That story starts six years ago, when Shahar Kaminitz and Yuval Tarsi launched Worklight under the name of Serendipity.  The initial vision was to enable business users to access information buried in hard-to-reach enterprise databases via flexible and consumer-style interfaces.

This foray to “consumerize the enterprise” was captured by Shahar’s quote in the announcement of the Series A in September 2006.  He said then: “There is a tremendous need to simplify the way enterprise application data is accessed by knowledge workers and customers and we are determined to take the leadership position in this nascent market”.

So far so good. But as Shahar flew around Europe and the US to evangelize Worklight’s middleware offering, it became increasingly clear that what businesses really wanted was to extend application functionalities to smartphones and tablets for the benefit of customers and employees. However this represented a major challenge due to the wide variety of mobile operating systems and form factors.

Recognizing a big opportunity, Shahar had the agility of mind to reevaluate the path the company was taking. He pivoted Worklight to build a full-fledged mobile application platform enabling to build optimized html5, native or hybrid applications while maximizing code reuse.

This swift, intelligent refocusing of the company paid quick dividends. Several major infrastructure players noticed that the platform was getting rapid market acceptance. IBM’s application integration middleware group (aka Websphere) made the first move, attracted by the perfect architectural fit.

Congratulation to the Worklight team for building a powerful platform that dramatically improves developer productivity and provides security, integration and operational control. Congratulations to Marie Wieck and the AIM group for identifying early the potential of Worklight and nurturing the relationship over 18 months. Finally, congratulations to our co-investors Genesis, Pitango and Shlomo Kramer who have been fantastic to work with.

The mobile opportunity is just beginning. Stay tuned for more activity by Index Ventures.

Since then, we have moved (around the corner) and also set up a London East outpost in Shoreditch, within spitting distance of Silicon Roundabout — the centre of gravity of London’s (and increasingly Europe’s) entrepreneurial tech scene. In fact, we pretty much witnessed the birth of Silicon Roundabout when Moo CEO and founder Richard Moross moved into a semi-ropey building on Old Street Roundabout that had been slated for demolition. Richard took on more space than he needed and started offering desks to other startups looking and pretty soon he’d rented out all his extra space.

Old Street Roundabout was famously given the name Silicon Roundabout in 2008 by one of Richard’s new tenants: Matt Biddulph, who co-founded Dopplr. Dopplr (Nokia) along with Amee, Soundcloud and Tweetdeck (Twitter) were all part of the original gang in Moo’s offices and when Moo finally outgrew its Old Street office, they passed the torch and Huddle moved in. Moo moved to Scrutton Street, also in the heart of Shoreditch and this time we also took a few desks so we could spend a few days a week rubbing shoulders with some of Moo’s new gang like Groupspaces, Lanyrd, Lightbox and LevelBusiness.

It turns out we’ve been pretty active in London over the last 10 years.

We’ve invested more than £185m in over 40 startups. But while all these companies started small, many have grown up really fast. In fact, in just the last 10 years when you look across all our London investments well over 5,000 new jobs and close to £1.5bn in new annual revenues have been created.

London has really given us exposure to all ends of the startup spectrum.

We have been very active in seed, investing over £26m in 15 London companies over the last decade, including the likes of Moo, Moshi Monsters, PeoplePerHour, Seedcamp, Songkick and Stylelistpick. We’ve also been involved at the earliest stages with the likes of Funding Circle, Glasses Direct, Housetrip and One Fine Stay.

Just in the last 10 years, London has also nurtured a rich vein of international category leaders and stellar exits we’ve been lucky enough to be involved with including Betfair (LSE), Last.fm (CBS), Lovefilm (Amazon), Playfish (EA), Net-a-Porter (Richemont) and Skype (eBay). All of these companies were happy to call London their home, but we believe for London – and Europe – we are just at start of creating world-beaters. We see a whole new wave of London companies like Alertme, ASOS (LSE), JustEat, King.com, Moshi Monsters, Mimecast, Viagogo and many others like Badoo, Moneybookers, Spotify and Wonga are all capable of enormous outcomes and taking a fundamental place on the global tech map.

London has some really special characteristics that we love and can really relate to.

Firstly, it is truly international which fits who we are: Canadian, Czech, French, Italian, American, South African, Swiss, Swedish – and oh yes, British. It also fits the profile and the mindset of the entrepreneurs we like to back who have also come to London from all four corners of the world.

