The bare facts are these, according to this lengthy analysis by Bloomberg News: Since 1953, the U.S. has imported more energy-producing resources than it has exported. The main reason is that the U.S. doesn’t have a lot of domestic oil production and has always relied on imports from other countries, many of them countries in the troubled Middle East. In a political context, the phrase “energy independence” is usually associated with pie-in-the-sky notions of being free from the odious burden of foreign policy entanglements in that region.

But now, Bloomberg says, the idea is no longer so pie-in-the-sky: Last year, the U.S. produced about 81 percent of its energy, up from a recent low of 70 percent in 2005. What gives? A boost in domestic oil production, more efficient cars, stricter mileage standards, ethanol in our gasoline and a significant surge in U.S. production of natural gas. In fact, if this keeps up, the U.S. is on track to be the biggest energy producer in the world within eight years.

Does that sound like something of an opportunity? You’d better believe it. Insight Venture Partners, the New York-based venture capital and private equity firm that has in the past invested in tech properties like Twitter, Tumblr, LivingSocial and FlipBoard, is leading a massive $165 million investment in a Texas-based oil and gas database company called Drilling Info.

Essentially, what the company does is provide a lot of incredibly specialized information about where energy resources like gas and oil wells are located, what its characteristics are, how long a site is likely to be productive, and so on. The database is offered via the cloud as a software-as-service product. “It really focuses on giving energy companies the data they need to make smarter decisions about where and how they spend their production resources,” Deven Parekh, managing director at Insight, told me. The database tracks information like depletion curves — a measure of how long a well can continue producing oil — and environmental information, seismic data and so on.

Offering it as an SAAS product just makes it easier to manage and maintain. Once upon a time, database companies would send out CDs with software and data updates. Using the cloud makes it easier to keep the data current, and to save on costs.

Parekh told me that Drilling Info has about 3,000 customers in the U.S. and worldwide; and while he wouldn’t disclose its annual revenue, he said it’s in the tens of millions each year. Its customers produce about 90 percent of the oil and gas produced in the U.S. A lot of its demand is coming from companies working on so-called “unconventional exploration” for oil and gas resources, and there’s also significant international interest, too. For example, there are more companies working on methods for getting hard-to-reach oil in shale reserves.

Parekh says the moment has come for some serious investment in energy production technologies. “Everyone pays attention to all the innovation going on at Apple and Google, but what they tend not to appreciate is how much innovation is taking place in the energy industry,” he said. “We don’t talk about it every day, but there’s so much going on.”

Battery Ventures and Eastern Advisors Private Fund are also investing, and at least part of the funding round is going toward earlier shareholders. The capital will be used to expand its customer footprint, but also to possibly make some acquisitions.

Note: Initially the headline on this story said it was Index Ventures, not Insight, making the investment. I’ve since corrected it, though the initial erroneous headline is still making the rounds on Twitter. Sorry about that.

The deal can’t help but be seen as a response to SAP’s acquisition last year of SuccessFactors, a Taleo rival. Indeed, Taleo’s shares have appreciated significantly in recent months — from $29 to $42 a share over the course of two weeks in December — on speculation that it would be the next cloud company to fall to the recent burst of acquisitions in the cloud software space. And so it has.

If Taleo is a new name to you, perhaps you should go back and read this interview I did with its CEO Mike Gregoire (pictured), about a week after the SuccessFactors deal. The company had been on track to do $325 million in revenue, and has been growing at a 20 percent annual clip.

What’s strange is that Gregoire seemed uninterested in being acquired by Oracle at the time, mainly because he had lived through Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, and had been with that company “until the bitter end.” Apparently, Gregoire and his board have seen past any reticence about Oracle this time around.

The press release is below:

Oracle Buys Taleo

Adds Leading Talent Management Cloud Offering to the Oracle Public Cloud

DUBLIN, CA–(Marketwire -02/09/12)- Oracle today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Taleo Corporation (NASDAQ: TLEO – News), a leading provider of cloud-based talent management for $46.00 per share or approximately $1.9 billion, net of Taleo’s cash and debt. Taleo’s Talent Management Cloud helps organizations attract, develop, motivate and retain human capital to improve performance and drive growth.

