Links 6/10: Cable Tech - Google Fiber may use Wi-Fi to reach homes; Nokia swings deal for Gainspeed
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Google Fiber could use high-speed Wi-Fi to connect to homes (The Verge)
Nokia Swings Deal for Gainspeed (Light Reading)
Cathy Avgiris put family first, became most powerful woman at Comcast (Denver Post)
Comcast, Time Warner Cable to testify on customer service issues (The Hill)
Hulu live stream will wholesale for around $34 a month, include affiliates, analyst says (FierceCable)
PUC, feeling heat from Uber allies, votes to reconsider $11.4M fine (Philly.com)
Gawker Media Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy (Hollywood Reporter)
Urban Outfitters: Retail sales sluggish & $19M payday for Vetri (Philadelphia Business Journal)
Philly Tech People News 6/9/2015: Comcast exec leaves for soon to be Cablevision parent; West Philly's Carter now a top Spotify exec
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Marwan Fawaz Named CEO of Nest (Multichannel News)
Former Adelphia, Charter and Motorola Home executive.
Altice USA Names Schreiber Chief Content Officer (Multichannel News)
Schreiber was senior vice president, content acquisition for Comcast
SAP reshuffles product, executive decks to better target smaller companies (ZDNet)
I want India to be the most innovative place for SAP: Dilipkumar Khandelwal
(Business Standard)
Spotify hires star music manager Troy Carter to help fight Apple and Jay Z (Recode)
Carter is a native of West Philadelphia.
Dudnyk promotes Tobias to president after Powers (Medical Marketing & Media)
Pinnacle 21 Attracts Clinical Data Standards Executive (Press Release)
Panitch Schwarze Hires Experienced IP Attorneys in Philadelphia (Press Relesse)
Links 6/9: Telefonica to roll out ThingWorx IoT platform; Comcast didn't need billion dollar deal to get MVNO status
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Telefonica to roll out ThingWorx IoT platform (TotalTele)
Verizon's CFO: 'We're perfectly fine' inking MVNO deal with Altice or other cable operators (FierceWireless)
Time Warner Cable Internet speeds are “abysmal,” NY AG claims (Ars Technica)
Tim Wu, in official government capacity now, takes shots at Time Warner Cable.
Lehigh Valley FedEx Ground terminal to be company's largest in U.S., VP says (Morning Call)
Service robots are coming to help us (Phys.org)
Highlights work being done at Penn SEAS.
Riverside acquires Horsham-based CAD software resaler Prism Engineering as add-on to Fisher Unitech platform (Crain's Cleveland Business)
AstraZeneca CIO Dave Smoley’s 6-point cloud toolkit (Diginomica)
Philly edtech startup rebrands as $4M Series A round closes (Philadelphia Business Journal)
Veeva Systems, off of strong earnings, holds commercial summit in Philadelphia (upddate)
Tom Paine
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Veeva Systems (NYSE: VEEV) reported earnings for its 1st quarter 2017 (yes, its a bit ahead of most) on Thursday, May 26.
Though based in California, Veeva has a strong presence in the Philadelphia / New Jersey region, where so many of its Life Sciences customers are located. Much of its successful strategy originated from its Radnor office.
Revenue and earnings both exceeded estimates, and the company raised its guidance for the current quarter and full fiscal year. Revenue grew 33% to $119.8 million. Earnings fell slightly to $12.5 million from $13 million a year earlier; On a per share basis, earnings were flat at 9 cents a share.
Revenue growth was strong across both CRM, its original and largest product, and Vault, its regulatory documentation product. The thing that stood out to me was management's enthusiasm over the breadth and depth of opportunities for Veeva Vault.
It is important to understand the distinction between CRM and Vault. CRM was built on top of Salesforce's CRM,and Veeva has, at least for the length of its current contract with Salesforce, exclusive rights within the Life Sciences CRM market using the Salesforce platform, as I understand it.
Outside of CRM, however, Veeva Vault was custom built by Veeva and is completely its proprietary product. And thus Veeva can take Vault into any market it wants. And because it doesn't have to`pay a percentage of revenue to Salesforce, potentially earn higher margins as well.
So the news from last week was that Veeva is doing some exploratory selling in a couple of markets, or possibly for a couple of non-vertical applications, outside of life sciences. From the earnings call:
"This quarter we will start selling Vault outside of life sciences with a small dedicated go to market team. They will focus on regulated industries adjacent to life sciences with solutions that are based on our existing commercial content and quality applications."
There are several possibilities I can think of for Veeva, but one of them would be selling its just released quality management product QMS into OTC pharma manufacturing environments.
Vault is seeing strong growth across market segments (Clinical, Regulatory, Quality), and Veeva reported 18 seven-figure Vault customer relationships, up 100% year-over-year.
During the earnings conference call, CEO Peter Gassner cited Philly-based Spark Therapeutics and its effort to find a cure for blindness as an example of the exciting, vitally important things Veeva's clients were doing.
Veeva shares hit an all time high after the earnings report, and it had a market capitalization of $4.8 billion at today's close.
To give an example of Veeva's growing ecosystem, San Francisco-based Aktani today announced it had raised $17.5 million led by Safeguard Scientifics, at least partly on the strength of its partnership with Veeva.
The Veeva Commercial Summit kicked off today in Philadelphia, where Veeva has held it each year of the event's existence, and one can expect some new product announcements to be forthcoming from it. Veeva will also have a presence at DIA 2016, also in Philadelphia from June 26-30.
