Burlington firm joins crowd on the cloud

Highlights from Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog.

Bright outlook for ‘cloudy’ start-up. CloudSwitch Inc. of Burlington, one of the better-funded cloud computing start-ups around, officially launched last week at the Structure 2010 conference in San Francisco.

While many small businesses have gravitated to cloud-based storage and server horsepower because of the cost savings and flexibility they offer, CloudSwitch aims to make it “safe’’ for larger companies. (The term “cloud computing’’ refers to off-site, pay-as-you-go services operated by a third party.)

Run by former SolidWorks chief executive John McEleney, CloudSwitch has raised $15.5 million from a trio of local venture firms: Matrix Partners, Atlas Venture, and Commonwealth Capital Ventures.

CloudSwitch sells software that’s installed in a corporate data center to enable a customer to easily use cloud services from providers like Amazon and Terramark to run their own applications.

“You make no changes at all to your underlying app,’’ McEleney says. “And you get complete encryption of all the data. The customer keeps the keys, and no one else has them.’’

CloudSwitch cofounder Ellen Rubin explains that big companies may want to “spin up’’ a few hundred extra servers when they’re testing a new application to see how it will work in the real world, or for already live applications during times of high demand, like a travel website during the height of summer vacation season.

“We see people saving from 30 to 50 percent, compared to maintaining servers and storage in their own data center,’’ Rubin says.

“The real savings is being able to shut it off when you don’t need it, rather than running it 24/7.’’

The company charges a minimum of $25,000 a year for access to up to 20 servers, with pricing scaling up based on the customer’s needs.

CloudSwitch has 24 full-time employees, and McEleney says it is hiring a bit on the business side, and “even more on the engineering side.’’

At the Structure conference last week, CloudSwitch took home both the audience award for top start-up (out of the 11 that competed), and the award given out by a panel of industry specialists.

Simplifying photo printing. The company hasn’t not made it official yet, but Pixable of Manhattan accepted its first round of funding from Highland Capital Partners of Lexington earlier this month. Pixable makes it easy to print photo books and calendars full of images stored on Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and other popular photo-hosting services. Bob Davis, the former chief executive of Lycos Inc. and now a general partner at Highland, will join Pixable’s board.

Three MIT grads started the company last year and were briefly squatting last summer in conference rooms at the school’s Sloan School of Management, but they moved to an office in SoHo last summer. “We didn’t have a very strong preference between Boston and San Francisco and New York,’’ says Iñaki Berenguer, Pixable’s chief executive. “But New York is famous for media, advertising, and events, and you could say we’re a media company, and that photos are mainly about events.’’ He adds says that New York is “a good place to mix long working days with having fun on the weekends.’’ The company has 10 full-time employees, and a dozen interns.

Pixable plans to expand its services beyond printing soon, but Berenguer did not want to be specific.

Keeping young alums close. Who better than a recent business school grad to launch a start-up that is creating mobile apps to help universities stay connected to their alumni?

Brent Grinna started working on EverTrue while at Harvard Business School; he graduated last month, and around the same time, the company launched its first app, Brown Alumni Connect. Grinna says EverTrue is focused on building “young alumni engagement tools’’ that will deliver news, sports scores, video, and an event calendar to alums via their iPhones (and eventually, Android phones and BlackBerrys).

“When you move to a new city, you can update your contact information so friends can find you, and you can use the app to find other alumni in the area,’’ he says.

Grinna says schools often don’t dedicate much energy to communicating with young alumni, who aren’t likely to become big donors for a decade or two. That is exactly the demographic Grinna expects will be attracted to EverTrue’s apps. Grinna has been bootstrapping the company thus far, following the advice of Jeffrey Bussgang, an entrepreneur-in-residence at HBS and a partner at Flybridge Capital in Boston.

“Our plan is to sign up some more schools, and then raise some funding,’’ he says.

For the full Innovation Economy blog, updated daily, visit www.boston.com/innovation.