Last week, Google launched Maps Engine Pro, a cloud-based software tool designed to let businesses organize and visualize geo-spatial data. Priced at $5 per month per user (there is also a free tier for businesses with limited usage levels), this tool allows small and medium sized businesses to create internal- and external-facing maps that utilize its data to make business decisions around asset tracking, sales territories, route optimization and so on.

Geo-spatial mapping and cartography platforms have been around for more than four decades – GIS software company ESRI (which has annual revenues of more than $1 billion) was set up in 1969 and MapQuest has been around since 1967 (in different forms until 1994 when it morphed into an internet browser app). The factors that have rejuvenated this traditional industry over the past decade or so have been the advent of the cloud, mobility, GPS devices, and most importantly the continued evolution of feature-rich and user-friendly Google Maps. In fact, from a data visualization perspective, ESRI, with its desktop ArcGIS platform and shapefile format is still the dominant high-end / desktop player, but on the SMB / consumer / cloud fronts, Google Maps dominates, with 1 billion monthly users and over 1 million active sites and apps using its APIs. In this context, the introduction of Google Maps Engine not only enables Google to better engage its SMB customers for a small fee, but it also drives geo-spatial business intelligence mindshare further towards the cloud, which is Google’s forte and ESRI’s weakness. What this product introduction also means, is that cloud-based geo-spatial business intelligence could become more commonplace going forward, presenting growth opportunities for service and consulting businesses in the SMB segment. For larger scale applications such as in logistics hubs, utilities etc., probably not much should change, with the likes of ESRI and Opus-portfolio company Space-Time Insight continuing to provide customized, centralized, on-premise data visualization systems for such use-cases.

There are a number of inefficiencies in the world that can be mitigated by the proper use of map-based business intelligence – maintenance, logistics, scheduling, tracking, queuing and so on. So far, the SMB world has had limited ability to address these inefficiencies, so let’s hope that Maps Engine kick-starts a movement towards spatially optimized businesses.

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Last week, Salesforce announced the launch of Salesforce Identity, the company’s new cloud-based identity and access management platform that will simplify for IT administrators the process of provisioning and managing companies’ collection of mobile, cloud and on-premise applications. The tool will allow IT departments to manage any app from any device, for employees, customers and partners.

Identity and access management (IAM) is an essential component of any enterprise IT operation. While dominated by traditional players such as CA and EMC, recent trends towards the cloud have enabled niche cloud-based/SaaS IAM solutions such as OneLogin, Okta, Ping Identity, etc. to successfully raise venture capital. At the same time, offerings from larger players, such as Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Oracle Public Cloud have emerged to provide more encompassing IAM solutions across on-premise and cloud infrastructure. Salesforce Identity joins the ranks of this later group. Salesforce Identity goes well with the company’s PaaS pursuits around Heroku, Force.com etc.

Security around access and authentication is in many ways a war of attrition – continually chipping away at risks is key in this space. This in turn implies the need for connectivity between silos around policies, geographies and platforms. Further, in today’s world of the ‘Internet of Everything’, there are many businesses for which IAM constitutes just one piece of a logical layer that also interplays with Physical Security (sensors, surveillance, etc.) to accomplish what is now more generally referred to as Information Technology – Operations Technology (IT-OT) convergence. An airport, a utility, a logistics hub, a distributed enterprise, all have critical need for such a holistic converged IT-OT view (the kind offered by Opus portfolio company Alert Enterprise), for which these entities are willing to pay top dollar.

The end-game is a holistic, transparent, actionable view around enterprise access and policies. Salesforce Identity gets us further along towards this end-game, yet there is a long long way to go…

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Last week, Amazon announced the launch of its ‘Login and Pay with Amazon’ service for ecommerce companies. Purported to be a mutually beneficial initiative for both sides, this service will enable Amazon customers to seamlessly log in and pay on partner ecommerce sites using their Amazon credentials, while giving the ecommerce companies the opportunity to gain new customers from the Amazon user base.

Few interesting points to note here: First, there is clearly a need for a seamless ecommerce experience, with 72% shopping cart abandonment across all devices and 97% abandonment on mobile devices. Second, brick and mortar still accounts for more than 85% of all commerce. Thus, Amazon’s greatest opportunity is in growing both the number of global online ecommerce consumers as well as its own share of wallet with these consumers, and with 215 million users, Amazon brings massive scale in making this transition to pervasive online commerce a seamless one. Third, the whole notion of context relevance should drive people to adopt Amazon Payments as the ‘social login’ for ecommerce, just the same way as FB Connect feels appropriate for discovery/sharing, Google login makes sense during the consideration phase, and PayPal login feels proper for financial transactions. And finally, Amazon Payments provides the company with yet another avenue towards negative net-working capital – this potentially being the key aspect differentiating Amazon Payments from PayPal.

So, we now seem to have taken care of the need for seamless access across the entire awareness / consideration / purchase funnel. Logically, in today’s era of mobility and multiple screens, the next wave should then be around enabling cross-device security and fraud management around this social login based access. Two-factor authentication is already being tested, yet the longer term path around secure ecommerce would need to go beyond that and include wireless carriers, mobile wallets, card issuing banks, and regulatory oversight – exactly the kind of ecosystem Opus portfolio company Payfone is starting to enable in partnership with bank fraud prevention consortium Early Warning Systems. Security  will for sure be the next step around ecommerce, but for now, Amazon continues to wrap its arms around the ecommerce mega-trend, becoming the rising tide that raises all boats…

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Back in May, we had discussed the launch of Pivotal, the EMC family’s take on PaaS. Well, Pivotal last week made a small but interesting acquisition of Toronto-based mobile development and strategy shop Extreme Labs for $65 million in cash. Extreme Labs has approximately 300 employees, and has built mobile apps for companies such as Groupon and Microsoft among others. In early 2012, EMC had acquired San Francisco based agile software development shop Pivotal Labs, which is also where the Pivotal name came from. Pivotal Labs’ strong developer teams had for over 20 years collaborated with client personnel to develop custom, scalable software solutions for clients willing to pay top dollar. Extreme Labs has a similar modus operandi in the mobile app development arena. Thus, Extreme Labs helps Pivotal fill out the mobile services piece of its ‘choice’ oriented approach towards helping customers build the right PaaS for their needs.

Big data broadly speaking is about three dimensions – volume, velocity and variety. The more visible PaaS offerings, such as AWS, Azure and OpenStack-based implementations, provide abstraction across all three of these dimensions. However, the focus for Pivotal seems to be large, traditional enterprises (such as GE, which invested $105 million), where the near term focus might be more on volume and velocity than on variety. Hence the Greenplum-based data engine, the focus on the industrial internet etc. These also are the kind of customers with whom the EMC sales engine could help close deals effectively. This means serious competition for the likes of IBM, Dell, Deloitte and Accenture, and that too driven by folks out of VMware, Pivotal Labs, Extreme Labs etc., who know what it takes to develop consumer-grade mobile and internet architectures. For PaaS or cloud middleware entrepreneurs on the other hand, the takeaway may be different – the opportunity to start with SMBs and to eventually move up to large PaaS deals might be going away soon, if not already. The opportunity instead might be in developing PaaS offerings optimized around usability, domain-specificity, configurability and cost for resource-constrained SMBs, and in scaling through increased breadth of offerings over time. This isn’t necessarily easy – PaaS was never really a friendly arena for entrepreneurs when compared to SaaS. So for entrepreneurs offering middleware/PaaS but not yet taking this approach, maybe it is time for a pivot?

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