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Freshdesk is trying to make waves in cloud customer support. Launched in June of last year, the young company is on a mission to help businesses of all sizes manage customer service through both traditional channels, like email and phone, as well on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Earlier this week, Freshdesk added to its customer support suite, launching support for private customer messages via the new Brand Pages Facebook launched back in February. This means that, using the new Pages, customers can initiate private conversations with brands, with the ability to share the kind of sensitive information they wouldn’t post publicly on Facebook or Twitter, like passwords and credit card numbers.

Freshdesk said that it’s the first customer support platform to offer this kind of integration, a shot across the bow of its two largest and well-established competitors, Zendesk and Salesforce’s Desk.com. To compete, the startup is making a push to differentiate its platform, adding private messaging via Brand Pages on top of what it believes is its core differentiator: Allowing its customers to support and manage multiple products and brands from one simple web interface.

In less than a year, Freshdesk has already raised $6 million in venture funding from Tiger Global and Accel, and, though it believes that the biggest market opportunity down the road will be in offering its brand of cloud customer support to the enterprise, Freshdesk wants to entice (and give back to) the little guys as well.

That’s why the startup is today announcing the first phase of its “Future Fund,” which will provide customer support services to 501 startups and early-stage businesses through a $10 million “fund,” which includes free support for one year. Freshdesk has teamed up with incubators and angel funds, like YouWeb, Tandem Entrepreneurs, Internet India Fund, 500 Startups, and Proudly Made to begin giving their early-stage businesses customer support tools so that they don’t have to worry about allocating their own money to CRM tools at those critical, early stages of growth.

Not unlike any other fund that provides growth services, value, or support to young businesses, Freshdesk is looking to give startups a painless way to start generating customer love early on in their growth.

So what does the Future Fund offer? Qualifying startups (any company that has under $1 million in annual revenues is welcome to apply, it’s not limited to the accelerators we mentioned earlier) will get up to three full-time customer support agents free for an entire year as part of Freshdesk’s “Garden” plan. The plan includes multi-channel support, which startups can use to support customer relation management through email, phone, their website, Facebook, and Twitter from one dashboard.

This means that they can view and manage queries, lead or sales questions, ticketing functionality, as well as community management capabilities that allow teams to engage customers in discussion forums and let early adopters suggest and vote on ideas. Startups with multiple brands or product lines can support their brands through a single account.

Freshdesk is supporting the fund from its internal revenues, and although it’s not disclosing rev growth, the team did say that it was supporting 700 companies as of April, which has doubled since February. With its Future Fund, Freshdesk believes that it’s doing a community service by way of a free service that lets young businesses focus on their product while maintaining quality customer support, but this is also very much an initiative that it hopes will introduce SaaS support to a new generation of companies, which it will try to convert to paying customers when the year of free service expires.

Like others, Freshdesk is free to start, with a tiered pricing scheme that escalates based on the number of agents and customization features a business needs. More on pricing here.

For startups looking to participate in the Future Fund, check out its landing page here.

A potentially big move forward for cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio — and an intriguing development for Microsoft, given its would-be ownership of Skype: Twilio and Microsoft have formed a strategic alliance to offer Twilio’s APIs to developers on the Windows Azure platform.

The offering will cover both Twilio’s voice and messaging services, and Twilio is sweetening the deal by giving developers a credit of 1,000 free text messages or inbound voice minutes when they sign up.

Windows Azure — Microsoft’s cloud platform for building and deploying web, mobile, enterprise and other apps — is playing an increasing role in the company’s bigger strategy to target developers — and make sure that they don’t all keep opting for a competing service from Amazon, EC2.

Microsoft has a hurdle ahead of it: as pointed out by Wired last week, Azure is “the world’s most misunderstood cloud.” (Poor Microsoft!)

The Twilio features are useful in that they, too, are cloud-based and do not require consumers/end users to have any applications or clients downloaded to use them. (That’s one way Twilio is differentiated from Skype.) Features available via Twilio include interactive voice response, mobile app distribution via SMS, call automation or two-factor authentication.