Together, Oracle and Taleo expect to create a comprehensive cloud offering for organizations to manage their Human Resource operations and employee careers. The combination is expected to empower employees and managers to effectively manage careers throughout their entire employment, enable organizations to retain talent and optimize costs, and improve the employee experience through faster on boarding and better collaboration with team members via social media.

The Board of Directors of Taleo has unanimously approved the transaction. The transaction is expected to close mid-year 2012, subject to Taleo stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

“Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “Taleo’s industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

“Taleo’s integrated cloud-based talent management solutions optimize how organizations hire, manage, develop and reward their employees and gives companies the intelligence needed to capitalize on their most critical asset — their people,” said Michael Gregoire, Chairman and CEO, Taleo. “Joining forces with Oracle gives us the opportunity to better serve our customers.”

Sales grew by 53 percent over the year-ago period to $22.5 million, which beat the average estimate of analysts by more than $1.5 million, while Q4 billings of $36 million were up 40 percent. Plus, the IPO raised more than $180 million in cash.

And while that’s all good, on an old-school GAAP basis, Jive finished the quarter with a $12.7 million loss that was roughly twice the size of the loss in the year-ago period. While that may seem at first to be kind of a bad thing, it’s not. Since Jive sells subscriptions, it defers a lot of its revenue to later periods, so the revenue it does book doesn’t readily outweigh the costs it incurs to get the sales growth done. This is common with SAAS companies like Salesforce.com and NetSuite, who also tend to run net losses on a GAAP basis, but focus on their non-GAAP results, which are more indicative of the state of the business.

I talked briefly with CEO Tony Zingale about this and other things, after he finished up his conference call with analysts. A summary of our chat is below, and below that is an interesting infographic that Jive’s PR team included with the earnings release. I thought it was a nice touch, so I’m sharing it here.

AllThingsD: Tony, for those who don’t know, walk us through the key metric in your results that, in your mind, made this a good quarter for you.

Zingale: Growth. Growth in revenue. It’s further amplified in a new market where growth is the paramount metric, and of course it’s measured against a path to profitability. And we communicated that in our guidance to the analysts. But it’s all about growth. If you can’t capture market share as measured by deals with large enterprises and paying customers, then the profitability metric comes into greater play. Plus, in SAAS software companies, profitability always lags because of the ratable revenue model.

How are you finding life as the CEO of a public company? I know it’s not new for you, specifically, but it’s new with this company.

I think it is a testament to social becoming viable and real in the enterprise. You’ve been following the story for more than a year. You can’t go public without recurring, substantial growth, and the kind of customers and the kind of growth as measured by the repeatability of the model. All at the same time, you have to continue to innovate, fend off the competition and deliver that value. It feels good to have cleared the bar of going public, but otherwise, it’s back to work.

Let’s talk about the competition. Are you seeing certain people out of deals where they show up against you?

We do exceptionally well in a head-to-head competition, especially when we see a request for proposal. We’re seeing more of those as we go into 2012. It lends credibility to the social business space, as corporations are thinking of social software as a line item in their budgets. The competitive landscape hasn’t changed. It continues to be the large enterprise software players like Microsoft and IBM. And certainly Salesforce.com shows up when we’re competing for business in the sales department, and a little bit in the marketing department. Salesforce is very well-entrenched in these situations. But we coexist with them all the time. But the landscape hasn’t changed much. It’s competitive in the early part of the process. But when it comes to competing inside and outside the enterprise — the flexibility of our delivery model and the strength of our reference customers — the competitors tend to fall away.

Ahead of the dinner, Anderson stopped by my office to let me have a peek at his 10 predictions, and we talked them over a bit. All 10 are below, along with some comments from Anderson that emerged from our conversation.

Before diving into the predictions, Anderson tells me there is a grand theme that unifies them all: “Integrating everything.”

