The Linux Foundation is sharing the results of their latest invitation-only survey of enterprise Linux users. Their last such survey, in August 2010, revealed Linux was gaining popularity in enterprise computing. It should come as no real surprise that the latest survey shows more of the same.

A lot has happened since late 2010, and the Linux Foundation survey reflects that. In “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users” we find that a substantial number of enterprise users “expressed concern with the rapid growth of data, and Linux is clearly the platform of choice to address it.” Less than half of respondents are planning to use Windows to handle their “Big Data” requirements.

While nearly 80% of respondents expect an increase in the number of Linux deployments in their organizations over the next five years, only 21.7% of those surveyed expect an increase in the number of Windows servers during the same time frame.

Perceived technical barriers to enterprise Linux adoption have dropped significantly, too. Only 12.2% of respondents cited technical issues as an impediment to success, down from 20.3% from the last survey. That says a lot about the overall value proposition for Linux installations.

It’s worth remembering, though, that this was an invitation-only survey. I’m sure a similar survey from Microsoft would yield results more pleasing to Redmond. Nonetheless, Linux is clearly at the vanguard of technical innovation, both for the traditional enterprise data center as well as for nascent cloud computing solutions.

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Virident, a company that offers flash-based storage solutions for enterprise, announced today that it has closed a $21 million series C funding round. The investment was led by Globespan Capital Partners, with strategic investments from Intel Capital, Cisco and contributions from existing investors, Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures. The series C round brings Virident to a total of $37 million in funding.

So why the interest in Virident? For starters, the startup’s management team counts former Google, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, SGI, and Intel employees among its ranks. So it has some talent. Second, the (enterprise) storage space is hot. And Virident has built flash solutions that are compatible with any servers and allow enterprises to enhance not only the speed of their applications but to ensure reliable performance under heavy workloads, specifically for data-intensive workloads, like databases, business analytics, simulation, visualization and high-performance computing.

Virident is operating under the belief that bringing flash memory to the storage space (both for data centers and enterprise storage) will fundamentally disrupt how information is stored. As Virident CEO Kumar Ganapathy told infoTECH, a future may well be coming in which the very flash memory chips that are built into billions of smartphones today force data centers “to adopt a completely new storage architecture with massive cost reductions and a significantly smaller footprint”. For Virident, the future is all about solid state devices.

Thus, the funding announcement today goes hand-in-hand with the company’s introduction of the next generation of its flagship product, Virident FlashMAX. The new product, according to the company, allows enterprise application performance to be optimized and, something that they reiterate over and over — consistent over time, across a wide variety of dataset sizes and diverse workloads — while “providing at least twice the performance of comparably flash-based solutions”. The product also comes with built-in, Flash-aware RAID.

Virident will use its series C round for market expansion and product iteration.

For more on FlashMAX, check it out here.

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Online store and backup service provider Backblaze this morning released version 2.0 of its flagship product, bumping up the allowed file size for storage and backups up to ‘unlimited’ and bringing other enhancements to the table.

The company has actually always provided unlimited storage – and “unthrottled bandwidth” – for five bucks a month, but now vows to make its unlimited offering even more unlimited. That’s right, boys and girls, infinite is the new unlimited.

Here’s a list of the main new features and improvements in Backblaze 2.0:

• Unlimited file size (up from 9 GB)
• Backup any file type
• Backup VMWare and Virtual Machines
• Restore to 1TB external drive (up from 500 GB)
• Added Automatic Throttle to maximize the efficiency of uploading of your connection

There are other enhancements, mainly in terms of speed and performance, but maybe you should just give it a whirl.

New customers, trials, and new installs by existing customers will automatically get Backblaze 2.0. Current customers and free trials will be automatically upgraded over the next few weeks (although users can ‘check for updates’ right now).

Backblaze customers that update from an existing version will keep the settings they have on their current installation.

If you want to learn more about who and how Backblaze can offer this at a relatively low price (if you pay for 1 year, it’s actually only about $4 per month), you should read Devin’s earlier story.

On a sidenote: I enjoyed re-reading an article about Backblaze I wrote a while ago: Online Backup Startup Backblaze Was Almost Bought. Twice. What Went Wrong?

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Backupify, the startup that provides online data backup, archiving and export, is today releasing a new version of its Backupify Snapshot tool with additional features for Google Apps admins. The tool, for those unfamiliar, allows Google Apps administrators to extract and download the complete Google Apps account for a departing company employ and save the data locally.

Previously, Snapshot was in public beta – it’s now being commercially released to all.

Traditionally, when an employee left an organization, the I.T. department would backup their files and folders, disable their Exchange mailbox and export their mailbox .PST file. Now, as companies of all sizes are transitioning to the cloud, termination procedures on the I.T. side have also changed. Unfortunately, because there’s not a simple process for exporting and archiving a user’s Google Apps data, companies will often just keep the account open but unused. That, however, can lead to an additional expense, as Google charges by seat.

