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.

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.

At the point where I wrapped up part one of our conversation from late last year, Levine had been talking about opportunities he saw around data storage in the enterprise. As he sees it, another big space ripe for disruption — and thus investment — is in security. That’s where the conversation picks up below:

AllThingsD: So Andreessen Horowitz has done a bunch of security deals. What kinds of opportunities are you seeing there?

Levine: Data security. Okta puts active directory out in the cloud. All SAAS apps, everything goes out there. That’s access control, which very much is security. Security is also being exacerbated by the number of mobile devices in an environment. If you have BYO devices and you’re using someone else’s SAAS, as a CIO you don’t own either piece of that. So an interesting security problem to solve is how you make corporate data usable in that scenario.

Is anyone coming close?

Sure. There’s one company in our portfolio. Silver Tail (now part of EMC) does behavioral prevention. It can look at the behavior of an endpoint and determine if it’s a human being. If you can detect patterns of illicit behavior, you can shut them down before they do any damage. So that’s interesting. Bromium, which just announced, which builds impenetrable walls around processes that live on mobile devices. The premise of Bromium is that you no longer have to do virus scanning. It assumes that viruses are coming into a system anyway, and they’re going to come by way of something like a browser, and affect a running process. But if that process is wrapped by an impenetrable wrapper, it can’t get onto the system. To kill that virus, all you do is shut down that process. So that’s an interesting investment we’ve made.

How do you go about finding the companies that you invest in?

We are not thematic investors, first of all. And I love that. To me, if you’re a thematic investor you end up being the 40th one to pick a company in a given stack, because you have to be in on a certain kind of company. We really do see nearly 100 percent of all the deals that are occuring at any given point of time. We evaluate every single company on its merits. As soon as we say we need to be in on something like, say, database technology, then all of a sudden I have made a preordained and preconceived decision that this is important. I don’t want to have a bias coming into things, that I throw out something that’s actually interesting, or include something that may be way overinvested. We look at each company as a fresh canvas, but we will look at companies that have great technical co-founders who believe that they are going to go dominate a given market segment. It may not be obvious at all. Most obvious things are obvious to many people. It’s a matter of finding the non-obvious things. There are a lot of things we see, and there are a lot of areas where we haven’t invested.

Is that how do you explain GitHub? That was a huge deal, and no one really understood it at first.

I wasn’t really looking to invest in a collaborative source code control system. Before last year, I didn’t even know it existed, and didn’t internalize the value of what they do. After we met them and realized the power of what they do, and have done, and the potential future for that company, we invested. It’s interesting when you don’t have biases and just let everyone come in and pitch, knowing you really can see things in the eyes of the entreprenuer, which I believe is really critical. As soon as I have opinions, I start to shape the company in my mind’s eye, and that’s really backward, because as a board member you want them forming the vision and to help along the way.

I’m hearing deal flow has been really high. Is that likely to continue for awhile?

It’s good that we’re seeing tons of stuff, and there’s a tremendous amount of innovation occuring. It used to be there was a lot of consumer stuff going on, and maybe only a few things happening in the enterprise. Now the enterprise deal flow is much higher than consumer. But I’ll tell you, it’s so cool to see all that. And we’ll pass on most things. But it’s cool being here, at this firm, but also at this time. The last time there was really a lot of flourishing innovation around the enterprise was in the mid-1990s.

Will you be doing many more deals in 2013?

I’m sure we will. We have a lot of seed investments right now. It’s a lot like dating before you get married, so I’m a big believer right now in what we have going on with our seed portfolio. They’ve come up for A rounds, and we have the opportunity to really work with the company. But I like seeds, because you get to watch a company and watch the execution and the dynamics of the team. One recent deal we did was Convergent-IO, which was a seed that turned into an A round.

What do you like and dislike in a team?

We’re very much pro-technical co-founder or founder. I would say that that is like a fundamental criteria. It is easier to coach a technical co-founder on how to run a business than it is to coach a professional manager on the DNA of what the vision of the company is. We look for someone who has a burning passion to go take on the world. We want entrepreneurs that want to go for the long ball. They want to run the company for the long term, and they want it to be a standalone enterprise, as opposed to building something to get acquired. We also like to make sure the entrepreneur understands how they’re going to use the money they’re raising. We like for them to have an appreciation of the clear understanding of how to get from point A to B.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

In the TV interview (see it below), Ellison made news, saying that Oracle will not be doing any large acquisitions, especially NetApp, the storage concern that has been occasionally mentioned as a possible target. Ellison said there would be no large acquisitions.

“We think we have all the assets in-house to grow very rapidly on an organic basis,” he said.

Baritoromo had clearly been reading AllThingsD because she made a point to call out Ellison’s 45 percent share of NetSuite. In a subtle dig at Salesforce.com and its CEO Marc Benioff, Ellison has been calling Oracle “the first cloud computing company.”

Then it was on to his keynote — his second of the conference — where he revisited in additional detail some of the points he made in his first keynote from Sunday, but also did some demos.

For one thing, Ellison reminded the audience that while Oracle may not yet be the biggest software-as-a-service company by revenue, it does offer more applications on a SAAS basis than anyone else — which, given Oracle’s just-completed rewrite of its entire suite of applications for the cloud, is a factual claim.

But he also made some important pronouncements around his view of how the cloud runs, again making subtle digs at the competition. “When you run in the cloud, you also pick the infrastructure that it runs on,” he said. That’s a dig at Salesforce and other smaller SAAS companies that seek to compete in some manner or another with Oracle. Sign on for the application, you’re stuck with the platform and other infrastructure that the company selling it has running in their data center.

It was an easy segue from there to Oracle’s public and private cloud offerings. Ellison said Oracle has about 400 customers using its new Fusion applications. He said about two thirds of those customers were running their applications in Oracle’s public cloud, while about one third were doings so on dedicated machines on premise.

But since both the public and private cloud are essentially equivalent — after all, they run on the same hardware and the same software — it’s easy for a company to change its mind. “They can move to an Oracle private cloud or public cloud without changing anything,” he said. “It’s very easy to move applications back and forth.” He thinks many of those customers will do just that and switch over to the public cloud within a year. “We’ll have more visibility into that by this time next year,” he said.

