Back in 2009, my colleague MG Siegler wrote a brilliant piece titled ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid,‘ which delved into how having a simple and easy to use product is a key formula for winning in the consumer tech space. A few days ago, Greylock Partner John Lilly echoed MG’s thoughts, explaining that simplicity is quite simply very hard to beat. While this doctrine has been applied to consumer technology products like Dropbox, Gmail, Twitter and most famously, Apple; reinforcing simplicity in the product thought process is becoming an ever-present part of enterprise technology as well.

Almost every pitch I receive for an enterprise product, whether it be in the business intelligence, big data, storage, or even virtualization space, includes the key phrase, “this product is extremely simple to use.” Part of this is the fact that many of these products are based in the cloud, which adds to the whole consumerization of the enterprise trend that is taking place.

But the enterprise is taking this a step further than just putting applications in the cloud when it comes to actual design and ease of use in the user experience. Take cloud storage giant Box.net, for example. The startup and its CEO Aaron Levie have been preaching simplicity in the enterprise for some time now. As Levie writes, complexity “serves as an easy – but ultimately blameless – scapegoat for failed deployments and lagging user adoption.”

Box’s drag and drop interface, which allows users to simply store and save files, avoids the complexity of many legacy options. The UI is clean, uncluttered and interestingly, Box hasn’t been in any rush to add bells and whistles to the product besides security and collaboration features. In fact much of the complexity exists behind the product, where the user doesn’t even interact.

Another area where simplicity is ruling is business intelligence. Splunk, which just filed its S-1 for an IPO, has been able to make a real business out of simplifying IT logs. Newcomer to the space, Domo, also promises a dead-simple interface for analyzing massive amounts of IT data.

Accel partner Ping Li agrees that the best enterprise applications in today’s world hide the complexity of the business processes running on the backend. He believes that while Apple has influenced  consumer technology in the design and product areas, the iPhone and iPad creator is also having a big impact on the enterprise. “Steve Jobs made phones and computers easy to use, and we’re seeing the Apple-effect bring simplicity into the enterprise,’ he explains. Li points out that the iPhone and iPad are complex products when it comes to the internal hardware components but on the exterior, are incredibly simple to use.

PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy recently wrote, there’s a new guard of entrepreneurs who are starting enterprise companies. Sarah says the ‘consumer kids’ have started creating enterprise companies, and are part of the consumerization of the enterprise. And these entrepreneurs are approaching the product for a simpler, more user-friendly point of view.

But developing these basic UIs for complex problems in the enterprise is a huge challenge. As Lilly writes, “It’s devilishly tough to build complex systems like software that actually show as simple interactions.” It’s something that Apple has mastered, and a number of enterprise companies are starting to catch on. Startups like WibiData, GoodData, and Code 42 are providing simple ways for enterprises to perform a variety of important and in-depth functions on the back-end, such as analyzing user data for personalization efforts, or developing hybrid storage solutions.

We’re also going to see more and more startups that are tackling even more complex enterprise interactions like virtualization, and creating extremely simple ways to take care of these problems.

Enterprise software is by its nature complex, but the user interface doesn’t need to be. We are all consumers of information, whether at work or at home. Any designing software needs to think about how to make it a joy to use and get people to use it repeatedly. Keep it simple, and we’ll keep coming back.

Photo credit/Flickr/bjornmeansbear

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Group task manager startup Asana launched its first native mobile app last week. It’s mostly a straight port of its existing mobile web app, so the main benefit at present is that switching back and forth with other apps is much faster than dealing with Safari.

The company says it’s planning to invest in native apps more over time, but the version available is already useful for me since I’ve been dumping all of my story ideas into Asana since I started at TechCrunch in November… because I’m on my phone all the time, and checking Asana to see what I need to do next while I’m also trying to do three or four other things.

If you’re not familiar, the stand-out feature of Asana’s mobile experience is that the projects, task lists and individual task windows from the web app now appear as layers within the home screen.