What does that mean? “It means a whole lot of stuff that needs to be integrated. We don’t need anything new at all. There’s so much work that needs to be done with the existing tool sets. Steve Jobs didn’t really invent anything at all. But he was great at integrating things into a product. There’s a lot more of that work to do. We have to do it in the phone world and the TV world and the health care world. We have lots of devices and lots of chips and lots of operating systems and lots of content. The bigger question is, how do human beings use it all efficiently?”

As an example, he cites the collaboration between Nuance, the speech software company, and IBM, bringing the Watson computer of “Jeopardy” fame into the area of health care. “For the first time, the idea of evidence-based medicine won’t just be in a magazine article,” Anderson says. “A doctor will be able to pick up his phone and describe four symptoms, and find out what the likely diagnosis is, what the indications are. It’s fantastic.”

So here are those 10 predictions, with additional comments from Anderson:

1. TV becomes the new center of gravity in the tech universe. All the other devices find their niches in the TV galaxy. Microsoft’s attempt to integrate Kinect into TV is a strong if qualified success. Smart phone-TV integration software becomes a new category. Pad-TV integration becomes common.

“Apple will hustle to launch the next version of Apple TV, and it will be a roaring success and be seen as Tim Cook’s first great product success. But what it really will be is Steve’s last product.”

2. 2012 will see tectonic shifts in phone markets. “Nokia will fail to come back, which is pretty clear to everyone except the people in Finland.” Samsung, Anderson says, will retain its spot as the new global leader in mobile phones by volume, and will keep this crown despite the debut of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

Meanwhile, Anderson says, Google will lose control over the Android operating system, mainly because unlicensed versions of Android will multiply in type and in installed base, especially in Asian countries. “It’s already a balkanized environment. Now Google loses control of the technology entirely. China is already running an unlicensed version of Android, and I think there will be more of that.”

Finally, the smartphone will finally emerge as the dominant category of wireless phone. “Why would you have anything else? And why would sellers of content and services want you to?” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in a rich country or a poor country. This stuff is cheap.”

3. Clouds are for consumers, and for start-ups. Even as a large number of big companies move pilot projects onto external clouds, it will become clear that the real trend is for enterprise to stay away from clouds in all key areas, for reasons of both security and reliability.

“The cloud guys hate this because they want to sell to enterprises,” Anderson says. “But the security issues are becoming really intense. If you’re a CIO, it’s a terrible environment, and you’re a target, for sure, especially if you’re a company with a lot of intellectual property. I’m not implying that things like SAAS (software as a service) aren’t a big trend. But no one is going to put their valuable IP on the cloud.”

4. Security splits the tech world in two, finally getting attention from CEOs. Companies with real IP start to realize they have to “go big or go home” with their security response, and their spending on protecting their “crown jewels” rises dramatically.

5. Siri stuns the world. Siri, on Apple’s iPhone 4S, has sounded the arrival of Internet personal assistants, and the world will spend this year marveling at what Siri and its rivals can and cannot do — and what they can learn to do.

“I think we’ll see a bunch of these things,” Anderson says. “Siri will get much better. It will learn how you learn. We’ve never seen people have long-term relationships with machines before, but it will be a long-term relationship, and she will remember everything, but make good use of it. She will know you learn better by seeing than hearing, or that it takes three times to tell you something. All those things that you have to program today should be learnable. None of that has been done yet. That creates a real friendship. And I think we’re going to start seeing personal assistants not just for everyday life, but for professions like medicine or car repair. Instead of just having Siri be everything, there will be many Siris for different contexts.”

6. We enter the amazing world of Dave and HAL, as voice recognition comes of age. From hospital to car, mobile to home, Kinect to Siri, exercise to play, work to entertainment, remote control to direct action, from Microsoft to Apple, from Tellme to Nuance — the time has come for computers and humans to talk to each other. With lots of funny stories, big bloopers and amazing breakthroughs, humanity at the end of 2012 will be talking to machines in a normal voice, and it will not seem unusual, nor be the cause of unending frustration.

