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.

On Friday afternoon, Dell gave an interview to the trade publication CRN (which used to be called Computer Reseller News) crowing about his company’s apparent share gains in the market for servers.

What got him excited was preliminary data (as in, not yet published) from the market research firm IDC, which followed similar findings from another research firm, Gartner (again, not yet published), that supposedly shows healthy gains for Dell and big losses at HP.

According to the numbers Dell shared with CRN, IDC found Dell — No. 2 in the worldwide server market — to have grown its share of the server market to nearly 28 percent, while HP’s fell from north of 35 percent a year to slightly below 31 percent. “HP is losing share at a staggering rate, and they are losing it to Dell,” Dell proclaimed.

HP, which had led the segment for the better part of two decades, didn’t respond to Dell’s claims. But it did respond a day earlier, after Dell enterprise chief Marius Haas gave a similar interview — again to CRN — claiming similar data from Gartner. “One quarter does not a trend make. … 17 years is a trend,” retorted Jim Ganthier, a marketing exec in HP’s server group.

Dell hasn’t bothered to wait for either research firm to finalize and publish their data, and I’ve asked both firms to comment on that. I’m no expert in the processes these firms follow, but from what I understand, execs at companies like Dell, HP and IBM see these “preliminary” figures before they get published in order to give the company a chance to dispute them if they vary from what’s really going on. When Gartner and IDC get around to publishing press releases, expect Dell to make a second push on this topic, and maybe give more interviews.

Dell naturally has an urge to pounce on HP and score a few punches. HP has been using the occasion of Dell’s $24.4 billion leveraged-buyout plan to create uncertainty among Dell customers. Way back on Feb. 5, when the buyout plan was first floated, HP issued a statement saying, “Leveraged buyouts tend to leave existing customers and innovation at the curb. We believe Dell’s customers will now be eager to explore alternatives, and HP plans to take full advantage of that opportunity.”

With IBM said to be in on-again, off-again talks with China’s Lenovo to sell its industry-standard server business, and Dell going private, HP is arguing that it is the one major vendor not engaged in a significant corporate shake-up, and thus able to focus most on its customers’ needs. Indeed, HP’s Dave Donatelli led a major Webcast with HP partners last week, touting that very message.

Neither company’s shares are really responding to any of the trash-talking today. HP shares are up slightly this morning to $20.76 a share, while Dell shares are also up a little to $13.35, or about 30 cents below the $13.65 buyout price that Michael Dell and private-equity firm Silver Lake have offered to take the company private.

Image copyright Cartoonresource

However, there is a revolution brewing in the enterprise and it’s starting right at the desk of the chief marketing officer (CMO). The way that products are purchased is being disrupted, and this is forcing the CMO to catch up. Buyers are now in control of the buying process and their behaviors are growing increasingly unpredictable. As such, marketers must strive to be everywhere buyers are; and to do so, marketers are starting to use data-driven automation to reach and address the needs of prospects wherever they may be in the buying process.

The changes that this revolution will bring over the next decade to support new marketing strategies will drive tens of billions of dollars of investment and innovation to the bottom lines of hundreds of thousands of companies around the world. The top marketing technology players — including Salesforce.com, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Google and Adobe — see the impending fight, and the war to own the marketing technology market has begun to play out. Battle lines are being drawn, and they center on the customer relationship management (CRM) system.

CRM as the system of record

Salesforce has been spending much of the last decade building its CRM system. Since more than 75 percent of the companies that use Salesforce are B2B, the company’s CRM platform is arguably the system of record for the B2B marketer. This puts Salesforce, as the fastest-growing scaled vendor in the space, in the driver’s seat to become the platform where marketers keep their treasure trove of prospect and customer information and interaction data. Oracle, NetSuite, IBM, Google, SAP — and arguably even Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter — don’t want to see Salesforce have the lock on such valuable data. To fend off the Salesforce threat, these companies are developing their own audience data strategies, ranging from aggressive acquisitions to building cookie data exchanges, or even building their own social networks (if they’re not one already). As each realizes, the vendor that controls audience data “wins” because all marketing decisions are keyed off of this information.

With the CRM system as the system of record, seamlessly connecting all of the marketing systems in an enterprise, executing programs and then measuring success becomes possible — once the right data can be plugged in. For example, today’s marketing automation systems sync with CRM systems so that as a salesperson moves prospects from leads to qualified opportunities, the marketing system can automatically send a different messages to each prospect, depending on what stage they are in within the marketing funnel.

However, integration currently ends there and the marketing organization is unable to easily tie the opportunity for unique messaging into any other marketing channel — such as SEM, social media or display advertising. The next step needed is an integration of all of these activities. In the above example, once the salesperson moves a prospect from a lead to a qualified opportunity within the CRM system, the move would trigger display advertising and social media marketing that syncs creative and messages across all channels in real time, and then adds the prospect’s interaction with each mechanism back to the CRM record. Scalable, measurable, one-to-one marketing that requires no additional marketing resource is the result.

What’s next?

The incentives for marketers to realize the holy grail of right message, right place and right time are clearly in place. So what’s getting in the way of all this progress from happening immediately? Two big areas have slowed progress: Integration of data across multiple systems in the enterprise, and privacy. The vendors duking it out for ownership of data — Salesforce, Oracle, et al — have begun work with data platforms to solve the integration issue. Privacy, however, remains a concern. The argument goes: If consumers don’t know what you’re using this information for, you shouldn’t be using it. This is a fair and reasonable argument, and in the CRM world where customer and prospect information is tied to personally identifiable information, it is going to be important that consumers opt in to the information being collected by the marketer. The tradeoff is similar to the one made today in loyalty programs such as grocery store or airline frequent flier programs: You give a company the ability to track your purchases and incentivize you to buy more through discounts and coupons, and they will give you a better experience as a customer.

