PACT, Ben Franklin Northeastern PA honor top entrepreneurs

Tom Paine


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Two of the area's most prestigious tech associations held their awards banquets last week.

On Thursday evening, May 9, PACT (The Greater Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies) held its 20th Annual Enterprise Awards. The event was held at a new venue this year, the Valley Forge Casino, intended to provide a bit more of a "red carpet" atmosphere (though hopefully it didn't lead to any startups wagering away their VC funds).

The IT winners of Enterprise Awards this year were:

· Technology Startup Company: ThingWorx
· Emerging Technology Company: InstaMed
· Investment Deal of the Year: Liquent
· IT Innovator Award of Excellence: Relay Network
· Technology CEO of the Year: Tim Wallace, iPipeline
· Technology Company of the Year: Quintiq

Comcast Executive VP David L. Cohen was named Legend Award Honoree.

You can see all the finalists here.


Also, on the evening of May 7, Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania held its annual i xchange at Zoellner Arts Center at Lehigh University, with some 550 attendees present.

Award winners included Ed J. Coringrato Jr (Entrepreneurial Achievement), CEO of CyOptics, the Breinigsville optoelectronics maker for the telecom industry that was recently acquired by Avago Technologies Limited for $400 million. Also honored was Anthony J. Salvaggio (Incubator Graduate), President of ComputerAid Inc., Allentown. The IT consulting firm, which started with two employees in the early 1980s, now has more than 3,000 full-time associates.

Michael Whitman, President & CEO, Micro Interventional Devices, Langhorne, was honored for product innovation. Started out of Ben Franklin TechVentures in 2010, Micro Interventional Devices developed a minimally invasive product for use in heart valve repair and replacement procedures.



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News from SAP's Sapphire: 5/14/2013: SAP says HANA will power all cloud applications

SAP Unifies Comprehensive Cloud Portfolio With SAP HANA® Cloud Platform to Serve Companies of All Sizes (PR Newswire)

SAP says HANA will power all cloud applications (PC World)

Dell gooses HANA appliances, loads up SAP Business Suite
Looks ahead to those Ivy Bridge-EX machines later this year (The Register)

SAP Exec To Partners: Huge Incremental Revenue Opportunities Ahead (CRN)

SAP introduces Mobile Secure; mobile device management (ZDNet)

NetSuite's aims for SAP's manufacturing heart (ZDNet)

Qualcomm's CIO Says Oracle Is A 'Dinosaur' That's Losing Ground In The Enterprise (SAI Enterprise)

Two visions of the future of Healthcare IT; John Glaser and Agent Smith of "The Matrix"

First, John Glaser, PhD, CEO of Malvern-based Siemens Healthcare, Health Services, and an acknowledged industry visionary, gives a 3 minute presentation at this past winter's HIMSS Conference in New Orleans on the future of the Electronic Health Record. Glaser sees the EHR moving from being largely a transactional record to becoming an "intelligent" record.







GE Healthcare came up with this curious commercial using Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) of "The Matrix" fame. The result is rather odd but perhaps strangely effective.








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Daily Links 5/14/2013: ABC launching trial of free online streaming in Philly today

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ABC starts free online streaming in Philly today (Philly.com: Philly Deals)

Aereo Lands in Atlanta on June 17 (Multichannel News)

Verizon, Vodafone Stalement Seen Amid $7B Dividend (Investor's Business Daily)

Daily Report: Surging Data Center Industry Blurs Boundaries (New York Times)

Connectify Kickstarts Cloud Service For Faster Internet On Mac & PC (PR Newswire)

Connectify brings its broadband channel bonding service to the cloud (Gigaom)

Here's Why The Founders Of Fusion.io Left Last Week (SAI Enterprise)




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Daily Links 5/13/2013: Alteva, MeetMe earnings

Q&A: Plaintiffs' lawyer Barry Barnett on the Comcast class action (Thomson Reuters News & Insights)

Alteva Reports First Quarter 2013 Financial Results (Marketwire)

MeetMe® Reports First Quarter 2013 Financial Results (Marketwire)
Mobile revenue growing rapidly, but not enough yet to offset decline in non-mobile revenue. Mobile now accounts for 70% of daily users in US and Canada.



First area health-information exchange forming (Philadelphia Business Journal)

Health IT Accelerator Launching at University City Science Center (Business Wire)

Instem Enters Early Phase Clinical Market; Acquires Logos Technologies and ALPHADAS (Business Wire)


David’s Bridal launches a mobile planning tool for brides-to-be
(Internet Retailer)

Some pre-SAPPHIRE SAP news

Bluefin on SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (Diginomica)

SAP Sapphire 2013 preview: Five big questions (ZDNet)

Sapphire Now 2013 – the discerning preview (Diginomica)

HP wanted to offload Autonomy on SAP, says SAP co-chief (The Register)
But HP says it was SAP that was trying to buy from them.

Philly Tech People News 5/12/2013: SAP names former Comcast exec Clarke to head marketing communications function

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Victoria Clarke Becomes SAP's Fourth Comms Head In Three Years (The Holmes Report)
Previously with Comcast, the Pentagon.

