Guardium and 9 Israel-related Headlines, Week of November 29, 2009
Filed under: Cleantech, Company Briefs, Data Storage, Environment, Information Technology, Mergers and Acquisitions, Uncategorized, cloud computing, data security
During the week of November 29, 2009 the biggest headline was IBM’s acquisition of database security and compliance company, Guardium. Dune was purchased by Broadcom and VMware is planning to double its workforce in Israel. For these stories and more, check below for this week’s 9 Israel-related headlines.
Cleantech
1. Capstone and Israel’s HelioFocus Get Grants To Fire Up Solar Powered Micro-Turbines
Investment
2. Broadcom To Acquire Dune For $178 Million
3. IBM buys database security firm Guardium
Information Technology
4. Thanks to Israel, ‘the Cloud’ will be safer
5. VMware doubles Israeli R&D workforce
5. Red Bend Software Named One of the Most Important Companies in M2M for 2010
Miscellaneous
7. Israeli firm Emblaze sues Apple claiming iPhone streaming ‘patent infringement’
8. Israeli tech firms are coming back home
Face.com and 11 Israel-related Headlines, Week of November 8, 2009
Filed under: Cleantech, Company Briefs, Environment, Information Technology, Mergers and Acquisitions, SaaS, VC, cloud computing
During the week of November 8, 2009, Motorola made its first Israeli acquisition by buying Bitband. Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) invested in XtremIO and Navajo Systems and Face.com went live with its facial-recognition tagger on Facebook. For these stories and the rest of this week’s 11 headlines, check below.
Cleantech
1. Jewish Israelis and Jewish Americans Look to US-Israel Cooperation To Break Oil Dependence
2. Deep sea aquaculture startup prepares for harvest
Investments and Economy
3. High-tech drives huge leap in exports
4. JVP and Giza Announce A-Round Investment in Early-Stage Startup XtremIO
5. Motorola in first Israeli acquisition: Bitband
Information Technology and Web 2.0
6. Facebook Facial-Recognition Tagger Goes Live
7. Windows 7 could hasten touch-screen computers (N-trig)
8. JVP Media Studio Invests Seed Round in Navajo Systems
Miscellaneous
9. Your cell phone can save you from a Dead Sea flash flood
10. The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs In America
11. Israel’s lively start-up culture keeps economy thriving
Trends and 10 Israel-related Headlines, Week of September 20, 2009
Filed under: Cleantech, Company Briefs, Environment, Information Technology, VC, Web2.0, cloud computing, virtualization
During the week of September 20, 2009, Nefos announced that it will use Magic Software’s business and process integration suite, iBolt. Waze continued to garner attention for its user-generated mobile road map application and analysts expect the online community software market to reach $1.6 billion by 2013. For these stories and more, check this week’s 10 headlines below.
Cleantech
1. Color matters: GreenSun Energy colored solar technology
2. New boost for clean energy launched
Investment
3. The Great VC Ice Age is Thawing (for now) – Part 1 of 3
Industry Trends
4. Cloud computing gathers steam with mobile devices
5. IDC forecasts $1.6 billion online community software market by 2013
Information Technology
6. African broadband growth could lead to higher spam rates (PineApp)
7. Nefos Selects Magic Software’s Business, Process Integration Suite
8. DEMOfall: Crowdsourcing Brings New Life To Mapmaking (Waze)
9. Growing businesses urged to start dialogue through email marketing
Miscellaneous
10. China marks 17 years with Israel
Crescendo Networks raises $5 million
Last week Crescendo Networks announced that it raised $5 million in funding. The company, which provides software that enhances the Web application delivery process, will use the money to “further fuel sales expansion” and to move its corporate headquarters to Menlo Park in California, though engineering and some operations will remain in Tel Aviv.
Since 2002, when the company was founded, it has raised $45 million and attracted customers ranging from Forbes.com to Aeropostale to Fujitsu. As more business processes become based online and virtualization, SaaS and cloud computing matures, Crscendo Networks’s line of AppBeat products will continue to offer any size business with the necessary solutions to accelerate application delivery, cut data center costs and boost capacity for business growth.
As Peter van Oppen of Trilogy Equity Partners, one of the investors in the round, stated,
“As the IT world experiences a paradigm shift in the way applications are delivered, data centers are incorporating cloud computing, SaaS and virtualization as part of modern web application infrastructures. We believe Crescendo Networks’ application delivery solutions are perfectly poised to capitalize on these expanding market opportunities.”