The future of enterprise marketing is one in which consumers benefit from transparency concerning where and how their data is being used, and through improved, more relevant experiences from vendors, service providers and favorite retailers.

To this end, expect the battle for data to continue as enterprise giants fill their platforms while trying to deliver the CMO increasingly sophisticated and integrated capabilities. Unprecedented efficiency in marketing will result, increasing growth and profits for the enterprise as more dollars become available for investment. The promise of true one-to-one and completely measurable marketing has been a long time in the making. It’s coming fast, and it’s going to transform the enterprise over the next decade.

Russell Glass, CEO of Bizo, is a serial technology entrepreneur, having founded or held senior positions at four venture-backed technology companies. Prior to Bizo, Russ led the marketing and product management teams at ZoomInfo, a business information search engine, where he sharpened his B2B marketing skill set and developed his love for business data.

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.

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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The consensus view of analysts says that Big Blue will report earnings per share of $3.05 on sales of $24.7 billion, and guide to profits of $3.95 a share on $26.2 billion in the quarter ending in June.

Chris Whitmore, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities, said in a note to clients earlier this week that he expects IBM’s sales to come in a little short of that consensus, but with a slightly higher EPS, driven in part by currency-hedging moves intended to take the sting off the effects from the contraction of credit and government austerity measures in Europe.

Whitmore says to expect solid results in IT hardware on the heels of a recent refresh cycle in IBM’s mainframe business. But with only two significant deals announced during the quarter, services results could be light. Ongoing cost-cutting measures, plus a shift toward selling more high-margin software, could boost gross margins to as high as 46.8 percent, up from 45.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. “In aggregate, we believe IBM’s high degree of recurring revs (about 60 percent of profits) and continued cost reduction and operational efficiency initiatives should support healthy margins and solid EPS going forward,” Whitmore wrote. He thinks it’s possible that IBM’s forecast that it will earn $16.70 a share in 2013 may prove a little conservative, and could go as high as $17.

On the hardware front, Whitmore says to pay attention to what IBM executives say about Unix servers in the conference call later today. While Oracle has recently announced a new line of servers based on its SPARC line of chips, and has made some bold claims about their performance, he says the industry contacts he talks to aren’t terribly impressed. “Based on our initial review of the product (and feedback from industry contacts), these new product announcements from Oracle mark a significant step up in the performance of its server products, but do not seem significant enough to change the ongoing competitive dynamics in the industry. As such, we expect IBM’s share gains in the Unix server market to continue. We believe investors will be acutely focused on management commentary on this front.”

First the funding: Gainsight said today that it has landed $9 million in a round led by Battery Ventures. Roger Lee, a Battery Ventures partner, led the deal.

Founded last year and based in Mountain View, Calif., Gainsight aims to use Big Data analytics to help companies hold on to their customers by making sure they’re getting the most out of the products and services they buy. How much would you pay to get an early warning that a key customer was at risk of bolting to a competitor’s product because they misunderstand something about yours?

Gainsight has a phrase for it: Customer Success Management. I call it churn reduction, but whatever you call it, it’s a pretty powerful idea, and already companies like Jive, Marketo and Eloqua (now a unit of Oracle) have signed on.

It’s an idea that founder Jim Eberlin happened upon at his old company, Host Analytics, which he ran for more than a decade. Which brings us to the new CEO. Gainsight named Nick Mehta (pictured), the former CEO of LiveOffice, a cloud-based email archiving outfit that’s now part of Symantec, as its new CEO. Eberlin will take on a product development role full-time.

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.

ForgeRock, a San Francisco startup led by a bunch of former Sun Microsystems execs, announced today that it has secured a $15 million Series B round of venture capital funding. Accel Partners, which led its $7 million Series A last year, also participated. Warren Weiss, a general partner at Foundation, will join the board of advisers.

I say “another player” because identity and access management is sort of a hot area these days. For one thing, companies are adding all sorts of cloud services to the mix of their IT operations, so there’s a significant need to make managing all the account credentials easier.

The one that comes most readily to mind is Okta, led by Todd McKinnon, a former Salesforce.com executive. It, too, has been raising a lot of money. And even Salesforce.com is making noise about getting into the identity game.

ForgeRock’s approach is based on open source software to provide a single sign-in across pretty much any kind of cloud environment, including public, private and hybrid. It also works with lots of software-as-a-service applications and mobile apps.

So far it has about 200 customers, including Thomson Reuters, Vodafone, McKesson and AOL.

The team is led by Mike Ellis, a former SAP exec who has also spent time at Oracle and Apple. CTO Lasse Andresen was also CTO for Sun’s European divisions. Jamie Nelson, VP of Engineer, was Sun’s director of engineering.

Several of the senior execs hail from Sun and worked on its identity products, including Sun Director EE and OpenSSO. After Oracle closed its acquisition of Sun in 2010, Sun’s identity products took a back seat to existing Oracle products. Several members of the ForgeRock team bolted Oracle to start their own identity outfit based on open source approaches.

As it turns out, Oracle is ending support for certain Sun identity products, so ForgeRock is going after their customers, specifically marketing a “Sun Replacement” — essentially an upgrade from Open SSO to its own OpenIDM. So now their old employer is a competitor.

The 17-member Fairsearch.org coalition, which includes Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, TripAdvisor and Expedia, said that Google “uses deceptive conduct to lockout competition in mobile.”

The organization complains that Google gives away Android for free, but then forces those who want its maps or YouTube or the Google Play store to then preload other Google services.

“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data,” coalition lawyer Thomas Vinje said in a statement. “We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market.”

