Rubin talking about privacy, specifically and respectively at the eighth D: All Things Digital last summer and at D: Dive Into Mobile in December.

“We take privacy extremely seriously,” said Jobs, who addressed the smartphone location data issue in particular. “A lot of people in [Silicon] Valley think we’re old-fashioned about this.”

And I pressed Rubin on Android being a “probe in your pocket,” and he said its mobile open source operating system did not collect data, although Google services did.

“I think this is a trust and verify,” Rubin noted.

Both Jobs and Rubin make some pretty strong privacy-related statements in these videos, so it will be interesting to see how it all shakes out:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110426/a-probe-in-your-pocket-heres-apples-steve-jobs-and-googles-andy-rubin-talking-privacy-at-d8-and-dive/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20110401/seven-more-questions-for-gil-elbaz-ceo-of-the-data-mercenary-factual/ http://allthingsd.com/20110401/seven-more-questions-for-gil-elbaz-ceo-of-the-data-mercenary-factual/#comments Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:00:27 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4622 When we last left Gil Elbaz, his company Factual had just landed a $25 million round of venture capital funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures.

I came up with the phrase “data mercenary” to describe in a fun way what Factual aims to be. If you’re developing an application or a Web service, and you need lots of data, you’re faced with several big problems up front. Where is that data going to come from? How up to date is it? How will you keep it fresh? These are questions that Factual aims to answer, both by supplying the data and helping ensure that it’s maintained. They’re big, complicated questions, and if you were going to ask someone to try and wrestle with them it would be Elbaz. He sold his first company, Applied Semantics, to Google, which went on to turn it into AdSense. Earlier this week I caught up with Elbaz in advance of his Web 2.0 talk.

NewEnterprise: So it’s been a few months since your funding announcement. How have things been going at Factual since then?

Elbaz: They’ve been going really well. We moved into a larger office. We’ve been bringing in lots of good people every other week, and we’ve accelerated the adoption with lots of leads. The places data is really taking off. We decided on a vertical approach to marketing and improving our data, so local is where we’re putting a lot of our resources. We are dabbling in other verticals and when we feel comfortable we’ll invest heavily in other areas. We just haven’t figured out which ones yet. We did recently launch a database of US physicians, which was a pretty significant effort. That’s an example of seeding the environment and starting conversations around a second vertical.

So everyone is talking a lot about “big data” and your talk at the Web 2.0 Expo is about data “haves” and “have-nots.” What do you mean by that?

The focus is to talk not just about big data as in a set of tool you need to process that data, but how do you get access to that data in the first place. The brand new startup in many cases doesn’t have any access to data, so that’s a big challenge, versus someone like LinkedIn, which has a huge batch of data to work from. But then I think every company really needs to act like they need access to much more data. Because no matter who you are there’s a lot of information you can’t access. The question is how does the ecosystem grease the wheels of efficiency of information movement, so that everyone can build much better information services. It’s still fairly stuck in my opinion in terms of easily getting information into your app.

So what do you suggest is a solution?

I break it down into many problems. There are six or seven categories of problems, and there’s many solutions for each one. One is findability, that is finding the information you need to access. The Web was built to make information findable by humans, it doesn’t necessarily mean its easy to find data you want to download. It may be government data, or data you want to license from someone. Or it could be an API. There are no big catalogs of structured data, though there’s been some progress from places like Infochimps and Microsoft Data Marketplace, though its just starting to happen. Another key issue is if you know a resource that’s available, is it easy to integrate. Many legacy data companies don’t have APIs. A lot of government data you have to request on tape and have it shipped to you. But with the advent of faster and cheaper networks, that’s improving. But it’s a chicken and egg. People have to push for these things or they don’t get fixed.

That’s two problems. Do you think people are figuring out that if they have data they need to make it useful by providing some kind of API support?

I think so. A typical Web site is much more likely to use several data sources than it would have several years ago. But I think the average will become greater and greater each year. Really there’s no limit to how many information services you want to access and integrate. That leads to my third issue which is standards and semantics. A big reason why developers will usually choose only a few sources to integrate is that they tend to be difficult to merge, unlike APIs, because of the lack of common languages for integrating. So if you have several feeds of business information, there’s no universal public identifier for businesses. You’d have to do a lot of work to integrate that information. At Factual we’re trying to popularize our own unique business identifier that we’re happy to distribute and hope that people use. We’re also trying to publish other people’s identifier, like Foursquare’s. In some way we really don’t care which one people use as long as a standard emerges.

That’s three problems. What’s number four?

