IP phone company ShoreTel has today announced that it is beefing up its offerings by acquiring unified communications company M5 Networks in a deal that is valued up to $146 million in cash and stock.

ShoreTel’s motivation for snatching up M5 was an effort to be able to offer its customers a choice of either on-premise or hosted solutions, enabling the company to reach a larger and growing market of users looking to deploy unified communications solutions. Gartner predicts that the “Voice as a Service” market is expected to show a 36 percent compounded annual growth rate in North America before 2015 — to $2.2 billion.

ShoreTel acquired enterprise mobility leader Agito Networks in October 2010 to extend the unified communications technology to mobile devices, enabling them to solve the bring-your-own-device problems that are changing the enterprise market.

M5 Networks, too, has made a couple of acquisitions lately, including Callfinity last year and Geckotech the year prior. The cloud communications company, which was founded in 2000, provides phone systems, applications, and cloud communications for businesses, and claims to be one of the country’s largest specialized VoIP providers.

Under the terms of the deal, M5 shareholders will receive approximately $84 million in cash and 9.5 million shares of ShoreTel stock, for a total of about $146.3 million in “initial consideration based on ShoreTel’s average stock price over the prior 30 days of trading.” Furthermore, M5 shareholders could receive additional consideration of up to $13.7, according to the company’s statement.

ShoreTel announced its Q2 earnings today, with revenue coming in at $58.0 million, up 8 percent sequentially from the first quarter of fiscal 2012 and up 22 percent from the second quarter of fiscal year 2011. Despite GAAP net loss for the quarter being $2.5 million, or $0.05 per share, ShoreTel had some highlights over the last six months, forging a distribution relationship with Ingram Micro in October, an expanded distribution agreement with Windstream, a North American communications service provider, along with expanding its relationship with Hewlett Packard, which will become a reseller of ShoreTel’s “Mobility solution.”

According to the statement, following the close of the acquisition, M5 will be operated as a ShoreTel business unit, which will be led by M5 CEO Dan Hoffman, while engineering teams will remain separate.

For more, see ShorTel’s announcement of the acquisition here and the announcement of its Q2 earnings here.

Check out our prior coverage of M5 Networks here.

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Microsoft and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) are teaming up today on the public release of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365, a name which surely Microsoft itself had a hand in creating. The new service will allow corporate customers to manage their deployed BlackBerry devices using Exchange Online, the hosted version of Microsoft’s messaging platform.

The addition comes at no extra cost to current subscribers of the Office 365 suite or the standalone Exchange Online offering, and supports any BlackBerry devices, whether on a business or consumer data plan.

Once enabled, the managed BlackBerry smartphones will be able to sync with Microsoft Exchange Online email, calendar and organizer data. BlackBerry Balance, a new technology that helps admins manage the corporate data on the device, while leaving personal data untouched, will also be available with this new offering. I.T. will be able to manage the phones using a web-based console, but employees will have access to self-service tools for password and device resets, remote lock and remote wipe functions.

BlackBerry Business Cloud Services is live now in 50 countries. More info is here.

Partnerships like this are one of the reasons why some mobile industry insiders believe that RIM could be a viable acquisition target for Microsoft. The companies are already working so closely together to integrate their technologies, and both share a similar end user customer base: the enterprise market. Reports that RIM has even engaged in takeover talks with Microsoft emerged in December, but nothing has yet to come of that. Instead, the company’s recent moves like the co-CEO step-down and (misguided) statements from new CEO Thorsten Heins (“I don’t think any drastic change is needed”) imply that company is attempting a turnaround, not putting itself on the auction block. At least for now.

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Online content, portal and front-end technology solution Synacor filed its amended S-1 today for an IPO looking to raise $75 million. The filing revealed that this month Synacor acquired Carbyn, an HTML5 operating system that lets users put their files, applications and more in the cloud and access them from any device’s browser. It paid $1.1 million in total for the company, with $600,000 paid up front with $500,000 to be delivered in April 2013, and it hired 7 Carbyn employees.

