Enterprise

AWS makes Neptune, its graph database service, serverless • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Apps, AWS, Enterprise, neptuneNo Comments

Nearly five years ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched Neptune, a service for running apps that need a graph database to store and query connected data sets. Now, to keep up with the serverless trend, AWS is expanding the offering with Amazon Neptune Serverless, a serverless option for Neptune that automatically scales to support variable graph database workloads. Unlike traditional databases, graph databases store nodes and relationships instead of tables, columns and documents. Developers building apps that track relationships among connected data points use graph databases to understand those relationships within the full data set; graph database use cases include contact tracing, fraud detection, drug discovery and even network security. Graph databases are powerful, to be sure. But they’re also unpredictable in terms of processing overhead. Typically, graph databases require a dev team to continuously monitor and reconfigure compute capacity to maintain good performance. Amazon Neptune Serverless ostensibly solves this problem by autonomously provisioning, scaling and managing clusters of graph database instances. Neptune Serverless supports the same graph query languages as Amazon Neptune, and customers only pay for the apps they use, according to AWS VP of databases, analytics and machine learning Swami Sivasubramanian. “Customers have asked us to take care of the heavy lifting associated with managing capacity and optimizing for cost and performance,” Sivasubramanian said in a press release. “Now, with Amazon Neptune Serverless, customers have a graph database that automatically provisions and seamlessly scales clusters to provide just the right amount of capacity to meet demand.” Neptune Serverless is generally available as of today today to AWS customers running Neptune in the U.S. East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Ireland) and Europe (London) server regions. Amazon says it’ll come to additional regions in the future. Serverless computing, which abstracts away the complexities of managing server capacity, is a growing trend in software development. According to one 2020 survey, 50% of AWS users said that they were using some degree of serverless capabilities. And CB Insights estimated the market for serverless was worth $7.7 billion in 2021, up from $1.9 billion in 2016. AWS last majorly expanded its serverless product portfolio in April, when it launched Amazon Aurora Serverless V2, its serverless database service, and SageMaker Serverless Inference, a solution for running AI systems that doesn’t require configuring the underlying infrastructure. July saw the release of several new serverless analytics offerings, including Amazon EMR, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka and Amazon Redshift.

Thoma Bravo, Sunstone Partners to acquire UserTesting for $1.3B and combine it with UserZoom • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in customer experience, Enterprise, mergers and acquisitons, thoma bravo, usertestingNo Comments

Thoma Bravo and Sunstone Partners announced today that they’re acquiring customer insight platform UserTesting for $1.3 billion in an all-cash deal. The acquirers say they plan to combine it with UserZoom, a customer research company Thoma Bravo bought an $800 million majority stake in last April. The firms paid what appears to be a generous $7.50 a share for the company, which opened trading this morning at $3.86 per share. Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, was surprised by the price, but says that combining the two companies creates a broad platform of customer experience services. “With more interactions taking place digitally, UserTesting has built out a nice platform for getting quick feedback that allows marketers to react quickly to the insights they’ve uncovered. And you have to think the combination of UserTesting and UserZoom has the opportunity to provide insights to a broader set of user experiences covering customers, employees, devices and more,” he said. While it may seem that Thoma Bravo wants to buy every company with ‘User’ in its name, as Leary pointed out, combining these two companies could provide an interesting mix of tools to help understand those users better with the ultimate goal of delivering better customer experiences. Thoma Bravo partner A.J. Rohde sees the customer experience angle as being key to this acquisition, especially the combined firms. “Our acquisition of UserTesting is a testament to our belief that customer experience is mission critical to organizations, and the combined company will be well-positioned to further market expansion, accelerate innovation and provide even greater insights to its customers,” he said in a statement. That outcome remains to be seen, but the fact is that UserTesting has had a rough ride as a public company, going public below its expected range just about a year ago when it IPOed at $14 a share — not a good sign as it entered the public realm. The stock price bottomed out at $3.43 a share on September 22nd. It had to be a pretty good day for shareholders when this price crossed the wire, all things considered. Not surprisingly, the UserTesting board unanimously agreed to the terms of the acquisition and the deal is expected to close in the first half of next year. There is a go-shop provision that allows the company to shop around and see if it can find a better price before December 10th. While that seems unlikely at this point given the premium on the share price, it is part of the terms of the deal. UserTesting was founded in 2007 and raised over $150 million before going public last year.

