Atlassian is perhaps the quintessential example of how new companies are built. Founded in Australia, the company has scaled and is now firmly entrenched in the U.S. as a publicly listed company.The interesting thing about Atlassian, at least compared to better known SaaS companies such as Box or Salesforce, is that it has scaled without resorting to the traditional model of having high-paid, and high-pressure, salespeople. Atlassian seems to have mastered the viral approach to selling, and it has an almost rabid following within enterprise development shops.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I've known Jeff Lawson, the founder and CEO of communications provider Twilio, for a number of years. I first sat down and chatted with Lawson (see video below) five years ago. At that time, our conversation was about how Lawson believed the new style of enterprise was enabling its people to do more, faster.At that stage, Lawson was a couple of years into his Twilio journey, and the company was a much smaller organization. Today, Twilio has over 500 employees, with headquarters in San Francisco and other offices in Bogotá, Colombia; Dublin, Ireland; Hong Kong; London; Mountain View, California; Munich; New York City; Singapore; and Tallinn, Estonia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Applications today look different from how they looked only a few short years ago. Instead of generally monolithic architecture, modern applications take on a far more modular approach leveraging component third-party services, new ways to deploy and interactions with an increasing number of third-party systems and tools. All of this complexity makes it hard for developers, operations teams or a combination thereof to really see what is going on.For that reason, vendors are increasingly looking to offer visibility as a specific product. That is the case for JFrog, which today announced Xray, a tool that aims to deliver transparency across applications. JFrog offers software management and distribution tools. Given that it already helps organizations deploy applications and manage those applications, it is a natural progression to offer visibility across those apps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Kinvey has long been a mover and shaker in the Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) world. That somewhat obscure acronym actually stands for something pretty important—the enabling of mobile applications. As the world increasingly demands data and applications to be accessible anywhere and anytime, mobile applications become even more important. But if you're an enterprise CIO or IT leader with a bunch of conflicting priorities, the last thing you want to do is wrangle the infrastructure and foundational aspects of building mobile apps. This is where Kinvey comes in.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Awhile ago I wrote a about Dome 9's security offering and was skeptical about its long-term opportunity. As I saw it, offering an add-on security product to a platform as voracious as Amazon Web Services (AWS) was a recipe for disruption. AWS has a history of intense innovation, and often ecosystem partners have been steamrolled by that process. As I saw it, Dome 9 filled a short-term opportunity that would soon be fulfilled by AWS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Awhile ago I wrote a about Dome 9's security offering and was skeptical about its long-term opportunity. As I saw it, offering an add-on security product to a platform as voracious as Amazon Web Services (AWS) was a recipe for disruption. AWS has a history of intense innovation, and often ecosystem partners have been steamrolled by that process. As I saw it, Dome 9 filled a short-term opportunity that would soon be fulfilled by AWS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I'm a massive fan of HelloSign. I seem to have an ever-increasing number of documents to sign and forms to fill out. This, coupled with the fact that I don't work from one fixed location, means that I always had lots of frustration when it came to form filling. Having to find a printer to print a form out, a pen to fill it in and then some way of digitizing the form to send it back was a real pain.I haven't had to do any of that for a year or two now—I simply use HelloSign (and its super-handy Gmail integration) to fill in, sign and send forms in a flash. So, now that my business form signing problems are solved, what other areas can HelloSign help with?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Apache Hadoop ecosystem is a busy one.Cloudera, HortonWorks, MapR, IBM, Microsoft, Datastax and Pivotal are but a few of the vendors either focusing purely on Hadoop or offering a Hadoop product on the side. And why not? The open-source software framework for distributed computing and data storage has grown from strength to strength.The genesis of Hadoop came from a paper published back in 2003 by Google. A few years later, Doug Cutting, who at the time was working for Yahoo, took up the project and gave it a name (after his son's toy elephant, no less). And from that humble beginning, a massive ecosystem has grown.