Alteryx has raised $12 million for its business intelligence service designed for data analysts to build tools out of their own internal data and that from third parties.

The investment comes from SAP Ventures and Toba Capital, a new firm founded by former Quest Founder and CEO Vinny Smith. Quest sold to Dell last year for $2.4 billion. Total funding for Alteryx is now $18 million. SAP also participated in the first round.

The Alteryx platform streams data into a data engine. The analyst then packages apps and publishes to the cloud. The analyst works with data behind the firewall, pulling in third-party information such as social streams. MongoDB, the NoSQL database, is used to serve up data to the app gallery.

The apps are pretty easy to use once set up for the user. I tried the service when I looked at the company late last year.

Alteryx plays in a very hot market. President Chief Operating Officer George Mathew said the business intelligence sector is estimated to be $10 to $12 billion by IDC. It’s evident in the news of the past week with Tableau having a very successful IPO.

Alteryx sees the market as defined by the total number of data analysts, which is estimated at 3 to 4 million. In contrast, there are only 200,000 data scientists.

Alteryx compares itself to products such as SAS and Tibco Spotfire, which Mathew says takes more time to integrate than its platform.

There is a reason why the business intelligence market is growing at such a clip. It’s the volume and velocity of data that requires tools that can get to the data fast and be accessible so the analyst can package it and provide to the end-user.

There is a misperception about the new Google Cloud Platform that the company put into general availability last week at Google I/O. It’s not a brand new platform. It’s what Google has used for years. It is Google’s foundation. It is what makes Google, Google. And now it’s open for the first time to developers and businesses.

Google Platform is new in the sense that anyone can now use it. But until now only a relative few number of people have had access to the platform.

Google Cloud Platform officially launched at last year’s Google I/O. So it still has a lot of hype that comes with a new Google service, especially at an event like Google I/O. It does not have the full set of features that comes with Amazon Web Services (AWS). A customer can get a much deeper service level agreement (SLA) from Windows Azure. Customers can use a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) like Openshift and leverage the Red Hat infrastructure. OpenStack is an option for companies that want to build out their own open cloud environment. Go that route and a customer has a host of vendors to choose from. Red Hat, IBM and HP are just a few to choose from for any number of software and services.

The Power Is In The Network

But there is one thing in particular that sets the Google Cloud Platform apart. And that’s the network that connects the company’s data centers so questions can be answered in milliseconds. It’s what makes it possible for Google to offer 3D maps, translation APIs and Google Glass.

“It is blazing fast,” said Will Shulman, co-founder of MongoLab about the network in a panel at Google I/O about distributed databases. “The other thing – it has a private distributed backbone between all the data centers.You are talking over Google’s backbone, not over the Internet.”

The network speed makes a difference in a few ways. The compute and storage in Google Compute Engine are separated but for the user it appears as if it is all together because it is so fast. It’s like having one giant, programmable super computer that in reality is distributed across thousands of servers.

The network speed also helps make a difference in cost. With the speed, comes the ability to process more data in less time.

Google factors its network into its pricing, much like cloud provider ProfitBricks does. ProfitBricks uses InfniBand, which offers more bandwidth capably than Google’s 10 gigabyte network. Regardless, Google’s fiber network and data center optimization provides the opportunity to offer sub-hour pricing, down to the minute.

On the Google platform,  a customer can double the cores and do a data job in 30 minutes at the cost that it would normally take an hour to do.

Google views data centers as living things. They are not islands but exist in a connected world, connected to devices, other services and other data centers.

It’s this view that shows why Google has to be so considerate of its own network. The world is becoming a vast data fabric. But networking is expensive. Compute and storage costs continue to decrease but networking has not gone down at the same pace as CPU and storage, said Google Product Maanger Amit Argawal in a presentation at the Open Network Summit last June.

What it costs to connect a 10 gigabyte pipe between two regions in the United States is different from connecting different countries in Asia, where the markets are emerging fastest, In the video, Argawal says in the video. Devices are ubiquitous and disposable. Someone can lose a smartphone, buy a new one and be back up in a half-hour. The data is in the cloud not on the device. The services in turn are populating across the network. Put together it’s a virtuous circle. The network needs to be fast and interactive. If not, user engagement will slow. High availability needs to be built into all layers of the stack.

Why Developers Play A Crucial Role

To allay networking and other costs, Google has to continually keep its operations running optimally. The Internet business model means services have to be free or for a small fee. That means Google has to make sure developers are building apps on services that will help Google extend its advertising products and low-cost cost subscription services such as Google Apps.

And that’s why Google Cloud Platform plays an important role in attracting more developers, who in turn help extend Google’s properties.

For example, Google talked at Google I/O about how it offers tools to help developers integrate into the Google back-end. Google Maps, Chrome. Android and BigQuery all have these integrations. Google Glass will get integrated but for now it is not the number one focus.

AWS has a rich developer ecosystem and has a deep selection of services to offer. But Amazon is not an identity and services provider like Google is. Google has more data to offer developers so that will also be a strong selling point going forward for the company with developers.

For Cloudant, a distributed database company, it’s the fact that there is now another community outside AWS that it can tap. “There are a large and growing number of developers on Google,” said Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Mike Miller, who also sat on the distributed database panel.

