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G2 Computer Intelligence Issue No. 1023 | April 7-11, 2014 Client Server News Competitive Intelligence On Systems, Virtualization and Cloud Computing Arista To IPO Amid a Ruction between Founders Pivotal Makes its Arista Networks, the 10-year-old network switch maker started by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim to compete with Hadoop Free If… Cisco and Juniper, has filed to IPO and Pivotal, the start-up owned by EMC, VMware and GE, made a raise a nominal $200 million. bid for attention Wednesday by making use of Pivotal HD, its Bechtolsheim and his buddy, Stanford version of Hadoop, free if – of course there’s an if – the professor David Cheriton, the first customer takes out a two- or three-year subscription to all the investors in Google, both bankrolled rest of its database widgetry. Arista and each own better than 5% of And that widgetry includes its Greenplum Database, the the joint. Indirectly through a trust set up Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) relational data warehouse for his kids Cheriton is Arista’s largest appliance; GemFire, its distributed, in-memory transactional shareholder. CEO Jayshree Ullal, who database; SQLFire, one of those so-called NewSQL relational used to run Cisco’s data center unit, also in-memory databases; GemFire XD, a Hadoop-based in- owns at least 5% of the action. memory database for Java workloads and HAWQ, the SQL-on- Unlike many IPO candidates lately, Hadoop engine that integrates Greenplum technology into Arista is actually profitable and has been Pivotal HD. for the last three years. If the customer signs up for this so-called “mega bundle” then However, there’s a sticky fly in the Pivotal says the customer can have its Hadoop distribution “on ointment. Apparently Bechtolsheim and an unlimited basis at no extra cost, including support.” Cheriton, who have started three What’s supposed to make the idea palatable, if not popular, is companies together counting Arista, the fact that Pivotal will be charging a single, flat, per-core have fallen out over who exactly owns annual subscription rate for the stuff, which it’s calling its Big Arista’s EOS network operating system. Data Suite. Cheriton stepped down from the Arista Pivotal calls it a “use it as you need it” pricing model, letting board on March 1 after a company he users “move their investment from one technology to another started on his own called Optumsoft within the suite at any time” without any upgrade fees. claimed in a letter to Arista in November In a canned statement Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz said, “With to own part of EOS and telling Arista that Pivotal Big Data Suite, we are taking the lead for the industry it was in violation of their 2004 non- by removing the technical barriers to data off the plates of our exclusive royalty-free licensing customers. Now the choice isn’t about Hadoop or a SQL agreement. database, in-memory or real-time processing, but efficiency Optumsoft’s widgetry includes a and value.” “software tool used to develop certain Besides the bundled support and maintenance, the user will components of EOS and a runtime only be charged for compute, not for simple storage, which library that is incorporated into EOS.” plays to Pivotal’s notion of a single centralized “Business Data In its filing with the SEC Monday Arista Lake,” where a company pools all of its ever-increasing data, said that “the 2004 agreement places analyzes it at will and builds the appropriate data-driven certain restrictions on our use and applications, presumably using the Pivotal One PaaS. disclosureHAPPY of the Optumsoft HOLIDAYS! software and Pivotal claims this lake thing is a “business priority for CIOs” gives Optumsoft ownership of and something it can “uniquely” deliver “without fear of runaway improvements, modifications and license and support costs.” corrections to, and derivative works of, Unfortunately, Pivotal isn’t telling what its per-core prices are the Optumsoft software that we develop. only that there’s a “cumulative contract minimum” and of course Client Server News | Issue No. 1023 | April 7-11, 2014 In the November 2013 letter, the term of two or three years. It claims the prices are Optumsoft requested that we cease all “aggressive” and competitive with other start-ups with rival conduct constituting the alleged Hadoop distributions like Cloudera, MapR and Hortonworks confidentiality and use restriction than with the old-line traditional database vendors like Oracle, breaches including the distribution of Teradata and IBM. any of their software in source code As Pivotal observes, it does give customers a chance to use form and the unauthorized access or any combination of its wares and see what suits their particular disclosure of their source code to third needs. Of course most of its wares weren’t built for Hadoop parties. Optumsoft also