FieldLens, a mobile field management tool for the construction industry, today announced that it has raised $8 million in capital in a Series A round led by OpenView Venture Partners.

The financing will help FieldLens accelerate product adoption while continuing to develop valuable new features for its users.

“OpenView invests in B2B software companies that we believe can dramatically influence profitability and efficiency of particular market segments,” said OpenView Founder and Senior Managing Director Scott Maxwell. “That’s why we are excited to partner with FieldLens, a company that’s bringing a game-changing solution to the construction industry – a massive market that’s only beginning to benefit from the efficiencies that come with access to better technology.”

Launched commercially in March 2014, FieldLens is a mobile field management app designed to help construction professionals effectively document, assign and manage jobsite issues online using any smartphone, tablet or the Web. It is the first and only tool to bring the best of social media technologies to the construction industry and enables entire project teams to instantly connect and collaborate with one another using a robust system that matches the real-world workflows and needs of construction projects.

Everyone on the jobsite, from subcontractors and general contractors to designers and owners, can use FieldLens for streamlined communication and collaboration in the field.

CEO Doug Chambers developed the idea for FieldLens after working as a construction project manager for more than a decade on projects of all sizes, including high-profile sites like the New York Times Building and 4 World Trade Center. Chambers witnessed first-hand how project teams struggled because they didn’t have the proper technology, and he realized the construction industry needed a powerful tool that connects project teams as simply and intuitively as popular social media platforms do.

“Our partnership with OpenView is a crucial step toward helping us achieve our goal of providing construction professionals with a mobile solution that will optimize efficiency where it’s needed most – right on the jobsite,” said Chambers. “All construction professionals, no matter what their role on the project team, have incredibly demanding jobs. They deserve access to technology that will make their day-to-day easier, and we are now poised to provide them with a tool that will truly serve their needs.”

The financing will help FieldLens accelerate product adoption while continuing to develop valuable new features for users. A major emphasis will be placed on developing virtual onboarding and coaching tools for customers, along with providing resources focusing on best practices to maximize productivity on the jobsite. Forthcoming product features will include analytics tools to help customers better understand the overall health of their projects and evaluate effectiveness of project partners, along with tools specifically designed to help trade subcontractors build more efficiently.

The investment round also includes participation from existing investors including Softbank Capital, High Peaks Venture Partners, Lerer Ventures, Contour Venture Partners, Borealis Ventures, and NYC Seed.

About FieldLens
FieldLens helps every member of the construction industry – including subcontractors, general contractors, designers and owners – communicate more effectively so that they can spend less time managing information and more time building better. To learn more visit http://fieldlens.com.

About OpenView Venture Partners
OpenView Venture Partners (openviewpartners.com) is an expansion-stage venture capital fund based in Boston that is focused on high-growth software, Internet, and technology enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies quickly optimize their product, go-to-market, and organizational and operational functions. Founded in 2006, the firm invests globally and has approximately $440 million in total capital under management.

This morning, FieldLens, a mobile platform for construction management and communication based in New York City, announced an $8 million Series A round of funding led by Boston’s OpenView Venture Partners.

The company has developed an app that helps construction professionals manage job site issues through any mobile device. FieldLens, which OpenView described as “Twitter for the construction site,” allows project teams to connect and collaborate with one another through the company’s unique platform.

In a statement announcing the funding, OpenView Venture Partners founder and senior managing director Scott Maxwell said that OpenView is always looking for B2B software companies that develop innovative solutions for untouched market segments. “That’s why we are excited to partner with FieldLens,” Maxwell said, “a company that’s bringing a game-changing solution to the construction industry — a massive market that’s only beginning to benefit from the efficiencies that come with access to better technology.”

Although headquartered in New York, FieldLens has team members spread throughout New England, including Charlie O’Neil, the company’s vice president of business development who lives in Bedford, N.H.

 

Socrata, a Seattle-based cloud software company focused exclusively on democratizing access to government data, today announced outstanding gains in customer growth and revenue in the first quarter of 2014.

Over the quarter, the company welcomed 22 new customers, already half of what it gained in all of 2013. Plus, Socrata grew revenue by 106% and employee headcount by 108% compared to one year earlier.

