Thursday, August 31, 2017

Facebook to open source LogDevice for storing logs from distributed data centers

 Facebook is planning to open source LogDevice, the company’s custom built solution for storing logs collected from distributed data centers. The company made the announcement as part of its Scale conference. Logs are used to track database events. If a server suffers an outage for any reason, companies need a way to debug, perform security audits and ensure consistency between servers.… Read More

Salesforce, IBM deepen partnership with new app integrations

 Salesforce and IBM are joining forces again as they attempt to deepen the alliance between the two companies. The partnership began last March when they agreed to sell each other’s artificial intelligence products, Watson and Einstein. Today’s announcement is all about data integration. Salesforce will be adding the ability to include IBM weather data in Lightning apps, while IBM… Read More

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Box shares down 4% despite what Levie calls “one of our strongest quarters”

 Cloud storage company Box reported second quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday. And although the company beat expectations on revenue and losses, it wasn’t enough to please Wall Street.  The stock fell almost 4% in after-hours trading. It seems that part of the issue related to the company losing its cash flow positive status for the quarter, coming in at a negative $14.7 million. Read More

Dropbox Paper gets document previews and some other small updates

 Dropbox continues to tune its products as it tries to tap a bigger audience within larger companies with some updates today to its collaboration tool Paper, including the ability to preview documents before loading them. As a blank slate, Paper is increasingly popular with designers you might talk to in Silicon Valley. It basically turns the process of designing and building a product spec into… Read More

Nuco’s Aion network provides a way to communicate between multiple blockchains

 As blockchains begin to gain in popularity, a need is developing to enable them to communicate with one another. That would require a networking infrastructure to facilitate that communication, and that’s precisely what Nuco, a Toronto-based startup is trying to do with the release of the Aion blockchain network today. Nuco CEO Matthew Spoke says that while each network is ultimately… Read More

Plaid delivers bank account integration to enterprise developers

 Plaid, which is best known for helping financial services customers build applications with direct connections to their users’ bank accounts, announced today that they have released a new SDK to bring that same type of functionality to enterprise developers. “At a high level we are the middle layer between you and your bank,” Zach Perret, CEO at Plaid told TechCrunch. When… Read More

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

OpenStack sees new use cases in edge computing and fast-growing interest in China

 OpenStack, the massive open-source project that aims to bring the power and ease of use of public clouds like AWS and Azure to private data centers, today launched Pike, the sixteenth major version of its software. Read More

Meltwater acquires Algo, an AI-based news and data tracker

 Meltwater, a company originally founded in Norway that provides data to more than 25,000 businesses to track where and how they are mentioned in media and other public platforms, has acquired a startup to double down on how it uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to do its job. The company has acquired Algo, a startup that has built a data analytics platform for real-time… Read More

Salesforce is using AI to democratize SQL so anyone can query databases in natural language

 SQL is about as easy as it gets in the world of programming and yet its learning curve is still steep enough to prevent many people from interacting with relational databases. Salesforce’s AI research team took it upon itself to explore how machine learning might be able to open doors for those without knowledge of SQL in a recent paper. The work, Seq2SQL: Generating Structured… Read More

Okta makes 2FA standard for all customers as it opens Oktane customer conference

Okta Team Rings Bell There was a time when two-factor identification (2FA) was nice to have, but times have changed as hackers get ever more sophisticated and users need whatever edge they can get. Perhaps that’s why Okta, the cloud identity company that went public earlier this year, announced that it’s making 2FA the standard for all its customers. They made the announcement at their annual Oktane… Read More

Seven moves that led to the VMware-Pivotal-Google partnership

 When VMware, Pivotal and Google announced a containerization partnership this morning at VMworld, it sounded more like the introduction to a joke — Google, VMware and Pivotal walked into a bar… But in fact, it’s probably not a coincidence that these three companies have joined together. They actually have a long and intertwined history — with former VMware co-founder… Read More

Apple and Accenture teaming up to help enterprises build advanced mobility tools

 There is a general misconception that Apple is strictly about consumer tools, but the fact is that the company has a big presence in the enterprise just by the sheer number of iPhones and iPads in the business world. It also has some high-profile partnerships with hefty enterprise vendors like IBM, SAP and Cisco. Today, Apple announced that it is building on those relationships with a brand… Read More

Pivotal-VMware-Google forge container partnership

 Pivotal, VMware and Google have teamed up on a containerization project that the companies say should simplify creating, deploying and managing container projects at scale. The companies are taking what is a set of open-source products and providing a commercial underpinning with the various parties in the partnership bringing the product to market. Read More