Google representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Two other HP directors, John Hammergren and G. Kennedy Thompson, will resign.

Lane is a former president of Oracle and is still a managing partner at the legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He joined HP’s board in late 2010 not long after Léo Apotheker became CEO, first as non-executive chairman. He then became executive chairman after the Sept. 2011 shakeup in which Apotheker was fired and then-director Meg Whitman was named CEO.

Whitworth is the activist investor who took a board seat in November of 2011 after buying up more than 17 million HP shares. Whitworth will become chairman of the Finance and Investment Committee, replacing Hammergren.

The story was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. HP spokesman Michael Thacker confirmed the report to AllThingsD via email.

Lane, Hammergren and Thompson had all been targeted by unhappy shareholders seeking to unseat them in a proxy vote at HP’s shareholder meeting in San Jose, Calif., last month because of Lane’s involvement with HP’s $11 billion acquisition of the British software firm Autonomy. Lane survived the vote — nearly 59 percent of shareholders voted in favor of his retaining a board seat — but according to The Journal he was uneasy with the margin and chose to leave the chairmanship.

At the shareholder meeting, Hammergren received less than 54 percent of yes votes. Thompson received about 55 percent.

Thompson had been chairman of the board’s audit committee. Director Rajiv Gupta was named its new head. Director Gary M. Reiner will replace Gupta as chairman of the Nominating and Governance Committee.

A source familiar with the company’s plans says the process of recruiting three or four new directors, including an outside, non-executive chairman, is just getting underway and will likely take a few months.

HP just sent a press release on all this:

HP Announces Changes to Board of Directors

Raymond J. Lane steps down as chairman, remains a director Ralph V. Whitworth becomes interim chairman G. Kennedy Thompson and John H. Hammergren to leave board

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 4, 2013 — HP today announced changes to its board of directors. Raymond J. Lane has decided to step down as chairman of the board, to be replaced on an interim basis by Ralph V. Whitworth. The board is commencing a search for a permanent nonexecutive board chairman.

In addition, John H. Hammergren and G. Kennedy Thompson, after eight and seven years of service to HP stockholders, respectively, have decided to leave the board. Both directors will continue to serve until the May board meeting. The board is commencing a search for two or more new independent directors.

“After reflecting on the stockholder vote last month, I’ve decided to step down as executive chairman to reduce any distraction from HP’s ongoing turnaround,” said Lane. “Since I joined HP’s board a little over two years ago, I’ve been committed to board evolution to ensure our turnaround and future success. I’m proud of the board we’ve built and the progress we’ve made to date in restoring the company. I will continue to serve HP as a director and help finish the job.”

“Ray, John and Ken are terrific leaders, and they’re passionate about doing the right thing for HP,” said Whitworth. “From here we will continue to recruit outstanding directors, strengthen our governance and do the best we can—the best we know how—for stockholders. Meg is leading a Herculean turnaround, so most of all, we must build and maintain the best possible leadership structure for Meg and HP’s entire team to succeed.”

“Ray, John and Ken have invested a part of themselves in HP,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “Their leadership is reflected in the early success we’ve had turning the company around. I’m grateful that Ray will continue to serve, and I wish John and Ken the very best. I also appreciate Ralph’s willingness to increase his responsibilities during this transition.”

With Lane stepping down as executive chairman, the role of lead independent director, currently held by Rajiv L. Gupta, is no longer necessary and will be eliminated. Gupta will remain on the board and will replace Thompson as chairman of the Audit Committee.

Today we heard from another analyst following SAP who says quite the opposite. Adam Wood, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, issued a short note to clients critiquing Goldmacher’s findings and urging them to “be aware of headline risk.”

Wood said you can do the same kind of analysis Goldmacher did on any company and come to a similar conclusion. “What he’s saying is that companies have leeway in how they report product growth, so that if you exclude stuff that has been growing very fast at SAP like HANA and Mobile then the rest won’t be growing as fast,” Wood wrote. “If SAP’s overall growth rate was poor it might be useful. But SAP’s overall growth rate is good, [about] 10 percent, and much better than its main peer.”

Goldmacher’s main contention is that SAP has been using aggressive discounts in apps and business intelligence products while holding the pricing line on database and mobile products. The cumulative effect is to make the undiscounted stuff look like it’s growing well on a revenue basis relative to the discounted stuff, which may be growing better.

Wood doesn’t think this is going on, though in at least one sentence he seems to agree that it’s possible SAP is doing exactly what Goldmacher accuses it of: “Anecdotally we don’t think SAP discounts HANA but may discount other products if they take HANA, so they want that business to grow. [There's] nothing unusual or untoward about that,” he wrote. However SAP has said that more than half of its deals for HANA products have been for standalone sales, and not for HANA when packaged with other things.

Take out HANA — SAP’s database appliance product — and mobile, Goldmacher argued, and you find that other products are growing at only 2 percent annually, much more slowly than the industry average for business software.

Wood calls Goldmacher’s note a “poor piece of analysis where the only outcome could be that SAP decides to stop disclosing as much in future in line with their peers, which would be a shame.”

It’s no surprise SAP is taking a little flack for this. SAP has been making noise about HANA’s growth for a while. Co-CEO Bill McDermott called it the “the fastest growing software product in the history of the world” in an interview with AllThingsD earlier this year. And since the world has a sense of irony, McDermott’s enthusiastic pronouncement came only days before SAP sales came in short of expectations in a January quarterly earnings report.

For its part, SAP says it has been consistent in its pricing of HANA and has stuck to its no-discount policy, and that there has been no change to how it reports results.

Fast and loose with the numbers or not, American Depository Receipts of SAP have fallen a tad. Having closed at $80.79 on April 2, they’ve fallen by more than 1.5 percent and closed today at $79.56.