With Backupify Snapshot, the idea is to recreate the same sort of account termination procedures companies are used to, but for cloud-based services. The tool compresses a user’s Google Apps account data (Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Contacts and Sites) into a Zip file that can then be downloaded to a local machine or server. The Google Apps account can then be safely deleted.

The killer feature in today’s release is the added support for multi-user and batch downloading – that will be a huge timesaver for I.T. during those times when there’s more than one employee account to export. (Layoffs, anyone?)

Snapshot also improved support for large organizations via better search, introduced a referral functionality that will dole out free downloads for those who refer their friends and added Google Checkout as a payment option. (Snapshot users get only 5 free downloads, then have to pay $10 per download).

Backupify Snapshot is available both as a standalone service and as a part of Backupify’s Google Apps Backup service. It has been used by over 500 organizations since its release last month.

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At the company’s first customer conference today, cloud storage platform Box.net is revealing a number of new features and products. The company is debuting a cross-platform enterprise sync solution for both Mac and PC devices, additional security features as well as new social capabilities.
 
For background, Box, which has 7 million users and stores 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a file storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, access the platform via the mobile web, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.

Box.net had previously offered a Sync desktop client, which allowed users to sync Box.net folders with their PC desktops. But Box has totally rebuilt the sync engine and is debuting a new version of Box Sync for Windows and the first-ever Box Sync for Mac. This allows users to access Box files from their desktop, work offline in native applications, sync edits back to Box, and access synced content from any mobile device. Customers including Turner Construction, TaylorMade, Pandora and LinkedIn are early users of Box Sync.


Box Sync for Windows and Box Sync for Mac will available as free downloadable desktop clients for Business and Enterprise customers in October. Additionally, Box and HP has announced that they’re working together to distribute Box Sync on future PCs to HP’s business customers later in 2011.

Box also unveiled a number of security features that will roll out to Business and Enterprise customers in Q4. A new Trusted Access section tracks which browsers, applications and devices are connected to Box. And sharing controls will make it easy for organizations to define sharing permissions by domain and user group. Additionally, Box announced a strategic collaboration with cloud identity provider Okta to help customers better manage identities in the cloud, adding to existing integrations with VMware and Ping Identity.

In terms of social, Box has already added a number collaborative features to its cloud-based platform but today is announcing that it will be brining new social capabilities to users over the next few quarters. These include making Box updates more personalized and intelligent, helping surface and discover more relevant content, and social commenting.

But Levie tells me that Box isn’t gunning to win social space, and wants to actually work and cope with existing social enterprise platforms like Yammer, Jive and Salesforce Chatter. In fact, Box is also announcing an in-depth integration with Salesforce Chatter using Chatter Connect. This will allow Chatter and Box users to collaborate in Chatter with content stored on Box. Salesforce also announced its participation as an investor in Box’s newly announced $50 million funding round.

It’s no secret that Box has seen tremendous growth in 2011 thanks to a growing acceptance of the cloud by businesses and large companies. Box says it is seeing consistent 3x year-over-year revenue growth, and has been adopted by 100,000 businesses, including 77% of the Fortune 500. And the company is even a pricey acquisition target. To help expand even further, Box just raised another $50 million in growth capital. And Levie says we can expect more product announcements from Box in the future.

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The federal securities laws require clear, concise and understandable
disclosure about compensation paid to CEOs, CFOs and certain other high-ranking
executive officers of public companies. Several types of documents that a
company files with the Commission include information about the company’s
executive compensation policies and practices. You can locate information about
executive pay in: (1) the company’s annual proxy statement; (2) the company’s
annual report on Form 10-K; and (3) registration statements filed by the company
to register securities for sale to the public.

As a part of documents that need to be filed by public corporations, the
total compensation of the top 3 paid executives in these corporations needs to
be published each year. From those records we have identified these information
technology executives who fall in that category. This is not an all inclusive
list of the highest paid IT executives but a snap shot of their compensation and
other CIOs can are paid more.

hspace=10 alt="Highest paid CIOs" vspace=10 align=middle
src="http://www.ejobdescription.com/images/CIO-Compesation.png">

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Vitrue, a social media marketing company, is rolling out version 3.0 of its social media management platform for brands. New features include localization and enhanced analytics and metrics within one dashboard interface.

As we’ve written in the past, Vitrue’s SaaS platform allows brands and marketing agencies to
communicate with fans and consumers across Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts, location based services, and via mobile applications. The company’s SRM (social relationship management) platform is being used by a number of high profile brands including Harley Davidson, Mentos, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Crocs, Eddie Bauer, Maybelline, Purina, McDonald’s, YouTube, Ford, AT&T, Disney and Best Buy.