Monday, August 28, 2017

VMware Cloud is now live on AWS — and IT pros just did a little happy dance

 When VMware announced it was partnering with AWS last fall, it turned more than a few enterprise heads. After all, we’re talking about one company that dominates virtual machines on-prem, and the other in the public cloud. Together, the two companies make a powerful combination — and VMware made the whole shebang official today at VMworld when it announced that VMware Cloud was live… Read More

VMware expands hybrid cloud strategy with series of announcements at VMworld

 VMware, the company that gave rise to the virtual machine concept in the enterprise data center, announced a series of products and services today at VMworld in Las Vegas that show a company clearly shifting to managing hybrid environments. The hybrid strategy really began to gain momentum last year when the company forged agreements with the top public cloud vendors including Microsoft,… Read More

Saturday, August 26, 2017

AI will fundamentally change how we manage content

 Content management is about to undergo a foundational shift as AI and machine learning bring long-sought order to enterprise content. As the volume of content has increased, the ability to manage it all seems to have alluded us. Ironic, since Content Management Systems were supposed to solve the enterprise content organization problem and help prevent your employees from reinventing the wheel. Read More

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Descartes Labs raises $30 million Series B for its brand of geospatial analytics

 Descartes Labs is announcing a $30 million Series B this morning in a large round led by March Capital. This comes just three months after one of Descartes’ largest competitors, Orbital Insight, closed its own $50 million Series C with Sequoia. Both Descartes and Orbital are playing in the emerging market of geospatial analytics. These companies use machine learning to produce insights… Read More

Marketo picks Google Cloud to migrate from on-prem data centers

 Google got a much-needed win today when Marketo, the marketing automation platform, chose Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to migrate its entire on-prem operation. The partnership will extend beyond hosting with Google also providing deeper integration with GSuite. Google says that should enable Marketo customers to generate content and communicate with customers directly from the Marketo… Read More

Google’s App Engine gets a firewall

 Google’s App Engine service, one of its longest-running public cloud computing platforms, is finally getting a fully featured firewall. Until now, developers couldn’t easily restrict access to their applications on the service to only a small set of IP addresses or address ranges for testing, for example. Instead, they had to hard-code a similar solution into their applications… Read More

Inflect’s infrastructure marketplace adds 30 new service providers and 2,200 data center and peering locations

 Inflect, a San Francisco-based startup that wants to make it easier for businesses to find the right co-location facilities, network service and exchange providers, today announced that it has added over 30 service providers and information about 2,200 data centers and networking peering locations to its database since its launch two months ago. These new service providers include industry… Read More

Cubic Telecom gets $46.5M to connect cars and other devices globally

 As automakers ramp up their connected car initiatives, a company that has built a solution to link vehicles up to mobile networks globally has raised a significant round of funding from a group of investors that includes Audi and Qualcomm. Cubic Telecom, a startup out of Dublin, Ireland, that has built a virtual networking solution that lets cars (and other devices) automatically connect to… Read More

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Lumity raises $19M to simplify employee health care choices

 As companies get bigger and bigger, their needs are going to change — including, probably most importantly, their options for health care as their employee base expands and the costs of those plans start to balloon. But the end result is that employees could be presented with a confusing set of plans to pick from without a whole lot of guidance. There’s where Lumity comes in.… Read More

Microsoft launches a new archival storage option for Azure

 Microsoft introduced a new storage option for its Azure cloud computing platform in preview today: the Azure Archive Blob Storage. This will give developers a cheaper alternative for the long-term storage of large amounts of archival data like logs, raw camera footage, audio recordings, transcripts and medical documents and images. This new tier joins the existing hot and cool blob storage… Read More

Forward Networks nets $16M to help prevent network outages

 As IP networks continue to grow and become ever more complex, and people become ever more dependent on them staying up all the time, a startup that is building software tools to help administrators keep networks running has landed a round of funding. Forward Networks — a startup that only emerged from stealth last November and has built a platform aimed at service providers and… Read More

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Microsoft Brainwave aims to accelerate deep learning with FPGAs

 This afternoon Microsoft announced Brainwave, an FPGA-based system for ultra-low latency deep learning in the cloud. Early benchmarking indicates that when using Intel Stratix 10 FPGAs, Brainwave can sustain 39.5 Teraflops on a large gated recurrent unit without any batching. Microsoft has been pouring resources into FPGAs for a while now, deploying large clusters of the field-programmable… Read More