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Yesterday, Hitachi took the wraps off their Unified Computing Platform by introducing its open data center platform. It is aimed at consolidating the enterprise functions of networking, storage, and compute into an orchestration layer. Virtualization is still guiding the evolution of the data center, in this case all the way to the physical form. If you like consolidating your systems into big iron with lots blinking lights, Hitachi has you covered. And if you like open systems that connect to your existing infrastructure, Hitachi believes that playing nice with others is in the domain of unified computing. Sponsor If you're interested in this idea, check out the video summary of the platform . The company shares us a deeper view of this product line and the problems it is intending to solve. Many of the opportunities targeted address budgets, for example, how to remove operating expense through the orchestration of resources. Orchestration is the Huddle on Third Down Orchestration merges network, system, and storage resources as a single unit to be managed and reported in. An analogy might be found in football. In the huddle, the quarterback might call "the slant 6" and all eleven members of the team interpret that play and perform their respective jobs. Orchestration, as Hitachi describes it behaves in a similar way. It will respond to plays like "scale up for product launch". All the members of the team (disk, server, and network) go to their respective places and do the jobs needed. And, if needed, adjust appropriately to the conditions on the field. Hitachi leverages a partnership with Microsoft's System Management tools to closely align the plan and reality to bring more intelligence into the equation. The Computing Stack is the Team This product is also about abstracting systems through software. The company is betting that the coordination of the tasks of operating systems, storage and networking within a single framework provides a lot of value to the business. Hitachi takes the point of view that it is best to harmonize existing assets though open standards and looks at computing as a utility to be shared in the organization. Some of the features the product contains make it easier for organizations to achieve scale across functions and environments. It is designed to support this modern data center principles: Multi-tenancy Charge back for resources Distributed physical data centers Public cloud resources through open APIs Hitachi Unified Compute Platform looks like an impressive physical device. It brings together resources normally held in separate racks and hosts them in a single location and reduces a lot of the work of wiring up data centers. As we unfold another chapter in computing, Hitachi is leveraging its strength in consolidation to meet the trend of massive growth of data. At a glance, there are a lot of reasons why IT managers might choose unified computing products: cost, ease, agility. Looking out a few years, it is easy to imagine growth in this category overall. Is Hitachi well positioned for aggregation of data center resources with its Unified Computing products? How will EMC, Cisco, IBM, and HP fare in the movement towards unified computing? Photo credit: idovermani Discuss
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Hitachi's Unified Compute Platform Goes for the Endzone
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In an email to staff yesterday, new Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal wrote that "When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what's working, what's not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success." With that, he announced Ning would be abandoning its longstanding business model and discontinuing non-paying sites on its network. In light of this, is it time to reevaluate and reign in some of the excitement about the freemium model for startups? Sponsor Offering free services for a product alongside premium fees for advanced or special features - the freemium - has been touted as a promising business model for startups for several years now: "Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base." The Freemium Summit in San Francisco last month featured many companies who've been able to leverage the freemium model to great success, including Evernote , Pandora , and Dropbox . A recent New York Times article predicts Pandora could reach $100 million in revenue this year. Finding the balance between what to offer for free and what to charge for is not easy. The trick is to put enough in the free version to get traffic and usage, but not so much that there is no incentive to upgrade. Companies who use the freemium model need to integrate their free service or product into someone's routine so fully (either by making sure it's accessible on their computer and on their mobile phone, for example) that users reach the point where they feel they simply must pay. In yesterday's press release , Ning noted that 75% of its users do pay for some sort of premium service. It may well be then that Ning's announcements are less a reflection on the freemium model than on the company itself. Despite over $120 million in VC funding, Ning has been unable to develop a sustainable business. Yesterday's announcement about the end to free Nings was accompanied with news that 40% of their staff would lose their jobs - an indication perhaps that the company's overhead was simply too high. Nevertheless, the news may serve as a cautionary tale for those startups who think the freemium model guarantees success. As David Heinemeier Hansson wrote in a post on 37signals , "Eyeballs Still Don't Pay the Bills." It remains to be seen if Ning can pull through this reorganization and turn a profit, or if they will also serve as a lesson on what happens when a business that's used the freemium model dumps all those "freeloaders." Discuss
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Is the Freemium Model (Still) Viable for Startups?