Crescendo’s products include, AppBeat DC, AppBeat SC and Maestro Platform.
Video: Henry Broodney of InGrid Networks
Filed under: Data Storage, IT management, Information Technology, Risk Management, Video, cloud computing
While attending a VC Cafe meetup in Tel Aviv last week, I had the opportunity to meet Henry Broodney, co-founder and COO of the Israel-based business continuity software company, InGrid Networks. The company’s data protection suite provides small businesses with solutions for backup and recovery and disaster recovery for desktops, laptops and servers by “leveraging existing networked resources to create a private storage cloud that integrates with a public cloud for off-site disaster protection.”
In this video taken at the meetup, Broodney gives a brief overview of the company.
Benefits of the technology include, seamless operation, low cost of ownership and ease of use.
G.ho.st: A real model for coexistence
Filed under: Data Storage, Information Technology, Israeli Websites, New Ideas, Uncategorized, Web2.0, virtualization
As if reading the news the past few months hasn’t been depressing enough with the worldwide economic downturn, the current conflict going on in Gaza had to happen to bring the news down to a whole new level of sadness. With each passing day it seems less likely that there will ever be a real peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and yet, as the current conflict unravels, one company, with an office in the Israeli city of Modi’in and another in the West Bank city of Ramallah seems to have found a solution.
That company, G.ho.st, is the only joint venture between Israelis and Palestinians and is defying the odds and difficulties that have arisen from strong sentiments on both sides. Founded in 2006, G.ho.st is short for Global Hosting Operating Systems and provides its 100,000 and growing users with a free vitual desktop that allows them to store items from their desktops and files and to access them from any computer connected to the Internet. G.ho.st calls it a virtual computer or VC.
The company is made up of 35 Palestinians who do software programming and are led by Director, Tareq Maayah and 6 Israelis, including CEO, Zvi Schreiber. Though the offices are relatively close to each other (under 6 miles away), because of restrictions, workers usually have to communicate via video conference and don’t have leisurely access to visiting each other. While the Palestinians are paid less than their Israeli counterparts (because the cost of living is less), both the Palestinians and Israelis have equal shares in the company.
According to correspondence I had with Schreiber this week, this model worked well and thrived during the relative peace that took place from the time G.ho.st was founded and, even now, is continuing to.
(Picture on left: Zvi Schreiber with Israeli President Shumon Peres. Picture on right: Ghost team.)
Schreiber explained that despite everyone’s concerns about the current conflict, in which employees on both sides have family and/or friends who are affected, work is still going on as usual and that the team, which includes people who worked through a previous conflict at their last job, is prepared to continue to work even if the situation were to spread to the West Bank.
Perhaps the secret to G.ho.st’s success and resilience of its employees so far has been the care that’s been taken to keep and maintain the common ground between employees in both offices. Prior to the latest conflict, the company would manage to get permits to bring everyone together in Israel for valuable team activities, meals, business updates etc. Because of the conflict though, Schreiber said that everyone is now (understandably) worried about the safety of their families and friends on both sides and there’s only so much the company can do about it. His hope however, is that “in some small way our team, working peacefully together, can be an example of what a different reality could look like.”
It’s not just the employees in the company working peacefully together though that can change reality. G.ho.st also has a foundation that is helping lay the groundwork for future joint ventures by creating community computer centers in Ramallah and in mixed Jewish-Arab towns in Israel. Perhaps if more companies were to use G.ho.st’s model in business and in the community, Schreiber’s hope will not only become a reality where the two sides co-exist knowing no borders and, in line with the G.ho.st slogan, no walls.
High demand for Mellanox Technologies’ virtualization solutions
Mellanox Technologies Ltd., a semiconductor-based server and
storage interconnect solutions provider, announced yesterday that since the January release of its InfiniBand drivers for VMware ESX 3.5, it has received a sharp increase in demand and inquiries from “partners, and end-users from multiple
enterprise data center vertical markets”. The drivers are drawing interest primarily for their ability to consolidate I/O adapters and, as a result, minimize the set-up process in virtualized environments.
According to the news release, Mellanox’s consolidation claims have drawn “heavy interest from
Fortune 500 companies” interested in “the ability to immediately save I/O power (up
to 30%) and I/O cost (up to 50%).”