The newest version of Vitrue’s software comes with a new dashboard and user interface, allowing marketers to see, access and manage all of the available functionalities, tools and modules within one interface. The company has also added enhanced analytics and metrics to give marketers specific metrics on demographics and engagement of their social pages and users including insight into traffic sources, overall user demographics, top fan profiles, fan growth breakdowns, top location snapshots, per-post publishing metrics, and user engagement statistics by action (i.e., like, comment, share, play, etc.) and by day of week and time of day.

Other features include the ability to publish targeted content to specific users, the ability to add coupons, quizzes, and more to campaigns, and 24-7 customer support.

Vitrue, which has raised $32 million,
faces competition from Buddy Media.

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Box.net has raised $18.6 million out of a $35 million round according to an SEC filing. We’ve confirmed this with the company. This brings Box’s total funding to $96 million.

Box, which has 6 million users and stores 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.

Box just raised $48 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others earlier this year, but the company’s CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie tells us that because of the strong venture market, the company’s strong performance, and the growth in the cloud, a new ‘expansion’ round made sense. He says this is a follow-on round to the D raise earlier this year, and it will involve current investors and new ones as well.

The round hasn’t been fully closed yet, and could change, says Levie. Listed in the filing are current investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson, U.S. Venture Partners, and Scale Venture Partners.

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Enter the Trimit time-saver. Trimit is a 0.99-cent app for iOS that allows you to condense content into 1,000, 500, or 140-character summaries. Essentially, Trimit is a text auto summarizer designed to fit all those things you’re reading on a mobile device into concise synopses and share those over SMS, email, Facebook, Twitter in .txt form — all with a few clicks.

And this is pretty nifty feature: Trimit can summarize your text just by shaking your device — like the opposite of mobile Boggle. No longer will your friends have to scan through your wordy Facebook status updates about your cats; just shake your phone to condense all those emotions into 140 characters. Apparently Apple likes the idea, too, as it just featured Trimit in the app store and mentioned it on Twitter.

Today, Trimit is also announcing a bookmarklet for the Web, (which is currently in beta and will be available for download within the week) so that you can get all the benefits of the app on your browser, too. For both web and mobile, text can be directly imported from any URL right from within the app using Trimit’s HTML parsing secret sauce.

The bookmarklet has many of the same sharing features as mobile, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, as well as URL sharing with a shorter summary to Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and more. You can print and save as a .txt file, sync with your computer, and import files from other devices to get at that summarizin’.

Trimit Founder Nick D’Aloisio, a 15-year-old Australian transplanted to London, said that he, like me, can sometimes be a bit of a waffler, which is where the inspiration for Trimit comes from. And now, through his team’s app and bookmarklet, he’s bringing pithiness to articles and blogs, to email, text, and Tweet composition, and to the transferral of desktop documents to mobile. (Trimit would have been a huge help for those poor souls who had to read my thesis in college.)

In the spirit of text summarizing, I should cut it off here. But readers may be curious as to how the auto summary works, and to that end, whether it works well or not. D’Aloisio was willing to share some of the juice behind the app, so here’s a peek. If you’re a words dork like myself, you may just like this.

The algorithm uses a process of “extraction” to create a summary of the text to one of the three specified lengths. Without completely revealing the secret sauce, the algorithm scans the text using a precise keyword search to find prominent topics within its content. It disregards general words and fillers, like articles and linking words (“but”, “and”, “when”) and gives words and phrases that are signals of importance, like time and/or place adverbials (the where’s and when’s, like “in California”, for example) greater weight.

Trimit also uses what is called “verb stemming”, which allow particular verbs in different conjugations to still be counted by the algorithm, like “speak” versus “spoke”, for example. This makes sure that past conjugations stay that way and don’t somehow pop into the future tense. The algorithm counts the occurrence of key phrases as well, taking into account the position of those phrases in the passage, so that they remain in order when summarizing.

And though linking words are often dismissed, contradictory conjunctions like “however” are given more weight because they often are included in overviews, just as facts, figures and quotes are valued higher as well. As you may have guessed, it all works on a points-based ranking system, and the words and phrases that are ranked highest, show up in the summary.

I’ll leave it at that, but you can learn more about Trimit in the video below. The Trimit team is currently in the process of raising a seed round.

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Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is spinning out PowerCloud Systems, the cloud-managed networking solutions provider that it has incubated through the Startup@PARC program since early 2008. PowerCloud has also gained more backing, with Walden Venture Capital and Javelin Venture Partners joining the line-up.

PowerCloud offers cloud-based technology for OEM vendors that is designed to make business networking devices easier to deploy, secure, and manage. The company builds on intellectual property developed at PARC, including two exclusive and eight shared patents in areas ranging from cloud-virtualized network controllers to “usable security.”

The company’s management team includes Broadcom and 3Com vet Jeff Abramovitz, who came to PARC as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Abramovitz will serve as president and CEO of PowerCloud Systems, while Andrea Peiro, former CEO of the Small Business Technology Institute, will serve as VP of product development and marketing.

More than 30 companies have gone to market via Startup@PARC to date, including Meshin, SolFocus, PowerAssure, and Powerset.

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