BlueStacks is hoping to take the clear early consumer interest in a home gaming console built with mobile technologies and make that into big business, and today it’s announcing what could become a huge advantage for its GamePop console over other similar offerings. GamePop will support iPhone and iPad apps at launch, in addition to Android titles, making the first such device to tap into Apple’s rich app ecosystem.

As part of this expansion, GamePop is also announcing its first partner on the iOS side today: Subatomic Studios. Subatomic is the studio behind Fieldrunners, the tower defense game that was one of the iPhone’s first true defining hits. Fieldrunners has since expanded to a number of different platforms, including the PlayStation Store, Android and more, but BlueStacks CEO Rosen Sharma explained in an interview that in the case where a title is available on both Android and iOS, GamePop will offer the version which is considered the flagship for the title.

And while Subatomic is just the first announced partner bringing iOS software to the GamePop, there are many more partnerships in the works And all of the iOS titles will be included free with the cost of the $6.99 per month subscription, alongside Android titles, to make up the 500 titles BlueStacks is aiming to provide to subscribers as part of their package. Like with Android titles, BlueStacks will be looking to procure high-quality iOS games, and Sharma points to Fieldrunners as a perfect example, since it’s a $2.99 game at regular price when purchased through the App Store. Any iOS titles will also be able to bring in-app purchases to the GamePop, though they’ll be handled through one of leading third-party in-app purchase API providers on Android rather than through Apple.

To get iOS games running on the GamePop, the use a new proprietary technology pioneered by BlueStacks called “Looking Glass,” which is somewhat similar to the type of virtualization that the company does when bringing Android titles to Windows 8, for instance, but with some crucial differences.. But Rosen also notes that this isn’t something that’s using Apple APIs or is in any way in danger of running afoul of that company’s rules regarding iOS software.

“From a technology perspective, it uses virtualitzation, but it’s a different kind of virtualization than what we use for example for our PC products,” he said. “This is more API-level virtualization. We don’t use any of Apple’s bits – the developer just gives us the app and we make sure that it’ll run on GamePop.”

Nor does GamePop’s method of bringing mobile software designed for Apple devices result in any kind of sacrifices when it comes to performance or quality of experience. Since the virtualization happens at a very basic level, the GamePop is essentially doing the same heavy lifting as the iPhone or iPad hardware, but doesn’t need to do any additional work, the way it would if it were virtualizing in the same way that Parallels does with Windows on an OS X computer, for instance.

“In iOS the app makes a call and says, for example, ‘draw a menu for me,’ and in GamePop the app would make the same call and we’d be drawing the menu for them,” he said. “At this point, iOS and Android are so similar from an API perspective that it’s feasible to do this. So there’s no difference in terms of performance, and in fact developers on iOS follow such good guidelines that getting them on GamePop is relatively straightforward.”

The change to GamePop not only gives it access to a broader library of software from which to choose its core group of titles, but it also means that GamePop isn’t just another Android-based home gaming console in the tradition of OUYA and GameStick. Now, it’s a different beast entirely, and one with a crucial competitive advantage over and above its subscription-based revenue model. GamePop is currently on sale for the introductory price of ‘free’ through June, with the $6.99 per month subscription, and will retail for $129 after that.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

VMware is exiting the collaboration market with the sale of SlideRocket to Clearslide, which will use the rich slide creation too to buttress its service that offers sales people presentation capabilities to better engage with customers.

Clearslide, a fast growing startup with $39 million in funding, will integrate the cloud-based online presentation application into its own service. SldieRocket is known for its  rich features that help people  produces slideshows that rival PowerPoint. At the time of SlideRocket’s acquisition, more than 20,000 customers and 300,000 users leveraged the service to more effectively build, deliver and share presentations

The majority of the SlideRocket team will go to Clearslide, which now has 150 employees and plans to have about 250 by the end of the year. The company has  made a mark  for itself through its capability for sales people to easily upload their sales collateral to the engagement platform. Sales teams edit and share information in a collaborative manner, designed for the sales process.

Clearslide offers analytics that show how the presentation was accepted by customers. That data can then be used to determine what sales presentations are more effective than others. It also serves as a coaching tool to improve a sales person’s effectiveness.

