WHAT WE'RE READING
The Investing Edge
of Enterprise IT
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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Dec
2012
Five Winds of Change in Enterprise Sails (Sales)
If there was one theme that consistently arose during our enterprise sales strategy forum a few weeks ago, it was that selling to business now is a completely different ballgame than it was 10 years ago. Our panel, made up of sales and IT executives from companies like Staples, HubSpot, and American Tower, among others, provided significant insight into how
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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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Oct
2012
Congratulations, Copiun
Congratulations to Puneesh Chaudhry and the Copiun team on their recent acquisition by Good Technology, and to Puneesh personally for his 40-under-40 nomination by the Boston Business Journal. Puneesh is a friend and Copiun is a local company we’ve followed for over a year. Puneesh deserves a lot of credit for foreseeing the enterprise world’s movement toward consumerization and BYOD,
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Sep
2012
Announcing the Second B2B IT Forum – “Cracking the Code in Enterprise Sales”
In June we hosted the inaugural B2B IT Forum, a new event series that focuses exclusively on rapidly emerging enterprise IT technologies. That event, which focused on cloud security, brought together some great local minds; we enjoyed hearing presentations from CloudLock, Copiun and Content Raven, and meeting people who share our interest in enterprise IT. The event was such a
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Jul
2012
Big Data: What’s Next?
Even before Governor Patrick announced the Massachusetts Big Data Initiative in May, the state had already established itself as the big data capital of the world. We have 12,000 people employed in the sector in more than 100 companies. We have big money flowing from venture capital ($350 million in 2011) to fund local startups offering new solutions. We are
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Jul
2012
Video: Terascala CEO Steve Butler Explains the Big Data Opportunity
One of the biggest opportunities in Enterprise IT these days in “Big Data,” but this opportunity is not without real challenges. Tackling these challenges requires innovation on many fronts. Processing massive sets of data requires powerful compute clusters, which much be complemented by equally powerful file storage systems. Terascala, a company we led the initial financing round for, has recently launched
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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
Introducing the B2B IT Forum
Ascent Venture Partners is hosting a new series of meet-ups called the B2B IT Forum, with the inaugural event taking place on June 26th. Our aim is to shine a spotlight on entrepreneurs and new companies in the Enterprise IT space. This will be not only a chance for you to learn about promising startups focused on rapidly emerging enterprise technologies, but also to hear from leaders of established, larger companies.