“The voice-recognition part is almost trivial,” Anderson says. “The important part is context-sensitive understanding. It used to be that all the researchers at Carnegie Mellon used to think that all you needed was more computing horsepower to do better at voice. It turned out that was wrong. It was right for a little while, but the real problem is context. And so, if you can build up that database where you can search it contextually for what to expect, that is where you get all the mileage.”

7. E-readers prosper, but pads continue to dominate what Anderson calls the “carry-along” market. Pads and tablets will come down in price and get closer to prices of e-readers. Meanwhile, Anderson says, Amazon’s Fire will move upmarket and evolve into a full-fledged tablet.

“If you look at the specs on the Fire, it’s a tablet, but it’s hobbled,” Anderson says. “So I think that this is part of the whole strategy: Come in and sell at a low price, and then later unveil a more complete tablet. Apple will stay ahead, though. A lot of people are asking me if Amazon will catch Apple, and the answer is no. The way it’s configured right now, there’s no way the Fire will catch up with the iPad.”

8. The consumption world explodes. Get ready for new devices, new content, new bundles, new connection techniques, new distribution channels, new aggregators, new tablets, new phones, new players, new self-published authors, new garage bands, new consumption models riding on social networks. There is nothing but high energy in the content consumer market. People are now ready to spend subscription money, and the publisher response will be huge. “It’s going to be a huge melee of stuff,” Anderson says. “We’ll invent more stuff to consume, and it will be very hard to figure out who the players are from week to week, and how they’re doing. They may not even know themselves.”

9. Governments and corporations focus on intellectual property as though it were their most prized asset. It is. This new global understanding leads to a reevaluation regarding giving critical IP away for nothing versus protecting it. The age of what Anderson calls “IP naïveté” is over, and the question of proper IP valuation is here.

What is IP naïveté? “When Jeff Immelt stood on the steps of the White House the day after he was named jobs czar, and handed the plans for GE’s most important jet-engine project to Hu Jintao in order to get the permission to be allowed to bid on maybe selling engines to China — that’s IP naïveté,” Anderson says. “Thinking that’s not going to come back and show up for sale in Houston from some Chinese company in about six months is IP naïveté.”

During 2012, he says, companies and countries will start valuing their intellectual property not for its replacement value, but for figures that are magnitudes larger. State-sponsored IP theft will shift from being considered a nuisance and more along the lines of an act of aggression.

10. Amazon gets it all. Between outdoing Wal-Mart online, to beating the booksellers and delivering groceries, and making new inroads in video streaming, Amazon will prove that one company can indeed have it all. Strong Kindle and Fire sales will only be icing on the cake.

Taleo’s CEO, Mike Gregoire, has been in this position before. As executive vice president of Global Services for PeopleSoft, he lived through Oracle’s hostile acquisition of that company. In an interview with AllThingsD, he didn’t comment directly on the speculation that Oracle might make a bid — Oracle hasn’t hasn’t said anything on the subject, either — but it was clear that he didn’t exactly seem to relish the thought, either. Having run $2.3 billion of PeopleSoft’s $2.7 billion in revenue, he was with that company “until the bitter end,” he told me.

After a stint as an angel investor and sitting on the boards of a few companies, Gregoire decided he was “more of an operational guy.” He joined Taleo and took it public in 2005, and has been at its helm since then. Taleo was at that time the second cloud-based software company to go public after Salesforce.com. It was so early for software-as-a-service (SAAS) companies, where customers pay a subscription fee to use the application, that when he approached banks for some financing, upon hearing the word “subscription” they would initially compare it to a magazine. Eventually they understood, and Gregoire got his loan. Now some of those banks are his customers.

Cloud-based enterprise software companies are suddenly hot acquisition targets. Aside from the SAP-SuccessFactors deal, Oracle acquired RightNow in October. As a growing cloud-based rival to SuccessFactors, with a protein-rich customer base, a solid operating model and an affordable market capitalization of about $1.6 billion, Taleo’s shares have shot up on speculation that it could be next.