Google App Engine symbolizes some of the differences that may attract developers. Google announced at Google I/O that PHP would be offered on Google AppEngine. This will make Google available to the scores of web developers who have built their web sites with the programming language. In March Google acquired Taleria, showing its continued emphasis on building out support for dynamic programming languages and need for systems that scale out efficiently.  From Frederic Lardinois post about the acquisition:

The company claimed that its technology allowed developers to “handle more users with fewer boxes, without changing a line of code.” Talaria also claimed its ” server lets you keep your favorite high-productivity languages, but with the scalability and performance you’d expect from a compiled language.”

And then there is the ease of use that Google is trying to offer with Google App Engine. These include back-end as a service tools and more management features that allow developers to focus more on the code then the back-end.

That’s important for companies such as OrangeScape, a “visual PaaS,” for non-developers to build apps. CEO Suresh Sambandam said that means the company can keep its IT team relatively tight.

Google has a network that makes it arguably one of the largest carriers in the world.  But it’s the cost of these data centers that will be its biggest challenge going forward. It’s almost as if Google had to open its infrastructure to extend its distributed network as efficiently as possible while continually attracting developers to scale its business model.

Earlier this week we reported on how Backupify was closing down TweetBackup, a free service to back up your Twitter account that it acquired in 2010; now we have confirmed that, as we’d heard, this is part of a bigger plan at the company to phase out consumer services altogether, as Backupify focuses its efforts on paid services for enterprise customers. From today, it will stop accepting new sign-ups for its free tier of back-up services for personal files. It is also discontinuing by the end of this year support for certain sites, including Facebook personal profiles, Blogger, Picassa and Flickr.

It will continue to offer services to back up Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter and personal Gmail accounts, but it’s likely that these will be moved to all-paid services over time, as part of its personal backup products, which it will continue to support “for the foreseeable future” (even if only as paid, not free, products). Rob May, CEO of Backupify, tells us that the timescale for free support is around two more quarters.

The moves are a signal that some startups that began with consumer social media services in mind have found that market hard to monetize. On the other hand, as enterprises become increasingly social, they are proving to be willing paying customers for many of the same kinds of offerings.

Rob May, CEO of Backupify, tells us that this move has been a long time in the making — some two years in fact.

“We started Backupify as a consumer-facing business but we quickly realized there was money in SMB and enterprise, so when we raised money the intention was to use it to go after the B2B market. And this is now a bigger chunk of our revenue — over 90%,” he told TechCrunch. In a blog post on the news, May also notes that enterprise was only a small percentage of revenues three years ago.

The company is not revealing total user numbers currently but when it announced a Series C round of $9 million last year, it had 170,000 users, and didn’t break out how many of those were free or paid.

He notes that in fact there is nothing of TweetBackup getting left behind in the closure. Over time, as Twitter has changed its own APIs, the company had to rebuilt its product from the ground up. It’s that rebuilt technology that has also gone into Ditto, the Symantec service for backing up Twitter accounts, which turns out was co-developed with Backupify (one by-product of the strategic investment that Symantec made as part of that most recent $9 million round of fundraising).

In the meantime, Backupify is working on developing services to back up other platforms and sites. It’s currently in testing with Apptivo, Freshdesk, Mavenlink, Nimble and Pipeline Deals to provide backup services to their users, and with the increasing move to cloud-based enterprise services, you can see how and where something like that could develop further. May says it’s not currently working with Evernote — a company with an ethos of saving your data for the rest of your live and beyond — but that he would love to.

One year to the day of the troubled Facebook IPO, the climate for tech IPOs in the public markets is significantly less stormy, especially for companies in the enterprise space. Today, not one but two, Tableau Software and Marketo, are debuting on New York stock exchanges. Business intelligence provider Tableau Software, trading as “DATA”, is one of the more highly anticipated tech IPOs of the year, and so far it has not disappointed. It priced its IPO at $31 per share, and it , popped 58% in early trading, and closed at 64% above opening price, or $50.75/share.

Meanwhile, Marketo, a cloud-based marketing services company, priced its IPO at $13 per share. It will be trading as MKTO on the NASDAQ exchange, but has yet to trade at the time of writing. It went up by more than 50% in early activity and then continued to creep up: it closed at 68% nearly 78% above the IPO pricing and trading at $21.48$23.10. (We have been updating these numbers throughout the day.)

Taken together, the two are strong endorsements for the market for enterprise services and some of the still-emerging trends within it.

Tableau Software, as its stock ticker unsubtly hints, is aimed more at a big-data play, offering visualization and analytics that it says are easy enough for non-technical people to use. Up to now, it still offers the majority of its services as downloadable, on-premises software rather than as cloud-based apps.

Marketo is positioned as a software-as-a-service, and like a Salesforce for the marketing department, offers its various services — inbound marketing, lead management, social marketing, event management, instant CRM integration, sales dashboards, and marketing ROI reporting and analytics — all in a one-stop-in-the-cloud-shop.

Tableau Software raised some $254.2 million at the $31/share price, after raising that IPO from an initial range of $23-26; this gives it a valuation of $2 billion. Marketo, meanwhile, is raising just under $85 million at a $550 million valuation.

(Incidentally, Facebook’s shares have lost some 30% of their value in the last year, and are at around $26.25/share at the moment.)