requested that although Pivotal claims they have been retrofitted to deliver a we assign certain components of our “unified set of capabilities.” software to them that they believed to It also seems to be discounting developer resistance to a top- be improvements of their software down approach. tool.” By that as it may, the Big Data Suite is available now. Arista said a breach-of-contract suit could be in the offing. Google Shares Split 2-to-1 If that happens Arista said it would Google’s long-promised, lawsuit-contested 2-for-1 stock split “vigorously defend” itself but there finally came off this week. could be material consequences if it Normal people with Google common stock, which is all Class loses like damages, an injunction or A stock, got a newfangled share of Class C stock for each of Optumsoft licensing or selling its their A shares. widgetry to competitors. So did the founders who got a Class C share for each of their “Whether or not we prevail in a special Class B stock. lawsuit,” Arista said, “we expect that While Class A stock has one vote per share, Class B stock any litigation would be expensive, time- has 10 votes per share and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who consuming and a distraction to own 15% of the stock, wanted to preserve their 55.7% control, management in operating our which has been eroded over the years by stock compensation business.” and stock deals. Despite the flap Arista means to go So Class C stock has no votes at all. public and told the SEC that in 2013 it In the future Google isn’t expected to issue many more Class realized $42.5 million on sales of A shares and to use Class C to do deals and reward or woo $361.2 million, up 87%, and said it’s talent. been growing at 71% a year since Class A is now trading as GOOGL, a new ticker symbol, and 2010. Microsoft accounted for 22% of Class C is using the old ticker symbol GOOG. Class B doesn’t its sales. trade. It’s expecting an uptick in sales as Google’s GAAP earnings per share will divided between the cloud absorbs more of its switches. Class A and Class C shares and so will be lower than investors It’s supposed to be taken out by are used to. Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, both of Since Google has been trading for more than $1,000 a share, which are Arista customers. So are a cheaper Google could attract more retail investors. places like SingTel, Facebook, Yahoo, It will be the first company to have two species of stock on the Rackspace, Equinix and Microsoft. S&P. It’ll debut on the New York Stock Thursday when the split came into effect GOOG (the old Exchange with the ticker symbol Class A stock) opened at $567 and closed at $569.30, up ANET. $2.30 or 0.41% having been as high as $587.28. See http://www.sec.gov/ GOOGL (the new Class C stock) opened at $568.10 and Archives/edgar/data/1596532/0001193 closed at $571.50, up $3.40 or 0.61%, having vaulted to 12514122171/d639957ds1.htm/ $588.30 during the day. Google is supposed to compensate investors for a period of time if the new C shares trade at a discount to the old stock. Page 2 | Client Server News | Copyrighted Materials. Please do not reproduce. Client Server News | Issue No. 1023 | April 7-11, 2014 Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt also holds B track them. shares, but share sales have cut his votes to 5.5%, They then realized the risk of data breach this according to the Financial Times. posed for the enterprise, particularly regulated industries such as healthcare, education, legal and Sookasa Brings Compliance-as- finance where the loss of a single device connected a-Service to Market to a cloud account can cause a catastrophic data breach and significant legal liability. An enterprise-hungry Dropbox can rest easier in its Eureka! Sookasa was born. It got $1.95 million in bed at night. seed money from Andreessen Horowitz, First Round A stealth start-up called Sookasa (say su casa, an Capital and SV Angel and now at launch a $5 equal opportunity Romance misspelling) claims to million A round from Accel with continued have vaulted the compliance hurdle stopping the participation from its seed investors. enterprise from adopting Dropbox’ cloud storage Sookasa figures that legacy encryption solutions and file sharing. focused on networks and end-points require heavy The start-up’s got a reportedly effortless, IT resources, restrict user freedom, weigh on the transparent way of encrypting files with bank-grade user experience and so won’t fly as high as its self- AES 256-bit encryption before they go to the service turnkey content-focused encryption and Dropbox cloud and keeping them that way through compliance solution which works on the cloud, on all their subsequent travels including their life on mobile devices, on desktops and when files are notoriously insecure mobile devices without mucking shared externally, with each file getting its own up the carefree user experience.