Another one is the economics of data sharing. While in some cases the data that is moving around can be made free by a government or by an e-commerce site that has a big motivation for sharing it, there are many cases where there aren’t any fully fleshed-out models of sharing data, because a lot of companies are worried that if they share their data they’re not going to get paid for it, and they put effort into collecting it. The data marketplaces I mentioned before are a start. There are sites like Mashery that help you monetize your APIs. At Factual we’re trying to build a new model where companies share data with us and we share it back with the community free for most developers, that is our API stays free. We charge for high usage rates via service level agreements, but for most developers it ends up not being an issue.

So someone like say Starbucks might share data about store locations, and this one closed and this one just opened, and this one was just renovated etc. They could share that data with you?

When I usually talk about a larger company, I’m usually thinking an app developer who going to be doing millions of data lookups a day. But in terms of integrating Starbucks’ own data on their own site, it’s probably more accurate than data from anyone else. Which brings me to a fifth issue, which is how do you test data and decide which data you can trust. It’s easy to decide based on the brand, whether its the United Nations or Starbucks. But it’s hard to scale it out and be automated. We have some of our own internal tools. But it’s not something people tend to ignore. People assume that if they’re paying for data it’s probably good.

By my count that’s something like five problems you’ve identified, which means we’re somewhere near the bottom of your list.

I’ve covered most of them. Another is ownership and rights. If you’re a search engine and you access data on the Web, it doesn’t scale well to understand the terms and conditions of publishing data because a computer can’t read terms and conditions agreements. If you’re a search engine the fine print can probably be ignored. That’s maybe not surprising, but it is interesting that ignoring them has become the norm because it’s simply impossible for a computer to consider them. Creative Commons created six different designations for how you can use content from a given site, say for commercial use or for non-commercial use with attribution. Flickr is an example of a service that’s put Creative Commons tags to use. But I’d love to see more automation happen around this. But there’s fewer standards when someone doesn’t want to give their information away for free, and how they get paid when someone re-uses it. I’d love to see more automation around that. And there’s a little of that happening around APIs. But the state of the art today is a lot of phone calls and business development. And that’s fine, but if we’re really going to scale the integration of Web-wide information into information services, there’s going to have to be a better way.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110401/seven-more-questions-for-gil-elbaz-ceo-of-the-data-mercenary-factual/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110323/intel-to-oracle-thats-okay-well-have-a-great-itanium-party-without-you/ http://allthingsd.com/20110323/intel-to-oracle-thats-okay-well-have-a-great-itanium-party-without-you/#comments Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:05:54 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4272 Chipmaker Intel just fired off a response to Oracle’s announcement that it plans to cease developing software to run on systems using the Itanium server chip. As you might expect, Intel is reaffirming its commitment to the architecture and slapping down Oracle’s suggestion that Itanium is nearing the end of its life.

“Intel’s work on Intel Itanium processors and platforms continues unabated with multiple generations of chips currently in development and on schedule,” Intel CEO Paul Otellini said in a brief statement issued just a few minutes ago. “We remain firmly committed to delivering a competitive, multi-generational roadmap for HP-UX and other operating system customers that run the Itanium architecture.”

As I mentioned earlier, Intel has two new generations of the Itanium chip in the pipeline. The current generation was known by the codename Tukwila. The next, which is generally expected next year, is codenamed Poulson. It’s an eight-core Itanium that will be built on Intel’s 32-nanometer manufacturing process, and Intel says it will double the performance of the current Tukwila generation. Beyond Poulson lies Kittson, about which few details are known. Otellini said it’s an “officially committed roadmap product” that is in active development. He also plans to say a lot more about it in his keynote at the Intel Developer’s Forum in Beijing next month. So, take that Oracle.

Update: And now finally Hewlett-Packard, which is for the most part the only company making servers using Itanium chips, has responded to all this.

In a statement issued just moments ago, David Donatelli, HP’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of its HP Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking group said the following”

“We are shocked that Oracle would put enterprises and governments at risk while costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110323/intel-to-oracle-thats-okay-well-have-a-great-itanium-party-without-you/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20110307/seven-questions-for-adam-selipsky-head-of-amazon-web-services/ http://allthingsd.com/20110307/seven-questions-for-adam-selipsky-head-of-amazon-web-services/#comments Mon, 07 Mar 2011 14:00:32 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=3751 A little more than a week ago, I made a lightning-quick trip to Seattle to visit with a few companies based there. (More on that in the coming days.) One of them was Amazon.com. I stopped by the company’s still-like-new headquarters in the South Lake Union neighborhood to talk with Adam Selipsky, vice president of Product Management and Developer Relations at Amazon Web Services. I had lots of questions about cloud computing and the plans of the company that’s most widely associated with the phrase.