Part one of Ellison’s CNBC interview is below. The other parts, where he talks about increasing Oracle’s dividend, explains why the hardware business shrank, why he bought all those houses, calls his late friend Steve Jobs irreplaceable, and then kidded Baritoromo about buying the LA Lakers are also all online.

The company says it expects to see 50,000 attendees this year, and is featuring more than 2,500 sessions presented by more than 3,500 speakers across 14 individual venues. And forget about booking a hotel room in San Francisco this week: People attending OpenWorld have booked nearly 98,000 hotel nights.

So what’s on the agenda? Expect to hear a lot about the cloud. Oracle’s latest update to its core database software, known as 12c, will be unveiled. It’s the first major revision to Oracle’s database software in about five years. The “c” naturally stands for cloud, which Oracle is going to be embracing in a significant way at this event.

The speeches kick off Sunday night with the first of two keynotes from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Co-President and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd is speaking twice as well, once on Monday and again on Thursday.

Oracle is likely to continue to challenge the notion that it’s on the defensive from companies like Salesforce.com. Ellison has publicly disparagedSalesforce and another cloud-based software company Workday, both of which compete directly with Oracle.

Salesforce (whose recent Dreamforce conference also blocked traffic) has built what’s forecast to be a $3 billion annual business selling customer relationship software that runs in the cloud, and its CEO Marc Benioff is a former Oracle exec and Ellison protégé. Workday, due for a $400 million initial public offering soon, is run by Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield, the founders of PeopleSoft, a company Oracle acquired in a hostile takeover. It offers a breed of software known as human capital management software used by HR departments at big companies.

Ellison and Benioff have feuded — sometimes publicly — over their competing visions of the cloud and how software should be delivered to large companies. Benioff is fond of saying that if a company ever takes delivery of a server at a loading dock, they’re not running the “true cloud.” Ellison — who also has a significant hardware business to consider — argues that big customers need a mixed approach: Where some will be happy farming out the work of managing the hardware to someone else, others will want to own it outright, while still others will want to mix and match. He’s also fond of pointing out that Salesforce is a big customer of Oracle’s database.

Oracle isn’t the only company arguing for the mixed cloud approach. IBM and Hewlett-Packard and Dell — hardware vendors all — tend to see the cloud in this way, as does Microsoft, which offers its products in both hosted and on-premise varieties.

Still, there’s no mistaking Oracle has come to embrace the “software-as-a-service” model long personified by Benioff and Bhusri as well as Netsuite, a cloud software player run by former Oracle exec Zach Nelson and in which Ellison is an investor. (Nelson is speaking at Openworld, too.) Oracle is pivoting toward delivering all of its software as a service, allowing customers to choose which approach best suits them. On Oracle’s last earnings call, Hurd made a point of calling out a long list of customer wins for cloud-based CRM and HCM offerings: Accenture, Adobe, Cisco Systems — where Benioff is a new director — Colgate-Palmolive and Proctor & Gamble are all running Oracle applications in the cloud.

Indeed, Oracle has said it is now the second-largest company offering software-as-a-service behind Salesforce itself. It reported $1 billion in bookings for cloud software in June. Expect an update on the size of that business in Ellison’s remarks.

Much of that growth has come from Oracle’s aggressive pace of acquisitions. It has been gobbling up cloud-based software companies such as RightNow and Taleo.

And Oracle’s service offerings don’t stop at software: They extend to hardware, too. Customers can purchase ExaData and ExaLogic hardware and then run them inside an Oracle-owned and -maintained data center. The point is to get the hardware up and running quickly without having to bear the time and expense associated with setting it up.

So, if you care about the cloud — and nearly everyone in enterprise IT does these days — it’s going to be an interesting week.

The company is announcing a bunch of important news today. The big piece is that its application is coming out of beta testing and is now ready for general availability; along with that, it is disclosing some of its customers — and one of them, at least, is kind of cool.

The second is that it has hired Phil Wilmington as its new president and COO. He has been executive chairman since January. Wilmington was President at OutlookSoft, the company that he and Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe ran together — Gheorghe was CEO CTO — before it was acquired by SAP in 2007. Before OutlookSoft, Wilmington had been co-president at PeopleSoft until it was taken over by Oracle.

You’ll remember that this is one of several start-ups aiming to attack the juicy vein of enterprise software that’s currently dominated by the Oracles and SAPs of the world, and more often than not by applications that tend to run on-premise. And naturally, like so many other upstart business software outfits these days, it runs it all in the cloud, or more precisely, the “software-as-a-service” model made so popular by outfits like Salesforce.com and Workday.

The unsexy way to describe it is Enterprise Performance Management, and it’s the stuff that businesses use to plan their finances and operations. Over a pair of lunches last year, Gheorghe explained something that sounded a lot like what all the other so-called “business intelligence” applications in the cloud are trying to do. His argument then, and now, is that while lots of applications give you good information, few help guide you to a decision or a course of business action. Gheorghe says that, in Tidemark, these applications have been “reimagined.”

One key problem holding it up is that data from one side of the business doesn’t get mashed up with data from another. What happens then is that enterprising executives try to do it themselves in Excel spreadsheets, which, even if you’re really good at building spreadsheets, isn’t optimal.

Tidemark’s play is to deliver real-time business data that has been adjusted for risk and assembled in consideration of all the strategic, financial and operational forecasting that has already been done. It also runs on the iPad or any other tablet or smartphone that supports HTML5, which shouldn’t be surprising anymore, but still is to me.

Those three applications Gheorghe told me about last October are ready for general availability: Metrics Management and Management Reporting basically answers the “what’s happening?” question about a business with a more sophisticated “what is happening and why?” kind of approach; Enterprise Planning is a classic budgeting and forecasting app; and Profitability Monitoring — by product, customer and channel — tells you precisely which aspects of your business are profitable or losing money.