As more applications and the servicing of them move to the cloud, I think we’re going to see a much bigger emphasis on solutions that deliver functionality without too many strings attached. Microsoft seems to think so, too: “We’ve seen the innovation happening around Twilio, and we want to make it as easy as possible for Windows Azure developers to build great apps that use Twilio’s communications platform and take advantage of Windows Azure’s scalability, reliability and flexibility,” Scott Guthrie, corporate VP, Microsoft, said in a statement.

The move is the next chapter in the expansion of Twilio’s business. Last week the company announced that it hired a new, full-time, European marketing director — James Parton, who got poached from Telefonica — in order to build out its relationships and business on that side of the pond.

Twilio’s VoIP API is already used by companies like eBay, Airbnb and Hulu, as well as many smaller developers, to add voice and text services into their consumer apps. Twilio has to date raised $33.7 million in funding from an A-list of backers including Besssemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures and Dave McClure.

[Image: Sean MacEntee, Flickr]

Birst, a San Francisco-based startup that offers on-demand business intelligence and analytics solutions for companies big and small, has raised $26 million in series D financing, led by Sequoia Capital. Existing investors, including Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures, also participated in the round, bringing Birst’s total funding to $46 million.

Founded in 2004 by a team of Siebel Systems veterans, Birst has developed a set of products that aim to make analytics and reporting quicker to deploy, easier to use, and affordable for organizations of all sizes, from individuals to enterprise.

How does it do this? Well, Birst is a business intelligence appliance, but it’s not hardware. It’s available as SaaS, and on-premise. Is it magic? No. Birst has been a player in the BI cloud space since it first launched its SaaS product in 2009, and CEO Brad Peters says that the most valuable chunks of this “big data” that we like to drone on and on about are actually being produced by applications that businesses run behind the firewall.

So, the key for Birst, then, is offering a solution runs just like any other lightweight SaaS tool, in that you can access it through the browser without stressing about upgrades or adding features, but it works on-premise, behind the firewall, so that businesses can take their business apps, be they Salesforce, Omniture, or the like, and funnel them all into a dashboard.

Birst builds on the mission of all BI solutions, that is to offer better ways to aggregate and present data so that they help companies make smarter, quicker, and more informed decisions. BI solutions help companies manage and make sense of their CRM, or make it easier to compare marketing spend to conversions. A company, for example, would be able to tell that the amount of leads and conversions its seeing from a new marketing campaign don’t justify the spend, relative to its marketing budget. Something needs to change.

Of course, there are all manners of smart data visualization tools companies can use to present their core business metrics, and you may have heard of behemoths like SAP, IBM, and Oracle, all of which offer serious, 16-cylinder analytics and reporting technology. The problem, the Birst CEO says, is that the enterprise players designed their solutions for a previous generation of IT, and most of them require cobbling together a workable system from a bunch of disparate parts.

The barrier for entry in implementation BI is high, so Birst set out to build this “virtual appliance” for analytics and reporting that make implementation considerably easier — and more affordable. And that’s really the kicker. Oracle’s Exalytics and SAP’s HANA, for example, employ great tech, but unless you’re a multinational, the costs and maintenance can be prohibitive. Unless you want to hire an enormous IT team, after all, they would appreciate it.

That being said, Birst is working with plenty of big players, including Citrix, Rackspace, and in the last year, it’s added Aruba Networks, en World Japan, Five9, Grupo Tress, Host Analytics, Motorola, oDesk, Saba, SunCap Financial, and more. But the key is that Birst is usable by both enterprise and smaller businesses, so where there are a bunch of companies offering great starter solutions for basic analytics, but try to get more sophisticated, and you won’t find much depth or scalability.

Combining advanced visualization with big data capabilities in a way that’s amenable to the cloud or use behind the firewall — hasn’t been done well yet. Birst wants to be the first. While rhyming, naturally.

Of course, you don’t have to dig deep in market analysis to come to the conclusion that there are more than a handful of companies playing in the greater BI/reporting/analytics space. There’s GoodData, PivotLink, QlikTech, Tableau, SAP, Oracle, IBM, Business Objects, and Microstrategy — to name a few — with QlikTech probably being Birst’s closest competitor.

