According to the IDC, 17.4 million tablets were shipped worldwide in the first quarter, with the lion’s share (68 percent) of those being iPads. As the iPad’s popularity has grown, it’s begun to find increasing adoption in the enterprise and among IT decision makers. As a result, some companies are looking to find better ways to utilize the iPad’s interface and unique display to present and visualize business data in more exciting and engaging ways.

Roambi, one of these slick new business intelligence (BI) apps, is finding success thanks to its enabling companies to transform their snooze-inducing Salesforce, Oracle, or SAP data (i.e. BI data) into interactive mobile dashboards, snappy charts and sexy graphs, and instantly deliver them to the iPad.

Building on its initial use case, last year Roambi released its so-called “Roambi Flow,” an app and content system that allows users to easily create and share original documents and interactive reports using analytics, text, graphics, video, and collaborative content.

Designed with the iPad interface in mind, those reports really look more like magazine-style publications, but based entirely on the custom content you provide. (Not unlike a BI data-version of Inkling.)

And today MeLLmo (the creator of Roambi) is taking its functioanlity one step further, moving from simply being a content creator to becoming a distributor and publisher as well, by launching a new platform that enables organizations to deliver analytics and multimedia content to anyone with an iPad. In other words, the key value proposition for the new platform is that companies can now not only create interactive reports in Roambi Flow, but actually turn those magazine-style reports into apps that can be published on the App Store, with customer logos, etc.

The platform also includes new licensing and features that give businesses the ability to distribute their custom Roambi reports both internally, just to staff, or externally to customers and consumers. They can also create and distribute co-branded materials in a single issue or series as iPad apps, saving money by removing the need to hire specialized designers, and, in turn, extending the reach of their brand thanks to the App Store’s massive, built-in user base.

As an illustrative example, an analyst firm, say, could upload a PDF, automatically transform it into a Roambi Flow document (i.e. a flip-style magazine for iPad), add interactive analytics, photos and videos, and then publish as their own app on the App Store — either for targeted customers or open download.

What’s more, companies can do this over and over, ad nauseam, publishing a bunch of separate apps or creating multiple editions within one. That company could also use its distribution mechanism to continuously publish the most up-to-date sales presentations for their sales force, for example, or use it as a marketing tool, publishing brochure-style content for open downloading.

In addition to its platform launch, the startup is today introducing Roambi Pulse — its tenth visualization tool for the iPad — which allows users to compare key performance indicators in animated, vivid display. By embedding historical performance of key metrics within interactive titles, users can swipe and tap their way through (what are presumably) more compelling and engaging insights. A Roambi Pulse sample is can be found in the free Roambi app now available in the App Store.

As for integration? Roambi’s platform connects with a mess of business information sources and integrates with existing systems from IBM Cognos, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP BusinessObjects, Salesforce Sales Cloud, and Google Docs.

MeLLmo raised $30 million from Sequoia in its first round of institutional funding back in September.

For more info, find Roambi at home here.

Some eye-opening stats out today from McAfee, the Intel-owned IT security company: a study of 28 million computers in 24 countries has found that 17 percent of all PCs do not have any form of security at all on them against viruses, worms, spyware and other Internet malware – a transgression that McAfee compares to “walking around naked on the Internet.”

But McAfee notes that while the average worldwide figure for unsecured PCs works out to one out of every six users, some countries are taking their security more seriously than others…

In Finland, the most protected country, only 9.7 percent of PCs had no security software installed at all. But in Singapore, the most unprotected country, 21.75 percent of all PCs do not have any anti-malware products or other security coverage.

The U.S. is not the worst offender of all, but it isn’t that impressive, either: it’s in the top five least-protected countries, with 19.32 percent of all computers lacking anti-malware software.

“The freedom to browse the internet comes with the added risk of unwanted exposure, and cybercriminals are preying on unsuspecting victims,” Todd Gebhart, co-president of McAfee, said in a statement.  “With 17 percent of the world walking around naked on the internet, it is critical that consumers update their virus protection before it’s too late.”

Having expired or disabled software is nearly as bad as having nothing at all — but at least the number of PCs falling into this category are smaller. For example in the U.S., 7.07 percent of the country had disabled security software installed on their computers, McAfee said. Singapore again performed worst of all here: some 11.75 percent of computers in the country have installed, disabled, security protection

McAfee points out some of the very basic-yet-critical issues with people not remaining vigilant about their security software: identity theft, data loss and the fact that your own computer can become an unwilling participant in the ongoing spread of the malware in question.

The lack of security also seems to fly in the face of people’s own knowledge of how fleeting their data can be: globally consumers say that 27 percent of digital files are “impossible to restore” if they were lost and not backed up correctly: the average value of those lost files was just over $10,000.

The security industry appears to be getting more creative in how it speaks to unprotected PC owners. McAfee recently joined up with other security companies to offer their services via Facebook, initally as a trial and later as paid service. It will be interesting to see whether new route to pushing security will lead to a measurable rise in people protecting their computers.

Update. There is another point of view, too: it may not be lazy behavior or lack of knowledge, but skepticism that protection actually works, which keeps some people away from using anti-virus software.

As reader Rosen Sharma pointed out, with a hat tip to the “naked” analogy, “Anti-virus detection rates are bad; having AV is like wearing see through clothes.” (He should know; he is currently CEO of PC app player BlueStacks, but he used to be an SVP and CTO at McAfee.)

At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last May, the unanimous winner of the “Audience Choice” award was a young, Atlanta-based startup called CodeGuard. The startup caught the audience’s attention based on a simple value proposition: To become a “time machine for your website.” In other words, CodeGuard’s free service allows any site owner to back up their website and revert to earlier versions, while monitoring for infections.

After months of tweaking and beta testing, today CodeGuard is officially pulling back the curtain on a new-and-improved service, backed by a fresh $1.3 million in funding from Imlay Investments and a host of angel investors, including Palaniswamy Rajan, Bert Ellis, Tom Noonan, Matt Chanoff, and Merrick Furst.

The new funding adds to the $500K the startup raised back in June of last year from Imlay and others. All of CodeGuard’s seed investors have returned to re-up their investments and give the startup the fuel it needs to expand — now just under $2 million total.

While there are a number of companies that provide disaster recovery and data backup, what differentiates CodeGuard from the rest, says co-founder David Moeller, is that it utilizes differential backup. What does that mean? As opposed to solely storing just a snapshot of a website’s source code and database, CodeGuard compares the current version with prior versions and only stores the differences.

This minimizes the space needed for backups and, in turn, gives the startup insight into all the changes in a website’s code and database. After launching its public beta at Disrupt last May, CodeGuard has since upgraded its backend infrastructure to Amazon EC2 and S3 to enable scaling and to provide near-total redundancy.

