At a live event in San Francisco today, virtualization giant VMware unveiled what it called a “monster” of a cloud infrastructure suite, upgrading its flagship VMware vSphere, even as rival Citrix forked over more than $200 million for Silicon Valley’s Cloud.com to better compete in the cloud computing arena.

The Citrix purchase of Cloud.com gives it CloudStack, its best known product, which is a way to build open private and public cloud computing systems. It put the Florida-based company in increased competition with VMware, as well as Amazon and Microsoft.

In related news, at its partners conference in Los Angeles today, Microsoft also stressed its private and public cloud computing solutions, unveiling a wide range of updates and features to its Windows Azure and other cloud offerings.

The competition in the space is certainly heating up as several rivals compete to become the key provider of technology and management in the cloud, as companies increasingly move their business operations there.

VMware’s strategy is to go bigger and stronger, with what it is billing as the most complete cloud package for users, touting more power, performance and scale in its vSphere 5 product.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said it has simplified its offering, which is the first big update to its cloud operating system since mid-2009.

All of it is about making companies more comfortable with moving completely to the cloud, which is still the biggest obstacle for a range of issues, including worries about security and, well, simple confusion.

VMware said vSphere 5 and its updated cloud infrastructure suite is expected to be available in the third quarter.

“The market has fully embraced virtualization as a key transformative technology at the heart of the next era of computing,” said VMware CEO Paul Maritz, in a statement. “With vSphere 5 and our cloud infrastructure suite, VMware is helping customers accelerate towards more efficient and automated cloud infrastructure, redefining how resources are managed and secured, and ultimately, driving a more productive relationship between IT and the businesses they serve.”

At a Q&A later, Maritz acknowledged the increasing competition, specifically pointing to Microsoft, where he once worked.

“They have been predicting our death for five years now,” he said, noting that has not come to pass. “That said, they still haven’t given up either.”

When he first joined Google nearly seven years ago to start its enterprise division, Gmail was barely out of the gate and Blogger was the search giant’s most notable acquisition. What could Google offer enterprises that they weren’t already getting from Microsoft and Oracle and IBM and scores of other established software and hardware vendors?

The answer? An alternative. Sheth pitched Google’s trio of senior executives–Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin–on the idea of experimenting with standard office applications–a word processor, a spreadsheet–that operated entirely within a browser. The product evolved into Google Apps, and while Microsoft Office still dominates the enterprise desktop, it’s widely accepted that Google Apps has made some important inroads against it: 3 million businesses use it in some way, and some 30 million people use it in their businesses.

Aside from the scores of companies, governments and non-profits that have adopted it, there are millions of college students using it, attracted by the zero-dollar price tag. Microsoft has responded with its own cloud-based office offering, Office 365, but its clear that Redmond’s traditional grip on the enterprise desktop isn’t quite as tight as it once was.

Now Sheth has an even bigger target in mind. If Office isn’t so sacred, why does Windows have to be? As the Group Product Manager Chrome OS for Business, he makes an interesting argument that the Redmond-centric world of corporate desktops is quietly nursing a desire for change. Where will it come from? A combination of cloud computing, and a desktop that’s stripped down to nothing but a browser. I talked with Sheth by phone earlier this month and my first question was about his education.

NewEnterprise: You did your undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, but now you work in software. Circuit design wasn’t for you?

I realized I liked software a lot more than hardware. But I was most of the way through with electrical engineering at Stanford. So I did my masters in software.

Does having been educated first on hardware give you a different perspective on any of the work you’re doing at Google?

It is actually relevant. A lot of what I’ve done involves software and user-facing interfaces, but it also involves a lot of infrastructure. When you look at VMWare, which is where I worked before Google, it’s about what you can do with a combination of hardware and software and change the game. It’s similar with Google Apps. It’s a big set of user-facing applications, but the big thing is the cloud computing infrastructure that’s underneath. The fundamental question is about how you wire computers together in the most efficient way possible. That is really the bread and butter underneath Google Apps. And finally with Chrome OS it’s the same question: What can you do to the form factor of the hardware if you’re really only running a browser on it. The background in hardware has served me well.