In a research note to clients today, analyst Peter Goldmacher of Cowen and Co. essentially accused SAP, the $21 billion (2012 sales) business software giant, of arbitrarily assigning revenue from other lines of business to HANA to make it seem as though it is growing faster than it is.

“If we take management at its word and believe that HANA’s two-year license growth [rate] through FY13 is about 120 percent, then this means that the other 90 percent of SAP’s license business, Apps and BI, is growing at … roughly 2 percent, materially below category growth rates,” Goldmacher wrote. “Our research and experience lead us to believe that SAP is allocating product revenue subjectively and that this is resulting in an inflated HANA growth rate. This could give the appearance of market momentum that doesn’t yet exist.”

That’s an important point, he argues, because HANA, a hardware appliance that runs several SAP business applications, is central to the bullish case that SAP shares are a good buy right now. “This could give the appearance of market momentum that doesn’t yet exist,” Goldmacher wrote. Incidentally, SAP doesn’t fully break out all the details in all the software markets it plays in.

SAP has been crowing about HANA’s growth rates for a while. In a conversation with AllThingsD in January, co-CEO Bill McDermott called it the “fastest growing software product in the history of the world.” Maybe, maybe not. It certainly didn’t help SAP meet the expectations of analysts when it last reported quarterly earnings in January.

So how is SAP supposedly doing this? Discounts. Large discounts on apps and business intelligence products coupled with no discounts on database and mobile products have the effect, Goldmacher argues, of making it look as though the database and mobile products are growing faster than they are. “Absent the uneven application of discounts by product, the database and mobile businesses are materially lower growth businesses and investors are overly confident in the ability of these two product lines to impact the model in the near to intermediate term,” he wrote.

I asked SAP spokesman Jim Dever about all this. He said that no such discounting is taking place. “We believe in the value of HANA, have priced it competitively, and do not discount it,” he told me today. “We have been consistent in our HANA pricing, our no-discount policy, and our reporting of growth rates and revenue results, and we have no changes to announce.”

For the record, SAP said it expects to see sales growth in the range of 11 percent to 13 percent in software and software-related services and 14 percent to 20 percent in its software and cloud subscriptions. The company next reports earnings on April 19.

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.

Worldwide, Gartner says, companies and organizations will spend a combined $3.8 trillion on hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications. That’s $100 billion higher than the last forecast it made in October.

While the U.S. avoided the fiscal cliff that five months ago cast a pall over everything related to the global economy and thus IT spending, the automatic sequestration that has mandated sudden cuts in government spending has offset any gains. And while Europe has settled down, the latest sovereign debt issues in Cyprus have also served as something of a setback. Both are seen as short-term headwinds.

Spending on devices — smartphones, tablets and printers — has grown like crazy, which shouldn’t surprise anybody, and will continue to grow, the firm says. Last year, spending on devices was $665 billion globally, and is expected to reach $718 billion this year, or 8 percent more.

Spending on enterprise software is running a close second, and is expected to grow by more than 6 percent to $297 billion. Here, a slowdown in IT operations management software is being offset by growth in spending on database management systems.

IT services and data center systems are also expected to grow this year, but a bit more slowly than in the previous forecast. Spending is coming down in the near-term on external storage and in Europe. IT services is seeing some intense price competition and redirection of budgets away from new consulting projects.

The slowest-growing segment will be telecom services, which declined last year. Gartner says it will generate about $1.7 trillion in revenue, up about 2 percent from last year. Declines in spending on voice are being offset by mobile data.

While the Théâtrophone was an impressive invention in its day, the subscription model itself has a prolific and fascinating history of enabling innovation throughout the world. Subscriptions have helped companies pioneer new distribution models across a diverse set of business applications; all in the name of seeking efficient annuity revenue streams that outweigh the cost of production and distribution. From an end-customer “subscriber” perspective, the convenience of easy access or repeat consumption can greatly outweigh the incremental cost of subscribing.

Subscriptions have historically also found ways to take on greater social meaning through the signaling of a certain status by way of access to a secret society, social club or charitable organization. In the 1700s, by “subscribing” to become a benefactor to a charitable organization or society, individuals were able to achieve certain significance among their peers. Subscriptions to charity balls and full-seasons of theatre access were as much of a status symbol as they were convenient. Country clubs, yacht clubs, athletic clubs, fraternities and other private clubs have almost always been entirely member funded by way of the subscription membership model. Memberships, dues, donations and even tithing from the Catholic Church were achieved via scheduled “subscription” payments.

During the 18th century, the notion of subscription that we know today arrived when subscriptions to periodicals, magazines, books and theatre events became common. These subscriptions typically included delivery of the printed material and were sold for a specified number of issues or a period of time.

During the 1800s, the idea of pay-as-you-go subscriptions emerged to support the need for staple items such as heating oil, coal, milk, ice and even diapers to be delivered to your home. In Paris, a five-franc annual tariff was levied on all residents for their “subscription” to a hectoliter of drinking water per day.

Throughout history, we observe some interesting commonality across each of these examples. Whether we’re talking about subscriptions for the purpose of convenience, pay-as-you-go consumption, engagement or status, the underlying business driver has always been that subscriptions provide the ability to generate capital in the form of an attractive annuity revenue stream. From a financial perspective, companies that are able to generate a growing audience of subscribers producing predictable revenue streams are far more capital-efficient than companies that need to acquire, and then re-acquire, each customer interaction. (If you’re ever curious about this assertion, just ask yourself why so many insurance companies occupy the largest buildings across all major cities in the United States.² By definition, insurance is an annuity-based, subscription business.)