Peters says that, having been in the space for more than a decade, and seen many venture-backed BI and analytics companies hit the deadpool, it’s not worth underestimating the competition. The stakes are high, as B2B servies are hot right now, and any service that offers companies great and small the ability to analyze their core business metrics, make them more actionable, operations more efficient — and boost that bottom line — will be speaking to a big audience.

Unfortunately, for the reasons above, Birst is keeping funding details, user stats, and revenue close to its vest. However, Peters did say that the company doubled its revenues and increased its customer base by more than 40 percent in the last year. In terms of the number of organizations using it technology, Peters says the number is in the “thousands,” which means that they are “well north” of 100K individuals. It also just built a new data facility to accomodate scale.

It isn’t clear at what valuation Birst raised its new $26 million round, but Peters did say that we can be sure it wasn’t a $50 million valuation that resulted in its series D. (To state the obvious, it was higher.)

For more on Birst, check ‘em out at home here.

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The heat is on to migrate more digital marketing activities into the cloud, and while we have seen a lot of movements from smaller, fleet-0f-foot startups in this area, the big players don’t want to be left out in the cold, either. Enter WPP, which today announced a partnership with the Bangalore-based outsourcing and IT specialist Infosys for a new cloud-based digital marketing platform.

Called “BrandEdge,” the two say the platform is the first of its kind in the industry, in that it brings together, into the cloud, a range of digital marketing activities such as creation and management of digital media across multiple locations and tools to manage campaing execution — all running on a single platform.

The two say that they have already signed up three major customers to use this, and while today they have not announced any specific names, in March Reuters ran a report that WPP and Infosys had nabbed a large deal with GlaxoSmithKline to manage its global marketing activities, so this could well be one of the companies signed up already.

The tie-up with Infosys also gives WPP potentially more links into working with companies in emerging markets, both as clients and as executors for different marketing services.

WPP’s involvement in the BrandEdge service is being run by Fabric, one of WPP’s digital marketing subsidiaries, and comes just days after WPP made another bet on digital: the company invested $7 million into MySupermarket, an online price comparison service based in the UK but planning to extend to further territories.

These movements are all part of a bigger strategy WPP has to grow revenues in the area of digital media over traditional advertising. In 2011, digital accounted for $4.8 billion out of total revenues of $16 billion. The plan is for WPP to make 40 percent of revenues from digital activities in the next five years.

In the case of BrandEdge, the product definitely serves a basic need: because of the internet, companies have become increasingly global in their marketing, but at the same time a lot of marketing functions have remained quite localized. As agencies look to win business, one area where they can have an edge over others is to offer a more centralized platform for all those local marketeers to use, with the added benefit of lower prices and a more efficient workflow.

At the same time, we are seeing some evolution in how advertisers pay for digital media: whereas in the past people have been billed by campaigns, the BrandEdge platform is offered on a subscription-based, pay-per-use model. That’s a trend we are seeing in other parts of the digital marketing chain, too. Just earlier today, Jonah Goodhart, the CEO of Moat, noted that his company’s offer of basing its analytics services on a subscription model was proving more popular than basing pricing on media spend. (WPP’s claim is reducing time-to-market by up to 40 percent and costs by up to 30 percent.)

Some of the services included in the new cloud platform are the ability to re-purpose digital media assets; integrate CRM and other third-party data for measurement, privacy, security standards and so on; provide analytics on that data; and offer services to deliver out that data to social networks, ad networks and other marketing channels. That could spell a challenge for smaller startups like Moat and Hootsuite who have been early movers in cloud-based services up to now.

Editor’s Note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip.

In the beginning there was the cloud. And it was good. But over time it can also be surprisingly expensive. If you’ve ever said “Oh my god,” at the end of your billing cycle, you’re may be starting to think about putting boundaries on this virtual Eden. Yet you’ll quickly find that public cloud vice is hard to stamp out. It’s ingrained into human nature and finds its expression through self-service IaaS delivery and opaque billing processes. Here are some of the sins we’ve seen:

Instance Gluttony: Why get a quarter-pounder when you can get a double quarter-pounder and a Big Gulp soda? IT admins are people too and they fall into this common foible when provisioning cloud servers. A “medium” Linux EC2 instance in Virginia is eight-times more expensive than a micro-instance. Run that instance for an entire year and you’ll see a difference of $1,225 over the cost of the micro-instance.

