ASPects: May 28, 2001

Rivio Aims for Mass Market

Distribution is the name of the game for Rivio, a service provider for small businesses that announced a partnership with Verizon Communications last week. The telecom giant will market Rivios services to its 3 million small-business customers. Customers will pay a monthly subscription fee based on the number of users and services selected. Rivio, which has a similar deal with Bank of America, aggregates Web-based services from partners, including Microsofts bCentral. Rivio also said it has raised $12 million in a fourth round of funding, bringing its total funding to $61 million. Investors in the Santa Clara, Calif., company include Accenture Technology Ventures, Bank of America, Opportunity Capital Partners and Softbank Venture Capital.

Supersize It, Says Jamcracker

The customers are getting bigger at Jamcracker, the services aggregator headed by Exodus Communications founder K.B. Chandrasekhar. Jamcracker originally targeted small firms, but that market has been slow to develop. Moving upmarket has allowed Jamcracker to snare customers such as InfoSpace, which has deployed Jamcracker services to more than 1,000 seats, and 600-seater Blue Martini Software. Jamcracker now has over 100 customers, says Todd Johnson, vice president of marketing. About 70 percent of the seats in the new-business pipeline are at enterprises with over 1,000 people, though the customer count is still more like 60 percent small to midsize businesses. Johnson says Jamcracker does not anticipate any major layoffs and is in no hurry to raise additional funds.