The deal was completed last week. Acquisition details were not disclosed.

The sale represents a changing shift in focus for VMware, the virtualization giant that in 2011 showed a deep interest in entering the collaboration market. But soon after the acquisition, there came the realization that VMware’s best opportunity was still in core infrastructure, said Chuck Dietrich, GM and VP at VMware, who served as CEO for the company. Dietrich was one of the original people hired when SlideRocket launched in 2009. That became evident in VMware’s focus on its attention in building a cloud software suite that banked on making its virtualization technology more suited to elastic infrastructures. Today, VMware’s core message is about the “software defined data cennter,” a concept that has captured significant attention from providers in the software, storage and networking market. The shift represents a deeper market realization that data loads are intensifying and the need is apparent to build out Internet scale infrastructures to manage the workloads.

In turn, the company  made the decision to scale back its plans for SlideRocket. As part of that decision, VMware kept SlideRocket autonomous, which Dietrich said has helped the company immensely. It continued to grow and put it in a position to be sold to Clearslide, where it will be fully utilized.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

EMC Chief Strategist Paul Maritz will lead a new platform group that will combine VMware’s Cloud Foundry, SpringSource, and Gemstone with EMC’s big data platform - Greenplum.

According to sources close to the company, EMC will announce the news next week. It’s unclear whether other groups will be affected by the move. As part of the new group, about 1,000 people will move from VMware to work under Maritz who left VMware as CEO this past summer.

GigaOm first posted on the news earlier this week. Hat tip to Barb Darrow for getting to the news.

EMC declined to comment for this story. VMware executives did not respond to requests for comment.

When Maritz left VMware, I wrote that he would be leading a potential spin out of a group that would include Cloud Foundry. Some scoffed at this, but now things are starting to makes sense. This is a smart move.

Cloud Foundry is the much-heralded platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that VMware launched in 2011 as an open project. It gained a fast following and has since served as the basis for its use as a service to build out platforms on public or enterprise data infrastructures. Partners include AppFog and Tier3. SpringSource is the Java framework that VMware acquired in 2009. It has gone largely underutilized under VMware. Gemstone is the distributed in-memory data cache solution that has been doing well but mostly because the group had its own customer base before moving inside to VMware. On the EMC side of the fence, Greenplum is the big data analytics platform that EMC acquired in 2010. It has since shown strong growth, as big data is the focus at EMC.

A source said to me at AWS re:Invent this week that VMware is more of a management systems company these days. Its core service is increasingly as a company that manages data centers with an emphasis on using its number one spot in the virtualization market. Cloud Foundry fits far better with SpringSource and Gemstone at EMC than at VMware.

Under Maritz, there will be the freedom to create a compelling package that bridges a platform play with a Java framework and a data-driven underpinning with Greenplum. It’s also great for Maritz, who is an innovator at heart. He can lead this new group with the freedom to look beyond and perhaps even partner with Amazon Web Services.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Data storage company Scale Computing, which provides clustered storage infrastructure for small and medium-sized companies, has closed a $12 million Series D funding round, led by Heron Capital Venture Fund. Reservoir Venture Partners also contributed to this round as a new investor, joining existing investors — including: Allos Ventures, CID Equity Capital, Spring Mill Venture Fund, Northgate Capital, Benchmark Capital Partners and Scale Venture Partners.

Scale said it will use the new funding to accelerate growth of its HC³ datacenter-in-a-box product — which combines servers, storage, and virtualization in one fully integrated, scalable appliance. It will also use the new funds for continued product development and the launch of a new partner program later this year. HC³ only launched in late August but it accounted for half of Scale’s Q3 sales, and the company said it is already approaching 100 HC³ deployments.

“There is a huge opportunity unfolding for us here in the midmarket with over one million companies in the US looking to virtualize for the first time,” said Jeff Ready, CEO of Scale Computing in a statement. Scale says its datacenter-in-a-box stands out from competitor products by EMC and VMware by doing away with ongoing licensing fees for the hypervisor. It also makes use of open source technologies and simplifies support. Scale claims its system results in significant reductions in costs and complexity for mid-tier companies.

