IT Jobs and Careers News

Solera Networks just announced that it has raised $20 million in Series D funding from Intel Capital (the chip-maker’s investment arm) and others.

The company says its DeepSee Platform can index and classify all network traffic, giving companies a comprehensive picture of their network security in real-time, either for spotting risks before a security breach or responding quickly once a breach has occurred. Both domestic and international sales supposedly grew more than 100 percent last year.

Previous investors Allegis Capital, Signal Peak Ventures, and Trident Capital also participated in the new round. Solera says it will use the money to expand global sales, marketing, and product development. It also notes that Intel’s expertise should help with future product improvements.

“With increasingly large amounts of data crossing corporate networks, organizations must balance advanced threat prevention with an aggressive and proactive response system to be fully prepared when an inevitable breach occurs,” said Intel Capital Investment Director Sean Cunningham in the funding press release. “We see companies continuing to realize that real-time, intelligent incident response is now an essential component of their security strategy. Solera Networks delivers a scalable, high-performance solution that addresses these challenges and is the only independent platform capable of broad integration.”

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Some 15 companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal plan to jointly work on a standard for blocking phishing e-mails by verifying that they come from legitimate companies. It seems obvious that trusted, legitimate companies could come together to do this, but it’s only started happening in the last 18 months.

DMARC.org – or the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance – is a new white-list system will be available for use across the Internet.

The other companies in the DMARC working group are AOL, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, American Greetings, LinkedIn, and e-mail security providers Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path, and Trusted Domain Project.

The move follows an announcement in November that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Agari were authenticating emails from Facebook, YouSendIt, and other e-commerce companies and social networks.

DMARC said the anti-phishing initiative has actually been going on for the last 18 months.

According to Google, about 15 percent of all e-mail comes from members of DMARC, but by published their DMARC records, these records can not be domain spoofed. This makes the anti-phising group much more effective at stopping criminal gangs from using phasing to dupe unsuspecting users.

DMARC.org plans to submit the DMARC specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardisation.

So perhaps we’ll start to see the ending of phishing once and for all.

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Today’s young workers are extremely tech-savvy, and the technology they’ll
have access to is a major consideration for many as they join the workforce.
Many are used to having 24/7 access to email and the Internet on their
smartphones or tablets. And with extensive knowledge of the Internet and its
many services, more are using Web-based applications for many of the solutions
they use on a daily basis. As an employer, making sure you have the right
technology on hand to both appeal to and keep your younger workers happy is an
important consideration when plotting out your technology roadmap.

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Keeping workers helps reduce training costs over time, and it could also help
you sell your CEO on some product purchases. You know that cloud solution you’re
dying to implement? Well, tell the CEO about your young workforce being able to
take advantage of it to work extra hours, and it might just happen. Want to
bring iPads to the office? Tell the top executive that it might just improve
productivity. As your company tries to find an edge in a job market filled with
educated Millennials, technology could very well be the differentiating factor
that helps you attract and retain a young workforce.

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Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

Images are courtesy of Jason Hwang, M.D., M.B.A.  Executive Director, Healthcare of the Innosight Institute and co-author of The Innovator’s Prescription.

In the New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande outlined how, at the turn of the 20th century, more than forty per cent of household income went to paying for food and food production consumed nearly half the workforce. Starting in Texas, a wide array of new methods of food production were tested. Long story short, food now accounts for 8% of household budgets and 2% of the workforce. As a wide array of small innovations ultimately led to the transformation of farming, so too is a rapidly building wave of innovative new care and payment models leading to similar breakthroughs in healthcare. I call this Nimble Medicine.

Traditionally, attempting a new care or payment model meant long planning and development cycles. The cost and complexity of testing new models prevented many from being tried. Even today, the leading HealthIT vendor is known to charge $100 million and up for its software. Amazingly, they require three months of training before they even let people use the software.  This is a vestige of the “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement particularly given that healthcare is a supply-driven market (e.g., MDs who own a stake in imaging equipment order scans at three times the rate of MDs who don’t). Spending nine figures doesn’t sound so bad when you have capital projects planned in excess of $1 Billion. Perhaps we should refer to the legacy model as the “build more, do more, bill more” model. Any health analyst will tell you that the cure for healthcare’s hyperinflation is NOT building more healthcare facilities. It’s as if a fire department argued that the way to solve a wave of structural fires was to buy more fire fighting equipment. Yes, that might help, however there’s a much more cost-effective approach such as having buildings inspected for fire prevention capabilities.

In their book, The Innovator’s Prescription, Clayton Christensen and Dr. Jason Hwang point out how applying technology into old business models has only raised costs.

In contrast, disruptive innovators such as WhiteGlove Health and Qliance rethought the care delivery and payment models from the ground up. Their results have been impressive. For example, Qliance has Net Promoter Scores higher than Google or Apple, while reducing the direct costs of healthcare (i.e., their service coupled with a high deductible wrap-around policy) 20-40%. More impressively, they have reduced the most expensive downstream costs (surgical, specialist and emergency visits) 40-80%. Likewise, WhiteGlove Health already has 500,000 members and has more 5-star reviews on CitySearch than any other organization in the country. In WhiteGlove’s S-1 filing, they highlight the importance of proprietary software they have developed to give them a cost and consumer experience advantage.

The next wave of disruptive innovators are taking advantage of second-mover advantage as the wave of healthtech startups provide them off-the-shelf software that is an order of magnitude less investment than the first wave of innovators. It’s a couple orders of magnitude less expensive than legacy HealthIT. More importantly for the innovators is the speed that they can not only stand up the new technology but also easily iterate based on real world experience. Rather than months or years, it’s hours or days. This is a key component of Nimble Medicine.

Consider the following scenarios: [Disclosure, my company, provides some of the technology components underlying these models which is why I have visibility into their strategy.]

• arriveMD has taken the lean practice model to an extreme by closing a bricks and mortar clinic and replacing it with a clinic on wheels. Their founder, Dr. Craig Koniver, visits patients at their home or workplace. It only took a couple weeks to put the technology into practice while running his practice, closing his stationary clinic, and outfitting his clinic on wheels.
• MedLion (aka The Most Important Organization in Silicon Valley No One Has Heard About) has created a fast-growing Direct Primary Care model with minimal capital investment. So far in 2012, they are opening clinics at the rate of one per week. They’ve done this with a mix of a creative business model and enabling technology that is well under 5% of the cost of what their competition has spent.
• A company that is providing emergency physicians to hospitals has found that many individuals are using the emergency department as their primary care facility. This is because these individuals aren’t able to access a regular primary care provider. Unfortunately, many of them are unable to pay the high fees common in an ER. Rather than simply sending them to collections, they are setting up an affordable alternative outside of the ER for non-emergent care. The technology setup takes less than a week to enable this new line of business. They’ve taken a lesson from wireless carriers who realize that more affordable packages can address a market need yet still be profitable.
• Sites such as 2nd.md have created virtual second opinion or e-consult marketplaces. Rather than flying from Alaska to San Francisco to get a critical second opinion or consultation, the individual and their family can save time and money through a virtual encounter. In response, some physicians are realizing that they can set something up directly without having to pay a 3^rd party intermediary. Their technology need is essentially a light-weight (and low cost) system that allows intake of patient information (medical history, lab results, etc.), a virtual visit (e.g., using software from a company like Revation) and then follow-up documentation. The entire technology implementation doesn’t take more than a couple of days. This has been applied in disciplines ranging from oncology to orthopedics to pediatrics and more.
• Even established organizations such as Catholic Health Partners are becoming more nimble. For example, a when drug gets taken off the market for safety issues, they can immediately identify the subgroup of patients currently on the drug for outreach, while simultaneously removing the drug from order preference lists and order sets, substituting with appropriate alternative medications. At one time this took days and now it takes just hours.

For those of us in the technology industry, there’s striking parallels with what has happened in technology where centralization was followed by decentralization. For providers, lessons can be drawn regarding how some organizations were able to make the transition from one generation to the next while many others faded from the landscape. The graphic below depicts the transition from the slide rule to the mainframe and then back out to mobile devices.

In an earlier piece (Healthcare Field of Dreams In Idaho: Health System Opens Innovation Center), I highlighted an innovation group that is building the next “hospital” – a hospital without walls. Unlike a massive capital project necessary to build a traditional hospital, I expect that new “wings” of the virtual hospital will get built via a series of smaller projects. They have hired entrepreneurial people to bring the agility necessary in this new approach. This is a great example of Nimble Medicine.

Related articles:

Money Ball for Medicine – Business Models for Healthcare

Healthcare Disruption: Providers Are Making Newspaper Industry Mistakes

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According to a new report from managed enterprise mobility provider Good Technology, iOS devices (iPhones and iPads) hold the top three spots in the list of the top 10 enterprise activations by device type. The report includes data gathered by Good for Q4 2011 and includes half of the Fortune 100, providing insight into enterprise activation trends among some of the world’s biggest businesses.

The company found that despite Android’s overall market share growth and steady absolute growth among Good’s customers, only 35% of all smartphone activations were on Android, compared with iPhone’s 65%.

The mid-October release of the iPhone 4S helped that particular device quickly earn the number one position on the top 10 enterprise activations list, with the iPhone 4 moving into spot #2. The iPad 2, meanwhile, claimed the third position.

Since there are far more Android devices than iPhone models, it’s not as fair to compare trends on a device-by-device basis. After all, there’s aren’t just a couple models of Android phones out there – there are dozens upon dozens of “top” (popular) devices.

However, even when looked at as a whole, Android activations accounted for just 35% of the smartphone activations and only 6% of tablet activations. The Samsung Galaxy S II was the top Android device at spot #6 and was followed by the Motorola Droid Bionic, the Motorola Droid 3, Sprint EVO 4G (Q3′s most popular Android device) and the Motorola Droid X2. Motorola phones were popular over the course of the past year, too, and were represented in the top 10 each quarter.

Good does note that iPhone activations had slowed in the previous quarter, in anticipation of the new iPhone, then jumped significantly after its launch, with 31% of smartphone activations from that device alone. But collectively, iOS devices accounted for over 70% of all activations in Q4, an indication that enterprise customers’ iOS preference wasn’t just being boosted by the iPhone 4S launch. iOS is the preferred choice in the enterprise, Good says.

On the tablet front, iOS’s domination is even more apparent – the iPad and iPad 2 account for 94% of the total tablet activations in Q4, compared with 6% for Android tablets, where the Galaxy Tab leads the pack. iPads were most popular in three industries: financial services (accounting for 42% for the quarter), business/professional services and life sciences.

Going into Q1 and Q2, Good says that it expects iPad and iPad 2 activations to slow heading into March, as customers prepare for the (rumored) launch of the iPad 3. It also expects Android activations to increase on a relative basis after the immediate impact of the iPhone 4S lessens and as BYOD (bring your own device) programs become more common.

However, says John Herrema, Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Good, the company expects the iOS/Android numbers to be roughly the same during the first half of 2012 as they are now. A change would require a major shift in tablet trends. “I don’t see that happening with the iPad 3 on the horizon,” says Herrema.

“If Android and iOS split smartphone [market share] or even if Android takes the overall smartphone lead, it would still likely be no more than 40% of all Good activations overall, given the dominance of Apple on tablets and the large numbers of tablets we are activating. Meanwhile, I don’t see Android dropping substantially below where it is now because that would require major shift among BYOD smartphone users.”

We should note that this report does not look at RIM devices or Windows Phone, as Good doesn’t have insight into these platforms. This is only a comparison between the iOS/Android adoption rates in the enterprise, which by itself, limits itself to enterprise environments where BlackBerry has already fallen from favor.

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Venture capital firm Battery Ventures this morning announced that it has made an investment in Continuuity, a stealth ‘big data’ startup founded by Battery entrepreneur-in-residence Todd Papaioannou (formerly VP and Chief Cloud Architect for Yahoo).

Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and a group of angel investors including Bob Pasker, Paul Ambrose, Matt Ocko and The Data Collective also participated in the round.

It’s unclear what Continuuity is building, and the press release makes us none the wiser:

Continuuity’s goal is to enable the development of the next wave of real-time Big Data applications.

Ok then. Here’s a recent video interview of Papaioannou talking about trends in big data:

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While there were some big IPOs in 2011, Zynga and Groupon among them, overall it was a disappointing year for IPOs. Will 2012 be any different? As the first tech IPO of the new year, Guidewire Software certainly hopes so. Back in September, the insurance software company joined MobiTV, Angie’s List, Brightcove, and Jive, filing its S-1, announcing plans to raise up to $100 million and to sell approximately 7.5 million shares at $10 to $12 per share, in advance of its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

Guideware ended up exceeding its initial targets, pricing its IPO yesterday above its target range at $13 a share, selling 8.85 million shares and raising $115 million. The company has officially begun trading on the NYSE this morning under the symbol “GWRE” — after granting underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 1.3 million additional shares of common stock to cover over-allotments, if any — and again proceeded to beat expectations. Guidewire stock jumped to $16.75 upon its first trade, up 29 percent. Since, it has gone as high as $18, and currently sits at around $17.25 per share.

Founded in 2001, the San Mateo, California-based company is a software vendor for insurance companies that provide property, casualty and workers compensation to their customers. The company offers a web-based claims system that supports personal, commercial, and workers’ compensation insurance, and enterprise app for coordinating and executing transactions, as well as underwriting and policy administrations systems for these carriers. In other words, Guidewire has sought to enable insurance companies to replace their core legacy systems and automate their businesses through web-based software.

After struggling through not-so-profitable early years, the software company managed to turn a profit in the last two years, seeing its first quarterly profit in 2010. In fiscal 2011, revenues rose to $172 million, with the company seeing a net income of $35.6 million compared to $15.5 million in fiscal 2010 — although current financials are not as strong, as revenues have been on the decline in recent quarters.

That being said, sales increased 51 percent to $52.4 million in the most recent quarter, perhaps due to a loyal customer base, as Chief Executive Marcus S. Ryu told the WSY, “No customer has ever left Guidewire. That gives us a lot of security, and allows us to plan our budgeting and investing.” (Check out The Deal Pipeline’s interview with Ryu this morning here.)

While the company counts more than 100 customers, including major insurance companies like Nationwide, CNA and American Family Insurance, Guidewire believes that the available market for their software is far bigger. Gartner, for example, found that insurance carriers spent $4 billion on software and $10.5 billion on IT services in 2010, and many of those are still using outdated technology systems.

And in another good sign for Guidewire, according to the Wall Street Journal, two of its leading investors, U.S. Venture Partners and Bay Partners, have indicated that they are not interested in selling, but buying more stock — as many as 400,000 shares of common stock at its IPO price. (The WSJ actually reported that Battery Ventures, another of the company’s investors, has purchased an additional 400,000 shares of common stock.)

The company is seeing some strong adoption of its software, especially its claims system, and both profits and sales are on the rise. Thus, the immediate outlook for Guideware seems positive, so keep an eye on its stock this week — it, too, may be on the up-and-up.

And just in case you want to see a bunch of people clapping:

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In 2011, Sony had several major security breaches: Sony Online Entertainment, Sony Pictures, and Playstation Network all were attacked and private data was successfully stolen. Their handling of the attacks, particularly the larger PSN one, was widely criticized.

Many users are either unaware or acutely aware of how many sites and services have financially or personally sensitive information on record. Events like the Sony hacks do not reassure them, and actions like Google’s yesterday (though arguably innocuous) may alarm them. Users want more control and more security.

And the EU is looking to give it to them. But with the threat of enormous fines, many companies will find that the most logical thing to do is move away from the entire business of storing and serving user identities.

It’s a simple fact that maintaining a database of a hundred thousand or a million (or far more) active users is a serious engineering problem in both software and hardware. Keeping things secure but still accessible, staying abreast of new regulations (like those proposed in the EU), providing localized support on billing and user data issues — it’s quite a task. Web enrollment in software and services is growing at a huge rate, and many products and “real” items such as cars and banks are increasingly reliant on online services as well. It’s been happening for a long time, sure. But the stresses are starting to get out of hand.

If you’re a car company, or a movie distribution service, or a game publisher, the process of keeping and tracking your users securely is becoming too great of a portion of your business. And with increased regulation and requirements like the EU’s (which some are calling “onerous” and a “tax” on businesses that keep electronic records, but are probably nevertheless inevitable), it’s not something on which they can get by with minimal effort.

So what will happen? The same thing that happens whenever a part of an industry begins to outgrow its role: new, dedicated companies sprout up and the world offloads the task onto them.

This already happens to some extent, of course. It’s not like every company in the world maintains an independent and proprietary database of its users. There are services and software for this purpose, and the user-management business is plenty real already.

But for the millions and millions of people and accounts still internally managed (numbers that are growing worldwide in any market you can think of as online services gain more traction), the situation no longer makes sense. Why should a company that runs a movie distribution service also be running a world-class user-management service? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like a restaurant making its own forks.

It was logical for a while that data related to Sony services should reside on Sony servers, administrated by Sony. But in a day where our logins transcend sites, and everything we do is personalized, that no longer really rings true — to Sony, that is. Regular humans want to go to a site, put in their user name and password, and have their data retrieved. They don’t really care if the data is served by Sony or a third-party site because it’s never said one way or the other.

But for Sony and companies like it, the increasingly expensive and complicated user-management part of their business is starting to look like an attractive target for spinning off to third-party services. And third-party services are going to start revving their engines to attract these user-weary multinationals. This doesn’t apply to services like Instagram and Spotify, naturally; they’re account-focused to begin with.

It will be much easier for a company built from the ground up for user databases to handle these requirements and adjust to local laws. They can do it faster, better, and cheaper than an internal team, and compete directly with each other. It’ll be good for the user data sector and good for the multinationals hoping to offload this burden. Not to mention good for the users: the EU regulations require fast turnaround on data, instant notification of security breaches, and impose heavy fines for abusive or neglectful companies. Sony wants to worry about the quality of its games and devices, not about whether each of its 20 internal user-tracking divisions is jumping through legal hoops.

Secure account management isn’t the most exciting business, but you better believe it’s going to show some serious growth over the next few years, and everyone will gain by it.

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Enterprise software company TIBCO is debuting a new version of its Yammer-clone Tibbr today. The newest version of the company’s social communications app includes geo-location capabilities called Tibbr GEO, which integrates the ‘check-in’ model in the enterprise.

By incorporating location into Tibbr, the service wants to physical places into data hubs that can immediately stream important insights relevant to that specific place. Tibbr GEO gives companies the ability to tag important places, whether in the enterprise or as part of the extended enterprise. As Tibbr users approach these places, they’re automatically presented relevant in-stream information.

For example, Tibbr says the geolocation feature could turn a gate into a contextual relevant data hub to give agents, pilots and flight attendants insights as they approach the gate. Or the section of every retail aisle could include data on individual shelf space, insights about individual products, how they’re selling, how fast they’re moving or how a new location might be affecting sales.

Tibbr Mobile applications now use HTML5 to deliver users a consistent mobile experience across all platforms and has also been updated to support offline access.

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A new poll of over 11,000 workers worldwide by Ipsos and Reuters shows that telecommuting is an increasingly popular choice, especially in non-Western countries. This will come as no surprise to many, but the numbers are higher than some might have guessed. Over 30 percent of workers in India, Mexico, and Indonesia claimed to telecommute regularly, and one in ten overall work from home every day.

It’s tempting to call any work that can be done via telecommute “knowledge work” or the like, but there isn’t enough of that to create these kinds of numbers. The internet has been so incredibly enabling in so many different ways that to limit it to such a narrow category is shortsighted. Many are doing web design or creating product themselves, certainly, but many are also managing entire “virtual” businesses, handling email chains with the Chinese manufacturers on one end and the Singapore design guys on the other, or keeping track of orders and customer queries via an online clearing house. There is very little that can be done in an office that must be done in an office, and worldwide in developing markets the cost savings of that fact are being welcomed with open arms.

Interestingly, it is in already-productive countries like Germany, Sweden, and Japan that telecommuting is viewed with suspicion. On one hand it is surprising: these highly wired and progressive countries are welcoming of technology in so many forms that it seems unlike them to reject it in this one. But part of their success is in their social infrastructure: cities, factories, offices, large companies in business for decades or even centuries. Telecommuting makes labor unit-based and decentralizes, preventing the kind of top-down regulation that they feel (and are certainly justified in feeling) has contributed so much to their prosperity.

The personal benefits and professional problems with telecommuting were not ignored: 65 percent of those polled felt that telecommuting allowed them to be more productive because they have more control over their work life. But 62 percent found it “socially isolating” and worried that lack of face time at the office would lessen their chances of promotion.

As a telecommuter myself, I am concerned more with the lack of infrastructure in place to deal with significant numbers of critical telecommuting employees. Just try to record a Skype video conversation between a three or four people, or give a presentation to 100 off-site employees and 200 on-site ones. There are solutions, of course, but many are expensive and industrial-size, requiring special equipment and software from Cisco or another enterprise enabler. Companies like Boeing may have settled the global collaboration problem, but what about a 12-person operation spread across Europe and Canada that makes camera accessories?

Just as services have enabled one relatively tech-naive person to become an online business (and continue to do so), new services over the next few years will have to focus on repairing the natural loss that occurs when your employees are never physically near each other. The numbers, as shown by the huge numbers in emerging markets, are huge and getting bigger, and the big money in established countries is still waiting for the right moment to jump in. Collaboration tools and startups have been big at Disrupt and other showcases, and for good reason. The next ten years of global productivity are going to be driven by them.

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