“Our business is expanding more rapidly than ever and we’re excited not only by the numbers of customers and new employees we’re gaining but the passion everyone in the Socrata family feels about open data and its power to improve the world. We’re helping leaders on five continents create stronger governments and organizations with data,” says Socrata CEO and Founder Kevin Merritt.

Triple-Digit Year-Over-Year Revenue Growth

Socrata, with its SaaS-based technology platform, solutions, and apps continues to lead the open data and open performance market. Its revenue grew 106% year-over-year in Q1 2014. Highlighting the company’s high level of customer satisfaction and engagement, Merritt notes that Socrata has a near-100% renewal rate and that 65% of current customer renewals expanded their business with Socrata, adding features like more data hosting and open data apps.

Record-Setting Quarter for New Customers Gains

Socrata’s family of open data innovators grew by 22 in Q1 2014. This is a strong uptick in demand for its services, considering that Socrata added 44 new customers in all of 2013 and 29 in 2012. In addition, seven of those 22 customers are outside the continental U.S.

108% Year-Over-Year Employee Growth

Socrata invested heavily in customer success, product engineering, and sales capacity in Q1, expanding its headcount to more than double its level one year earlier. New employees were added in its Seattle and Washington, DC offices. Notably, Socrata added Jeff Kaplan as its Director of NGO and Multilateral Organizations. Already a leader in the open data community, Kaplan is known for his work as a consultant for the World Bank, bringing open data to countries in Eastern Europe and Africa.

“As the open data movement matures, we’re attracting and finding more talented people who have already been working with governments and organizations on transparency, accountability, and access to data. They have passion for open data, strong technical skills, valuable and relevant experience, and they believe deeply in Socrata’s mission to use data to improve the world,” says Merritt.

More Q1 2014 Highlights

In addition to strong revenue, customer, and headcount growth in Q1 2014, Socrata enjoyed some other noteworthy achievements that include:

• the release of a new suite of financial transparency apps – Socrata Open Budget™ and Socrata Open Expenditures™ – to help governments improve transparency into their budgeting and spending processes while educating citizens and encouraging them to get more involved in civic issues.
• launching the second edition of Open Innovation, Socrata’s print and digital magazine that features the latest news in open data plus opinion pieces from leaders in open data and open performance.
• forming a partnership in the United Kingdom with Ethos, a leading consultant helping cities use technology to be more efficient. The Ethos Smart business unit will work with Socrata to more rapidly bring open data and open performance to cities in the U.K.

 Continued Momentum Forecasted For 2014

Socrata forecasts continued strong momentum in the public sector for its open data and open performance solutions, as well as its growing number of civic apps created on Socrata’s cloud platform.

About Socrata

Socrata is the cloud software company focused exclusively on democratizing access to government data. It helps government leaders improve transparency, modernize citizen access to information, and bring facts into every decision, with unprecedented speed and cost savings.

Delivered as turnkey cloud services, Socrata’s data consumerization products unlock data in enterprise silos and transform it into useful information that everyone can easily access, visualize, share and reuse. Innovators like the World Bank, Medicare, Data.gov, EnergyStar, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Kenya, Lombardia, and Maryland, have all chosen Socrata as the data-sharing platform for their open data and open performance initiatives. To learn more about Socrata, visit http://www.socrata.com or follow us on Twitter @socrata.

Spredfast, provider of a social marketing platform, has released the Spredfast Performance Index to empower brands and media to evaluate social performance within the context of each unique business and help teams work smarter to improve social business impact.

Spredfast also offers analytics to deliver visibility and comparative insights that brands can use to strengthen their social tactics.

Spredfast Insights is a component of the Spredfast Social Relationship Platform. Enhanced functionality provides social teams with a visual way to show the impact of social. A performance dashboard measures the effectiveness of an organization’s social program through an aggregated view of all social properties. Social teams can drill even further for a closer look at individual accounts and messages, such as audience insights, engagement trends, and content analysis. Spredfast Insights also delivers comparative analytics that enable brands to perform side-by-side comparisons of accounts, initiatives, content labels, and more.