“Scale Computing is at the forefront of virtualization hyperconvergence,” noted Bill Gurley, partner at Benchmark Capital, in a statement. “Scale is able to remove both the complexity and cost of CPU/storage virtualization with their HC³ product. The hypervisor isn’t merely commoditized — it elegantly disappears inside the intuitively simple interface.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Big Switch, one of the hottest startups in the fast-growing software defined networking (SDN) market, has named Jason Matlof as its new vice president of marketing after he left Battery Ventures as a partner in September.

The move is noteworthy, because it illustrates how fast the new networking space is emerging, as data becomes ever more difficult to manage on traditional physical infrastructure. SDN technology helps to facilitate the virtualization of the network. The dream is that the network can be anywhere. In more practical terms it means that customers can program their networks to their needs. Big Switch makes the claim that it can decrease networking complexity and thus save money on capital and operational expenses.

Big Switch is getting a lot of attention now that Nicira, its biggest competitor, sold to VMware for $1.26 billion. The move to hire Matlof, who has a deep background in networking, shows that the company is beefing up its management team with the potential of getting gobbled up by a VMware competitor.

A competitor may likely be one of the major companies pushing converged infrastructure. That’s not likely going to be Oracle but more so a company like IBM, which Brad Casemore points out on his excellent blog, “Twilight of the Nerds”:

One company I had envisioned as a potential (though less likely) acquirer of Nicira was IBM, which already has a vSwitch. IBM might now settle for the SDN-controller technology available from Big Switch Networks. The two have been working together on IBM’s Open Data Center Interoperable Network (ODIN), and Big Switch’s technology fits well with IBM’s PureSystems and its top-down model of having application workloads command and control  virtualized infrastructure. As the second network-virtualization domino to fall, Big Switch likely will go for a lower price than did Nicira.

It’s the price tag that becomes the issue here. VMware paid a lot of money for Nicrira, inflating values for companies across the space. Casemore believes Big Switch would go for less than Nicira.

We’ll see what happens, but with Matlof on the team I’d expect there is a higher likelihood that Big Switch is looking at what its exit might be.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the space of a little over a month, VMWare is making yet another acquisition to strengthen its position in cloud management: it is buying cloud log analytics platform Log Insight from its current owner Pattern Insight, the data management and search platform company. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As part of the deal, the team working on Log Insight will transfer to VMWare, as will the technology underlying the product, Pattern Insight said in a statement.

VMWare made its name in the virtualization market, and this acquisition underscores how it is looking to carve out a similar role in managing the enterprise cloud space. Competitors in that area include Rackspace, HP, IBM and Dell. Other acquisitions that VMWare has made in the same area include DynamicOps and Nicira in July.

The growing popularity of cloud-based computing systems has had a knock-on effect in terms of how much data gets generated in the process. Products like Log Insight help companies monitor that data for problems in their data centers and in cloud environments. Current customers include Intel, Qualcomm, Tellabs and Motorola.

Log Insight was one of two core products at Pattern Insight, and the sale will allow the company to focus more on the other product, Code Assurance, which “identifies and removes all ‘known’ (previously fixed) defects in source code before it is released.”

A blog post from Spiros Xanthos, CEO & co-founder of Pattern Insight, describes Log Insight as “the culmination of our efforts aiming at management and real time operational analytics for IT data.”

He adds that he thinks the acquisition will help Log Insight grow into an even bigger company that could work not only in cloud but also virtualization environments. “VMware is ideally positioned in the middle of two of the most important shifts in IT in the recent years, virtualization and Cloud Computing,” he notes. “It therefore provides the perfect home for Log Insight and the team to continue innovating.”

Additional reporting, Alex Williams

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As expected, EMC shuffled the deck today. It named COO Pat Gelsinger as the new VMware CEO, replacing Paul Maritz who has moved into a new role as EMC’s chief strategist.

Yesterday I reported that Maritz was out as VMware’s CEO and was being considered as a replacement for EMC CEO Joe Tucci, who is expected to retire by the end of next year. We also reported Maritz is a candidate to lead Cloud Foundry, the successful open-source platform as a service (PaaS) that has the potential to become a core part of EMC’s core cloud offering.  It has been reported that Cloud Foundry will be spun out as a subsidiary of EMC. VMware is a subsidiary of EMC.