How does Tableau’s IPO compare to other high-profile enterprise listings? The money raised is just shy of the $260 million that enterprise security company Palo Alto Networks raised in July 2012. It is still a ways behind HR specialist Workday’s IPO in October 2012, which raised $637 million.

Tableau Software’s 10-figure IPO sets the stage for other $1 billion+ tech IPOs from the likes of Box and Twitter. Tableau had raised around $45 million prior to this from investors including NEA and Meritech (Crunchbase puts the total at only $15 million, but Geekwire says that NEA’s total investment in the company has been $29 million, and its SEC documents tell another story).

In contrast, Marketo has raised $108 million in six rounds, from investors that include Institutional Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund, Storm Ventures and Battery Ventures.

Data visualization software company Tableau Software, going by the symbol “DATA,” will start trading tomorrow on the New York Stock Exchange at $31 per share, up from earlier today when the company said it would trade in the $28 to $30 range.

Tableau will offer 8.2 million shares of its Class A common stock, up from the 7.2 million it previously said it would offer. That puts the offering at $254 million with a market capitalization of more than $2 billion. Previously the company’s market cap was estimated at $1.7 billion.

The company, which filed its IPO in April, develops business intelligence software, including Tableau Desktop, Tableau Public, and Tableau Server and has about 10,000 customers.

It has established itself as one of the most feature-rich data visualization providers. It integrates with data warehouse platforms and with an extensive list of partners, including Google Cloud Platform, IBM and HP Vertica.

The IPO shows the value that enterprise software companies command. Palo Alto Networks and Splunk have had successful IPOs and a host of new deals are expected in the coming months. For example, Marketo, a marketing automation company, will also begin trading tomorrow on the Nasdaq scheduled in a $73 million IPO and a market capitalization of $429 million.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

This is the final episode of my show on TCTV, “In The Studio.” The final guest is a good friend, Parth Shah (no relation), an engineer with VMware, and before that, at Yahoo! Parth combines the precision of CMU CS graduate’s take on web development with a hacker mentality, and has the rare skill of being able to explain some of the most complex enterprise IT concepts to those who don’t have as much context — such as me! In this short conversation, Parth shares with us his work at VMware and his generalized thoughts on how the enterprise stack is being disrupted today. This video would be a great primer for anyone who wants to begin to learn about the enterprise world.

As an added bonus, Parth and I have spent a few months collaborating on a post about the enterprise IT stack, written in lay-terms so that a wider audience can learn more about it. We are proud to publish this post today, which you can read here.

Finally, thank you for being a loyal viewer of “In The Studio” as it ends today (my Sunday column, Iterations, will continue). In the span of 18 months, the show ran for 70 consecutive weeks, producing 70 episodes featuring Silicon Valley’s up-and-coming founders, legendary venture capitalists, emergent seed investors, and focused on producing quality, primary-source content in today’s noisy tech media landscape. For me, “In The Studio” was a terrific platform to get to meet people who excelled at what they do. As someone who is new to the technology world, doing the show was a crash-course in learning by conversation, and making those conversations public will hopefully provide insight to others who are looking to learn. I have worked to organize and reproduce all the videos, which you can access here. This is a great privilege, so thanks again to all those who participated.

BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal of the bitcoin world, is today announcing that it has raised another $2 million. And in a kind of poetic justice, the round is led by none other than the Founders Fund, the VC started by what’s commonly called the PayPal Mafia.

The Atlanta-based startup says that it was not planning to raise any money at the moment — it announced an initial raise of $510,000 only in January. That was its first outside funding after being bootstrapped internally. However, the company also says that it couldn’t say no, considering who was asking:

“We were not looking to raise any capital until later this year, but we could not ignore the opportunity to have Founders Fund involved with BitPay,” Tony Gallippi, co-founder and CEO of BitPay, notes in a news release on the deal. “There’s no single investment firm we would rather have on our team right now than Founders Fund.”

Nevertheless, it looks like the extra money will be used for hiring: there are currently two jobs open for node.js developers “who are excited about bitcoin.” BitPay is also looking for a UX designer. There will also be more investment in its platform and further product development.

Founders Fund partners know a thing or two about payment platforms — given their past experience as founders and senior execs at PayPal and other companies. Their interest in BitPay comes from the fact that it, and bitcoin, in general, appear to be growing like wildfire.

“BitPay’s ambitions have been global from the outset, and at Founders Fund we have been impressed with the company’s tremendous growth as they sign up hundreds of new customers a day, turning the potential for opportunity into a reality,” said Brian Singerman, a Partner at Founders Fund, in a statement.

When we covered the company’s first raise in January, we noted it had already signed up 2,100 businesses that were using its platform to process bitcoin payments. In April, it added nearly that many again: 1,900 merchants, and they are now processing $5 million per month in bitcoin transactions covering areas like electronics, precious metals, “and other low-margin products.” The promise of using bitcoin over dollars is lower fees, and companies are seeing “a large increase in profitability by accepting bitcoin payments,” the company notes.

In addition to Founders Fund, Max Keiser’s fund Heisenberg Capital, a London-based fund focused on bitcoin companies, is also involved in this seed round. It comes as a number of other VCs are also jumping into the bitcoin landgrab.