The Spredfast Performance Index introduces a customizable algorithm for brands to uniquely measure success. For the first time, brands can prove real business impact of social and have the data to improve social tactics in real-time.

Brands now can use the Performance Index to do the following:

• Customize how each brand defines reach, activity, and engagement, along with their respective priorities and goals.
• Track the progress of social programs to defined business objectives, so teams can quickly improve tactics.
• Understand how social activities impact business goals, and easily communicate social success to C-suite stakeholders.

“For most organizations today, social teams are tasked with managing their social strategy across a wide range of brands and channels. They need a fast, easy way to understand social performance for each brand and insights that will allow for immediate action,” said Rod Favaron, CEO of Spredfast, in a statement. “Social teams no longer need to comb through dozens of spreadsheets and reports to understand what’s working. Using Spredfast’s robust analytics capabilities, brands can easily understand social’s impact on their bottom line and can work smarter to deliver great social experiences that build lasting relationships.”

The Performance Index also feeds off technology from Spredfast’s partnership with Brandwatch, which resulted in the integration of Brandwatch’s social analytics and monitoring platform with Spredfast’s social media management platform. The integration enables organizations to monitor, analyze, and take action on real-time business insights from the world’s social conversations.

NextDocs, a leading provider of regulated content management and compliance solutions for the life sciences industry, today provided updated benchmark data on the scalability of its NextDocs 6 solution – and discussed the details of some of the company’s large-scale implementations.

NextDocs reported that its solutions have now been deployed at more than 100 life sciences companies, including five of the top 10 largest global pharmaceutical companies and two of the largest CROs. This record, particularly at the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and CROs, demonstrates scalability and performance in some of the most demanding operational environments. As an example of production deployments of NextDocs 6, the company cited its recent go-live at a Fortune 100healthcare company with more than $40 billion in annual revenues and 30,000 employees.

“Global life sciences companies need their regulated content and compliance management systems to be highly scalable, highly reliable and high performing. NextDocs made significant investments to meet the technical and operational demands of these companies,” said Zikria Syed, Chief Executive Officer of NextDocs. “By releasing our scalability benchmark data publicly, it not only validates the capabilities of the NextDocs 6 solution, but also gives our customers the highest confidence that our solutions will meet and exceed their most stringent requirements.”

NextDocs also publicly released a report, SOP Scalability in Life Sciences, providing detailed benchmarks on the scalability and performance of its regulated compliance solutions. The company is publishing the benchmark data to establish a new set of industry standards on which life sciences companies can rely when evaluating these mission critical systems.

Scalability and performance are critical to the success of enterprise technology deployments. However, when it comes to regulated compliance systems, there has been little comparative information publicly available. Thus, companies are often in the dark on what constitutes best-in-class capabilities. By releasing the industry’s first scalability and performance benchmarks for regulated compliance solutions, NextDocs hopes to educate companies on system performance and elevate standards in the industry.

The benchmark report, SOP Scalability in Life Sciences, goes beyond previously published reports. Those older tests focused on document read and write, browsing and downloading performance – actions not specific to compliance scenarios. The newly released report includes data for compliance-specific actions including PDF rendering, workflows, approvals and content indexing – providing more detailed benchmarking to the industry.

The data is derived from lab testing of real-world deployments and real-world compliance scenarios. NextDocs partnered with Microsoft to conduct the testing in the Microsoft Life Sciences Lab and utilized only customer-provided scenarios. The NextDocs platform was successfully tested at 75,000 users with 200 concurrent contributors and 1,000 concurrent readers accessing a site collection containing over 550,000 documents. The updated SOP Scalability in Life Sciences report is available for download at www.nextdocs.com.

NextDocs 6 added expanded capabilities to meet the demands of the highly global, mobile and collaborative life sciences operating environment. Those NextDocs 6 enhancements are designed to meet the business needs of both mature companies with large and highly developed online regulated content management processes, as well as emerging, high-growth companies that aspire to more automated, scalable and compliant processes.