The companies are a great fit, a veritable match made in the cloud. Synacor helps telecom and cable service providers set up websites on its managed, hosted platform where their customers can access ”e-mail, security, online games, music and authentication of TV Everywhere”. That means Synacor already handles all your web-based, and TV services, but is missing what lives on your OS. Carbyn’s OS that can be accessed from anwhere will fill this gap and let Synacor’s clients provide their customers with an expansive set of services in a single-sign on package.

Major stockholders of Synacor who will each be selling about a quarter of their shares include Intel Corporation, Walden International, Crystal Internet Ventures, Advantage Capital Partners, and North Atlantic Capital. These companies all contributed to Synacor’s $17 million Series C round in 2006. Some additional facts from the filing include:

• 6,818,170 shares will be made available at between $10 and $12 a share, 5,454,545 shares from the company and 1,363,625 shares from stockholders
• 2011 revenue was roughly $91 million, up 37% from its $66.2 million revenue for 2010.
• 2011 income from operations is estimated to be between $3.8 million and $4.2 million, compared to a loss from operations of $3.3 million in 2010
• Over the three months that ended December 31, 2011, Synacor-powered sites had an average of 18.7 million unique visitors per month, as measured by comScor

As mobile demand for access to television and OS-based content increases, Carbyn should become an increasingly valuable component of Synacor. The Ontario-based Carbyn started just a year ago, and the founders said it was looking for its first funding when it made waves in September when it launched at TechCrunch Disrupt. Seems like Synacor picked up Carbyn’s anywhere OS at just the right time.

See Carbyn’s technology in action below:

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Cloud computing software and service provider Joyent has secured an $85 million round of new funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by European group Weather Investment II. It also included Telefónica Digital, the growth arm of global telecom giant Telefónica, which participated as a strategic investor.

Weather II is a strategic shareholder in telecommunications companies. Most notably, it holds a 20% stake in Vimpelcom, the world’s sixth largest mobile telecommunications group by subscribers. Joyent states that Weather II was advised in the round by investment and management group Accelero Capital. Both Weather II and Accelero focus on telecommunication and related media and technology companies in telecom and enterprise markets.

“We are delighted to make this strategic investment in a company that is providing solutions to some of the toughest problems in cloud computing, such as cloud performance, resiliency and security,” said Khaled Bichara, co-CEO of Accelero Capital.

Meanwhile, Matthew Key, Chairman & CEO of Telefónica Digital praised how Joyent’s technology would fit perfectly with technologies it has developed in-house and its own cloud services model.

Joyent’s cloud software suite SmartDataCenter is used by developers and enterprises worldwide. With JoyentCloud.com, the company provides public cloud services to a number of well-known companies, including LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe, Dell and Kabam. It’s also the steward of the open source server-side JavaScript project Node.js, a runtime for developing data-intensive, real-time apps, and a contributor to Joyent SmartOS, an open source project which powers the commercial software SmartDataCenter.

According to David Young, CEO and founder of Joyent, the new funding will enable Joyent to “build out a global compute offering to assist customers in expanding consistent software, support and services to their clients.”

Throughout 2012, Joyent plans to roll out a collection of “seamlessly connected high performance clouds” serving global corporations on every continent, the company says.

The San Francisco-based company had previously raised $5 million in September, which brought it close to $30 million total. The company’s existing investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Intel Capital, and Liberty Global.

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Enterprise-focused cloud performance analytics company Tidemark, formerly known as Proferi, has raised $24 million in new funding led by Redpoint Ventures with existing investors Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Dave Duffield, co-founder and co-CEO of Workday participating. This brings the total amount raised to more than $35 million. Redpoint partner Geoff Yang will join Tidemark’s Board of Directors.