The terms of this most recent round were not disclosed, the company notes, “although 100% of the existing seed shareholders exercised their pro rata rights to maintain their ownership percentage in BitPay.” Previous investors in BitPay included Shakil Khan (the Path and Spotify former head of special projects, who has also launched his own bitcoin information resource, Coindesk), Barry Silbert, Jimmy Furland and Roger Ver.

BonitaSoft, a provider of an open source business process management (BPM) solution, has raised a $13 million Series C round led by the FSN PME Fund, a French government initiative to invest in technology companies to help them scale globally. Also joining the round are previous investors Ventech, Auriga Partners, and Serena Capital. The new funding round brings the total raised by the company to just over $28 million since being founded in 2009, and follows an $11m Series B in late 2011.

BonitaSoft is headquartered in Grenoble, France — hence the French government’s backing — although it also has a U.S. office in San Francisco where I’m told CEO Miguel Valdes Faura spends half his time, as well an another office in Paris. It operates in the BPM space, competing with the likes of Pegasystems, Appian, LongJump, and a number of other open source players.

Companies use BPM software to automate their processes, particularly where these operate at the intersection of machines and people. For example, insurance companies might employ a BPM suite to design software to automate the claims process when a customer is involved in a car accident. Or to streamline and make accountable any business process where without systems in place things would otherwise fall through the cracks, especially at scale.

To that end, BonitaSoft’s solution includes a design studio to model business processes, a BPM engine that adapts to various information systems architectures, and an end-user interface for managing and interacting with processes. It also has support for a range of internal and external systems via a library of hundreds of ‘Connectors’ and a strong developer community (due to its open source nature) who contribute connectors, business processes and other extensions.

BonitaSoft says that it serves more than 600 companies and governments worldwide, claiming customers such as Accenture, DirectTV, Old Dominion University, Trane, Teach For America and Michelin. Its software has seen more than 2 million downloads, while the open source community is said to be 60,000 member-strong.

Like other open source business models, BonitaSoft makes money by charging for additional add-ons and support. It plans to use the new capital to “fuel its global expansion plans in the USA, Europe, and Latin America”, specifically increasing its marketshare of mid and large-sized businesses who currently rely on proprietary and aging BPM solutions. It also plans to plough some of that cash into developing next-generation BPM technologies.

AirWatch, the startup that helps businesses manage security and more on employees’ mobile devices, is today announcing that it has raised another $25 million, led by Accel with participation also from Insight Venture Partners. The funds come as part of an expanded Series A round, originally for $200 million, which the company announced with a splash in February during Mobile World Congress. This Series A is the first outside money raised by AirWatch, and values the company at just over $1 billion, according to sources.

Both AirWatch’s CEO, John Marshall, and Ryan Sweeney, the partner who led the round at Accel, tell TechCrunch that this latest expansion of the round was made at the same valuation. It comes just weeks after rival Good Technology raised a $50 million round and is preparing for an IPO.

As with the earlier $200 million, this latest injection will be used to help AirWatch build out its business, add more services, and quite possibly make some acquisitions along the way.

Marshall declined to say what areas acquisitions might be in, other than to note that they would be strategic investments to expand product lines and customers. “I think we will look very carefully at adjacent technology or tuck-in acquisitions,” he told TechCrunch. “I would not want to answer [who they are]. The three companies that I am looking at right now are all doing different things, and I don’t want to tip off our competitors.”

One area where AirWatch sees a particularly bright spot is in what Marshall refers to as “containerization of content,” in which services exist not just to manage whole devices but to be able to make more sophisticated services to partition and control particular services, such as a specific suite of enterprise apps or even one particular area of data. “The largest portion of our business is still in the enterprise mobility management space, including devices as well as apps,” he said. “The growing part of the business is around being able to secure the content in a digital locker. We see a lot of growth in extending that out within our customer base. I can’t emphasize how important this is in our strategy.” It will also lead AirWatch further also into desktop services, supporting not just mobile devices and platforms but the services and PCs used to run things when workers are not running around.

The funding, and AirWatch’s moves to grow, are signs of a consolidation afoot in the area of mobile enterprise services, specifically around mobile device management and the larger “BYOD” trend, where workers are following larger consumer trends using smartphones and tablets to do everything online, and are increasingly bringing in their devices to the office to help them work there, too. Up to now, there have been dozens of companies working in this space, both big (like AirWatch and Good) and small.

“We think this market is going to play out quickly,” said Marshall. “There are haves and have-nots, and we want to be the market leader and continue increasing that separation. Consolidation is absolutely on the cards.”

He also says that will play out not just in terms of services and winning business but also in terms of funding. “The VCs are getting pretty smart and are realizing that the winners are shaping up. That will cut off capital for those players who are not in the leading pack. Some will be acquired, and some will disappear.”

Indeed, Sweeney at Accel agrees on the investing front, but adds that the company is also gearing up to look for more mobile enterprise investments going forward.

“We’re actively looking in mobile enterprise,” he told TechCrunch. “This is the largest investment we’ve made in mobile enterprise to date but [the trend of] folks bringing phones and tablets from home to work and leaving with your PC in your pocket are still growing, so we think mobile enterprise will be a growth area for 3-5 years for sure.”