So you joined Google about seven years ago with the mission of creating something–you basically had a blank sheet of paper–that Google could offer the enterprise. And your first idea got shot down. What was it?

At the time I joined Google the enterprise division was literally 25 people. We had a few engineers and salespeople, and we brought in a manager, Dave Girouard. I came in with the explicit mission of starting something else within Google that was to be aimed at businesses. And that something else was completely undefined. When I was still at VMware, a friend sent me a Gmail invite, and I started using it, and it was better than my corporate mail. I thought it could be a very interesting enterprise product. After I joined, I pitched Eric, Larry and Sergey on the idea of putting Gmail into an appliance and shipping it out to corporations. They didn’t go for it. I went back six months later, with some new insight, specifically that we could use our server architecture to make it easier for businesses and educational institutions to deploy and manage email, and that from there we could move up-market to deploy applications. We got exactly one engineer to work on that.

It was very much like running a start-up. I was the product manager and was tasked with starting this new business and we went through all the classic things that a start-up does. Building the product, building the team, selling the vision to an early set of adopters–San Jose City College was our first college customer and Northwestern and Arizona State followed after that. We started small and incubated it within Google. We did a lot of experimenting with that small team to see what was viable and eventually we were able to get more resources to make it bigger.

So how does the Google Apps experience compare to your new role in building a business around Chrome OS for businesses?

It’s very similar. In Chrome OS I’m back in start-up mode. Essentially I’m trying to build a vision. We have a small team of people that all sit together in one area, building out the business model, and we’re trying to start small and grow from there. One way to look at Google is as a closed confederation of start-ups. All these teams are empowered to build something that is visionary. But we all have a lot of leverage behind us, and so we’re able to do a lot more than we ever would have been able to do if we were a small company.

I see a potential problem there: Don’t all these start-ups within Google run the risk of creating independent silos or fiefdoms that aren’t all on the same page? We hear a lot of criticism of the silos at companies like Sony or even Microsoft. Even at Google, there’s Google Voice, which is a great product but doesn’t really fit with anything else, though I understand it eventually will. But how do you avoid this silo problem?

It’s a great question, and its something we’ve thought about a lot. There are basically two extremes. The first extreme is on one hand you have different teams doing things completely different from each other. The other extreme requires that everything be integrated extremely well together. We tried to find a happy medium. The benefit for one is that you can move quickly. But if you do the other extreme, you slow down innovation. Your project may take several times longer. One big advantage is the Google infrastructure is all there. You don’t have to think about user authentication or how to store files. That’s all done for you, so everyone is using the same infrastructure. A lot of the parts you need are there and you just build on top of them. You can never strike a perfect balance, but we think ours is pretty good.

So what’s your mission with the Chrome OS?

My mission is to bring Chrome to business and to ask how we make it something that can reshape the enterprise desktop. The thing that was really intriguing for me, is that cloud computing has done so much for businesses. You don’t need to think about deploying the hardware, you can just turn things on. You don’t need to worry about massive up-front payments for hardware, you can just pay monthly for what you use. And your applications just keep getting better. In my mind the cloud really stops at the desktop.

The desktop is tremendously hard to manage. It costs a lot to maintain, most of the cost for a business is all in the maintenance. It doesn’t get better over time, it gets slower as you use it. I think there’s a huge opportunity to bring the principles of cloud computing to the desktop. It gets better, and it’s fast and secure. That’s the vision. We think we can do that because we have a unique operating system. It’s just a browser that’s completely stateless. As a result of that, you can boot up in 5 to 10 seconds. And no matter where you go, you log in, you have your entire desktop. If the system breaks, that’s not a problem, you just jump on to another system. If you lose it, it’s not a problem because its stateless.

There are people who would say its crazy to try and dislodge Windows as the operating system of choice for businesses, and yet you think you can do it. What kind of results have you seen so far?