Versa raises $120M for its software-defined networking and security stack • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in BlackRock, cybersecurity, Enterprise, Security, startup, Startups, VersaNo Comments

Networking and cybersecurity firm Versa today announced that it raised $120 million in a mix of equity and debt led by BlackRock, with participation from Silicon Valley Bank. CEO Kelly Ahuja tells ZebethMedia that the proceeds, which bring Versa’s total capital raised to $316 million, will be put toward go-to-market efforts and scaling the company. He demurred when asked what percentage of the financing was equity versus debt. Versa’s large round suggests that, despite the market downturn, VCs haven’t lost faith in cybersecurity vendors yet. According to data from PitchBook, venture capital investments have reached about $13.66 billion so far this year, up from $11.47 billion compared to 2020 (albeit down from $26.52 billion in 2021). It helps these vendors have customers — or at least potential customers — in droves. A December 2021 survey by CSO found that 44% of security leaders at large companies expected their budgets to increase in the upcoming 12 months. And Gartner estimates spending on information security and risk management will total $172 billion in 2022, up from $155 billion in 2021 and $137 billion the year prior. “The pandemic drove enterprises to accelerate their transition to cloud and saw their workforce become fully distributed. This has led to a dramatic increase in cybersecurity issues — leading businesses to look for new ways to protect and connect their users, networks, and applications,” Ahuja told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “We find ourselves in an extremely good place to have the right solution that meets the market needs.” Apurva Mehta and Kumar Mehta, two brothers, co-founded Versa in 2012. They came from Juniper Networks, where Apurva Mehta was the CTO and chief architect of the mobility business unit and Kumar Mehta was the VP of engineering. Kelly Ahuja, a Cisco alum, was tapped as Versa’s CEO in 2016. Versa provides a vast range of subscription-based software services — too many to list here — but positions itself primarily as a secure access service edge (SASE) provider. As described by Gartner in 2019, SASE combines software-based wide area networking and security principles like zero trust into a single service model. Through partnerships with service providers, Versa connects users to apps in the cloud or data centers with security layered on top — like data loss prevention tools and gateway firewalls. Concretely, the company offers a hardware-agnostic software stack that provides a single interface — via the cloud, on-premises or both — to implement corporate security and networking policies. “Versa’s portfolio in SASE converges security and networking,” Ahuja said, noting that Versa has a “sizable” team working on machine learning and AI-based malware detection. “Versa has developed a differentiated platform that combines AI and machine learning-powered security services edge and software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) solutions that helps customers reduce cybersecurity risk.” When asked about current clientele, Ahuja said that 625-employee Versa’s solutions have been deployed by “tens of thousands” of enterprises globally. He declined to reveal revenue figures, instead pointing to San Jose-based Versa’s annual contract value, which he says grew 60% over the “past few years.” “Every industry and business are facing similar macro challenges — high inflation, risk of recession, and supply chain and geopolitical challenges,” Ahuja said. “[But] Versa provides a clear value proposition and ROI of reducing cybersecurity risk.” In a June 2021 piece covering Versa’s last funding round, CRN’s Gina Narcisi pointed out that the SD-WAN and SASE space has seen a great deal of consolidation in recent years. Cisco Systems acquired Viptela and VMware bought SD-WAN vendor VeloCloud, and more recently, HPE’s Aruba snapped up Silver Peak while Palo Alto Networks absorbed CloudGenix. Last year, Ahuja told Fierce Telecom’s Linda Hardesty that Versa wasn’t shopping itself. Plans haven’t changed, he says — Ahuja sees the latest financing as setting the firm on a path toward an initial public offering.

Persona expands beyond identity verification with new suite of services • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in digital identity, Enterprise, identity verification, persona, SecurityNo Comments

