Executive Moves

Active Reasoning, a Palo Alto, CA based developer of compliance software that audits peoples’ activities within the enterprise data center, named Charles Price as VP of Engineering. Price was formerly CEO of P2 Systems.

Anthology Solutions, a San Jose based provider of integrated storage solutions for small businesses and branch offices, named Ray Robidoux as President & CEO. Robidoux was formerly President of Netgear.

Arcwave, a Campbell, CA based provider of wireless solutions for the cable industry, named Michael Allen as VP of Worldwide Sales & Support. Allen was formerly VP of Global Sales & Service for Pacific Broadband Communications.

Artimi, a Santa Clara, CA based fabless semiconductor company developing single chip system solutions for high bandwidth wireless connectivity, named Colin Macnab as CEO. Macnab was formerly VP of Marketing & Business Development at Atheros Communications.

Digit Wireless, a Lexington, MA based technology development and licensing company focused on advanced interface technologies for mobile and portable products, named COO Mark Connon as CEO.

ECentury Capital Partners, a McLean, VA based venture capital firm, promoted Principal Jim Broder to Managing Director and Associate Chris Fritz to Principal.

Kalido, a Burlington, MA based provider of adaptive enterprise data warehousing software, named Joan Nevins as CFO. Nevins was formerly CFO at Upromise.

Matisse Networks, a Mountain View, CA based developer of DWDM Packet Switching for multi-service metro networks, named Michael Johnson as CFO. Johnson was formerly CFO & SVP of @Road Inc.

Oraxion Diagnostics, a Fremont, CA based provider of advanced metrology systems for semiconductor and related industries, named Bang C. Nguyen as CEO and Jonathan M. Sabol as COO. Bang was formerly VP of Marketing & Sales at NuTool. Sabol was formerly VP & GM at Asyst Technologies.

Pay By Touch, a San Francisco based biometric-based consumer payment service, named John Morris as President & COO. Morris was formerly in senior management at IBM.

Secure Data in Motion (dba Sigaba), a San Mateo, CA based provider of secure message management solutions, including e-mail, instant messaging and document delivery, for enterprise and government markets, named President & COO Al Cohen as CEO.

SiteScape, a Maynard, MA based provider of secure Web-based workflow and collaboration solutions, named Philip Andrews as Managing Director of European Operations. Andrews was formerly VP of EMEA Sales at System Management Arts Inc.

SurfKitchen, a Reading, UK based mobile software provider, named Richard Oliver as CFO. Oliver was formerly CFO & COO of SpiritSoft.

VaST Systems Technology, a Sunnyvale, CA based provider of tools and models for embedded system design automation, named Robert Bedichek as VP of Engineering. Bedichek was formerly an Advanced Micro Devices Fellow and head of the SimNowTM platform simulator group.

Vitex Systems, a San Jose based provider of transparent ultra-barrier films for use in flat-panel displays, promoted COO James Marshall to President & COO.

Xoomsys, a Santa Clara, CA based developer of a distributed processing solution for accurate large-scale circuit simulation using industry-standard circuit simulators and inexpensive Linux computing clusters, named Anthony Luk as VP of Engineering and John Yelinek as VP of Worldwide Sales. Luk was formerly VP of Engineering at Barcelona Design. Yelinek was formerly VP of Worldwide Sales at Nassda Corp.

Mergers & Acquisitions

AD Group, a Warrington, UK based developer and provider of CCTV solutions, acquired ChipWrights, a Waltham, MA based provider of digital signal processing technology for mobile imaging applications, for an undisclosed amount.

Aeroflex, a Plainview, NY based designer, developer, and manufacturer of automated testing solutions and microelectronics for the aerospace, defense, and broadband communications markets, acquired the Test and Measurement Division of UbiNetics, a Melbourn, UK based developer of 3G mobile wireless technology, for an undisclosed amount.

