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To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (629)	4/25/2011 11:31:58 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1685

Enterprise virtualization and cloud architecture start-up Big Switch Networks has closed on $13.75 million in Series A financing. Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures co-led the round. Four new directors joined the company’s board as a result of the financing: Former Veritas CEO Mark Leslie; Bill Meehan, director Emeritus at McKinsey and Co.; Shirish Sathaye, partner at Khosla Ventures; and Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures. Big Switch is based in Palo Alto, Calif. PRESS RELEASE April 25th, 2011 -- Big Switch Networks, a new company building a platform to bring the benefits of virtualization and cloud architecture to enterprise networks, announced today that it secured $13.75 million in a Series A financing, led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Big Switch Networks also announced that it has joined the newly formed ONF, a nonprofit group focused on promoting OpenFlow and other Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies as a way to speed innovation in the networking industry. OpenFlow is a standard protocol that enables networks to evolve more rapidly by giving owners and operators better control over their networks and the ability to optimize network behavior. “Enterprise networking is exciting again. We’re seeing new customer problems that aren’t well addressed with traditional networking technologies and changes in the large IT suppliers that are creating opportunities for startups like Big Switch Networks,” said Mike Volpi, Partner at Index Ventures and Former SVP/GM of the Routing Technology Group at Cisco. “Just when everyone thought that networking was getting boring and commoditized, Big Switch Networks comes along! Virtualization is now coming to the network layer,” said Charlie Giancarlo, Former Chief Development Officer of Cisco and Angel Investor in Big Switch Networks. “We’re excited about Big Switch Networks. This is a very strong and technical team, well positioned to be the VMware of networking for the private cloud and campus LAN,” said Shirish Sathaye, Partner at Khosla Ventures. With this infusion of capital, four new directors joined Big Switch Networks Co-Founders Guido Appenzeller, CEO, and Kyle Forster, VP of Sales and Marketing, on the board: * Mark Leslie, Lecturer in Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Former CEO of Veritas * Bill Meehan, Raccoon Partners Lecturer in Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Director Emeritus at McKinsey and Co. and Leader of the Firm’s West Coast and Private Equity Practices * Shirish Sathaye, Partner at Khosla Ventures and Former VP of Engineering and CTO of FORE Systems and Alteon WebSystems * Mike Volpi, Partner at Index Ventures and Former Head of M&A, Chief Strategy Officer and SVP/GM of the Routing Technology Group at Cisco “The advances over the last few years in compute virtualization have left enterprise networking behind,” said Appenzeller. “With this round of funding, we’re pulling together the world class team at all levels that will bring the benefits of virtualization to networking.” About Guido Appenzeller Guido Appenzeller is the Co-Founder and CEO of Big Switch Networks. Before co-founding Big Switch Networks, he was a Consulting Professor at Stanford University and Head of the Clean Slate Lab where he managed the OpenFlow standards effort and led the team that developed the OpenFlow reference implementation. He was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum and holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and a M.S. (Diplom) in Physics from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. About Kyle Forster Kyle Forster is the Co-Founder and VP of Sales and Marketing at Big Switch Networks. He spent most of his career at Cisco, where he started as a technical assistant to SVP Mike Volpi, and most recently he was the product manager of a $100 million portfolio of Cisco’s WLAN Controllers. He holds an MBA and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University and a BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University. About Index Ventures Index Ventures is a leading global venture capital firm active in technology venture investing since 1996. The firm is dedicated to helping top entrepreneurial teams in the Information Technology, clean technology and life science sectors build their companies into market defining global leaders. The team is based in Geneva, London, and Jersey and will open a Silicon Valley office in the Fall of 2011. Index works closely with companies at all stages to build disruptive technologies and emerge as market defining global leaders. For more information, visit: www.indexventures.com. About Khosla Ventures Khosla Ventures, the venture investors behind well-known networking companies such as Juniper Networks, Redback Networks, Extreme Networks, Kalpana, Aruba Networks, Infinera and Cerent, was founded by Sun Microsystems Co-Founder Vinod Khosla in 2004. The firm helps entrepreneurs deliver lasting change through technological innovation. Today the firm has holdings in traditional technology sectors and has one of the largest and broadest clean technology portfolios. For more information, visit: www.khoslaventures.com. About the ONF ONF’s mission is the promote the development and use of SDN technologies, like OpenFlow, to allow networks to improve more quickly. SDN enables rapid innovation because it allows network owners and operators to optimize the network for their needs. For more information, visit: opennetworkingfoundation.org About Big Switch Networks Big Switch Networks was founded in 2010 to bring the benefits of virtualization and cloud architecture to enterprise networks. Big Switch is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit: bigswitch.com