The left-hand projects bar forms the bottom layer. If you press on one of your projects, its task items slides in from the right to appear as the next layer. If you touch any task, its pane then comes in to form the third layer.

To navigate back from lists or individual items, click on mostly submerged window on the left. The overall feeling is so natural that after a few days of using it I had to stop myself from pressing on my computer monitor to simulate the same experience.

The main downside to the mobile experience, at least for now, is that you can’t create or reassign tasks to others. Instead, any task you create just defaults to yourself and you’ll need to change it on the web site later. Expect everything to improve rather quickly, though. The company iterates fast, recently adding a repeat-event feature to tasks that others and myself had been wanting, for example. (Although it still hasn’t added time of day, which would be helpful for those of us who need to manage a lot of tight deadlines).

Overall, yes, there are dozens and dozens of other task manager type apps out there, and I know because I’ve tried using many of them over the years. Asana is approaching this consumery-enterprise space the right way, by not trying to add in too many features or forcibly define how people can to use it. I’m including Basecamp in the “other” category, as I’ve always found it to be overwrought (or as designer Damian Madray put it, ”Basecamp is to Asana as Android is to iPhone”). Instead, Asana focuses on nailing a few features right then adds on the right extras on top, as my friend Dan Kaplan explored in this recent article. It also does what many competitors don’t, which is provide a seamless user experience across web and (supported) mobile devices.

You can download the iPhone app here.

[Screenshots via Asana, because I don't want to show everyone what I'm working on next]

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Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera, which just raised $25 million, helps distribute Hadoop, and provides practical services around the technology, similar to what Red Hat does for the Linux framework.

Apache Hadoop v3 integrates support for Red Hat, CentOS, SuSE and Ubuntu Linux distribution operating systems as well as support for both 64 bit and 32 bit Java. Only CDH3 is available for download as an rpm, deb, vm or tarball installation and can run in the cloud on Amazon or Rackspace.

CDH3 allows for social network analysis and clickstream sessionization; content optimization and clickstream sessionization; network analytics and mediation and more. CDH3 has also been upgraded to support the most recent Linux distributions, and the application is up to 20 percent faster with two times the improved performance in HBase query throughput. It is also more stable with hundreds of bug fixes spanning the 11 key components of CHD3. Functionality and usability have also been improved with a new OBDC driver to integrate BI clients such as Microstrategy.

Cloudera’s CEO Mike Olson told GigaOm last year that the company could have the legs for an IPO down the line. What do you think?

[crunchbase url="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cloudera" name="Cloudera"]

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What makes Expensify so easy is that it can pull in your transaction records and automatically categorize them. All you need to do is register your credit cards with the platform, and the site will automatically import E-receipts. You can also take a photo of paper receipts and import it. Once your transactions are in the system, you can tag expenses and then submit the expense report to your business’s bookkeeper for reimbursement.

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Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides services around the technology.

The startup’s first paid subscription product, Cloudera Enterprise includes authorization management and provisioning, integration configuration and monitoring and resource management. Features include LDAP integration, which allows organizations to integrate directly with their existing user authentication system; delegated group administration so that separate groups can manage their own pool of users; application access control providing administrators with advanced control over data access and user logging so that administrators can review individual user activity for advanced security.

Cloudera is also releasing a new version of its Distribution for Hadoop and has created two new open source projects as part of the distribution. The company is releasing Flume, its data loading infrastructure, and its Hadoop User Environment (HUE) code under the Apache V2 open source license.

This is the first paid software for Cloudera. The company most recently launched a free desktop version, which provides a unified graphical user interface for Hadoop applications that includes tools for job and cluster management.

Via Cloudera, Hadoop is currently used by most of the giants in the space including Google, Yahoo, Facebook (we wrote about Facebook’s use of Cloudera here), Amazon, AOL, Baidu and more. To date, Cloudera has raised $11 million in funding from Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. The company’s founder, Christophe Bisciglia, recently left Cloudera.