Here’s the part where it’s time to name the customers. One CIO told me that he got his CEO excited to use Tidemark in a bar. That sounds a little sketchy, until you realize that the company is Pabst Brewing. CIO Ben Haines said that in the beer business, you sell via third parties. In this case, there are about 600 different distributors that it does business with, and all of them send data back to Pabst in different ways. “It’s all disparate, and we try to make sense of it and try to figure out what’s going on,” Hains said. Then there’s data from Nielsen covering what consumers are saying and doing, and then there’s shipping data coming from individual breweries. The challenge has been to mix them all up and make them useful. Not easy, that.

Haines had built out systems running IBM’s Cognos, but said that it can be years before it’s up and running and tuned enough to deliver data you can actually use. “We don’t have that kind of time,” he said. “Most people run their companies on spreadsheets because their business intelligence applications haven’t kept up.” It used to be that Pabst would have generated about 400 different reports that different execs would have to have, and people might read them, they might not, and when they did, they had to hunt for the data they needed to do their jobs.

One night in a meeting at a bar — it is a beer company, after all — Tidemark execs whipped out an iPad and showed Pabst President John Coleman all of the company’s live data at a glance, in a dashboard. He was an instant fan.

Other customers being named today are also sort of cool. One is CEC Entertainment, which is better known as the company behind the 550-store Chuck E. Cheese pizza chain. The other is Platinum Hospitality Management, a manager and operator of mid-market hotels that works with Hilton and Marriott, among others.

Tidemark also has some strong financial backing from venture capital firms, including Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, which invested $6.3 million back when Tidemark was still a stealth start-up called Proferi. Later rounds included Redpoint Ventures with Greylock and AH also participating, and as of January, Tidemark had raised a combined $35.5 million. Ben Horowitz of AH is a director. Aneel Bhusri, the former PeopleSoft CEO turned Greylock Partner who is also co-CEO at the soon-to-be-public Workday led Tidemark’s A round. Dave Duffield, another former PeopleSoft CEO and the other co-CEO of Workday, also invested in that round.

Shares of Salesforce are falling and falling big in after-hours trading as the cloud-software concern reported quarterly results that beat all the forecasts of Wall Street analysts, but which included an outlook for the quarter and year ahead that fell short of expectations.

Soon after markets closed, Salesforce shares took a 5 percent haircut, falling by $8.31 to $138.46. That drop comes on top of a drop of more than 1 percent during the regular session, when the shares finished at $146.77.

Earnings for the quarter were 42 cents per share, beating the consensus of 39 cents. Revenue was $732 million versus the consensus of $728.3 million. So far so good.

Then came the outlook: Salesforce said it expects revenue to come in at between $773 million and $777 million, soundly beating the expectation of $771 million and change. Still good.

The problem was with the EPS expectation, which one must remember is a non-GAAP profit to begin with. Salesforce says it will be 31 cents to 32 cents a share, versus a consensus of 34 cents. (On a GAAP basis, which no one pays attention to, Salesforce still expects to report losses in the range of 26 cents to 27 cents, and of 72 cents to 75 cents for the full year.)

Okay, everyone freak out. More as I go through the numbers.

Here’s the Salesforce announcement.

Salesforce.com Announces Fiscal 2013 Second Quarter Results
- Quarterly Revenue of $732 Million, up 34% Year-Over-Year
- Quarterly Operating Cash Flow of $136 Million, up 64% Year-Over-Year
- Deferred Revenue of $1.34 Billion, up 43% Year-Over-Year
- Unbilled Deferred Revenue Increases to Approximately $2.8 Billion
- Raises FY13 Revenue Guidance to $3.025 – $3.035 Billion

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — Salesforce.com (CRM), the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today announced results for its fiscal second quarter ended July 31, 2012.

“Our second quarter revenue growth was outstanding at 34% in dollars and 37% in constant currency,” said Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Salesforce.com’s social enterprise strategy is enabling companies to connect with customers, partners, and employees in completely new ways – and it’s creating new opportunities for their growth and ours.”

Salesforce.com delivered the following results for its fiscal second quarter:

Revenue: Total Q2 revenue was $732 million, an increase of 34% on a year-over-year basis. Subscription and support revenues were $687 million, an increase of 35% on a year-over-year basis. Professional services and other revenues were $44 million, an increase of 20% on a year-over-year basis.

Earnings per Share: Q2 GAAP net loss per share was ($0.07), and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.42. The company’s non-GAAP results exclude the effects of $85 million in stock-based compensation expense, $20 million in amortization of purchased intangibles, and $6 million in net non-cash interest expense related to the company’s convertible senior notes. Non-GAAP EPS calculations are based on approximately 146 million diluted shares outstanding during the quarter, including approximately 3 million shares associated with the company’s convertible senior notes. GAAP EPS calculations are based on a basic share count of approximately 139 million shares.

Cash: Cash generated from operations for the fiscal second quarter was $136 million, an increase of 64% on a year-over-year basis. Total cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities finished the quarter at $1.8 billion.

Deferred Revenue: Deferred revenue on the balance sheet as of July 31, 2012 was $1.34 billion, an increase of 43% on a year-over-year basis. Current deferred revenue increased by 38% year-over-year to $1.27 billion, benefited in part by longer invoice durations. Non-current deferred revenue increased by 293% year-over-year to $69 million. Unbilled deferred revenue, representing business that is contracted but unbilled and off balance sheet, ended the second quarter at approximately $2.8 billion, up from approximately $2.7 billion at the end of the fiscal first quarter.

As of August 23, 2012, salesforce.com is initiating revenue, GAAP EPS and non-GAAP EPS guidance for its fiscal third quarter of fiscal year 2013. In addition, for the full fiscal year 2013, the company is raising its revenue and non-GAAP EPS guidance previously provided on June 4, 2012, and initiating GAAP EPS guidance.

Q3 FY13 Guidance: Revenue for the company’s third fiscal quarter is projected to be in the range of $773 million to $777 million, an increase of 32% to 33% year-over-year.

GAAP net loss per share is expected to be in the range of ($0.27) to ($0.26), while diluted non-GAAP EPS is expected to be in the range of $0.31 to $0.32. The non-GAAP estimate excludes the effects of stock-based compensation expense, expected to be approximately $99 million, amortization of purchased intangibles related to acquisitions, expected to be approximately $27 million, and net non-cash interest expense related to the convertible senior notes, expected to be approximately $6 million. EPS estimates assume a GAAP tax rate of approximately 37%, and a non-GAAP tax rate of approximately 35%. The GAAP EPS calculation assumes an average basic share count of approximately 142 million shares, and the non-GAAP EPS calculation assumes an average fully diluted share count of approximately 151 million shares.