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (629)	4/29/2011 5:27:03 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 1685

Check Your Cloud Computing Contracts By Andrew L. Share Law360, New York (April 29, 2011) -- In light of the recent outage of Amazon Web Services, cloud computing customers as well as those who utilize software as a service (SaaS) and other hosted applications should take the opportunity to conduct an audit of their contracts with their providers in order to confirm that desired safeguards and redundancies are built into the services. Additionally, companies will want to make sure that they have not contracted away the right to seek remedies arising out of a provider’s outage or degradation of service. Conducting an audit in light of the Amazon outage will give companies the necessary perspective of what issues they may face during a future outage and how they can better plan, now, for such outages. Redundancy Undoubtedly, Amazon is one of the largest cloud providers and until recently most users of its service would not have thought to question the soundness of Amazon’s operations and controls. That said, if the until recently infallible Amazon can suffer an outage then surely other vendors are equally as vulnerable as well. As a result, customers of cloud type services should take the events of last week as an opportunity to review existing contingency and disaster recovery plans, and prepare new ones if necessary, so that they are prepared to mitigate their losses and downtime in the event of future outages by any provider. By all accounts, the companies hit hardest by the Amazon outage appear to be those who had not built redundancy and recovery safeguards into their operating plans. As larger companies have long known, and smaller start-ups are now unfortunately realizing, system redundancy is an essential component to surviving a provider’s outage by providing a switchover to a system presumably not affected by an outage. Depending upon a company’s requirements, system redundancy can come in a number of forms, ranging from the utilization of a provider with multiple servers located in multiple data centers across a wide geographic area or even the use of multiple providers as a backup to the others. The failure to have any sort of minimum redundant and backup systems in place, is akin to a SaaS and cloud customer “putting all of its eggs in one basket.” While companies undoubtedly will continue to utilize single vendor and single data center solutions to manage their cloud computing needs due to the costs associated with implementing redundant securities, customers of cloud type services are nonetheless urged to reconsider the risks of doing so in light of the frustrations evidenced by last week’s outage. Service Level Agreements In addition to concerns regarding redundancy and backups, cloud and SaaS customers also need to make sure that their providers’ service level agreements (SLAs) are appropriately crafted in light of the type of services to which the SLAs will apply. Many cloud and SaaS providers offer SLAs as a reassurance to the customer of the providers’ commitment to achieve an agreed upon level of performance. Even if not initially offered by a provider, customers have come to expect some sort of stated service level as well as a monetary credit if the provider does not achieve the promised minimum level of service. From the customer’s perspective, SLAs and their associated credits should act as an incentive to the provider to achieve the agreed upon service levels and earn full payment for services rendered during the measured period. While the failure to achieve a particular service level often results in a credit to the customer, customers need to be cautious of whether the credit is intended as a liquidated damage or any sort of exclusive remedy for a provider’s missed service level. Most service level credits are not anywhere near the size that would be necessary to truly make a harmed user whole as a result of damages an outage or degradation of service might impose. Most commonly, SLA credits are provide in the form of a mere percentage off of the next month’s invoice, which in reality pales in comparison to the actual damages a company can incur due to an outage of its SaaS or cloud providers, whether such damages are in the form of lost ad revenue, diminishment in loyalty (and thus a decrease in site traffic) or failure of the ability to provide services to its own end users. Companies need to make sure that the SLAs and associated credits built into their provider contracts provide the companies with a reasonable level of comfort that the provider is confident in its ability to perform, but also do not prevent a company from seeking additional redress to recover the actual damages due to a service failure. Accordingly, customers must be aware of any contractual language that implies that a service level credit is the provider’s sole liability and the customer’s exclusive remedy for all damages arising out of the provider’s failure to achieve a stated service level. If not, users of cloud-type applications and services may unhappily find that their only avenue of redress against a provider is to merely a claim a credit against another month’s service, and depending upon the nature of the missed service level, another month of subpar service is not an appealing resolution for the customer. Conclusion While the actual damages that may arise out of the recent Amazon outage are not yet clear, there is no doubt that affected websites have potentially lost millions of dollars of revenue and, equally important, possibly some loyalty from their viewers and users. Nonetheless, no one truly expects that cloud type services are going to fade away. Accordingly, companies should not miss the opportunity to use the outage as a reason to re-evaluate their IT systems and applications and focus on planning how to deal with, and mitigate, future issues. ________ *Andrew Share is an associate with Nixon Peabody in the firm's Manchester, N.H., office and counsels companies in corporate and business law matters, particularly in mergers and acquisitions, and licensing and technology transactions. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the firm, its clients, or Portfolio Media, publisher of Law360.