If you just have a browser and take out everything else, life gets a lot simpler. And this is why I think that the desktop OS is ready for a radical change much like the enterprise applications were a few years ago. One thing we’ve found is that very significant portions of the population are using only a browser right now. Those trends show that this area is ripe for a change. If you look down the line in three years, the majority of those business users will use only a browser. We created this pilot device called the Cr48, which is a notebook with Chrome OS installed on it. We received 50,000 applications from businesses interested in trying it, and we now have thousands deployed in the field. We have companies like Intercontinental Hotel Group, Virgin American and Groupon using them for different things. We’ve even heard from the US Army Intelligence Office. We heard from a lot of companies we didn’t expect interest from.

I think you’ll see some early adopters, groups of users within companies, this year. Some companies’ pilot programs want to do large roll-outs to call centers and to customer service reps and some want to roll them out to mobile sales people. Many will find that it makes sense to them because it brings the cost down. No one wants to pay to have to fix a system that’s broken because two applications are in conflict with each other. No one wants to pay to go patch an operating system. That kind of thing is going to become a lot easier with Chrome OS.

Yahoo announced its first-quarter earnings today, showing a continued worrisome revenue growth stall, due in large part to declines in search revenue from its partnership with Microsoft.

The Silicon Valley search giant reported revenue of $1.06 billion, down six percent from a year ago, on net earnings of 17 cents a share, down 28 percent.

The performance was essentially in line with Wall Street expectations, which had been estimating that Yahoo would report $1.05 billion in net revenue and earnings of 16 cents a share, after traffic acquisition costs (TAC) was taken out of its results.

That compared to revenue of $1.13 billion and 22 cents in earnings in the same period a year ago, results that were goosed by the sale of its Zimbra email asset to VMware.

Yahoo’s revenue growth drought was due largely to declines in its search advertising business, which fell 19 percent in the quarter from $440 million to $357 million.

Contractual guarantees paid by Microsoft, its search partner, masked even larger declines.

On a GAAP basis, search revenue was $455 million, a 46 percent decrease compared to $841 million for the first quarter of 2010.

Yahoo said display revenue ex-TAC increased 10 percent to $471 million, compared to $427 million for the first quarter of 2010.

It was a good performance, but by no means a barn burner, especially compared to Google’s 27 percent revenue growth year-over-year in its earnings last week.

Thus, it seems the turnaround efforts at Yahoo, much touted by CEO Carol Bartz, are still turning.

In a statement, she said:

“We are solidly executing toward our plan for returning Yahoo! to sustainable revenue and profit growth. During the quarter, we beat the midpoint of revenue guidance while continuing to deliver on the bottom line.”

As BoomTown had previously written, in the last quarterly call, Bartz had warned that MicroHoo had not grown yet into the beautiful swan expected in this ugly-searchling tale, noting that it might take until the second half of 2011 to see some prettier results.

Thus, Yahoo is right to focus on display advertising, an arena it dominates still, despite increasingly successful incursions from Google and Facebook.

Yahoo’s stock is certainly reflecting the worry, holding fast to its share price in between $16 and $17 for a while now. It closed today at $16.12, down 23 cents a share.

A year ago it was above $18.

The shares rose almost three percent in after-hours trading, though, to $16.57.

I will be liveblogging the conference call Yahoo’s top execs have with analysts, starting at 2 pm.

Until then, here’s the official Q1 earnings press release to peruse:

YHOO_Q111PressReleaseFinal

I can tell you that Windows Azure is going to make the telematics systems in the next generation of Toyota cars smarter. And I also know that this unit of Microsoft has been in a state of management flux recently. Amitabh Srivastava, the Microsoft Distinguished Fellow, who in 2006 took over a project then known only as Red Dog that went on to become Azure, left the company in February.

It’s no secret that, like so many other companies, Microsoft has some big plans for cloud services. It recently disclosed that it plans to spend more than $8 billion in research and development funds on its cloud strategy.

On a recent visit to the Microsoft campus in Redmond, I got a chance to sit down with Doug Hauger, Microsoft’s general manager of Windows Azure. And my first question was really really basic.

