A daily summary of stories in the areas of Big Data, cloud computing and software-led infrastructure from some of the top news sources on the Web.

Business News

Hightower Raises $13M Series B Round For Its Leasing Management Service – TechCrunch 

“This new round brings Hightower, Inc.’s total funding to $22 million, which makes it one of the best-funded startups in the commercial real estate world,” TechCrunch writes. “While much of the recent startup action has focused on residential real estate thanks to startups like Porch and Houzz (as well as existing players like Zillow and Redfin), commercial real estate has remained under the radar.” Of course, it’s also where a lot of big money is.

DataHero Snags $6.1M To Democratize Data Visualization – TechCrunch

DataHero, Inc. also said it hired a new CEO – Ed Miller – whose successful exits include Xythos, a content management company, which was acquired by Blackboard, Inc. in 2008. The company is building a SaaS service that helps end-users to create dashboards and visualizations from pre-defined sources such as Salesforce.com, Eventbrite and Box.

MuleSoft is now a $1.5 billion company – Business Insider 

Ross Mason started MuleSoft, Inc. as a free tool to connect application program interfaces (APIs) from different applications. Companies like TIBCO Software, Inc. charged a fortune for this capability. Mason gave it away for free. MuleSoft is still an open-source project on GitHub, but the for-fee cloud service is on track to book $100 million in revenues this year. The company has raised $259 million and is valued at $1.5 billion, Mason told VentureBeat.

Akosha Gets $16M From Sequoia To Help Companies Handle Customer Questions – TechCrunch

The Indian company has raised $21.6 million in its quest to build a service that lets companies conduct hundreds of real-time chat interactions with customers. It’s used to understand customer satisfaction better as well as to deliver deals and offers.

Bd4travel GmbH Raises $4.2M To Let Online Travel Industry Use Big Data To Personally Target Visitors – TechCrunch

This is one of a burgeoning number of startups that are trying to improve upon the travel planning service to make the experience more customized to the user’s needs. For example, the referring site that brings a customer to Orbitz or Expedia can reveal something about what their budget is, or the service can offer up alternatives to fully booked hotels based upon cost criteria revealed by a user’s previous clicks.

Alibaba to open more data centers in global cloud computing push – PCWorld

When Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. opened its first China data center in March, analysts said it looked like the company would stick to its home market. Looks like they were wrong. Alibaba aims to be a global cloud services provider, said Simon Hu, president of its cloud computing arm.

HP Autonomy lawsuit: customer MicroTech files new suit – Business Insider 

Reseller MicroTech Computers, Inc., which was cited by Hewlett-Packard Co. as being a victim of Autonomy’s shenanigans, agrees. It’s filed a $16.5M lawsuit against HP for software it never received.

Ansible Partners With Cisco, CSC, HP And Rackspace To Make Deploying And Managing OpenStack Easier – TechCrunch

Ansible, Inc. already offers some services to manage OpenStack clouds, but it is now working with these partners to make the process much simpler.

Product News

Psst. Want a cheap cloud, VM? Google has one. But there’s a catch – The Register 

Google calls them “preemptible” virtual machines, meaning they can be shut down at any time and have a maximum run time of 24 hours. Google is targeting applications like batch analytics, where many VMs are combined on a task for performance reasons and it isn’t particularly critical if some drop off. In exchange for dealing with this unpredictability, customers get a 70% discount. See also Google offers cut-rate computing for low-priority jobs – Network World

By the way, Google also cut the price for Cloud Platform virtual machines by 30%, writes InformationWeek

Maxta, Inc. polishes OpenStack credentials with Kilo support – The Register

The company, which has raised $35 million, provides software-led hyper-converged systems. “Its software runs on third-party servers and storage systems as specified by its MaxDeploy architectural templates,” The Register says. It wants to be a go-to choice for OpenStack clouds.

Trends & Analysis

Cloud IaaS market tops $16.5 billion, led by Amazon, Microsoft, Google

No signs of a slowdown in sight, says Gartner, Inc., which predicts the IaaS market will grow 33% this year and 29% per year through at least 2019.

Oracle releases antidote for VENOM vulnerability – The Register 

The buffer overflow vulnerability enables attackers to break out of VM sessions and access the host. KVM and Xen have patched the problem. VMware, Inc., Microsoft, and Bochs are immune.

SDN to bring new round of internecine office wars to IT shops – The Register

Gartner analyst Eric Ahlm says internal security groups will resist the ideal of letting software from outside the firewall define anything.

Look Before You Leap – The Coming Leap Second and AWS – AWS Official Blog

The second coming of Y2K? “The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems (IERS) recently announced that an extra second will be injected into civil time at the end of June 30th, 2015,” says the AWS blog. “This means that the last minute of June 30th, 2015 will have 61 seconds.” Apparently, not all computer clocks will handle this situation very well.

Forecast update: 410M PCs on Windows 10 in 18 months – Computerworld

Net Applications, Inc. estimates “More than three-fourths of all PCs running Windows 8 or 8.1 will migrate to Windows 10 in the first 18 months.”

Photo by Paul Bica vis Flickr