Secondly, London is truly a creative, commercial, financial, media & marketing powerhouse on a global level. Now that it’s starting to get tech and become one of the world’s great entrepreneurial capitals this is a truly powerful cocktail and as such London has definitely become our firm’s centre of gravity.

We see the evidence building every month: the buzz around Songkick’s Silicon Milk Roundabout, Google’s recent decision to build a major campus in Shoreditch, stronger links to Silicon Valley (which we are delighted to help enable with Danny and Mike on the ground in San Francisco) plus of course the Mayor and the UK government’s efforts to recognize the importance of tech startups as an essential driver of growth.

We’re super excited about the step change we’ve seen over the last decade and now have 11 partners actively making investments In London from early-stage (Ben, Bernard, Robin, Saul, Simon and myself) to growth (Dom, Giuseppe and Jan) and life sciences (Francesco and Kevin). We love London and are honoured to have played a part in its astounding tech emergence. If the last 10 years are anything to go by, we can only be excited about what the next 10 will bring us. Strap on your cycling helmets!

The web has shaped so many things around us.  One of the biggest changes is the increased shift from a product economy to a subscription economy.  We all buy products and use them every day.  But what products actually provide us is an experience or a service.  A car is actually a transportation (maybe also an entertainment?) service.  A newspaper is actually an information service, and so on

The web has allowed us to buy the services as a subscription, which is much closer to the value we actually get from them.  Some industries have been in subscription business models for some time – telcos and utilities are prime examples of these.   These businesses have created good value for both the creator of the service (telcos really love the fact that we are subscribers) as well as for consumers of the service.  This is particularly true of businesses that require high fixed costs to create the service in the first place.

But now this shift from a product economy to a subscription economy is happening in virtually ever sector around us as both new companies as well as established companies launch new services.  Think of the software industry, which is undergoing an enormous transition from products to SaaS.  Or think of media’s migration from depending on physical media to subscriptions services like Netflix or Spotify.  This trend is just beginning.

The challenge with this migration, however, is that it imposes major changes in the way businesses relate to their customers.  The first is how to price the services. For example, should a service be priced based on consumption or based on just access?  The second is how to engage in a lifetime relationship rather than a single transaction.  Imagine what shifting from a “bronze plan” to a “gold plan” mid-month does to the billing and financial systems.  The third is the financial implications of these subscription models.  When can you recognize revenues for a service?  Finally, there is the complexity of integrating the subscription services into the existing enterprise systems ranging from CRM to Finance & Accounting to the ERP.

Enter Zuora.  Tien Tzuo and his team at Zuora had seen this problem first hand as they scaled Salesforce.com from a newcomer in the CRM space to being the exemplary SaaS company over the last decade.  They created a SaaS-based billing systems which allows all new services to shortcut their way, in a mature and fully-featured way, for monetizing their relationships with customers.   The first act of that was the billing and payment operations as well as the taxation system.  As it turns out, the simple act of sending the right bill to a customer is not so simple.   Especially since, billing is a primary method for “engagement” between a service and its customers.  The fact that Zuora itself was a SaaS really helped as the service providers could avoid the complex task of deploying and managing their billing systems.

Over the last 4 years, Zuora has had to figure out the complex world of enterprise software integration as well.  They have connected into countless CRM, Accounting, and HR systems as well as a range of payment gateways.  They have made friends with Saleforce, Workday, Netsuite, Oracle, SAP, and many others.  Few systems touch as many elements of the enterprise infrastructure as the billing system.  One thing I learned from my years managing the Service Provider business at Cisco, was that the billing system was sacrosanct.  Only a select few were allowed to touch that portion of their infrastructure. Zuora has placed itself in that role.

Zuora has also accumulated an impressive list of customers ranging from established market leaders like News Corp and Dell to newcomers like Tata Communications and Box.net.  The experience accumulated through these customer deployments puts them in a class of their own in this market segment.  Of course, like many companies at this stage, Europe is becoming an attractive market to them – and we at Index, are here to help.

Of course, no Index investment story is complete without talking about the team.  We met Tien at our offices in San Francisco for the first time.  Even though Tien had enjoyed a successful career at Salesforce.com, it was pretty evident that he had a lot to prove.  The drive and passion to build a great business was evident in the first 10 minutes of the conversation.  Tien has assembled a world-class team around him from leaders in the SaaS and software – Netsuite, Oracle, Webex, Vitria, Paypal, and many more.