Full Year FY13 Guidance: Revenue for the company’s full fiscal year 2013 is projected to be in the range of $3.025 billion to $3.035 billion, an increase of 33% to 34% year-over-year.

For the company’s full fiscal year 2013, GAAP net loss per share is expected to be in the range of ($0.75) to ($0.72) while diluted non-GAAP EPS is expected to be in the range of $1.48 to $1.51. The non-GAAP estimate excludes the effects of stock-based compensation expense, expected to be approximately $382 million, amortization of purchased intangibles related to acquisitions, expected to be approximately $95 million, and net non-cash interest expense related to the convertible senior notes, expected to be approximately $24 million. EPS estimates assume a GAAP tax rate of approximately 30%, and a non-GAAP tax rate of approximately 37%. The GAAP EPS calculation assumes an average basic share count of approximately 141 million shares, and the non-GAAP EPS calculation assumes an average fully diluted share count of approximately 150 million shares.

The idea is to let companies create their own environments where they share information internally and with partners and customers of their choosing. Exposing business processes to the kind of social flows that we’ve become accustomed to on Facebook and Twitter allows vendors and customers to participate in discussions more readily. As Salesforce puts it, this amounts to “breaking down the boundaries of the business.”

Most products that bring companies into the same place with the other entities they do business with are focused purely on the conversation, or on getting transactions done. Communities, Salesforce says, will let them do a lot more.

Deploy communities to support any business process — from franchises sharing best practices, to high-end retailers delivering custom shopping experiences, to universities looking to connect students with alumni.

If it sounds a lot like Chatter, it should, though that brand name appears almost nowhere in the announcement. It’s being run by Doug Bewsher, Salesforce’s SVP for Chatter. But the fact is that Chatter isn’t quite getting the traction that companies like Jive and Yammer are getting.

Salesforce’s news happened to drop on the same day as word of a major upgrade from Yammer, which is in the process of being absorbed into Microsoft. The software giant said in June that it would pay $1.26 billion for Yammer.

Among the new features is an in-box that gives the user a quick glance at new messages meant for their eyes, including mentions, group messages they’re included in and private messages. Another is a homepage view that, at a glance, gives you a look at what people in your company are buzzing about and what files are being actively shared.

There’s also a “presence” feature that indicates when someone is online at that moment, so you can start a conversation with them; you can easily add more users to the conversation as needed.

As you may remember, Yammer and Salesforce have a history of being rivals. Last year, Yammer launched a promotional campaign called “Friends with Benefits” that touted the fact that Yammer integrated data from Chatter, though they acted more like Frenemies.

Piper Jaffray analyst Mark Murphy wrote in a note to clients this morning that Salesforce has closed a huge deal worth more than one landed earlier this year with State Farm Insurance — that deal was valued at $140 million. It’s not clear who the Salesforce deal was with.

Salesforce doesn’t disclose any of its biggest customers. In its most recent 10-K, it said that one customer it didn’t name accounted for 6 percent of accounts receivable as of Jan. 31, and beyond that, no single customer accounted for 5 percent or more of accounts receivable.

A hypothetical deal at $140 million would account for about 6 percent of 2012 revenue; though, since Salesforce tends to amortize its sales like subscriptions, it will probably avoid having to disclose all the juicy details.

The deal was unexpected, Murphy says, and comes 10 days before Salesforce reports quarterly earnings on Aug. 23. It’s also unusual in that deals of this size typically close late in the year, when companies are using up the last of their purchasing budgets and making big plans for the year ahead. One suspicion: It might be a company whose fiscal fourth quarter is ending in August.

Anyway, I reached out to Salesforce, and its spokeswoman declined to comment, citing its quiet period. The deal might also be the one that CEO Marc Benioff referred to when he said, on a recent earnings call, that the deal pipeline looked “unlike anything we’ve ever seen in size and scale.”

Salesforce shares rose by nearly 3 percent, to $143.88, which amounts to a year-to-date increase of about 42 percent. That is certainly impressive, though even at that level, the shares are trading only 5 percent higher than they were at this time last year.

If you don’t believe me, ask Karl Keirstead, the analyst at BMO Capital Markets, who wrote in a note to clients last night that Salesforce appears not to be suffering from any of the troubles hitting so many other tech companies in light of the global economic slowdown. Having tapped industry sources for a peek at the tone of Salesforce’s business, Keirstead writes, “We didn’t pick up any evidence that the tough macro backdrop has trickled down to CRM, and the consensus view was that business has ramped nicely since April.”

He notes that Microsoft’s customer relationship management product, Dynamics, is showing up in the small-business end of the marketplace, though it’s seen as “short on user interface and features.”

And even though there was little sign of any large deals closing, Keirstead writes that the chance of Salesforce ending the quarter with billings up by about 30 percent is “promising.”

Another good indicator: The results of German software giant SAP, a key Salesforce rival, which on Tuesday reported solid numbers that defied the economic conventional wisdom.

For the record, the consensus view of Wall Street analysts forecasts Salesforce to report sales of $728 million and per-share earnings of 39 cents on a non-GAAP basis this quarter. One other highlight of the quarter’s results is that it will be the first earnings report since Salesforce reached a deal to acquire Buddy Media for almost $700 milion.

One that has gotten a fair amount of attention — in no small part thanks to those who invested in it — is GoodData, founded by CEO Roman Stanek (pictured). A little less than a year ago, it took $15 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz. That round was also notable because AH had been an early seed-stage investor in the company.

Today, GoodData announced it has kicked its funding up a notch, landing a $25 million Series C led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from a new investor, Next World Capital. Prior investors, including AH, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners all participated in the round, which brings GoodData’s total capital raised to $53.5 million. Brian Paul, a managing director at Tenaya, will join GoodData’s board.

