For the past year and beyond, a rising tide of concern within the European Parliament regarding its citizens' data privacy has put the U.S. on the defensive and American companies, particularly those selling cloud services, in a tight spot. EU companies and governments guard their customers' private data fiercely, but Patriot Act provisions make it possible for that data to be released to U.S. law enforcement despite EU regulations. And what the disconnect means is that U.S. cloud vendors are losing contracts, losing business, and losing traction in one of the most connected regions in the world. See this FierceTelecom story. Editor's Corner

SMBs, consumers and enterprises increasingly are turning to the cloud for data backup, and that has moved providers of backup solutions to the forefront, as evidenced by news today that Code 42, a Minneapolis-based startup, has landed $52.5 million in funding in a round led by Accel Partners.

Code 42, whose popular CrashPlan backup service competes in the same space as DropBox, Box, Carbonite and others, provides online, offsite and onsite backup plans to consumers, SMBs and enterprise.

The company said the funding will be used to accelerate product development and expanded sales and marketing efforts.

The funding round is the first major investment from Accel Partners' recently announced Big Data Fund, which is dedicated to funding category-defining infrastructure and application companies in "Big Data." Split Rock Partners also participated.

CrashPlan launched in 2007, and Code 42 now manages and protects over 100 petabytes of data globally. The company has parlayed its consumer play into one that also addresses the needs of business. Its product lineup includes online backup solutions for the SMB, CrashPlan PRO, and private and public cloud solutions for the enterprise, CrashPlan PROe. All products offer multi-destination, cross-platform, continuous protection onsite, offsite and online.

The company said it's experienced more than 500 percent growth over the last three years, and now has 86 employees.

"The explosion of mobile devices and cloud services has created big data and security opportunity for the enterprise," said Matthew Dornquast, co-founder and CEO. "Accel has the unique ability to identify significant industry trends like ‘Big Data' and ‘The consumerization of IT' and help entrepreneurs translate those trends into category-defining global businesses. The insight and experience of our investor team will be invaluable as we scale Code 42."

The company counts Adobe, Google, Groupon, HP, Intuit, Kraft Foods, LinkedIn, NASA, National Geographic, Salesforce.com, Stanford University and The University of Texas among its largest customers.

Code 42 was self-funded and has been profitable since 2001; it has more than 4,000 customers around the world using its enterprise plan, CrashPlan PROe.

For more:
- see this release
- see this AllThingsDigital article

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Despite a stumble with its latest Gmail app for the iPhone and iPad, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is continuing to push deeper into the enterprise email and collaboration space, signing a deal with General Motors that could put its Google Apps product in the hands of the giant automaker's 100,000 employees.

GM won't sign a final deal until Google meets certain requirements with the software, according to the Wall Street Journal; GM declined to confirm the deal.

Google Apps--Gmail, Google Docs and the Google+ social networking platform and its video calling component--in the form of Google Apps for Government, has been gaining traction with city, state and federal governments looking for cost savings. The software helps contain costs and reduce capex.

The State of Wyoming, City of Los Angeles and the federal government's General Services Administration are among the biggest wins for Google Apps.

Research firm Gartner has said Gmail, which currently has only a one-percent share of the enterprise email market, poses a significant threat to Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Entourage software.

GM currently uses Lotus Notes, an IBM product. Both Microsoft and Google have targeted the company's email and collaboration business. A deal would give Google, which has made inroads with SMBs as well as governments, a high-profile customer in the enterprise space.

IDC analyst Al Hilwa said landing GM would be a "feather in Google's cap" and a "credibility boost for cloud services for large companies."

Typically, Google charges businesses with more than 10 users $50 per year per user, but that pricing structure may have gone out the window in its attempt to win GM. Hilwa said Google may be offering a discount of up to 50 percent.

For more:
- see this Wall Street Journal article

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Taking government services online, and in many cases, to the cloud, has the potential to save as much as $114 billion worldwide by 2016, according to new research.

ABI Research said the implementation of online e-government services, especially "citizen services," will help drive the e-government services market to sharp growth over the next five years.

"Investment is set to increase from $28 billion in 2010 to $57 billion in 2016, and the number of users will nearly triple over the forecast period," said ABI Research analyst Phil Sealy.

But, he said, because of a very fragmented market, growth in different regions will vary widely.

"Initially much of the activity will be in the major industrialized countries," he said. "But rollouts of e-government services will accelerate beginning in about 2014 when online services in developing regions start to become a reality."