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There is a reason why lawyers go through year of school and tests to get to the jobs that they get paid so much to do - law is a complicated beast that takes a special breed to understand all the ins and outs of it. When entrepreneurs and venture capitalists meet at the bartering table to talk over the terms of their agreement, there is often too much or too little negotiation that goes on, so here's some advice I came across that can help startup founders find the "sweet spot" for negotiations. Sponsor Matt Bartus , a Silicon Valley-based lawyer who mainly aids startups and VCs, wrote last week on his blog A View from the Valley warning entrepreneurs new to the negotiating table to not damage their relationship with their investors by over-negotiating . According to Bartus, a surplus of startup and legal advice from blogs has clogged the minds of new entrepreneurs who think they need to nit pick over every detail of a term sheet. "They sometimes feel the need to optimize every individual provision in the term sheet according to the guidelines found online," writes Bartus. "For example, a founder recently expressed his shock to me that a VC wanted an 8% non-cumulative dividend preference on the preferred stock given the historical lows of current interest rates. He didn't realize that dividends in fast growing companies are almost never paid, thus making this provision essentially irrelevant and just a relic of past practice." Bartus says that while over-negotiating and creating needless tension is a common misstep, it is just as bad to not push back enough and to accept the terms of the agreement without any discussion. When you roll over and take what they give you, you show them that you don't stand up for yourself, damaging both your credibility and the possibility of future investments. To avoid this, he provides a few suggestions for topics that are worth debating with VCs that won't necessarily damage your relationship. Of the dozens of issues that could arise between VCs and entrepreneurs, Bartus provides a list of six important issues that could be discussed during negotiations, of which three he suggests actually focusing on. These include valuation and dilution, liquidation preference, board of directors and voting provisions, founder vesting, antidilution protection, and finally, exclusivity. By knowing these important issues, you can boost your credibility with the VCs and you ensure that you can get the best results from the term sheets for you, the founder. This is exactly why hiring a lawyer with startup experience is key to doing things right. Yes, the job of the lawyer is to explain to terms to the entrepreneur so they know what they are signing up for, but mostly, that lawyer is there to take the burden of legal worries off their back. As with any position within your startup, lawyers should be chosen on merit, not based on their reputation to the founders. He recalls an issue he had when representing a VC who was dealing with a lawyer who was the father of the founder with no startup experience and who slowed the whole process down, damaging the relationship between the two parties. Just remember the real important part of a VC/entrepreneur relationship: building and growing a great product. Hire a great lawyer with startup experience and let them do the grunt legal work so as to not divert your energy and focus from your ideas and your business. For more legal resources geared at startups, check out our list compiled earlier this year . Discuss
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Avoid Legal Tussles When Negotiating With VCs
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Cloudkick is a cloud monitoring start-up that helps system admins manage cloud servers. Today, the company announced it is getting physical, bringing its cloud monitoring capabilities to internally hosted servers and virtual machines. The company has had a lot of success in helping companies who startup in the cloud and start to achieve scale. It already has a host of hot startup companies including Posterous , Bump Technologies , and Urban Airship . Through listening to users, the company decided to offer local server support to merge its view of all server assets for these organizations. Sponsor What is CloudKick? Cloudkick enables a company to manage internally hosted servers and run the Cloudkick's agent and report into the same console as your cloud computing infrastructure from AWS, RackSpace, SliceHost and others. When installed, the CloudKick agent will respond to status checks from the Cloudkick monitoring solution, which itself is a distributed cloud application. Cloudkick supports a host of cloud provider solutions and shares a report of feature. We met with the company at their offices in San Francisco. Upon entry to the warehouse, called " The Farm " near the Mission District, we realized that was a true technology startup , founded by system administrators trying to make their jobs easier. The team participated in Y-Combinator and has received an initial capital infusion by Avalon Ventures. The Cloudkick system offers consolidated server reports and shows server events by polling registered clients in cloud (and now data centers) and piping them to Cloudkick's multi-tentant event aggregator. The tools are modeled after administrative tools like Cacti, Nagios, and Munin, but are delivered on on top of an agent-driven real time view of the underlying assets of server infrastructure. When