Alien Technology, a Morgan Hill, CA based provider of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) products, acquired Quatrotec, a San Francisco based specialty integration services and project management firm focused on commercial aviation and other transportation markets, for an undisclosed amount.

Boston Communications Group, a Bedford, MA based provider of products and solutions that enable wireless operators to rapidly deploy and manage innovative voice and data services, acquired PureSight, a San Clemente, CA based provider of advanced content recognition (ACR) and management solutions for mobile operators and enterprise markets, for an undisclosed amount.

Click Commerce, a Chicago based provider of collaborative commerce, acquired Xelus, a Fairport, NY based provider of collaborative enterprise service management solutions, for an undisclosed amount.

Cisco Systems acquired FineGround Networks, a Campbell, CA based provider of a Web application delivery solution for enabling secure, high performance Web applications in the enterprise, for approximately $70 million.

CTC Communications, a Waltham, MA based communications carrier, merged with Lightship Telecom, a Bedford, NH based provider of high-speed Internet and data access, local and long distance telephone service, dynamic bandwidth allocation, Wide Area Networks, co-location and hosting services, for an undisclosed amount.

Entelos, a Foster City, CA based provider of computer-based disease-simulation models, acquired Discovery Innovations, a San Francisco based provider of Web-based informatics software and information services, for an undisclosed amount.

Francisco Partners, a Menlo Park, CA based technology-focused private equity fund, acquired RedPrairie, a Waukesha WI based provider of supply chain technology solutions that enable business process transformation, for an undisclosed amount.

Integration Associates, a Mountain View, CA based provider of tested wafers and packaged ICs for wireless, wireline, and power system management applications for a wide range of systems, acquired CompXs, a Santa Clara, CA based developer of low power, mesh network solutions, for an undisclosed amount.

Talk America, a Reston, VA based communications provider that offers phone services and high speed internet access to both residential and business customers, acquired LDMI Telecommunications, a Southfield, MI based communications provider serving business and residential customers primarily in Michigan and Ohio, in a deal valued at $40 million.

UTStarcom, an Alameda, CA based provider f IP-based, end-to-end networking solutions and international service and support, acquired Pedestal Networks, a Fremont, CA based developer of innovative universal broadband solutions, for an undisclosed amount.

Funding

Attenex - Seattle, WA; a developer of software for document analysis and visualization tools for electronic discovery; $5 million; Series B; Voyager Capital.

Brix Networks - Chelmsford, MA; developer of real-time service assurance and performance management solutions that verify the quality of advanced, Internet Protocol-based services; $1.5 million; Series E; Telus Ventures.

Caspian Networks - San Jose, CA; a developer of flow-state IP QoS systems; $55 million; round not specified; ABN Amro Capital, Alloy Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Oak Investment Partners, U.S. Venture Partners.

Good Technology - Santa Clara, CA; a provider of mobile enterprise software on smart phones and mobile platforms; $15 million; Series E; Advanced Equities Financial.

InPhase Technologies - Longmont, CO; a developer of holographic data storage (HDS) recording media and systems; $32.1 million; Series C; New Venture Partners, Alps Investment Research, Bayer, Hitachi, Japan Asia Investment Company (JAIC), Mitsubishi, Nanotech Partners, Yasuda Enterprise Development.

Isilon Systems - Seattle, WA; a provider of intelligent clustered storage systems for digital content; $20 million; Series D; Focus Ventures, Atlas Venture, Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital.

Nanotech Semiconductor - Surrey, UK; fabless chip company, designing and supplying Driver and Receiver ICs for the fiber-optics communications industry; $6 million; Series B; Atlantic Bridge Ventures, Pond Venture Partners.

Proxilliant Systems - Stockholm, Sweden; a developer of cable networking solutions; $2.52 million; round not specified;Creandum, Northzone Ventures

Quickoffice - Plano, TX; a developer of office document software for mobile phones; $7 million; Series A; Mayfield.

Qumas - Cork, Ireland; a provider of enterprise compliance management software solutions; $10 million; round not specified; Fidelity Ventures, General Catalyst Partners.