Founded by Romanian entrepreneur Christian Gheorghe, the Tidemark Enterprise Performance Management Platform delivers real-time, risk-adjusted metrics management; strategic, financial, operational planning and forecasting; and profitability modeling applications.

Tidemark’s premise is that enterprises are investing billions yearly in traditional business intelligence systems that were not built for today’s data deluge and do not provide the forward-looking analysis that is required of businesses today.

Basically Tidemark monitors and analyzes business data, including key performance indicators, key risk indicators and other data for enterprise business planning functions. The software can produce full profit and loss reports by product, customer, supplier and channel to understand the detailed drivers of cost and improve margins.

The web applications are built with a HTML5 user interface and includes application components such as processes, goals, dimensions, KPIs, calculations, risks and controls. Tidemark also features integrations with a number of cloud and on-premise systems for sourcing structured and unstructured data including PDFs, MS Office documents and blogs.

The new funds will be used for customer acquisition.

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CEOs at three of India’s top ten outsourcing providers recently told the
Times of India that they plan to “reduce on-site work by up to five percent over
the next year and handle traditional onsite projects such as managing takeover
of an existing outsourcing contract& through videoconferencing. (The Times
did not name the CEOs or their companies.)

alt="Cloud Outsourcing" vspace=3 align=right
src="http://www.it-toolkits.com/images/CloudOutsourcingGuide.jpg" width=85
longDesc="Security Manual Template - Sarbanes-Oxley" height=110>As the
whistleblower case against Infosys, alleging that the Indian IT services
provider misused B-1 visas to bring offshore staff to the U.S., heads to court
later this year, it’s unlikely that scrutiny of the temporary worker visa system
will subside. And, as of Monday, talks between the U.S. and India intended to
address these visa complaints among other issues, were called off
indefinitely.

Prepare now for the inevitable effects of reductions in onshore and on-site
headcount:

• Conduct a Process Design Review – Make sure that
  essential on-site roles required for seamless operation of global delivery
  will be filled. Consider contract resources to handle short-term gaps, advises
  Amneet Singh, vice president of global sourcing for outsourcing consultancy
  Everest Group. Longer term, developing such skills in-house maybe a better
  bet. “Buyers are picking and choosing certain roles to bring back in-house,”
  says Esteban Herrera, chief operating officer of outsourcing analyst firm HfS
  Research.


• Invest in Change Management Efforts – Prepare users for
  potential tweaks in the delivery model and changes in their day-to-day working
  experience, says Singh, and execute an effective communication strategy to
  address any uncertainty in the business
  Consider Nearshore Alternatives –
  Providers with alternate delivery locations, like Mexico, do not have the same
  temporary visa restrictions as a result of the North American Free Trade
  Agreement (NAFTA), Herrera points out. They can more easily transfer workers
  across borders to manage projects and knowledge transfer.


• Beef Up Your Technology Backbone – Your offshore provider
  is likely to require more high-end videoconferencing or digitization
  capabilities to manage future projects. Ensure you have the right
  infrastructure and software to handle the proposed technology enablers of
  diminished on-site staff, says Singh. Also, make sure to design and execute
  effective internal training programs for the new tools.


• Revisit Contract Pricing - If your IT service provider is
  planning to move on-site roles overseas, it’s probably a good time to
  renegotiate price, but don’t play hardball. Sharing the upside of sending more
  work to less costly locales will result in a happier and healthier
  relationship long-term.

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Symplified, which provides identity and access management tools for cloud applications, has raised $20 million in Series C funding led by Ignition Partners. Existing investor Allegis Capital, Granite Ventures, and Quest Software also participated in the financing, which brings the company’s total funding to $38.8 million.

With more than 3.8 million subscribers, Symplified offers a cloud identity and access management service for enterprises. Businesses can use Symplified for cloud identity management, access control, single sign-on for employees, user management and auditing across any access device using a unique proxy gateway architecture deployed either in the cloud or on premises. The company provides secure access to SaaS applications like Salesforce, ADP, WebEx, Xactly, Taleo, Success Factors and many others.