On Dec. 2, the day before the SuccessFactors deal, Taleo shares closed at $32.96. On Dec. 5, the first trading day after the deal, Taleo rose almost 20 percent to $39.50. The move by SAP — long a vendor of traditional on-premise business software — to embrace the cloud-based or SAAS model is an important acknowledgement that the business of selling business software is fundamentally changing, Gregoire says. Indeed, it’s a fact that SAP’s co-CEO Bill McDermott acknowledged even before bidding on SuccessFactors.

And it’s hard to argue that Taleo (pronounced Ta-LAY-oh) isn’t making an impressive showing. The company has been growing its sales at between 17 and 20 percent since since 2008, and it’s on track to hit $325 million in sales this year, up from $237 million last year. It has 5,000 customers, including 180 of the companies on the S&P 500, and its product is available in 38 languages.

Naturally, my first question for Gregoire was about his thoughts on the SuccessFactors deal.

AllThingsD: Mike, it has been a busy few days since the SAP-SuccessFactors deal was announced. What did you think of the deal? And what, if anything, does it mean for Taleo?

Gregoire: I think it started a few weeks earlier, with the Oracle RightNow deal. It’s a confirmation that the on-demand model is moving into the next phase of its adoption. We’ve got 5,000 customers. We’ve been the No. 1 on-demand player in the enterprise. No one has as many Fortune 100 customers as we do. We drive the second-largest number of transactions volume of any on-demand player. It kind of felt like we had been pushing this rope, trying to get people ready for that next phase of adoption. So Oracle and SAP are acknowledging that the on-premise solution is running out of gas, and they need to augment that solution with some off-premise cloud solutions. Second, it’s important that SAP has recognized that talent management is extraordinarily important, and it complements a back-end Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Taking care of people helps your company grow, and without it, your company is at a competitive disadvantage.

A lot of people look at the the phrase “talent management” and think it’s kind of specious — or even boring — software that only the human resources office needs. What does it mean?

If you want to talk about an application that moves the needle for business performance, there’s nothing better. The No. 1 expense in businesses is people. We see the news about the unemployment rates, and then we see that companies can’t hit their productivity goals because they don’t have the right people in the right jobs. Its absolutely crazy. That’s the problem we solve. Talent management is about getting the right people into your company, having them work on the right things, because you’ve got performance goals, measuring those goals, tying that to pay-for-performance and compensation. And, by the way, the chances that person has the right skills at the right time is about zero, so you want to tie those goals to a learning management system, and making that happen in real time, and then providing intelligence about the whole ecosystem of employees. That moves the needle with respect to business performance.

What’s a classic example of this software in action?

I’ll talk about SunGard, which is a customer of ours. They use an Oracle ERP system, and they use our learning management systems. Let’s say you’re a SunGard sales rep and you just got promoted. The day that your promotion goes through in the ERP system, it kicks off a transaction in our learning system that checks your history to see what courses you’ve taken and whether you’ve got all the certifications you need. And then it automatically builds out the courses you need to take to be successful in your new job. We also do succession planning. And the days when you’re only going to consider people inside your company are over. You’ve got to think broader than that. United Airlines, which is a customer, when they think of succession planning, they’re not only thinking about the 200 high-potential individuals within the company. They’re talking to people in the industry so they can take a look at the people inside and outside the company and consider different scenarios. Our application is graphical, so you can drag people around in a visual tree and see what each scenario looks like. And then you can save them for later, so that if someone gets promoted, fired, or leaves the company for another job, you’ll know what to do, should any of those three things happen. Most people do this sort of thing in their heads.

How do you think Taleo stands up against SuccessFactors competitively?

