WHAT WE'RE READING
The Investing Edge
of Enterprise IT
May
2013
Financing News: PerspecSys and the Cloud Data Security Opportunity
Last week PerspecSys announced a new financing round that we participated in, alongside Paladin and Intel. We are very excited to be working with the team and our co-investors, and see tremendous potential for this company. Over the last 12 to 18 months, we have witnessed an almost seismic shift in the posture of large enterprise customers toward cloud-based applications. SaaS
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Mar
2013
Announcing the Ascent Storify Page
While our singular focus at Ascent is enterprise IT, our portfolio spans a wide range of tech subcategories: Software & SaaS, Data & Analytics, Cloud Business Services, Mobility & Communications, Financial Services & Transaction Technology, and Security & Compliance. Each sector witnesses regular news and innovation, and each has numerous compelling stories. To help facilitate telling those stories, we’ve created
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Jan
2013
Technology Drives Change at a Top Global Bank
Ascent strives to anticipate long-term technology trends within the enterprise that can change business for the better. Taking the long view means the technologies we identify can take years before their impact is felt at the enterprise level, so it’s encouraging to get a glimpse of emerging areas of technology that are already driving massive change at large companies. Recently
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Oct
2012
Young Turks in the Enterprise
There was a widely circulated news item recently that tried to explain the mindset of this year’s college freshmen, noting that, for them, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Kurt Cobain have always been dead. (Message to this generation: please do yourself a favor and delete a few LMFAO and Lady Gaga tunes from your iPod in favor of selections off Nirvana’s
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Sep
2012
Observations from Dreamforce 2012
I was at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference yesterday with 95,000 of my closest friends. Seriously, that’s how many people registered for this event. It’s an impressive display of organizational prowess and the Salesforce team puts on a great show. The keynote yesterday morning featured lots of slick videos and loud music. It also included appearances by Tony Robbins, The Cake Boss
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Jun
2012
Inaugural B2B IT Forum Tackles Cloud Security
Anytime you start something new – be it a job, a training regimen, or in the case of the entrepreneurs we back, a company – there’s always a lot of excitement and energy. That was very much the case Tuesday when we held our inaugural B2B IT Forum at the Microsoft NERD Center. We heard great presentations, met a lot
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Jun
2012
Ascent Index: BYOD (June 6 – June 20)
We know bringing your own device to work (that’s ‘BYOD’ for most of us) is a hot topic right now – and getting hotter. Over the past two weeks alone, the term had nearly 22,000 mentions on social networks which is a 10 percent increase over the first half of the month. One reason for the uptick could be the
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May
2012
ASCENT INDEX: CLOUD SECURITY (MAY 4 – MAY 18)
One of the most tweeted stories on the cloud so far in May has been a contributed piece on Mashable examining how cloud computing and Google products are changing a generation, namely students. It discussed how students as young as five and six are using tools such as Google Docs, and how demands from college students are driving universities to
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