Clients include HP, Blue Shield, ESPN, Forest Laboratories, Moody’s, Zynga, Netflix, Rambus and Dolby Laboratories. The company says that it tripled revenues and customer adoption last year. Symplified also has a strategic partnership with Amazon in place, and launched the Trust Cloud on Amazon Web Services to become the only provider of identity management services on Amazon’s cloud platform at the time.

Symplified will use the funds to expand operations, service and support, research and development, and marketing.

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US-based desktop virtualization software maker DeskStream has acquired Northern Irish cloud start-up WorldDesk, the companies are set to announce today at CES in Las Vegas. Terms of the acquisition, which is expected to close this quarter, were not disclosed.

Interestingly, the acquisition will see DeskStream adopt the WorldDesk name and branding.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

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As companies move their data out from behind firewalls into the cloud and employees use self-provisioned mobile devices, infosecurity must change. That’s why cybercrime prevention provider ThreatMetrix will announce tomorrow its acquisition of TrustDefender, which detects malware-based attacks. ThreatMetrix can now offer an integrated fraud protection solution that verifies the identity and integrity of any device trying to access secure data. If an endpoint has been compromised through malware or identity theft: access denied.

Reed Taussig, ThreatMetrix’s CEO tells me the acquisition was made with a combination of cash and stock. It was bankrolled by ThreatMetrix’s 300% year on year revenue growth and the $12 million funding round it took in October 2010.

TrustDefender co-founder and CEO Andreas Baumhof will become the new ThreatMetrix CTO. The majority of the Australian TrustDefender’s team was picked up, but won’t be relocating to ThreatMetrix’s San Jose headquarters. TrustDefender took $16 million in funding from Nexbix Ltd in March 2010.

ThreatMetrix’s device identifications system looks at over 250 aspects of an endpoint device to determine its integrity. — where is it, hidden proxies, if text is being rendered in foreign language, or if that email address has been used to make a request from multiple continents. TrustDefender detects malware and other threats including trojans, Poison Ivy, and man-in-the-browser-attacks. It services financial institutions, SaaS providers, ecommerce companies, and government.

Before now, companies had to seek out separate vendors for device identification and malware detection. Taussig tells me “The identification of malware on a device should be a feature of device identification. We were fortunate to have found a malware ID company that has leading edge technology with referenceable, high-end customers that recognize this is a match made in heaven. The acquisition provides huge advantages, as clients can be supported by a single product.”

Additionally, ThreatMetrix has just signed a partnership with major credit bureau TransUnion. This will help it verify the authenticity of user biographical and financial data to protect logins and payments.

Instead of only accessing firewalled data through dedicated, pre-screened devices, employees now accessing the cloud with their own laptops, tablets, and phones. Let’s be honest. Who knows what those devices are being used for in the off-hours? It’s therefore more important than ever for IT departments to have a strong device ID security system. Otherwise their company’s source code, intellectual property, design docs, customer names or credit card numbers could be at risk.

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Cloud storage platform Box (which you no longer have to refer to as Box.net as it now owns Box.com!), has seen incredible growth over the past year, both on the consumer and on enterprise side. Much of the growth has been driven by mobile, with the company seeing a 140% increase in mobile customer implementations each month in 2011, leading the total number of new mobile users to jump up by 171% monthly.

By year end 2011, Box’s total mobile user count reached 1.9 million, up 9 times over 2010. But nowhere has mobile’s impact been more felt than in the enterprise, where iOS and Android especially have driven business adoption of not just mobile apps, but the cloud in general.

In terms of mobile platform adoption, there were more than 1.2 million iOS app downloads in 2011, 462,000 on Android, 200,000 webOS downloads and 51,000 on PlayBook. (Yes, PlayBook!) These numbers include both consumer and enterprise growth combined, however.

