After kicking off our new fiscal year at the start of July, I have been very busy over the last few weeks attending several conferences (it's the conference season at our company – where all the new year goals and initiatives get communicated and set). However here is some slightly belated great news I have been wanting to communicate during the past few busy weeks:
Dayforce, a BizSpark One company in my portforlio just raised a $10M round lead by BridgeScale Partners. Dayfoce provides on-demand workforce management solutions across industries and is one of the most compelling solutions based on all the latest Microsoft technologies like Silverlight and Microsoft Dynamics.
Dayforce offers a complete workforce management solution with functionality that includes time and attendance, labor scheduling, labor forecasting, labor budgeting, labor analytics, task management, human resources and employee self-service. The company has set itself apart from competitors with its vastly superior user experience, much faster application, and by providing significantly greater business value.
Dayforce has a fantastic leadership and engineering team and continue to provide cutting edge solutions that address today and tomorrow’s enterprise needs. See more details at http://www.dayforce.com.
My Canadian counterpart David Crowe and I have been working very closely with the Dayforce leadership team and very excited and happy about their success. Dayforce was just featured at the Microsoft BizSpark One booth at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington DC from July 10th – 15th and are poised to do great things in the new fiscal year. This exciting news comes a few months after UK company Huddle, another one of my Portfolio companies successfully raised an $8M funding round from Matrix Venture Partners.
NextPage, a member of the BizSpark One program for high-potential startups, helps companies mitigate enterprise risk, increase document policy compliance, and reduce the cost of eDiscovery by enabling them to track and manage documents no matter where they are located — on hard drives, USB flash drives, servers or stored as e-mail attachments.
Below is a guest post from NextPage’s Director of Marketing, Andromeda Wuebker. Find NextPage at the BizSpark One Pavilion (#287) the Worldwide Partner Conference Expo.
It’s NextPage, reporting from the BizSpark One Pavilion at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington, DC. The BizSpark One team certainly set the tone for the week by hosting a World Cup party for the eight BizSpark One startups chosen to attend the WPC 2010. This year’s conference is themed “Infinite Possibilities” to explore Microsoft’s cloud services built on Microsoft Azure.
Walking into the convention center after the World Cup festivities I found myself spontaneously jumping up and down, having joined a chanting crowd decked out in Spain’s red and yellow jersey’s, flags waving everywhere. Day one, there’s a tangible buzz in the air.
The NextPage team is at the WPC to share and demonstrate our SharePoint “migration management” capabilities. We love helping companies that are making the move to SharePoint (hosted locally or on the cloud), do so intelligently.
As SharePoint users ourselves, we understand how critical SharePoint is to productivity and collaboration. So much so, that we’ve designed products to get companies there faster and more efficiently. Our streamlined migration path technologies can capture, classify, clean and then deploy an organization’s newly governed documents to their new home. Once in SharePoint, NextPage works in the background to track, control and monitor documents to keep them in a state of continual compliance.
We are so excited about Microsoft’s focus on innovation, which is nowhere more obvious than within the BizSpark One group. Being here at the WPC, I can’t help but feel that the possibilities are truly infinite. Little x, big O to Microsoft’s BizSpark One team and thank you for being such amazing partners!
Andromeda Wuebker
Director, Marketing
NextPage
marketing@nextpage.com
Its been a while since I had time to write …that;s because I have been busy. Its been a super exciting fiscal year with my team’s launch of the BizSpark One program this past fall. As you can imagine my colleagues and I have been heads-down trying to execute this exciting new program. However I have had so many inquiries lately as to what I have been up to; and more and more people want to find out more about BizSpark One ..so its time for the REVEAL…: What is BizSpark One? The official definition : Microsoft® BizSpark™ One, the latest extension to the Microsoft BizSpark program, accelerates the growth of selected high potential Startups through a one-to-one relationship with Microsoft and a global community of advisors, investors, and peers. BizSpark One pairs each Startup with a dedicated relationship manager at Microsoft who works with the Startup to identify its unique opportunities and build a tailored plan to promote the Startup’s visibility, expand its network of investors and mentors, expose it to business opportunities, and develop cutting edge applications
As one of eight panelist on the selection team, we have been busy trying to recruit the most innovative companies into the program. On the team I own the Enterprise and Vertical sector as well as the Dynamics product line and so I have been looking for innovative companies to incubate. Who are some of the exciting new companies I am working with?
