The index closed up 2.04 percent today.
Category: Uncategorized
Data management startup Rubrik gets $261M at a $3.3B valuation as it moves into security and compliance
There is a growing demand for stronger security at every point in the IT ecosystem, and today, one of the the more successful enterprise startups to emerge in the last several years is announcing a big round of funding to provide that.
Rubrik, which provides enterprise data management and backup services across on-premise, cloud and hybrid networks, has raised $261 million in funding at a $3.3 billion valuation from Bain Capital Ventures and previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and IVP. It intends to use the funding to build (and buy) tech to expand deeper into security and compliance services alongside its existing data management products.
“As we have demonstrated leadership in data recovery, our customers have been demanding new products and services from us,” CEO and co-founder Bipul Sinha said in an interview, “so we’ve raised capital to double down on that.”
This Series E brings the total raised by Rubrik to $553 million, and it is a big leap for the company: its last raise of $180 million, in 2017, valued Rubrik at $1.3 billion.
Rubrik is not disclosing any other specific financial numbers with the news – Sinha’s response to the question was that he thinks the valuation jump speaks for itself. He also confirmed the company is not profitable, but intentionally so.
“Our goal is to build a long-term, iconic company, and so we want to become profitable but not at the cost of growth,” he said. “We are leading this market transformation while it continues to grow.”
That market transformation is to provide services – and up to now, specifically data back-up services – for enterprises that operate their networks across a hybrid environment, with data used and stored on premises, in the cloud, and sometimes in multiple clouds.
There are a number of other companies that compete with it in backup including biggies like Druva, CommVault and EMC, but Rubrik was an early mover in identifying a need to backup and provide data recovery across a mix of locations.
Moving into security and compliance is a natural progression for the company.
There has always been a synergy between Rubrik’s core business and security/compliance. Often the need for backup and recovery arises specifically as a result of security breaches or other glitches that result from people accessing data when they are not supposed to, and that issue gets compounded when you have data stored and used across multiple locations.
“The fragmentation across cloud and on-prem services creates issues around security and data management,” Sinha said. “The more fragmentation you have, the more important Rubrik [or other data management services] get.”
Similarly, moving into security and compliance together goes hand-in-hand because both address similar needs at companies to be handling information responsibly. “Security and compliance are joined at the hip from a regulatory perspective,” Sinha said.
Up to now, Rubrik has mostly built its service from the ground up. One notable exception has been that it made an acquisition – its first – last year when it acquired NoSQL data backup specialist Datos IO, which helped Rubrik further expand from appliance-based management to cloud-based.
In the case of adding on more security and compliance offerings, it’s not clear yet whether that will be built organically or via acquisition (and there are indeed a number of security startups out there that could be candidates if it’s the latter).
“Rubrik is fundamentally an innovation driven company,” Sinha said. “We like coherent and consistent architecture. Having said that, as a responsible and ambitious company, we are always looking at the marketplace, at where there are the teams that we can acquire.”
Notably, the company has started to signal its growing interest in this area in recent months. The latest build of its flagship Andes data management platform placed security features center stage, and now we can expect to see more of that.
Existing customer loyalty has always attracted investors to the company, and that’s been the case here, too.
At a time when many tech observers are wondering if we are gearing up for a “winter” in the startup ecosystem – where, in a buoyant climate, investors have gone all-in with perhaps too much exuberance that will not bear out in terms of startups’ actual performance – the thinking is that Rubrik’s track record will help it continue to win business both on its legacy services, and as it ventures into newer areas.
“Rubrik has won the trust and loyalty of large enterprise customers around the globe by offering a simple and reliable solution that solves the challenge of protecting and managing data in a hybrid cloud world,” said Enrique Salem, former CEO at Symantec and Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, in a statement. “Given my experience leading the largest enterprise data protection company, we are confident that Rubrik is positioned to win and be the market leader in enterprise cloud data management.”
Salesforce Commerce Cloud updates keep us shopping with AI-fueled APIs
As people increasingly use their mobile phones and other devices to shop, it has become imperative for vendors to improve the shopping experience, making it as simple as possible, given the small footprint. One way to do that is using artificial intelligence. Today, Salesforce announced some AI-enhanced APIs designed to keep us engaged as shoppers.
For starters, the company wants to keep you shopping. That means providing an intelligent recommendation engine. If you searched for a particular jacket, you might like these similar styles, or this scarf and gloves. That’s fairly basic as shopping experiences go, but Salesforce didn’t stop there. It’s letting developers embed this ability to recommend products in any app whether that’s maps, social or mobile.
That means shopping recommendations could pop up anywhere developers think it makes sense like on your maps app. Whether consumers see this as a positive thing, Salesforce says when you add intelligence to the shopping experience, it increases sales anywhere from 7-16 percent, so however you feel about it, it seems to be working.
The company also wants to make it simple to shop. Instead of entering a long faceted search as has been the traditional way of shopping in the past – footwear, men’s, sneakers, red – you can take a picture of a sneaker (or anything you like) and the visual search algorithm should recognize it and make recommendations based on that picture. It reduces data entry for users, which is typically a pain on the mobile device, even if it has been simplified by checkboxes.
Salesforce has also made inventory availability as a service, allowing shoppers to know exactly where the item they want is available in the world. If they want to pick up in-store that day, it shows where the store is on a map and could even embed that into your ride-sharing app to indicate exactly where you want to go. The idea is to create this seamless experience between consumer desire and purchase.
Finally, Salesforce has added some goodies to make developers happy too including the ability to browse the Salesforce API library and find the ones that make most sense for what they are creating. This includes code snippets to get started. It may not seem like a big deal, but as companies the size of Salesforce increase their API capabilities (especially with the Mulesoft acquisition), it’s harder to know what’s available. The company has also created a sandboxing capability to let developers experiment and build capabilities with these APIs in a safe way.
The basis of Commerce Cloud is Demandware, the company Salesforce acquired two years ago for $2.8 billion. Salesforce’s intelligence platform is called Einstein. In spite of its attempt to personify the technology, it’s really about bringing artificial intelligence across the Salesforce platform of products, as it has with today’s API announcements.
In 2019, Tech Must Win Back Public Trust – Or Sink
From revelations that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube helped Russian intelligence manipulate western elections, to Google’s record $5 billion antitrust fine for misusing Android, 2018 has been a year of scandal for tech’s big leaguers, that has eroded trust in its power for good.
Poor performances from CEOs in front of cameras and congressmen and women hasn’t helped. Mark Zuckerberg’s dead-eyed deflections are the go-to in this department–in the words of Kara Swisher, he and his company “have been working humanity’s last nerve for far too long now–but there are plenty other lowlights that the industry’s key players should strive to avoid in 2019 (Jack Dorsey, here’s looking at you).
“Over these 12 months our relationship with tech has both been darker and more muddy because it becomes increasingly clear that all the bright and shiny positive potentials of tech are at the risk of being darkened by forced misuse of data, manipulation, supervision, no respect of the citizen, no respect of individual rights,” EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager told Britain’s BBC this week.
The EU’s GDPR law has been decried in Silicon Valley, a place where government intervention into business is about as welcome as a kick to the groin. For tech to win back public trust, its luminaries must shed the idea they exist on a higher plain that states, stop breaking things before they get caught, and realize that people on the street–their users–often now equate tech companies with the robber barons of the Second Industrial Revolution, at the end of the 19th century.
Facebook usership among teens is in decline. More and more western users are facing up to a life without social media. The question is no longer if people can live without it, but how and when they will give up. That should worry everybody in the industry. History is littered with firms and sectors that sat still on declining numbers (just ask Yahoo, or Dell, or hundreds of other flashes in the digital pan).
If tech’s biggest companies can work with legislators and avoid the scandals that have hit them hard in 2018, 2019 could be a year in which the public speaks eagerly about adopting new technology, rather than first asking questions about its public benefit. If not, expect the clamor for Facebook, Google and co to be broken up to grow.
The post In 2019, Tech Must Win Back Public Trust – Or Sink appeared first on Red Herring.
How One Entrepreneur Is Bringing Vintage Clothes to Your Doorstep
Jessica Abo sits down with Shilla Kim-Parker, the CEO and Founder of ShopThrilling.com, to discuss how she’s helping unique and eco-friendly fashion reach more people around the world.
6 Ways Organizations Have Launched Into Digital Transformation
6 Ways Organizations Have Launched Into Digital Transformation
juliet.vanwage…
Wed, 01/09/2019 – 10:48
IT leaders across several industries are intrigued by digital transformation, but many still haven’t figured out how to put it to work for their organization. Some organizations laid the groundwork with early Internet of Things projects. Others can benefit by studying these early successes and failures.
As enterprises look for effective, manageable entry points into digital transformation and IoT, they should consider use cases proven effective for organizations in their industries. Here are six of the most common – and valuable – ways businesses are already adopting innovative solutions.
MORE FROM BIZTECH: What’s stalling digital transformation efforts?
1. Energy Management and Smart Buildings Buoy Efficiency
This is a use case that applies to organizations in practically all industries, as every dollar that can be saved from reductions in heating, cooling and water usage can be reinvested in the business. Additionally, many organizations undertake ambitious energy and water conservation efforts, and smart building programs can increase worker comfort. According to Intel, a smart building program can cut energy costs as much as 8 percent in the first year of implementation, with annual savings reaching up to 30 percent in subsequent years.
2. IoT Data Makes Predictive Maintenance A Reality
With connected sensors, organizations can continuously monitor the condition of high-value and mission-critical equipment for signs of imminent failure, and then either proactively perform repairs or replace the equipment before it malfunctions. This not only decreases maintenance costs, but also prevents productivity losses by minimizing equipment downtime. Predictive maintenance is an especially important IoT use case for industries (such as the gas, oil and energy sectors) that require organizations to operate in remote environments where maintenance is a major challenge.
Shell, in partnership with Microsoft, is one organization that’s making use of IoT data to institute predictive maintenance efforts on its oil rigs and at gas stations.
“From pipelines through to platforms to wind farms, you have to maintain a heck of a lot of kit in this value chain,” Dan Jeavons, general manager of data science at Shell, said during a recent panel discussion at Microsoft Ignite of the company’s predictive maintenance efforts. “And if we can provide our operators with less information around what’s going to happen next and allow them to move toward condition-based monitoring of equipment, to move toward real-time detections of anomalies, that’s going to really change the game.”
3. Predictive Analytics Offer Organizations a Boost
As organizations collect and analyze more data, they are finding ways to use this information to forecast vital variables such as customer needs and product demand. Better forecasting can help enterprises to get ahead of the market with their offerings, and can lead to manufacturing schedules, marketing campaigns and pricing strategies that allow them to match the type and quantity of their products and services to changing conditions on the ground. The data needed for effective predictive analytics programs can be gleaned from IoT components including video feeds, mobile geo-location, social media channels and log files.
4. Connected Video Surveillance and Monitoring Ups Safety
Many businesses have utilized security cameras for decades. By connecting IP-based cameras to the network and applying analytics tools, organizations can automate existing processes and arrive at valuable new insights. Many states and cities already use camera systems to automate processes such as speed-limit enforcement and toll collection, and analysts foresee a future in which cameras are able to use facial recognition and other intelligent features to make “decisions” on their own. For instance, public street cameras might one day automatically dispatch first responders after an automobile accident.
5. Real-Time Location Tracking Improves the Customer Experience
Tools such as radio frequency ID tags and mobile beacons can track people and assets. These solutions are often used in the retail sector, as well as settings where inventory management is a critical concern. In retail, the simple act of keeping the right products in the right place on the shelf so they’re available for customers to purchase can prove deceptively difficult. And when retailers make mistakes in this area, it often costs them sales and has a negative impact on the overall customer experience.
“In an era of omni-channel retail – which demands high inventory accuracy – the errors created in the supply chain propagate downstream and ultimately impact a retailer’s ability to meet customer demand in a timely manner,” a recent report published by IDC notes. “As our results suggest, several of these errors found at the store or in direct shipments to the consumer via a retailer’s fulfillment center are caused by the upstream disparity between the information flow and the physical product flow amongst brands and retailers. … RFID technology eliminates the errors commonly found in the process, ensuring the accurate flow of information and products.
According to the International Council of Shopping Centers, 41 percent of shoppers want stores to provide interactive shelves to give product information, and 36 percent are interested in in-store tablets that show a larger offering of products to purchase.
6. Worker Safety Gets a Boost from IoT
According to the International Labor Organization, workplace accidents account for 320,000 deaths each year, with non-fatal accidents numbering more than 300 million annually. IoT-connected wearable devices, including helmets and wristbands, can help prevent these incidents by collecting biometric, environmental and geo-location data and sending real-time alerts to employees and managers if workers’ well-being is compromised. For example, wearables can help ensure workers aren’t exposed to excessive levels of heat, cold, radiation, noise or toxic gases.
AWS gives open source the middle finger
AWS launched DocumentDB today, a new database offering that is compatible with the MongoDB API. The company describes DocumentDB as a “fast, scalable, and highly available document database that is designed to be compatible with your existing MongoDB applications and tools.” In effect, it’s a hosted drop-in replacement for MongoDB that doesn’t use any MongoDB code.
AWS argues that while MongoDB is great at what it does, its customers have found it hard to build fast and highly available applications on the open-source platform that can scale to multiple terabytes and hundreds of thousands of reads and writes per second. So what the company did was build its own document database, but made it compatible with the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API.
If you’ve been following the politics of open source over the last few months, you’ll understand that the optics of this aren’t great. It’s also no secret that AWS has long been accused of taking the best open-source projects and re-using and re-branding them without always giving back to those communities.
The wrinkle here is that MongoDB was one of the first companies that aimed to put a stop to this by re-licensing its open-source tools under a new license that explicitly stated that companies that wanted to do this had to buy a commercial license. Since then, others have followed.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it’s not surprising that Amazon would try to capitalize on the popularity and momentum of MongoDB’s document model,” MongoDB CEO and president Dev Ittycheria told us. “However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market.”
That’s a pretty feisty comment. Last November, Ittycheria told my colleague Ron Miller that he believed that AWS loved MongoDB because it drives a lot of consumption. In that interview, he also noted that “customers have spent the last five years trying to extricate themselves from another large vendor. The last thing they want to do is replay the same movie.”
MongoDB co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz echoed this. “In order to give developers what they want, AWS has been pushed to offer an imitation MongoDB service that is based on the MongoDB code from two years ago,” he said. “Our entire company is focused on one thing – giving developers the best way to work with data with the freedom to run anywhere. Our commitment to that single mission will continue to differentiate the real MongoDB from any imitation products that come along.”
A company spokesperson for MongoDB also highlighted that the 3.6 API that DocumentDB is compatible with is now two years old and misses most of the newest features, including ACID transactions, global clusters and mobile sync.
To be fair, AWS has become more active in open source lately and, in a way, it’s giving developers what they want (and not all developers are happy with MongoDB’s own hosted service). Bypassing MongoDB’s licensing by going for API comparability, given that AWS knows exactly why MongoDB did that, was always going to be a controversial move and won’t endear the company to the open-source community.
AWS gives open source the middle finger
AWS launched DocumentDB today, a new database offering that is compatible with the MongoDB API. The company describes DocumentDB as a “fast, scalable, and highly available document database that is designed to be compatible with your existing MongoDB applications and tools.” In effect, it’s a hosted drop-in replacement for MongoDB that doesn’t use any MongoDB code.
AWS argues that while MongoDB is great at what it does, its customers have found it hard to build fast and highly available applications on the open-source platform that can scale to multiple terabytes and hundreds of thousands of reads and writes per second. So what the company did was build its own document database, but made it compatible with the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API.
If you’ve been following the politics of open source over the last few months, you’ll understand that the optics of this aren’t great. It’s also no secret that AWS has long been accused of taking the best open-source projects and re-using and re-branding them without always giving back to those communities.
The wrinkle here is that MongoDB was one of the first companies that aimed to put a stop to this by re-licensing its open-source tools under a new license that explicitly stated that companies that wanted to do this had to buy a commercial license. Since then, others have followed.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it’s not surprising that Amazon would try to capitalize on the popularity and momentum of MongoDB’s document model,” MongoDB CEO and president Dev Ittycheria told us. “However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market.”
That’s a pretty feisty comment. Last November, Ittycheria told my colleague Ron Miller that he believed that AWS loved MongoDB because it drives a lot of consumption. In that interview, he also noted that “customers have spent the last five years trying to extricate themselves from another large vendor. The last thing they want to do is replay the same movie.”
MongoDB co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz echoed this. “In order to give developers what they want, AWS has been pushed to offer an imitation MongoDB service that is based on the MongoDB code from two years ago,” he said. “Our entire company is focused on one thing – giving developers the best way to work with data with the freedom to run anywhere. Our commitment to that single mission will continue to differentiate the real MongoDB from any imitation products that come along.”
A company spokesperson for MongoDB also highlighted that the 3.6 API that DocumentDB is compatible with is now two years old and misses most of the newest features, including ACID transactions, global clusters and mobile sync.
To be fair, AWS has become more active in open source lately and, in a way, it’s giving developers what they want (and not all developers are happy with MongoDB’s own hosted service). Bypassing MongoDB’s licensing by going for API comparability, given that AWS knows exactly why MongoDB did that, was always going to be a controversial move and won’t endear the company to the open-source community.
What is Kubernetes? Container orchestration explained
Docker containers have reshaped the way people think about developing, deploying, and maintaining software. Drawing on the native isolation capabilities of modern operating systems, containers support VM-like separation of concerns, but with far less overhead and far greater flexibility of deployment than hypervisor-based virtual machines.
Containers are so lightweight and flexible, they have given rise to new application architectures. The new approach is to package the different services that constitute an application into separate containers, and to deploy those containers across a cluster of physical or virtual machines. This gives rise to the need for container orchestration-a tool that automates the deployment, management, scaling, networking, and availability of container-based applications.
Gallup Poll: Labeling Sites May Help Stop Fake News Spread
A new Gallup survey suggests people are less likely to share stories from sites that are clearly marked as untrustworthy.
Susan Anderson 