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Announced two years ago, Google App Engine offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform. Last year, Google added the ability to build Java applications off of the platform. With the newly launched Google App Engine for Business, Google is introducing new enterprise-level capabilities, including centralized administration, premium developer support and an uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), flat monthly pricing, and soon, access to premium features like cloud-based SQL and SSL.

The new version included centralized administration, which is an administration console lets you manage all the applications in your domain. And Google promises reliability with a 99.9% uptime service level agreement, with premium developer support available. Also Google is addressing security by only allowing users from a Google Apps domain to access applications, with and administrator’s security preferences implemented on each individual app.

In terms of pricing for the new versions, each application costs $8 per user per month up to a maximum of $1000 a month. And Google is adding more enterprise-level functionality in the future, including hosted SQL databases, SSL on a company’s domain for secure communications, and access to advanced Google services.

Added to the mix of the announcement is a new collaboration with virtualization giant VMware, which just announced a partnership with Salesforce, to make it easy and fast to build apps and deploy them to either Google App Engine for Business, a VMware environment (On a vSphere infrastructure, vCloud partner, or on Salesforce’s VMforce) or other infrastructure such as Amazon EC2. The aim is to make it easy to create rich, muti-device web applications hosted in a Java-compatible hosting environment Users of Google App Engine for business can now use VMware’s SpringSource Tool Suite and Spring Roo which are integrated with Google Web Toolkit and Speed Tracer.

Google has added new data presentation widgets in Google Web Toolkit to speed development of traditional enterprise applications, increase performance and interactivity for enterprise users, and make it easier to create mobile apps. And Speed Tracer now helps developers identify and fix performance problems not only in the client and network portions of their apps, but also on the server thanks to the integration with VMware’s SpringSource tool suite.

This clearly represents Google’s big push to bring enterprise development to the cloud, by now offering a powerful and interoperable environment and toolset to developers. This should prove to be a more worthy competitor to Amazon Web Services, which is one of App Engine’s major competitors for hosting environments.

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Sugar 6 includes the Sugar Shortcut Bar, which is a persistent toolbar throughout the application that allows users to perform common tasks from the toolbar, including creating an account, contact, sales opportunity, document, note, task or logging a meeting or call. Included in the Shortcut Bar, users will also see a context-aware Global Search field which filters search results based on the module in use (e.g., Contacts, Opportunities and Accounts) and produces results without leaving the page.

The application has also received a bit a facelift, with a new, sleek look and easier navigation. In addition to the new user interface, Sugar 6 also includes native application support for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry Smartphones and even the iPad.

SugarCRM, which faces competition from Salesforce, Zoho and other companies that develop CRM products, had a bit of a shakeup last year when CEO John Roberts abruptly resigned last May. But with over 600,000 subscribers of the company’s products, and nearly $50 million in funding, SugarCRM seems to be doing just fine.

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The new version includes a dead simple project visualization and tracking tool. Plus the new product also offers a TortoiseSVN plug-in, allowing teams using the TortoiseSVN Subversion client to have seamless communication between Subversion and OnTime. And the update features e-mail and worklog enhancements, as well as an automatic-update functionality for OnTime Windows client.

Currently used by more than 100,000 software developers, OnTime’s clients include Verifone, EA Sports, Disney, the United States Army, Lego, Cox and Intel.

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According to the statement, OpenOffice.org 3 recorded over half of that number from the central download site alone.

(Note: title and first para initially mentioned 200 million downloads, which was 100 million short of the claimed total number of downloads)

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CloudShare is essentially a collaborative tool for IT environments, allowing users to share, interact and collaborate in enterprise IT environments, for any length of time. CloudShare Pro’s environments are pre-configured to include servers, networking, storage and pre-installed operating systems and application licenses, including those forsoftware vendors like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. The new offering also promises speed, scalability, and ROI. The starup says that its enterprise customers have seen sales cycles accelerated, and costs reduced by 30-50 percent, tracked via CloudShare’s analytics dashboard.

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