GoodData’s approach to the big-data problem is to do — what else? — harness the cloud. But it does it in a slightly different manner. Rather than compete directly with the usual providers of business intelligence software, like SAP, Oracle and IBM, it offers its service indirectly via cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, Dell’s Boomi cloud-integration service, and Okta, the start-up focused on providing unified access to SaaS services.

It’s working. The company’s customer base has surged to 6,000, and bookings — a key indicator of future revenue that has turned into an important metric for companies in the cloud software space, like Salesforce.com — grew by 600 percent in 2011.

Skire is privately held and relatively small, so the financial terms aren’t being disclosed. Oracle says it will combine its assets with its existing Oracle Primavera line of products. Primavera was a company devoted to software built for the engineering and construction industries that Oracle acquired in 2008.

It’s another step by Oracle in filling out its software-as-a-service offerings. The big one this year, of course, was Taleo, a SaaS-based human capital management application, which it grabbed for $1.9 billion. The other big one in recent memory was RightNow, which it acquired for $1.4 billion last October.

Oracle has also been buying up companies in the social space — three so far this year, to be exact. Earlier this month, it acquired Involver. That deal came after the acquisitions of Collective Intellect in June and Vitrue in May. Prices on all three were officially undisclosed, though Vitrue was reported to have sold for about $300 million.

IBM acquired a software company called Tririga that overlapped somewhat with Skire in the space of managing real estate.

Skire’s customers include ConocoPhillips, Dow Chemical, Qualcomm, Bank of America and Roche.

Gartner’s last forecast for the year called for global spending on IT to hit $3.5 trillion. Today it has added an extra $100 billion to that estimate, and nudged its official estimate for the year upward to $3.6 trillion.

Leading the pack of the the market segments that are expected to grow is investment in public cloud services, expected to grow by about $109 billion, which is a lot faster than the $91 billion previously thought. By 2016, Gartner reckons, spending on public cloud services will more or less double again, to north of $200 billion.

Most IT spending will be on moving various business processes to vendors, some of them cloud software players, into the cloud, where they can be sold on a subscription basis, or “as-a-service.” It’s followed closely by “infrastructure-as-a-service,” which is growing almost as fast.

Services generally will amount to a $864 billion worth of spending this year, amounting to a 2.3 percent increase over last year. Ever-more-complex environments that combine stuff that runs in the cloud and on-premise are boosting demand for IT consulting services.

That the marketplace is still growing — and not shrinking — is in line with results from prior surveys by other companies, but it’s also welcome news, given the slow pace of growth in the U.S., the weakness of the Euro Zone as that region’s countries struggle with their ongoing sovereign debt crisis, and the slower rate of growth in China. Though it’s important to remember that the last time Gartner released this figure, in January, it was when it revised it downward from $3.8 trillion. If that’s what a step in the right direction looks like, then I guess I’ll take it.

Earlier this month, the company surprised analysts by reporting quarterly results that were better than anyone expected, and with the revelation that Oracle is now the second-largest provider of software-as-a-service after Salesforce.com, it has challenged the conventional wisdom that it was more of an old-school software company.

But that’s not the most interesting thing I noticed in looking over Oracle’s most recent financials. I saw that a lot of operating expenses were lower — $174 million lower, to be exact — in Oracle’s fiscal 2012 versus fiscal 2011. It looked to me like the Mark Hurd playbook is alive and well. It was the first thing that came to mind when I sat down with the Oracle president (and former CEO of both Hewlett-Packard and NCR) at Oracle’s offices in New York for his second on-the-record interview (here’s the first) with AllThingsD. A transcript of our conversation is below:

AllThingsD: Mark, Oracle had a pretty good quarter, when people expected it to be tougher. Software sales are up, hardware is down. But when I went back and looked at the results, I saw something that looked familiar: Shrinking expense lines in things like marketing and general and administrative. I thought that looked a bit like the old Mark Hurd playbook from HP, and NCR before that. Is that part of what’s going on?

Mark Hurd: I think it was a good quarter for us. The quarter behaved well across virtually every metric. Our pipelines were up. Our conversion rates, which is our ability to convert pipeline into orders, was strong. I think, to your point, we managed our expenses. I think, in the context, if you look at the quarter, we added 3,300 people to our sales organization. And those are really the quota-carrying people, plus the technical people who support the sales people. And we did that while keeping our sales and marketing expenses relatively flat year over year. I think anytime you can realign your capital so you can get it into R&D, or into sales, as we have, it tends to show up. We’ve got more opportunities than we can deal with right now, so we had to increase, and it’s a great thing for us.

And that increase is taking place at a time when some people expected you to cut back. Are you trimming in some places and adding in others?

We’re doing exactly what you’d expect us to do. We’re looking at everything in the company, and trying to ensure that we have our investments in the right place. It’s a team sport. We’ve done a lot of work across Oracle to be prudent in some areas with expenses. But at the same time, we’re investing. Our investment in Research and Development is up. As as you’ve seen, our investment in sales and technical people is up. We’re investing into the business because we think we’ve got a great hand and we want to go play it.

Are you investing in Europe, too? Everyone is concerned about their exposure there, given all the sovereign debt problems and the economic troubles there.

We invested during the year across all the geographies. We grew our U.S. sales organization. We grew our European sales organization. We grew in Latin America, and we grew in Asia. And we grew across most pillars of our business. We made material investments in our applications business, and our cloud applications business. We made investments in middleware — we think we have a very strong suite of middleware, and we want to increase our sales force there. We made investments in business intelligence. We think we have a strong offering with Exalytics, and we want to boost our efforts there. And we’ve made investments in engineered systems, and they’re showing up. If you look at the quarter, we booked almost as many systems in Q4 of 2012 as we did in all of 2011. So I think that’s a compliment to both the product and the capacity of the sales force.

Let’s talk about your engineered systems business, because I think that’s the newest piece that people are just beginning to understand. These are the Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics systems you’ve been talking about. You’ve got the legacy Sun hardware business on one hand, but what’s fundamentally different about the engineered systems versus the traditional systems?

