Numbers, Volume 44

While we “don’t do numbers” here at RedMonk, I come across many interesting numbers each week. Here are some:

Private Twitter

Yammer now has 70,000 corporate clients, and 800,000+ total seats (users). At least 1,000 of those companies are paying for the product, and Sacks says 10%-15% of seats are converting to paid. 70% of Fortune 500 companies are using Yammer, says Sacks. Paying customers include Cisco, Nationwide, AstraZeneca, Alcatel-Lucent, Sungard and Molson Coors.

Ubuntu Growth

[A]s newly appointed chief executive officer at Canonical Jane Silber told El Reg back in March, the installed base of Ubuntu users is estimated at around 10 million users. That’s up from 6 million three years ago, and by some indirect measurements, Canonical can gather without snooping around on people’s machines, the base is growing at 10 per cent per month.

Ubuntu/Eucalyptus Driven Clouds

According to Matt Asay, who joined [Canonical] back in February as chief operating officer, the company has more than 12,000 deployments of UEC, and it’s seeing about 200 downloads per day at this point.

Free does that…

Now you’ve been following my Lonely Planet coverage, over the past week, right? You remember that they seized the initiative and made 13 of their European iPhone app guides free of charge for four days to help those trapped by the Ash Cloud travel chaos?

Well they’ve now knocked back 3 million downloads in total, making their guides the most popular in the App Store.

I know I downloaded all of ’em.

Big in Japan

Apple Inc. shipped 1.69 million iPhones in Japan in the fiscal year ended March 31, capturing the top share of the country’s smartphone market, MM Research Institute Ltd. said.

The iPhone, offered by Japan’s third-largest wireless carrier Softbank Corp., accounted for 72 percent of smartphones shipped in the country in the period, the Tokyo-based researcher said in a report yesterday. Taiwan’s HTC Corp. was second with 11 percent, followed by Toshiba Corp. with 6.8 percent, it said.

Microsoft Money, this past quarter

Quarter ending March 31st 2010 vs quarter ending March 31st 2009, $millions

Segment	Revenue	Change	Profit	Change
Client (Windows + Live)	4415	+967	3061	+788
Server and Tools	3575	+84	1255	+31
Online	581	+59	-713	-302
Business (Office)	4243	-265	2622	-134
Entertainment and devices	1665	+36	165	+206

See more digging from Mary Jo.

Microsoft going after cloud pie

“What we’ve done [in the past] is sell software,” Elop said. “In the cloud world we’re still selling that same software but we’re also participating in a bigger part of customers’ IT budgets. We’re going after more of the pot.” Some 90 percent of Microsoft’s engineering team will be working on cloud computing in some way within a couple of years, according to Elop.

Exits Onces Again Open

According to the Exit Poll report (PDF) by Thomson Reuters and the NVCA, Q1 2010 ended with nine venture-backed initial public offerings (IPOs) and 111 merger and acquisition transactions.

Additionally, there were 31 disclosed venture-backed M&A exits averaging $180.2 million, 21 percent higher than the total average disclosed transaction value for all of 2009. As the chart below shows, the funding-to-exit ratio for software and Internet start-ups was roughly 4 to 1, a surprisingly high statistic.

Voting with your wallet

[I]n IT, in analysis for my upcoming book, The New Polymath, I found we spend over 50% of our budgets with the top 25 infotech and telecom vendors. The imbalance between buyer and vendor concentration is acute – top 25 buyers in contrast barely make up 5% of that same spend– and yet we persist with vendor consolidation and lock-in. Time to exploit more “exotic” and “arsonist” vendors I cite in my book in spades. Let them pull you to a better world.

Cloud Risk

Which of the following do you believe about cloud computing (including software as a service)? (Please select one.) (n=1,767)

1. The benefits achieved with cloud computing outweigh the risks – 17%
2. The risks of cloud computing outweigh the benefits – 45%
3. The risks and benefits of cloud computing are appropriately balanced – 38%

Plenty of Eyeballs to stick

[A]t its Chirp conference Wednesday, co-founder Biz Stone finally made public some numbers. He says [Twitter] now has 105,779,710 registered users—and is adding 300,000 new users a day. About 60 percent of them are coming from outside the U.S.

Meanwhile, consumers are starting to spend more again, meaning more avenues for “junk mail” (advertising) to separate them from their cash.

When your underwear has an IP address

In 10 years there will be 50 billion devices connected to the web, declared Ericsson President and CEO Hans Vestberg yesterday. That differs from Intel’s estimates that by 2015 the world will have 15 billion connected devices up from 5 billion now. However, the point is the same — mobile broadband and cheap chips equal a connected network of gadgets.

Spiceworks State of the SMB

9% Average increase in 2010 budgets 80% Plan to buy new hardware 21% Plan to buy new virtualization software 70% Plan to have same or fewer staff 15% Decrease in hosting purchase plans 25% Plan to use cloud computing.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients and mentioned and relevant clients.