NewEnterprise: Doug, there’s so much happening in the cloud computing space these days, and most of the time when people think of cloud services they think of Amazon Web Services. And if they mention Windows Azure, they think, well, that’s Microsoft’s answer to Amazon. But you describe Azure as more of a platform-as-a-service. Can you walk me through the differences?

Hauger: Windows Azure started about five years ago. At that point it started because the company, as with all service providers, was facing some challenges on providing large, scalable, manageable services, not just to consumers, but to businesses that could dynamically scale, and that we could innovate on quickly, and bring out new features. Originally it was meant to be a platform we would use internally for services that we would then deliver out to customers. We quickly realized that we should sell it to partners and customers, and allow them to build on it as a platform.

There are fundamental differences between infrastructure as a service and what we did as platform as a service. It’s different in key ways from, say, what Amazon does with EC2 and S3 or VMWare being implemented in a data center. Our starting point for the design was to see the data center as a unit. That means the networking structure, the load-balancers, the power management, and so on–rather than in infrastructure as a service, you start from an individual server and move up.

If you allocate a service into Windows Azure and say you want it available 100 percent of the time, we will allocate it across multiple upgrade domains and physical power domains in such a way so that if any individual rack goes down or if we’re upgrading the operating system, there’s no interruption in service. That’s just a fundamentally different starting point, with an individual server and moving up. And the way that we do that is we have built out an abstraction layer of APIs that let you write to a set of services, storage services, computer services, networking services, et cetera. As a developer you can write to the service, and give us your application, and it just gets provisioned through what we call a fabric controller, that controls the data center, and also across multiple data centers. That was a design point. That’s how we allow people to write services that can scale and won’t fail and will be available all the time.

The conversation about infrastructure as a service typically starts at cost savings. You go see a customer and they say they want to cut their IT budget and outsource their IT, and so they start there. Platform as a service you start at the cost savings, but very quickly you see 10, 20 or 30 percent cost savings. But the conversation quickly turns to the innovation life cycle that they can get out of the platform. It’s much faster than you can at infrastructure as a service.

The big point that everyone gets about the cloud is that they can use it to save money, but then they quickly start asking what more can they do with the cloud. Are you seeing the same thing?

Yes, exactly. In the enterprise, they’re starting to turn the crank on innovation. I talk to customers who are turning things around in six weeks or a month whereas before they would six months or a year. I actually just talked to a customer the other day, and they said their developers were spending 40 to 50 percent of their time managing services and they couldn’t use that time writing software which was their job. When they moved to a platform as a service, they didn’t have to worry about that anymore. We’re seeing this happening in the enterprise where people are doing this for internal development and on services they’re building for their customers.

One example, Daimler just did their new version of the smart car. They wanted a service so you can check the status of your car when its charging from your smart phone, locate it, et cetera. They turned it around in a couple of weeks on Azure and launched it at the same time as the car launched.

We’re also seeing small players compete at the enterprise level. There’s a small company called Margin Pro and they do mortgage analysis and risk assessment on mortgages. Basically it’s a couple of economists and developers. They wrote the software on Windows Azure, and now they have 70 banks around the world, tens of millions of dollars in revenue, and they are competing with some of the biggest financial services companies in the world because of this back-end infrastructure data center they can use to deliver their results to their customers.

But do you have customers who run standard apps on it too?

Many standard applications have some level of customization, and so we’re seeing a lot of hybrid applications, where customers are extending them into Azure. We have a case with Coca-Cola Enterprises which has a back-end order-processing app that they’ve extended into Azure. And what they wanted to do was get more reach and more agility for the front-end. So they built a secure connection between their data center and Windows Azure and then extended the application out to their partners and customers, essentially people like Domino’s Pizza who order Coca Cola products. We’re seeing a lot of these cases of existing applications being extended like that.

We’re also seeing companies using the high performance computing workload. One example is a company called Greenbutton, which has done a high performance scheduling and billing system on Azure. Another is Pixar, which has an application called RenderMan, which does rendering. Most large animation houses have their own clusters they do this rendering on. Pixar wanted to open up a market for smaller animation houses, little Pixars if you will. They’re working with Greenbutton to embed their technology into RenderMan. They can farm their rendering out to Azure and be billed on a usage basis. That’s a case where you have a large company and a smaller one working together and leveraging the power of the cloud to open up a whole new marketplace where they can be competitive. We call it the democratization of IT.