Marshall says AirWatch is currently adding 500 business per month, which would put its current client base at around 7,500, with some of the bigger names including Delta, Lowe’s; United Airlines; Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF); Skanska; PepsiCo; Henry Ford Health System; Mount Sinai Medical Center; Best Buy and Abbott Laboratories. The company boasts four of the top five global Fortune companies; the top four global energy companies; six of the top 10 global airlines; six of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies; seven of the top 10 global consumer product companies; five of the top 10 global luxury goods companies; two of the top three global hotel groups; nine of the top 10 U.S. retailers and three of the top five U.S. medical device companies.

Google’s stock price came close to its 52-week high on the first day of Google I/O today, hitting $915 per share at close. In comparison, Apple today dropped 15 points to close at $428 per share, 277 points off its 52-week high.

This morning, Google stock jumped to $909 per share from its opening price of $895 when Co-Founder Larry Page hit the stage at around 11:45. It is now trading at $916.50 in after-hours trading. One analyst I talked to attributed the increase to Google’s announcement of its “all access” streaming service and the rotation out of hardware makers such as Apple and HP.

The difference between Google and Apple’s share price is a barometer of the tech landscape. Google is a data company. Apple is more about design, creating beautiful devices.

The difference is evident here at Google I/O. Google has built its infrastructure to manage more data than arguably any company in the world. It uses ths data to provide services that it highlighted today in its keynote. This includes its Google Translate APIs and the next generation of its Google Maps. The iPhone will always be elegant. As my colleague Josh Constine points out, the beauty of a device is just not as important, as the entire world becomes a fabric of data objects.

Time for a back-up plan for your Twitter back-up plan. Backupify — the Cambridge, MA cloud-based backup, search and restore provider for online services — is shutting down TweetBackup, a company originally founded in Sweden that Backupify acquired in 2010 for an undisclosed amount. Tweetbackup has posted a note about the closure on its site, as well as — yes — on its Twitter account, noting that new signups are stopping as of today, and that existing users will have 30 days, until June 28, to keep logging into their accounts and back up their Twitter data elsewhere.

After 45 days, it notes, “we will begin purging the data from our Amazon servers.”

On one of the two FAQ pages that Backupify has created to answer some questions about the service, it suggests a couple of alternatives to TweetBackup’s subscribers: for business users, the company recommends Backupify’s own-branded service; for consumers, it suggests going somewhere else altogether, either Ditto from Norton Labs, owned by one of Backupify’s strategic investors, Symantec; or SocialSafe.

We are reaching out to the company to find out more, but it looks like this is part of a larger strategy at the company to reposition itself more closely on its enterprise services and away from lower cost/free consumer offerings.

In fact, this may not be too new of an idea:

“We always intended to have Tweetbackup users join Backupify’s base Twitter service,” Backupify’s Jason Ellis notes. And in July 2012, when Backupify announced the $9 million round in which Symantec invested, it noted that the free services (TweetBackup was one) were there for lead-generation for paid apps.

It is not clear how many active users TweetBackup has at the moment. In 2010, the company had a policy of requiring users of its service to follow it on Twitter — evidenced at that time because @tweetbackup was the only account Wikileaks was following at the height of its controversy with Amazon and PayPal over contributions via their payment systems. By that measure, Tweetbackup had around 57,382 users, although the same platform is likely also used as part of Backupify’s wider Personal Apps social media backup service. Last year when Backupify announced its Series C round of funding it had 170,000 users, free and paid.

Backupify offers paid standalone products to back up Google Apps and Salesforce. “Personal Apps, which include Facebook and Twitter, has a freemium model. It will backup personal apps free for a limited amount of data and then charge for more features and more storage space. (Prices for paid services range from $3/month/user for the most basic Google Apps backup through to $50/month for 10 licenses of 1GB each for Salesforce.)

Given that Twitter has now made its own archiving service more widely available, perhaps the writing was on the wall for whether Backupify would ever be able to translate Tweetbackup into a more profitable service without more investment to enhance the product. Monetizing even appeared to be one of the issues behind the company’s acquisition back in 2010:

“They’re the number-one ranking company in Google for Twitter backup,” Rob May, co-founder and CEO of Backupify, said of the company at the time of the acquisition. “I guess they had some problems monetizing their user base, and so were looking to sell.”

Meanwhile, there are other services like FrostBox and SocialSafe that back up multiple social media accounts. Both of these are now offering free, six month licenses to TweetBackup refugees.

Google announced today at I/O that it made Google Cloud Platform generally available, marking a milestone for the cloud community and the real arrival of a giant to contend with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its pay-as-you-go pricing.

The service, now with 3 million apps, is now open to any developer or business. In its post announcing the news, Google revealed a bit about new pricing, instance types and other features:

• Sub-hour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a 10-minute minimum, so developers don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use.
• Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads.
• Advanced Routing features help create gateways and VPN servers and enables developers to build applications that span local network and Google’s cloud
• Large persistent disks support up to 10 terabytes per volume, which Google says translates to 10X the industry standard

Google also announced a new data store for non-relational data and availability of a PHP runtime.

The new App Engine 1.8.0 includes a limited preview of the PHP runtime – the top requested feature with customers. PHP is one of the most popular web programming languages, running open source apps like WordPress. According to Google, only whitelisted applications may be deployed on App Engine if they use the PHP runtime. When the restrictions lift, Google will nnounce it on the App Engine blog.

For a good part of last year, Google had engaged users in a limited beta of the platform, which allows developers to run their apps on Linux virtual machines hosted on Google’s massive infrastructure. Developers had to either get an invitation or go through Google’s sales teams to get access to the service.

Starting in April, developers who subscribed to Google’s $400 per month Gold Support package with 24/7 phone support were able to access Compute Engine without the need to talk to sales or receive an invitation.

Google also announced it dropped its instance prices by 4 percent (that’s after it already dropped storage prices by 20 percent last November).

Google is emphasizing its cloud platform this year. There are 25 sessions for the Google Cloud Platform at Google I/O. Only Chrome and Android have more.

Google is increasingly relying on its data-center infrastructure to attract developers. It offers the APIs to integrate with apps and now the capability to use the data centers for compute and storage. That’s an important shift if Google wants to attract more developers and compete with the AWS ecosystem.

We are more than two hours into the Google I/O keynote, the kickoff to a three-day event with 171 sessions. But something is quite different from last year. Google Cloud Platform has risen to the tof of the pack with 25 sessions, second only to Google Chrome with 48 and Google Android that has 35.

Last year, Google Cloud Platform had just been launched and so the sessions were more introductory in nature. This year, it has more sessions than Google+ (15); TechTalk (15); YouTube (13); Knowledge and Structured Data (6); Google Ads (5); Google Wallet (5) and Google Glass with four.

In the opening keynote this morning, Google highlighted Android, gaming, and translation APIs along with a host of other topics. In the Google Cloud platform sessions, pretty much all of what the keynote is covering gets pursued more in-depth. For example, there are sessions about intense gaming, and a session about advanced Go concurrency pattens.

Google Cloud Platform, with 25 I/O sessions, is certainly not as sexy as Google Glass but it’s importance is arguably greater than that of a single (ambitious) product. Google Cloud Platform is being positioned as the foundation for application development with third-party developers — until now, we have not seen Google push so hard to attract developers to its own platforms. But now it is trying to draw in developers with its robust collection of APIs and its vast compute and storage that serves as the backbone for Google’s emphasis on leveraging large data loads.

Android and Chrome are the Google darlings. But their vitality is only as strong as their developer communities. Google Cloud Platform plays an important role in the development of this ecosystem as evident by the broad topic areas that will be covered in the sessions over the next three days.

In the big new world of business intelligence, RJMetrics has found a market helping e-commerce companies easily analyze operations data and make smarter decisions as a result. Big startups have signed on, including Fab, Bonobos, Threadless and thousands of smaller businesses. Today, the momentum has landed the Philadelphia enterprise startup a $6.5 million first venture round led by Trinity Ventures.

SaaS BI, as online business analysis software is called within the industry, is full of competitors. Tableau Software, which is planning to IPO, along with GoodData, Domo and others have been successfully selling to big companies that need complex integrations to best analyze their own data. On the low end, Datahero and Chartio provide quick and inexpensive ways for a small business to get some quality integrations.

RJMetrics has focused on what e-commerce companies need, Moore explains, although he notes that its clients range from online gaming companies to nonprofits. The secret isn’t some magical new type of BI software, but a better focus on lucrative online transactions businesses. If an online retailer wants to analyze how colors of different types of hats are selling against each other, for example, a non-technical sales analyst at the company could go into RJMetrics and quickly create a visual explaining what’s happening.

The company promises to replicate client data to hosted, secure servers and optimize it for analysis within seven days, versus the months required for more complex products, with a set of APIs developed around systems that e-commerce companies are already using. Then it makes a dashboard of data visuals available to the company, including key stats for transaction businesses, such as customer lifetime value, repeat purchase probability, and cohort analysis on database segments. This lets a company answer questions like which types of customers are likely to regularly buy red fedora hats. For clients with technical staffers, it provides access for them to run their own queries on more complex data sets hosted on its own servers. Prices for the basic version of the online service start at $500 per month.

Fab cofounder Jason Goldberg has written effusively about his experience with RJMetrics, and how its analysis helped him prove Fab’s worth to investors when it raised $40 million in 2011.

From a fundraising standpoint, providing access to the RJ data basically said to the VC’s, “here we are, here’s the data, we’ve got nothing to hide, take a look and decide for yourself if you want to pursue investing in Fab.” Effectively, we turned the pitching on its head. Since the RJ data updates several times per day directly from our database, it was many times more powerful than providing powerpoints and excel spreadsheets. This was the real stuff, auto-updating! And, since RJ enables all the data to be downloaded into excel, the analysts at the VC firms were able to do all of their own analysis on the front end of the investment process.

The core RJMetrics product grew out of Moore’s own data analysis work (which has separately resulted in some great guest posts for TechCrunch, like this formative 2009 analysis of Twitter user behavior). The new funding round, which includes participation from existing investor SoftTech VC, will go towards sales and marketing. With the overall growth in the Saas BI industry, Moore says it’s time to focus on the e-commerce part of it.

Auvik Networks, a Canadian enterprise networking startup co-founded by repeat entrepreneur Marc Morin (co-founder of now-public Sandvine and of PixStream, sold to Cisco); David Yach, a former CTO of BlackBerry’s software division; and ex-Sandvine product manager Alex Hoff, is today announcing that it’s raised it first round of outside funding: $6 million from Celtic House Venture Partners, Rho Canada Ventures, and BDC Venture Capital IT Fund, along with more contributions from Auvik’s founders, who have been backing it internally it to date. Auvik is part of a wider trend of companies working in software-defined networking, in its case developing a cloud-based platform for enterprises to manage IP networks built out of hardware from multiple vendors. Auvik has yet to release a commercial product: that will only come at the beginning of 2014, according to Morin, who is the company’s CEO.

“We’ve been focusing on the core technology and bringing the product out and bring it to market,” he told TechCrunch, noting that this round is being led by investors that were also strong backers of his previous startups. “This should be enough until launch.” The plan, he says, is for Auvik to support “all major hardware.”

To match how Auvik plans to disrupt traditional networking, Morin says that Auvik will also be priced in a disruptive way: there will be three tiers — See, Tell and Do — ranging from free of charge to a fee of about $12 per device per month, covering such things as community membership, and data collection, through to configuration services, 24-hour support and deeper analysis.

Enterprise startups continue to remain a focus for VCs, even as their attention gets distracted by the buzz around the next big thing, be it bitcoin or 3D printing.

One of the reasons is because there are still so many areas left to tackle in the space, cluttered as it is with legacy IT services and hardware.  It is here that Auvik sits. Up to now, businesses (especially those that are big enough to have multiple locations, but perhaps not big enough to have huge IT support groups) have had to deploy people to reconfigure networks physically, partly because it’s difficult to get hardware from different vendors to “speak” to each other. Using an API-style approach by way of the open-standard OpenFlow, the idea is that Auvik will become easy for anyone, not just IT engineers, to reconfigure and control how a network operates.

“Networking has been about hardware and boxes, but the focus now is on how people use software to control things,” noted Morin. “No one should have to configure routers and switches anymore.”

While a lot of the early emphasis will be on operating devices and users on a company’s network of desktop devices, the plan is for this to also include the many mobile devices that are also becoming more powerful and more used by workers. This is one area where Yach’s expertise, which spans not just BlackBerry but also years at Sybase, should come in handy.

Morin says that at the moment Auvik counts companies like SolarWinds and Meraki (recently acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion) as among its competitors. But he contends that Auvik will be taking a different approach from them. Tackling the idea of multi-vendor architectures — a common occurence at many medium-sized companies — Auvik is trying to make it as easy as possible for non-engineering IT people to use its platform, also a crucial priority for the size of companies that it’s proposing to target. “The real promise is a dramatically simpler way to configure how an application can be run.”

The other important point is that Auvik says it will, for the first time, provide a cloud-based way for enterprises to go deep into how their networks are controlled.

He uses the instance of a finance group’s network access as one example, with the idea that these people may log in on more than one device. “Say you want to put a policy on the finance group so that they can go straight to the finance server, and you want to enforce that, but the network doesn’t identify users, just IP addresses,” he says. “Using our platform, you can now join these up and change network configurations based on that, and modify it during the day as users log in and log out. Network management has been around for a long time, but it hasn’t had a very deep level of abstraction for how it works.” Morin says that most of the capabilities of hardware are never exploited by medium-sized companies, and so its service will aim to take advantage of that well, extending the life and functionality of that equipment.

Collaaj has launched a service designed to make it easy to create videos and send them as messages.

The SaaS tool includes an editor that allows people to make videos from content that could include a demo recording of an app, a drawing, annotations on a presentation or someone sending a video message of themselves to an individual or a group. The data is managed through the Collaaj platform that includes a backend to a store, stream and securely share with other team members. The video can be saved as an MP4 and sent as a link.

Collaaj has different uses than a video-capture product like Camtasia, which is designed for more high-end use cases. For example, it can be used for pre-sales to send product demonstrations, and support teams can use it to build a knowledge base and visual FAQ.

It competes more directly with Webex, GoToMeeting and Microsoft Lync, but those tools might also be complementary, as they lack the asynchronous capabilities that come with Collaaj.

In addition to the iPad app, Collaaj is available on Mac and Windows. Co-founder Kiran Kamity said the client download is a small file similar to Dropbox.

GraphLab, the open-source distributed database, has received $6.75 million from Madrona Venture Group and NEA for its machine learning technology used to analyze data graphs for recommendation engines.

Developed five years ago at Carnegie Mellon University, the open-source data analysis platform takes semi-structured data that describe relationships between people, web traffic, product purchases and other data. It then analyzes that data for services to provide online recommendations.

Graph databases, similar to Graphlab, have increased in use as more data needs correlating to better understand its meaning. Wikiepdia describes graph database in the context of graph theory. It applies mathematical structures “used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of vertices or nodes and lines called edges that connect them.”

It’s the ability to make the connections between billions of nodes and lines that forms the basis for making recommendations.

Dr. Carlos Guestrin is GraphLab’s CEO. He is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Washington, who developed the technology at Carnegie Mellon. He says it is GraphLab’s flexibility and better machine learning capabilities that makes it better in comparison to other data analytics tools such as Mahout, the open-source machine learning technology.

GraphLab has gained adoption in the market. It is used by a number of consumer services to drive millions of transactions. Pandora and Walmart Labs are cited as users of the technology.