As an Index Growth investment, we are also fortunate to join a roster of terrific investors that saw the potential of Zuora before we did.  Congrats to our friends at Benchmark, Redpoint, and Shasta for having backed this great team. We are privileged to join them in supporting Tien & Co.

We’re proud to say that our colleagues in Switzerland will not be looking at the TCS in the same way again.  In fact, every time we look at an invoice we receive, we’ll think that they will all come from Zuora some day in the not too distant future.

The elephant toy – Hadoop – has become a household name in the Big Data sector these days and we’ve been tracking it for some time at Index. The Big Data world is complex and there are many components of it, but at the core of it all is Apache Hadoop’s revolutionary compute and storage architecture for data. We think that this might be one the most significant trend in data architecture in a decade.

To understand Apache Hadoop’s impact on compute and storage architectures, it’s important to understand where it came from and why it was needed in the first place. While applications have always produced a lot of data, we only ever stored the “valuable” data. This data was labeled and tagged and ultimately stored in neatly architected databases. Meanwhile, we simply ignored data like application logs and website logs, which offered the potential for in depth user insights, but were too voluminous and lacked the structured necessary for data systems at the time. It’s also important to realize that this unstructured data is increasing at exponential rates. As IT infrastructures across the economy get instrumented with Internet-scale solutions, the amount of data product increases exponentially – which further exacerbates the problem and expands the opportunity.

Google was one of the first companies to tackle the challenge of parsing through vast amounts of data in an attempt to make sense of it, all in a cost-efficient way. Not only did they have to contend with massive volumes of data, they also had to deal with large amounts of unstructured data, as websites didn’t have nice labels or tags. They came up with a concept called MapReduce, which solved both the scale problem and the cost problem for crawling and indexing unstructured data across the web.

MapReduce is the modern version of the “grid computing” that we talked about for years, but with a twist. The old way of parsing lots of data was to have a large computer (expensive) that fetched (expensively stored) unprocessed data, processed it and then returned it. MapReduce parsed up both the compute load and the stored data in moderately sized chunks and distributed it out across cluster of cheap/commodity computers with cheap disks to process. The processed data would then be reassembled into intelligible “knowledge” that helped users run their business. This is a big deal because it completely changes the cost and scale equation to computing big amounts of data.

Google published a white paper of MapReduce and a few smart engineers in the open source community cooked up Hadoop. Since the original creation, the little elephant has moved in as the heart and soul of many Internet companies’ computing architecture. Yahoo was the biggest and most active user, but Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Hulu, and many others have joined the herd. The uses are varied and unique, but all of them center on using Hadoop to get insight from data that was previously discarded.

As an open source project, Apache Hadoop has many parts and a large community of contributors that create it, however, the core Hadoop engineering team from Yahoo has been a driving force in making Hadoop what it is today. Through some stormy times at Yahoo, Eric Baldeschweiler and his colleagues stuck together as a team to work on what is becoming one of the most significant trends in computing. Particularly noteworthy is Yahoo’s live implementation that is now sized over 42,000 CPUs, with their largest cluster spanning 4,500 nodes. That is some serious scale.

Early this year, Yahoo decided that the Hadoop asset should form the core of a new independent company. In late June, Hortonworks was formed to pursue the full potential of Apache Hadoop. For Index, we were delighted to have one of our long term friends – Rob Bearden – become the President of Hortonworks. Rob was the COO at both JBoss and SpringSource – two of the most successful venture-backed open source companies in the last decade. Rob’s been on the board at Pentaho and Gluster (RHAT) with us – a pair of terrific Index open source stories. His knowledge of the open source market and ability to build a world-class organization around great technologies make him the perfect complement to Eric.

Hadoop has clearly become one of the most vibrant sets of projects in the Apache universe. While open source projects thrive on the contributions made by the community; in our experience with MySQL and others, the greater the contributions than an organization makes to the project, the more they can shape the destiny of the project. After doing our analysis, it became obvious to us that Hortonworks is the most prolific contributor to the technology and thus extremely well positioned for the coming years.

We tip our hats to our friends at Benchmark Capital who pulled off a coup by helping to create Hortonworks and bringing together the founding team there. We are privileged to be working with them on another promising project. Open source in is our blood at Index. Aside from MySQL, we have been investors in OpenX, Cloud.com, Pentaho, Trolltech, Zend – more than a dozen open source companies. We think we have a lot to add to this adventure.

