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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Apr
2013
Six Pre-Requisites for the New Wave of Enterprise IT Security Solutions
Given that IT security is a $60 billion market, you might think that we have robust solutions for keeping enterprise networks and data protected. But you’d be wrong. In reality, better than 1 in 5 enterprises—and likely more—has been compromised. In the past few years, the number of cyber-breaches and the sophistication of the attacks have heightened dramatically. 250,000 new
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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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Feb
2013
2012 a Year of Record Growth for V.i. Labs
Our portfolio company V.i. Labs recently issued a press release that highlighted the Company’s strong performance in 2012. See the release here. We are very pleased with the Company’s performance and congratulate the management team for a strong year. Software piracy remains an enormous problem for software providers. According to estimates from multiple analysts, the annual commercial value of software
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Nov
2012
Ascent Index: Cybersecurity
AT&T last week reported that cybersecurity was a billion dollar opportunity for the company, as attacks on its networks had doubled in the past four months. But it’s not just the telecommunications giant that hopes to seize on the cyber opportunity; many leading companies – be they Google, IBM, General Dynamics or countless others – have acquired information security vendors
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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
Reflecting on a Successful Exit – Fidelis Security Systems
I’d like to take a moment to congratulate Peter George and the entire management team at Fidelis Security Systems. The Company’s recent acquisition by General Dynamics is clear validation of Fidelis’ essential role in helping secure and monitor critical data for major business and government customers. Ascent is very appreciative of your efforts and thrilled with the outcome. In the
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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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