Quorum Systems - San Diego, CA; a developer of multi-mode radio architecture for wireless products; $15 million; Series B; Greylock, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Riskclick - London, UK; a developer of Business Process Management (BPM) software for the risk management and insurance industry; $8.2 million; Series C; Adventure Venture Partners, Amadeus Capital Partners, BA Capital Partners Europe.

Sefas Innovation - Arcueil, France; a provider of infrastructures for print and electronic document solutions; $3.8 million; Series D; XAnge Private Equity, AGF Private Equity, Matignon Technologies, Sofinnova Partners, SPEF Venture.

Shenick Network Systems - Dublin, Ireland; a developer of an integrated network application emulation and performance analysis test system; $3.25 million; round not specified; Innovacom, Trinity Venture Capital.

SpikeSource - Redwood Ciity, CA; a provider of open source IT Infrastructure solutions; $12.85 million; Series A; Fidelity Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Trolltech - Oslo, Norway; a provider of software development tools and libraries; $6.7 million; Series B; Index Ventures, Northzone Ventures, Teknoinvest Management.

Vast Systems Technology - Sunnyvale, CA; a provider of electronic system level (ESL) design tools, models, and technologies for the concurrent design and development of the hardware and software components of complex systems-on-chip and embedded systems; $12 million; Series C; Foundation Capital, Allen & Buckeridge, Mohr Davidow Ventures.

Wave7 Optics - Alpharetta, GA; a provider of broadband optical access network equipment; $3 million; Series C; Ballast Point Ventures.

Zenprise - Fremont, CA; a provider of infrastructure management software; $11 million; Series B; Shasta Ventures, Bay Partners, Mayfield.

Contributor: Venator Partners - Venator Partners is a Boston-based executive search firm that specializes in recruiting senior-level executives in the software and communications industries.
Copyright: Copyright © 2004. Venator Partners, LLC.
Covered Categories: M&A, Start-ups, Personnel Changes

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NetApp to hire 300 in Bangalore - economictimes

How To Roll Out An Open API - radar.oreilly

Q&A: Randy Haykin - The Outlook Ventures managing partner talks about what VCs are missing and how offshoring isn’t saving any money. - redherring

Efi Gildor buys Chiaro Networks for $10m - Chiaro has raised an incredible $216 million to date. - globes.co.il

The end of corporate computing? The beginning of chaos - dealarchitect

The Engadget Interview: Jeffrey Citron, chairman and CEO of Vonage - engadget

Microsoft Vs Unix: Its a tie for the first time - financialexpress

Intel Adds DRM to Chips - osnews

Top 25: Innovations - cnn

Infectious Greed posted on Google’s business efforts and intentions towards penetrating the enterprise space - Infectious Greed: Google’s Enterprise Strategy: Business as Loss Leader?.

Paul Kedrosky ends the post with “Fascinating. Who would have thought that selling software into enterprises could one day become a loss-leader for a technology company’s consumer strategy?”. After reading the post and the article I could not understand how Google’s enterprise efforts will help them achieve better results on the consumer frontier and how does it play as a loss-leader.

I think that Google tries to enter the enterprise space with minimal efforts (They have very large competitive frontiers in consumers advertising, search and portal arenas) to achieve certain concrete goals regardless whether they reveal their strategy or not:

1) Create a contender for Microsoft’s competitive edge in the personal information search space, where Microsoft has “strong” grasp (They own the enterprise OS and the documents platform). This may be a real intention to complement Google’s offering or just to “divert” Microsofts focus for a while. Microsoft on their end will be able soon, after integrating and deploying personal search tool into their platform, to offer a better enterprise search via MSN that will present local results as well. This is something that Google will need to deal with seriously.

2) Create an initial customer base for educating themselves on enterprise search needs for later upsell with an offering that will be a “serious” contender for current enterprise search vendors. I think that education will be achieved by them (1,000 customers is enough to learn from) while building a real leverage-able customer base is something that I don’t believe is achievable until they will present an offering in the same level current expert enterprise search engine vendors offer. No matter how “mini” their prices will be.