Below are a profile of a few that span various vertical industries or are doing innovative things with our Dynamics product line: SImplifi- great new company based in North Carolina that address the area on Online Banking in the Financial Services industry. We will be powering this with Microsoft Dynamics gloStream - An exciting new company based in Michigan in the Healthcare Space. This company is building the next generation EMR solution based on Microsoft office (profiled before in an earlier blog) Dayforce – a company building Workforce Management solutions on our Dynamics Platform. Really snazzy application based on SIlverlight, Dynamics and all the goods… Artesian – a fabulous cloud/SaaS based company in the UK that’s providing Sales Intelligence around CRM Lokad – a disruptive cloud based company based in France addressing Sales Forecasting based on our WIndows Azure cloud platform Lattice Engines - .NET based Predictive Analytics on CRM - currently been integrated with Microsoft Dynamics (profiled in an earlier blog) NextPage – great company with an innovative approach to Document Management based on SharePoint technologies Acumatica – exciting new ISVs with reputable founders from Russia with a cloud/SaaS based ERP solution. The solution is all Microsoft technologies with great soon to be integration with Microsoft Dynamics. Now the dust has settled with BizSpark One – I will be providing a digest on each company over the coming weeks so you can have a nice preview to all the exciting new innovations Microsoft has across various vertical industries. Stay tuned and for folks who regularly read my blogs apologies for taking so long to write…
One of the companies I have been recently engaged with as part of our Enterprise Incubation program is NextPage, a venture backed company building Compliance and Information Risk solutions based on our SharePoint Technologies. The company is lead by seasoned veterans that have launched prior successful startups - one a successful search business acquired by Fast Search and Transfer - which was later acquired by Microsoft.
In this new venture, NextPage have built a Tracking Platform that mitigates enterprise risk, increases document policy compliance and reduces the cost of e-discovery by tracking and managing documents no matter where they are located – hard drives, USB’s, Shared Drives, SharePoint, or Email attachments. Their technology is patent pending and proactively tackles the risk by tracking, classifying, executing policy, and reporting on the compliance of all documents across the enterprise. The NextPage suite of applications is being deployed across large enterprises to manage information risk.
I have been working with Darren Lee, President and CEO over the last several weeks on Engagement plan to get NextPage entrenched into the Microsoft ecosystem. The company has recently been accepted into the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program and will also be part of the Microsoft High Potential ISV program in the next fiscal year.The company is currently involved in joint sales activities with the Microsoft Life Sciences vertical and will be expanding to other verticals in the coming year.
The company is funded by Oak Investment Partners and Dominion Ventures and are currently engaged in joint Enterprise sector engagement activities with our Enterprise Partner Group (Microsoft's global sales force).
Check out more information about this company at http://www.nextpage.com and watch out for more updates on the successes of this great new innovative company.
If you were paying attention to the US elections over the last year, you've probably heard a lot about how the healthcare system in the US needs to be modernized and transformed. With the US economy currently at an all time bottom, the Obama administration is making bets on a few industries to make the US more efficient and stimulate jobs. The healthcare industry is one place where billions of dollars (already allocated) will be spent over the next several years.
Microsoft has the right infrastructure and tools to make this transformation happen quickly. One company at the right place at the right time with the right solution is gloStream,.
gloStream provides physicians and healthcare facilities across the U.S. with electronic medical record software and practice management solutions based on the Microsoft Office suite - delivered and supported through a nationwide network of local technology partners.
gloStream applications are secure, easy-to-use and the only solutions on the market embedded with Microsoft Office. With a simple user interface, robust voice recognition technology, and single-click access to all patient data, gloStream products help doctors improve patient care by streamlining workflow and creating efficiencies in office administration.
gloStream’s deep healthcare experience and its utilization of Microsoft technology (and specific use of Microsoft Office) provide doctors and staff with a secure, reliable, scalable, customizable and affordable EMR and PM solutions. gloSuite is easy to learn and use so doctors and staff can limit training time and get up their full patient load in a matter of days, not weeks. The Obama administration is giving $44,000 to each doctor to implement an EMR and gloStream is at the right place at the right time to take advantage of this opportunity.