While Apache Hadoop has been something of a Silicon Valley phenomenon, the trends that enterprises face everywhere are undeniable – all enterprise face a tsunami of unstructured data coming their way. Big data is challenge and an opportunity in virtually every sector of the economy: healthcare (drug discovery, patient care), public sector (taxation, demography), retail (demand signal, supplier management), financial services (sales and trading, analytics), and so forth. Corporations in most of these sectors are struggling to find a scalable and cost effective solution, not just to “deal with” the data, but also to transform it into a competitive advantage.

Across all of these industry verticals, big data and it’s ecosystem will undoubtedly be the solution. While most enterprises are still in the early stages of adopting Hadoop, it’s clear to us that if we fast-forward a few years, there will be big herds of elephants running around enterprise architectures and Hortonworks will be in the center of it all.

In some cases an early exit is appropriate.  Certain startups should be sold in the early years of their success if, for example, the size of the opportunity turns out to be more limited than originally anticipated, or when management and investors have diverging views about the future potential for the business.

But when an already successful young company enjoys the combination of a validated large market opportunity coupled with a highly motivated and ambitious management team, capable to sustain excitinggrowth rates for several more years, we see a truly exceptional growth company that can generate a very significant independent business.

In these situations selling out early would be a real pity.  This is the reason we launched our first dedicated Growth fund in 2007.

Our first Growth fund has been dedicated to helping companies with high potential to continue on a further growth-cycle over the subsequent 3 to 5 years, elevating the value of their business to aspire to reach beyond the $1 billion revenue category.

For European entrepreneurs, the first Index Growth fund constituted a unique opportunity.   Prior to its launch, there was very limited availability of European technology growth equity funds.

The success of our first Growth fund makes the case for the second Index Ventures Growth fund very clear.  Our strategy for this new Growth fund is consistent with what we have done so far in with the original Growth fund; investing between €10M and €50M in the equity of fast growing companies, with proven business models and solid management teams going after large market opportunities in which they have already built an initial leadership position that can be extended.

To give you more color about the companies we love to back, we will share some elements and a few examples from the first Growth fund portfolio: the average revenue growth rate of our portfolio companies was above 70% in 2010 vs 2009, and from an initial level of generally around €20M at the time of our initial investment, several have already crossed the €100M bar this year.

They all had proven business models, although not all were profitable at the time of investment.

In terms of sectors, we like to invest in areas that are aligned with our core expertise in technology, especially inInternet and online businesses, as well as software.

We love category leaders like Etsy in NY, or ASOS in London, which are rapidly expanding their e-commerce activities internationally.

We also like regional leaders that enjoy leadership in several local markets, like Privalia, the leading online private-sales player in Spain, Italy and Brazil, or Just-eat, leader in online restaurant shopping in the UK and Scandinavia.

And we love massively scalable business models like Dropbox, the latest addition to the Index Growth portfolio, which we believe will revolutionize the way we store and share files on the Internet, are a strong fit with our values.

Outside our core internet and software focus, we look for large market opportunities that can leverage technology to sustain high growth rates.

Take Moleskine, a company that has built a phenomenal brand offline with its legendary notebooks and is continuously increasing its online presence, or Sonos, an innovative wireless music system for the home, or Adyen, a company that is transforming the online payment landscape.

We also like highly scalable models, like the one adopted by RPX, a defensive patent aggregation business now public on Nasdaq, which builds on a clear understanding of technology patents and unique expertise to rationalize the US-patent market.

Geographically, we seek to invest in emerging leaders with international expansion ambitions wherever they may be located.

To give you and idea, within the first Index Growth fund, we have invested in companies located in many different cities, including London, Paris, New York, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Milan, Copenhagen, and Moscow.

Generally, these companies have strong links to Europe because are European companies expanding internationally and to the US, or because are US-based companies for which the European expansion is a key element of their growth strategy.

The Growth fund is a very important part of our integrated strategy to support entrepreneurs at various stages of their development, enabling us to tailor our investment offering to the needs of companies through their lifecycle, all the way from an initial seed investment to their more mature growth stages.

With our early-stage venture fund focused on seed and startup investments, we are dedicated to creating companies that have the potential to become global category leaders.

With our new Growth fund, we are passionate about embracing emerging category leaders as their leadership becomes apparent, and are dedicated to helping them reach their full potential.