Given how much people talk about cloud computing and the number of companies that use it, you’d think the cloud was a huge business for Amazon Web Services–or AWS for short. It’s not. Amazon doesn’t break the units results out specifically, and instead lumps it into the “other” category for financial reporting purposes, which amounted to $953 million in 2010, or about three percent of Amazon’s total sales. But you can get sense of its growing importance elsewhere within its financial reports: Capital expenditures in 2010 were $979 million, more than 2.5 times the amount it spent in 2009. Amazon didn’t detail exactly how it spent that money–some went to offices, some to infrastructure for AWS–but it did say this: “We expect this trend to continue over time.”

Next week, Amazon Web Services will hit its five-year mark, so with that milestone in mind, I took the opportunity to ask Selipsky first about its beginnings, before diving into its future.

NewEnterprise: Adam, I remember vaguely the day that Amazon announced it was getting into the vaguely worded “Web Services” business, and really scratching my head at it. How did all this start?

Adam Selipsky: We built it out of necessity. We wondered why projects were taking longer than it seemed they should, and so we did a study and found that our engineering teams were spending about 70 percent of their time on non-value-add work like provisioning and managing their server and IT infrastructure, and not innovating on behalf of customers. That was a big aha moment. We got a blinding glimpse of the obvious, we realized we were not the only ones with this problem. We figured out there was a broad need for these basic technology infrastructure services.

When I think of all the companies that I know have started out using AWS, my head spins. Who’s your biggest customer?

We wouldn’t break that out. Zynga is one the biggest, obviously. Look at their growth. They couldn’t have grown the way they did without AWS. Netflix is another highly significant one. They said they have moved most of their infrastructure to AWS. They have a talented set of engineers who could build and manage their own infrastructure if they wanted to, but the point is that they don’t want to. They’d rather work on Netflix rather than the underlying infrastructure.

You’ve recently added a service called Elastic Beanstalk. Are you going to continue to add services like that through the year?

As fast as we knock out new services and features, the list of what our customers want from us continues to grow. I think that’s because this is so new, and since we’re replacing the data center, there’s a lot of things built up over the decades that run in those data centers. There’s going to be a long list of mission critical services that we need to bring up.

What’s the big one that people are asking for?

More flavors of databases. We have RDS, the relational database, and we’ve said we’re going to do an Oracle engine. So there’s more to do on databases, not only adding new flavors, but also just being more scalable. There’s big demand for really highly scalable, high-performance databases, and I think we’ll continue to work on that. And I think that there will be more stuff around ease of use. There’s going to be more features to help you figure out and deploy whatever you need.

We’re starting to see a lot of talk from other companies like Google and Microsoft and IBM who want to get into the cloud services business. What kind of competitive threat to see coming at you?

We’ve been in business for five years with real paying customers, with large companies down to guys in basements, and I think we were lucky enough to have a real first-mover advantage. A lot of technology companies have not followed quickly in part because they haven’t wanted to follow quickly. They make money by getting seven-figure purchase orders, which is good for them, but not so good for their customers, so they have a real dilemma about making the transition.

Another thing I’m hearing a lot of these days is talk of private clouds. Companies are wondering why they can’t build their own clouds themselves, and still maintain the on-premise control of their data. Do you sense any threat from that?

There are a lot of companies with large sales forces who are banging the private cloud drum very loudly. When they all do that in concert, some customers are going to listen. But you have to parse that talk from the reality. I think some customers have to be very careful because they lack some fundamental characteristics of the cloud. If you’re still writing a very large check, and not operating in a pay-as-you-go fashion, you’re losing one of the key advantages of the cloud. If you just bought machines that had to appear on a loading dock somewhere, then what you have isn’t instantly scalable. Most importantly, it doesn’t take the heavy lifting out of your hands so you can focus on the things that your customers care about and instead focus on things that are really just table ante at the end of the day. CFOs and CIO are going to have look really closely at the benefits that are being advertised to them. A lot of those models look like yesterday’s economic model.

What about hybrid models? Along with private clouds I hear a lot about mixing cloud and on-premise.

I don’t want to come across as some kind of religious zealot for the cloud. We’ll live in some kind of hybrid world for many years to come. But I think that what hybrid principally means is when there’s cases where there’s applications that can’t move because of government regulations or it was just built in 1978 and it’s just not conducive to moving–you see that a lot actually–but you want to run other things in the cloud. One of our jobs is to make it really easy for enterprises to live in that hybrid environment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110307/seven-questions-for-adam-selipsky-head-of-amazon-web-services/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110213/checking-in-with-foursquares-dennis-crowley-at-mobile-world-congress-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110213/checking-in-with-foursquares-dennis-crowley-at-mobile-world-congress-video/#comments Sun, 13 Feb 2011 23:00:32 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=3996 Although tens of thousands of people have checked in to Mobile World Congress in recent years using Foursquare, this is the first time that Dennis Crowley has done so.

However, the youthful chief executive said that as a big mobile geek, he’s excited to see what all the phone makers have in store.

“This is like the South by Southwest of mobile,” Crowley said, referring to Austin’s annual tech and culture festival.

He’s also eager to meet with carriers and phone makers to convince them to more deeply integrate Foursquare into their devices and services.

People mistakenly think of Foursquare as just a game where people boast to their friends about all the places they have been, Crowley said, but what underlies that is a hugely powerful database of places filled with all kinds of recommendations and other inside information.

Over time, Crowley hopes Foursquare will be able to tap the aggregate data and serve it up in useful ways, as well as help individuals get personalized recommendations based on their past check-ins.

One way Mobilized tries to get a sense for the strength of the different mobile platforms is by asking time-crunched developers how they are allocating resources. Crowley said Foursquare, which now has about 50 employees, has three developers on iPhone and two each on Android and BlackBerry. The company used outside partners to create its Nokia and Windows Phone 7 apps.

As for Crowley, he’s been splitting his time between an Android device and his beloved iPhone. His well-worn phone is covered front and back with various stickers–all the easier to pick out his device, he says. But Crowley doesn’t have the iPhone 4, instead sticking with the 3GS. Crowley said his colleagues all upgrade to the latest and greatest and someone needs to make sure the service still works on older gear.

“I like to keep it one generation behind,” he said. “Someone’s got to take one for the team.”

I pressed him on the potential for dangers with all this checking-in, including concerns about physical safety. Without trying to dismiss the issue, Crowley noted that he’s been checking in with his location as long as anyone–since 2000–and has yet to have anything bad happen. The worst thing that’s happened to him, he said, is people showing up to parties uninvited.

For more from Crowley, check out the video we did in the lobby of his Barcelona hotel.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110213/checking-in-with-foursquares-dennis-crowley-at-mobile-world-congress-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110131/intonow-its-shazam-plus-foursquare-for-tv/ http://allthingsd.com/20110131/intonow-its-shazam-plus-foursquare-for-tv/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:00:13 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2983 IntoNow, a new iOS app launching today, identifies television programs by just hearing snippets from them. It’s similar to the Shazam mobile app that many people know and love, which IDs an ambient song by recording it and quickly matching it to an archive.

IntoNow users can “check in” to a particular episode once it’s been recognized, like one would check into a restaurant on Foursquare. The goal is to enable conversations around the watercooler and on social networks by helping users connect around what they’re watching and discover new things to watch.

It’s common knowledge that the only thing people love more than watching TV is talking about it, but none of the many “social TV” start-ups–GetGlue, Miso, Philo, Comcast’s Tunerfish etc.–has emerged as a clear leader. Unlike the competition, IntoNow isn’t trying to provide a platform for conversations, but rather to show what people are watching.

Still, it’s not clear people want to download an app to tell themselves and their friends what they’re already watching on television.

IntoNow can recognize both live television and five years of archived U.S. TV airings. It constantly analyzes satellite feeds and matches them to TV listings to have current data.

Adam Cahan, the CEO of IntoNow, says his company’s TV recognition technology–which it calls SoundPrint–is akin to a GPS, which takes the hassle out of figuring out exactly which restaurant you’re at and matching it to something like Foursquare’s database.

Cahan’s company was very recently spun out of Auditude, a company where Cahan was also CEO. IntoNow’s seven employees and its technology were all formerly part of Auditude, actually. That company, which just raised $11 million from investors including Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures, has shifted away from video identification to video advertising management. IntoNow has yet to raise its own funding, but Greylock and Redpoint already have equity in the start-up.

In addition to creating a feed of what episodes they’re watching, IntoNow users can share on Facebook and Twitter, look up programs on IMDb, add shows to their Netflix queues and purchase episodes on iTunes.

The name “IntoNow” comes from the expression “What are you into now?” IntoNow hopes other companies will build SoundPrint audio recognition into their own social TV products. SoundPrint has 2.6 million airings in its catalog, is constantly recording 130 channels and needs four to 12 seconds of audio to make a match.

While it’s only iOS for now, IntoNow and SoundPrint are in development for Android and Web-enabled televisions.

IntoNow eventually hopes to help content owners validate that their watchers are participating with live content, and help the TV industry measure advertising and viewership metrics without relying on a panel.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110131/intonow-its-shazam-plus-foursquare-for-tv/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110128/startup-watch-smoopa-android-app-helps-electronics-shoppers-compare-prices/ http://allthingsd.com/20110128/startup-watch-smoopa-android-app-helps-electronics-shoppers-compare-prices/#comments Fri, 28 Jan 2011 10:00:13 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2935 Smoopa, a new comparison shopping start-up with a pretty silly name, this week introduced its first app, which allows Android users to scan bar codes of electronics, movies and games, and find out whether they’re cheaper online.

That’s similar to other shopping apps such as those from e-commerce powerhouse Amazon, but Smoopa has a few neat features.

First of all, Smoopa always includes shipping costs in its prices. It also shows recent prices for the 12 million products in its database, so you can get an idea of whether to buy now or later (kind of like what Farecast/Bing Travel does for air flights). And it gives users the ability to track the price of a product and be alerted when it comes down. Users can also share a product price with friends through in-app Facebook integration.

Boston-based Smoopa currently has data from Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Office Depot, Buy.com and TigerDirect. CEO Mendel Chuang said the company doesn’t carry Amazon feeds yet, in part because the company obscures shipping costs in the product listings it provides through its API.

Chuang reported that retailers are increasingly comfortable with customers pulling out smartphones while they browse, even if it makes them likely to spend their money elsewhere. Best Buy has a policy of matching its own online prices, which are apparently often lower than those on its shelves. And after all, you’re already in the store, so you may value the convenience of buying a product right there, where shipping is always free.

Smoopa is available for free in the U.S. through Android Market, and online at www.smoopa.com. The company is working on an iOS version.

Chuang, who formerly led marketing for Google Friend Connect, launched Smoopa with a team of three other MIT grads. The company is bootstrapped and expects to make money from affiliate revenue sharing. It built its bar-code-reading technology in-house.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110128/startup-watch-smoopa-android-app-helps-electronics-shoppers-compare-prices/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110125/facebook-sets-mobile-sights-on-html5/ http://allthingsd.com/20110125/facebook-sets-mobile-sights-on-html5/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 20:15:09 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2752 “Mobile is our primary focus for our platform this year,” Facebook CTO Bret Taylor told an audience of developers at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco today.

Taylor said Facebook will emphasize HTML5 development in order to have maximum impact across fragmented mobile platforms for both his company and those who build on the Facebook platform.

HTML5–which is the new browser standard that gives Web applications capabilities on par with native applications–Taylor said, “might be a little ahead of that curve, but that’s where we’re putting a huge amount of investment in the next year.”

Already, said Taylor, 125 million of Facebook’s 200 million-plus mobile users are using HTML5-capable devices like the iPhone and Android.

Even so, when Facebook introduces a new feature, it has to implement it across seven different versions: facebook.com, m.facebook.com, touch.facebook.com, its iPhone app, Android app, BlackBerry app and custom integrations for other handset OSs.

Facebook wants to reduce that friction for its own sake and its developers’ as well. The company’s first step toward this goal was its single sign-on for mobile apps introduced last year, which has already had significant impact on developers like Flixster, Taylor said.

Facebook’s HTML5 push brings it into step with Google, which has put a major emphasis on Web apps despite its own Android mobile OS. But even so, the two companies have had major success with native apps, when they’ve chosen to build them. Facebook has the No. 1 free iPhone app of all time, while Google Mobile for iPhone is No. 3. (Coming in second is Pandora’s streaming radio.)

“Mobile devices are inherently social,” said Taylor, noting that he feels that the combination of mobile, social and location will be an especially fruitful area for products like Facebook Places and Foursquare.

Taylor said Facebook is likely to create its own “high-quality location database”–which would compete with start-ups like SimpleGeo–though it’s not something the company has specific plans for yet.

Addressing start-ups wary of Facebook competing with their products by making them a part of its platform, Taylor said, “Our philosophy has always been to build products into Facebook that are generally useful, which is why we built location into the platform. We felt like it would have a really big impact for developers if they could all leverage a common location infrastructure.”

Facebook’s platform focus in 2010 was about improving user experience, Taylor said, and he considers that effort a success. He said Facebook reduced spam (a.k.a. unwanted posts about games like FarmVille and other applications) by 95 percent last year through policy simplifications.