I have been working with CEO Mike Sappington and his team over the last few months as part of our Enterprise Incubation program and the company has just been accepted in the Microsoft Startup Accelerator program and shall be engaged with our High Potential incubation team going forward.
The company just closed on a $7.5 million series B financing round co-lead by Beringea (Michigan’s largest VC firm) and members of gloStream's executive management team. Stay tuned in the future for more news on this highly innovative company.
See more about the company at http://www.glostream.com
Microsoft Startup Accelerator Partner Lattice Engines, Inc. has supplied large B2B sales organizations with Microsoft centric solutions since its inception in 2005.The company has built a CRM Analytics application, POETSM, which has for the last couple of years helped large sales organizations achieve 5 to 15% growth in revenue by more optimal allocations of their sales people and sales and marketing investments.
POET utilizes the customer’s CRM & ERP data in conjunction with external data sources to model the buying behavior of the business customers and prospects of our customers. By developing a quantitative model of opportunity at each potential customer account, POET helps sales reps use their time more effectively in order to drive revenue.
I have been recently working with the management team of Lattice Engines to connect to our global sales force engine. The company is planning to do further integrations into the Microsoft stack around our latest technologies. This will enhance the product line and will also have the added benefit of creating the perfect partnership scenario between Lattice Engines and Microsoft
Up and coming startups and entrepreneurs should take note of this - Lattice Engines took an early bet on the Microsoft platform which has lots of documented benefits over open source.
They also aligning against the latest technologies which makes folks in the Microsoft ecosystem excited about their stuff (Microsoft is filled with techies who love that) and their heavy deep integrations into Microsoft platform products enhances the revenue potential in enterprise situations which makes the global sales force excited and will help them achieve scale.
So the formula for future entrepreneurs is as follows:
(1) Validate whether the solution you're building or interested in investing in aligns to opportunities identified in the enterprise. My organization can help you figure that out. We have access to opportunity maps which identify hotspots in the enterprise over the next 3-5 years.
(2) Align with latest Microsoft technologies. Microsoft's BizSpark program gives startups free software for the first three years with many additional benefits - which takes away the standard current argument as to why startups initially go to open source - Cost of software
(3) Get a few customer wins - preferably with large enterprises which validates the offering.
(4) Use the Microsoft Enterprise Incubation program to achieve scale and visibility.
For more insight into how to connect to the ecosystem - see my prior blog here.
During my entire tenure at Microsoft, the most difficult problem for young companies has been connecting to the Microsoft ecosystem - more specifically our global sales force. We see this year after year in satisfaction surveys our organization does with startups.
The problem is a really complex one. In multinational conglomerates like IBM and Microsoft, its quite the norm for organizations not to be talking to each other. In the case of Microsoft, there are two organizations startups will interact with in the process of trying to get to the enterprise market place: Developer and Platform Evangelism Organization (DPE) - (my parent organization chartered with technology adoption) and the Enterprise Partner Group (EPG) - our global sales organization that has folks working with enterprises of all sizes around the world.
Having worked in the ISV space at Microsoft over the last 5+ years - I became aware of all the major issues and gaps in the current Microsoft ISV infrastructure which pose a barrier for startups. My experience over the last several years in trying to help startups make the required connections for success has put me in a unique position of understanding exactly what needs to be fixed. This is the task I chose to undertake over the last 2 years in the Emerging Business team.
As you can imagine - the process has been a long one. The key has been to get both business units (DPE and EPG) to realize that they have a common goal even though their objectives are different. The DPE organization had to realize that all their technology adoption efforts is really aimed at getting successful ISV scenarios (which implies companies eventually successful in the marketplace). The EPG organization based on their goals are very tactical and were traditionally interested only in situations that could bring revenue NOW. However its to that organization's best interest to also have a longer term view and put in place a process to nurture the next generation companies.
With a little bit of tenacity, I've gotten both organizations to focus - the EPG organization now realizes the startup ecosystem is where future revenue opportunities are going to come from in the next 3-5 years; and our DPE organization has realized it must go through the motions on making sure it provides the necessary infrastructure to make sure startups get on the latest technology quickly and are set up for future success in the marketplace.
We now have a well baked program which should assist strategic ISVs have a more predictable path through the ecosystem. I have defined a three stage process for this to happen:
(1) Defining Opportunities for ISVs in the Enterprise - the EPG organization has been investing resources over the last couple of years to determine the highest value gaps and opportunities that exist across various enterprise sectors. Our organization has collaborated with EPG in compiling these into "Enteprise Opportunity Maps" which are publicly available to ISVs, entrepreneurs, VCs and startups. If you're an entrepreneur wondering what the next opportunities are in the enterprise, you should check out these maps. Our organization will be making these available in the coming weeks and months.
(2) Validation with our Global Sales Force - once a company has begun to get some wins in the Enterprise, its best at this stage to find out what else they need to do to enhance their value proposition on the Microsoft stack. Each go-to market (GTM) segment identified by our EPG organization have global owners. My organization has been working collaboratively with these global leaders to advise strategic companies how to enhance their value proposition to make our field force excited. In many instances, this involves further integrations of our latest technologies to enhance the product line and upgrading any legacy technologies to the latest.
(3) Building an Engagement Plan - If there is consensus that the ISV solution represents a significant opportunity, the Enterprise Partner Group with their heavy footprint in enterprises can be a great avenue for scale and can assist startups go to market faster. In this stage of the process ,my organization works with the startup to put together a comprehensive engagement plan comprising of three components:
- A Business Development component - where we assess key programs the startup must align with to get traction in the ecosystem with our sales force
- A Technology Alignment \Development Component - where we spell out key enhancements to improve the product line. The plan typically includes timelines for adopting key technologies to enhance the value proposition
- A Sales Activation Component - commitments from the Enterprise Partner Group to expose the ISV solution to the worldwide marketplace
If a compelling plan is put in place, our organization will nominate the startup into our Accelerator program, where they will receive resources (and sometimes funding) to fast track the execution.
During the course of this past fiscal year, I took a number of startups through this process and they are now well on their way to success in the ecosystem. I will profile some of these great companies in the next few blogs.
Another belated conference digest (delayed due to me being down in the trenches with the Enterprise Incubation program I manage) :
A few weeks back I attended another great conference – the Under the Radar Cloud Summit in Mountain View, CA.
There’s been so much buzz about the Cloud in recent months with big players like Microsoft making a push into this new computing paradigm with its Azure Cloud platform, services and offerings.
Well, the Under the Radar organizers pulled in great set of companies from across the world (Spain, Russia to the United States). The event was packed – lots of VCs in attendance who are looking for the next big bets in investments.
A majority of the startups at the conference where infrastructure play companies in many areas like data storage and protection, managing cloud servers and virtualization.
Conference Logistics – Companies had to do an “elevator pitch” for a few minutes about their solution and why it was compelling. One of the things I loved about the format of this event was that they had a panel of industry experts and VCs who asked these companies tough questions about key competitors in the spaces, how companies plan to go to market and make money etc. There was also great audience interaction – each company was allowed to take a few questions from the audience – which was great. This was one key feature that I think was missing from the Finovate event ( a conference with a similar format that I just reviewed). The Finovate conference however had more in depth presentations from the companies and demos – which was missing from this event. My ideal conference would be a combination of the two – In depth presentations and demos(missing from Under the Radar), audience interaction and a panel of experts ( missing from Finovate but a great feature at the Under the Radar Cloud event).
Here are highlights of some of the startups that presented:
Abiquo - A startup based in Barcelona, Spain that are offering an open source cloud computing platform for managing virtual data centers. They are targeting enterprises who want to reduce costs by allowing technology like this to manage their complex inventory of information systems from one platform (networks, Apps, physical servers etc)
Cloud Kick – based in San Jose, CA. This company has a systems to manage Cloud Servers such as Amazon’s EC2.
The company has a monitoring solution to support production systems in the cloud as well as the ability to monitor the health of the servers and tools to keep information about what each server is doing. This company launched in March and in 3 months say they have gotten 1200 registered users and 6000 registered servers
Eucalyptus – Based in Santa Barbara, CA is a company that allows IT organizations to build and maintain on premise private and hybrid clouds. Their platform is an open source cloud infrastructure that supports multiple cloud APIs and virtualization platforms. The founder Rich Wolski who presented the solution is a Computer Science professor at the University of CA, Santa Barbara and the Eucalyptus solution originated from his research group.
He says he set out to build the “Linux of cloud computing” and the company is currently raising an Angel round of funding
Zimory – based in Berlin, Germany. Carsten Rudolph who manages the Microsoft Emerging Business ecosystem in Germany had asked me to look out for them at the conference. Their technology is aiming at enabling enterprises to make efficient use of their infrastructure resources – utilizing heterogeneous virtual servers across one- or -many data centers to build an “internal computing cloud”. This is a very interesting concept and definitely a company to watch. The cost savings and benefits in my opinion are obvious if this takes off – the big huddle this company is likely to face is convincing CIOs of large enterprises to put their enterprise data centers in
the cloud. I can see that happening with smaller companies looking to save costs and not wanting to worry about managing all their infrastructure with the added benefit of accessing their stuff anywhere – however in the immediate future I think this will be an uphill sell for large enterprises.
Twillo – San Francisco based company which hosts a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud. The company wants to allow web programmers to integrate real time phone calls into their apps. The company says its IP is patent pending and its
easy to use APIs should allow programmers to be able to build advanced voice communications applications that solve business problems. The founder used to be a Product Manager for Amazon’s web services division and also was the founding CTO of Stubhub, a $350M ticket exchange acquired by eBay in 2007.
Overall a great event, very well organized and a great pool of companies. Kudos to the Under the Radar organizers as they pulled of yet another insightful and successful event.
A couple of weeks back I attended the Finovate Startup conference in San Francisco, which seems to be the premier event for new Financial Services innovations in the United States. There were a total of 55 startups presenting and showing demos at the conference from across the United States.
Conference Logistics – the format of this conference is similar to DEMO – each company gave a 5-7min pitch about their solution and tried to articulate what makes them unique and interesting. The only drawback is that there was no audience interaction and there was no panel to ask burning questions like how companies plan to go-to-market etc. However a great event overall with a wide spectrum of companies.
Key Insights – The entire Financial Services Industry is going through a transformation. I attended this event with colleague Victor Dossey, Strategist for the WW Financial Services Industry. What we saw were lots of startups with online or cloud type solutions with solutions which are really cannibalizing the main businesses of large banks and financial institutions as well as startups targeting consumers with online options to managepersonal finances ( where players like Intuit and Microsoft currently play).
There were also lots of Mobile Banking vendors – however majority of them have targeted the iPhone platform.
I only saw one with a Windows Mobile application – although all the companies I talked to expressed interest in building one for Windows Mobile. However it was clear this platform was not their main focus.
Here are a few interesting companies :
Mint.com – Mint.Com is a online personal finance service. I saw this company about a year back when they were just starting out. The company is now providing money management to over a million users and its services are free. I believe the company is targeting revenue through advertising and makes a fee for consumers adopting third party products and services. The company has some great investors – Benchmark Capital , Shasha Ventures and First Round Capital and has received great press coverage over the last year from Time Magazin, PC World, Kiplinger and has received two Webby awards.
MoBank – easy to use secure money management and mobile commerce application for the Smartphone.
Application looked great on the iPhone. This company was the Red Herring 2008 winner and are based in the
UK and US. Platform in non-Microsoft\heterogeneous. Their investors are the University of Oxford and 15
private seed investors and are located in Menlo Park and the UK
ZimpleMoney – SaaS company that aims to enable individuals, businesses, non profits administer financial agreements in a hosted, secure, private environment. Agreements include loans, leases, rents, billing, investments, contract collections and dedicated deposit plans, They’ve got apps like a Free Loan Tracker, Family and Friends Loan manager and a billing system. They are based in Costa Mesa California and have private investors.
Wesabe – based in San Francisco, this company has web based software to help consumers understand and manage their money. They’ve got a platform, Springboard consisting of personal finance management tools to financial institutions and their customers and also introduces social networking component with social personal finance community on the web. The company is funded by Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures and have raised about $5.7M in funding
SmartHippo.com – A social networking financial services company. This company has a platform aimed at empowering communities to save money when shopping for rates on financial products and services. This company is one of a growing list of companies giving consumers comparative shopping information when searching for financial services products. They list ING Direct and Fifth Third Bank as their current customers and are based
in San Francisco and Montreal , Canada.
Prosper – based in San Francisco, CA – allows consumers to bid on loans using their online auctioning platform. Auctioning and P2P lending seems to be another growing trend – I profiled another company MoneyAisle who are in the same
space but is more dynamic and interactive. Consumers create loan listings and set the maximum rate they are willing to pay and bid on loan listings they select. Lenders can bid down the interest rates and at the end of the auction, Prosper combines the bids with the lowest rates into one loan to the borrower and handles all on-going loan administration tasks. They unveiled some new product offerings at the conference and should be interesting to watch how they perform. They’ve got some high profile investors – Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital and Fidelity Ventures are among the investors.
As promised I will begin to profile some of the most interesting companies I met at the CTIA conference. One such is a great new San Diego startup called SmartTouch who are poised to take SMS to a whole new level with the introduction of their SMS Browser . I met the VP of Business Development at the conference who showed me a demo of this exciting new product.
The SmartTouch browser gives mobile users rich graphical access to their favorite web content and services entirely through SMS. There could be a huge market for this company as they target user without a data plan - which still happen to be the majority of all mobile phone users. In addition, given that no one has yet delivered a great mobile browser, there is also a potential to lure millions of consumers who are currently dissatisfied with their mobile browsing experience to their gateway to goods and services via their very easy to use SMS Browser.
The product I saw offers a seamless and graphical experience that shortcuts the inefficiencies of mobile web browsing. VP of Business Development Craig Braun says they've "wrapped shortcodes, keywords and SMS content in an interactive, intuitive, UI even our Moms can use" and based on what I saw this is indeed true.
Craig says the company's focus is on mobile users who want to do something specific, and do it quickly. Users who don’t want the whole web, but want to do simple things like updating Facebook, checking their account balance, ordering pizza, viewing their weather forecast, making purchases on Amazon etc. This of course happens to be majority of mobile phone users. Craig Braun says " SmartTouch is targeting mobile’s forgotten majority - those users without a data plan, or for people who are unsatisfied with the mobile browsing experience, SmartTouch is their shortcut to getting things done".
SmartTouch is currently enrolled in the Microsoft BizSpark program and was recently selected as "Startup Company of the Day" in February 2009
SmartTouch is based in San Diego, CA. You can find out more details about this company at http://www.smarttouchmobileinc.com/
Company Facts: John McDonough, CEO; Prashant Kantak, Strategic advisor; Craig Braun, Business development; Dave Change, Engineering lead | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /v2/Blogs/rodney_bowen-wright/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 255 | | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /v2/Blogs/rodney_bowen-wright/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 255 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /v2/Blogs/rodney_bowen-wright/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 256 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /v2/Blogs/rodney_bowen-wright/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 256 |
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Featured Startup
The BizSpark startup of the day is crowdzone (mobiTeris), based in the US. Below you will find an interview with Murgesh Navar, CEO of mobiTeris. All the best to them and congratulations for being the startup of the day!
Read more...
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