The revolutions constantly taking place in our industry from cloud and SaaS through to social and mobile platforms, have created an environment where it is cheaper and more capital efficient than ever before for entrepreneurs to quickly launch innovative products and services, and test them in the market.

At the same time, this makes it essential for companies that get initial success to rapidly have access to the resources and networks required to scale very quickly and establish defensible leadership.

We have been working hard to make sure we remain a very closely integrated firm across the different funds and offices and to be a value-added partner of choice for entrepreneurs regardless of stage, funding amount or geographical location. With the opening of our office in San Francisco this opportunity is only increased.

We are super excited about the next step in the Index story that the launch of new Growth fund represents, and look forward to continually improving the way we work as a team with our entrepreneurs across stages and geographies.

- Giuseppe, Dom and the Index Growth team

One area where we are committed to enhance our proposition to entrepreneurs and invest more time and money is the Nordic and Baltic area.  Index Ventures has already invested a disproportionately high share of funds and time here relative to the size of the markets.  Here we reflect on what Index has been up to in the region, and just why it creates so many innovative and successful tech companies.

I met with Anthony Goldbloom and Jeremy Howard for coffee on a Sunday when I was passing through San Francisco, and yes it was one of those meetings that is supposed to be 45 minutes and ends up being 3 hours. It was also one of those meetings that makes you smile on your drive home because it reminds you why it is such a privilege to be in the business of helping entrepreneurs fulfill their missions.

Kaggle is a big data company that allows enterprises with vast amounts of data to get the best data scientists in the world to uncover hidden relationships in their data and produce superior predictive mathematical models. It exploits the fact that the people with the data are not necessarily the people with the best skills to see patterns in the data or build algorithms to model them.

As a web-based marketplace that connects data owners with data scientists, Kaggle exploits the power of interdisciplinary collaboration. In one real case, a glaciologist was able to do a better job of seeing patterns in radio telescope data than the NASA data scientists who submitted them. Kaggle allows research institutes (like NASA or the Royal Astronomical Society) and companies (like Allstate, dunhumby and Deloitte) to sponsor competitions in which data the 17,000 data scientists who have already signed up on Kaggle, compete to come up with the best predictive algorithms for their data.

We see Kaggle at the intersection of three major trends: the universal recognition of the gold hidden in big data and the imperative of finding better ways to extract it;  the growing willingness of enterprises and institutions to entrust mission critical work to talent in the cloud, and the increasing dominance of web marketplaces. Granular, relevant, real-time data is everywhere and not a day goes by that one doesn’t come across a process or a transaction that couldn’t be improved by a better algorithm.

Kaggle builds on our investments in Factual and The Climate Corporation which use a variety of tools to tame the big data beast and bring tangible value to corporations and farmers, PeoplePerHour and Stack Exchange which leverage the limitless know-how and expertise of cloud talent and experts and Just Eat, Etsy, Shapeways, Housetrip and Funding Circle among other marketplaces of various shapes and sizes.

Kaggle’s plan to refine and scale it’s offering to enable hundreds of businesses, institutes and agencies to leverage the collective expertise of the world’s best data scientists is extremely compelling to us. The impact that Kaggle can have by tackling some of the world’s biggest data problems was also not lost on Max Levchin who is becoming the company’s chairman, bringing his phenomenal experience as an entrepreneur and as an innovator. We are very excited about working with Anthony, Jeremy and the talented team they have already begun to assemble, as well as Vinod and David who have joined us in leading this investment, in the wake of other exciting Index/Khosla Ventures collaborations Boku, The Climate Corporation and AdMarvel. While a business that originated in Australia and has moved to San Francisco from where it intends to address a truly global market may feel rootless to some, it feels very familiar to us.

Hats off to the founders, AB and Hitesh, for a unique product vision and superb technical execution.  Congratulations on a great outcome to Ben Golub and the entire Gluster team in Bangalore and Mountain View!

Unique technology

We came across Gluster in October 2008 following an introduction by Nexus Venture Partners . The company developed GlusterFS, an open source clustered file system enabling efficient storage of large amounts of unstructured data across distributed nodes. Gluster’s innovative architecture removed the need for centralized metadata, leading to remarkable performance even as data volumes grew into the PetaBytes. Early customers and users raved about the product and Index made a $1 million investment from our seed fund.