At what point is the customers’ thinking right now? Are they still at that point where they want to see how much money they can save by moving things that are on-premise to the cloud or are they past that by now?

I would say there’s three buckets of customers. I’ve been in this role for three years and the conversations have evolved in some interesting ways. Three years ago I was telling people they should be adopters and get on board with this platform early. They all said to come back and talk to them in five years. Then about two years ago, the majority of customers were in the first bucket, interested in wanting to save money but they weren’t interested in doing any new innovation. And then there were a few willing to innovate a bit by extending their applications into the cloud. Today I would say many, but not the majority yet, but a lot of them say they get the cloud, they get the cost savings, and now they want to drive the innovation life cycle faster. And there is a growing percentage who are willing to do something completely different and compete in a new way and build a brand new business. It’s been exciting to see that.

What’s been really exciting has been seeing mid-sized companies realizing they can use the cloud to give them an advantage to innovate faster and compete against really big companies. So that is sort of the landscape. Interestingly, I’ve been seeing a lot more adoption among the financial services companies than I had anticipated.

Aren’t they the ones who are supposed to be the most conservative when it comes to IT? I mean, they’re aggressive on performance, but obsessed with security and so skeptical of using the cloud because they don’t want to let their data leave their hands.

Exactly. But think about financial services. They’ve been in cloud computing forever, but it’s just been running on their own proprietary clouds. And so they are very good about understanding their application portfolio, and what can run in a public cloud, what has to stay in a private cloud, and how they can span those clouds. You can basically say you want to do risk assessment on portfolios, you anonymize the data, and you run it on the public cloud, you do all the analytics, you bring it back on-premise and then you deliver it to your customer. Having that kind of mentality in that industry allows them to move very quickly.

Also, manufacturing is moving and adopting the cloud faster than I would have guessed. And interestingly enough, government–not so much federal, because there’s so many certification requirements–but state and local governments are embracing the cloud because of the economic situation, and these are not just governments within the U.S. In Australia and Western Europe, we’re seeing governments adopting and building out applications so they can get services out to their citizens.

So what’s keeping you up at night? What makes you worry?

There’s a few things I think about. While we drive customers to a very fast innovation life cycle, we need to stay ahead of that innovation life cycle ourselves. We’ve done a pretty good job with that. One example, when we first released in beta a few years ago, we had .NET but we didn’t have PHP or Java. We got feedback immediately, almost on the first day, that customers wanted those and right away. And so we turned it around and added those within three months. Our ability to turn the crank pretty quickly is there. And that is something that in the software industry and specifically Microsoft, we have to make sure we make this turn toward service delivery, where we have to innovate quickly so you can deliver services. I think we’re doing a good job, but it’s something top of mind for me.

What are they asking for now? Is there something new the customers want that they don’t have?

They’re asking for continued investment in Java. We have it now, but making it a truly first class citizen, which is what we’re focused on delivering. We also need to keep our ear to the ground around things like application frameworks, extending the modeling capabilities in Visual Studio and things like that. It’s just a matter of thinking about the developer. We need to understand what they want, that’s what we’re here for.

Taylor Barada (pictured here), Yahoo’s recently appointed head of M&A, is joining Zynga in an unspecified role.

Barada replaced Andrew Siegel, who left Yahoo in December to join Condé Nast.

Yahoo staff was told of the move yesterday.

According to his bio at the Silicon Valley Internet giant:

“Taylor works with the Americas and Global Product orgs at Yahoo! leading strategic analysis/execution of acquisitions, divestitures, investments and other strategic relationships. Recent transactions include the sale of Zimbra to VMware and the acquisition of Citizen Sports. Prior to Yahoo! he worked as an investor, consultant, and operator at Rosewood Capital, Bain & Company, and Peregrine Systems. Taylor started his career as a professional soccer player and was a three time National Champion at the University of Virginia while completing his B.A. in History and Foreign Affairs.”