The startup is also today officially launching a complete redesign of its user interface, which means, among other things, an update to its “Time Machine” feature. The majority of the UI updates are visual in nature, giving those site owners who may not have a computer science degree a visual glimpse into their website’s operations, rather than lines of text (as in the previous version of CodeGuard). Now, site owners can simply log-in to CodeGuard’s free dashboard and sort through prior versions of their website visually, choosing from particular versions of files that they want to restore — or restoring the whole site to a previous version.

Previously, CodeGuard had simply downloaded a zip file of the contents of a website and presented its Time Machine in text-form, but now users can take advantage of a visual representation of their file mix, watching as their development support works on the site, etc.

The startup also released a cPanel plugin so that hosting providers can allow their users to create accounts with a few clicks from a hosting provider control panel, which now complements a WordPress plugin with similar functionality.

In the big picture, CodeGuard wants to provide backup for life for websites of all stripes, from the big players to the mom and pop shops and millions of bloggers out there using WordPress. Of course, users want things to be easy, but when it comes to backup and monitoring, there are a lot of different use cases, and configurations change from provider to provider. WordPress itself has a laundry list.

So, CodeGuard has struck strategic partnerships with hosting and web service providers like Parallels, CloudFlare, A Small Orange, HostDime, HostMySite, WebHostingBuzz and NameCheap, and now offers integration options via cPanel, Plesk, and WordPress, as well as FTP/SFTP, MySQL and WordPress backup and restore. And that’s really one of the coolest parts of CodeGuard’s technology — it performs platform-agnostic, non-intrusive change monitoring and differential backup, whether tunneling over SSH or using near-ubiquitous but dated protocols like FTP.

In terms of cost, CodeGuard offers a pay-as-you-go service, which is free until users hit the 2GB limit, at which point they can upgrade to a yearly rate of $10/month. For $25, users can access all their backups for 72 hours.

Moeller says that the key here, though, is that CodeGuard isn’t doing the typical bait-and-switch that’s become rampant among backup solutions. The goal, he says, is to keep backups and snapshots as small as possible so that users never get to that 2GB limit.

The other important differentiating point for CodeGuard is an element of customer service. That is to say that many solutions give site owners the tools and just leave them be. In contrast, when CodeGuard, say, opens up a site’s servers and checks to see what’s been modified or deleted, it automatically alerts users if they find any changes. That way users know that their backup solution is working — based on the fact that the startup actually notifies them with each change.

With its new infusion of capital, Moeller says, CodeGuard has been ramping up its team and integrating its technology with hosting providers all over the country. In the last two weeks, its observed 20 million changes to files, and its new system has been designed with scale in mind, to be able to handle an exponential load. The startup hopes to begin offering Tumblr backup in next quarter, along with support for a number of other content management systems.

For more on CodeGuard, check ‘em out at home here or in the video below:

Last month, San Francisco unveiled a new cloud-based open data site as part of its move to adopt cloud services and, in turn, to encourage open government, transparency and accountability by improving access to data and information. San Francisco is hardly alone — both public and private sectors in the U.S. and around the world are pulling back the curtain on their data. Of course, opening the doors is one thing, but unlocking and making sense of that data? Not quite as easy.

That’s why Palo Alto-based Junar has developed a platform that allows businesses, governments, and NGOs not only to unleash their data in order to drive collaboration and enhance transparency, but to remove the headache of having to develop their own proprietary software. And to fuel its initiative, the startup announced today that it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Aurus, Austral Capital, and a host of national and Latin American angel investors.

Many governments and businesses want to open their data so that others can help build, innovate, and interpret it, often it’s not so easy to access or organize into, say, simple reporting. Instead, often only a subset of that data is accessible and most of it isn’t formatted in a way that can be programmatically used.

So Junar developed a web-based data publishing system to make it easy for organizations to open and maintain, which is today launching as Junar Open Data Platform, a SaaS data management system, that promises to do just that.

Using the platform, organizations can collect, enhance, publish, enable commenting and annotation, and report on their open data no matter in what format it’s formatted. It does this through a simple workflow that enables organizations to streamline projects, whether it be in extracting datasets, building graphical views, or just managing data publishing, all while being able to keep tabs on which pieces of the dataset are getting the most use.

Of course, some data is best left unshared, so Junar allows users to control which datasets are made public and which are assigned for internal-use only. Meanwhile, the Open Data Platform Junar, CEO Diego May says, only takes a few minutes to deploy without having to install software or pay for new servers, along with the ability to customize the platform for their particular brand — integrating data into their websites or letting Junar host it.

While competitors are most certainly out there, May says that services like Socrata and Tableau (and others) are more concentrated on data visualization and presentation, rather than providing a broader cloud-based publishing and management solution that offers end-to-end support — discovery, analytics, reporting, and visualization.

For the past few months, Junar has had more than 200 organizations testing its new platform, and today it’s opening its doors officially, offering a free trial account for a limited time to those who sign up on its website here. From there, a “Pro” Junar account runs $290/month, increasing to $830/month based on the number of datasets, publishers and features.

More on Junar here.

One more Y Combinator startup from the March 2012 class has bagged a seed round of funding. PlanGrid, which has created a groundbreaking app for the construction industry, has raised $1.1 million from a notable list of backers. They include Suleman Ali, founder and CEO of TinyCo; Sam Altman, founder of Loopt; Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail; Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, Ray Levitt, Director of Stanford University’s Construction Engineering department; building-sector-focused Navitas Capital; as well as 500 Startups and Y Combinator itself.

Plus, here’s a twist: the funding marks the first investment in a startup (outside of acquisitions) by the cloud-services company Box, as part of its /bin Box Innovation Network initiative.

Ryan Sutton-Gee, one of the co-founders and CEO of PlanGrid, tells me that the motivation for Box is to foster cloud-based enterprise apps. “Box and PlanGrid initially started talking simply to discuss possible integration,” but they were impressed enough with the product and team, and so they offered to help with fundraising, he said. Since launching its first app in March, PlanGrid’s customer base has shot up. Sutton-Gee says that it is now being used by over 2,900 construction projects worldwide.

The app, which we detailed in length we first covered PlanGrid, in its basic concept is aimed at taking away some of the pain points and costs in creating blueprints for construction workers, in itself, $5 billion industry, Sutton-Gee says. The idea: transfer the whole “analog” process of printing out and distributing costly blueprint sheets into a slick and easy-to-update iPad app. (And expensive/inefficient it is indeed: for every $1,000,000 in building costs, there are $3,500 of printing costs, Sutton-Gee says.)

The funding will be used to expand PlanGrid’s team and add more features to the app. “Raising this round is a major milestone for us, and it will add a lot of fuel to our fire in bridging the gap between good, intuitive software and the construction industry,” says Sutton-Gee.

At the time of the launch, I wondered aloud whether the construction industry would be a challenging market — the iPad doesn’t seem like the most rugged of gadgets — but PlanGrid’s calculations that their product would be a game-changer have borne out:

Apart from the fact that their customer base is growing, it seems like PlanGrid is actually changing user perception. “Customer feedback has continued to be really great, especially from our in-field users,” says Sutton-Gee. “We’ve had many customers tell us that PlanGrid is the reason they decided to buy iPads, and that we are the killer tablet app for the construction industry. We’ve even  had a couple customers tell us they were going to buy Android-based tablets until they found us, and decided to change their IT strategy to incorporate our product.”