To back up claims about its drivers performance capabilities, Mellanox will be showcasing its InfiniBand drivers in action at VMworld Europe 2008 this week. VMworld Europe is led by VMware (Virtual Machine ware) and is a key conference for business and IT professionals on “virtual technology and business solutions.”
VMware’s website defines virtualization (also termed “cloud computing” by IBM and Google) as letting,
one computer do the job of multiple
computers, by sharing the resources of a single computer across
multiple environments. Virtual servers and virtual desktops lets you
host multiple operating systems and multiple applications locally and
in remote locations, freeing you from physical and geographical
limitations. In addition to energy savings and lower capital expenses
due to more efficient use of your hardware resources, you get high
availability of resources, better desktop management, increased
security, and improved disaster recovery processes when you build a
virtual infrastructure.
Data center architects and IT managers in vertical sectors (such as banking, Web 2.0 and healthcare) who are trying to cut their data center costs and decrease risk through virtualization should look into how Mellanox’s InfiniBand drivers for VMware ESX 3.5 can help simplify the implementation process.
Company Facts
Founded in 1999 and based in Yokneam and Tel Aviv, Israel.
Eyal Waldman, Co-founder, Chairman of the Board and CEO.
Roni Ashuri, Co-founder and Vice President of Engineering.
Products: Silicon adapters, adapter cards, software and production development kits.
Website: www.mellanox.com.
Related entries:
Company in Focus: G.ho.st.
Company in Focus: XIV.
About the author: Lisa Damast is the Membership
Manager of ebizQ.net and currently resides in Israel. Any questions or
inquiries regarding this blog or ebizQ membership services can be
directed to her via email at ldamast (at) ebizq (dot) net. She can also be followed on Twitter, where she covers additional Israeli technology companies and Israel-related headlines and topics.
Company in Focus: G.ho.st
News:
Last week, Europe had its 4th annual LeWeb3 conference focusing on technology in Europe. During the conference, Israeli Web-based operating system, G.ho.st received third place in a competition among the most promising startups that had been showcased.
Background:
According to the G.ho.st website,
“G. ho.st (“ghost”, the Global Hosted Operating SysTem) provides a free and complete Virtual Computer (VC) service, including personal desktop, files and applications, available from any browser. G.ho.st is the world’s first and only true open Web Operating System (Web OS), working seamlessly with leading third-party web applications. The G.ho.st VC delivers a mature computing environment to every person, which is free of charge, available everywhere and admin-free.”
Analysis:
G.ho.st is getting a lot of positive feedback and comments from the media and blogosphere. While, G.ho.st, which is open source, is competing against dozens of other web-based operating systems, most people seem to be impressed with its functionality, easy user-interface, and its stability — factors that surely led to G.ho.st being chosen as a startup to watch at LeWeb last week.
According to KillerStartups.com, “the service is ideal for people that travel a lot, or students that frequently use community computers.” With its 3 gigabyte of storage, it seems like the perfect replacement for the USB storage drive that individuals and companies embrace.
Aside from business travelers, G.ho.st’s VC also has significant potential to impact the enterprise market, which is currently being overtaken by open source and software-as-a-service (SaaS), as a whole. Although some of the biggest players in the field, Google and I.B.M., use the term cloud computing instead of WebOS, the basis for both is distributed computing on the Internet.
While Google’s online collaboration and office applications are ultimately G.ho.st’s biggest threat, Google will also help define the future of the field as it will be the one that will take the hit or bask in the glory when its services and other WebOS services, such as G.ho.st, start to really take business away from Microsoft’s Windows and Office sales and the software giant is forced to retaliate.
Of course, any G.ho.st role in the enterprise will depend on how companies receive it in the workplace. Such a virtual desktop has the potential to offer significant pros and cons for employees and companies alike. It also might blur the line between the line of work and home and create a new security threat for IT departments to address.
However, before that point, as previously mentioned, G.ho.st is one of dozens devoted to a universally web accessible desktop, and a close eye on their progress should be kept. On this level, it seems that G.ho.st’s most immediate threat is Jooce, which has several similarities and differences to G.ho.st.
Additional Resources:
Interview with the G.ho.st – Zvi Schreiber
Can G.ho.st scare Microsoft?
G.ho.st Crunchbase profile
Mashable review
G.ho.st on TechCrunch
LeWeb recap
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