Fast forward to today. We are in the midst of yet another explosive expansion of subscription business models. From traditional media moving to digital media, to the rapid adoption of SaaS and cloud-based businesses, mobile and social products, applications and services are all careening toward some form of subscription-based offering. This is largely because the cost of developing and launching new businesses has declined to such an extent that it requires a very different level of up-front capital investment to chase these opportunities.

Why are subscription models everywhere today? The following intersection of trends is powering the recent appeal for subscriptions:

From the business perspective, there has always been a strong appeal in creating a predictable stream of revenue. Beyond that, the notion of maximizing lifetime value from existing customers is something that has always existed, but is now enabled through better visibility into activity. Traditional e-commerce companies like eBay have long focused on optimizing the “Triple A’s” — Acquisition, Activation and Activity. With today’s technology in place, we now have the ability to solve for all of these variables in a way that is not only more palatable to the end customer, but in many respects the optimization is couched in a way that is actually a benefit to the customer. (Think about the recent reminders you’ve likely received from your oil changer, dentist or even hair stylist that it is time for you to come back for your next appointment.)

Consumers have evolved a long way from the cable and magazine subscriber of yesterday as well. Today, consumers expect to have a range of choice in their offerings. They’ll commit to subscribe particularly if they have the ability to select from a range of feature/pricing options that best suit their own preferences.

There exists a psychological minimum. If a service is offered at a price level that feels low enough in relation to the marginal benefit that they receive, a consumer will subscribe. Conversely, they will elect to cancel if the marginal benefit wanes and is no longer worth the cost to continue subscribing. Managing the perceived value of any subscription product or service over time creates a relationship between the consumer and the service provider, each of whom seeks to maximize the value they are receiving from the other.

At the same time, the upfront capital investment required to launch a new enterprise service has declined to such an extent that it affords businesses a greater opportunity to test and learn as they go. As recently as 10 or 12 years ago, during the first dot-com boom, companies raised massive amounts of money not only to signal a coveted first-mover market position, but also to fund the huge amount of investment required to scale out a company. Today, we have cloud services and SaaS/PaaS offerings like Amazon Web Services and RackSpace.

The Web has become too fragmented to sustain ad-only revenue models.
Ten years ago, venture capitalists were inundated with companies seeking funding for ad-supported business models. Today, the Web is far too fragmented to support businesses seeking to aggregate massive ad dollars.

There has been a 100X reduction in the cost of software infrastructure within 10 years.
Here is an example: In just over 10 years, the “rented” application infrastructure model once offered by Kontiki (before it was called SaaS/PaaS) would have cost a customer approximately $100,000 per month to launch a business. Today, the same offering is delivered by Amazon Web Services for approximately $1,000 per month.

The cost of storage has plummeted 16X in the last 10 years.
Today, it costs you $0.085 per GB to store data. Ten years ago, it cost $1.39/GB. This decline in storage costs has created the opportunity for subscription-based file-sharing and backup companies like Box.net and Dropbox.³

The cost of Internet bandwidth “transit” has declined 75X in the past 10 years.
Entirely new business models have emerged due to the proliferation of inexpensive and ubiquitous broadband connectivity. This has allowed companies like Hulu and Netflix to have distribution to large markets at economically sustainable rates.⁴

Open-source software has eliminated the need for expensive licenses.
Ten years ago, companies aiming to deliver a service at scale were likely to sign up for expensive Oracle and Microsoft licenses. Today, startups have an impressive roster of free open-source software to choose from to run their operations.

On the Web today, the confluence of these trends is creating new markets and opportunities. The functional role of marketing has evolved to become increasingly data-driven.

Financial CRM allows the consumer to get what they want, and the business to provide a well-crafted migration path of high-probability options for cross-sell and up-sell options in the future. The management of this path for monetizing users post-sale has become an even more critical discipline for maximizing enterprise profitability than the sexy and creative brand-building efforts on which companies have traditionally focused.

All of these factors combined increasingly lead entrepreneurs to a similar conclusion. It is now far more efficient to offer products and services via subscriptions. Subscription pricing easily attracts customers, eliminates their purchase anxiety and, if designed well, keeps them happily paying over a longer period of time. Subscription models not only allow for attractive and efficient pricing, but also alleviate the need for a heavy-handed sales pitch. Ultimately, customers appreciate that they are in more control — always having the ability to upgrade their service, or to cancel and move on to something better.

Based in San Francisco, Dan Burkhart is the CEO and co-founder of subscription billing service Recurly, Inc. He was also an executive at eBay and NBC Internet.

The software giant’s chief executive on Tuesday unveiled a set of midrange and high-end server systems, powered by a faster version of the Sparc microprocessor line invented by Sun. Oracle said the new systems are much speedier in running an array of applications, including Oracle databases and Java software, and are up to ten times faster than the similarly priced Oracle system it replaces.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Oracle said in a statement that the growth of smart mobile devices — iPhones and iPads, as well as Android phones and tablets and the like — have exponentially boosted data traffic on networks. That has created a need for service providers to better manage the new traffic loads on their networks, while also deploying new services that can make money. Tekelec’s control software is already in use by more than 300 service providers around the world.

Additionally, Oracle said it will combine Tekelec’s capabilities with those of Acme Packet, which it acquired earlier this year for $1.7 billion.

In a conference call yesterday, CFO Safra Catz blamed the problems on issues with sales execution, due in part to all the sales people Oracle has hired in recent months: “Since we’ve been adding literally thousands of new sales reps around the world, the problem was largely sales execution, especially with the new reps, as they ran out of runway in Q3,” Catz said on the call. “As expected, many of the pushed out deals have already closed.”