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News today from Hitachi is that the company is forming a new, standalone Silicon Valley-based unit to explore and execute upon opportunities within the Internet of Things.This is interesting, since the parent group, Hitachi Limited, has a dizzying variety of business units, many (if not most) of which have their own IoT opportunities. Indeed, when attending a Hitachi Data Systems conference last year, I was amazed at the variety of businesses that fall under the Hitachi moniker. Many of those businesses were demonstrating in the expo hall, and a huge number had an IoT bent to what they were doing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As a freelancer who has worked for a large range of big companies over the years, I'm all too aware of how important contracts are to an enterprise's working.I've long been amazed that coming to a decision about a body of work tends to be a relatively quick process, but actually negotiating and formalizing the contract becomes an incredibly drawn out process. I've often laughed when I've been sent a 40-page contract by a vendor for a tiny piece of work. I have neither the legal skills nor the legal budget to pore through the document. I tend to just let things slide—at the end of the day, I'm just keen to get the job happening.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Puppet CEO Luke Kanies has seen a lots of change since he founded Puppet.The company, whose goal is to make the deployment of IT infrastructure quicker and easier than before, came about around the time widespread adoption of virtualization occurred. This adoption called for a new way of working: instead of physically racking and stacking machines and installing software on them at the same time, the ability to programmatically set up servers called for a new way to set up the software that runs on them. This is the area that Puppet and its arch-rival Chef are focused on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ExtraHop is a vendor that offers real-time stream analytics for data in motion. That's a fancy-schmancy way of saying ExtraHop analyzes communication across the network to give visibility into application performance, availability and security. ExtraHop is an agent-less, appliance-based offering that promises cross-tier visibility.Given this message of visibility across geographically distributed operations, and across multiple infrastructure providers, it is perhaps unsurprising to see ExtraHop today announce the availability of extended public cloud monitoring functionality to now include Microsoft Azure (alongside the existing Amazon Web Services). On top of the Azure extension, ExtraHop is extending its offering to support branch offices to benefit geographically dispersed organizations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At the OpenStack Summit in Austin recently, one of the companies invited to keynote on the first day was a cloud, hosting and services vendor from France, OVH. Like most of the people in the room, the name OVH raised my eyebrows. I've been covering the cloud world since it existed, and I'd never come across the company. Maybe they were a new startup or something?It turns out that, far from being a new startup, OVH is a mature and expansive vendor. It's just that they're primarily involved in Europe in general, and France in particular. That looks set to change, however, and I took the opportunity to sit down with Pascal Jaillon from OVH to hear what the company is up to. The OVH product line spans traditional hosting, hosted Microsoft Exchange, domain name provisioning, and, of course, cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Every now and then I get a product demo that makes me grin. One where the value of the product is just so obvious that I can't argue. That was the case recently when I met with Teridion and heard about what they're up to.Technically speaking Teridion offers a cloud-optimized routing platform. That is an uber-technical description and doesn't really do the product justice. But how about a description that is easier to understand? Like Waze, but for the internet? Or how about some results—a 20 times internet performance improvement?Teridion offers the Global Cloud Network (GCN) a new approach to content delivery that is both non-caching and secure—and required no hardware or pre-provisioning of servers. GCN is a globally routed overlay network leveraging cloud-optimized routing. Teridion deploys a number of Cloud Virtual Routers across the global data centers of multiple cloud vendors. These routers automatically sense localized traffic issues and route traffic to the best path for optimum speed. The net result is blazing performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Investments happen all the time. And usually a modest(!) sub $4 million series A round wouldn't raise much attention. After all, Silicon Valley is built on a high cadence of startup founding, investments and eventual exit out the other end (be it successful or otherwise).But this one is interesting in part because of those investing in the company, and also because of who is involved in the founding of this particular startup.SnappyData is building an in-memory transactional analytics database that is built on top of the Apache Spark open-source initiative. Nothing too exciting there, right? Well, an added twist is that the SnappyData leadership team—Richard Lamb, Jags Ramnarayanan and Sudhir Menon—previously built GemFire into one of most widely adopted in-memory data grid products in the market. Oh, and that little company, GemFire, was eventually acquired by VMware. And for those unaccustomed to the slight incestuousness that occurs in the technology industry, VMware went on to create, and eventually spin out, the Pivotal organization, headline investors today in SnappyData.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Traditionally the way an organization gives its remote employees access to corporate applications is via a Virtual Private Network (VPN). VPNs have never been a whole lot of fun to use, but as the world moves to ever higher numbers of discrete applications and a huge variety of access devices, the traditional VPN model is looking tired.Zscaler aims to change that with Zscaler Private Access, a new service that promises organizations to provide access to internal applications and services while ensuring the security of their networks.Zscaler is an internet security company. The company offers a secure web gateway, fully from the cloud. In doing so, Zscaler is helping to move security further out into the internet backbone. Indeed, Zscaler is operated from over 100 data centers globally. Zscaler covers a host of security needs, including internet security, next-generation firewall, web security, sandboxing/advanced persistent threat (APT) protection, data loss prevention, SSL inspection, traffic shaping, policy management and threat intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Traditionally the way an organization gives its remote employees access to corporate applications is via a Virtual Private Network (VPN). VPNs have never been a whole lot of fun to use, but as the world moves to ever higher numbers of discrete applications and a huge variety of access devices, the traditional VPN model is looking tired.Zscaler aims to change that with Zscaler Private Access, a new service that promises organizations to provide access to internal applications and services while ensuring the security of their networks.Zscaler is an internet security company. The company offers a secure web gateway, fully from the cloud. In doing so, Zscaler is helping to move security further out into the internet backbone. Indeed, Zscaler is operated from over 100 data centers globally. Zscaler covers a host of security needs, including internet security, next-generation firewall, web security, sandboxing/advanced persistent threat (APT) protection, data loss prevention, SSL inspection, traffic shaping, policy management and threat intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Salesforce is a juggernaut.In the 10 or so years since it was founded, the company has pretty much single-handedly changed the face of the software industry. Concepts such as SaaS, the cloud and enterprise application marketplaces were, if not invented, at least popularized by Salesforce.In the past decade, Salesforce has gone from being a very interesting and agile CRM vendor to being a provider of pretty much an entire enterprise software stack—from applications at the top end through to development platforms for the creation of applications. Indeed, the fact that health IT vendor Veeva was able to undertake an IPO based on a product built entirely on Salesforce's platform is testimony to what Salesforce has achieved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News today from security testing vendor Bugcrowd highlights an increasing trend towards leveraging an outside community to do good things for organizations.First, the news: Bugcrowd is investing a $15 million Series B led by Blackbird Ventures along with existing investors Costanoa Venture Capital, Industry Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Rally Ventures. Not one to miss out on a funding opportunity, Salesforce Ventures also joined the round. The company has now raised $24 million since its founding at the Startmate accelerator in Sydney, Australia.What Bugcrowd does is pretty simple. Its flagship product, Crowdcontrol, is used by a bunch of high-profile brands, including reditKarma, Fitbit, Motorola, Tesla, TripAdvisor and Western Union, to resolve security bugs in their products. But this isn't any magic bullet “apply our advanced platform and resolve your bugs automatically” kind of science fiction. Instead, Crowdcontrol leverages that most ancient of resources—the crowd. Bugcrowd has built a vetted community of over 27,000 security researchers, all of whom helps Bugcrowd's customers reveal the holes in their software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News today from security testing vendor Bugcrowd highlights an increasing trend towards leveraging an outside community to do good things for organizations.First, the news: Bugcrowd is investing a $15 million Series B led by Blackbird Ventures along with existing investors Costanoa Venture Capital, Industry Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Rally Ventures. Not one to miss out on a funding opportunity, Salesforce Ventures also joined the round. The company has now raised $24 million since its founding at the Startmate accelerator in Sydney, Australia.What Bugcrowd does is pretty simple. Its flagship product, Crowdcontrol, is used by a bunch of high-profile brands, including reditKarma, Fitbit, Motorola, Tesla, TripAdvisor and Western Union, to resolve security bugs in their products. But this isn't any magic bullet “apply our advanced platform and resolve your bugs automatically” kind of science fiction. Instead, Crowdcontrol leverages that most ancient of resources—the crowd. Bugcrowd has built a vetted community of over 27,000 security researchers, all of whom helps Bugcrowd's customers reveal the holes in their software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ben Kepes