Maritz will remain on VMware’s board of directors. Gelsinger’s new job takes effect September 1.

EMC and VMware need a stronger cloud strategy. At present, it’s missing pieces such as a dedicated infrastructure environment. Its most recent acquisition of DynamicOps helps to some degree. VMware is the leader in the virtualization space but it needs a deeper play that goes beyond licensing virtual machines. DynamicOps has established itself by helping its customers turn their existing IT infrastructure into more elastic environments that essentially mimic the public clouds of the world.

But Cloud Foundry is the jewel.

It would say a lot if Maritz led Cloud Foundry but it is unlikely. With him as EMC’s CEO, it’s a good thing, too. Maritz is a technologist who has so far been a supporter for Open Stack. With him gone, it could be trouble for the nascent PaaS service.

But maybe not. EMC has shown it sees where the market is going. The leading storage company recently acquired XtremIO to boost its flash play, which is increasingly popular for big data environments. Data centers are starting to replace mechanical spinning disks systems with SSDs due to their superior speed.

But EMC is more about convergence than distributed architectures. Cloud Foundry’s significance is in how it can fit into an open cloud environment such as OpenStack. EMC big play is in converging its networking, storage and compute into one machine. That’s great for data center consolidation but it is not an environment that developers flock to. And it’s hardly cloud.

Cloud Foundry has attracted developers. To continue doing so, it needs Maritz to stay at EMC. He serves as a leader who is also deeply respected in and outside the company. Without him, it would be trouble. For now though, it’s steady as it goes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Andreessen Horowitz is investing an eye-popping $100 million into GitHub, the ever popular repository for developers to post code and collaborate.

It’s GitHub’s first infusion of venture capital.Co- founder Tom Preston Warner said the round will go to developing GitHub Enterprise, a server side version of GitHub.com.

Since its debut in 2008, GitHub has become an astonishingly popular Web destination, emerging as the social network for developers.

Warner said a search has been underway for a venture round. Andreessen Horowitz was just the right fit. In our interview today, Warner specifically referred to a post written by Marc Andreessen in the pages of the Wall Street Journal titled: Why Software is Eating the World. Andreessen argues that entire industries are getting eaten up by software. From movies to agriculture to national defense, the word is getting eaten by technology companies, most of which are from San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.

“These guys fit as what we see as a future vision for GitHub,” Warner said.

As part of the deak, GitHub will bring on Andreessen Horowitz Partner Peter Levine as a board member. Levine was the founder of XenSource, the virtualization technology company acquired by Citrix in 2007. Levine brings intimate knowledge of the role virtualization plays in the enterprise. That’s a critical factor, considering the importance that virtualization plays in corporate enterprise environments.

In a blog post, Levine says the team at GitHub rise comes through its focus on people not repositories:

They took an old technology category and turned it on its head. Source Code Management (SCM) is the second most fundamental tool for a programmer after compiler and development tools. It stores, versions and branches source code being developed by teams of programmers. At scale, these systems become highly complex and often difficult to manage. In addition, historically SCMs have been anti-social. The No. 1 conversation they generate is referred to as: “Who broke the build?” GitHub solves these two problems and dramatically expands the category by changing the old model in two important ways:
Rather than forcing every development team in the world to deploy their own SCM, GitHub runs one big SCM in the cloud and the management issues vanish.

GitHub organizes projects around people rather than code.

Warner said his team built GitHub.com. Now it’s time to build a vibrant on-premise technology that developers can easily use to deploy code and collaborate with other developers. GitHub will integrate with any open virtualization format (OVF). According to Wikipedia, OVF is “an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of software to be run in virtual machines.”

GitHub’s package system will make it easy for developers to upgrade from current version up to latest version of the software. Upgrades will be made weekly and quarterly.

“We are disrupting how software is written in the enterprise,” Warner said. He said he sees his competitors as IBM Rational software, Perforce and Clearcase.