But when Box tracks its enterprise sales, it tracks the reason for buying, and this past year, the company found there was a 30x increase in the number of enterprise deployments that were mobile-driven. So while mobile user growth may be up 9x, the sheer need for mobile connectivity is what’s driving its business. The mobile needs of the enterprise is affecting the company’s bottom line with Box seeing 3x revenue growth over the past year, as large organizations, like Procter & Gamble, McAfeee and AAA for example, signed up for the service. The enterprise customer base, meanwhile, grew by 2x and now includes 82% of the Fortune 500.

In the enterprise, iOS (iPhone, iPad) saw the most adoption, with 5 times year-over-year growth from 2010. Interestingly, Android is growing at a faster rate: 7 times year-over-year growth, even though it isn’t the largest mobile platform Box supports (iOS is, and more so the iPad).

Specific industry verticals are adopting Box at a faster rate than others, too, with the biggest jump coming from the Food and Beverage industry (up 7x), where Box counts Red Bull, Dole, PBR and others as customers. Because of the workflow-based nature of many of the industry’s tasks – like tracking product from the field to processing – this group was also big on the building custom applications on top of Box’s platform. Box now has over 130 apps integrated with its service and 5,000 developers.

Meanwhile, more traditional use cases involving knowledge worker and document sharing led to greater adoption in Financial Services (up 3.5x) and Health Care (up 3x) in 2011.

What’s interesting about these mobile adoption trends is the impact they’re having on cloud adoption. Says Box’s VP of Mobile, Matthew Self, “one of the big drivers we see for mobile adoption – and one of the big reasons why mobile deployment growth was actually higher than the user growth – has to do with the fact that enterprises are adopting cloud services because of mobile.”

“Mobile adoption is actually driving cloud adoption,” he says, “which isn’t totally obvious. But when you get to mobile, it isn’t about Microsoft anymore. Less than half of the computing endpoints in the world are Microsoft now…They’ve forced CIO’s to defect from Microsoft’s own entrenched postion, which is sort of bizarre. But it’s not like a CIO can say, ‘oh, I’ll just wait a year or two on mobile.’”

Ouch! (But totally right).

This exit from the Microsoft era is all the more evident in smaller to medium-sized businesses, which by their very nature, have had to be scrappy, turning to low-cost, easy-to-manage cloud services as an alternative to a traditional I.T. infrastructure. But the tide is turning. More enterprises are arriving at Box, which often represents their first or second toe dipped into the water of cloud computing. Maybe they use Salesforce, or some small cloud service on the side, but many are still Microsoft-based organizations running Exchange and Office.

Box then slides into place as a supplement to traditional systems like SharePoint then becomes the system of choice, leaving businesses to wonder why they still need the old system at all. In 2012, Box plans to help those folks cut the cord even more by implementing a new feature that will allow mobile users the ability to not only access, but also edit and comment on documents via the Box mobile app without needing another app supporting that file type installed on their mobile device. (For example, edit a spreadsheet on iOS with Apple’s Numbers app).

Self says Box’s move here is reflective of the move to more “cloud-augmented” apps, which he points out is already a big trend in consumer’s mobile computing behavior.

“These are apps where the bulk of the interesting work is happening in the cloud, not the mobile device at all,” he explains. For example, Apple’s Siri, where the voice recognition and processing work is happening in the cloud, and the iPhone is just recording what you say then playing back the results. Or Amazon’s Silk browser, which runs in the cloud, where only the UI (the presentation) is taking place on the mobile device. This too, mirrors Box’s plan for mobile: use HTML5 and web services for the business logic, while the UI/presentation layer renders through native code.

Combined with an increasing acceptance of using secure mobile apps (versus securing the whole mobile platform, e.g. RIM/BlackBerry Server solutions), it’s going to be easier than ever for enterprise customers to cut legacy connections altogether.

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