“NextDocs 6, combined with Microsoft SharePoint, is a highly scalable, performance controlled document management platform, tested and proven for large-scale environments,” said Zikria Syed. “And NextDocs will continue to publish public benchmark data to back up that claim and push the envelope in the industry. We think our customers and the industry will benefit immensely from greater transparency and more comprehensive benchmark data. ”

 

NextDocs Corporation today announced that one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical and biologics companies has leveraged the NextDocs clinical solution suite across more than 200 clinical trials to manage regulated content and compliance, and bring together clinical trial constituencies onto a single management system.

The average cost of bringing a new drug to market is $1.3 billion, with approximately 90% of that expense associated with Phase III trials.  In addition, pharmaceutical companies are seeing that up to 50 percent of drug discovery and development work is being done “outside their firewalls.”  As a result, these companies are seeking new strategies and technologies that accelerate and drive down the cost of running clinical trials by promoting internal and external information exchange, collaboration and compliance.

The NextDocs clinical document management suite allows companies to leverage technology to manage clinical trials more effectively as it significantly reduces the time they have to spend on managing paperwork.  The NextDocs Electronic Trial Master File (eTMF) along with Trial Exchange (TrX) help pharmaceutical companies to streamline processes, improve transparency and quality, automate information exchange, and reduce the administrative overhead associated with running clinical trials.

This Global Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, one of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, initially deployed the NextDocs eTMF solution over two years ago to manage clinical trial documents.   In 2013, the company expanded the deployment to include Clinical Research Organization (CRO) access.  Subsequently, the company deployed the NextDocs Trial Exchange (TrX) investigator portal solution to provide external access to a user community of over 30,000 investigators across more than 10,000 trial sites.

The NextDocs eTMF solution provides a clinical collaboration platform for managing trial documentation that incorporates best practices in document management from across the life sciences industry.  The pharmaceutical company’s CRO partners are able to access the system securely thus enabling true sponsor/CRO collaboration in the contribution and management of TMF content.

The NextDocs Trial Exchange  solution is a clinical portal that utilizes one single repository for both trial sites and sponsors, accessed through two different user interfaces.  The solution’s easy-to-use interface for investigators plugs directly into the eTMF without additional routing, allowing trial site staff to contribute and access documents with minimal training.  Trial Exchange has apps to support completing trial work through mobile platforms, including Windows 8 and iPad.

Enabling investigator sites to easily download and upload key study documentation electronically and directly into an eTMF workflow dramatically reduces the need for printing, scanning, collection and reconciliation of documents.  This reduces costs, speeds processes and provides a much clearer chain of custody for this regulated documentation.

“With the NextDocs clinical solutions suite, this major global pharmaceutical company is bringing together all its primary constituents – including internal project teams running the trials, the CROs they do business with, and the investigators participating in the trials – to collaborate, communicate and enforce compliance.    The time and cost savings directly impact the speed and success of their clinical trials,” said Zikria Syed, Chief Executive Officer of NextDocs.

This client has further integrated its NextDocs clinical solutions suite with its Clinical Trial Management System (CTMS) to ensure trial information is not duplicated across multiple systems.  As an example, when a new study is defined in the CTMS, the NextDocs API enables the provisioning of a fully configured eTMF workspace to support collecting documentation. The solution is also integrated with Exostar’s Life Sciences Identity Hub, to further coordinate credentialing and authorization of external users including investigators and CRO partners.

More than 100 life sciences companies rely on NextDocs solutions, including 5 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies and two of the largest Clinical Research Organizations (CROs).  For more information on NextDocs solutions, visit www.nextdocs.com .

Skytap, the leading provider of SaaS development and test environments, today introduced the Skytap TapIn Partner Program, designed to empower companies to capitalize on the application development market, which according to Gartner is forecasted to be $9.78 billion in 2014¹.

The program enables partners to participate in joint go-to-market programs and maximize shared business opportunities for cloud services. Leading companies including Orasi Software, PPS Infotech, and tap|QA are already benefiting from the partner program.

