Bridgescale Blog

Dayforce today announces its recognition for the second consecutive year as one of the 50 Most Engaged Workplaces™ in Canada. This annual award recognizes top employers that display leadership and innovation towards engaging their employees.

“More employers are realizing that the most successful organizations are those that invest in employee engagement,” said Razor Suleman, CEO and Founder, I Love Rewards. “We’re thrilled to honor those companies that are truly committed to creating positive, thriving work environments. These companies understand that their employees are their greatest asset and are leading by example as they revolutionize the workplace. All of our award winners are ahead of the curve – they should be extremely proud.”

The 50 Most Engaged Workplaces™ panel of judges evaluated each applicant on how they measured up to other organizations based on the Eight Elements of Employee Engagement™. The Eight Engagement of Employee Engagement™ include: Communication, Leadership, Culture, Rewards & Recognition, Professional & Personal Growth, Accountability & Performance, Vision & Values and Corporate Social Responsibility.

The panel of judges included Dr. Bob Nelson, PhD, Best Selling Author and President of Nelson Motivation Inc., Paul Hebert, Managing Director and Lead Consultant of i2i, Stacia Garr, SR Analyst with Bersin & Associates, Debbie McGrath, Founder and Chief Instigator at HR.com and Razor Suleman, Founder & CEO of I Love Rewards.

Thomson Reuters (ironically, founded and 53% owned by a Canadian family) recent research indicated that the amount of venture capital dollars invested in Canadian startups declined 2% in the second quarter compared to the same period last year while the US market grew 15%.   While money is pouring into silicon valley startups addressing social media, cloud computing companies and mobile applications, our brightest and most talented entrepreneurs in Canada are hitting a wall when it comes to raising capital for their companies.

These Canadian entrepeneurs/companies are left with no choice but to seek capital down south and most likely move their companies to California or Boston.  The local Canadian R&D credits are interesting but if you can’t raise the money to spend on R&D, it doesn’t matter.

This venture industry contraction has and will certainly adversely impact Canadian technology industry unless some significant changes happen.  In my opinion, there is not a shortage of quality of entrepreneurs.  Instead, there is a shortage money willing to take the risk and back experienced venture capital funds who can source, filter and work with this elite group of individuals.     The number of Canadian venture funds active in early stage investing is probably less than 10 from over 50 firms 5 years ago.   This is not enough capital to support this venture capital industry.

The interesting paradox is that Canadian commercial banks and pension plans are sitting on record balance sheets and therefore liquidity is not an issue.  These same entities depend on deposit and job growth..exactly what the Canadian venture capital industry delivers.  Why aren’ t  they putting more capital in this asset class?  What the Canadian venture capital industry needs is LP leadership.   We do have a few leaders like Northleaf Capital, OVCF, and BDC but the industry needs much more.  Once we get a few leaders to step up, take the risk and see the returns and the ong term value..others will follow.  Unfortunately, the outlook is grim and this contraction will most likely continue.

CS7542/CS7522 delivers ultimate user experiences by enabling simultaneous quadruple play services and enterprise class security and performance

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–(EON: Enhanced Online News)–Cortina Systems, Inc. (Cortina™), delivering innovative technologies that link people and networks worldwide, today announced the CS7542/CS7522, an ultra high performance multi-services delivery platform, designed to address the paradigm shift occurring in the market place due to the emergence of IPTV technology and the convergence of DVB, router gateways, and DVR set top boxes. The CS7542/CS7522 creates a new model of a single delivery platform that delivers simultaneous line rate bandwidth for secured data, voice, video, and mobile services without service degradation. Its industry leading IPSec and enterprise class QoS/routing performance makes it an ideal solution for powerful digital home and SMB networking appliances.

“To ensure the system’s longevity and to support ever increasing bandwidth, Cortina’s CS7542/7522 combines hardware-accelerated, enterprise-class, networking performance and security features with a flexible and scalable architecture to enable future value-added services.”

.“The digital home is in a rapid transition period where a new single service delivery model is needed to meet the growing demands and requirements for digital content and distribution,” said Dr. Stewart Wu, Vice President at Cortina Systems. “To ensure the system’s longevity and to support ever increasing bandwidth, Cortina’s CS7542/7522 combines hardware-accelerated, enterprise-class, networking performance and security features with a flexible and scalable architecture to enable future value-added services.”

“Operators around the world are quickly transitioning from basic modems to high-end IP-based residential gateways that currently deliver voice, data, video, and mobile, but can also serve as a platform for future services,” commented Jeff Heynen, Directing Analyst, Broadband Access, Infonetics. “Cortina has developed the first scalable platform that easily delivers multi-stream, HD video, both wired and wireless networking with high reliability, high security, and remote monitoring, as well as troubleshooting capabilities operators require.”

Key Technology Advantages:

•High Performance Processor: Powerful 4,000 DMIPS Dual ARM Cortex A9 with dual NEON DSP Extension core enables computationally intensive applications and the ability to add new services without a platform upgrade

•Gigabit Line Rate Network Engine: Enterprise network performance with service aware QoS addresses any needs from Service Provider

•Flexible Architecture: Robust set of networking/storage/video/audio interfaces to address different markets and applications

•Enterprise Security Performance: Gigabit line rate security and packet engine for network VPN or content DRM/CA

•Active Power Management: Low power gateway operating mode to meet any future green standard

With the integration of six transport stream inputs, the CS7542/CS7522 is an ideal platform for CATV, DVB, and IPTV video convergence, a critical objective for MSOs, Telcos, and GoogleTV. In addition to the digital home market, the CS7542/CS7522, as an enterprise-class, ultra performance SoC solution, is particularly well suited for SMB VPN routers, enterprise access points, and a variety of storage applications.

“As a residential carrier services delivery platform, the CS7542/7522 is extremely power efficient by offering a unique low energy gateway mode that draws minimum energy when idle but provides instant-on when new traffic arrives. The platform can also actively manage the overall system energy usage by shutting down inactive blocks individually and activating those as required for specific applications,” commented Dr. Wu.

Both the CS7542 and CS7522 are sampling now.

Evaluation Based on Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute

Sunnyvale, Calif. – August 12, 2011 – Proofpoint, Inc. (http://www.proofpoint.com), a leading provider of cloud-based security and compliance solutions for enterprise messaging and collaboration, today announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders quadrant of the 2011 “Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways.”1

“We believe Proofpoint’s positioning by Gartner in the leaders quadrant is a great confirmation of our continued success in helping large, global enterprises control a wide variety compliance and security risks associated with email,” said Gary Steele, CEO of Proofpoint. “Proofpoint continues to lead the market with a focus on security, innovation and customer satisfaction, delivering solutions for email security, encryption, data loss prevention and email archiving that help organizations reduce costs while making email safe, secure, compliant and easier to manage. We continue to see some of the largest and most security conscious organizations worldwide switching from legacy email security solutions to Proofpoint.”

To access a complimentary copy of Gartner’s complete “Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways” 2011 report, please visit:

http://www.proofpoint.com/email-security-magic-quadrant

Writing in the “Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways,” Gartner analysts Peter Firstbrook and Eric Ouellet note that, “The secure email gateway market is a mature market. Buyers must look at advanced functionality, service delivery, vertical integration of related email products and strategic vendor relationships to differentiate solutions.”

Gartner also says that, “Policy-based encryption is an increasingly important capability and a significant differentiator of leading products.” Explaining further that, “The adoption of DLP drives the adoption of encryption. Companies that search for sensitive or private information in email often find it. However, exchanging this content with third parties is often a business imperative, and blocking it outright is rarely an option. Encryption becomes an enabling tool to send sensitive content safely and in compliance with regulations.”

Of vendors positioned as Leaders, Gartner says, “Leaders are performing well, have a clear vision of market direction and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership positions in the market. Companies in this quadrant offer a comprehensive and proficient range of email security functionality, and show evidence of superior vision and execution for current and anticipated customer requirements. Leaders typically have a relatively high market share and/or strong revenue growth, own a good portion of their threat or content-filtering capabilities, and demonstrate positive customer feedback for anti-spam efficacy and related service and support.”

Proofpoint SaaS and On-premises Email Security Solutions

Proofpoint delivers a variety of cloud-enabled solutions for security and compliance used by leading enterprises worldwide to protect against spam and viruses, safeguard privacy, encrypt sensitive information and archive messages for easier management and electronic discovery:

•The Proofpoint Enterprise Protection™ suite delivers all of Proofpoint’s best-in-class email security and email management components. Features include: advanced connection management; Proofpoint MLX™-powered spam detection; signature-based and zero-hour virus protection; email firewall, deep content inspection and outbound filtering capabilities to enforce acceptable use policies for message content and attachments; advanced message tracing; and TLS encryption.

•The Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy™ suite provides “defense in depth” data loss prevention for private information of all types. It protects private information in email, defends against leaks of confidential information and ensures compliance with common international, industry and US data protection regulations—such as HIPAA, GLBA, state privacy/encryption regulations and PCI-DSS. Proofpoint Enterprise Privacy includes the policy-based email encryption capabilities of Proofpoint Encryption™ which helps to mitigate the risks associated with regulatory violations, data loss and corporate policy violations by automatically applying encryption based on an organization’s unique policies.

Proofpoint also offers email archiving, eDiscovery and email management solutions including a SaaS email archiving solution, Proofpoint Enterprise Archive™—which makes it easy for organizations to securely archive email and solve the storage management, legal discovery, supervisory and regulatory compliance challenges associated with email retention—and Proofpoint Secure File Transfer™ which lets email users send large files quickly, easily and securely, while minimizing the impact of large file attachments on email servers and other parts of the email infrastructure.

Proofpoint recently introduced the industry’s first cloud-based compliance solution for Microsoft Office 365, which delivers enhanced regulatory compliance, archiving, encryption and data loss prevention capabilities for Microsoft’s next-generation hosted business application suite.

(1)  Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways,” by Peter Firstbrook and Eric Ouellet, 10 August 2011

INCENTIVE MANAGEMENT

The Market
Incentive management (IM) is on a roll. “The market has been growing as organizations look to rationalize and replace spreadsheets,” says Mark Smith, chief research officer and CEO of Ventana Research. The past year saw major consolidations—the marker of a maturing industry—including SumTotal Systems’ purchase of Softscape, CRM magazine’s One to Watch for 2010. With IM vendors announcing record-breaking revenues, analysts believe this industry will expand upward and outward in 2012.

Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO at Constellation Research, predicts that IM will extend its reach into the larger market of human capital management. “There’s a realization that we haven’t been investing in people as much as we should,” he says. To maintain a core team of talented employees, companies will invest in solutions that tie together sales and human resources. To simplify that shift, Smith says, ease of integration will be critical, noting that vendors will respond “to the need to provide more flexibility into model and planning capabilities.”

The Leaders
French compensation solution provider Excentive first hopped across the pond in early 2009. Two years after its initial expansion in the North American market, the vendor is gaining ground, as evidenced by its first-ever appearance as a category leader. Smith praises Excentive’s “approach to integrate incentives and compensation across the organization,” a philosophy that’s consistent with current customer demand.

In 2011, Merced Systems again found a spot on our leaderboard, an honor it has earned every year after its 2008 purchase of sales specialist firm Practique Associates. In the past 12 months, Merced continued to integrate its solutions and build its performance management brand. Smith says, “After expanding into sales, [Merced] has advanced incentives to operate across both sales and services.” This spring, the California-based vendor introduced Sales Performance Management 4.0, which will be available for purchase this year. The release demonstrates Merced’s commitment to the mobility trend with smartphone and tablet access—functionality that analysts agree is becoming increasingly crucial.

With two decades of performance under its belt, Synygy maintains its reputation as a strong IM provider. The vendor remains true to its pure-play roots. Wang says, “Customers love the ability to stay best-of-breed based on Oracle and Salesforce.com integrations.” Much of Synygy’s business grows out of outsourced opportunities, but the vendor’s SaaS story has helped Synygy move down-market, too. “The company has been continuing its advancements with improvements for many years,” Smith says.

Varicent has won a spot on our leaderboard every year since the category’s inception. However, 2011 marked the first year in which the Canada-based vendor gave the winner a run for its money. Through new partnership agreements with SugarCRM and the TerrAlign Group, Varicent has delivered added value for its customers. And that’s reflected in its 3.8 rating for depth of functionality, the highest in that category. Jim Dickie, managing partner at CSO Insights, says that the vendor “provides the right blend of capabilities you can use as right out of the box, along with the ability to highly customize.” With solid scores and a strong vision, Varicent could well take the lead in 2012.

The Winner
One of the first SaaS-only vendors in the market, Xactly is being rewarded for its innovation. Our IM winner for the third year in a row, the San Francisco–based vendor announced revenue growth of nearly 50 percent in the first quarter from the year before and celebrated its 100th SMB customer in May. Wang says that Xactly’s success can be credited at least in part to “understand[ing] both the management team’s needs and the salespeople’s needs.” With the release of Xactly Incent 7.0, the vendor introduced the Sandbox, which lets users create, modify, and test personalized compensation plans. This development spearheads a trend toward self-service capabilities, which Wang believes will continue to gain momentum.

Investment Will Help BlueCat Networks Meet Growing Global Demand for IP Address Management and IPv6 Readiness

Toronto, Canada – July 21, 2011 – BlueCat Networks, the IPAM Intelligence™ company, today announced the completion of a $16.8 million round of financing by new investor Trident Capital.

With this investment, the company will continue to develop, sell and support the market’s most innovative IP Address Management, DNS and DHCP solutions. BlueCat Networks will use the funding primarily to support the expansion of its Sales and Engineering teams and the further development of its global channel partner program. Trident Capital managing director J. Alberto Yépez joins the BlueCat Networks Board of Directors.

“BlueCat Networks has enjoyed remarkable success in the DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management market and the demand for our solutions continues to grow,” said Michael Hyatt, co-founder and CEO of BlueCat Networks. “This new funding will enable us to continue to invest in the quality people, innovation and industry partnerships that drive our achievements, while maintaining a cash reserve for future opportunities. We welcome Trident Capital as an investor and valued member of our team and thank them for supporting our vision.”

Trident Capital has an exceptional track record of building successful infrastructure software companies including: Bytemobile, Epicor (NASDAQ: EPIC), mBlox, Merchant eSolutions, Qualys, Signio (acquired by VeriSign – NASDAQ: VRSN), Sygate (acquired by Symantec – NASDAQ: SYMC), Tablus (acquired by EMC – NYSE: EMC), Thor Technologies (acquired by Oracle – NASDAQ: ORCL), and Tricipher (acquired by VMware – NYSE: VMW).

“For the past 18 years, Trident Capital has focused on investing in entrepreneurs and innovators that are setting the direction of their respective markets,” said J. Alberto Yépez, Managing Director, Trident Capital. “BlueCat Networks is a leader in the IP Address Management market with proven solutions implemented by a growing base of satisfied customers and channel partners worldwide. We believe the growth of the IPAM market is set to explode, propelled by key business and technology drivers including the proliferation of IP-enabled devices, the migration to emerging Internet technologies like IPv6, the growing need to secure network infrastructure by implementing standards like DNSSEC and the requirement for regulatory compliance. After conducting extensive due diligence, looking at all aspects of the business, we believe BlueCat Networks is well positioned to capitalize on this growing market demand.”

BlueCat Networks’ innovative IPAM solutions provide an essential technology for helping organizations address the transition to IPv6, reduce IT management costs, launch new services and manage network growth and change.

Company Also Promotes Jenny Rutherford to VP of Marketing

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — July 20, 2011 — IMVU, an online social entertainment destination where members use 3D avatars to meet new people, chat, create and play games with their friends, today announced that IMVU has been recognized as an AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Company for 2011. IMVU is also proud to announce the promotion of Jenny Rutherford to vice president of marketing.

“This year’s AlwaysOn Global 250 are companies driven by the biggest mega-trends,” said Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. “This year’s winners clearly represent some of the highest-growth opportunities we’ve seen in the private company marketplace in the history of the global Silicon Valley.”

“We’re honored to be named with other great consumer technology brands, including Facebook, Zynga, Twitter and Yelp,” said Cary Rosenzweig, CEO at IMVU, Inc. “We’re counting on Jenny to continue strengthening user acquisition and to expanding our global brand. She has terrific marketing experience and skills.”

Jenny recently joined IMVU as head of strategic marketing before being promoted to vice president of marketing. Previously, she served as vice president of marketing at Oodle, the company that built and powers Facebook Marketplace. Prior to her role at Oodle, Jenny served in senior marketing and product management roles at Nuance Communications and Intuit. She also worked in brand management at The Walt Disney Company and in consulting at McKinsey & Company. Jenny received her B.A. in organizational behavior at the University of California at Berkeley Haas School of Business

“I’m thrilled to help take IMVU to the next level,” said Jenny Rutherford, vice president of marketing at IMVU, Inc. “Almost 70% of IMVU users are female, and I love that behind the company’s world-class 3D avatars, IMVU is really about helping people create new friendships.”

For Toronto’s BlueCat Networks, the future is now.

With the Internet itself on the verge of one of the largest fundamental transitions in its young history, the Toronto-based technology company has announced it is taking on a new round of venture capital financing to help it make the most of the changeover from IPv4 to IPv6 addresses.

On Thursday, BlueCat co-founder and chief executive Michael Hyatt announced the company has signed a deal for a $16.8-million venture capital round from Silicon Valley’s Trident Capital.

“We’re now almost officially an IP-dependent world, where all our phones, medical devices and everything in our homes are connected, and making sure that connectivity is there and that that IP address is delivered is a must,” Mr. Hyatt said in an interview.

For BlueCat, the fresh infusion of capital, combined with the $11-million the company secured from Bridgescale Partners in 2009, brings the company’s lifetime venture capital financing to nearly $28-million.

“We saw the need for managing IP at a higher level with great visibility and controls being a must have for all business institutions and governments,” said Alberto Yepez, managing director of Trident Capital.

“When we looked at the market and who were the leaders in the marketplace, that’s how we came to learn about [BlueCat]. The fact that they are in Toronto, Canada is also a plus because there’s a lot of special technology coming out of Canada with great schools like Waterloo and others that have great potential.”

BlueCat’s technology helps companies manage the IP addresses that must be assigned to every device on a corporate network, be it a computer, a smartphone or tablet.

While most users are familiar with the alphanumeric Web addresses that end with a .com, .ca or .edu, many users don’t realize that every device connected to the Internet has its own unique Internet protocol, or IP, address.

An IP address is a unique digital identifier for a connected device, kind of like a phone number; just as it’s impossible to make a call without a phone number, without an IP address, a computer can’t connect to the Internet.

IPv4 addresses consist of four numbers separated by dots, while IPv6 addresses have 16 numbers with dots in between, which exponentially increases the number of available addresses.

Currently, the Internet is going through a transition period, shifting from IPv4 addresses to IPv6 addresses. Essentially, the Internet has run out of IPv4 addresses, and so the entire Web is changing over to the IPv6 standard.

BlueCat’s technology not only helps companies manage the much larger IPv6 numbers, but also helps companies transition from the IPv4 standard to the IPv6 standard.

By taking on additional funding, BlueCat is hoping to rapidly grow the business and maximize its footprint at a critical time in the evolution of the Internet.

Company Also Promotes Jenny Rutherford to VP of Marketing

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — July 20, 2011 — IMVU, an online social entertainment destination where members use 3D avatars to meet new people, chat, create and play games with their friends, today announced that IMVU has been recognized as an AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Company for 2011. IMVU is also proud to announce the promotion of Jenny Rutherford to vice president of marketing.

“This year’s AlwaysOn Global 250 are companies driven by the biggest mega-trends,” said Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. “This year’s winners clearly represent some of the highest-growth opportunities we’ve seen in the private company marketplace in the history of the global Silicon Valley.”

“We’re honored to be named with other great consumer technology brands, including Facebook, Zynga, Twitter and Yelp,” said Cary Rosenzweig, CEO at IMVU, Inc. “We’re counting on Jenny to continue strengthening user acquisition and to expanding our global brand. She has terrific marketing experience and skills.”

Jenny recently joined IMVU as head of strategic marketing before being promoted to vice president of marketing. Previously, she served as vice president of marketing at Oodle, the company that built and powers Facebook Marketplace. Prior to her role at Oodle, Jenny served in senior marketing and product management roles at Nuance Communications and Intuit. She also worked in brand management at The Walt Disney Company and in consulting at McKinsey & Company. Jenny received her B.A. in organizational behavior at the University of California at Berkeley Haas School of Business

“I’m thrilled to help take IMVU to the next level,” said Jenny Rutherford, vice president of marketing at IMVU, Inc. “Almost 70% of IMVU users are female, and I love that behind the company’s world-class 3D avatars, IMVU is really about helping people create new friendships.”

VANCOUVER, BC – June 28, 2011 — Vision Critical, a global research and technology firm and pioneer in the market intelligence field, was named as a Honomichl Top 50 U.S. market research firm. Vision Critical, the global leader for providing on-line marketing research communities, made its debut as the 27th top market research firm in the US, as published in the 41st annual business report of Marketing News, an American Marketing Association publication.

“Vision Critical is proud of its transformative force within market research and thrilled to be recognized for our contributions among this prestigious list of market research firms,” said Angus Reid, chief executive officer and chairman of Vision Critical. “We attribute much of our growth and success to our ability to foster deep connections for brands. Using our innovative approaches to cutting-edge research, we ensure our customers have access to real-world, authentic brand insights so they can make strategic and insightful decisions regarding their brand’s lifecycle.”

Vision Critical enjoyed a 30 percent increase in US revenues and a 29 percent increase in ex-US revenues in 2010, bringing its total worldwide research revenue to $62 million. This is a sharp contrast to the average revenue of the Honomichl 50, which had a cumulative average revenue increase of 3.3 percent.

The “Top 50 US Market Research Ranking and Review” is published each year by the AMA and Inside Research, founded by Jack Honomichl, a leading market research industry authority. Rankings are based on previous year revenues.