Copacetic

Infoworld reports on the launch of Workday, a hosted ERP vendor founded by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. They are both ex senior executives of Peoplesoft. What’s interesting about this company from an Irish perspective is that according to the article they have integrated Cape Clear’s ESB offering into their base product.

Aneel Bhusri is already on the board of Cape Clear as a Greylock investor.

Could this be the exit chance of a lifetime for the Cape?

I’m just catching up on my blogs and the one thing that rocks my world is news of Amazon’s new web service EC2. They’ve jumped the gun on Sun and Google to provide a global grid facility to anybody with a credit card. USD$ 0.10 (10 cents) an hour gets you,

… the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth

You get prebuilt Linux instances to layer your own images on and free interconnect to your S3 storage.  We already use S3 so this is going to increase the security of our application, improve scalability and make it cheaper all in one go!

Total cost for a years worth of compute power 0.10 * 24 * 365 = USD$ 876. Moving stuff from out current hosted environment to our S3 storage was going to cost us a fortune but this could have a radical impact on our most significant cost, bandwidth, where’s that spreadsheet…..

I’ve dealt some digs out to the Cape in the past, but this report from Silicon Republic seems to indicate some serious sales growth.

According to the latest Gartner Dataquest report on application integration and middleware (AIM), Cape Clear holds 18.9pc of the north American ESB market and has experienced revenue growth numbers of 86.7pc. Worldwide, Cape Clear captured 15.9pc of the market.

Congratulations, guys, well done!

• Freshmeat announcement page (update : fixed borked link)
• Celtix Home Page
• Product page from the Iona Website
• The Celtix Demo page

InfoWorld reports on the launch of Celtix Iona’s new Open Source ESB. Iona are a little late to the Open Source party but I would expect the Celtix product to put up a pretty good showing on the technical front.

However they suffer from the same problem as Cape Clear, how do you compete on the one hand against tier one incumbents like Oracle and IBM and also hold the line against OpenSource experts like Apache and JBoss?

If egos could be massaged, one way to compete would be to merge both companies back into a single entity. The original goals of Cape Clear (low cost commodity products in the XML/CORBA/J2EE space) were lost long ago and they now range across the same prospect base as Iona.

Chris is safely ensconced on the board as chairman so any old enmity could be smoothed over by the new Iona CEO Peter Zotto. Give Annrai back his old job as CTO, tag him as a serial entrepreneur (did it twice!) and move all the Cape Clear staff back from the pugatory of Donnybrook to the central location of Shelbourne Road.

Job done!

Cape Clear has broken cover with its latest investment round of USD$15m. The latest partners to invest are InterWest one of the Silicon Valley Sand Hill mob. As Annrai is reported to have said in 2005 in the Sunday Business Post,

So only a billion to go then Annrai .

From what I gather on the web and my own sources Cape Clear total investment to date is broken down as follows,

• 2 Million in seed funding from ACT in 2000
• 16 million in Series A funding from Accel and Greylock in 2001
• 10 million in Series B funding from Accel and Greylock 2003
• 5-10 million: A phantom series C round raised as a set of warrants amongst existing investors. It was never press released and their is no mention of it on the net.
• 15 million in a series D round in the last few weeks with InterWest

So we can guess that the total investment is at least USD$48m and may be significantly more.

Thats a lot of money for a bit player in the web services/SOA/ESB market place. Even at a preference multiple of one they would need to make USD$100million in a trade sale before any of the common stock holders see a dime.

Answers on a post card for the last Irish company to make a trade sale exit that netted more than $100m…

Disclosure: I was Director of Engineering at Cape Clear from 2000 to 2003 and I have (common) stock in the company.