When you look at Sun, it’s a server line that has the SPARC chip and the Solaris operating system, and it has a very long history. So there’s a couple things we’ve done. Exadata is really a little different than a traditional Sun server. It’s a combination of five different technologies. It has a lot of DRAM memory in it. It has a lot of flash memory in it. It’s got incredible compression technology. We can take a database and shrink it and make it one-tenth the size that it was before. We network it with Infiniband, which gives us 10 times better performance inside it. When you shrink the database by a factor of 10, and run the data inside the computer 10 times faster, you’re doing what you did before 100 times faster. A report that used to take 100 minutes to generate now takes one. And, by the way, you can turn that into a cost benefit or a performance benefit. By that I mean, if you’re happy with 100 minutes, you need only one-tenth of the computer. Or you can run 100 reports in the time it used to take you to run one. It also really combines a server, storage and a database. It’s all of those things, and that’s why we call it an engineered system. And just as important as all of that is the fact that we put it together for you, we provision it for you. Our engineers take the Exadata and integrate everything, which normally you’d have your own people do.

And then you have specific flavors of these systems that are designed for specific industries, say retail or finance or health care?

Depending on how far up the stack goes. Think of Exadata up through the database layer. Exalogic goes up through the middleware layer. Exalytics takes the foundation of Oracle’s business intelligence suite. So they’re three different engineered systems that are built around different parts of the Oracle software stack.

So where does that leave the traditional Sun hardware business?

I think when you speak of Sun, you think of the T Series computer line and the M Series computer line. Larry [CEO Larry Ellison] has done a lot of investments in that core line. So in the traditional server line we’ve done new SPARC silicon, the T4, we’ve brought out a new version of the Solaris operating system, all in an effort to drive better performance and total cost of ownership. And we think now, as we push new releases of SPARC, we think we’re going to have the highest-performing silicon in the computer industry. No one argues that Solaris is the most advanced operating system of the Unixes that are available today. Now we’ve also done something new. We’ve introduced a SPARC Supercluster, and that’s all those different pieces in Exadata, built on a SPARC chip and running Solaris. So if you’re an older Sun-SPARC customer and want the benefit you get from Exadata, but you don’t want to switch over to Intel and Linux, which is what Exadata is built on, you can get them and keep SPARC and Solaris. We’re investing into the Sun base.

That brings me to another interesting point. Without diving too deep into the circumstances around the departure of Keith Block, he got caught in court documents saying some things about Sun products; and earlier, there were some statements made by Larry about letting the business around some older commodity products — Sun products, products where the profit margin is lower — shrink. Obviously you’re not going to defend what Block said, but at the same time, you’ve got Larry saying that it’s okay with him if the sales of certain hardware products fall to zero. Putting myself in the shoes of a longtime Sun customer, I wonder if you can unpack those two ends of a spectrum for me?

The best thing to do is tell you what we’re doing. We’re interested in selling intellectual property that differentiates Oracle in helping our customers run their IT better. That’s what we’re focused on. Those things manifest themselves in the T4 chip and Solaris 11 and SPARC Supercluster, and Exadata and Exalogic, and so on. A product that we bring to the customer that merely passes through our distribution channels and passes through our books, we don’t think we add a lot of value to that. We continue to do it mainly, though with less emphasis, because the customer has asked us to do it. Our view is that Oracle adds value where we can bring to bear differentiated intellectual property that gives people a better, more advanced solution that helps them do something cool and exciting.

Let’s talk about the cloud. Larry said Oracle is on track to be the No. 2 software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider after Salesforce.com, after all those acquisitions you’ve made. Oracle has always been kind of a traditional on-premise software player. How do you see the cloud strategy shaping up?

Let me first say this: You have to separate “cloud” from SaaS. First, there’s an incredible amount of Oracle technology running in the cloud: Oracle databases, Oracle middleware, Exadata, Exalogic. … So if you asked us to give us to give you cloud revenue, it would be huge. But that’s separate from SaaS. Just to be clear: We are No. 2 today in SaaS; we have roughly a billion dollars in SaaS revenue. And we’re just getting started. Our stuff is only just now hitting the market. We will have most of our Oracle portfolio running as SaaS on the Oracle cloud by the end of the calendar year. And when you look at our cloud, it’s best on our technology, running our apps. And by the way, that other SaaS company you mentioned — I can’t remember their name — their stuff is built on Oracle. And it was built three decades ago, in the ’90s. Our stuff is fresh, it’s new and modern and built on Fusion middleware.

Speaking of acquisitions, are you still in the hunt? You did Taleo and RightNow and Collective Intellect recently in the SaaS space. Are you still looking around?

We’ve said we’ve got a balanced capital allocation strategy. We’ve been big buyers of our stock. We’re increasing our dividend. And we’re continuing to look at deals that make sense. Larry has said that sometimes the best growth in Oracle’s history has been during economic downturns. And it’s because so many properties become available.

Did you kick tires on Quest Software?

I can’t comment on M&A matters.

When I talked to Meg Whitman at HP earlier this month, she talked about her desire to have a better relationship with Oracle, and how HP and Oracle crafted one of the “great partnerships in IT industry history.” It sounded a little like an olive branch to me. You’re unique in that you sat on both ends of that partnership at various times. Do you share her sentiment?

I can’t comment on that.

You’re coming up on two years at Oracle. Tell me a little about the division of labor. You work with Larry and CFO Safra Catz. How does it work?

It’s just like Larry said at D: All Things Digital. [See the full video here.] He does a lot on products, as he said. I run the revenue, and Safra runs most of our operations. And then, to be blunt, the three of us come together on the strategic issues, and we talk about the issues that cross the areas.

Bowing a bit to uncertainties brought on by the world economy, especially given the turmoil in Europe, Gartner revised the forecast downward a bit from its previous estimate.

Within that big bucket of spending are several classes of applications; the biggest by far is ERP, or enterprise resource allocation, which is the bread and butter of companies like SAP, Oracle and, in the cloud, Netsuite. Gartner says that’s going to be a $25 billion business this year.

After that is Office Suites, which is dominated by Microsoft Office, at $16.5 billion.

Business intelligence, a sector where there’s been a lot of start-up activity — companies like Domo, Birst and Good Data come to mind — is a $13 billion business.