Going forward, we’ll have to see how that works out. [With] due respect to what I’ve read about the deal in the press, I don’t think the integration with SAP is going to be a walk in the park. There’s at least seven platforms in SuccessFactors. And in this deal, you have two companies who have struggled to do SAAS at scale. SAP doesn’t have a very good track record executing on SAAS. They spent a lot of money building Business ByDesign. Rumor has it that SAP spent as much as $500 million building it. Their track record has been very marginal. The same is true with SuccessFactors. They’ve done a good job with one product that’s on an old platform for between 5,000 and 10,000 employees. They don’t have a good track record in the upper end of the enterprise, and they haven’t been able to get revenue from outside of their core, which is performance management. They went and bought a company in learning management. We’re dominant in recruiting; they’ve been trying to build a recruiting engine for five years. I don’t know that they have any significant reference customers on that yet, but they should have some soon, because they’ve been at it for so long.

So why did SAP buy SuccessFactors, then? Was it for the customer base?

SuccessFactors has a pretty small customer base. We’ll know more after they publish the 10-Ks and 10-Qs, so we’ll see more of where the synergies really are. But the synergies that have been reported is they want to be able to take the SAP technology and repurpose it into the SuccessFactors stack, which sounds expensive and time-consuming, and then take that stack and combine it with Business ByDesign and compete with Workday. We work pretty closely with Workday, and often go in with them shoulder to shoulder on deals when a customer needs recruiting and learning. And they use our recruiting products.

So, let’s handle this one piece of business. I’ve seen no fewer than five analyst reports saying you’re going to get taken out by Oracle. Have you been contacted by Oracle, or anyone else, about a possible acquisition?

We don’t comment on that kind of speculation. But a first-year MBA student could connect those dots. We’re positioned to be the only independent full-suite SAAS player in the market right now, and that’s a good place to be. How everyone reacts to that, I can’t control. But we’re on track to do $325 million in revenue this year, and we’re growing at about 20 percent per year. We have 12 percent operating margins. Who else has that? We’ve not only figured out how to do SAAS at scale, but we’ve done it profitably. And we continue to innovate. That’s where we want to be.

What are your priorities for 2012?

Three things. Selling back into our customer base. Most of them came to us for our recruiting heritage. If you take a look at last quarter alone, 36 percent of our net new bookings were in products other than recruiting; we’ve been reporting that number every quarter. So there’s a big push to sell our other products into our existing customer base. Second is geographical expansion. We bought a company in France that effectively doubled the size of our European salesforce. Despite what you hear going on Europe, they are not going to spend as much on technology in 2012 and 2013. If they are going to spend any money, it’s not going to be on upgrades of perpetual software licenses. I think they will spend it on SAAS, and I think Europe is generally way behind on SAAS. If I were to tell you our biggest deal last quarter was going to be a seven-figure deal with a Swiss bank, you would have said I was crazy, and that it would never happen. But it did. The reason it happened is that SAAS is orders of magnitude cheaper than paying maintenance fees on perpetual software licenses. The same thing happened with Société Générale, the French bank, which stopped an upgrade of either Oracle or SAP midstream, and they went with us. There is definitely room for SAAS in Europe, and there will be more room for SAAS in Europe in 2012; I think we’ll be a net beneficiary of that. Third is innovation, both organic and inorganic. We’ve been acquisitive, and every transaction we’ve done has been accretive and has worked out well. We’re good at either buying technology or customer bases and integrating them very quickly. Organically, we’ll be doing a lot of work on mobile and social features.

Fast forward to October, and Slootman is not only CEO of a new company, ServiceNow, but is getting his old band from Data Domain — which he sold to EMC in 2009 after a takeover battle with NetApp — back together.

So what is ServiceNow? It was started in 2003 by Fred Luddy, the former CTO of help-desk management outfits Peregrine Systems and Remedy, one of which is now part of Hewlett-Packard, the other part of BMC. The ServiceNow idea is basically to compete with HP and BMC by replacing those old on-premise help desk management applications with a cloud-based software-as-a-service offering.

ServiceNow has grown like crazy, doubling its sales every year for eight years in a row — it now has 500 employees and boasts $130 million in recurring revenue. Slootman joined as CEO in April. And now he’s hired a bunch of his old buddies from Data Domain to join him.

