Data Sheet—Thursday, September 4, 2014

Welcome to Thursday, Data Sheet readers! What to do when you want attention for your tech conference? Hire Oscar winner (and Box customer) Jared Leto to share the keynote and get him to pass around the gold guy. I’ll bet the actor and musician is thrilled he didn’t choose iCloud, like fellow winner Jennifer Lawrence. Read on for real BoxWorks news, plus why it’s easier to take risks on enterprise startups.

Box thinks out of the box. Sure, CEO Aaron Levie pioneered the category, but there are oodles of competitive enterprise cloud storage options so the developer is differentiating with things like new Microsoft Office 365 integration plus a series of industry-specific solutions for content management and collaboration, starting with retail, healthcare, media and (you guessed it!) entertainment. Leto uses Box to store and distribute his music.

TIBCO seeks "strategic options." We heard the rumor last month, but the developer officially tapped a special committee two weeks ago to maximize shareholder value.

Tune in to your opt-out responsibility. What happens when you forget to inform consumers of their privacy rights? Verizon is paying $7.4 million for its goof-up.

Your federal tax dollars at work. Accenture just won two U.S. army contracts worth $53.1 million. Its mission: ongoing support and application development services for one of the biggest ERP systems in the world—with more than 52,000 users. Accenture deployed the installation in 2012, consolidating 107 other apps in the process.

CLOUD CHATTER

Dimension Data: Make that a dozen. The global IT services company just switched on its twelfth cloud data center in Toronto. Its proposition: more management, integration and automation services than rivals like Amazon Web Services.

STATS & SPECS

Behold, a wealth of inexpensive mobile devices. Google may be teaming with VMware and Nvidia to make Chromebooks a sexier enterprise option, but there is no scarcity of sub-$300 competition out this week. Choose from Lenovo's first 8-inch Android tablet, Toshiba's no-frills Windows slate, the latest netbook from ASUS, or Acer's Windows tablet trio.

Plus, want a better iPhone alternative? Here are more details on several smartphones willing to oblige: Samsung's oddly shaped Galaxy Note Edge, and plus Microsoft's new Nokia Lumia trio (voiced by the Cortana digital assistant.

Need to run Windows on your Mac? VMware seeks to bite into Parallels' market share with a Fusion revision more explicitly targeted at IT pros who need to get at virtual machines in remote data centers.

STARTUPS & DISRUPTORS

Sign on the digital dotted line. Electronic signature company Softpro is now part of document management developer Kofax, in a $34.7 million cash buyout.

Mapping the great indoors. Most map services can find a building reasonably well, but IndoorAtlas uses geomagnetics fields to locate specific stores, offices or places inside. It just got $10 million from Chinese search engine giant Baidu.

FAQ

Most CIOs talk the talk when it comes to innovation, but at what point does an untested, unknown, yet unimaginably innovative technology become worth the risk?

As you know too well, most IT organizations still are structured and staffed for support, not strategy. Nor do most teams have time to entertain product briefings with every bright-eyed developer or engineer who comes knocking. "Outside of financial services, most organizations don't have a way of figuring out what is legitimate," says Jonathan Lehr, the former Morgan Stanley IT guy who founded a regular New York meet-up in January 2012 for this purpose.

Lehr's current day job is venture director for Work-Bench, an enterprise tech growth accelerator with 32,000-square-feet of office space near New York's Union Square. Work-Bench describes itself as a bridge: startups get a place to develop ideas and gather feedback, while IT professionals can use the organization for better intelligence about forthcoming big data, analytics and security technologies. "By bringing both sides together, we can accelerate product feedback, customer insights and ultimately solve immense business point points and technology problems."

Some of Work-Bench's better-known affiliated startups: Context Relevant (an analytics developer that raised $21 million in May), Dwolla (a cyber-payments player with backers like Andreessen Horowitz), Fuze (a visual collaboration company with at least $48.5 million in VC) and vArmour (a stealthy security company that closed another $36 million round in August).

Still not ready to trust? As I was prepping this column, I came across a well-sourced, long-form ComputerWorld feature that does a great job of debating the usual objections: "Should you buy enterprise applications from a startup?"

I especially appreciated the perspective of Red Robin CIO Chris Laping: "In the new paradigm, [most software] implementations are so much shorter, you don't have to think about that risk. You're not talking about three years and $20 million. You're talking about 75 days and $50,000. You implement little modules and get big wins along the way."

What's your risk tolerance for enterprise startups? Share your perspective at datasheet@heatherclancy.com.

ONE MORE THING ...

Google: Let's just do it ourselves. The company has plenty of experience optimizing hardware for its cloud data centers, but it wants something even faster and smarter: a quantum computer. After working with controversial "qubit" innovator D-Wave (which also slums around with Amazon), it hired a University of California professor to create its own design.