That’s tied with CRM (customer relationship management) at $13 billion as well, most of it split among Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com.

And speaking of Salesforce, Gartner notes that more companies are demanding applications as a service, which most people describe simply as “in the cloud,” which is why we’re seeing traditional on-premise players like Oracle and SAP shifting toward cloud-based offerings and buying up younger cloud software companies.

Even with all the hype the cloud companies get, they make up a relatively small portion of overall software spending. Gartner says cloud and software-as-a-service offerings will account for only 16 percent of the enterprise software business by 2015.

Gartner’s Tom Eid said that the increase reflects overall market demand, with more buyers evaluating their options during the current technology refresh cycle, and returning buyer confidence for enterprise software as the market slowly recovers and organizations resume investing in technology. SaaS and cloud-based services are forecast to grow in usage, expanding from 11 percent of enterprise application spending in 2010 to 16 percent in 2015.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Oracle shares finished today’s regular trading session down more than 2 percent or 58 cents to close at $27.12. The main reason was market chatter, about upheaval at the top of its sales ranks, following the disclosure in court documents of a series of embarrassing instant messages by the company’s head of North American sales.

But among the nuggets from today’s surprise earnings conference call — held three days earlier than scheduled — was news that not only is Oracle’s business officially killing it, but that Oracle is now on track to be the second-largest software-as-a-service company in the world behind Salesforce.com

How’d that happen? Acquisitions. Earlier this year, Oracle spent a combined $3.3 billion for Taleo and RightNow. The combined effect, as CEO Larry Ellison put it during his remarks on a 35-minute conference call with analysts, is that Oracle is on track to bring in $1 billion in bookings this year.

That would put Oracle in second place behind the biggest SaaS company, Salesforce.com, run by former Oracle exec Marc Benioff, which is on track to do its first $3 billion year.

Ellison also took another shot at his new favorite punching bag, Workday, the SaaS or cloud-based human resources software company run by Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield, two former execs of PeopleSoft, the HR software company Oracle took over in 2004 after a $10.3 billion hostile takeover that has raised a lot of money at an impressive valuation and expects to IPO this fall.

Hear Ellison tell it himself in this audio clip from the call below.

Other examples that have punctured my attention bubble in recent years are platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service and storage-as-a-service, and there are probably many more. Then they get turned into ever-weirder acroynyms: Saas, PaaS, Iaas. You get the idea.

Today, Netsuite, the cloud player whose traditional approach is essentially to run your business from the cloud, today contributed its own new thing offered as a service: Commerce. (Cue the acronym: CaaS.)

One of the big things that businesses have to do is buy and sell goods and services from other businesses. The most basic example is that widget makers have to buy cardboard boxes from a supplier, because the goods don’t show up on the loading dock by magic. The same goes for every bit of physical stuff a business needs and also the services it pays for to keep its operations running smoothly.

Netsuite isn’t just managing the back-end business-to-business commerce, but also the direct-to-customer type of commerce. And the experience works pretty much anywhere a customer may be coming from: On a phone, tablet or PC, in a store or on social media.

As customers have essentially come to expect to be able to buy anything and everything online, the traditional back-end commerce engines like Microsoft Dynamics, Great Plains, Sage and even SAP were imperfectly combined with patchwork solutions for selling on the Web. And the bits of the system that faced customers have rarely if ever been unified with the ones that also face suppliers, which has a way of complicating things like inventory, the supply chain and everything else that stems from basic ebb and flow of supply and demand.

And things are getting even more complicated as machines are programmed to automatically buy things from other machines based on a pre-defined set of circumstances.

NetSuite has built what it calls a commerce engine — dubbed SuiteCommerce — that speaks directly to the core enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) functions that are already its bread and butter. In English that means that the new engine comes into the process already knowing what everything is, and also who everyone is. That makes it ready to wheel and deal not only with customers but also with suppliers. And when you get down to it, that’s a good way to reduce a lot of friction in any business, which is pretty much what cloud computing is supposed to be about.

The commerce service was probably the biggest news to come out of Netsuite’s SuiteWorld conference in San Francisco today, where CEO Zach Nelson (pictured) gave a keynote address. The company also announced a partnership with Square, the maker of little white credit-card reading thingies that you can insert into an iPhone or iPad for the purpose of accepting payment. Square’s Register application has been integrated with SuiteCommerce, so if you see more businesses using Squares, maybe this has something to do with it.

Flying under the radar — and away from the eyes of the tech press that might have otherwise paid it attention — was sort of the plan, Demandforce chief marketing officer Patrick Barry told me in an interview a few minutes ago. “We built this company the old-fashioned way. That meant putting our customers first. PR and other things were not a priority. Our customers don’t read tech sites. We focused our efforts on reaching out to our customers.”

Whatever it was, it worked. Demandforce, launched in 2003, had attracted $11.8 million in venture capital investments, primarily from Benchmark Capital. By the time of the acquisition announced today, the San Francisco-based outfit had 300 employees, a profitable business with a run rate of $60 million in annual sales and — get this — $12 million in the bank.

So what does Demandforce do? Marketing for small businesses: Dentist’s offices and hair salons and auto-repair shops and scores of other types of small businesses that make up the majority of the U.S. economy and need help reaching out to their customers.

Demandforce, Barry told me, built bridges to the data stored in old-school marketing software programs — and there are dozens of them — that would typically run on desktop machines, freeing up the data and moving it into the cloud.

From there, it would apply its own marketing algorithms to the business: managing appointment reminders, asking customers for feedback and publishing customer reviews. So far, Demandforce has syndicated 1.5 million reviews to Google and CitySearch and other sites like them that accept Demandforce content.

Intuit said in a statement that it will make Demandforce into a new division in its Small Business Group; it will continue to be led by Rick Berry, Demandforce’s president and founder. He will report to Kiran Patel, the executive vice president and general manager of that group.

After the deal closes, Intuit said, it expects Demandforce to add one to two points to its revenue growth in fiscal 2013, and to be neutral or slightly dilutive this year. Intuit shares rose 44 cents, or less than 1 percent, to $58.04.