Enterprises need to build, test, and release higher quality software in less time to gain a competitive edge. To gain this critical advantage, development and test teams must overcome the inefficiencies and constraints within the software development lifecycle. Enterprises often lack the internal infrastructure resources to address these challenges, presenting a tremendous market opportunity for Skytap and its partners.

“The Skytap TapIn Partner Program provides our partners with substantial benefits to make the necessary investments to build innovative cloud service offerings powered by Skytap which will empower their customers to deliver better software faster at significantly lower costs,” said Wayne Monk, vice president of business development and alliances at Skytap. “We are committed to building a strong partner community and it is critical that our partners are rewarded and fully supported across the marketing, sales, services, and support lifecycle of their business. The Skytap TapIn Partner Program provides the elements to deliver on this promise.”

The foundation of the program is Skytap’s SaaS-based development and test solution, which provides dev/test teams with the tools and resources they need to rapidly build, test, and release higher quality software. Partners can leverage Skytap’s SaaS solution to differentiate their offerings, and deliver the highest customer value.

Skytap’s TapIn Partner Program provides rewarding benefits that are tailored to meet the requirements for a diverse range of technology partners:

• Business Partner Program: Supports national and regional partners that desire to market, sell, service, and/or support the Skytap Cloud service.
• Global Outsourcing and System Integrator Program: Provides global advisory and consulting firms with the resources they need to make informed recommendations to their customers who would benefit from the Skytap Cloud service.
• Technology Alliance Program (TAP): Empowers hardware and software vendors to combine their solutions with the Skytap Cloud service to provide customers with an enhanced or unique value proposition.
• Powered by Skytap Program: Allows technology and cloud providers to embed the Skytap Cloud service into their existing services to provide enriched and differentiated solutions to their customers.

Skytap partners will leverage many of the benefits of the new Skytap TapIn Partner Program to help them market, sell, deliver, and support the Skytap Cloud service. The program will provide: rewarding margins, marketing development funds, joint sales assistance, sales and technical enablement, and strong marketing support to increase awareness and demand of partner offerings powered by the Skytap Cloud service.

In a separate release, Orasi, an Atlanta-based quality assurance software reseller and professional services company, today announced it will resell Skytap’s SaaS solution.

“Skytap has really thought through what it takes to help a partner achieve strong profitability and be successful selling cloud services,” said Nick Kavadellas, president and CEO at Orasi Software. “The Skytap TapIn Partner Program is one of the more comprehensive programs we have seen and will clearly accelerate our path to winning new business.”

To learn more about the Skytap TapIn Partner program, or to become a partner, please visit http://www.skytap.com/company/partners.

Partner Quotes

“Joining the Skytap TapIn Partner Program gives us the ability to provide development and testing services to our customers via virtual labs in the cloud,” said Bob Rosscoe, president at PPS Infotech. “With Skytap we are able to deliver services using test environments that mirror the production environment to our customers much quicker, with less training and at much lower costs, allowing us to effortlessly cater to the varied demands of our government and healthcare customers.”

“Our customers are adopting Agile and Lean methodologies to achieve greater velocity with their software development lifecycle. Our partnership with Skytap enables us to help our customers realize the full benefits by providing self-service, on-demand development and test environments,” said Michael Faulise, managing partner at tap|QA. “Partnering with Skytap provides us with an additional value proposition as we strive to continue to be the fastest growing specialized provider of QA and testing services in the Twin Cities.”

About Skytap, Inc.

Skytap is the leading provider of cloud-based dev/test environments to the enterprise. Skytap Cloud removes the inefficiencies and constraints that companies have within their software development lifecycle. As a result Skytap customers release better software faster. Skytap customers can run complex enterprise applications unchanged in Skytap Cloud, collaborate securely with global teams, and gain unparalleled business productivity. Additionally, IT organizations can maintain full visibility and control over cloud projects, align capacity with demand, and reduce costs. To try Skytap Cloud and learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

1. Gartner, Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2011-2018, 1Q14 Update, Laurie Wurster, Yanna Dharmasthira, Chad Eschinger, et al., March 14, 2014.

Intronis, Inc., provider of world-class cloud backup solutions for the IT channel, today announced the immediate availability of its Spring Release ’14.