And there will be more features to make PlanGrid even more sticky: since launching Sutton-Gee says his team has added several new features, including the ability to pin photos taken with the iPad to blueprints (“finally a sensible use for the iPad camera!” he quips), the ability to attach any .pdf to individual blueprint sheets, and adding retina support for the new iPad (“which makes blueprints look really fantastic”), in addition to a redesign of the UI of the app.

He notes that a new version of the app is now with Apple with more enhancements. Users will be able to share markups across iPads and back up to the web (similar to Google Docs sharing, he says). Plus photos taken with the camera will automatically upload to the PlanGrid cloud (“a la Instagram”). Users will also be able to build an automatic archive, and PlanGrid has created a web-based version of its .pdf renderer to keep track of everyone’s documents.

Sutton-Gee says that in terms of take up, PlanGrid is seeing the most usage in California, Texas and Massachusetts in the U.S., “but have paying users in pretty much every state, and we also have paying users in Australia, Mexico and Canada.”  The app is being used on a wide variety of projects, he says, with the biggest on large buildings such as hospitals and manufacturing facilities.

No, NFC still hasn’t come to the iPhone — or many other devices, for that matter. But this does not appear to be stopping the momentum in the world of mobile payments. Research out today from Gartner says that this year will see more than $171.5 billion in mobile payment transactions — a rise of over 60 percent on 2011′s $105.9 billion — with 212.2 million people (up 32 percent from 160.5m in 2011) using some form of mobile payment service. And what’s fuelling the rise? Despite the rise of smartphones, it’s legacy-based services like SMS and web-based transactions.

Longer term, Gartner believes that transactions will reach a volume of $617 billion by 2016 — with average growth slightly slowing down to around 42 percent — with 448 million users using such services.

SMS, Gartner research director Sandy Shen notes, remains the “dominant” access technology for making payments in developing markets, while in more mature markets, the vast majority of transactions are made via mobile internet portals. In North America in 2012, 80 percent of all mobile payment transactions will happen via Web/WAP routes, Gartner predicts; the figure in Western Europe is an even higher 88 percent.

That’s not to say near-field communications — the technology that will let people wave their phones in front of a payment terminal to pay for goods and services — is completely absent, but use of it will remain “relatively low” through 2015. (My theory is that if Apple puts an NFC chip into an iPhone and activates a service with it sooner than 2015, these forecasts could change: I’ve heard more than one mobile payments industry person tell me they are “just waiting for the iPhone to get NFC” before things really take off.)

Interestingly, Gartner doesn’t put slow adoption of NFC on the doorstep of handset makers, but does seem to refer to challenges among other players: ”NFC payment involves a change in user behavior and requires collaboration among stakeholders that includes banks, mobile carriers, card networks and merchants,” Shen notes.

Her prediction: NFC will be used but not for payments: “Tticketing, rather than retail payment, will drive NFC transactions,” she says.

– Fragmentation. This seems to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, fragmentation in offerings — both from the point of view of service providers and technologies (NFC, SMS, dongles from the likes of Square and Paypal among them) — seems to keeping any one solution or group of providers from properly scaling up as the de facto standards for mobile payments. That has a knock-on effect for merchants and consumers, of course, who trust such solutions less. Gartner believes these kinds of fragmentation issues will continue for the next two years.

But on the other hand, fragmentation may be a necessary evil for success. Gartner points out that as mobile payments continue to mature, providers will need to tailor offerings to local markets, or “local demand patterns to customize their offerings,” says Shen. That goes not just for regulation and getting approval to offer services in specific markets, but also different retail business models, existing embedded technology, and local preference. For example, while U.S. customers may love Square, the jury is still out whether Jack Dorsey and Co. will be able to take that solution further afield with such success.

That’s not to say that there will not be behemoths in mobile payments are there are in the world of credit cards, but that local companies may have a stronger role in mobile payments than we have seen in credit up to now. “There will be a few global players that have the scale and resources to serve large customers and the mass market whose requirements can be readily satisfied by standard solutions,” Shen notes. “However, there will always be segments that cannot be sufficiently served by the global players. The demand of these segments can only be satisfied by specialized or local players who can better understand the segment and have specific solutions to meet the unique challenges.”

– Who is in the driving seat? In North America and Western Europe, it will be merchants, says Gartner, who will be seeing mobile payment transactions both in physical stores as well as in online payments. Online it will be led by companies like eBay and Amazon, who are already going at a fast clip in mobile payments. Offline, the Starbucks model of using an app to work as a payment method/loyalty card will be the route that others will also take.

Developing markets are another story. It won’t be merchants as such setting the pace for and using mobile payments. Rather m-payments will be used mainly for other kinds of services like money transfer and top-ups of mobile calling and text minutes. An interesting area I’ve not seen mentioned before is ticketing: apparently mobile payments are used to improve the efficiency of buying tickets for public transportation in markets like Africa and South Asia, Gartner says.

– Regional breakdown. North America may make the most noise, but by 2016 it will only be the third-largest market for mobile payments, Gartner says. Asia Pacific will be the biggest region, with Africa at number-two, with the pair accounting for more than 60 percent of all mobile payments in four years. The full table below

[Image: Steven DePolo, Flickr]

Google just announced that its Google Apps for Business service has earned ISO 27001 certification. This certifies that Google is following the standard ISO information security management protocols and best practices “for the systems, technology, processes and data centers serving Google Apps for Business.”

If you’re a startup or individual user, chances are you don’t care too much about whether a company you are working with is following any of the ISO’s over 19,000 standards. This certification, however, will likely give larger and more highly regulated businesses (and the executives who sign off on these deals) the necessary reassurances that moving to Google’s cloud solutions is safe.

This ISO 27001 certification, which was certified by Ernst & Young CertifyPoint, an ISO certification body accredited by the Dutch Accreditation Council, follows Google’s previous FISMA certification for its Google Apps for Government product. Google also regularly submits itself to third-party audits according to the SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 standard, which is quite comparable to the ISO 27001 standard.

It’s important to note, though, that this certification is not a security “seal of approval,” as security consultant Alec Muffett told Computer World UK’s Anh Nguyen, and does not “guarantee that the applications are 100% secure.” Instead, says Muffett, companies that apply for ISO 27001 certification get ” to design their own high-jump bar, document how tall it is and what it is made of, how they intend to jump over it and then they jump over it.”

Google’s Eran Feigenbaum, the company’s director of security for its Google Enterprise group, believes that “businesses are beginning to realize that companies like Google can invest in security at a scale that’s difficult for many businesses to achieve on their own.” While most of Google’s competitors focus on getting their data centers certified, it’s worth noting that Google also argues that its certification is broader and also includes its networking infrastructure and applications.