Analysts today seemed willing to take that explanation at face value. “While the sales execution excuse is hardly bulletproof, we side with Oracle on this one and conclude that the issues are largely internal and can be addressed relatively quickly,” wrote BMO Capital Markets analyst Karl Keirstead in a note to clients today. “We haven’t picked up signs of a February lull in enterprise IT spend.”

Brad Reback of Stifel Nicolaus agreed. “We think the issue was not macro, competitive or product related, but due to training and productivity issues with new sales hires and their inability to close enough ‘bread and butter’ deals,” he wrote in a note today.

However, it’s hard to gauge how much of today’s decline is the result of the quarter’s results, and how much can be attributed to chatter that Oracle President Mark Hurd might, in one scenario, be tapped to run Dell.

Yesterday, Fortune reported that the private equity firm Blackstone Group is mulling a competing bid against Silver Lake Partners and Michael Dell to take that struggling computer company private. In the event that Blackstone were to win the bidding process, it would, the story goes, want Hurd for the CEO job there.

Hurd, whose previous job was running Hewlett-Packard, where he earned a reputation as an aggressive cost-cutter, hasn’t signaled his interest in such an outcome either way. But today The Wall Street Journal reported that Blackstone was in talks with GE concerning a bid on Dell’s financial services unit, meaning that the chatter about Hurd running a Blackstone-owned Dell might be just that — chatter.

Earnings on a per share basis were 65 cents on revenue of $9 billion. That’s a penny short of the consensus view of 66 cents and $400 million shy of the $9.4 billion in revenue that analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected.

Oracles shares fell 6 percent quickly in after-hours trading. The shares closed up slightly at $35.75 during the regular session.

It looks like there are a lot of reasons for the miss. New software licenses fell by 2 percent, which is completely not what was expected from many analysts, some of whom had predicted new licenses to grow by more than 7 percent.

Hardware sales also continued to fall. Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, and has been seeking to rebuild its hardware business with a line of new systems that in time are expected to overtake dwindling sales of the commodity systems. Obviously that hasn’t happened yet, as hardware system sales fell 23 percent year on year to $671 million. Hardware support revenue fell by 6 percent.

Oracle also said that without the currency impact owing to the strong U.S. dollar versus foreign currencies, its per-share earnings on a GAAP basis would have been better by a penny.

Update, 1:58 PM: Oracle shares are now down by more than 7 percent to $33.10 after hours. Another thing that may be weighing on the stock is this story from Fortune concerning Dell and private equity fund Blackstone. Blackstone is seriously weighing a move to bid against Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell and his private equity partner Silver Lake. Additionally, the story says that Blackstone would like Oracle president, and former Hewlett-Packard CEO, Mark Hurd to run Dell if it were to prevail in such a bid. I’m hearing from sources familiar with the matter that Blackstone has indeed been in touch with Hurd.

Here’s Oracle’s original announcement. I’ll have a little more to say as I take a closer look at the numbers.

Oracle Reports Q3 GAAP EPS Up 6% to 52 Cents; Q3 Non-GAAP EPS Up 5% to 65 Cents

Cloud Software as a Service Revenue Up 111%, Trailing Twelve Month Operating Cash Flow of $13.7 Billion

REDWOOD SHORES, CA–(Marketwire – Mar 20, 2013) – Oracle Corporation ( NASDAQ : ORCL ) today announced that fiscal 2013 Q3 total revenues were down 1% to $9.0 billion. New software licenses and cloud software subscriptions revenues were down 2% to $2.3 billion. Software license updates and product support revenues were up 7% to $4.3 billion. Hardware systems products revenues were $671 million. GAAP operating income was up 1% to $3.3 billion, and GAAP operating margin was 37%. Non-GAAP operating income was down 1% to $4.2 billion, and non-GAAP operating margin was 47%. GAAP net income was unchanged at $2.5 billion, while non-GAAP net income was down 1% to $3.1 billion. GAAP earnings per share were $0.52, up 6% compared to last year while non-GAAP earnings per share were up 5% to $0.65. GAAP operating cash flow on a trailing twelve-month basis was $13.7 billion.
Without the impact of the US dollar strengthening compared to foreign currencies, Oracle’s reported Q3 GAAP earnings per share would have been $0.01 higher at $0.53, up 8%, and Q3 non-GAAP earnings per share would have been approximately $0.01 higher. Total revenues also would have been 1% higher and new software licenses and cloud software subscription revenues would have been 2% higher than reported.
“Our non-GAAP operating margin increased to a Q3 record of 47%, and we expect it to reach an all-time high for the fiscal year,” said Oracle President and CFO, Safra Catz. “Both operating cash flow and free cash flow were at record levels for a Q3, with operating cash flow of $13.7 billion over the last twelve months.”
“The Oracle Cloud is the most robust and comprehensive cloud platform available with services at the infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS) and application (SaaS) level,” said Oracle President, Mark Hurd. “In Q3, our SaaS revenue alone grew well over 100% as lots of new customers adopted our Sales, Service, Marketing and Human Capital Management applications in the Cloud.”
“This month we will begin deliveries of servers based on our new SPARC T5 microprocessor: the fastest microprocessor in the world,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “The new T5 servers can have up to eight microprocessors while our new M5 system can be configured with up to thirty-two microprocessors. The M5 runs the Oracle database 10 times faster than the M9000 it replaces.”
Q3 Fiscal 2013 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast
Oracle will hold a conference call and webcast today to discuss these results at 2:00 p.m. Pacific. You may listen to the call by dialing (913) 312-6699, Passcode: 591704. To access the live webcast of this event, please visit the Oracle Investor Relations website at http://www.oracle.com/investor. In addition, Oracle’s Q3 results and Fiscal 2013 financial tables are available on the Oracle Investor Relations website.
A replay of the conference call will also be available by dialing (719) 457-0820 or (888) 203-1112, Passcode: 1437646.
About Oracle
Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle ( NASDAQ : ORCL ), visit www.oracle.com or contact Investor Relations at investor_us@oracle.com or (650) 506-4073.

