Next Valley View: NetSuite And More

I'm not going to be shy about this: We've been working overtime to bring you some really exciting Web TV programming this fall on Valley View. We've lined up the biggest names in technology, the hottest topics in enterprise IT, sneak peeks, and some of the newest product concepts you'll hear about anywhere. I can't wait to tell you! (So what am I waiting for?)

First, September 26 (some October tidbits at the end--and trust me, that's exciting too). We're streaming the show live earlier than ever before. East coasters, we heard you: 4 p.m. PT was too late. We're beginning at 11 a.m. PT. You can tune into Valley View here, and if you'd like to add this to your calendar and be eligible to win a brand-new Amazon Kindle Fire HD tablet or a Google Nexus 7 Android tablet, register for Valley View here.

Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite

We'll kick things off with Zach Nelson, the CEO of NetSuite. NetSuite has been providing software-as-a-service--starting with ERP--for 13 years now. You heard that right: 13 years. Before Business ByDesign was a gleam in SAP's eye, and before Larry Ellison, who happens to have provided the financial backing for NetSuite, could proclaim the cloud as mere vapor. Before Salesforce.com. Before Workday. Before SuccessFactors. Before anything was cloud, before everything was cloud, there was NetSuite.

Did you know that Oakland A's GM Billy Beane (the main character of Moneyball) is on NetSuite's board of directors?

Zach Nelson, NetSuite's CEO, came to run the company 10 years ago, after a stint at McAfee, and before that at Oracle. He has led the company on a fairly steady course of success--the company's market cap is well over $4 billion, and it has doubled revenue from 2007 through 2011.

We'll be talking with Nelson on the eve of Oracle OpenWorld, where he is one of the scheduled keynote speakers. We'll discuss NetSuite's key product strengths and where it's having success, its "complicated" relationship with Oracle, the lengthy list of NetSuite competitors, and some of the latest cloud software trends, including social, where NetSuite has been fairly quiet compared to other software providers.

Yobie Benjamin

Next, we'll talk with Antonio "Yobie" Benjamin, a bank CTO. Yobie wears many hats, and he has a long, glamorous history that is matched only by his long, glamorous hair, and his hysterical and upbeat personality. We'll talk to Yobie about his latest projects, what technology excites him these days, and about the future of mobile payments.

We'll devote the last part of our show to what we like to call The Elevator Pitch, where we ask five, hand-selected companies to tell us in three minutes or less what their product does, and why you--our audience--should care. We'll have a panel of judges (our editors), and we'll really be sticklers for time (no, honest--we'll have a clock, a buzzer, and everything).

One company's elevator pitch we'll be highlighting: Crowdstrike. Crowdstrike is still in a bit of stealth mode, but its approach to information security is garnering a great deal of attention: Use big data to help businesses focus on adversaries, rather than figuring how to pour limited dollars toward building a bigger fortress. Crowdstrike believes that by understanding who the adversaries are, businesses have a better chance of preventing attacks. Fresh off a $26 million infusion of funding, and staffed by a team with an impressive collective history in the security industry, Crowdstrike may well be the next big thing. CEO George Kurtz will tell us all about this new approach in his elevator pitch.

We'll also feature Cliqr Technologies. Cliqr, backed by Google Ventures, promises businesses a way to migrate enterprise applications to the cloud (with some possible within a day!), and manage those applications' security. CEO Gaurav Manglik says that his company's approach doesn't require modifications to applications that tie them to a specific cloud provider, thus also making it easy to migrate applications between clouds, preventing lock in.

Another three-minute elevator pitch will feature Fusion-io. Gary Orenstein, Fusion-io's senior VP of product says his company's purpose is to make the world's data go faster. Data is everywhere--the cloud, the Web--but it's on disk, which is too slow for many of today's demanding data needs. With Fusion-io's IoDrives and Ion Data Accelerator software, data center managers can build solid-state, flash-based storage arrays across physical and virtual servers more cost effectively, the company claims. Orenstein says Fusion-io is doing lots of work in organizations using Oracle, Microsoft, and MySQL databases, and is also starting to see some big data deployments using MongoDB. We'll hear Orenstein boil all of this down into his three-minute elevator pitch.

I'm also looking forward to Kontiki's elevator pitch. Whether video's dominance on the Internet holds true also on corporate networks is debatable, but it is certainly becoming a more common way to communicate with, and train, employees. Kontiki has been quietly garnering the enterprise video distribution business of companies like GM, Nestle, Coca-Cola, and Wells Fargo, to name a few. At Nestle, it manages some 2,000 videos on the company's intranet. In our Valley View elevator pitch session, you'll hear more details from CEO Dan Vetras--namely, how its secret sauce is compelling IT shops to consider an approach that Vetras claims obviates the need for expensive WAN acceleration hardware.

And finally, those of you dealing with a mobile workforce (and who isn't?) will want to tune in to hear from Appthority, a cloud-based platform that identifies and grades mobile applications for risky behavior before your employees deploy them on their mobile devices. This is one of the newest and most novel mobile security approaches we've heard.

Make sure to tune in. September 26, 11 a.m. Pacific time right here.

Oh ... what about October? We've got some more exciting elevator pitch guests, to be sure, but we will also be talking with Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Oracle president Mark Hurd. Our November lineup is looking exciting too ... but I'll leave that one for another day.