Given that all of this isn’t the most exciting news in the world – especially not on a national holiday in the U.S. – here is a video of Feigenbaum, who is also a mentalist – playing Russian Roulette with a nail gun:

Box is releasing a number of new features today, with the broad theme of addressing “the needs of our largest enterprise customers in deploying this kind of technology,” according to CEO Aaron Levie.

Those features include the ability to search files across an entire company, a new dashboard offering more granular controls for company administrators, mobile security options like passcode locks, support for multiple email domains, activity notification archiving, and a new enterprise licensing agreement. Altogether, Levie says this means big companies can manage organization-wide Box deployments “at a scale that was never before possible.” This should also help some of those larger customers address issues like regulatory compliance.

For example, Box’s search was previously limited to individual accounts. The new enterprise-wide search addresses e-discovery requirements, so if a legal issue arises, businesses can find content anywhere within the company.

The new ELA is crucial too, Levie says, because it means customers should have more predictable pricing as the exact size of their teams change, rather than paying purely on a seat-by-seat basis as in the past.

Levie adds that this is part of a larger trend, both within Box and across cloud industry. A few years ago, CIOs of large companies only wanted to use a service like Box in isolated pockets of the organization.

“Today what we’re seeing is, companies are doing the inverse,” Levie says. “They actually want their core systems to be cloud. … They would rather have the core systems be from vendors that can focus all of their energy on solving all of their core problems instantly.”

Hence the new features making that process easier. Levie also points to the successful IPOs of companies like Jive Software and Splunk as evidence of how the enterprise landscape is changing. That brings up another question: Given its growth and success, is there a Box IPO on the horizon? It may may be in the long-term playbook, but Levie says that for now, he’s enjoying the benefits of keeping the company private, so, “We’re definitely not going to do anything this year.

Kony Solutions, the unfortunately named makers of a write once, run everywhere mobile app development platform today announced that it has closed a $15 million series C round of financing. The funding was led by New York City-based venture capital firm, Insight Venture Partners, a 17-year-old firm that has invested in companies like Tumblr, Buddy Media, Wix, Chegg, and Twitter — to name a few.

Insight also led Kony’s $19.1 million series A financing, which it closed in January of last year. With its latest infusion of capital, which brings total funding to nearly $39 million, the startup is looking fund the deployment of new sales and marketing programs, regional expansion, and to ramp up hiring.

For those unfamiliar, Kony is on a mission to develop technologies and apps that both facilitate and accelerate customer engagement on any mobile operating system, device or channel. Through its flagship product, KonyOne, the startup offers a development environment and mobile middleware that allows big businesses to build and launch both enterprise and consumer apps.

As a result, Kony now offers support for nearly every technology and deployment option out there, from native apps on all native OSes, HTML5-capable browsers, single page apps, wrappers, hybrids, and more — even support for BYOD deployments. The agility and scalability of its platform have attracted more than 70 Fortune 500 companies, banks, airlines, as well as automotive and insurance companies.

Kony CEO Raj Koneru says that the startup will use its newest round of funding to continue managing and expanding on its recent growth, which (as of the end of its FY2012) had seen more than 200 percent growth in bookings and has added more than 30 new global customers, including Aetna, CIBC, Independence Blue Cross, Scottrade and Sun Life Financial.

What’s more, the company recently launched a suite of off-the-shelf, vertical-specific apps for banking, healthcare, retail, and travel, while earning the business of more than 30 new customers, including Aetna, CIRC, BlueCrossBlueShield, Scottrade, and Sun Life Financial.

With patents-pending for its flagship product, KonyOne, support of more than a billion user sessions annually, and its being named a “Visionary” startup by Gartner, Kony is really starting to find the kind of traction it will need to compete in a crowded space.

For more, check out Kony at home here.

Confirming rumors from last week, HP just publicly announced a layoff plan that will result in a reduction of 8% of its workforce. Shortly after releasing the memo to Wall Street, HP CEO Meg Whitman sent a company-wide video message explaining the future of Bill Hewlett and David Packard’s company.

She acknowledges throughout that HP is in trouble, stating in the beginning, “HP’s performance is still not where it needs to be” and “We have a lot of work ahead of us to get HP back on track.” She also explains, a bit comically and perhaps erroneously, that “[HP] is currently rebuilding credibility one quarter at time, and to do that, we need to consistently deliver on what we say.”

Whitman also reaffirmed HP’s commitment to infrastructure, PCs and printing, servers, storage and networking. “This is a differentiating strength for HP and one we can be proud of,” she said in the video.

However, the axe is about to fall throughout HP. Before Whitman attempts to justify the cuts, she explains that HP’s employee count has grown at a pace unsustainable by its low revenue as of late.

“We’re struggling under our own weight,” said Whitman in today’s internal video memo. “And we’ve got to restore a healthy balance in order to return HP to its position as a growing… thriving… innovating… industry leader. That’s what this is all about. And the workforce reduction is only one piece of a comprehensive effort. We see a lot of opportunity to remove complexity, streamline and reduce costs in a number of areas across HP.”

Like previous rumors speculated, HP plans on reinvesting the savings into the company. “We’ll be investing to drive leadership in the three strategic pillars – cloud, security and information optimization. And in each of our businesses, we’ll make investments to stay ahead of customer expectations and market trends.” This is a fresh move for HP who under previous leadership simply used the savings of a smaller company to help the ledger.

In the consumer-focused PC and Printing Group, “we’ll be focused on design, engineering, quality, and generating demand and desire with our customers,” she said. In Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) “we’ll invest to drive R&D and innovation in our core businesses of servers, storage and networking. In Software, we’ll be investing to speed development across Security, Information and Management Infrastructure for both on-premise IT and in the cloud – with a key focus on software-as-a-service offerings. This will include the extension of Vertica and Autonomy across our entire portfolio. And in Services, we’ll improve processes and build-out capabilities in cloud, security and information. We’ll also be strengthening our industry practices, as well as our service quality and innovation.”

Whitman also detailed that HP is looking to better train their employees while providing a “career development and better tools and support.”

Like most leaders, Whitman ends the video with a reminder to her underlings that “In times of change, it’s easy to lose focus, waiting to see what happens next. We can’t let that happen. This a great organization, full of incredible people who are resilient, committed and who care about our customers and our company. I’m asking all of you to please keep driving forward. Close every deal. Leave nothing on the table. We need that now more than ever.”

Below is a transcript of the video. We are currently working on obtaining the video itself. Update: We have the video. Uploading now.

Within HP’s quarterly results today, a bit of a development for Autonomy, the company’s $10.2 billion enterprise software purchase from last year that was profitable when HP bought it but in the last quarter saw “significant” declines in its core licensing revenue: its founder and head Mike Lynch is stepping down, and he is getting replaced by a HP man: chief strategy officer and EVP of enterprise software Bill Veghte.

HP says in its Q2 earnings release that this is being done to help improve Autonomy’s performance. In an internal memo to employees, which TechCrunch has obtained, CEO Meg Whitman says that the move is being made to as a mark of how HP is “investing to speed development across Security, Information and Management Infrastructure for both on-premise IT and in the cloud – with a key focus on software-as-a-service offerings.” The same strategy will be applied to the company’s Vertica business, Whitman noted in the memo.

HP’s Q2 earnings saw revenues down by three percent to $30.7 billion. Within that, the company saw a mixed (but overall declining performance) in its different divisions:

• The Personal Systems group saw flat revenues with a 5.5 percent operating margin. Commercial revenues were up three percent but the bigger portion, consumer revenue, declined by four percent. Total unit sales were down by one percent.
• Services were down by one percent with 11.3 percent operating marging.
• Imaging and printing (which is merging with PSG) is down 10 percent.
• Enterprise servers, storage and networking also down by six percent.
• HP financial services up by nine percent with a 9.9 percent operating margin.
• Sofware revenue up most of all: 22 percent with a 17.7 percent operating margin (no wonder this is the part that previous CEO, Leo Apotheker, wanted to keep and ditch all hardware). However, within this Autonomy saw a “significant” decline in license revenue.

Autonomy’s performance probably represents something of a disappointment — and perhaps surprise to HP, since the unit seemed to be doing much better when the acquisition was announced in October. At the time of the deal, Apotheker noted:

“Autonomy presents an opportunity to accelerate our strategic vision to decisively and profitably lead a large and growing space…Together with Autonomy, we plan to reinvent how both unstructured and structured data is processed, analyzed, optimized, automated and protected. Autonomy has an attractive business model, including a strong cloud based solution set, which is aligned with HP’s efforts to improve our portfolio mix. We believe this bold action will squarely position HP in software and information to create the next-generation Information Platform, and thereby, create significant value for our shareholders…Autonomy is a highly profitable and globally respected software company, with a well-regarded management team and talented, dedicated employees. We look forward to partnering with a company who shares our commitment to solving customer problems by creating smart, cutting-edge products and solutions.”

Mike Lynch, the founder and current head, will be stepping down after a transition period, HP says, and it doesn’t look like it’s giving up on Autonomy any time soon: “the market and competitive positioning for Autonomy remain strong, particularly in cloud offerings,” the company writes in its statement.

Autonomy, founded in the UK, offers a software infrastructure solution in which enterprises can get different applications to “communicate” with each other.

It has 20,000 customers worldwide, and there are over 400 OEM companies that offer licenses to more than 500 products. Applications include those that handle information access technology, pan-enterprise search, information governance, end-to-end eDiscovery and archiving, records management, business process management, web content management, customer interaction solutions, and video and audio analysis.

Following are some other founder departures from other companies HP has acquired — as you can see it looks like all of the others may have been working through their earn-outs (typically two years; although Chris Lynch stayed for just over a year after Vertica was bought, to join Atlas Ventures). Between Autonomy getting bought in October and today, it’s been about eight months.

HP acquired Opsware for $1.6 billion in 2007.  President & CEO Ben Horowitz stayed a year before leaving in 2009 to launch Andreesen Horowitz.

HP acquired Vertica for $350 million in February 2011. CEO Chris Lynch left in March 2012 to join Atlas Ventures, a VC firm.

HP acquired Stratavia in August 2010.  Terms not disclosed.  CEO Thor Culverhouse left in February 2012 to found new company.

HP acquired ArcSight for $1.5 billion in September 2010.  CEO Tom Reilly left HP in May 2012.

HP acquired Fortify in August 2010. Terms not disclosed. CEO John M. Jack left in January 2012.

Business software giant SAP announced today that it will acquire Ariba’s cloud -based business commerce network for approximately $4.3 billion. SAP’s subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., is offering $45 per share for the platform, and plans to close the deal during the third quarter, pending Ariba shareholder approval of the sale. Ariba had 100.2 million shares on the market, as of March 31st, according to an AP report citing FactSet data.

The Ariba board of directors has already unanimously approved the transaction. The per share purchase price represents a 20% premium over the May 21 closing price and a 19% premium over the one month volume weighted average price per share, says SAP.

The deal will be  funded from SAP’s free cash and a €2.4 billion term loan facility and is expected to be accretive to SAP’s non-IFRS earnings per share in 2013. SAP says the acquisition will combine Ariba’s successful buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP’s own customer base and solutions in order to create new models for business-to-business collaboration in the cloud.

Sunnyvale-based Ariba has approximately 2,600 employees, $444 million in total revenue, and experienced 38.5 percent annual growth in 2011. Its business network recorded 62 percent organic growth in the same period. With the addition of Ariba, SAP will acquire the leader in cloud-based collaborative business commerce.

The focus of Ariba’s business is in procurement, spend management, and supplier discovery, and is partnered with major ERP suppliers, including SAP, as well as Salesforce, IBM and Oracle.

“The cloud has profoundly changed the way people interact. The impact will be even greater as enterprises connect and collaborate in new ways with their global networks of customers and partners,” SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe said in a statement. “Cloud-based collaboration is redefining business network innovation, and we are catching this wave in the early stage of its evolution. The addition of Ariba will create the business network of the future, deliver immediate value to our customers and provide another solid engine for driving SAP’s growth in the cloud.”

Most businesses need to be able keep in touch with their customers and provide customer service over the phone, but rolling out a call center can be expensive. Not just that, but most call center software today isn’t very good at keeping tabs on customers and presenting all the information that businesses need to serve them better. That’s why Talkdesk is launching its cloud-based call center software Tuesday as part of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt.

The startup enables call agents to know everything about customers when they call, based on reverse lookup of the customer’s phone number, without having to ask for their information. It also integrates with the existing CRM systems that companies use, such as SalesForce, as well as helpdesk software like ZenDesk and Desk.com. But it also hooks into Twitter and Facebook to find public information about customers from social networks.

Not only does Talkdesk handle CRM and help desk features, but it also allows agents to make, receive, record and transcribe calls. It gives a history of the customers’ previous interactions, including items purchased and searched, the amount of money spent, and previous calls made. Since the service operates in the cloud, all of this information is available in the agent’s web browser when a customer calls.

Talkdesk is based on Twilio technology, and was founded as part of the Twilio Fund contest last year. Launching today, Talkdesk is making its cloud-based call center software generally available to anyone who wants to sign up. Because of its cloud-based infrastructure, businesses can sign up in less than five minutes.

Talkdesk was part of last summer’s 500 Startups Accelerator class, and has raised $450,000 to date. It has three employees, based in Mountain View, Calif.

Disrupt Q&A

Q: What are the things that company buying your product gets ROI?

A: When you use Talkdesk, you have all the information about the customer, and you can quickly answer problems and make suggestions.

Q: Do people replace existing software, or layering on top?

A: Customers we have now don’t have call center software.

Q: Regulatory issues from recording phone conversations?

A: You have to tell the person, but you can add information before someone answers the call.

Q: Pick one customer and explain the use case?

A: Chevy, for example, using for support and one for sales. They have two numbers, and can see all information about the customer.