Barada’s departure to the San Francisco online gaming phenom–which was apparently able to extend him a more lucrative offer–will will put a crimp in Yahoo’s already slow-moving merger and acquisition strategies.

Yahoo declined to comment and I have emailed Zynga and have not yet heard back.

The new data centers would add to its sizable footprint of 36 data centers already in operation. While it won’t yet say where they’ll all be, some will be in Asia, a few in the Europe-Middle East-Africa region, and at least three will be in the US. Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services, wouldn’t go into any further detail than that. He did say Dell selected the locations based on a combination of where it already has a data center presence and where it sees new demand emerging.

Schuckenbrock, along with Praveen Asthana, Dell’s vice president for Enterprise Solutions, talked about the plans on a conference call with reporters yesterday. They said Dell’s plan calls for a new push to offer both platform and virtual desktop-as-service as well as IT outsourcing. Dell will run both private and public clouds, and will offer Microsoft Azure as well as VMWare and Openstack, an open-source cloud architecture it has backed, based on the customer’s needs.

It also announced a new product called vStart, an easy-to-buy virtual infrastructure that’s based on its Dell PowerEdge servers, which incidentally run on Intel’s Xeon processors which were the subject of a big upgrade announcement on Tuesday. VStart combines the servers, its EqualLogic storage product, and its PowerConnect switches into a single product that can run either 100 or 200 virtual machines at once.

Dell also deepened its relationship with Microsoft around cloud services, announcing a three-year strategic partnership with Redmond that’s based around Microsoft’s System Center, a product for managing IT infrastructure. It is also adding new file-backup and email archiving services to the mix.

Finally Dell is rolling out a virtual desktop product that strikes me as piercing the heart of its identity as a PC vendor to large companies. It’s offering a virtual desktop solution that can essentially replace the desktop that you’re probably using on your desk right now with a virtual machine, where all the computing happens in a data center.

Asthana says there’s a lot of benefits to running a virtual desktop. For one thing virtual machines are more secure, they’re easier to support. He says Dell’s customers are struggling with the complexity of switching to virtual desktops. “They don’t even know where to start, giving all the questions around hardware and software,” he said. Though it still lags behind Hewlett-Packard in the desktop PC business, its experience in understanding how companies use old-school desktops gives it a leg up in taking the hassle out of moving to virtual ones, he said. The point is to make it easy. Time will tell what companies think about about it.

The order is said to coincide with the forthcoming release of a new product that Isilon is expected to announce next week.

So huge an order for data storage would coincide with the construction of Apple’s huge data center in Maiden, N.C., and that’s expected to be the hub for a new version of iTunes that relies more on storing media in the cloud and less on using its customers local hard drives.

If you have trouble getting your head around the petabyte, the fine folks at another EMC unit, the backup service Mozy (soon to be a unit of VMWare) produced this fascinating graphic. As they tell it, one petabyte is enough to store more than 13.3 years worth of HD video, meaning 12 petabytes would be enough to store nearly 160 years worth.

The scale of the storage infrastructure, if true, would amount to another potentially intriguing clue to the environment Apple is using inside its data center. Previously it had disclosed in job ads on its Web site that its hardware there will include a mix of systems running Mac OS X, IBM’s AIX, Oracle’s Sun/Solaris, and some Red Hat Linux-based machines.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple’s Area 51: The Truth Is Out There
• Apple’s N.C. Data Center Intended for iTunes, MobileMe
• Apple Owns Another 70 Acres Near NC Data Center
• Was Apple Planning on Doubling Its North Carolina Data Center All Along?
• Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center
• That’s Apple’s New Data Center? Where’s the Giant Glass Cube?

Conceding that Cisco has been “slow to make decisions” and “been surprised where it should not,” he promised to take “bold steps and make tough decisions.” The consensus appears to be that divestitures are coming.

