Box.net Lands VC Funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Online-storage startup Box.net announced today that it has raised $1.5 million in a Series A investment from venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ).

Coincident with its funding announcement, Box.net reported that it has reached a milestone of 500,000 registered users.

In addition to providing simple online storage, Box.net allows users to upload, access, share, and collaborate on their files within third-party applications and devices. Box.net users can access their personal files from sites and services such as Netvibes, Goowy, Pageflakes, Google Homepage, and Live.com, and a showcase of those integrations and others is scheduled for November.

The online-storage market is exceedingly crowded, and Box.net doubtless is counting on the financing and the business connections from DFJ to help it establish an edge against rivals such as Xdrive, Strongspace, Omnidrive, Streamload, and Google’s GDrive.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of TechCrunch reports that the funding initially was disclosed in an August SEC filing. With the funding, Kirkpatrick believes, Box.net has a good chance of surviving the inevitable online-storage shakeout.

Postscript on Cisco’s TelePresence: The Debate Continues

In the wake of Cisco’s TelePresence announcement, former Microsoft blogger extraordinaire Robert Scoble wonders whether the future of videoconferencing will be in big, expensive, elaborate systems such as Cisco’s, or in lightweight, low-cost, client-based software.

He concludes that both will find audiences and markets.

For reasons I put forward earlier today, I am not confident the approach Cisco has taken with its closed, expensive, telco-mediated TelePresence will find more than a modest enterprise following.

I have an inkling that the TelePresence system, developed internally at Cisco over a two-year period, could be a sign that Cisco’s overpowering need for accelerated revenue growth and fat margins — both of which are required to keep Wall Street’s hounds at bay — has overtaken its ability to focus on its customers’ needs and requirements. TelePresence strikes me more as what Cisco wishes large enterprises would adopt than as something developed to meet an emerging adoption curve.

I might be wrong, but I believe the TelePresence is white elephant in the making. It has the feel of Cisco jumping the shark in a big way.

Cisco Delivers Realistic Videoconferencing, but Will it Find Buyers?

Cisco today announced the Cisco TelePresence, a high-quality, high-end, big-ticket videoconferencing system that the company hopes will find favor with multinational enterprise customers.

The Cisco TelePresence 1000 is designed for small-group meetings and one-on-one conversations, while the Cisco TelePresence 3000 is intended for meetings of up to 12 people.

In a detailed article describing the system, LightReading provides the following description of the TelePresence 3000:

TelePresence consists of three video screens (60-inch plasma, 1080 pixels), each meant to display two people (for a total of 12 — six on either end of the link). The TelePresence room has a table set in a semicircular arc, so that when both ends of the connection are live, users see the illusion of one round table, the shape of an open hoop. Speakers on the screens are life-sized for the distance involved — that is, they’re made to look as if they really are sitting across this table.

The $299,000 list price includes the video screens, the speakers, the microphones, and the table (cut to just the right arc to pull off the circle illusion).

TelePresence has to occupy a dedicated room with wall colors chosen from a palette determined by Cisco. A third-party inspector will judge whether the room’s lighting and acoustics make the grade.

Carriers are partnering with Cisco to bring the solution to market, and for obvious reasons. Said Randy Harrell, a director of product marketing at Cisco:

We have carrier partners who are very interested. It looks billable. It requires QOS.

By most accounts, the videoconferencing systems deliver exceptional verisimilitude. For that price, though, buyers have a right to expect life-like results.

Cisco apparently spent two years developing the system internally, eschewing the option of buying its way into the market through an acquisition. Apparently, Cisco didn’t feel external alternatives offered sufficient quality, and it wanted to deliver an unprecedented solution.

While the quest for engineering excellence might be laudable, Cisco also seems to have designed the videoconferencing system as much to lock in the customer with proprietary technological hooks. Here’s a quote from the LightReading article that illustrates the closed nature of the system:

TelePresence has to occupy a dedicated room with wall colors chosen from a palette determined by Cisco. A third-party inspector will judge whether the room’s lighting and acoustics make the grade.

In other words, no fair showing off the good china in a trashy, undusted closet.

The system has to run with a Cisco PBX and Cisco CallManager software, as TelePresence is "very tightly integrated" with CallManager, Harrell says. The chances of expanding TelePresence to work with other PBXs is "not very likely," he adds.

Will enterprise customers buy what Cisco is selling?

I don’t think enough of them will go along with the program to produce the $1 billion in revenue that Cisco wants from videoconferencing in the next five to seven years. TelePresence is too closed, too unwieldy, too specialized, and too expensive for the vast majority of enterprises. Some companies might be tempted to put one between their North American and European headquarters, but the price and the proprietary lock in will dissuade most buyers from taking the plunge.

Then, there’s the question of whether videoconferencing will ever become as popular as vendors such as Cisco are hoping. I can envision videoconferencing — at the right quality and a compelling price point — becoming a successful vehicle for some intracompany meetings spanning geographic jurisdictions, but I wonder — as does Ken Camp — about its efficacy as a potential replacement for face-to-face business meetings.

Well, Ken does more than wonder about it. He is outright dismissive of Cisco’s seemingly hypocritical commercial advocacy of videoconferencing for business purposes. It turns out, Ken might have a point. Even Randy Harrell, the Cisco director of product management, says, "There’s such a disdain in upper management here for videoconferencing."

If there’s disdain for videoconferencing at Cisco, what sort of reception awaits the high-priced concept in other executive suites around the world?

Oracle Acquires MetaSolv to Extend Telecommunications Offerings

With Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference just getting underway in San Francisco, the database market leader announced this morning that it had acquired MetaSolv in a cash-for-stock deal valued at $219 million, about a 23-percent premium over MetaSolv’s market capitalization at close of trading this past Friday.

The acquisition of MetaSolv is Oracle’s 24th in the past two years.

MetaSolv provides operations support software for communications service providers, including wireless and wireline operators. Its software enables subscriber provisioning, service activation, and network inventory.  MetaSolv’s customers include Nextel and T-Mobile.

The acquisition builds on Oracle’s earlier $220-million purchase of Portal Software, which provided billing and revenue-management software company for communications providers.

Oracle wants to extend its reach into vertical markets in which it already is active, such as telecommunications, healthcare, and financial services. In these markets, its plan is to add specialized infrastructure or vertical applications to its existing software stack.