Q: What would a customer use instead?

A: In the example of Chevy, they have big call centers, but nothing for this type of solution. Out goal is to eventually to go big in the enterprise.

Q: Price points?

A: First agent is free always. So customer tries one agent, and then expand. We charge $49 per month per agent.

Q: A lot of your focus is on the telephony side of things and that’s important, but a lot is moving to social media.

A: For now, we are only voice, but integrate with email systems like ZenDesk. But the phone is still the main avenue of conversation for all businesses.

Software is eating another part of the world. (Or at least the next generation of software is eating the older 1970s-era kind.)

Sunglass, which is coming out of beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, should bring a bit of joy to longtime CAD users and professional architects and designers. The company is launching very social, browser-based software for 3D modeling.

“This is like Google Docs for 3D objects,” said CEO and co-founder Kaustuv DeBiswas. “We’re taking traditional desktop software from the architecture world and putting it in the cloud.” Sunglass is undercutting existing computer-aided design software dramatically. Normally, this older software can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000, he adds. In contrast, the most basic version of Sunglass is free and then designers can pay for extra apps or add ons.

This is not a total replacement, however. It’s meant to be a collaboration tool for teams of designers or individual hobbyists. “Software modeling has seen 30 to 40 years of development. We don’t want to compete on a feature-by-feature basis,” he said.

Inside Sunglass, designers can take a 3D model and rotate, flip or scale it without Adobe Flash. It’s built with HTML5 and WebGL. The team behind Sunglass comes from MIT. DeBiswas earned his Ph.D in design computation and was a TED fellow last year while his co-founder Nitin Rao is an MBA from Sloan that started his career out in social enterprise and microfinance.

DeBiswas has spent years thinking about the future of design technology. ”Sunglass is a product that’s fluid enough that everyone from a kid doing a Maker Bot to a professional firm can use it,” he said.

Sunglass works with more than different 40 different file formats, removing a hurdle that has long made it frustrating for designers to critique and give feedback on each other’s work. There’s also a Dropbox integration for storing and accessing 3-D files.

It’s also a bit social. Sunglass users can simultaneously access a single 3D model and suggest tweaks through chat or voice chat. There’s also a sketch tool for marking suggestions. It’s easier to share 3D models with embeds like this one on DeBiswas’ Tumblr. He says that helps with virally attracting new customers. There is also an API that lets designers build tools for others. Because Sunglass is a platform play, the company is hoping that developers will eventually build specific tools that others will want on an as-needed basis.

They’re not pursuing a classic monthly subscription model with one standard set of paid premium features. Instead, customers can pay for apps at a rate of about $25 a month.

“Our vision for software in the future is that it will be a collection selected parts,” Rao said. “It won’t be a big company giving you a one-size-fits-all set of toolbars.” He gave an example app that does very fast cloud-based rendering. It takes about 45 seconds per object.

Taking a page from Sequoia-backed Unity Technologies’ business model, there’s also a store where designers can buy one-off 3D models from others. Unity, which has a 3D gaming engine that powers titles like Shadowgun, has a store where game developers can buy 3D effects and models from other developers.

“After cutting costs and fixing interoperability, the third thing we want to go after is building a community with this store. We have a lot to learn from the gaming industry and we think the comparable opportunity in the product design and architecture market is really massive.”

Sunglass has raised $1.8 million in seed funding from General Catalyst, Sherpalo Ventures, Lerer Ventures and Maynard Webb.

Q&A

Q: What are the biggest technical difficulties in bringing this to the browser? And what are the benefits versus doing this on the browser?

A: Most of the computation doing computation are doing it back stage. We have super computers. If you think about it one of our clients, their reactions were my client gives me large BIM files which I have no use for except that we have to go ahead and re-model. We support 45 file formats and you can drag at 3D file. We are working on technologies which will give you data on demand. We’ve taken this constraint as an opportunity.

Q: Is this for professional users? Or for regular people? The presentation implies that you’ll have users who are not fluent with CAD.

A: This spans from kids playing with the motorcycles above to professionals who are modeling fluid dynamics. Starting off, it’s aimed at professional designers, but it’s easy enough that you don’t need complex training.

Q: Can you talk about price points?

A: Bite-sized modules and apps for anywhere from $25 to 100 per month.

Q: You guys are latching on to a huge trend in terms of designs. How do you help synchronous collaboration? Many of these designers don’t see themselves as early adopters. They may not feel comfortable with this or with their work in the cloud. How do you deal with this?

A: Asynchronous collaboration is important. We’re working with a version where you can store a version. We have a version on Tumblr. Other people could view it on Tumblr. We have all the persistence of data on the back-end. It’s not transient. It’s not just real-time collaboration. The second thing is about behavior. Two things. We think the product has enough virality in it. I would send you a link. You don’t need a plug-in. It’s just HTML5, WebGL. We’ve made the interface light. We believe that tomorrow that software will be a collection of small pieces. We’ve intentionally kept it very simple. This has happened to every other industry. We believe it will also happen in design.

If you are in the business of needing to process shopping for your ecommerce startup then this is going to be of interest. If not, look away now.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York the startup PayLeap, which is a payment platform for ecommerce, is reaching out with a new program to help fund the development of applications connecting to their payment gateway platform.

Whether it’s marketing spiel or not, PayLeap claims to have “set aside” $1 million in funding to cover developers upfront, as well as a residual stream back from referred businesses that have active payments with the company.

Here’s how it works: A lot of web and app developers refer their customers to some of the larger payment gateway companies, but they don’t get anything back for doing so. PayLeap program (P4) plans to collects these ongoing residuals through a referral relationship. That means the merchant, the partner, and of course PayLeap benefits.

PayLeap is going up against Authorize.net and Auth.net (a legacy gateway that’s been around a long time). The problem is the developers don’t get anything back for those referrals. PayPal, Google Checkout, Stripe and Square are also competitive but often involve additional fees.

P4 is supposed to help offset the development costs associated with certifying through PayLeap’s APIs and help cover co-marketing and promotional costs.

This could be useful for startups which need to handle electronic payments like credit, debit, check/ACH, gift card, and EBT because its connected to global payment processing platforms including First Data, TSYS and Paymentech.

Of course, it’s not just commerce, but could apply to mobile, healthcare, bill presentment, inventory management systems, and pretty much anywhere electronic payments are needed, according to Rod Katzfey, COO.

As they say, you pays your money and you takes your choice…

Yottaa, the Boston-based startup that offers cloud-based web performance monitoring and optimization services for small businesses, is today announcing that it has closed a $9 million series B financing round. Each of the startup’s existing investors, including General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures, re-upped for Yottaa’s series B, joined by additional undisclosed investors.

Yottaa’s new round brings its total funding to $13 million and will be primarily allocated towards product development and increasing the rapidity of its product release cycle, as Yottaa gears up to add further features and components to its suite of services that aim to optimize, protect, and monotor websites and critical web apps for organizations of all stripes, but particularly the little guys — startups and SMBs.