With such a whopping round, there has to be more to this than just building an enterprise technology.  Listening to Warner,  he talk about GitHub Everywhere, a concept that permeates into all aspects of the business. It’s clear the company wants to build an organization with a great culture and technology that can be used universally in an enjoyable and collaborative way.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ask a VC, the TCTV show where you ask the questions, is back after a long hiatus and we’re kicking things off with two partners this week from Spark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz!

If you’ve got questions about what it’s like to shift from being an entrepreneur to being a venture capitalist, both our interviewees can actually tell you.

So how does this show work? You ask questions either in the comments or at askaVC(at)TechCrunch(dot)com and we’ll put them forward to our VC guests.

So for our first taping, we have Nabeel Hyatt, who just joined Spark Capital in February after serving as a general manager at Zynga (pictured at the right). He sold his company Conduit Labs to the social gaming giant and that deal set the groundwork for Zynga’s Boston studio.

Before that, he was a vice president of product at the MIT Media Lab spinoff Ambient Devices, which embedded information from the web into everyday objects like light bulbs, mirrors, refrigerators, and umbrellas to make the physical environment an interface to digital media.

If you’ve got questions about what the “Zynga mafia” will end up being like, he’s probably the one to ask.

Then later this week we have Peter Levine, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who is extremely seasoned at company building (pictured at the top). Not only does he teach at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and do mountain climbing, he has also served as CEO of XenSource, a provider of open source virtualization solutions that was acquired by Citrix Systems. He then became the senior vice president and general manager of Citrix’s data center and cloud division.

He’s also actually a two-time venture capitalist. Before XenSource, he was a managing director at Mayfield. And then, before that, he was at Veritas Software where he started as an engineer when the company had just a few people. By the time he left 11 years later, the company was doing $1.5 billion in revenue, had nearly 6,000 people and he was one of three executive vice presidents, responsible for sales to hardware manufacturers, marketing, mergers and acquisitions and the Veritas venture fund. Like his firm’s other partners, he also writes regularly and has some good advice on how to run board meetings and evaluate sales deals here.

Levine has recently gotten the firm into deals like Actifio, the virtualization data management software maker that raised $33.5 million in December. So if you have questions about Andreessen’s enterprise strategy or the firm’s unique approach, he’s the one to ask.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The enterprise is moving towards simplicity, and this extends to the data center. Nicira, a stealthy virtualization startup with backing from big-name investors, is pulling the curtains back on its disruptive platform that hopes to change the way server and storage virtualization is done. And Nicira is revealing that it has raised with $50 million in funding to date from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates, as well as individual investors including VMware co-founder Diane Greene and Benchmark Capital cofounder Andy Rachleff.

Nicira’s NVP is a software-based system that creates a distributed virtual network infrastructure in cloud data centers that is completely decoupled and independent from physical network hardware. Nicira says that it is shifting the intelligence and control of the network away from hardware and into software, simplifying the virtualization process.

NVP’s platform forms a thin software layer that treats the physical network as an IP backplane. This approach allows the creation of virtual networks that have the same properties and services as physical networks, such as security and QoS policies, L2 reachability, and higher-level service capabilities.

According to the company, organizations can provision and deploy services in minutes rather than weeks or months, and you don’t need to change any of your existing hardware or software infrastructure. All enterprises need is IP connectivity.

Nicira says that virtualized data centers face limits to what applications they can support and where the workloads can be placed. These limitations result in restricted workload mobility, and leave data centers under utilized.

Stephen Mullaney, Chief Executive Officer of Nicira, explained to us that the network hasn’t evolved for the cloud-based data center, and the existing solutions are inflexible and complex. “The solution is to virtualize and create virtual networks that are decoupled from physical networks. The network is transitioning from hardware to software just like every other business. Software is eating the world,” he says.

The NVP platform is compatible with any data center network hardware. It can be deployed on any existing network, and it allows for future changes to the network hardware without disruption to the operations of the virtual network platform. The software is delivered through a usage-based, monthly subscription-pricing model, which scales per virtual network port. Customers only pay for what they use, and pricing scales accordingly. The company, which has nabbed a number of executives from Cisco, already counts AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace as customers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch