Omnitrol Networks Closes Funding Round to Meet Accelerating Demand

Omnitrol Networks announced today that it has closed a round of financing with Javelin Venture Partners and several existing investors. A select group of new strategic individual investors also participated in the round, including Puneet Arora, the former CTO of TIBCO Software.

The financing round brings Omnitrol Networks' total investment since inception to approximately $15 million. The company has also been previously backed by Westlake International Group and individual founders. The capital will be used to expand sales and marketing, and help accelerate key initiatives in response to sustained industry growth.

Read the complete news release.

NTT Multimedia Deploys Automated Mobile Asset Tracking from Omnitrol Networks

A little bit of background about this division:
NTT Multimedia Communications Laboratories, Inc (NTT MCL) was founded as a division of NTT America in 1996, and incorporated in 1998 by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT). NTT is a leading global provider of telecommunications services to pursue the commercialization of advanced technologies that would leverage NTT’s expertise in multimedia communications. Since then, NTT MCL has evolved into being the only overseas advanced research and development arm of NTT Communications.

After evaluating available solutions, NTT MCL selected the OMNITROL Asset Tracking solution utilizing RFID sensor technologies from Impinj and Omni-ID. The appliance-based OMNITROL Asset Tracking solution used Impinj Speedway Revolution RFID readers with circularly polarized antennas deployed at the facility entrance/exits. The RFID readers are managed directly by the OMNITROL appliance running the OMNITROL Asset Visibility Edgelet, which implements sophisticated status, presence, identification, and directionality algorithms to determine what asset is moving where, with a very high degree of reliability.

Complete press release here.

EMC to acquire data warehouse vendor Greenplum

Another sign that Big Data is top of mind for IT vendors. The acquisition is showing the importance of getting business value out of the data generated by applications (business or monitoring), sensors, users and customers. Read the article here. There's something very interesting about the combination of data analytics and cloud/virtualization. This is what Omnitrol has delivered in our solutions: analytics-as-a-service.

SAP acquires Sybase for $5.8 billion

This acquisition has the potential to upend the software industry in a significant way. Sybase doesn't have the greatest database market share but its mobility software will allow SAP to connect its enterprise software (including analytics) to billions of devices. Few companies have successfully made key transitions in their business. SAP is in the middle of one them, it looks like they are taking it very seriously.

Facebook has the world's largest Hadoop cluster

I like it when different themes are beginning to converge. Earlier this year, I wrote the importance of mining enterprise data. But how do you organize, index, and search a large amount of mostly unstructured data (ie emails, blogs, documents, web pages, logs, videos)? Here comes Hadoop. This is a very good video that explains Hadoop as a new data platform.



Another of my key themes is social networking and Facebook just released data about their Hadoop storage cluster. 21 PB of data, that's 1 million gigabytes and you can bet it will double next year or so. That's a lot of data to mine to get value for advertisers.

Omnitrol Networks Takes Best-in-Class Ranking from RFID.net

RFID.net has awarded Omnitrol Networks a best-in-class ranking among intelligent sensor network software and appliance makers.

"Our team of experts found that the Omnitrol Networks solution not only outperformed and out-scaled competitive offerings, but also saved tens of thousands of dollars in hidden costs," wrote Louis Sirico, President of RFID.net.

Here are some of the key differentiators that RFID.net identified:

• device-agnostic support for RFID readers, printers and encoders, Real-Time Location Services (RTLS), PLC controls, digital and analog sensors, and metering and operator feedback devices;
  
• integration with commercial databases, ERP and other back-ends;
  
• a secure distributed smart-agent software framework;
  
• a built-in service creation and sensor emulation environment for rapid delivery of business intelligent applications.

Read more here.

How many Java developers are there?

Over 9M according to this blog post. I first looked at Java back in 1996. An engineer at Alcatel brought the first copy of "Java in a Nutshell" and said: "This is the future".

The author of the blog says that at the time of Java's open sourcing in 2007, there were 6 million Java developers and the number of Java developers had been rising at an average of 0.75 million per year during the previous two years. After Java was open sourced, that number shot up to 1 million per year.

Why the success?
From a technical point of view, "Write Once, Run Anywhere" and a solid set of APIs would do the trick.
From a business point of view, Free and a "transparent" Java Community Process would work, but a solid evangelist like Sun Microsystems is also needed.

As the back-end is moving to the cloud and the front-end is moving to mobile devices, Google and Apple are in control of the user experience. Java is still very relevant (through Android for the front-end).