Google gives large businesses more options to connect directly to its cloud

In September, Google launched the beta of its dedicated interconnects for Google Cloud enterprise users. These direct connections to the Google Cloud Platform essentially give enterprises a private on-ramp to the Google Cloud, which is especially important if they want to mix and match their own data centers with applications that run in Google’s data centers. Today, the dedicated… Read More

Facebook’s Workplace, now at 30,000 orgs, adds Chat desktop apps and group video chat

 It’s been once year since Workplace, Facebook’s social network designed specifically for businesses and other organizations, came out of beta to take on the likes of Slack, Atlassian, Microsoft and others in the world of enterprise collaboration. Now, with 30,000 organizations using Workplace across some 1 million groups (more than double the figures Facebook published April)… Read More

TechStars alums will now get discounted WeWork space

 WeWork and TechStars are buddying up, the organizations announced today. TechStars, the global accelerator program responsible for companies like ClassPass, Sphero and Digital Ocean, will be bringing its program into the WeWork community by running its curriculum at WeWork locations in Toronto, Boston, Kansas City, and New York City. As a part of the deal, TechStars alumni will now get a… Read More

Spotinst delivers spot cloud infrastructure services at discount prices

 Cloud infrastructure vendors offer a range of prices for their services including aggressively priced virtual machines available on the spot market on an as-available basis. The catch is that the vendor can shut down these VMs whenever they happen to need them. Spotinst, a Tel Aviv-based startup, developed a service to buy and distribute that available excess capacity. Today, the company… Read More

Google and Cisco announce hybrid cloud partnership

 Google and Cisco today announced a new partnership around helping their customers build more efficient hybrid cloud solutions. Unsurprisingly, given Google’s recent focus, this partnership centers around the Google-incubated Kubernetes container orchestration tool, as well as the Istio service mesh for connecting and securing microservices across clouds. “Google Cloud and Cisco… Read More

Microsoft’s rebranded Azure Container Service shifts its focus to Kubernetes

 As far as container orchestration goes, Kubernetes is quickly becoming the de facto standard, even as Docker Swarm and Mesos/Mesosphere DC/OS continue to find their own niches. For the longest time, Microsoft argued that one of the advantages of its managed Azure Container Service (ACS) was its support for multiple orchestration tools, but that’s shifting a bit today and Microsoft is… Read More

New Neo4J platform gives developers a set of tools for building enterprise graph applications

 Neo4j builds tools for creating graph databases, and today at its GraphConnect conference in New York City, it announced a new platform for developers to build graph-based applications using a common set of services. Emil Eifrem, Neo4j co-founder, says while the concept of graph databases has steadily gained in popularity in recent years, the databases need to connect to various enterprise… Read More

LinkedIn boosts its messaging with smart replies, pre-written, AI based interactions

 LinkedIn — the Microsoft-owned platform for those who want to network with professional contacts and advance their own careers — has been in the middle of a long-term makeover of its social tools, as it looks to drive more usage. Today comes the latest chapter in that story: the site is unveiling a new smart reply feature in its messaging app, which gives users prompts with… Read More

HashiCorp raises $40M for its cloud infrastructure automation services

 HashiCorp is probably best known for Terraform, its open source tool for automatically provisioning infrastructure by describing it as code.  But the company also offers a whole range of additional open source security tools and products that enable multi-cloud deployments, as well as enterprise versions of these tools that add features for larger teams on top of these free version. Today,… Read More

Primer helps governments and corporations monitor and understand the world’s information

 When Google was founded in 1998, its goal was to organize the world’s information. And for the most part, mission accomplished — but in 19 years the goal post has moved forward and indexing and usefully presenting information isn’t enough. As machine learning matures, it’s becoming feasible for the first time to actually summarize and contextualize the world’s… Read More

Hearsay acquires Mast Mobile’s tech for adding work numbers and CRM integration on your smartphone

 Hearsay Systems is announcing that it has acquired technology and intellectual property from Mast Mobile. The Mast service allowed businesses to manage work and personal numbers on a single mobile phone, and to connect those phones to their customer database. It was backed by Samsung, FirstMark Capital and others. Hearsay, meanwhile, offers marketing and communication tools for the… Read More

Cisco scoops up BroadSoft for $1.9 billion to boost communications tools portfolio

 One thing is clear, Cisco is not afraid to use its considerable cash on hand to fill in holes in its product portfolio. Today it wrote out a big fat check for $1.9 billion to acquire BroadSoft, a Maryland company that delivers unified communications via service providers. The purchase gives Cisco a new way to sell its communications tools as it shifts its focus from a pure networking… Read More

WeWork acquires Flatiron School

 WeWork, the behemoth co-working company valued at $20 billion, has today announced the acquisition of Flatiron School. Flatiron School is a coding education platform that offers both online and offline classes to folks who want a career in the world of tech. The coding academy was launched in 2012 and has raised more than $14 million since inception, according to Crunchbase. The terms of the… Read More