Cisco has been an acquisition machine during the last decade, but has little to show for it. Obvious candidates for divestiture are its consumer products business, which includes the Linksys brand of home networking gear, and Pure Digital, the makers of the Flip Digital video cameras. Consumer products carry lower margins than other products, and Cisco’s already got enough problems with its gross margins, which have stood at 64 percent since 2008 and gone nowhere.

One problem, the analyst Brian Marshall of Gleacher and Co. wrote in a note to clients issued yesterday, is that Cisco has so thoroughly dominated its core networking markets that it has effectively saturated its market. In looking for new areas to grow into, Cisco has been forced to look for what Marshall calls “adjacent markets,” like consumer networking gear, TV set top boxes, among others, both of which sap the potential for margin growth.

And while it’s hard to argue that Cisco’s low valuation doesn’t create a buying opportunity, there’s a lot more to consider, Marshall says. While Cisco grew its total revenue base by 7 percent from 2008 to 2010, a group of smaller independent competitors–Marshall calls them the “chimps” compared to the Cisco “gorilla”–like Juniper, Checkpoint, F5 Networks, Aruba Networks and a few others–collectively added roughly the same amount of incremental revenue that Cisco did during the same period, and nibbled away at Cisco’s dominance in the process. “Innovative companies can still have an impact in the technology industry even when competing against an 800-pound gorilla,” Marshall wrote.

One ace in Cisco’s deck, Marshall says, is VBlock, a data-center-in-a-box made by VCE, a company Cisco jointly owns with EMC and VMWare, and run by former Compaq CEO Michael Capellas: Cisco adds the networking component, servers and management software, EMC brings the storage and VMWare brings the virtualization. The product is just getting off the ground, but VCE recently said it has a pipeline of orders worth $1 billion and 120 interested customers. It is at least something for Cisco bulls to hang their hats on for now.

Two of the new directors come from the software security firm McAfee, where Jive CEO Tony Zingale held a board seat from 2008 until its $7.7 billion acquisition by chip giant Intel: Charles Robel was McAfee’s chairman and has been on its board’s audit committee, and sits on the board of Autodesk and is the lead independent director on the board of Informatica; and David DeWalt was McAfee’s president, and before that was president of software sales and services at storage giant EMC, following the acquisition of Documentum, which it acquired in 2003 and where he was CEO. Dewalt is chairman of the board at Polycom.

Jonathan  Heiliger  is  the  Vice  President  of  Technical Operations at Facebook, meaning he’s the one who makes Facebook go. He reports directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Before that he led the engineering team at Walmart.com, and before that he was COO at Loudcloud, the company that ultimately became Opsware.

Sundar  Pichai  is  vice  President  of  product  management at Google, and oversees such products as Google  Toolbar,  Chrome  and Chrome  OS. Before Google, he worked at Applied Materials, the maker of chip manufacturing gear, and was management consulting for McKinsey and Co.

I asked CEO Tony Zingale about Jive’s plans to go public. He wouldn’t comment on that, naturally, but its well understood that Zingale, who ran software company Mercury Interactive until its $4.5 billion sale to HP, was brought on with an IPO in mind, as The Wall Street Journal reported last year. He also wouldn’t comment when I asked him if Jive has hired any bankers.

But he did say that Jive is at what he called “an inflection point.” In case you hadn’t notice, social enterprise software is a segment that’s growing like crazy, with offerings from Salesforce.com, Parature, Yammer, and a host of others. “We’re building the next great enterprise software company,” Zingale says. “And guys like this don’t join boards of companies that aren’t already successful and that don’t have a pretty good runway ahead of them.”

Jive certainly has some momentum. It has about 3,000 corporate customers–including big names like Cisco Systems, Nike, VMWare, Intel and fast food giant Yum Brands–and about 15 million end users. And last year it landed a big $30 million investment from Kleiner Perkins. Its other investor is Sequoia Capital, which invested $15 million in 2007. Boomtown’s Kara Swisher talked to Zingale and another Jive director Ted Schlein about the investment in a video interview last year, which I’ve added below.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110330/in-another-pre-ipo-move-jive-software-adds-four-directors-all-with-public-company-experience/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110321/peter-levine-veritas-veteran-and-data-center-guru-joins-andreesen-horowitz/ http://allthingsd.com/20110321/peter-levine-veritas-veteran-and-data-center-guru-joins-andreesen-horowitz/#comments Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:32:01 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4190 Venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz said today that it has appointed Peter Levine, a veteran of the enterprise software company Veritas that’s now a part of Symantec, and the former CEO of XenSource, now part of Citrix, as its first venture partner.