Add-On Greed: It’s so easy to start racking up costs when you opt to add services on top of your machines. Consider the option to add patch management as it comes offered by a large cloud provider. The managed services package that includes patching costs $100 per month just to start using for a single server. After that, it’s $0.12 per server per hour, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you figure that it works out $87.60 per month and over $1,050 per year. It’s much less expensive to deploy cloud patches yourself.

Cluster Lust: It’s natural to want to instantiate machines. But it’s a desire that just needs to be kept in check. Seeding too many machines, all designed to do the same task, can be wasteful. Soft budget controls can help you know when someone is going overboard and can help you curb those enthusiasms. That’s nice, but hard limits that can prevent the launch of new instances when a user exceeds budget is much more powerful, if you’ve got the technology to do it.

Sins of Silent Omission: Does your team tell you about each machine they spin up? I didn’t think so. It’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask for permission, especially when your credit card is involved. Just seeing what’s running may be a big help when it comes to eliminating these rogue instances. Controlling access and ensuring only approved applications are running are important too when it comes to hunting down unapproved instances that nobody told you about.

Termination Sloth: It’s great to spin up machines, but it’s a sin to be lazy about shutting them down. Some experts estimate that between 15% and 40% of public cloud instances run idle at any point. That adds up. Suppose you spin up 10 large EC2 instances, do the work that needs doing and leave them running until the end of the month. That compute power sits there doing nothing but costs $2,304. Without a single, unified view of your machines, your best bet for finding the slothful is to look for the people who forget to turn out the lights or leave the toilet seat up.

Compute Envy: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s compute cluster. Big companies see their bills rise as one operating group starts to envy the resources another gets and refuse to share. People start standing up instances just to keep up with other developers they know, instead of provisioning based on real need. It sounds silly, but it happens all the time in big corporations.

Cloud Pride: Think you’ve got it right? The chances are that by the time you’ve overcome the other sins of the public cloud and brought your spending under control, it may be time to move back inside the enterprise and launch a private cloud to save costs — just as Zynga did. Architecting for portability can help you make this transition should you need it.

Image credit: Soffront Blog

Microsoft has announced that it has signed its largest-ever cloud services deal, an agreement with the All India Council for Technical Education to deploy Microsot’s Live@edu service to some 10,000 technical colleges in the country, covering 7.5 million users.

The deal is significant not just for its size but also as a mark of how cloud services are developing in two big areas at the moment: education and emerging markets — and how Microsoft is staking out a claim to be a player in both.

Under the terms of the deal, the AICTE, an association representing both technical colleges and institutions of technology, will use Live@edu, Microsoft’s hosting communication and collaboration service specially customized for the education sector, to offer collaboration services, email, web apps, IM and storage to 7 million students and half a million faculty members. The deployment will take place over the next three moths, Microsoft said in a statement.

Microsoft has not disclosed the value of the deal, but it won it over competitive bids from some of its biggest rivals in cloud services Google and IBM, another key reason for Microsoft to have secured the deal.

AICTE went for Microsoft, it says, because of the broader portfolio of services that Microsoft offers, and also its competitive pricing.

IT in India is one of the fastest growing segments of its economy — combined with back-office and outsourcing it’s an industry worth around $100 billion at the moment. Microsoft has a strong presence in the country already, so getting buy in from students who will be working in that sector in the country longer-term is a good way to ensure more loyalty to Microsoft’s products in the future.

In all, there are around 22 million people using Microsoft’s Live@edu service, meaning that this newest deal in India represents about one-third of all of Microsoft’s cloud/education business.

[photo: Microsoft in India, flickr]

Editor’s Note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip.

We’re at a technological inflection point, a major branch of computing is splitting off and everyone from the sysadmin to the CEO is wondering what it will mean.

The usual cabal of vocal technologists isn’t helping the situation. The chatterboxes maintain a constant chant of change: “Cloud, Cloud, Cloud!” Yet they fail to contextualize it in the overall IT architecture. They imagine a bright future where all servers will hum along in ultra-efficient datacenters (preferably solar powered) diligently tended to by the infrastructure-as-a-service providers. Why would you ever host your own server?