Fantastic team

The next stage was about building a business and extending the product. Gluster assembled a top-notch R&D team in Bangalore and needed management talent in the bay area. We launched a search with Lee Schweichler looking for a CEO able to develop a cloud-focused strategy combined with low-friction go-to-market.  Ben Golub joined in March 2010 and did an amazing job, rapidly building the successful team including Lori Budin, Mike Backlund, Dave Garnett, John Kreisa and many other talented individuals. Rob Bearden, whom I got to know with Pentaho, also joined the board.

Strong market position

The product evolved into a fully-fledged enterprise-grade storage platform packaged into Amazon machine images (AMI) and virtual appliances for RightScale and VMware, ready to be deployed in the cloud or on premise. With organizations needing to store explosive amounts of data in a cost-effective and manageable way, Gluster’s customer count rose rapidly. Index pre-empted rising interest in the venture community and led an $8.5 million round in October 2010.

Ideal acquirer

Red Hat is a perfect home for Gluster. The acquisition will come as no surprise given Red Hat’s increasingly active role in cloud. Red Hat started with the acquisition of KVM in 2008 and accelerated lately with OpenShift and CloudForms. Congratulations to Red Hat as well on a superb move!

Index and open source

Open source software underlies much of the cloud’s infrastructure. Index has been a leading open source investor with exits such as TrollTech (Nokia), MySQL (Sun/Oracle), Dimdim (Salesforce), Cloud.com (Citrix) and thriving companies such as OpenX, Pentaho or Zend. We will continue to back innovative companies at the intersection of open source and cloud.

Today businesses must not only continue to be on top of customer interactions across traditional channels (phone, email, chat, forums, etc) but must now also carefully monitor and react to developments about their products and services across social networks. In a huge departure from the past, social networks are making the need to engage with customers more (a) real-time; (b) public and personal.  An unattended customer complaint can spread like wildfire and cause tremendous brand damage, while positive reverberations may represent effective sales & marketing opportunities to latch on to. This is true whether you are selling to consumers or enterprises. The challenge for businesses is to provide their often overwhelmed and distributed customer service teams with the collaborative tools they need to pro-actively and effectively manage these new customer touch points in real time.

While researching the space last year, we came across Assistly thanks to a pointer by Fusion-io’s Gary Orenstein (@garyorenstein).

Three characteristics immediately stood out for us:

1. Great founding team: Alex, Gary, Jeremy and Brad are repeat entrepreneurs with deep domain knowledge, having previously started two other customer-service companies
2. Killer product: Not only did the product already look very good, the team shared a religious product and customer focus
3. Willingness to experiment: The founders had no preconceived notion about how to best market the solution and were willing to experiment and learn (e.g. their innovative pay-as-you-go pricing)

This led to very rapid adoption with Assistly adding hundreds of customers per month including 37Signals, Bonobos, Spotify, Typekit, Yelp, OneKingsLane and Square as well as several Index portfolio companies like Songkick, Path, Squarespace and Groupspaces. Alongside Zendesk, the first mover in the space, Assistly quickly emerged as a leader in next-generation SaaS customer service. In particular, customers rate the platform’s real-time architecture and administrative capabilities highly.

On the back of its active corporate development program, Salesforce made a strategic investment earlier this year. A couple of months ago, witnessing how the company was developing ahead of expectations, Salesforce decided it was time to move aggressively and acquire the business. It is a logical step: Salesforce announced its ambition in social media management with their Radian6 purchase early this year and is acutely aware of the importance of customer service through ServiceCloud. Assistly will now enable Salesforce to effectively serve a larger base of customers, starting with SMEs.

We are obviously thrilled for Assistly’s founders and team and congratulate them on their vision and flawless execution. Congratulations also to Salesforce for having successfully acquired a fantastic team and product. Finally, we must thank the early investors True Ventures, Social Leverage and Kenny van Zant for inviting us to participate in the Series B last year.

We’ve been really fortunate over the years at Index to be involved with some real pioneers in enterprise software; in open source with MySQL, DimDim, Pentaho and OpenX; in cloud with RightScale, Gluster, and Cloud.com and we’re really excited to see how lightweight SaaS services like Mimecast, Assistly, Chartbeat and Erply are starting to solve real problems at low cost for businesses of all sizes. Social CRM is an area of particular interest where we expect to see significant innovation as social media creates a customer-centric open world in which every customer interaction is a marketing interaction and audiences can be targeted in a much more contextual and granular way. We plan to invest further into customer and product-focused companies aiming to tightly integrate social media into enterprise processes.

Bernard