Comcast’s Pick joins ValueVision board (CED Magazine)

InterDigital Adds Todd Simpson to Lead Innovation Partners (Globe Newswire)

Seasoned Specialty Retail Leader Named CEO of David’s Bridal
Pamela B. Wallack, Former Gap Executive Vice President, to lead largest specialty bridal market retailer (Business Wire)

GROM Hires Analytics Practice Lead
SAP Partner Engages Leading BI HANA Expert to Spearhead Analytics Practice (PR Web)

Checkpoint Systems, Inc. Appoints Jeff Richard Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (Business Wire)

Peter Illari Joins iCorps Technologies to Grow Philadelphia Market (PR Web)

DMi Partners Continues to Grow, Adding Three Associates to Creative Department (Marketwire)




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Today in Philly Tech History 5/12/2010: SAP acquires Sybase for $5.8 billion (Updated 5/16)

Tom Paine


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On May 12, 2010, SAP announced it had agreed to acquire Dublin, CA-based Sybase for $5.8 billion. The first big strategic bet under co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe since they took over the top spot from Léo Apotheker on Super Bowl Sunday of that year, the Sybase buy offered benefits in at least three important areas: database technology (the core of Sybase's original business although it was now a distant runnerup to Oracle, IBM and Microsoft) , strength in vertical sectors like financial services and telecom, and advancing SAP's position in mobile technology.

Sybase CEO John Chen left the company last year to join PE giant Silver Lake Partners, and Sybase became a fully integrated part of SAP rather than a standalone unit.

I asked R "Ray" Wang, Principal Analyst & CEO of enterprise software research firm Constellation Research, Inc., to reflect on how the Sybase acquisition has turned out for SAP three years later. He responded by email that "while the acquisition was on the expensive side, SAP used it to leap frog from super legacy ERP vendor to a more forward path of innovation. In general the Sybase acquisition set into motion 3 areas for SAP:

1. Mobility - this helped them move into the mobile device management and mobile app dev market.
2. China presence and credibility - this gave them a good footing in China based on John Chen's market development and credibility with the Chinese government.
3. The underpinning of database and HANA - the movement to reduce dependency on Oracle and set a path for in-memory computing came from these efforts."

When I asked Wang to be more specific about how Sybase contributed to the development of HANA, he said "The key thing was having access to some of the smartest database minds in the world. They say HANA is home grown, but I think they learned from Sybase and built from scratch."

Also, this thread on the SAP Community Network from earlier this year provides some interesting perspectives on what was gained from the acquisition.

Update 5/16/2013: Hasso Plattner speaking at SAPPHIRE: "Guess why we bought Sybase? They have a whole package of columnar store. Probably will be useful."



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Patent Court Torn on Whether Software Deserve Patents (Bloomberg)

Timothy B. Lee joins Washington Post

Tom Paine


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Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica

Timothy B. Lee, the Philadelphia resident and libertarian-oriented economic thinker who has written about technology issues for Ars Technica and Forbes and has been an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, has apparently joined the Washington Post in a full-time role, according to his twitter feed.

He will be moving to Washington, and his new position will require that he end his 10 year relationship with the Cato Institute, he tweets.

Lee has a masters degree in Computer Science from Princeton. He is an often provocative thinker who goes against the grain of orthodoxy, and it will be interesting to see what he contributes at the Post.

Why couldn't the Inquirer have made an effort to keep him in Philly, I wonder? (Needn't ask.)




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Veeva Systems holds Global Customer Summit in Philadelphia

Tom Paine


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Veeva Systems, the Pleasanton, CA-based Cloud CRM and CMS vendor to the Life Sciences and Pharma industries, held its Global Customer Summit earlier this week with over 700 attendees from 100 companies at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia.

Veeva, a company founded only in 2007 and about which I would guess few outside of its niche markets and perhaps the Salesforce.com universe (its CRM runs on the Force.com platform) knew much until recent months, has been put on the map due to widespread reports that it is planning an IPO that could take place as soon as the third quarter, and has already lined up its lead bankers for the deal. (See my posts California-based Cloud Pharma CRM & CMS vendor Veeva Systems, with sales & marketing based in Radnor, may seek IPO and Reuters: Veeva Systems, with significant Radnor presence, taking more steps towards IPO ). While Veeva has not confirmed the most recent reports, neither has it denied them.

Veeva held its Customer Summit in Philadelphia this year, as it has in the past, partly due to the large concentration of Life Sciences customers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and also because of the location of Veeva's US customer service, sales and marketing in Radnor. The event gave Veeva the opportunity to make some significant new product announcements:

Introduced Veeva Network, a cloud-based customer data and master data management (MDM) solution.


A new mobile CRM and CLM (Closed Loop Marketing) solution for Windows 8. The same apps had been available on the iPad since 2011.

Veeva also announced that two major healthcare advertising agencies had committed to developing content for Veeva's new, approved (for regulatory purposes) email app that allows Pharma salesforces to communicate directly with physicians via their tablets.

In addressing the summit, Veeva’s CEO, Peter Gassner, presented some key company milestones. He said in the last 5 ½ years (essentially since the company's founding), Veeva’s user base has grown to 100,000 users in 75 countries and the company currently has 500 employees, and is still growing at 100% per year.

Veeva Systems had around $120 million in revenue last year and is profitable, according to reports. It accomplished this with only $7 million in venture capital - $4 million of it institutional (from Emergence Capital) and $3 million in angel funding. Veeva told me in March it had 50 to 60 employees in the Philadelphia area.



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