And like any company going through a growth spurt, Twitter’s organizational structure has become complicated.

The company has tried breaking into multiple departments with various leaders. But as time has passed and Twitter has scaled, roles have grown confused and inefficient, and communication between some of the departments has suffered.

This is important. Some say the company thrived in its early days from its loose-knit structure, but also suffered from a clashing of big personalities, a revolving CEO seat and defecting employees across the ranks. But as the company continues its slow, steady trudge toward going public, the Twitter of today is trying to be a different animal entirely. That means working out the kinks that still exist inside its organizational makeup, and proving to the public — and the Street — that yes, Twitter is in this for the long haul.

Making this adjustment will also mean clarifying the vision of what Twitter, the product, is, and what it is meant to be. That means faster shipping of new releases, faster decisions being made, and ultimately (hopefully), a happier user base.

To remedy the most recent issues, Twitter made significant structural changes to a number of departments earlier this month, shuffling around key managers in the hope of streamlining some of the more dysfunctional aspects of the company’s interdepartmental communication.

This is likely a good thing — or Twitter wants it to be, at least. But looking back, one thing is clear: It has been a long time coming.

Twitter, not unexpectedly, declined to comment on this story.

The Old Guard

This whole thing began nearly a year and a half ago, when CEO Dick Costolo and Chairman Jack Dorsey started cherry-picking talent from some of the Valley’s top firms. They plucked away Google engineers by the handful, recruiting hundreds of them to staff Twitter’s large engineering operations (Costolo has said more than half of Twitter is made up of engineers).

The idea back then was to restaff some of the key positions in the company with seasoned vets across the four major departments — Product, Design, Engineering and Revenue — the heads of which would report directly to Costolo.

Twitter Product VP Michael Sippey

But the old layout, as it was set up, was complicated. Former SAY Media vet Michael Sippey led as VP of consumer product development, while Othman Laraki was VP of product growth. Revenue had Adam Bain as president of global revenue, with Kevin Weil as his deputy of sorts, acting as director of revenue product. Design was led by Doug Bowman, but then Andrei Herasimchuk was promoted later to become overall director of design, while Bowman continued as creative director.

Lastly, Adam Messinger was poached from Oracle to join as VP of engineering infrastructure in November of 2011, while Chris Fry was brought on in April of 2012 for another key engineering role.

So that was the lay of the land. Costolo had his lieutenants, who ideally would handle things smoothly and hand up the high-level stuff to the top. But as became evident shortly thereafter, that didn’t work out.

It’s Complicated

First of all, it’s tough to have too many cooks in the kitchen. And despite the fact that this layout seemed to be streamlined, there were too many people reporting to Costolo at any given time.

As one insider told me, “This was a mess. One year ago, Dick had four product and design reports and three engineering reports.” In other words, seven different department heads, each with Costolo’s ear.

Beyond that, there were some issues inside of a few departments that contributed to stumbles in workflow.

Design

The Design department has been dysfunctional for a long time. Earlier days saw an “overall lack of process and structure,” another person told me, and a series of new managers may have been an overcorrection, from Doug Bowman to a period with Dorsey’s heavy involvement, then to Andrei Herasimchuk after his promotion.

Design VP Mike Davidson.

Thus, Mike Davidson, a veteran designer who was founding CEO of Newsvine (acquired by NBC), was picked last autumn by Sippey and Messinger to refocus the department. There have also been a series of smaller departures inside the department, and one big one — Andrei Herasimchuk left just a week after Davidson’s appointment.

I’ve been told by multiple people that the design process has improved significantly under Davidson’s reign over the past five-plus months, and he has brought in multiple new hires from the likes of Apple, Facebook and startup PicPlum. He has also increased the department size by 30 percent since his arrival.

What remains to be seen, however, is how much Davidson will improve the output of the overall department.

Engineering

The Engineering department had its own problems. And the setup has been somewhat peculiar.

Adam Messinger was poached from Oracle to act as VP of infrastructure engineering in November of 2011. But at some point along the way, Messinger switched over from infrastructure to VP of application development — essentially a product position. That’s something of a head-scratcher, because Messinger’s background isn’t in consumer products, but infrastructure — the very thing he was hired on to do.

Twitter CTO Adam Messinger

Through all of this, Design was reporting to the Engineering department instead of acting as an independent function as it once used to.

Everything Old Is New Again

So despite Twitter’s grand organizational plan set out last year, things weren’t working out. Design reporting to Engineering just wasn’t working. Engineering leadership was muddled. Costolo had too many people to listen to in order to get things done. As one insider told me, it was “a mess.”

So as of mid-March, there’s a new New World Order at Twitter, a long-overdue “consolidation and clarity in the company,” as one source put it.

Now, according to sources, the structure has been trimmed down to a handful of go-to VPs reporting to Costolo, including Michael Sippey, Chris Fry, Kevin Weil and global revenue president Adam Bain.

Sippey is getting the biggest bump. Laraki left Twitter at the end of 2012 to work on his own thing. Sippey is now vice president of Product and Design, overseeing both departments.

Senior Vice President of Engineering Chris Fry

Fry also gets a radical step up in his responsibilities. He’s now senior vice president of overall engineering. He’ll also work closely with Alex Roetter, who is now a VP in the Engineering department, working on international, growth and revenue engineering. Kevin Weil will continue to act as director of product in the revenue department.

