…providing virtual environments in the cloud. CloudShare’s self-service SaaS platform and suite of solutions enable business users to build, freeze and share complex computing environments

The company boasts of over 175,000 users worldwide and more than half of the Fortune 100 as customers. Anyway – today CloudShare is extending their platform to deliver upon the needs of development and testing groups. CloudShare Labs is a self-service solution that delivers cloud infrastructure but in a way that is optimized for the particular use case of the department needing it. Particular capabilities of the platform include:

• Simplified Bug Fixing: The solution enables the capture of a multi-VM disk and memory state, literally freezing a bug in its environment so it can be shared with developers and corrected without having to reproduce the bug in a different environment
• Environment Cloning and Template Libraries: The ability to clone a master environment eliminates mistakes caused by misconfiguration and enables collaboration among cross-functional and dispersed teams through a web browser, console or SSH session. Groups can also create and store libraries of templates for later reuse
• Integration: The new solution integrates with the leading application lifecycle management (ALM) and software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes and tools, such as Team Foundation Server and Jenkins
• Remote Access: CloudShare Labs extends an organization’s existing on-premise development and testing environment to the cloud. Using an organization’s virtual private network (VPN), teams can connect to CloudShare to burst for more resources or collaborate with anyone, anywhere in the world.

It’s actually a compelling argument – individual development team are using so many specific functional tools that the idea of creating a one-size-fits-all development recipe that will cover all the different needs of a development organization is untenable. Rather what is needed is the ability to create libraries of stack templates, and to clone these environments as and when required. The environment cloning and template library aspects of CloudShare Labs make sense. The ability to “freeze” an environment mid-error and in doing so to more readily track and fix bugs is also a logical and compelling proposition.

The CloudShare approach is an interesting one and will suit large enterprises with a wide and diverse spread of development approaches and methodologies – it will be interesting to see the uptake that the product gains in the marketplace.

I was joined on the panel by two early PaaS thinkers – Sinclair Schuller of Apprenda and Bart Copeland from ActiveState – it was a really fun panel to moderate – take the time to watch I tbelow.

So what does MyIT have to do with location anyway? And why is that of even mild interest to people thinking about how their organization will function into the future?

Well if you look at the video of MyIT in action that an analyst from Ovum created (embedded at the bottom) you’ll see that much of the value in the product lies in the fact that the application is inherently location aware. It’s no use going to a service portal looking for, say, the nearest printer, if the application has no awareness of where the user is. Similarly it’s a drain on productivity having to manually inform the application of your location. Dancy explained to me that there’s a few core pieces of IP that BMC holds around the smarts within MyIT:

• Protection around a location aware service catalog – covering not only location but network and device details etc
• Visualizations of IT assets including their state (say for example a map showing that a printer around the corner is down)
• The ability to check in assets via QR codes or NFC tags

Now I’m not going to make a comment on the use of patents when it comes to software – that’s a discussion for another day. Indeed, and somewhat coincidentally, the country I live in, New Zealand, recently decided that software would be specifically excluded from patentable items. But what is interesting here is whether or not location is going to be a critical part of service desk management – looking at the video below it would seem to be the case. That being so it will be interesting to see how other companies in the service desk space respond and innovate what they do.

The bottom line here is employee enablement – few people would disagree that IT service is too slow and reactive – the addition of location based services on top of established IT service platform is a valuable development. And hey, if it means my printer can become the mayor of my home office, in the same way that I can be mayor of a café on foursquare, well that’s OK too.

Quote Stock Sell has had a lengthy tech history, it was originally written in MS Access and has undergone a number of rewrites in SQL and is now fully rewritten as a web based SaaS product. It is targeted for small to mid sized businesses, in particular those who want to deploy systems that will allow them to scale over time. It is particularly suited for businesses that track serial numbers, batch numbers or expiry dates and hence is suitable not only for businesses in the hard product areas but also for FMCG, pharma and other product-based businesses.