Having earlier in the week tapped Arne Josefsberg — a 25-year Microsoft veteran who was most recently general manager of the Windows Azure service — as its chief technology officer, ServiceNow has just hired a batch of Data Domain guys away from EMC:

• Michael Scarpelli, the former CFO of Data Domain will now be ServiceNow’s CFO.
• Dan McGee, the onetime senior vice president of engineering, will be — you guessed it — senior vice president of engineering.
• David Schneider will be senior vice president of worldwide sales and service, taking the same title he held at Data Domain.

Though people know Slootman primarily for his work in the storage business at Data Domain — which he ultimately sold to EMC for $2.1 billion — he calls his journey into that line of business a “diversion.” Before Data Domain, he was a senior executive at Borland Software. “Before I was a storage guy, I was an applications guy. I worked in the software layer, so this is right in my wheelhouse,” he told me. “People say the cloud is hot, but what’s even hotter is cloud management, because people need software to manage it, and we’re right smack in the middle of that set of issues.”

So what’s the plan for ServiceNow? To kick things up a notch, naturally. “We’re getting the company IPO-ready,” Slootman says. And while it hasn’t hired any bankers yet, it’s not for nothing that Slootman just brought in a team of trusted execs who were along for the ride with Data Domain’s 2007 IPO and subsequent acquisition.

If and when it happens, a ServiceNow IPO will be rather different from so many others in recent history. ServiceNow is already cash-flow positive: It has $70 million in cash on the balance sheet, Slootman says, and started with practically no venture capital. It took a small $2.5 million round from JMI Equity in 2005; in 2009, Sequoia Capital invested by buying out some employees’ shares, and Sequoia’s Doug Leone joined the board of directors.

So what happened at Greylock? “I found out that I don’t have the temperament or disposition or DNA set to be a venture capitalist,” Slootman told me. “A lot of people told me I wouldn’t last, and they knew me better than I knew myself. If you’re going to fail at something, it’s best to fail fast and move on to the next thing.”

The Street was quick to speculate that Dell was looking at Rackspace or Brocade. Turned out it wasn’t either of them.

Moments ago, Dell said it will acquire Boomi, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) outfit that focuses on the integration side of the business. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but this is obviously a small acquisition for Dell. Boomi landed $4 million in venture funding in July of 2008 from FirstMark Capital and, as best I can tell, nothing more after that.

Yammer, the enterprise equivalent of Twitter, said it had grabbed another $10 million in financing.

But the question for the San Francisco-based microblogging service for businesses and closed groups is: “What are you working on?”

Yammer has both free and a paid–the gold level is $5 per user, per month–versions and is essentially a useful productivity tool.

Emergence Capital took the lead in the Series B round for Yammer, along with ubiquitous Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway and previous investors.

Yammer previously raised $5 million from Charles River Ventures and The Founders Fund.

Here’s the release:

Yammer Secures $10 Million in Series B Funding from Emergence Capital and Previous Investors

Investment To Fuel Product Innovation and Sales Coverage

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., February 3, 2010–Yammer, Inc., the leader in Enterprise Microblogging and Real-time Communications, today announced that it has received $10 million in its Series B round of funding. Emergence Capital leads the round; with general partner Jason Green joining Yammer’s Board of Directors. SV Angel, led by seasoned Silicon Valley investor, Ron Conway, is also participating as are previous investors, including Charles River Ventures and Goldcrest Investments from Dallas.

Yammer launched its solution in September 2008 and has experienced rapid user adoption with over 60,000 organizations globally having adopted the solution. Drawing on this momentum, Yammer will use the proceeds to accelerate product innovation and increase sales coverage.

“Yammer is revolutionizing the way employees communicate and collaborate, filling a need that email has failed to deliver,” said Jason Green, general partner at Emergence Capital. “Yammer has a passionate and proven executive team, a compelling freemium business model, a loyal customer base and a huge market opportunity. We are thrilled to be joining them in the next phase of their rapid growth.”

