Numbers, Volume 2

As I explained last week, I come across a lot of numbers during the week. While we “don’t do numbers,” here at RedMonk, I thought I’d start collecting together some of the more interesting & helpful ones I see. Here’s volume 2 of the numbers notebook clean-out:

Maybe it wasn’t such a weird idea

eBay CEO John Donahoe: Skype a $500M business @ high teens margins, 30-40% growth last year. Wow. (Mike Olson at the Accel Symposium.)

The UNIX Wars!, Armistice Edition

It’s a little discussed secret that Solaris enjoys the largest installed base of any commercial UNIX or Linux distribution. It is also true that the Solaris OS is supported on more than 1000 platforms, with more than 150 HP/Compaq systems on Sun’s Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). Plus there are currently more than 7,800 x86 applications shipping for Solaris.

And, this from James Governor is all the analysis you need:

Recession driving pragmatism, and maintenance/support contract focus rather than new sales. see RedHat-Microsoft and Sun-HP deals this week. [And then:] Of course – this deal is likely to be about EDS as much as anything else. it has a crapload of Solaris under management.

Pink-dots to Green-dots

In the fourth quarter, Sun disclosed that billings from a collection of programs that includes Solaris and virtualization software were just $42 million in the second quarter ended in December, off 29% from the year-earlier period.

That’s a Lot of Pink Dots

The JavaFX Runtime has been downloaded over 100 Million times since launch on 12/4. [Also:] the Java business for Sun, last quarter, delivered more than $67m in billings, up nearly 50% year over year. [Also:] Despite the current economic climate, nearly 10 million Blu-ray disc players were sold in the US in 2008 (a third in the last quarter), and consumers bought 2.5 times as many Blu-ray discs as the year before.

OpenSSO at Verizon

What has over 40,000,000 users, 1,000,000 logins per day, and peaks at 4,000 logins per minute? Verizon’s OpenSSO deployment, that’s what!

Atlassian

Atlassian hit $100 mm all time sales this week. 7 years and a great ride. The story is not about collaboration or wikis or developer tools per se. It’s about lightweight enterprise software that enterprises can put in the hands of 100s or 100s of people more easily, more affordably than trad s/w. Without a traditional sales force and private equity. Obviously biased I am, but it’s about a different type of software company. (Via Jeffrey Walker on The Enterprise Irregulars list)

For more perspective, they report 2008 revenue at about $35M. See also Susan’s post on the topic.

Lombardi Mo’: it’s getting SaaSy

Driven by significant customer acquisition and expansion, the company achieved 47 percent software sales growth as compared to the same period in 2007…. SaaS Adoption: Surpassed 4,500 companies using Lombardi Blueprint, an ‘on-demand’ process-documentation tool that is used to collaboratively map an organization’s business processes, identify problems, and prioritize improvement opportunities, making it the most widely used Software as a Service (SaaS) BPM product.

See the travels of Barton George for more on Blueprint.

Adobe Open Source Downloads

While on a 2/24/2009 briefing with Adobe, they gave RedMonk the following download numbers:

• FlexSDK – average of 15,000 downloads a month.
• BlazeDS – average of 8,000 downloads a month.

Since getting into open source a little while ago, Adobe has been going through the usual path of what it’s like for a closed source company to open up. Of late, there was a dispute between Adobe and the Flex community over the naming of a button function. After some talk – complete with threats of forking – both sides resolved the issue, which was great to see in action.

OK Datacenters

Dell powers its 240,000-square-foot customer service center just west of downtown Oklahoma City with 100% wind power. —via Tom “Greenmonk” Raftery

Never mind forks, Success Brings Complexity

Internet Protocol — 11,000 word spec. HTTP 1.0 — 18,500 word spec. HTML 1.0 — 10,000 word spec. XHTML 1.0 — 7,000 word spec. SOAP 1.0 — 7,000 word spec. Now contrast this with the HTML 5 specification, which is nowhere near being done, but already more than 268,000 words!

Success not so intuitive for some

[Mint.com] CEO Aaron Patzer says that as of today around 680,000 of 934,000 registered users (over 70%) have linked at least one bank account to Mint, with most of them linking between 5-6 of their financial accounts.

Buzzkill

In terms of traffic comparisons between the two sites, the most recent I’ve seen comes from third-party analytics firm Compete. It showed Facebook receiving more than 68 million unique visits in January while Twitter got less than six million (this doesn’t include the unknown number of users who access Twitter and Facebook via third-party services). I’ll let you do the math. Suffice to say, one is left wondering why the certainly-much-smaller web service is getting so much press coverage relative to its usage.

If that’s just 9% of it, I’d love to see the other 91%!

IDC revisited its growth projections for all areas of IT after the recession set in, and cloud computing was almost the only one for which its projection increased, Gens said. It expects spending on cloud services to almost triple by 2012, to reach $42 billion, or 9 percent of IT revenue.

Cashing Out

CrunchBase counted 284 exits in 2008, exceeding $41B (nearly 200 transactions had undisclosed purchase prices.)

Be sure to note where the exits are, esp. in this whacked out discotech we call “2009.”

“And you may ask yourself, ‘how did I get here?'”

Revenue for [EDS in HP] group grew 116% to $8.7 billion, and accounted for about one-third of the company’s profit. HP is progressing ahead of schedule with its EDS integration plan and by the end of the first quarter had cut 9,000 of the nearly 25,000 jobs that it expected to cut as part of the deal, Hurd said.

Cloud Arms Dealers

On a briefing this week 3Tera told me that they now have between 350 and 400 customers, spread between “public” and “private” clouds. See more info about their latest release of AppLogic.

Modernization with PHP

Since the start of IBM and Zend’s joint partnership more than 12,000 IBM [System] i customers from 150 countries have obtained Zend products for IBM i and PHP has been utilized by i customers in rolling out business-critical Web applications.

Bank’s HPC Spending

Platform’s survey of senior IT executives at 35 leading financial services firms highlights that cost reduction (54%) and meeting the increased risk management need (23%) are the primary reasons for banks to invest in HPC solutions in 2009. This highlights how banks recognize the benefits of HPC to improve capacity/utilization of existing assets and use of virtualization, especially in the wake of the financial crisis. Interestingly, virtualization is the ‘watch-word’ for banks in 2009 as it is considered the infrastructure priority by the majority of banks (54%) in 2009 compared to HPC (17%), cloud computing (14%) and SOA (12%).

71% Planning to Spend Less on Travel

Using the most conservative figures for estimating the dollar impact of such cuts, ACTE suggests that the 176 member companies responding to the survey will spend about $880 million less on travel this year than they had planned.

AdventNet’s Customer Base

Launching the SaaS version of their IT management platform yesterday, AdventNet/ManageEngine says they have close to 35,000 customers for their existing, on-premise IT management portfolio. That’s up by around 8,000 since the Sep. 2008 number of about 27,000.

Meanwhile, during a call on SSO in AdventNet’s other product line, Zoho, they said they had 1.5 million ZoHo users, about 5-10% of which were paying customers. They didn’t share precise numbers.

Disclosure: Sun, IBM, Adobe, HP, and Zend are RedMonk clients.