ActionIQ nabs $30M led by A16Z to bring big data targeting to marketers

 The trend of using big data analytics to glean more targeted insights for your business continues to be democratized, with an increasing number of startups hitting the market to help those who are not data scientists nor engineers take advantage of these kinds of tools. In the latest development, a startup called ActionIQ — a marketing activation platform that gives marketers better… Read More

Atlassian is on one heck of a run

 When Atlassian went public at the end of 2015, it was a bit of an anomaly: a tech IPO whose numbers looked quite good with some profitability. It’s been almost two years since that IPO, and since then, the company’s valuation is at around $9 billion. The company popped 32% on its first day and hit a valuation of $5.8 billion. A lot of that is thanks to an insane run this year so… Read More

Apple’s enterprise strategy begins to take shape

 When Apple announced its partnership with GE this week, it would have been easy to dismiss it as another random collaboration from a company people don’t generally associate with the enterprise. After all, Apple killed off their enterprise server product years ago. You might rightly ask, what exactly do they have to do with the enterprise these days? But if you consider the notion of… Read More

Data is the name of the game, as Intel Capital puts $60M in 15 startups, $566M in 2017 overall

Intel Capital, the investment arm of the processor giant, is today announcing its latest tranche of investments, a total of nearly $60 million going in to 15 startups that are working on solving different problems in the bigger area of big data (with a full rundown below). The investments come on the back of a big year for the group: in 2017 so far, Intel says that it’s invested $566… Read More

SendGrid files for marketing email IPO

 Denver-based SendGrid has filed for an IPO. The company, which helps marketers send emails to customers, says in its S-1 that it’s processed more than “one trillion emails.” Revenue for last year was $79.9 million, compared with $58.5 million in 2015 and $42.3 million the year before. The business is unprofitable, losing $3.9 million in for 2016, compared to $5.9 million… Read More

Two Google alums just raised $60M to rethink documents

 When you open a Google doc or a spreadsheet, you get a blank spreadsheet and some documentation as to what you can do with it — and that’s pretty much where we’ve been for quite some time. But two MIT graduates, coming in from Microsoft and Google, have built up a team that for the past three years has quietly been trying to rethink how we approach documents. CEO Shishir… Read More

MongoDB shares pop 25% in its public market debut

 MongoDB made its public debut with a bang, with jumping more than 25%, today after spending the past several days revising up its expectations throughout the IPO process — which seems to have landed on the right spot. The company provides open-source technology that can be attractive for early-stage startups that want to get off the ground and then seeks to convert those companies to… Read More

Cisco’s buying machine learning startup Perspica and folding team into AppDynamics

 Cisco announced today that it intends to acquire Perspica, a machine learning-driven operations analytics firm that has raised $8.5 million. Cisco intends to fold Perspica’s team into AppDynamics, the company it purchased earlier this year for $3.7 billion. Cisco did not share the Perspica purchase price. All of these machinations have a purpose. Cisco is of course at its heart a… Read More

Swedish lock giant Assa Abloy acquires smart lock maker August Home

 The smart home market continues to heat up, and the legacy giants do not want to get locked out: quite literally. This morning, Assa Abloy, the $23 billion Swedish lock giant that owns Yale and many other brands — announced that it is buying US-based smart lock maker August Home to double down on new technology.  Terms of the deal are not being disclosed but we have asked both August… Read More

MongoDB prices its IPO at $24 per share

 MongoDB has finished up what is essentially the final step in going public, pricing its IPO at $24 and raising $192 million in the process. The company will debut on the public markets tomorrow and will once again test the waters for companies that are looking to build full-fledged businesses on the back of open-sourced software. MongoDB provides open-sourced database software that can be… Read More

Adobe expands its Creative Cloud services for enterprises

 Adobe is using its annual MAX conference to launch a number of new features that are especially interesting to enterprises today. Usually, when we talk about enterprise software, we’re talking about pretty boring line-of-business applications, but as many of the biggest companies are also bringing their creative agencies in-house, their need for collaborative tools that work across teams… Read More

Now part of Cisco, AppDynamics update looks to deepen understanding of business performance

 When Cisco acquired AppDynamics in January for $3.7 billion, it was a big surprise as the company was on the verge of going public. While it’s probably too soon to say how intertwined it will become in the Cisco product family, it continues to march forward announcing an update to the products set at the AppD Summit today in New York City. Today’s announcements build on the… Read More

Apple and GE announce deep partnership

 While Apple has had its share of enterprise partners in recent years including IBM, Cisco and SAP, today’s announcement that it will be working directly with GE feels a bit different with the two companies more closely intertwined than in previous deals. Apple and GE have committed to build a set of development tools and to develop apps together using Apple’s design sensibility… Read More