In terms of competition, we have noticed some interesting analysis regarding Microsoft may enter VoIP telecom market - analyst. I’m pretty sure we will hear a lot more about this. As many may remember, Microsoft has long wanted to get into the telecom market.

You can search through google and find many press releases such as Microsoft’s telecom moves. I’ll bet Microsoft has observed the impact of Skype and decided that this represents another way for it to enter into this domain.

With regards to Skype and 911 service, we noticed that Skype Positions Itself as ‘Enhancement’ VoIP, Not Responsible For 911 Service. Still not completely clear, but certainly less ambiguous than before.

Finally, we see a continued series of articles discussing wireless convergence. The analysis is beginning to get more sophisticated, with some now discussing how wireless VoIP may not be a threat to wireless operators, but may be a opportunity, such as Three myths about cellular/wVoIP convergence. This article begins with the sentence “To help operators understand how dual-mode handsets offers them more opportunity than opposition, let’s dispel a few myths that prevent operators from integrating WiFi into their service offerings.”

Likewise, the article Handsets, the New Convergence is a good discussion on some of the many details that need to be worked out for VoWiFI to become a reality. BTW, anyone notice the article from News.com Skype: Interference on the line?. I’m sure that this was one of more critical interviews that Niklas Zennstrom had to go through!

Related Tags:

Contributor: Louis Philip
Title: Owner
Company: SummitCircle.com
Message: Directory of Skype phones, add-ons and communities.
Email: Email Louis-Philip
Copyright: Copyright © 2004, 2005. SummitCircle.com
Covered Categories: VoIP

Yesterday a large corporate espionage investigation has been revealed on Israeli news authorities and many top executives from leading corporations have been arrested and invited for formal investigations at police HQ - YES, Pele-Phone, Cellcom execs arrested for computer espionage. Among the suspected companies you can find the top names of the leading telecom companies in Israel as well as other leading food and consumer goods companies in our little business landscape.

What reported in brief is that many of these top executives ordered a “service” offered by a private investigation firm to conduct espionage on target competitors by using a “smart” software product that works as a trojan horse installed on competitors’ computers. This “trojan horse” was installed un-intentionally by executives from the competitor companies, either by “innocent” files received by email or as a gift software packages, where after installed started to serve its operators for retrieve files from the competitor file servers. The report says that the most important files where retrieved including personal documents of CEO and other top management.

This is the largest corporate espionage scandal ever happened in Israel (Although still under investigation) and it takes down the “best” names and the most credible top executives in our local industry.

My thoughts on this:

1) This is very bad for Israel as a small economy trying to fit into global markets both in terms of reputation and level of business ethics and I think we all will pay for it “high price” in the near future.
2) The service as described in local news cost the companies who ordered it less then 500$! I guess now it will cost them more!
3) The “group” behaviour in this scandal makes it even worse. If it was one “bad guy” then people could say it can happen even in the most ethical places. Now that it seemed to be a “normal” business conduct for these companies and top executives it does raise a “business moral” question.

On a personal note, I can only hope that investigation will be thorough and justice will be served!

Update: This wide security breach makes you think about IT security investments and their effectiveness (Especially here in Israel, the so called security innovation “spring”). This kind type of threats seems to me as something that can serve as a good basis for a new breed of security tools that deal with trojan horses that are already installed inside corporate networks and transmit sensitive material on-demand to computers outside the network. The weak link here is the loose connection between the network activity and the file system activity while when tied logically together they present a misuse and when kept separated are harmless.

Update: A startup aiming to solve this just raised funds - PortAuthority.

Yesterday I wrote about the news that Microsoft opened their tech support knowledge base via RSS feeds Structured Corporate Feeds? with a new concept of structured RSS and I thought to elaborate on it further to make the idea more useful.