IaaS is progress and cloud computing makes everything else obsolete. To suggest otherwise is to be labeled a luddite.

Yet reality doesn’t mesh with this simplistic vision. Real companies face much more complex compute infrastructures that still include self-hosted virtual machines and physical servers. And those on-premise machines aren’t going away. IT professionals are adding to their compute portfolio and require ever better tools for managing this increasing complexity.

The cloud doesn’t replace on premise computing, it adds to it.

This is how technology truly evolves. Many people believe in orthogenetic evolution, a singular march from hunched over ape to intelligent man. But a better conceptualization of the high-level concept is that of a branching tree. Some portion of an existing family heads off in a new direction and all the families continue changing, but in different directions.

Broadcast television split off from technologies derived from radio. And both technologies have continued to evolve. Television got the VCR (1976), TiVo (1999), HD (1996) and Blue-ray (2003). Radio got FM the transistor (1954), stereo (1961), satellite (1963), XM (2001) and podcasting (2005). Radio didn’t stop functioning or evolving when television came out, but the two technologies did carve out different habitats in people’s media-consumption universe: TV at home, radio in the car.

Computing is the same way. There are many, many companies operating mainframes, despite the perception that it was killed off by client-server architectures. Love your flash memory? Somewhere someone is spinning tape-based electronic storage. And they do it with good reason. Mainframes are quick, proven, secure and reliable. They’ve been optimized for mission-critical applications such as payroll. Tape-based storage is cheap as dirt and may be used for compliance with archiving regulations.

Now cloud computing offers another option for IT architects to put in their arsenal. It’s great for applications with uncertain processing loads, for rapidly ramping infrastructure and for startups who want to pay as they go. But if you have to worry about PCI and HIPPA compliance, you’re not taking your data outside your firewalls. Got applications with specific hardware requirements, like powerful processors to handle graphics? You may not even want to virtualize, let alone go to the cloud.

As the number of compute options increases, so does complexity. You have to think carefully about your requirements, consider the tradeoffs and plan accordingly. You also have to set up systems to help you manage this highly heterogeneous infrastructure and tame the complexity. The evolution of IaaS gives IT architects unprecedented choice and power. Smart companies are moving fast to take advantage of it and the ones that miss out are apt to go extinct.

Much was made of the news last week from Apple that its businesses had effectively created over 500,000 jobs in the U.S. not just directly at its company but at the many that link into the ecosystem it has created. Today, Microsoft teamed up with IDC to publish some research that took that one step (or actually 13.5 million steps) further:

The two say that cloud computing services will generate nearly 14 million jobs worldwide by 2015, and that in 2012 that number is already at 6.7 million. That development, IDC says, could account for $1.1 trillion annually in new business revenues.

That will come in the form of more efficiency for people whose jobs would have originally had more tie-in with IT — now outsourced in the form of cloud-services — but also completely new opportunities: half of the jobs that will be created, says IDC, will be in China and India.

Microsoft, of course, has a big agenda to push here with its own cloud applications, but IDC is attempting to focus on the bigger picture, where companies like Dropbox, Box and Apple will sit alongside more enterprise-focused offerings, and those findings essentially go beyond what Microsoft will achieve with its own services.

IDC predicts that new jobs will be split equally between small and large business, with more than one-third of jobs in three specific sectors: communications/media (2.4 million jobs); banking (1.4 million jobs) and discrete manufacturing (1.3 million jobs). Sectors like banking will focus on cloud-based security and private implementations rather than public cloud services — the latter, on the other hand, are getting adopted not only by other businesses but by consumers, too.

What’s interesting is that the U.S. seems to be more of a consumer of apps than a creator of cloud jobs. The country accounted for 62 percent of cloud services spend in 2011, but by 2015 will only account for seven percent of cloud jobs, or 1.09 million jobs created as a result of cloud services.

In contrast, IDC says that the real growth will come in developing countries. Indeed, given that we’ve already seen years of IT outsourcing to countries like China and India, it’s not really surprising that countries like this will lead the way in terms of more job creation in the area of cloud services. IDC predicts that China will see 4.6 million and India 2.1 million new jobs by 2015, accounting for nearly half of all the new cloud-related jobs.