Persona, a four year old identity startup, has done pretty well for itself with its original identity verification idea, an API that lets companies capture various documents like a driver’s license or passport to prove who you are online. It went so well, the company announced today that it has expanded into a full blown platform of identity-related services. In addition to the core verification product, the company now includes a set of services on the platform that customers can mix and match as they wish. These include a risk assessment engine, an identity workflow tool, a graph database aimed at link analysis and fraud detection and a marketplace, an app store of sorts, for external developers to help connect their business tools to Persona’s identity tools. Persona co-founder and CEO Rick Song says that the company has been developing these tools over time, but this is the first time it’s presenting them as a platform. “It’s been a work in progress for two plus years as we continually have built out each of these components piece by piece, but none of these have ever really been formally launched. They were kind of hidden behind the scenes,” he said. “We’d have a blog post talking about how you could utilize something, but never really consolidated it into a single platform. So the actual ‘platformization’ has really been a lot of work for us over this past year.” He says that while most customers are primarily using the identity verification service at this point, he is starting to see some expansion into the other products. “These days, we’re actually finding more customers who are adopting the Persona platform for nothing related to verifications at all. Instead they are using our suite of tools to run a manual [identity] review or use our graph product, which allows you to import data into our system and find fraud rings and suspect behavior within your population, or our automation orchestration tool and now the marketplace, which enables you to pull in a lot of different data and automate decisions.” The company founders used to work at Square, and they have FinTech customers like Square and Robinhood, but Song points to companies like Doordash, Coursera and Sonder Health as examples of broader customer use cases. In fact, he says that was the plan all along. “One of the earlier strategic goals for us was actually how can we not just build a FinTech identity platform, but rather a universal identity platform that could really work for any use case out there in the world.” Along the way, Persona has raised over $200 million including a $150 million investment last year at a healthy $1.5 billion valuation. Perhaps investors were willing to put so much capital into the company because it had this broader vision beyond identity verification.

SGNL.ai secures $12M to expand its enterprise authorization platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in authorization, Costanoa Ventures, Enterprise, identity and access management, Security, startup, StartupsNo Comments

SGNL.ai, a company developing enterprise authorization software, today announced that it raised $12 million in seed funding led by Costanoa Ventures with participation from Fika Ventures, Moonshots Capital and Resolute Ventures. CEO Scott Kriz said the proceeds will be used to develop the company’s core products and hire the initial team, as well as work with design partners to refine SGNL’s solution. In an interview with ZebethMedia, Kriz asserted that authorization is increasingly becoming a concern for management at every level. He’s not wrong. According to Gartner, organizations running cloud infrastructure services will suffer a minimum of 2,300 violations of least privilege policies — i.e. when a user is given privileges above what they need to do their job — per account each year by 2024. Meanwhile, the average global cost of a data breach reached a record $4.24 million in 2021, IBM recently reported, increasing by 10% from 2019 as more people transitioned to remote work. Kriz and SGNL’s second co-founder, Erik Gustavson, spent roughly a decade developing identity solutions at Bitium, which they co-launched in 2011, before conceiving of SGNL. After Google acquired Bitium in 2017, Gustavson joined the tech giant as an engineering manager working on “next-generation” identity access management for G Suite (now Google Workspace). Kriz also spent several years at Google on the product, identity and authorization team. “From our vantage point working in multiple, identity-focused areas at Google, it was clear to Gustavson and I that few companies had been able to effectively solve enterprise authorization at scale,” Kriz said. “Seeing a critical need to help companies keep user and customer data safe, we founded SGNL in 2021 to address the challenge. We quickly attracted a core team of identity industry experts who are passionate about pushing the boundaries of what is possible in enterprise authorization.” SGNL aims to provide “just-in-time” access to enterprise data to a company’s employees based on business context, such as business needs or justifications. Rather than relying on relatively static roles or attributes, the startup’s platform only grants access to software resources and data when a user needs them. A glance at SGNL.ai’s dashboard, which lets admins review authorizations across teams, divisions and individual employees. Image Credits: SGNL Beyond this, SGNL attempts to unify existing systems-of-record such as corporate directories, HR directories, customer relationship management platforms and ticketing systems, building a graph of workforce and customer data that can be used to determine dynamic access rights. Access can be audited in real time, ostensibly making it easier for managers to produce compliance reports and analyze historical authorizations. “The pandemic and broader shift in working patterns — hybrid, remote work, extended workforces, etc. — makes the problem of authorization and access management more urgent for the enterprise. The modern workforce is no longer operating from inside a corporate firewall using only on-premise applications,” Kriz added. “This creates ideal conditions for bad actors to exploit overly broad ambient access rights to attack the enterprise … SGNL’s platform helps contain the blast radius by reducing ambient access and determining access to sensitive data on a just-in-time basis.” Kriz declined to reveal the size of SGNL’s customer base or the company’s current revenue. But he noted identity management has attracted much investment over the past few years as new hurdles emerge across the enterprise security landscape. According to Crunchbase, $3.2 billion in venture dollars went into the identity management space in 2021, about 2.5 times the amount of investment from 2020’s $1.3 billion, which was already a record. SGNL’s challenge will be attracting customers away from rival vendors like Opal, whose software automatically discovers databases, servers, internal tools and apps to delegate access requests to employees. ConductorOne, another identity and access management automation platform, recently nabbed a $15 million investment. Identity and access management software provider ForgeRock filed for an IPO last September after raising over $700 million in VC cash. Kriz says he’s confident, though, that the current slowdown in tech will be a tailwind for SGNL as companies face pressure to purchase solutions instead of building them in-house. To his point, there’s some evidence to suggest IT teams are overwhelmed with tasks related to managing identity and access. For example, in a 2020 poll conducted by 1Password, responding IT personnel said that they burn a full month of work — 21 days — resetting passwords and tracking app usage. “The number and cost of data breaches is only increasing … SGNL is positioned well with the shift in most enterprise organizations to increase security, ensure compliance and reduce expenses,” Kriz said. Palo Alto-based SGNL, which currently has 28 employees, expects to hire seven more people by the end of the year.