Though it shut down ways for applications to recruit users, it wasn’t like Facebook prevented games from growing, said Taylor, citing the fantastic ascent of Zynga’s CityVille, which grew to 100 million users in 40 days, compared with the four years it took Facebook itself to reach that number.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110125/facebook-sets-mobile-sights-on-html5/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110119/when-it-wasnt-stuffing-cars-emc-was-doing-real-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20110119/when-it-wasnt-stuffing-cars-emc-was-doing-real-business/#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2011 02:56:45 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1964 When it wasn’t stuffing a Mini Cooper full of dancers storage concern EMC actually did launch a huge batch of new products yesterday.

The headliner was VNXe, its first low-end offering, priced at less than $10,000 and aimed at small and medium businesses, a segment where Dell used to resell EMC equipment. In another bit of product-launch theater, EMC had a fourth-grade boy onstage to demonstrate that the box–which in this case was mounted on the back of another Mini Cooper–could be managed and configured from an iPad.

I caught up with EMC Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Burton to talk about it and the 40 other products EMC launched yesterday.

NewEnterprise: So 41 products all at once?

Burton: I’ve never been in a situation where the release dates of so many products aligned. We realized we might as well do them all at the beginning of the year. Internally we called it the “mega-launch.”

What kind of opportunities do you see in that lower-end market. This was your first entry into that market.

We estimate maybe a $4 billion opportunity there. We don’t have much of it now, call it zero. We’ve never really built a product that’s tailor made for that market. And for a product like that, you can’t just build it–you have to build it in a way that the channel can make money on and create customer satisfaction. We’ve got several partners who will take this product to market. We’ve committed $20 million there to generate demand and bootstrap the whole thing.

Tell me about this go-to-market effort.

Traditionally EMC has been led by direct sales. We have a sales force and they call on the customer directly. With a products that sells for $9,000 or $10,000 you can’t afford to sell that in the same way. We have to create pull for the product with our partners. You have to get the customers calling to ask for the product. It’s a little bit of everything. There’s advertising, there’s direct campaigns. Anything to get the phones to ring. To get the reps at the events jazzed up we’ve leased a fleet of 21 Mini Coopers. We’ll be doing 108 partner events around the world.

So who do you see as a typical customer for this?

Before I worked for EMC I ran a software company that had about 700 or 800 people. We had about 20 guys in the IT department. We didn’t have a lot of specialists, we had a lot of generalists there. So I’d say any company that’s at less than $25 million in annual sales is a perfect candidate. They’re not going to have the high-end skills to deal with the complexity of the high-end arrays. But they’ll have VMWare, they’ll have exchange environments, they have file shares, and they’ll want to get going quickly.

It’s funny I should be talking to you today. I just published a Q&A with Ping Li of Accel Partners. We got to talking about the storage needs of companies moving to the cloud, particularly around their database environments, and he said the trend is toward running open-source things like Hadoop on commodity hardware. He said he’s not seeing a lot of EMC gear at Google or Facebook or many of the other Web companies. There’s a lot of people who are seeing both a trend and an opportunity around that. What do you see?

If you’re Google and you’ve got your own team of rocket scientists who can build your own file system and kernel and download modules from the Internet every day, you don’t need it. But if you’re Pfizer, you probably have a lot of rocket scientists, but you probably don’t want them working on reconfiguring kernels, you probably want them working on discovering new drugs. And so, picking the techiest of the tech companies and saying they don’t use our stuff, yeah those are companies with the smartest tech guys on the planet. The problem is they’re not in all the Fortune 500 companies in the world, and in fact I’d argue they’re in almost none of them.

So if you want to have that scaled-out commodity storage and you want to manage big data, and you don’t want to hire 1,000 rocket scientists to do it, we can sell it to you. It won’t be true commodity hardware, but then you won’t have to hire so many people to manage it. That to me is kind of the rub. EBay is a big name on the Web, and it uses our Object Storage infrastructure. Could they have built it themselves? Probably. But there’s a little intellectual snobbery inside these companies. They say, “We don’t want to buy your stuff because we’re smarter than you.” Those are the edge cases. If we just get the rest we’re happy.

Let’s talk about the broader picture in IT spending. What are you hearing from your largest customers about their intent to spend this year?

2010 was a decent year. Going into 2010 folks said they thought their spending would increase two to three percent. They probably ended up with three to four percent. Looking out into this year, people seem a little more optimistic. But even still I think it’s in the three to five percent range. One thing we saw in 2009 is that folks didn’t buy much storage capacity last year and instead tried to use what they had. Going into 2010 there were signs of recovery and people started to spend again, and we see that continuing into 2011. One reason for the Isilon acquisition is that we do see a trend toward spending into different areas of the business.