The new platform enhancements, which include expanded support for physical imaging and virtualized environments including Hyper-V and VMware 5.5, significantly extend the Intronis cloud backup platform to become the IT channel’s leading single-source provider of business recovery services. The Spring Release ’14 enables channel partners to streamline the tools they use, reducing their management time, while expanding business opportunities with their customers and prospects.

“Business IT environments are becoming increasingly more complex and data-driven, putting greater pressure and responsibility on the channel partner to protect, secure and recover the entire business, not just the data,” says Rick Faulk, Intronis CEO. “Our Spring Release ’14 is the first in a series of new product introductions coming over the next several months that addresses these challenges head on, and provides our channel partners with an all-in-one data protection platform that will help deliver faster data recovery and maximize business availability.”

The Intronis Spring Release ’14 adds a number of important features that will enable channel partners to more effectively and efficiently support blended IT environments and virtualized solutions. Major features added to the Intronis Cloud Backup and Recovery Solution include:

• Physical Imaging: Intronis partners are now able to backup servers, laptops, and desktops locally, and provide their clients with local image-level, P2V (physical-to-virtual) and object-level recovery. Intronis partners can backup these images using a recurring-interval or calendar-based schedule, enabling fine-grain control over recovery points. Plus, backups can be saved locally or on a network share for faster data recovery.
•     Hyper-V: In addition to backing up VMware virtual machines (VMs), Intronis partners can now backup Hyper-V VMs to the Intronis Cloud, to a local device, or both. Hyper-V backups are stored and encrypted, and partners can save any number of historical versions of VM backups using Advanced Archiving rules.
•     Expanded Platform Support: Other enhancements in this release include support for Exchange 2013 and VMware vSphere version 5.5, a refreshed user interface, faster performance on the Intronis portal, and faster file-level restores.

“By adding support for Hyper-V, VMWare 5.5, and Physical Imaging, Intronis is fulfilling our desire to leverage a single vendor and platform for all of our customers’ backup and recovery needs,” says David Alger, CTO, Mobius Works, a long-time Intronis partner. “With the Intronis Spring ’14 Release, we can now easily restore a virtualized image so that our customers can get back up and running more quickly in the event of an outage or data loss.”

For Intronis partner Computer Network Services in Florida, the Spring Release ’14 means the total IT solutions provider can now offer new and existing customers the ability to extend Intronis’ offerings to their main servers, while continuing to use the cloud file and database features for other systems and mobile users. “Virtualization is a necessity for any business, so for us, the ability to support Hyper-V is imperative to stay on target and continue to deliver exceptional customer service,” says Matthew Ritchie, IT consultant and network engineer, Computer Network Services, a Stevens and Stevens LTD company.

The new and advanced features and functionality within the Intronis Spring Release ’14 are proven to help channel partners better manage, support and protect their customers’ IT ecosystems. “The Spring ’14 Release is a transformative announcement for Intronis and positions our partners to deliver higher-value services and enterprise-grade support,” says Chuck DeLouis, Intronis vice president of product management. “It’s extremely rewarding to see the enthusiasm our partners have for Intronis’ new Spring Release ’14 and the solutions coming shortly on our strategic roadmap.”

For more detail on Intronis’ Spring Release ’14, visit Intronis.com/product or contact Intronis’ sales team at (800) 569-0155.

To learn more about Intronis online, follow the channel-friendly cloud backup and recovery innovator on Facebookand Twitter, and read the Intronis Cloud Backup and Recovery Blog.

About Intronis

Intronis is an award-winning provider of world-class cloud backup solutions exclusively for the IT channel. Intronis offers the deepest Exchange and SQL backup on the market, securely protects physical and virtual data with native support for VMware, Hyper-V, and physical system images, and easily integrates with top RMM and PSA tools. Intronis’ complete data protection platform has been field tested by thousands of MSPs and is centrally managed from a single console that can be customized and rebranded. In 2014, the company was recognized as a “Best Channel Vendor” by Business Solutions Magazine and one of the “Top 100 Cloud Computing Vendors” and “Top 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors” by CRN Magazine. Learn more at http://www.intronis.com.