Certainly, this is no easy task, especially considering that Yottaa is now straddling two continents, with the majority of its near-50 employees based in China while its headquarters are to be found in Boston. Yet, in spite of this — and in spite of the rising star that is the popular and well-funded Cloudflare (nominally, a Yottaa competitor) — the startup has been growing fast.

Led by Coach Wei, the former Chairman of Nexaweb, Yottaa has attracted over 80K businesses, thanks to its affordable software that allows businesses of all sizes to accelerate their websites and critical web apps. What’s more, over the last six months, Yottaa’s Site Speed Optimizer has grown to serve over 100 million unique visitors per month, and, as of last month, five percent of web users have visited sites accelerated by the Yottaa network.

Back in February, the startup announced its Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, which leverages the startup’s patented cloud-routing technology and global infrastructure to automate realtime, front-end optimization for the websites of startups and small businesses.

And speaking of that, adding to its value proposition and giving it a more defensible position in an attractive and growing market, Yottaa has been granted two patents, one being the aforementioned cloud routing technology, with a second granted in web performance and front-end optimization. What’s more, the startup has another eight patents pending approval.

Two months ago, Yottaa added some impressive talent (and experience) to its team, including the addition of former Yahoo CTO Raymie Stata to its board of directors. At Yahoo, Stata helped develop the company’s technology strategy and drive key projects like Hadoop. Prior to joining Yahoo, the CTO founded Stata Labs, which developed content management technology relating to email, leading the company until it was acquired by Yahoo. Along with Stata, the startup also hired Morris Porter as VP of Sales and Business Development, who formerly led sales operations for Citrix Online and served as VP of sales at Intranets.com, which he helped transform into a $600 million business unit within Cisco Systems.

On top of all this, Yottaa has been continuing with what its CEO describes as an aggressive product release cycle, turning its attention to the mobile web, launching a solution that allows users to bring a speed boost to their mobile web sites. Combining its patented front-end optimization service with a global content delivery network (CDN), the mobile acceleration software aims to address the mobile performance bottlenecks that have become endemic to the delivery and execution of the code that drives mobile applications, solving these challenges in an automated fashion.

The startup’s mobile performance solution was developed in partnership with another Boston-based startup, MocoSpace, a social gaming platform that today boasts over 25 million registered users. With MocoSpace in tow, the solution has been developed to help ensure that MocoSpace and other mobile companies can offer a great users experience in both mobile apps and HTML5 games on increasingly speedy mobile devices and networks.

With its growing suite of optimization and performance solutions for websites and web apps, one could see Yottaa as increasingly looking like a small-business-oriented version of Akamai. Either way, there is plenty of talent and competition in the space, but Wei thinks that the scope of the problem is huge and is only getting bigger thanks to the skyrocketing adoption of the mobile web. One could build a big company just by focusing on a particular link in the chain, he says, like mobile.

It’s taken Yottaa a long time to get to a place where the team (and Wei) feel like they’ve developed a steady foundation on which to work. But Wei says that he believes the team has arrived and, instead of taking the lean startup, fast iteration approach to product development, the team is focusing on solving these thorny optimization issues with a bigger team that will focus on rolling out bigger products every three months or so. It may be an alternative approach given the popularity of the lean startup dynamic in Silicon Valley, but with one foot in China already, a handful of patents pending, and more products on the way, Yottaa may very well be following Cloudflare to a lofty valuation.

For more, find Yottaa at home here.

The team behind Salesforce.com’s enterprise social networking app Chatter is making a big push for real-time communication with two new features — Chatter Messenger and Chatter Screensharing.

Chatter Product Marketing Director Dave King demonstrated Messenger and Screensharing for me earlier today and, well, they look like instant messaging and screensharing, just, y’know, in Chatter. King admits that there are other enterprise IM tools out there (there’s part the TechCrunch team uses HipChat, for example), but he says it’s the “in Chatter” part that’s really important.

After all, he says that most collaboration tools are “separate and siloed from each other.” When Salesforce acquired web conferencing company Dimdim in January 2011, it could’ve just launched these capabilities as a separate tool, but it would have “proliferated these islands of collaboration.”

Instead, King says the features are built into Chatter’s “core architecture.” So if you’re discussing a potential sale with someone in Chatter, you’ll be able to know whether they’re online, and if they are, you could start talking in real-time. You could also start a group chat. That gives the conversation more context than if you’d just reached out to them on an unconnected IM client. It also means you can tap into the connections and recommended connections that you receive in Chatter.

One downside of Chatter Messenger compared to, say, Gchat: It’s limited to people within your company. However, King points out that Chatter now includes spaces to interact with external customers, so it’s conceivable Salesforce would expand Messenger similarly.

Messenger has been in pilot mode since late 2011 (the company was talking about both Messenger and Screensharing in August.) It’s planned to become generally available for free as part of Chatter in June, with a pilot of Screensharing coming in the third quarter of this year.

King says there are now 150,000 active Chatter networks.

GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has been growing like gangbusters. The site now has over 1.6 million registered developers, hosting over 2.8 million repositories on everything from jQuery and Ruby on Rails to node.js and Redis. At the outset, Github was just a side project, a tool to make developers’ lives easier (its first slogan: “Git hosting: No longer a pain in the ass.”) Github is still a boot-strapped operation, but as both its user base and its own hacker collective (now at 73 strong) have grown, there has been an increasing demand for tools that fall outside Apple’s domain.

Today, about 50 percent of GitHub’s traffic comes from Windows users, and, as a result, the startup has finally heeded demand and is now officially bringing the party to Windows, launching a desktop app to address the challenges of developing on Windows and to make it easy for Windows developers to collaborate in open-source and private repositories.

GitHub released a similarly-targeted Mac client last year, which has since seen wide adoption. However, as popular as Apple has become, the majority of enterprise development still takes place in a Windows environment. As a result, GitHub has been looking to make its platform more appealing to corporate developers and enterprise, and its new Windows app intends to do just that.

Developing in private or open-source for Windows has lagged behind in terms of adoption among developers because they’ve lacked a full toolset for project collaboration, GitHub CTO Tom Preston-Werner says, so, with its new Windows client, the startup just made it easier to get up and running using Git and GitHub on Windows machines.

GitHub for Windows is a native app that runs on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and even the pre-release Windows 8, and includes a complete installation of msysGit. The app syncs users’ code to the cloud and allows developers to clone their repositories right from the app or directly from GitHub.com with its new “Clone in Windows” button.

Of course, anyone who’s been following GitHub’s progress will notice that it took the team more than a few days to finally release its Windows client. As one might expect, the reason for this was, besides a need to tear down development hurdles for Windows developers, that the team wanted to create an app (and a toolset) they would actually use themselves. In order words, to build a Windows app by Windows developers — for Windows developers.