Companies and organizations of all sizes across a wide range of industries benefit from Yammer. They use Yammer for a multitude of reasons, including improving workforce productivity, connecting a geographically dispersed team, getting new employees up to speed, and increasing the flow of content and knowledge.

“Yammer is focused on improving the way employees communicate and stay connected to critical information about their company and job,” said David Sacks, founder and CEO at Yammer. “We’re pleased with the rapid growth and market adoption we’ve achieved and are poised to accelerate it with exciting enhancements to our product and with broadened sales coverage. We’re eager to work with Emergence Capital and leverage their expertise in building world-class Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies and are gratified that proven technology investors such as SV Angel and Charles River Ventures are also participating in the funding.”

This morning, Cisco (CSCO) announced plans to purchase the software-as-a-service security vendor for roughly $183 million in a bid to expand its Web security portfolio both on-premises and in the cloud. Among ScanSafe’s clients: Google (GOOG), AT&T (T) and Sprint (S).

“With the acquisition of ScanSafe, Cisco is executing on our vision to build a borderless network security architecture that combines network and cloud-based services for advanced security enforcement,” said Tom Gillis, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Security Technology Business Unit, in a statement. “Cisco will provide customers the flexibility to choose the deployment model that best suits their organization and deliver anytime, anywhere protection against Web-based threats.”

Expected to close in the second quarter of 2010, the deal–Cisco’s sixth acquisition of the year–comes on the heels of the Barracuda Networks acquisition of security SAAS vendor Purewire.

Yes, the SAAS enterprise applications vendor loves everyone, but none more than Google (GOOG). This morning, Salesforce (CRM) expanded its alliance with the search behemoth, linking its Force.com online development platform to Google’s App Engine. The move essentially allows consumer applications built on Google App Engine to call on data stored in Force.com. And that heralds more robust cloud computing applications, more–and better–alternatives to Microsoft’s (MSFT) core business applications, which are only just now adapted for the cloud.

BoomTown has been lagging in getting up this lovely video I did from a dinner party last Thursday, thrown for NetSuite’s tenth anniversary, which was held at one of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s many houses–this one in the tony Pacific Heights section of San Francisco.

NetSuite (N) is one of the pioneers in the broadly termed software-as-a-service space, selling an “integrated web-based business software suite, including Accounting software/ERP software, CRM software, and Ecommerce software.” Essentially, that’s hosted software solutions for medium-sized businesses or divisions of larger companies.

Zzzzzzzzzz, right?

Actually, it is an important topic, as businesses actually do begin to embrace the idea of putting themselves increasingly in the so-called cloud, which is Silicon Valley’s trendiest term du jour.

It is a topic, in fact, that Microsoft is going to be blabbing about all week, starting today. The SaaS space, including its cloud computing efforts, will be Topic A at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

In any case, after a lovely tour of Ellison’s house–Ellison co-founded the company with former Oracle (ORCL) exec Evan Goldberg and has been a major NetSuite investor–by NetSuite’s PR guru Brooke Hammerling, and some dinner chatter, I did an interesting video interview with NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson about the direction of the sector.

Here’s the video:

A longtime tech exec, Kertzman is one of the funniest players in the tech sector, and was once the font for all the best jokes about Microsoft, back in the day when no one made jokes about Microsoft for fear of digital defenestration.

Today, Kertzman is actually much more serious, focused on the business-to-business part of the Web 2.0 world, rather than the more popular consumer-facing areas into which most VCs have been pumping oodles of money.

While Kertzman was early into the widget trend–in fact, he was the first to say the word to me at a Demo conference where he was showing off the Widgetbox, the widget directory startup, a moment for which I shall never forgive him–his new focus is on companies like SlideRocket, the online presentation application, and other Web-based productivity products like it.

Yes, I swear, SaaS–Software as Service–can be interesting! Really!

We also liven things up with some chatting about too-high valuations and thoughts on the Microsoft-Yahoo takeover battle, as well as the recession.

Here’s the video of Kertzman: