Big Data Analytics Specialist Tableau Software Raises $254M In IPO, Shares Pop 58%; Marketo Up 65% To $21.48
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 has popped 58% and is at nearly $49/share in early trading on the NYSE.
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’s now 68% above the IPO pricing and trading at $21.48. (We’ll keep updating these numbers for both stocks.)
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 $26.45/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 multi-billion IPO sets the stage for other multi-billion tech IPOs from the likes of Box and Twitter. Tableau had raised less than $40 million prior to this from 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).
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.
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Zapier Launches API-Monitoring Service To Catch Issues And Outages
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.
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Microsoft touts Yammer’s growth: Sales up 259% YoY, 312 new customers in most recent quarter
Microsoft’s $1.2 billion purchase of enterprise social tool Yammer caught many by surprise. Three quarters later, Microsoft is publicly trumpeting the price that it paid, right next to performance metrics for its new subsidiary. The implication is simple: Yammer was a good buy.
Today in a blog post, Microsoft detailed that in its fiscal third quarter – the most recent quarter – Yammer grew its sales by 259% year over year. In the quarter, its best regarding “user engagement,” Yammer added 312 new clients.
Juan Carlos Perez at CITEworld clarified with Microsoft, regarding the sales metric. He reports that: “[Microsoft] specified that to calculate the revenue spike, Microsoft considered only sales of standalone Yammer licenses, and left out revenue coming in from Enterprise Agreement volume licensing deals involving the ESN product.”
Put another way, the above 259% growth figure only applied to Yammer, and nothing external to it.
It’s mildly frustrating that Microsoft will only report a percentage-ratio figure regarding sales, but it isn’t out of character for the firm. In its most recent quarterly report, Microsoft, by way of a single example, detailed that Windows Phone revenue rose by $249 million. But it declined to disclose the aggregate number, only releasing the increase.
Amazon is infamous for releasing ratio data as well.
Yammer integration across Microsoft enterprise and corporate products, particularly SharePoint remains nascent, it should be noted. A final point: Microsot is exceptionally fond of announcing when a new business segment reaches a run rate of $1 billion per year. That breaks down to $250 million per quarter. As it hasn’t said as much about Yammer, we can assume that it hasn’t reached that size. That gives you a better comprehension of its size.
Top Image Credit: Håkan Dahlström
Originally posted here: Microsoft touts Yammer’s growth: Sales up 259% YoY, 312 new customers in most recent quarter
Debian Will Serve As The Default OS For Google Compute Engine
Google is bringing Debian to Google Compute Engine and is making it the default OS for developers using the service. Google will support both Debian 6.0 and 7.0, which was released this week.
There are some pretty clear reasons why Google is making Debian the default OS. First of all, it’s free, said Krishnan Subramanian, a cloud analyst and founder of Rishidot Research. “With Ubuntu and Red Hat, Google has to deal with the vendors who want to make money themselves,” he said. Further, Debian has a large customer base. And it fits with Google’s geeky culture.
In its blog post about the announcement, Google cites improvements in the Debian 7.0 “wheezy” release. It has hardened security, better 32- and 64-bit compatibility, and it addresses community feedback.
Google states that it will evaluate other operating systems that it can enable with Google Compute Engine.
It’s important to note that Google Compute Engine is only available for subscribers to the $400 Gold Support package.
This all looks like a tune up for next week’s Google I/O event where there are expected to be announcements about Google’s cloud computing strategy.
Debian competes with other Linux-based operating systems, such as Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora. According to DistroWatch, Debian ranks fifth in page hits. Mint is in the top spot.
More here: Debian Will Serve As The Default OS For Google Compute Engine
Simple Task-Management Asana Debuts Organizations To Help Enterprises Streamline Productivity
Asana, the high-profile productivity startup that’s trying to redesign the workplace around tasks (instead of email), is tackling the scale of its productivity app with a new announcement today.
Last year, Asana announced premium plans, which allowed larger teams larger than 30 members to use the cloud-based app. Co-founder Justin Rosenstein says that there has been rapid adoption of Asana in larger teams that have grown to hundreds of members. These teams have generated more than 55 million tasks and 85 million messages.
Asana has been noticing that businesses want to expand Asana to several parts of their companies. Rosenstein says that the startup identified a big problem for enterprises—as companies get bigger, it’s a challenge to expand productivity across all products and missions. Today, the company is announcing organizations, which enables companies to adopt Asana at an enterprise scale: from hundreds to thousands of employees.
The company is debuting a number of new features that would help large organizations coordinate and achieve their goals. Specifically, Asana says that larger organizations need better support for managers, multiple teams and IT departments, and the app now allows managers and team members alike who belong to multiple teams to access a single Inbox and single My Tasks list across all their teams. They will also be able to search or create custom reports from saved searches across all these teams. This is especially useful for employees using Asana across multiple teams and projects.
Asana is also making it easier for new members to join groups. Before Organizations, new team members needed to be invited to join an Asana team by someone already on the team. Now, anyone who creates an account with their company’s email address will automatically be added to that company’s Organization.
Asana now categorizes teams as groups of people (working on projects) within an Organization. Anyone can create and name a new Team, and invite existing or new Asana members to it. Teams are listed in the new Team Browser this is a new feature of Organizations. The Asana left pane now lets you see all the Teams in your Organization. Within the Team settings, each team has control over how their team membership is defined and whether the Team is listed or not.
Lastly, IT teams can create admin accounts to view user activity, set security and access policies, centralize billing, and manage users. Clearly for large enterprises, this added security and control is necessary.
Asana has been consistently adding innovative features to its productivity app. A few weeks ago, Asana added unified search. And this iteration seems to be paying off—Asana, which is less than two years old, now has tens of thousands of users and hundreds of companies paying for the product.
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