Quote Stock Sell is realistic about the appetite of small businesses to actually dive into the analytics of their business. As founder Mark Lazarus:

Let’s be honest – how many owners of small businesses really want to log in to a software system and run reports to find out business information, most prefer to just check the P&L and balance sheet to see what is happening at a glance.  As such we try to reflect changes in Quote Stock Sell straight to the balance sheet – for instance if you mark inventory as faulty in Quote Stock Sell, we journal that value into “Faulty Inventory” on the balance sheet

Anyway back to the product. Quote Stock Sell has a wide breadth of inventory functionality. Some of the key areas covered by Quote Stock Sell are:

• Customer management
• Supplier management
• Quotes
• Orders
• Employees
• Products
• Inventory
• Warehousing
• Point of Sale
• Invoicing
• Supplier returns
• Reporting

That’s a very wide range of functional areas and ticks most of the boxes that the majority of small product companies will have. Quote Stock Sell is tightly integrated with Xero and I was keen to quiz Lazarus about this strategy and how much risk he sees of Xero encroaching onto their territory – Xero has already, after all, announced that it will be introducing some inventory functionality in the near future. In a logical response, he told me that

With regard to Xero stealing our lunch – that is always a thought in the back of every add-on developers mind.  We think Xero have a lot of other priorities before they can cover all the features of our system.  We’ve had many years of development go into our product.  Ultimately the answer is “Yes”, Xero could steal our lunch, but I think it’ll take them a while to come up with the same recipe (as they are busy with many other things), and maybe what we’re doing is not really something they would like to do.  We spent many years hoping Quickbooks would come up with a system to cover what we needed so we didn’t have to keep developing our inhouse system – but it never happened, maybe Xero will be different, but for now we have a window of opportunity, and we also have plans to eventually move into a wider market space and other verticals as well, diversification is key, but we have to start somewhere and this is where we chose, the Xero add-on space, we hope it will be fruitful for us.

It’s a point of view that makes sense, Xero is likely, at least in the short to medium term, to only skim the surface of what real product companies need to runt heir business, given their focus purely on this space, Quote Stock Sell should have no problem keeping ahead of them. The product looks really strong, I would suggest that the UI is perhaps one area that lets them down a little bit, it seems to show the products routes in a previous generation of software. but a pretty UI is simply lipstick, what really counts is what’s under the hood and by this measure what we have here is a very strong inventory product.

MuleSoft rightly points out that APIs have created a kind of common language for the way enterprises will work into the future. The number of open APIs available is rapidly increasing and alongside these open APIs, there are a plethora of enterprise applications and data sources that, regardless whether they are on-premise or off, need to be connected to other applications. MuleSoft is betting that organizations will look to integration vendors to provide a broad platform that covers both what we consider integration to be today (give me a plug in to connect salesforce to NetSuite for example) but also that covers integration of a more distributed nature (let me connect these sensors with this analytics dashboard alongside our back office ERP system).

The platform is built as an integrated set of individual products. Users can utilize the bits of the platform that are of relevance to them, but also give themselves a roadmap in terms of their future technological direction. The different functional pieces are:

• Anypoint technology – enables point-to-point integration,

• CloudHub – A so-called integration platform as a service (iPaaS), offering the ability for enterprises to integrate SaaS applications with each other or to on-premise applications, as well as allowing SaaS providers to build and offer packaged integration applications that automate business processes across applications
• Mule ESB – An integration platform for connecting enterprise applications on-premise and to the cloud, eliminating the need for custom point-to-point integration code
• Anypoint Connectors – Out-of-the-box connectivity to hundreds of enterprise and SaaS applications
• API Solution – Built on top of the CloudHub iPaaS, this is a solution for designing, building, publishing, securing, managing and monetizing internal services and external APIs, as well as engaging the developer community around APIs:

• APIkit – New open source API design toolkit that helps developers generate consistent APIs that adhere to best practices, eliminating uncertainty and friction in creating new APIs
• Anypoint Service Registry – Announcing general availability today, a service registry and the easiest way for enterprises to govern and manage all of their internal services and APIs, both on-premise and in the cloud offering visibility, enforcement and lifecycle control
• API Manager – Newly released as beta today, a cloud-based API management cloud service allows enterprises to connect with business partners and create new revenue channels through a secure and scalable API strategy
• APIhub – A public repository and community for APIs, which allows developers and enterprises to discover and use over 13,000 APIs, and enables API providers to publish and document APIs, engaging the developer community on an open, collaborative platform
• Unified development experience – Designed to offer away to build integration applications, for deployment either on-premise or in the cloud

• Mule Studio – Graphical design environment for creating integration flows, making any developer into an integration developer
• Anypoint DataMapper – Graphical data mapping and transformation, enabling point-and-click data integration for SaaS and on-premise applications
• Anypoint Connector DevKit – Developer toolkit that allows developers to build Anypoint Connectors from any API in hours or days, not weeks

That’s a whole heap of technology and a fair few buzzwords to boot, but despite all that, MuleSoft is onto something here. Innovation in the future is going to rely on not only applications talking to each other but also the ability to interface between a plethora of different data sources and applications themselves. APIs are creating that connectivity and a broad based integration platform that includes both integration as we’ve always thought of it, alongside the mechanics to build and run a broad API suite, is a compelling proposition – as the number of possible endpoints increases – enterprises will increasingly look to deliver a consistent way to combine the different elements of those endpoints – to this end, MuleSoft is positioning itself smartly to compete in the new look enterprise.

Apparently investors agree with this perspective since the second piece of news today is that MuleSoft has raised an additional $37M, led by NEA. This round brings MuleSoft’s funding to date to a massive $81M and includes such luminaries as salesforce.com (a new investor), Hummer Winblad, Morgenthaler, Lightspeed, SAP Ventures and Bay Partners According to the company, the funds will be used to fuel the company’s aggressive growth plans across both SaaS and enterprise parts of the business – which means we’re going to see a lot more enterprise sales folks pitching MuleSoft to blue chip customers.

Integration is one of the areas I’m picking for massive growth over the next few years – an integration play that is well positioned to capture the growth in connected sensors and devices is placing itself strongly to become a force to be reckoned with – MuleSoft will be one to watch moving forwards.

@benkepes indeed. Twitter is an intereting case because for bootstrapping the relation was inverted – now power balance is the other way…

— Josh Robb (@josh_robb) March 13, 2013

But Twitter isn’t the only example, recently Netflix decided to no longer issue developer keys for its public API.

But is this really a fair summary? Recently John Sheehan from RunScope wrote an excellent post in which he attempted to give developers some guidance when they’re thinking about building a service that takes advantage of platform APIs. Sheehan’s perspective is that in many cases the interests of the developer, and of the API provider, are not aligned. As Sheehan wrote:

Is an app that helps you manage your Netflix queue driving meaningful new subscriptions for Netflix? Probably not. Is another Twitter client helping Twitter sell and show you ads? Definitely not. When the most important transaction for Twitter was someone putting content into the network, it made sense to allow that content from anywhere. That’s no longer important to them. This is the future of Twitter APIs.

Sheehan’s post is a real wake up call, for a long time developers, and the industry at large, has been living in a kind of alternative reality. This skewed vision of the world assumes that platform companies will continue to invest time and resource to develop and maintain their public APIs regardless of whether doing so provides any real value back to the business. It’s almost like we’ve started to believe that these platform companies, commercial entities that they are, approach their public APIs as some kind of public good work that they do for the Karma.

Unfortunately this mindset has been encouraged by the investment world – on the one hand VCs have been quick to encourage developers to build solutions on top of other’s platforms – possibly to further their own opportunistic interests as investors in those same platforms. On the other hand VCs have been running around putting wads of cash into many of these end-point services, perhaps believing their own idealistic, if slightly shonky, view of the future.