At another level I think I agree with you and with Ping that certain companies will move to Hadoop for a certain class of application and we’ve got a pretty strong relationship between our Greenplum division and Hadoop. What a lot of people want to do is analyze traditional enterprise data in conjunction with something else. What Greenplum has tried to do is bridge the gap between Hadoop and the more traditional storage infrastructure. Hadoop is not going away, and its something that we fully intend to work with.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110119/when-it-wasnt-stuffing-cars-emc-was-doing-real-business/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110118/microsoft-and-hp-show-off-the-fruits-of-their-partnership/ http://allthingsd.com/20110118/microsoft-and-hp-show-off-the-fruits-of-their-partnership/#comments Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:00:51 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1919 About a year ago, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft announced a three-year, $250 million deal to team up around cloud computing. It was a strange announcement chock-full of buzzwords. They said they would “collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings; and integrated management tools.” Know what any of that means?

Today’s the day we all find out. The two are showing the first fruits of their combined quarter billion dollars worth of labor. The pair announced they have built four enterprise-focused appliances that they say will combine applications, infrastructure and productivity tools into a single unified system. The first half of this quartet is being announced today, with more to follow.

One is the HP Business Decision Appliance, which is intended to run business intelligence applications. The appliance, they say, greatly reduces the time and effort for companies to deploy and manage business intelligence, which is a fancy way of saying you’re analyzing the data from the operation of your business, and looking for patterns or trends that might not otherwise be apparent. It’s optimized to run for Microsoft’s SQL server database software and its SharePoint collboration software, and takes less than an hour to install, they promise.

The second is the HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance, a data store designed for small- and mid-size companies that they say delivers performance that’s suitable for a big enterprise, but doesn’t require an administrator to run it. It’s a smaller version of the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which the two first previewed in November and is available now.

Next up is a messaging appliance geared toward making it easy to install Microsoft Exchange 2010, the server piece of Outlook, Microsoft’s all-purpose email, calendar and contact software that’s so widely used in companies around the world. Its formal name is the HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and the two companies say it’s the industry’s first self-contained server for enterprise-class messaging that can be deployed in only a few hours. It comes pre-configured and with “best practices” designed in. The mailboxes are large, centrally archived and available to any device. It will be available in March.

What’s after that? HP and Microsoft are also working on something they call the HP Database Consolidation Appliance, which can bring hundreds of databases into a single appliance. This one will run SQL server and Microsoft’s Hyper-V Cloud.

It’s all about making IT projects easy to deploy, says Mark Potter, HP’s senior vice president and general manager for industry standard servers and software. “It can take anywhere from one to 18 months to roll out a sophisticated service to end users,” Potter told me in an interview yesterday. “About 32 percent of all IT projects are rated a success. It takes our customers a lot of time, planning and risk. We’re trying to bring a solution to the market that does for business applications what Microsoft Office did for desktop productivity.”

Why spend so much to team up? Microsoft and HP think that by 2015 there’s a combined market worth $55 billion for business intelligence, data warehousing, messaging and online transactions, making that quarter billion potentially worth it. Now they just have to prove these appliances can sell.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110118/microsoft-and-hp-show-off-the-fruits-of-their-partnership/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101229/millions-of-honda-owners-victims-of-yet-another-data-breach/ http://allthingsd.com/20101229/millions-of-honda-owners-victims-of-yet-another-data-breach/#comments Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:25:38 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1150 Carmaker Honda is warning more than two million of its customers in the U.S. that an email database containing some of their personal information has been stolen.

It’s not yet 100 percent clear if this breach is connected to the recent breach of the email marketing firm Silverpop Systems, but it sure looks that way. Honda was an enthusiastic Silverpop customer as recently as 2009, according to this press release. It’s the same company whose data was breached in thefts of customer data from McDonald’s and deviantArt. A similar incident was reported concerning the drugstore chain Walgreen’s, but it hasn’t been tied specifically to Silverpop.

The list contained the names, login names, email addresses and–get this–vehicle identification numbers of more than two million Honda owners. Another list, this one containing only the email addresses of nearly three million Acura owners, was also taken.

Honda has contacted all the customers via email. The worry is that affected owners, especially those on the list with the VINs, may be targeted for some kind of phishing attack. Imagine getting an email from someone pretending to be your local Honda dealer who correctly identifies the car you just bought and asks you to give up more personal information so that you can get “special offers.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101229/millions-of-honda-owners-victims-of-yet-another-data-breach/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101223/what-is-thingd-why-did-it-make-the-fancy-and-whats-up-with-those-fancy-offices-lets-ask-founder-joe-einhorn/ http://allthingsd.com/20101223/what-is-thingd-why-did-it-make-the-fancy-and-whats-up-with-those-fancy-offices-lets-ask-founder-joe-einhorn/#comments Thu, 23 Dec 2010 12:00:55 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27379 Some buzzy start-ups are easy to explain. Then there’s ThingD.