Levine is the third partner to join AH in recent months. In January it named HP and Opsware veteran Mark Cranney as a partner for market development. And in March it added IronPort’s Scott Weiss.

“Adding Peter makes us smarter at the firm on a certain class of products where he is much more experienced and goes much more in depth than we do, in areas like virtualization and storage,” AH co-founder Ben Horowitz told me. A key area of expertise is one that Levine developed specifically at Veritas, he said, that of working with manufacturers of infrastructure products. “Veritas was probably the most successful company in the history of enterprise software at the OEM model except for Microsoft,” Horowitz said. “It’s a very complicated thing to do–and a very complicated thing to do correctly–so he brings a specialized skill set to the table.”

Horowitz also said Levine will help AH expand its reach and find deals in places where it hasn’t had a presence before, places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Levine is a lecturer. One example: Bromium, a stealth startup that AH says it is investing in. While Horowitz didn’t disclose the amount the firm is investing, he did describe Bromium as a “security plus virtualization company.”

“It’s the kind of deal we wouldn’t have known about without working with Peter,” Horowitz told me.

“We’re at the second generation of what you can do with virtualization,” Levine told me. “Companies like Citrix and XenSource did a lot of the hard rock-breaking to get chipset support from companies like Intel to support virtualization, and once they did that there was an opportunity to take virtualization to the next level. Bromium is a company that takes advantage of all that.”

Levine is continuing in his role as a vice president of Strategic Development at Citrix and will continue teaching a class on Technology Sales at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Previously, he was senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center and Cloud Division at Citrix, having joined that company in 2007 by way of its $500 million acquisition of XenSource, a provider of open-source virtualization sofware, where he was CEO. XenSource’s customers included Microsoft, Symantec, HP, NEC and Dell.

This will be Levine’s second go in the venture capital ring. He spent three years as a general partner at the Mayfield Fund and in that capacity served on the board of Consera Software, which was purchased by HP. He sat on the advisory board of VMWare and was an investor in Actona, which was ultimately acquired by Cisco Systems.

Levine first rose to prominence as an early employee of Veritas Software, and during his 11-year stint there helped to grow it to 5,000+ and more than $1.5B in annual revenue. His last job at Veritas was executive VP, where he was responsible for worldwide marketing, OEM sales, business development and several product divisions. Before that, he was a software engineer at MIT and worked on Project Athena, an early-1980s research project to build a campus-wide distributed computing network that turned out to be a forerunner of the kind of corporate networks we now use every day.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110321/peter-levine-veritas-veteran-and-data-center-guru-joins-andreesen-horowitz/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110215/tk-4/ http://allthingsd.com/20110215/tk-4/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:00:36 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=57801 Company-subsidized tablets may outnumber their employee-owned counterparts sooner than expected.

Morgan Stanley recently surveyed 50 enterprise CIOs about current and future tablet deployments and came back with some pretty astonishing findings: 21 percent of them are already purchasing tablets for employees and 51 percent expect to begin doing so in the coming year. In total, 67 percent of the CIOs surveyed said they’re either planning to deploy tablets or provide support for employee-owned ones this year. Now the scope of these deployments remains to be seen, but the fact that so many are being budgeted suggests the tablet is gaining meaningful traction in enterprise.

And if you’re dubious of that claim, consider this: Pads accounted for 29 percent of new enterprise activations of Good Technology software in December 2010, up from 25 percent the month prior. Clearly, there’s growing corporate interest in the tablet, which means there are growing opportunities for companies that provide enterprise software solutions for it–mobile security vendors like Check Point, desktop virtualization companies like VMware and cloud-based applications outfits like Salesforce.com.

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