In his post Sheehan advocates for a stronger dose of reality for people contemplating building a service on top of an API platform. As he wrote in his post, the three rules that companies need to remember are:

Thou shalt not freeload

For infrastructure and SaaS APIs, the relationship is clear: you pay for the value you receive either transactionally or as part of your subscription. For everything else, the provider of the API you are using should benefit equally or better from the value your use of the API is providing. If your app is not driving direct transactional value for the provider, you’re in a risky situation.

Thou shalt not forego talking to a person

An open API is a great way to test drive an integration, but it does not absolve you from the responsibility of building a relationship with the provider. If you can’t reach someone, that should be all the reason you need not to use that API.

Thou shalt monitor everything

Using a third-party API is code for your application that happens to run on someone else’s servers. Use the same level of rigor for monitoring and testing that you would for the code that runs on your own machines. When something goes wrong (and they will), have systems in place to notify you before your customers do.

Sheehan is absolutely on the ball here, his history (he was formerly at IFTTT – a company completely built on an API play) gives him a deep understanding of the economic drivers behind a vendor’s public APIs. But more broadly than the particular API perspective, Sheehan’s post points to a much more practical perspective on business that is arising in the industry. The reawakening of attention for enterprise software, the less than stellar post-IPO showing of a number of consumer facing companies (Zynga, Facebook, Groupon) and the oft-discussed series A crunch that means investors are looking for proven and defensible traction before funding a startup are all adding up to a far more pragmatic view of the world.

APIs are an amazing enabler of innovation, and an integral part of the way companies can build their product, their userbase and their presence – but unless they think about mutual benefit, a real relationship with the provider and a strong focus on making sure the “lights stay on”, that massive opportunity may just disappear in the blink of an API providers eye.

Tuesday – DeployCon

I’m really looking forward to the second edition of DeployCon – in the morning I’ll be moderating a panel with two of my favorite PaaS executives, Sinclair Schuller (the super smart and often outspoken CEO of Apprenda) and Bart Copeland (no less smart himself) CEO of ActiveState. The topic of our chat will be the Business Value of Private PaaS. It’s an area I’m particularly interested in – and am keen to dive in to the use cases and success stories that these two are seeing in the private PaaS space. If you’d like to come and attend the event, use discount code DCCOMP6.

Tuesday – Cloud Connect Executive Summit

Tuesday afternoon sees me jump ships (but stay in the same venue) over to the Cloud Connect executive summit where I’ll be running another session that is of real interest to me. My work as an angel investor, as well as startup adviser, alongside the advisory work I do with some VC firms, has me particularly interested in this session. The title of the panel is Finding the Next Cloud Opportunity and I’ll be joined by a who’s who of VCs and cloud executives including Ryan Floyd, the Founding General Partner of Storm Ventures, John O’Farrell a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Salil Deshpande the Managing Director of Bain Capital Ventures and Rueven Cohen, SVP at Virtustream.

Wednesday – Cloud Connect

Wednesday afternoon sees me joining a panel looking specifically at SaaS applications for enterprises. While we’ll surely be doing a bit of name checking of applications that we’ve all had success with, much of the focus of the panel will be on advising customers around methodologies to ensure a robust process for adoption of SaaS applications. On the panel I’ll be joined by Kevin Dobbs, the CEO of Montclare, and the Clouderati’s own gentleman, Mark Thiele from Switch networks.

Wednesday – Cloud Connect

My final formal job on this trip is to take part in another panel – this one also close to my heart. True Stories from the Cloud will be moderated by Randy Bias from Cloudscaling, himself a veteran of many cloud stoushes and we’ll also be joined by Thomas Barton and Neal Sample. In the panel we’ll try and separate the wood from the trees and tell some home truths about cloudwashing, failed deployments and the unintended consequences of cloud gone wrong.