Governments are looking to offer information and services on many levels. ABI Research is expecting to see mobile services become ever more popular, especially in those countries where providing citizens fixed broadband connections may not be a viable investment option. The aim is to maximize e-inclusion and e-participation of citizen-centric services by providing simplistic and convenient means of access.

"Countries such as the U.S. that already have well-established e-government services are looking into aligning services onto one portal rather than multiple portals," said ABI Research group director John Devlin. "The same applies for Europe. Aligning services will make it easier for a country's citizens to access all services in one place. This allows a reduction in operating costs, while maintaining service levels."

In the U.S., both the federal government and state governments are looking to not only transition services, but online and cloud communications as well.

The General Services Administration, for example, in July said it had switched its 17,000 employees over to Google Apps to take advantage of its cloud-based email and collaboration offerings, cutting down on the costs of establishing and operating data centers. The GSA said the change will save it more than $15.2 million over the next five years.

Likewise, the State of Wyoming, which in June became the first state to adopt a full suite of Google Apps for Government, which includes desktop videoconferencing and live online collaboration while creating documents for its more than 10,000 state employees. Wyoming believes the switch will help it save $1 million annually.

And of course, Congress increasingly is using Skype and Oovoo VoIP and video chat to communicate with constituents and each other.

For more:
- see this release

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Waking up to damage from Irene after this weekend, residents of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states are probably feeling a range of emotions--relief that it wasn't any worse; sadness at loss of personal property or perhaps even a loved one; shock at the immensity of the re-building task ahead of them. Worrying about how their businesses are affected probably is and should be a little further down the list of considerations.

Still, every time this kind of disaster occurs--whether it's an earthquake, hurricane or tornado--businesses get a not-so-subtle reminder of how important it is to have a disaster recovery plan, particularly one that ensures redundancy of IT services. It's a lesson a lot of companies have learned and that some have learned the hard way, but when the next disaster strikes, you can be certain at least one business will be learning it for the very first time.

Cloud services can be part of the disaster recovery solution, and at this point, most businesses probably know at least a little about cloud services and how they can help in disaster recovery. However, as these businesses look to invest in cloud services, they face a new challenge--figuring out a very crowded and confusing market that contains both public Internet and private network cloud solution service providers, which range from Internet retailers to well-known technology vendors to telephone companies.

What's needed most at this point is clarity, so businesses can make the right decisions. Virtualization company VMware this week is taking a step to help businesses find some clarity in the cloud by launching a Web site to help them find and test offerings from VMware cloud partners. It's one step in the right direction, but if cloud service providers want to truly help their potential customers recover from the next disaster, they need to be honest and detailed about what their services can and can't do. Being clear amid the confusion gives you one less think to worry about with the next hurricane that blows through.--Dan

Server virtualization pioneer VMware is holding its VMworld conference in Las Vegas this week, and among new announcements, it has unveiled a new online resource to help corporate enterprises find and test VMware cloud services partners, many of whom are telcos or similar service providers.

The new site, vcloud.vmware.com, provides information on about 48 vCloud service providers so far and allows companies to test-drive their services. VMware eventually plans to include reviews and recommendation tools to further help virtualization customers connect with the cloud.

In a similar vein, the company also announced Global Connect, a service to help multi-national corporate enterprises find cloud service provider partners in different regions of the world and combine them into a single global virtual cloud services platform.

VMware's success may increasingly depend on the future of such partnerships as chief competitor Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) continues an aggressive marketing campaign against the company that started the whole virtualization trend--or at least made the market take notice. VMware also has taken some odd turns recently, having launched a new licensing strategy that stoked controversy among customers. After an outcry, VMware revised the licensing scheme but its competitor Microsoft has alleged it merely masked its price hikes.

At this week's conference, VMware also is announcing a new database management platform called vFarbric Data Director, which enables greater control over dispersed databases.

For more:
- read this CNET post

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Time and again Google has made the claim they are not a carrier and thus shouldn't be succeptible to the same regulations as phone companies. In the past we've covered the call termination debate where companies pushed for Google to follow regulations other companies had to follow. Now with the new calling available in Gmail, should Google be even more afraid of being regulated like other companies providing phone service?

A group of analysts come together in a recent eWeek article to chime in on this issue and the issue seems to really come down to what Google is actually offering. Google is providing an end point for calls through a free software based messaging platform, but broadband services are still being provided by telecom companies. Of course even with that being the case, it's not like telephone companies can manage the phone service Google is providing over their wires--which is often what the FCC regulations are meant to affect.