RSS feeds in the perspective of infrastructure tools enable today an efficient mechanism for detecting changes in distributed content and it mainly serves for personal publishing via blogging tools serving publishers and news reading tools serving readers on the other end (And of course other aggregation and indexing services to better serve information identification and classification purposes).

Exposing corporate systems such as the corporate tech support knowledge base via RSS creates a new pattern of information transfer that has several unique attributes:

1) The corporate information is transformed from a structured format (The corporate database system) into a stream of plain text updates with one structured attribute, which is the date of publication.

2) The extensive meaning embedded in the corporate structure is lost due to this transformation.

3) Relationships in between pieces of information that existed in the corporate system are lost as well.

Even in the simple case of knowledge base updates; if we consider the experience of someone reading this information via the knowledge base browser Microsoft provides, then the experience itself is structured even if it is not very noticeable and reading it via a plain news reader that presents it as plain text looses information and capabilities on the way. Capabilities such as archiving, classification, search and others that were embedded in the same information while it resided on the corporate system.

This loss of structure is maybe not very dramatic at this stage of the blogosphere where only a fraction of corporate information systems are tunnelled via RSS. If this practice will be adopted widely then a restructuring behaviour on the other end will and should emerge. The transformation between the structured content into plain text and then again into a structured format on the end (It can be a different level of restructuring that will be controlled by the publisher) can be implemented using many methods. One of the methods can be an a mapping of fields that will be part of the XML content and will be re-interpreted on the other end.

Different uses of RSS and corporate systems that I can think of are: CRM sales figures to partners and vice versa, Investor relations info to stock markets and stock information consumers, Updates of product features to partners and customers, Security fixes to customers, Press releases to the public, All PRM implementations (Partnership Relationship Management), Internal operational indicators to corporate performance systems and more…

RSS can also be elevated to include binary code updates as well and that can be a platform for many new corporate applications as well.

As a final note, I think that the basic nature of RSS feeds being served in a machine readable format creates many opportunities for innovation that is beyond basic change detection and aggregation mechanisms. Including innovation such as automatic language translation for example.

If anyone is interested to dig in one of these concepts and make something useful out of it I would love to assist if I can.

Scobleizer commented on Danny Sullivan’s note regarding Google’s strategic patterns with a post No strategy +is+ a strategy.

I fully agree with Scobleizer’s phrase “strategy: not having a strategy IS having a strategy”. Google, I think, has embraced the fact that long term strategies in the old fashion way, where a strategic planning, execution and evaluation cycle of at least a year or more does not cut it anymore for competing effectively in web services. Strategic cycles are just becoming shorter everyday and if someone will take a look at what they do then a visible strategic cycle that is very short in nature (no longer then 1 month) will emerge. Except for this short cycle of strategy they do follow a longer term strategic intention of making information accessible easily and that intention does provide them with a guiding light.

Update: Isn’t this a strategic move? code.google.com/summerofcode.

US Venture Capital delegation to Israel on 6 June - businessweek

Silver Lake Speaks - paul.kedrosky

Yahoo! Mindset - radar.oreilly

Good recruiting advice from Laurence Haughton on Recruiting.com - recruiting.com - “Dr. Sarah Bridges (an organizational psychologist I interviewed for my book) suggests that interviewers can do that by looking for a point in someone’s work history where they got in over their head and asking:
1. What went as expected?
2. What surprised you?
3. What mistakes did you make?
4. How did you deal with mistake a, b, and c?
5. What did you learn?”

Cisco Chomps FineGround - lightreading

Threats, Opportunities on Horizon for Global IT Industry, Gartner Reports - reed-electronics

Information Builders Teams With Amdocs to Enhance Self-Service Functionality - biz.yahoo

Oracle’s Strategy To Focus on SAP’s Prices - crmbuyer

China’s Technology Strategy - emergic

The battle for the blogosphere - infoworld

Microsoft, HP partner on national ID systems - infoworld