Veevs Product Announcements from Veeva Commercial Summit
New Veeva CRM Engage and Veeva CRM Engage Webinar Make Digital Engagement in Life Sciences Easier and More Compliant
Veeva Introduces Vault PromoMats DAM to Deliver Advanced Digital Asset Management Capabilities in Life Sciences
GSK Adds New Veeva Commercial Cloud Applications Following the Success of Veeva CRM
Links 6/8: Salesforce's Demandware buy : Good or bad; Comcast & Amazon, Aereo's ghost
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Salesforce acquires Demandware. Good? Bad? Buy! (Paul Greenberg/ZDNet)
Salesforce acquires Demandware to add Commerce Cloud (Diginomica)
Hewlett Packard Enterprise and GE are teaming up on the Internet of Things (Re/code)
No mention of GE IoT partner PTC ThingWorx, but that doesn't imply anything. Reading through the PR, HP's main role seems
to be supplying hardware and support, not IP snd software.
Aereo Assets Live On (Light Reading)
Amazon, Comcast Fire Up Tablet Promo (Multichannel News)
Pega CEO Alan Trefler and his conflict with public cloud (Diginomica)
I want India to be the most innovative place for SAP: Dilipkumar Khandelwal
(Business Standard India)
Comcast Business, ABC's 'Shark Tank' team up for casting call in Philly (Philadelphia Business Journal)
Subaru SelectsDemand Aria Systems to Monetize Its Connected Car Initiatives (Press Release)
Safeguard Scientifics leads $17.5 million financing in SF-based Aktana
Tom Paine
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San Francisco-based Aktana announced today that Radnor-based Safeguard Scientifics (NYSE: SFE) has led a $17.5 million funding with participation from returning investor Starfish Ventures and others. Aktana had previously raised $12.5 million, according to CrunchBase.
Aktana's initial product offering is what it refers to as Decision Engines, and its first major application is targeted at the Life Sciences industry. I would make a rough comparison conceptually to Salesforce-backed InsideSales (with the caveat that I've seen neither), except InsideSales tries to engineer much of the waste out of the telephone sales process, while Aktana is aimed at field reps.
It is designed, according to a company's individual strategy and preferences, to reeingeneer the rep's workflow to anticipate roadblocks, identify specific events, and navigate towards goals, while leaving the rep in control. Aktana sees opportunities beyond Pharma, but at present that accounts for virtually all of its business.
 |
| From Aktana website |
Aktana was not born as a pharma specialist, CEO David Ehrlich ( sociology major undergrad, Masters in engineering at Stanford, Harvard MBA, ex McKinsey) told me in a phone interview. It had the concept and literally called around to companies in different industries, to find out if they saw an application for it. Finally they found a taker in Merck Japan. Pfizer soon followed. It took three or four years to reach this point.
Aktana's success with these customers came to the attention of leading Life Sciences cloud vendor Veeva Systems, which is headquartered not too far from Aktana in its new Silicon Valley digs (though Pleasanton may not technically be in the Valley) and has an important east coast base in Radnor. Eventually Veeva incorporated Aktana as an optional add-on to its CRM offering named Veeva CRM Suggestions. Ehrlich quickly ticks off the names of six or seven major pharma customers, and says growth is happening quickly. IMS Health, the likely #2 vendor in Life Sciences CRM, also has partnered with Aktana.
It plans to use the new funds to expand product development and to accelerate its global reach by opening offices in China and Europe, adding to current offices in San Francisco, New York City, and Tokyo. Al Wiegman, Managing Director at Safeguard, will join Aktana’s Board of Directors.
Thoma Bravo, one week after its $3 billion Qlik deal, acquires Wayne- based Elemica
Tom Paine
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Subscribe in a readerElemica, a Wayne-based supply chain software company specializing in process industries (chemicals, petrol) has been acquired by PE firm Thoma Bravo. This comes a week after Thoma Bravo's uncontested $3 billion bid for Radnor-based Qlik Technologies. Terms were not disclosed.
I'm not sure how big Elemica is in terms of revenue, but I do know its applications are typically complex and should generate considerable revenue, though since customers were often Elemica owners I don't what pricing or revenue reflected. It has 217 employees on LinkedIn.
Thoma Bravo, based in San Francisco snd Chicago, had made two other fairly recent buys in the Philly area, quality management software firm Sparta Systems of Hamilton, NJ in July 2014, and iPipeline of Exton last summer.
The website SpendMatters, which has covered Elemica in the past, has the best first take on the deal.
My understanding is that the owners of Elemica prior to this transaction were process industry companies that would also be its customers, but I haven't been able to absolutely confirm the past ownership structure.
Update: Elemica representative confirmed that the companies owning Elemica were the process industry enterprises that were most likely to be its customers. Not absolutely sure what companies were owners of record at time of Elemica's sale this week, but this article excerpt talks about who was on board at its founding. Notice that some of these companies, such as Dow and Rohm & Haas, have been impacted by M&A.
August 16, 2000 --The eight founding participants of Elemica announced today that they have signed a definitive agreement that formally creates the premier neutral, independent and secure e-marketplace for the chemical industry. ATOFINA, BASF , Bayer , BP, Dow, DuPont , Rohm and Haas and Shell have signed the document that will fund and accelerate the establishment of Elemica Limited as a company. Together, the eight founders are investing a total of $100 million in the company. The target operational launch date for the company's transactional site is December 2000.
In addition to the eight signed founders, 12 other companies have already agreed in principle to invest and participate in the marketplace, and are now in the process of entering into definitive agreements with Elemica. These companies include Air Products, Ashland Distribution Company, Celanese, CHEMCENTRAL, Ciba Specialty Chemicals, Degussa -Hüls, Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, Mitsui Chemicals , Rhodia, Solvay , Sumitomo Chemical and Van Waters & Rogers.
A quick look at Elemica's owners will lead to the conclusion that virtually all are SAP customers. Given that, I'm surprised that SAP didn't offer a bid, though we don't know that it didn't bid for sure. But there's been a pattern
in which financial buyers outbid strategic buyers for mature software companies.
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