Messinger is the man spun off here, announced last week as chief technical officer of Twitter. It’s curious, though; sources said that in his new position, Messinger lost many — if not all — of the staff directly reporting to him, which would make it seem a less-than-desirable position to be in. I’m also told that Messinger had issues with recruiting enough engineers, a serious problem at an organization of Twitter’s size and scale. Recruiting, as any tech company will tell you, is of the utmost importance.

Of course, it could be that Messinger is better as a high-level thinker, as I’ve been told — someone who would do better focusing on the “big-picture” aspects of Twitter and what it will look like in the future, rather than down in the engineering trenches. Still, perhaps Messinger won’t be satisfied with the high-level CTO role in a few months, and depart for other pastures. (TBD on that one.)

To Be Continued

So that’s that. For now, most of the shifting is kaput (as far as I’m aware), and as it has been put to me, the Sippey/Fry combo is the “new world order in charge of the roadmap,” while Weil and Roetter will hold down the revenue product and engineering duties. (There were one or two other noteworthy shifts as well, including moving Raffi Krikorian up to VP of engineering in charge of Twitter’s platform.)

If all goes according to plan, you’ll hopefully see Twitter-the-product get better on a much faster-paced timetable.

Will it all work better than the previous layout? I don’t know, and I’m sure Twitter doesn’t either. We’ll have to check back in another year.

On average, analysts expect earnings per share of 66 cents on sales of $9.4 billion, coupled with similarly solid guidance headed into Oracle’s fiscal fourth quarter.

Analyst Brad Reback of Stifel Nicolaus, in a note to clients March 18, wrote that Oracle’s hardware sales have likely bottomed out last quarter and should show signs of recovering, though he admits there’s still a lot of “wood to chop.” Sales in its newer Exa- line of hardware should finally start to offset the slowing business in commodity x86-based servers. Overall, he expects hardware sales to grow 11 percent sequentially, though they still should be down about 5 percent year on year.

Software license revenue should show about 7.5 percent, Reback writes. Additionally, Oracle has added to its revenue growth via acquisitions like Taleo and RightNow, both of which have benefited from Oracle’s strong distribution network.

In a world where large companies are always looking for ways to keep costs under control and boost what flows to the top and bottom lines of a P&L statement, it’s a fair question to ask, especially when there’s an hourly workforce involved, whether it’s in retail, a call center or a customer support situation.

Hourly employees make up about 60 percent of the workforce in the U.S. These are often high-turnover jobs, where management is difficult and the results uneven. But the fact that it’s so big makes it a prime target for the kind of predictive analytics that are becoming so fashionable these days.

That’s exactly what Evolv does, and today it announced it had landed a $15 million Series D round of venture capital funding led by VantagePoint Capital Partners. Previous investors GGV Capital, LightSpeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures also participated in the round.

Evolv uses big-data techniques to predict whether or not an employee is likely to be a successful, effective and efficient employee. Among other things, it tracks which training techniques work and which don’t, charts overall performance of the workforce and creates profiles of employees who perform well and those who don’t.

In the end, it’s about keeping employees working for the company over a long period of time, shrinking that turnover rate. After all, it’s expensive to bring on new employees and train them. On that front, Evolv has some stats to brag about: Its customers, on average, see the tenure of their hourly employees increase by about 15 percent. And its 19 customers, with a combined workforce of about 750,000, see an average improvement of $10 million to the profit and loss statement. Xerox is one customer that has been publicly named so far.

It’s not as though other companies haven’t sought to tackle this problem with software. Evolv CEO Max Simkoff told me that when Evolv wins a deal, it’s usually displacing on-premise software from the likes of SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft or SAS. Collectively those five control more than half of the market for performance management and analytics tools.

“The first generation of these apps are cumbersome and clunky to use,” Simkoff said. “A lot of them focused on creating really big, complex reporting engines. We set out to build an insight engine. Companies don’t want reports. They wan’t conclusions.”

As part of the investment, Bill Harding, a managing director at VantagePoint, will join Evolv’s board.

Domo, based in Lindon American Fork, Utah, and founded by former Omniture CEO Josh James, has in the last two years become famous for the fundraising prowess of its popular CEO.

Sources familiar with the deal’s terms tell AllThingsD that the funding round announced yesterday values Domo at $310 million post money.

Many of these investors are betting primarily on the reputation of James, a likable CEO with a knack for pulling silly stunts, like a contest to guess the company’s name, and a “funeral” to kill the old one, in order to gin up publicity for his company.

Stunts aside, there’s a lot of faith percolating in the Valley for James. AllThingsD reported in 2011 that after leaving Adobe, which had acquired Omniture, he was raising an unusually large seed round of betwen $5 million and $8 million. At the same time, he was also raising what eventually turned out to be a substantial A round that already included Benchmark Capital.

One venture capitalist who asked not to be named said that he convinced his firm to write James a check in this round after having lunch with him recently. “He said to me ‘Oh, by the way I’m raising another round,’” this person said. “I went to my firm and said we should get it in on it, just because it’s Josh.”

With total capital raised now $125 million, the list of investors who’ve bet on James is substantial. GGV Capital was the lead investor, with Greylock and Bezos Expeditions also joining in. Others include Workday co-CEOs Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield, who have made personal investments.

From there the list gets even longer: Founders Fund, Mercato Partners, etc. IVP, which joined with a $20 million investment in the extended A-round, also participated, as did Sorenson Capital’s Fraser Bullock. Then there’s Cougar Capital, the VC fund run by Brigham Young University.

Domo also named lots of angels in its press release. There’s Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff; Lars Dargaard, founder and CEO of Successfactors; Marc Gorenberg of Hummer Winblad Ventures; John Pestana, James’ co-founder at Omniture; and John Thompson, the former CEO of Symantec.