All in all it’s going to be a pretty busy few days. If you’re attending DeployCon, the executive summit or CloudConnect itself – be sure to stop by at one of my sessions, or say howdy when you see me passing in the hallways. Oh and if you’re a runner, be sure to join us on Wednesday and Thursday mornings for a short easy jog. 6:30am in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency

In the case of Citrix, the thinking goes something like this: enterprises and service providers are looking to deliver up a single interface to their customers, one that includes infrastructure elements but also workloads and services. They want to be able to do so and have a consistent approach towards the commercial transaction, the user management, the actual provisioning and the operation aspects of the service. CloudPortal is designed to do all this – it delivers the back end requirements on top of which sit the actual services that SPs want to provision (and, for that matter, the sort of services that forward looking enterprise IT organizations want to “sell” to their internal business units in a “cloud like” manner).

As Citrix points out (self service for sure but, in fairness, a valid perspective):

operating a cloud as a business, internally or externally, can be a difficult task without the right set of tools to connect cloud services to business operations and end-users. For today’s cloud architects, building infrastructures to meet elasticity and resource pooling requirements of the cloud is already well-defined – the challenge has been delivering cloud services in a meaningful and accessible way to all users, technical and non-technical

In other words – people understand how to BUILD clouds, but the services that actually let them SELL cloud and cloud services are less well understood, and less well catered to. To this end, the CloudPortal Business Manager delivers a broad services catalog platform that allows customers to build:

• Custom Cloud Services Catalog – Create a custom catalog of services including IaaS, cloud, 3rd party, value-add and IT services that are delivered to users through a self-service interface
• Extensible Platform – Leverage the partner ecosystem and newly available SDKs and APIs to deliver any service (IaaS, PaaS, storage, etc.) while broadening the portfolio of services to differentiate and increase the value of the cloud
• Complete Cloud Visibility – Give users a single view of their cloud services, including availability, system health, performance, account status, utilization, billing, helpdesk and alerts
• Metering and Monitoring – Track service usage with real-time reports and monitor system health with built-in alerts. Generate customized reports for current and historical activity with drill-down analytics
• Workflow Approvals – Define workflow rules for new user activation and service provisioning to ensure departmental requirements and budget approvals are met

One customer using the Business Manager is SunGard Availability Services. Simon Withers, the VP of Global Cloud Product at SunGard Availability Services is bullish about the platform:

SunGard Availability Services delivers a suite of Enterprise Cloud Services, which includes the recent release of our public cloud service powered by Apache CloudStack in Europe. With this recent addition of public cloud services in partnership with Citrix, SunGard Availability Services provides customers access to our public cloud customer portal delivering a customized set of public cloud services via Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager

MyPOV

I agree that building cloud products is a relatively well understood task but all the services that ensure those products can be sold and supported are less well provided for. It’s an area that many different vendors are tackling – the subscription and financial vendors like NetSuite are taking an ERP-centric view of the problem space whereas subscription and billing vendors like Zuora look more to the service catalog side of things. It’s a valid perspective to posit that service providers and enterprises are looking for a commerce platform that is more tightly coupled with the actual service elements being sold.

That said, what I know of large service provider organization is that there is rarely a platform product that actually meets the myriad of their needs – often they end up building something custom, or kludging together a bunch of ad hoc modules to meet their needs – it ain’t pretty, but all too often it’s the reality.

First a little about the company – SalesFUSION provides software that accelerates revenue by connecting sales and marketing with prospects at the moment they are ready to buy. The SalesFUSION 360 suite adds an on-demand enterprise lead management service to whatever CRM a customer uses. SalesFUSION helps to increase lead quantity, lead quality, and revenue conversion rates by integrating and automating the lead management process. It competes in the super hot marketing automation space with well-established companies like Marketo and Eloqua along with startups like CrushPath and Hubspot.

Interestingly the investment comes from Atlanta based Hallett Capital – better known for backing Google Apps stars Cloud Sherpas and BetterCloud. SalesFUSION states that despite being profitable for some time, the enterprise attention that marketing automation is garnering encouraged them to up velocity and get some funding to fuel further growth – one only needs to look at the M&A activity that has occurred in the marketing automation space in the past few months to see that is a logical strategy – SalesFUSION could well be a quick flick sort of an investment.