Now, there are lots of X-as-a-service plays in the IT world, and one of them is the desktop-as-a-service approach, where everything you need for a workaday PC can run on a virtualized server in the cloud, and all the user sees is a keyboard, mouse and screen. It’s efficient, easier and less costly to support than desktop PCs. But? You need to fully license every instance of software you use, in much the same way you would with an old-school desktop. And then there’s always the latency that comes from delivering something via the pipes, which are never quite fast enough, no matter what you do.

But what if you could deliver a full computing experience — operating systems, applications, gaming, the whole enchilada — virtually? Two weeks ago, I saw a demonstration of just such a service that kind of blew my mind. And today the company behind it, Numecent, is coming out of stealth mode and also announcing a spinoff.

First, let’s cover the basics: Numecent is a start-up run by Osman Kent, the onetime CEO and co-founder of 3Dlabs, the company that in the 1990s more or less started the graphics processor industry, which Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are the leaders of today. The company has a bunch of undisclosed investors, but last month TechCrunch reported that it had raised $2 million in a series A that was part of a larger $10 million funding round. I’m told there are 107 individual shareholders in the company.

So what does Numecent’s Technology do? It calls its technology “cloud paging,” and in its corporate literature it takes pains to explain that it is nothing like “pixel streaming,” a technique in which applications, mostly games, run on a cloud server and deliver the experience of the game — literally the pixels of a gaming environment — to a PC over the Internet. This is essentially how OnLive, a gaming outfit, works.

The fundamental problem here is that while the cloud is good for streaming linear content like movies and music, where one bit follows logically after another, it’s less good at nonlinear stuff, like applications. One bit doesn’t necessarily follow in a logical order from another, because users jump around from one process or feature to another. So if you’re trying to run a software application via the cloud, you can run into trouble pretty easily if it’s a processor-heavy program.

Cloud paging, as best I understand it, uses the Internet to transmit x86 chip instructions — basically telling the Intel or AMD processor in a PC what to do remotely. What this allows is something Numecent describes as “friction-free” computing. What that means in practice is that you could run any application on your local system from the cloud, in an almost-instant, on-demand manner. And when you’re done using it you just shut it down and your local system is left more or less untouched. When you’re done using it, it’s as if the software had never been on your PC.

Numecent’s cloud-paging scheme breaks software up into small pieces, called “pages,” that can then be pushed out dynamically. The user’s machine creates what’s called a virtual memory management unit, which handles the job of requesting the pages that are delivered. Connections between the client machine and the server are also strongly encrypted.

The end result, the company says, is a reduction by as much as 60x in deployment and delivery time of applications. And there’s also nothing to maintain. When the user is done using the virtual application or machine, there’s nothing left on the client machine.

Let’s say you’re a part-time graphic designer who works for a company only two days a week. The company would normally have to pay for you to have Adobe Creative Suite installed on the machine you use. This can easily run a few thousand dollars. But if you could check it out for a few hours and run it on a cloud server, with the same features and the same native speed, as though it were installed on your local system, it would cost your employer a lot less.

Central to all this are 10 patents that Numecent has on its cloud-paging technology. I’m told that these are battle-tested patents, and that Microsoft and Citrix Systems are among its licensees.

The same experience can be applied to games. Most games worth having can be bought from download stores today, but they’re huge and take a lot of time to download and then install. What if you could just play whatever game you wanted, pay for the time you use it, and then stop paying when you’re done? That’s sort of the idea behind Approxy, a spinoff that Numecent is launching today, as well. Yavuz Ahiska, another 3Dlabs alum, is taking it out of Numecent, and plans to offer a white-labeled cloud gaming service that gaming companies can license. Approxy is described in a lot more detail in the video (below) that Numecent shared with me exclusively.

Numecent’s plan is to essentially spin out different companies that put its cloud-paging technology to work in different contexts.

Approxy from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

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.”

If the name seems familiar, then perhaps you remember something of the episode resulting in Roehm’s acrimonious departure from Wal-Mart. The retailer hired her in 2006 in an attempt to bring its brand image into the 21st century and make Wal-Mart an acceptable choice for higher-end consumers.

A lengthy Wall Street Journal profile that year ran through the highlights of Roehm’s pre-Wal-Mart career: Racy double-entendre-laden ads for the Dodge Durango; a campaign with the tagline “That thing got a Hemi?” promoting Chrysler’s muscular engine. In 2004, she hatched an idea for something called the Lingerie Bowl, a pay-per-view event, tied to that year’s Super Bowl, which was to feature scantily clad women playing football. Car dealers and conservative groups complained, and Chrysler withdrew its sponsorship. Early successes at Wal-Mart included a 2006 TV campaign that poked fun at electronics retailer Best Buy.

However, Wal-Mart fired Roehm at the end of 2006 over accusations that she carried on a romantic relationship with a subordinate, Sean Womack. Wal-Mart also accused her, in a court filing, of using company-paid travel to conduct the affair. Roehm was also accused of accepting gifts from executives of an ad agency she ultimately selected, which Wal-Mart said violated company policy.

What followed was a full-blown ad-industry scandal. Womack’s wife turned over emails between Roehm and Womack, more or less proving the affair. Roehm sued Wal-Mart in 2007, accusing then-CEO Lee Scott and other senior executives of accepting gifts of travel and concert tickets from suppliers, and benefiting from preferential prices on items like boats from the Minnesota billionaire Irwin Jacobs. It only got uglier, until a judge dismissed her suit; the lawsuits appear to have ended.

Roehm doesn’t seem to have much history working on campaigns for business-to-business products of the kind that SAP produces. Even so, given her reputation for trying to shake things up with sleepy brands, it will be interesting to see what she does with SAP.

SAP is definitely on the move. Two months ago, it spent $3.4 billion to acquire SuccessFactors, a cloud-based maker of human resources software. That deal was only the latest in a string of deals by traditional software companies to roll up cloud-based outfits. SAP is also making noises about its own cloud, and will probably want to spend lavishly to market its Business ByDesign and HANA products this year, which SAP’s co-CEO Bill McDermott discussed last year with AllThingsD. That’s going to require some new marketing messages that will probably be like nothing the company has ever done before. It will be fun to see how it evolves.