To do that, GitHub has been amassing a pretty serious team of developers who collectively — aside from having cache in the community — own quite a bit of experience developing on and for Windows. For starters, GitHub brought on Phil Haack and Paul Betts, both of whom left Microsoft to join GitHub to help ship the app.

Before GitHub, Haack led the development of both ASP.NET MVC and NuGet, among other things, during his four-plus year stint as a senior program manager at Microsoft. Paul Betts joined Github following a four-year run at Microsoft, where he worked on Vista, and created development tools, among other things.

GitHub for Windows also relied on help from Tim Clem, Cameron McEfee (the guy behind GitHub’s Octocats), and Adam Roben to get the startup’s new app ready for shipping.

Developing tools that are useful to Windows developers right out of the box is essential to the success of GitHub. Of course, most big companies are still hesitant to put their code in the cloud, and although the startup puts most of its focus on open source project hosting, it’s free. The company makes its money off of its private repositories, and so better tools for companies and corporate developers could mean a significant boost in revenue for GitHub.

Of course, it’s also for the love of a challenge.

For more, find GitHub’s announcement here.

How is data moved between systems? In the enterprise environment, point-to-point application interfaces are either handled with expensive and cumbersome utilities or, more likely, with custom code…and frankly, a lot of manual labor. BroadPeak Partners has a better idea. The company is today introducing its application known as K3 Server, a system that aims to disrupt the traditional enterprise interface market by making it easier for I.T. to build, and for end users to tweak, the way code is handled, transformed, reconciled, mapped and enriched as it moves in between systems.

BroadPeak is a software consultancy formed in 2006, whose founders have backgrounds in energy trading and capital markets. The idea for K3 Server came to them last year, when they saw the difficulties in how trades were being brought off an exchange and managed for one of their clients.

“It really wasn’t about retrieving trades from that exchange,” explains co-founder Vivek Pathak, “it was about moving data from one system to another system effectively, in a way that was transparent for the business users, and that had fail safe mechanisms to alert when things went wrong (as always does in big tech enterprises), and to give a way for a simple business user to manage the logic of that integration thereafter.”

And so K3 was born. But the product isn’t just meant for moving data off an exchange – the technology BroadPeak designed can be used for anything. Containing 140 open source components which are initially put to work by in-house I.T., the system can be purposed for moving and managing data between just about anything, from data stores in price repositories to electronic health records.

The system offers three main functions: transparency (allowing you to see what data goes through and what fails, so you can act upon that), mapping (field x in System A maps to field y in System B) and rules (if data meets this criteria, then take this action).

For IT, K3 Server means they no longer have to re-invent the wheel every time they need to translate data between two systems or develop a failover routine, for example. The framework allows them to call up the component instead of coding these pieces from scratch every time they’re used.

But while the main data highway, so to speak, is set up by IT, the interesting thing about K3 Server is how the data is handled afterwards. In a traditional environment every little tweak or adjustment would have users scrambling back to developers with a change request. But K3′s “Rules Manager” offers a GUI interface that lets end-users customize their own “if/then” statements for how the data needs to be enriched afterwards (add this reference, set this field, e.g.)

Pathak says that in early beta testing, the GUI was simple enough for an end-user to handle, even though this was someone for whom using an Excel spreadsheet was considered a technical feat. Plus, the company claims that using the K3 Server system instead of traditional processes results in a 50% reduction in deployment, operation and maintenance of enterprise integrations. And who doesn’t love less work, right?

Given BroadPeak’s wide client connections from their consultancy practice, they’re not worried about signing up their first users. However, others interested can sign up to beta test here. For those waiting for the public launch, it’s very close, we’re told, and the system will then be licensed on a per-server basis, renewed annually.

BroadPeak bootstrapped their efforts, spending around $500,000 on K3 Server’s development, and is not looking to immediately raise funding.

Disrupt Q&A

Judges: Adrian Aoun, Fritz Lanman, Dave Samuel & Michelle Zatlyn

MZ: What are the benefits of this?
A: Fast to deploy, really after replacing custom code. Market is around trading, primarily. Can move 30K trades per second through K3. Benefit to business: gets data to right place at right time.

AA: You know it’s not just about wrapping data, it’s about taking actions on data. How much extensibility is in the UI? And what happens when you pass the limits of that?
A: Have 65 integration patterns, plus open source components. We know that in the future we need to create UI transparency into those integration patterns.

FL: Which verticals are being targeted?
A: Trading is a great place to start, because there’s a low tolerance for losing data. Also looking at healthcare and CRM.

FL: Risks in sales process?
A: Developers are used to developing their own stuff. Wish I could say it’s been easy. Sales cycles are about 6 months.

DS: More about the team?
A: Trading biz and tech for long time. (See above)

AA: Is it easy to pitch CIOs?
A: Most boring part – mapping – is the bane of CIOs, they’re backed up all the time.

The web is a vast, mostly useless, wasteland with bits of information held in random silos scattered about. Cyfeon Solutions’ Answer Factory attempts to unite these locations in the spirit of increased productivity.

As I was told by founder Brandon Smith, its goal is to provide business users a solution that allows them to make better business decisions by pulling in data from multiple sources from across the web.

Smith was joined on the Disrupt NYC 2012 stage by Rod Taylor, EVP of sales at Cyfeon Solutions, to present Answer Factory for the first time. As they explained, Answer Factory acts as a single access point for the end user (most likely a business type) with access to big data and broad support for databases, .txt/.csv files, and popular APIs like Twitter and Google Docs — even weather data can be pulled in as need to help lay out travel plans. Answer Factory federates the data, models it, and then pushes it to the users, all in real time.

The idea is to give the business users a single access point for the various data and information sources needed for their job. Answer Factory is a Java-based software component that sits on top of the data source, which also allows for predictive answering. Say there’s a question concerning personnel. Currently, as Smith explained, a user would have to consult several sources — LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype and others — for the answer. This is where Answer Factory comes in — once the data sources have been added to the back-end, the user will have access to all the information.

It’s not a perfect solution yet. The interface isn’t the most consumer friendly — Smith and Taylor clearly state that this is an enterprise solution, targeting business professionals, but the UI could use some work nevertheless. Selling a database management tool is hard enough but selling a cumbersome database management tool is incomparably harder.

Disrupt Q&A

Q: What’s your elevator pitch?
A: We provide a way for companies to use all the data inside or outside the company at any time to help improve their decisions

Q: It sounds like answer quality is what you’re getting after. Do you have any metrics to prove that your answers are better?
A: I don’t have specific answers since just launching today, but I can talk about our skill set. A lot of our folks have enterprise app experience, and we couple that with strong data science ability, so we return some unique answers.

Q: Who are you targeting?
A: Business users, we’re not targeting technical side of the house. Think sales and operations teams.

Q: If a potential customer finds you on Google, what would their search query be?
A: What are solutions that allow me to make better decisions within my company, and specifically a way that takes advantage of internal and external data.

Q: How do you access the company’s private data? Do you copy it? Do you get on their servers?
A: We have about 20 out-of-the-box adapters that can plug into many different databases.