One analyst at Gartner thinks that if the FCC does decide to classify Google as a carrier of sorts, the company might just drop its offerings rather than go down that road.

For more:
- read the whole debate at eWeek

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AT&T finds Google Voice blocking calls to convent
AT&T and Google spar over Google Voice

Shoretel has released the newest version of their Unified Communications (UC) solution at IT EXPO this week. The new version improves upon the distributed services aspects of Shoretel's offering.

"Shoretel has always been about pushing its capabilities out into appliances, out into the network, making it so that wherever you are in the network you always have always-on capabilities to communicate," said Jeff Ridley, director of product management with Shoretel in an interview with FierceVoIP. "The upgrade is large enterprise-focused with more distributed services. For customers with multiple locations [Shoretel 10 is] giving them an even better solution."

The upgrade also featured a new SIP upgrade to make T.38 fax integration and Microsoft Exchange 2007 intergration simpler for their enterprise customers. Back in March, Kevin Gavin, VP of marketing at Shortel revealed Shoretel's movement to break out of the SMB market saying: "The recession is allowing us to break out of Tier 2 status, and we're gaining market share as Nortel has trouble." This version 10 upgrade in someways continues on the themes of Shoretel's version 9 upgrade bringing even more features to their enterprise targets.

For more:
- read this release

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It doesn't matter how successful or innovative you might be, at some point in the growth of an industry the government is going to want to get a piece of the action. And then they are going to want more. Congress is holding hearings today to revise details of the Universal Service Fund (USF) act and their changes might effect certain VoIP providers. Congress members are deciding on whether to include a requirement that VoIP providers must contribute to the USF in states where their customers live.

The draft USF bill currently being discussed would give states the power to force any company providing communications services within their state to contribute to the fund. The definition would include VoIP providers--particularly Internet-based VoIP providers--and in some ways that's what the languages is targeting. Oregon Public Utility Commissioner Ray Baum who testified in front of the congressional committee reviewing the bill didn't mince words: "The FCC has the authority now to eliminate the need for the new definition of 'communications service provider' by making a long-overdue final classification of the status of facilities-based and so-called nomadic VoIP providers,” Baum said in a prepared statement.

The USF is designed to subsidize phone service to rural communities, the poor, schools and libraries. Legacy telcos and VoIP providers pay part of their interstate and international revenues into the fund. And while the FCC does get some funds from VoIP companies, up until now rulings have gone against states trying to get funds from companies providing communication services within their borders. A while back Vonage won an exemption from paying USF fees because it claimed to be an information service.

For more:
- read more at Telephony

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LOS ANGELES - VoIP Logic, a managed VoIP provider, announced it has purchased VoIP engineering firm SunDial Inc. for an undisclosed amount. SunDial will be absorbed by VoIP Logic, with SunDial CEO Ardeshir Ghanbarzadeh joining VoIP Logic as vice president of operations.

VoIP Logic said more than a dozen SunDial customers would remain directly surpervised by former SunDial employees, ensuring a seamless transition. In addition, the SunDial customer base will now have access to VoIP Logic's additional managed services.

VoIP Logic CEO Micah Singer said in a release that the transaction made strategic sense for his company, as the added professional engineering services and Ghanbarzadeh's expertise would be excellent resources for VoIP Logic's customer base. At IT EXPO East earlier in 2009, VoIP Logic reported strong growth metrics, and the company appears to be capitalizing on its growth with strategic purchases. 

For more:
- see the press release via Reuters here

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Iowa Network Services (INS) and Onvoy Voice Services have employed Tekelec to monitor their jointly-owned SS7 network to monitor the increased presence of IP and VoIP traffic traversing their respective networks. The two service providers will leverage Tekelec's Integrated Applications Solution (IAS) to monitor, correlate and report on multi-protocol network traffic to deliver intelligence information for troubleshooting and traffic management. Tekelec is not a stranger to INS. INS already leverages Tekelec's EAGLE SS7 to deliver wholesale SS7 services to other Local Exchange Carriers, CLECs and wireless operators.  

In May, INS and Onvoy replaced their former network management product with the IAS solution, which can conduct network monitoring and reporting in both the legacy SS7 and next-gen SIP domains. Tekelec says the IAS can provide service providers troubleshooting capabilities and KPIs to support traffic management, security and wireless services and SMS. What's more, the IAS can support both TDM and VoIP network with a common set of applications so service providers with blended networks can conduct real-time performance management.  

For more:
- see the release here

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