Solo GP secures $140M for fifth seed, third opportunity funds • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Enterprise, solo GP, streamlined ventures, Ullas Naik, VentureNo Comments

Streamlined Ventures, led by Ullas Naik, secured $140 million in new capital commitments for its two newest funds. This brings the total funds managed to eight with the assets under management reaching about $325 million. Institutional investors, family offices and high net worth individuals pumped $102 million into the firm’s fifth seed fund, which targets startups focused on data science, AI, software automation, APIs and Web 2.5. The second is $36 million into a third opportunity fund that invests in mid-stage financings of seed-stage companies from prior seed funds. Naik is a solo general partner who started Streamlined Ventures in 2011, but prior to starting his own firm, had been in both angel investing and venture capital for more than 25 years. He was also a co-founder of the investment firm Cota Capital and spent a large chunk of time at Globespan Capital. In the past 11 years, Streamlined has had its hand in the seed financings of such companies as DoorDash, AppLovin, Forge, Rigetti and Rappi. Naik told ZebethMedia that 16 companies crossed $1 billion in value, with three of them over the $10 billion valuation mark. He has already deployed some of the capital from the new seed fund in companies, including Ratio, byCore, fun.xyz, Haystacks.ai, Precog and FenixCommerce. He intends to invest in 30 to 35 companies with this new fund. Naik sat down with me to talk about the new funds, the fundraising environment and why he decided to go it alone — he did admit that it was difficult for limited partners to initially embrace the idea. However, it’s clear that changed, enabling him to start with $33 million for his first fund and make his way up to $102 million with this latest one. The following was lightly edited for clarity and length. ZebethMedia: A lot of solo GPs start off that way, but don’t intend to stay that way. Why have you decided that was best for you? Naik: Part of the reason I started off as a solo GP is because I’ve been in partnerships in the past. This is my third venture firm that I’m helping build. The other two I did with partners, and so I understand the pluses and minuses that come with having a partnership. I was moving with a certain velocity and assumed that having a partner in the mix would just slow me down, and it actually has been the case. We have built this platform at such a velocity over the span of 10 years, and I don’t think that would be possible if I had a partnership that was imposing “checks and balances” on my instincts. Now, if I was a new entrant into venture, the idea of having partners makes complete sense because you do want checks and balances on your behavior because your instincts haven’t been honed yet. In my case, I felt comfortable and confident in my instincts that it made sense to actually stay solo and accelerate, which is exactly what we did, and so far it’s been wonderful. What was the fundraising environment like for you raising these two funds? We closed the seed fund in May or June, but the bulk of it got raised when things were still relatively good. I think I’d already started to see the environment tighten, even when we were raising our seed fund, and so I think we may have been one of the last few that kind of made it through, but we definitely felt it on the opportunity fund. We were raising $40 million and we would have gone up to $50 million. I could sense that limited partners were having a harder time and were hurt by what’s happening in the public markets. It was just a question of rebalancing, where to allocate capital and everybody was in “risk off” mode. What were some of the concerns from LPs this time around? There is no doubt that innovation and disruption will continue with software, and I don’t think that anybody doubted that. Where they were more concerned is what happens with the current monetary policy. With inflation, a potential recession, implications for earnings and implications for the ability of our software companies to sell into our customers, which are mostly B2B businesses. The only way to address that is to say, “well, that is fair, but that’s probably not the likely scenario.” Valuations are ultimately coming down, and that’s why we’re buying low. However, we’ll be selling probably in four or five years. This environment is not going to persist. In about two or three years, all this will have been a memory, a bad memory, but a memory. Are you looking at founders in a different way at all given the current fundraising environment? There’s a temptation to solve for more traction, which of course we look at, but at the end of the day, we’re betting on big market opportunities with founders who think in an uncapped manner. Almost every company we’ve invested in has that mix of things. Are you doing anything different with these funds that you have previously done? We generally tend to be the first money into those companies, but in today’s environment, I don’t have to be the first money. I can wait for a seed extension round and invest in the seed extension at the prior valuations. Now we get a lot more traction for the same valuation. You invest mainly in data science, AI, software, etc. Are there industries that you are shying away from or staying away from? In terms of vertical markets, like fintech, insuretech or health tech, we’re looking at everything, and we still continue to. We’re doing this speculative phase on web3. We invested in a few web3 companies, but only in companies where we saw true value transfer, like in gaming or DeFi. The bar is kind of high around web3 and it’s an area where I’m sort of deploying dollars much slower. How