SalesFUSION, has several hundred midsize and large enterprise clients including Hitachi, Coverall, Avanade and Green Giant. The company has differentiated itself in the general marketing automation market by offering what they claim to be the industry’s deepest integrations to CRM systems from Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, SugarCRM, SalesLogix, NetSuite and Salesforce.com.  They’re also articulating a strong focus on customer satisfaction – that would seem to be borne out from the 99% per annum renewal rate that they’ve enjoyed since 2009.

SalesFUSION has an end-to-end view of marketing automation As Chad Rudd, CEO and founder says:

…Plenty of marketing automation vendors can manage a bulk email campaign, but by combining web analytics, lead scoring, social profiles, dialog responses and key CRM data, we are able to strip out the noise and present the most relevant and useful information to sales reps – directly inside the CRM system.  This is absolutely unique in the industry

SalesFUSION looks like a good product and far more than the shallow offering that many other startups are trying to sell into the crowded marketplace – I suspect we might be seeing some news fro this company in the months to come.

I’m always interested then in seeing companies that are trying to bring a high level of functionality and integration to small and mid size manufacturing and selling organizations – latest to come past my inbox was Stitch – a company that aims to make complex inventory management simple. Stitch’s take is to integrate multiple sales channels, all in real time and to allow for consistent pricing, invoicing and accurate inventory management. Stitch was created by Brandon Levey, himself a veteran of running a product business – in his case Levey previously ran both a sustainable clothing business and a mobile accessory one. The complexity and difficulties he experienced during that time directly led him to build a business management application.

Stitch joins a number of other companies n this space – companies like Unleashed and TradeGecko at the smaller end of town, while BrightPearl and Intacct take a slightly different approach, aiming a tad higher up the food chain and delivering functionality across the different needs of a business. Of course there are always the top shelf vendors – NetSuite being perhaps the best known SaaS vendor – but the price tag for NetSuite puts it out of the realm of most SMBs.

In terms of its differentiation from the competition, Stitch distinguishes itself by offering:

• Real-time syncing. Many vendors integrate using a semi-regular poling mechanism, thereby introducing opportunity for inventory errors in the case of near-simultaneous sales via different channels
• Blending on and offline sales worlds to keep track of online sales as well as wholesale sales all in one place
• Intuitive design – at-a-glance dashboards tracking the stage of each order through completion
• Reports and insights to make data-driven decisions
• Moving towards a complete small business solutions with ad-on integrations such as ShipStation, PayPal, and upcoming Xero and Vend

In terms of this last point, current integrations, Stitch currently works across a number of hosted shopping carts, Marketplaces and POS systems including Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, BigCommerce, Storenvy and SAIL (an open-source POS similar to Square, and recently acquired by Verifone). Add-on integrations include PayPal, ShipStation, Quickbooks and GoogleDrive/GoogleDocs. Stitch is promising integration with Xero, Ecwid, Magento, Vend and Goodsie in the near future.

When I talked to Levey, he was quick to articulate the analytics side of what Stitch does. Specific examples he gave include the ability to generate customizable reports to break down sales by channel, product, or variant so customers know exactly what is and isn’t selling well. Another analytical angle is the integrated data from all sales channels in order to know which products and channels deserve more attention and which should be scaled back because they are less profitable While In understand the value this sort of analytical approach can bring, it seems to me that the initial pain point that SMBs face is the functional one – simply not being able to tie their systems together and offer real time, accurate inventory across online channels and off is a massive problem. As a potential customer, I’d rather Stitch spent most of its effort in building the various integrations that customers need, rather than developing sexy analytical charts – don’t get me wrong, analysis is useful and all, just kind of irrelevant if the core solution doesn’t work across the different systems an organization uses.

Either way, Stitch is doing a good job of build an ecosystem of connected applications – they’ve picked up $1M seed funding round 12 months ago and have used that to build out the team and the product – it will be interesting to see them balance the varying pressures to build breadth with depth int heir product over the months ahead.