checking out the demonstration, we also noted that the browser is updated in real-time as events are polled. This keeps the information fresh without having to re-check and brings the best of browser based real-time communication to system administrations. Cloudkick's implementation is simple and elegant. The young company is demonstrating product leadership by living the mantra of simplicity and utility. Here's a sample of the graphs from CloudKick's feature inventory . Monitoring Every Server The goal of this release is to bring servers from the datacenter to power of cloud monitoring. It allows a larger and larger region of infrastructure to rely on outside controls to monitor it's health and well being. One feature we we intrigued by with Cloudkick was the ability to tag and filter groups of hosts, and to then set rules across them. For example, tagging all servers "web apps" allows a rule to quickly set custom rules for checking up time. The company offers an API for its services and uses 2-legged OAuth for API authentication. OAuth is "an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.". The company also offers a proxy service that streamlines and secures the connections for hosts that will connect to the Cloudkick services. Cloudkick is a cloud company monitoring clouds and shows us in many ways the architecture of the future. In one of the blog posts from company, they share " love affair with cassandra " and how multi-master database technology is an enabler for co-location of server assets in infrastructure clouds. Where does Cloudkick go from here? Discuss
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Cloudkick Broadens its Scope: Now Monitors the Datacenter
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Sears Holdings Corp. just announced they posted thousands of jobs on Twitter via the Twitter-based job board service, TweetMyJOBS.com . The parent company of retail stores like Sears and Kmart and home to brands like Kenmore, Craftsman, DieHard, Lands' End, Jaclyn Smith, Joe Boxer, Apostrophe and Covington, Sears Holdings posted over 500,000 job openings last year via traditional recruiting channels like job search sites and newspapers. Now those same jobs will be on Twitter, too. Says Lance Brolin, Director, Talent & Human Capital Services Operations for Sears Holdings, of the decision to engage on Twitter, "we're quickly realizing that we needed to broaden our employment marketing to include social media." Sponsor According to Gary Zukowski, president and founder of TweetMyJOBS, this partnership makes Sears one of the largest brands to embrace mobile recruiting. Although Twitter is the platform used for the service, the primary function of TweetMyJOBS is to connect job seekers with jobs via text messages sent to their cell phones. How TweetMyJOBS Works The TweetMyJOBS service lets job seekers receive instant notifications on their phone when new jobs are posted online via the popular micro-messaging service Twitter. The company aggregates the Twitter-based job postings from over 7000 companies and maintains over 8250 specific job channels within those companies, all of which are searchable via their website. However, it's the job matching service that makes TweetMyJOBS worth using for those in need of work. Instead of having to follow potentially hundreds of Twitter accounts belonging to companies, the service will match a Twitter user's interests with the available jobs posted to Twitter. Users can also specify a particular geographic region where they prefer to work. They can even use the service to post their resume to Twitter. When a job seeker and a job listing match up, the user is alerted via a text message sent to their phone via Twitter. For job posters, there are fees involved for adding listings just like there are with any other job board. At present, it costs $4000 to list 500 jobs and $8000 for unlimited job postings. Single posts are $1.99. In return, companies are able to directly connect with qualified candidates while also tracking the clicks on the jobs they list. Sears Holdings: 7000 Jobs Now, Hundreds of Thousands to Come At launch time, Sears Holdings has posted 7000 jobs to TweetMyJOBS. The lineup includes everything from cashiers to vice presidents, a company representative tells us. And this is just the beginning. Over the course of the year, the company will continue adding all their available jobs to the service. Since, as noted above, the company posts hundreds of thousands of jobs per year, they will soon have thousands more to post to TweetMyJOBS. In today's tough, competitive hiring market, a service like this can give motivated job seekers an edge. Since it allows for instant notification when a job is made available online, users of TweetMyJOBS can be among the first to apply to available positions. They can also rest assured that the jobs sourced are from reputable companies assures Rich Trombetta, TweetMyJOBS co-founder. Unlike on many job boards today, filled with questionable get-rich-quick schemes, work from home offers and other spam, only legitimate jobs are made available on his service. "We are very careful about the types of jobs we list on the site," Trombetta recently told the Chicago Tribune . "We eliminate the spam." Interested job seekers can sign up for the service here at TweetMyJOBS.com . Discuss
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Sears Holdings Corp. Posts Thousands of Jobs on Twitter, Hundreds of Thousands to Follow
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