The year-old company has big-name backers and lots of interest from tech’s A-list. But when you start talking about what the company is up to–a structured database of objects, compiled primarily by machines–things get a little fuzzier.

Here’s another way to look at what the company is doing: TheFancy.com. It’s ThingD’s consumer site (and where you’ll now end up if you try heading to http://www.thingd.com).

This one is easier to understand. It’s a catalog of stuff people like, illustrated with photos they’ve taken or pictures they’ve found on the Web.

See something you like, and Fancy will tell you more about it; find someone who has interesting taste and Fancy will show you more stuff they like. You can also see what Ashton Kutcher likes, if that floats your boat.

And there is an iPhone app, of course.

There’s no business there yet, but you can easily imagine how Fancy could add e-commerce into the mix, if it gets scale. Which makes it quite similar to other social/stuff/catalog start-ups like Svpply.

The big difference is that Fancy is powered by ThingD’s database, which is supposed to be doing some very heavy lifting, and that Fancy/ThingD has some very serious expectations. The kind you get when you get backing from people like Andreessen Horowitz, Allen & Co., Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Chris Hughes right out of the gate.

You can see where this is going, or at least where it’s supposed to go. ThingD’s ambition to catalog lots and lots and lots of stuff puts it in the same sandbox, theoretically, that heavyweights like Amazon and eBay are already playing in. And Google, of course. The folks at Facebook, among other big tech companies you know, are paying attention.

With the exception of a Sun Valley showcase, ThingD/Fancy has stayed mostly quiet for the past year. But now, as 29-year-old founder Joe Einhorn gets ready to open up Fancy to the general public, he’s trying to explain what he’s doing to the rest of the world. This New York Observer profile is especially well-done.

I thought it’d be fun to get him on camera and let him tell his story in his own words, so I dropped by his very unstart-up-like office (it’s on top of the Apple Store in New York’s meatpacking district!) and he put up with my brutal cold and my caveman questions.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101223/what-is-thingd-why-did-it-make-the-fancy-and-whats-up-with-those-fancy-offices-lets-ask-founder-joe-einhorn/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101222/gawkergate-collateral-damage-now-includes-the-new-york-times/ http://allthingsd.com/20101222/gawkergate-collateral-damage-now-includes-the-new-york-times/#comments Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:13:11 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1010 It’s now been at least 10 days since the Gawker group of Web sites was hacked by a group calling itself Gnosis in one of the side threads to the WikiLeaks controversy.

Within two days, sites like LinkedIn and later Blizzard Entertainment and Yahoo had advised their users to change their passwords.

The latest company caught up in all this is the New York Times. A little more than an hour ago, the Times sent an email to customers (see below) whose email addresses appeared in a searchable database of compromised Gawker commenting accounts, warning them that if they used the same password on nytimes.com as they did on Gawker, it would be a good idea to change it. There is no evidence of any funny business on the Times’ Web site.

Incidentally, in case you missed it, Gawker’s technology head, Thomas Plunkett, circulated a memo detailing what happened at Gawker and what it plans to do in response to the incident. One thing it will do is offer disposable commenting accounts that users can ditch easily, and for which storing an email address won’t be required.

Here is the email from the Times:

NYTimes.com Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 5:15 PM
Reply-To: nytdirect@nytimes.com

In case you missed our recent article “Gawker Sites Hacked and Passwords Compromised”
http://nyti.ms/hjNvlY we are writing to inform you that databases belonging to Gawker Media were compromised and hackers obtained more than one million user names, e-mail addresses and passwords.

While there is no evidence of suspicious activity on NYTimes.com we wanted you to know that
the e-mail address you registered with NYTimes.com matches an e-mail address that was on
the list of Gawker e-mail addresses and passwords that were published online.

If you use the same password for NYTimes.com as you did for Gawker, we strongly recommend you change your password. Changing your NYTimes.com password can be accomplished by visiting the Member Center page: http://www.nytimes.com/membercenter. After logging in to your account, click on the ‘change’ button associated with the password field which can be found under the Account Summary heading.

Here’s a Gadgetwise post with tips on developing a good password (in brief: do not make it a real word, keep it long and mix in an unusual combination of letters and numbers).
http://nyti.ms/gGR3kz

Please contact Customer Support at 1-800-698-4637 or e-mail customercare@nytimes.com with any questions.

Have a safe and happy holiday season.

The New York Times Company
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018

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