Boston-based private equity shop Berkshire Partners announced this afternoon that it is acquiring Accela — a nearly 20 year old startup that sells regulatory management solutions to government clients. Accela has gone through a troika of CEOs in the last year. Previously acting CEO Mark Jung replaced Maury Blackman last October who had managed the company for about a decade. We… Read More
When you think about dead companies walking, BlackBerry was clearly one that came to mind, but under the leadership of CEO John Chen, the company is actually making a comeback as a software company focused on security, and it’s latest quarterly earnings report suggests the pivot is working splendidly. The company reported revenue of $249 million, which shattered analyst’s… Read More
Here is a cloud computing feature that may seem a bit odd at first but that does actually have its uses. Google’s Compute Engine today launched the beta of a new feature called “nested virtualization.” As the name implies, this essentially allows you to run VMs inside of VMs. But why would you want to do that? “Nested virtualization makes it easier for enterprise users… Read More
Facebook has made no secret of its wish to do more in the online recruitment market — encroaching on territory today dominated by LinkedIn, the leader in tapping social networking graphs to boost job-hunting. Today, Facebook is taking the next step in that process. Facebook will now integrate with ZipRecruiter — an aggregator that allows those looking to fill jobs to post ads to… Read More
When Box landed GE as a customer in 2014, it marked a turning point for the cloud content management company, giving them momentum ahead of their IPO. Three years later, Vera, a data rights management startup is getting a similar feeling, announcing GE’s 300,000 employees would be using Vera to protect the company’s intellectual property as it moved through the world. “This… Read More
Malicious hackers and security breaches that have exposed personal information of millions of people have pushed the issue of online security into the spotlight, not just for individuals but for organizations that do business with them. Now a company called Onfido, which has built a way to help websites verify people’s identities using a photo-based identity document, a selfie and… Read More
Microsoft today announced that it has joined the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as a Premium Sponsor. The OSI, which launched in 1998, takes a relatively pragmatic approach to open source and advocates for open source in business and government. The OSI also reviews open source licenses, which are often vendor specific, to ensure that they conform to “community norms and… Read More
Eden, the office management and tech support platform, has today closed $10 million in Series A funding led by Spectrum 28, with participation from Fifth Wall Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Y Combinator Continuity Fund, Canvas Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Eniac Ventures and other existing investors. Eden started out as a tech support service for both businesses and consumers. The… Read More
Cloudflare has made a name for itself as a content delivery platform and security company, offering services to help keep websites up and running (sometimes running into a little controversy in the process). Now, as the company marks its 7th birthday — it actually launched on September 27, 2010 — it’s moving into another new area, literally and figuratively. Cloudflare is… Read More
In its most recent earnings report, Adobe reported record revenue, but CEO Shantanu Narayen admitted he was a bit disappointed with the Experience Cloud results. That’s the part of Adobe that includes the Analytics Cloud. Today, the company is announcing an update to the analytics product aimed specifically at the lucrative retail/ecommerce market. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence.… Read More
There’s a lot of talk about employees wanting much more flexible work schedules, and a lot of that is thanks to the emergence of companies like Lyft and Uber that allow people to work on their own schedules. But that ability still doesn’t exist for the rest of the world, especially when it comes to hourly jobs with rigid schedules. But that doesn’t mean that employees… Read More
Google Cloud announced today that it has acquired Bitium, a company that focused on offering enterprise-grade identity management and access tools, such as single-sign on, for cloud-based applications. This will basically help Google better manage enterprise cloud customer implementation across an organization, including doing things like setting security levels and access policies for… Read More
Workplace — Facebook’s bid to take on the Slack, Microsoft and the rest of the players in the market of business chat and collaboration — is getting a big push today by way of a significant customer win. The company has signed on Walmart, the retailing giant and the world’s biggest employer with 2.2 million employees on its books. Walmart is rolling out Workplace to… Read More
Microsoft Excel users rejoice. Your favorite spreadsheet is about to get a lot smarter, thanks to the help of machine learning and a better connection to the outside world. As Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s general manager for Office, and Rob Howard, the company’s director of Office 365 ecosystem marketing, showed me during a briefing at the company’s Ignite conference today,… Read More
Managed by Q, the platform that helps office managers handle day-to-day operations, has made its first acquisition, picking up Y Combinator graduates Hivy for an undisclosed amount. Managed By Q lets office managers book cleanings, handy work, IT help, and order office supplies thanks to a partnership with Staples. MBQ has raised upwards of $72 million and now serves New York, Chicago, San… Read More
Splunk has always been data central for IT operations info, but as the logs fill up with ever-increasing amounts of data, it has become impossible for humans to keep up. Recognizing this, Splunk started building in machine learning and artificial intelligence last year, and this week they are enhancing those capabilities to make it easier to surface the data that’s most critical. The… Read More
ProsperWorks, a service that offers a set of Google-centric CRM tools, today announced that it has raised a $53 million Series C round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from GV (the fund you probably still remember as Google Ventures). This new round brings the company’s total funding to $87 million, which, in ProsperWorks’ own words, makes t the “#1 funded… Read More
Lively co-founder Shobin Uralil likes to describe the health savings account as the “401(k) for healthcare” — but that it’s woefully underused as an investment vehicle like a 401(k). So instead of just relying on it as a way to pay for healthcare, Uralil and his co-founder Alex Cyriac set out to build a way to not only help people start up health savings accounts, but… Read More
At its Ignite conference, Microsoft today put its stake in the ground and discussed its progress in building a quantum computer and giving developers tools to experiment with this new computing paradigm on their existing machines. Read More
Moving lots of data to the cloud can take a long time and cost quite a bit, even over fast connections. Like its competitors — and especially AWS — Microsoft has long allowed its Azure users to import data to its cloud by shipping hard drives to its data centers. It’s now going a step further with the preview launch of the 100 TB Azure Data Box, its answer to AWS’s 50… Read More
Microsoft, just like many of its competitors, has gone all in on machine learning. That emphasis is on full display at the company’s Ignite conference this where, where the company today announced a number of new tools for developers who want to build new A.I. models and users who simply want to make use of these pre-existing models — either from their own teams or from Microsoft.… Read More
Last year, Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, but even though the acquisition has long closed, Microsoft hasn’t yet done much with all of the data it gets from the social network. At its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, the company announced some first steps in integrating LinkedIn’s social graph with its Office products. Read More
Ignite is Microsoft’s main annual conference for bringing together its enterprise users and IT community. It’s no surprise then, that security is one of the main topics at the event, with about almost 150 sessions dedicated to the topic. And just as unsurprisingly, Microsoft is also using the event to announce a number of new security features, largely around its Microsoft 365… Read More
Unless you’re a regular Bing user, chances are you haven’t thought about Microsoft’s search engine all that much in recent years. While Microsoft has kept adding features to the service over time, its market share has remained pretty stable. At Microsoft’s Ignite conference in Orlando, however, Bing took center stage for a little while. Read More
Microsoft today announced a major expansion to its Microsoft 365 offerings. The idea behind Microsoft 365 is to provide a single integrated solution that combines subscriptions to Office 365, Windows 10 and (depending on the plan you choose) the Enterprise Mobility and Security suite into a single bundle with prices that start around $12.50 per month and employee for the most basic tier.… Read More