(Graph image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is the lead investor in a $20 million oversubscribed B round for PernixData, a company that the venture capital firm says has made a breakthrough that has not been seen in the storage business for the past decade. Lightspeed Venture Partners, which led the first round, joined the round with Kleiner.

Also participating in the new round were Mark Leslie, founder and CEO of Veritas; John Thompson, ex-CEO of Symantec and Microsoft board member as well as Lane Bess, ex-CEO of Palo Alto Networks. Last year, PernixData raised $7 million.

It may seem like overkill to call something a breakthrough. But PernixData has developed a scale-out software defined storage system that manages the flash instead of forcing IT to over-provision. That’s in contrast to solutions that have historically meant throwing more hardware at the storage problem. Traditional methods make scaling out expensive, as the storage often has to be attached instead of getting pooled and easily deployed. PernixData makes it easier to scale out without storage being as much of a concern.

The breakthrough comes in how PernixData decouples performance and capacity, two factors that have led to more IT spending in the past ten years than most any other issues. The performance problem stems from the need to have sufficient storage capacity in order for systems to run well. It becomes a guessing game. With virtualization comes the need for more storage capacity. By separating performance and capacity, IT can get more granularity in the management of the storage without adding to or changing out the infrastructure. The company claims it also means IT can scale out performance as easily as they scale their compute and memory, without any need to change applications or storage infrastructure. That provides some freedom to better manage data loads. It means a business does not have to focus as much on the cost of storage. With more scale out capability, a company can think differently about extending its business.

Poojan Kumar, CEO and Co-Founder of PernixData said at their launch in February that they would focus on the VMware market. That is still the plan but it also wants to extend to other hypervisor platforms such as Xen and KVM, the hypervisors of choice for scale out systems such as Hadoop.

PernixData is for real. They have customers and have grown fast since the February launch. But this is a software play and you can expect the competition to intensify as more systems companies take a deeper software focus.

Just before Google I/O, Microsoft is making a big pitch for developers with a high-profile announcement about a new team that will focus on building outside interest in app development on the Azure platform.

The group,  which will have a base in San Francisco, is part of the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) group led by Technical Fellow John Shewchuk.  As Mary Jo Foley wrote, the new developer team is part of Microsoft’s effort to be a platform provider more so than a software purveyor.

Here’s what Shewchuk wrote recently about the effort:

We’re building out the team by adding top-notch developers and evangelists from across the industry. Two recent examples: James Whittaker – a known industry disruptor and incredible speaker joins us from Bing where he has been leading the development team making Bing knowledge available programmatically – many people may know him from his viral blog post on why he left Google for Microsoft. And Patrick Chanezon just joined us from VMware where he was driving their cloud and tools developer relations – he has a ton of expertise in the open source space which will be increasingly important given our new Azure IaaS support for Linux.

Of particular note is the hiring of Chanezon, who recently left VMware to join Microsoft as its director of enterprise evangelism. In a blog post, Chanezon puts an emphasis on Microsoft’s Azure platform and its readiness. Interestingly, he says that Azure “is more open than people think.” I take that as he and the development team have some work in growing awareness about the Azure infrastructure.

Chanezon leaves a job at VMware where he managed developer relations for Spring and Cloud Foundry. Spring and Cloud Foundry were recently spun out into a separate company called Pivotal that is positioning as a platform for data analytics and app development. Chanezon worked at Google on the Cloud Platform Advocacy Team manager before leaving for VMware.

It’s apparent that Microsoft has built a world-class development platform but getting people to use it has posed its challenges. This is in part due to Microsoft’s past focus on its insistence that developers uses Microsoft technology at every level of the stack. That attitude has shifted as symbolized in the news today and a series of announcements over the past several months related to Azure. It has launched new mobile features for iOS and Android development. In March they offered support For PhoneGap, Dropbox and Hadoop. Arguably the most strategic move came last month with the news of general availability of Active Directory on the Azure platform.

Still, Microsoft has lagged in attracting developer talent to the Azure platform.  What it needs is not just good evangelists but a deeper ecosystem that will only come if it can build credibility  in the market.

Zapier, a service that automates tasks between online services, has launched a tool that monitors 200 APIs, sometimes catching an outage before the provider does.

The new tool monitors the uptime and downtime of every API on Zapier. It is designed to monitor the realtime status of popular web APIs and their impact on customers that use the Zapier service or just want a good resource to monitor how APIs are behaving. Each API can be monitored via SMS, instant message, email or any number of methods that are supported by Zapier’s core product.

Zapier Co-Founder Wade Foster said they developed the monitoring service, because, while vendors often provide performance dashboards for their main products, they don’t do so for their APIs. This is true for such services as Amazon, Desk.com and 37Signals. This can be a problem as APIs are now the glue for connecting apps. The shortcoming leaves consumers in the dark when APIs go down, Foster said in a recent email discussion. For example, the Google APIs had an outage, which Zapier discovered almost instantly.

Here’s the Hacker News thread documenting the outage. “My co-founder is the top commenter there,” Foster said. “The subsequent comments were what encouraged us to release this publicly.”

He said the dashboard has been public for about a week. Almost everything is always up which speaks to the quality of applications that are being built these days.

This is a pretty cool service. It’s important, too, especially for app developers who will often monitor multiple APIs that integrate with their apps.