Google Cloud gets into web3 act with managed blockchain node service • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in blockchain, cloud, Crypto, developer, Enterprise, google cloud, web3No Comments

Five years ago the blockchain was blossoming in the enterprise, or so many companies had us believe. Back then, companies like SAP and IBM were trying to build blockchain practices, but while the technology sounded good to solve myriad problems in the enterprise, it never really took off. Fast forward to 2022 and the blockchain comes under a new guise with the name web3 as an umbrella term and lots of VC money behind it. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the cloud platform companies want to get into the act. To that end, Google Cloud announced today that it’s launching Blockchain Node Engine, which it’s billing as “a fully managed node-hosting for web3 development.” Earlier this year, the company announced that it was launching a new team dedicated to digital assets, and this tool is part of what has come out of that team’s work. In a blog post announcing the new service from Amit Zavery, GM and VP of engineering and platform and James Tromans, director of cloud web3, the two wrote that blockchain nodes have to work hard, constantly exchanging the most recent blockchain data, so that all nodes stay in sync. It’s a data- and resource-intensive process. Google Cloud hopes to make it easier by offering a managed service to handle node creation, while providing a secure development environment in a fully managed product. From Google’s perspective, it’s a heck of a lot easier to let them do the heavy lifting while you concentrate on building your web3 application. In the pair’s own words, “While self-managed nodes are often difficult to deploy and require constant management, Blockchain Node Engine is a fully managed node-hosting service that minimizes the need for node operations. web3 companies who require dedicated nodes can relay transactions, deploy smart contracts and read or write blockchain data with the reliability, performance and security they expect from Google Cloud compute and network infrastructure,” they wrote in the post. This is nuts and bolts stuff, helping companies to set up a node on supported blockchains and then managing it for the user, so they don’t have to worry about all the management overhead involved. For starters, the company will support Ethereum blockchain, so developers deploying nodes on Ethereum could do it themselves or pay Google to do much of that work for them. Presumably there will be other supported blockchains in the future. While it may feel like a pure crypto play, Tromans says the service is ultimately agnostic and developers can build anything they wish. “We are building foundational primitives to help developers innovate more quickly. Accordingly, Blockchain Node Engine is focused towards [multiple] developer use cases: smart contract development, reading from and writing to the blockchain, etc. How different developers use their fully managed, dedicated blockchain node engine infrastructure will be dependent on their individual use cases,” Tromans told ZebethMedia. The product is available starting today in private preview.

Integration platform Cinchy lands fresh cash to connect data sources • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Apps, data integration, Enterprise, funding, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Cinchy, a startup that provides a data management service for enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $14.5 million in Series B funding led by Forgepoint Capital with participation from IVP, SUV, Techstars and Mars. Bringing the company’s total raised to $24 million, the capital will be put toward scaling Cinchy’s outreach and continuing to invest in the startup’s core technology, CEO Dan DeMers told ZebethMedia in an interview. “Data management remains an expensive chore, and a proliferation of apps producing an ever-increasing volume of data only adds to the challenge. As a result, rather than being a business driver or competitive advantage, data is more often a drain on IT budgets and a nightmare for compliance teams,” DeMers said. “The Cinchy platform addresses many of the challenges associated with today’s IT environments, specifically those defined by data silos, data copies and complex code.” DeMers co-founded Cinchy with Karanjot Jaswal in 2017 with the ambitious goal of abstracting away data integration processes. DeMers was previously the director of prime finance and futures technology at Citi, where he built and managed a tech delivery and support services group for brokerage. Jaswal was also at Citi, working on the data warehouse team on risk and margin. Both DeMers and Jasawal perceived that companies were struggling to overcome data integration hurdles. To their point, in a recent IBM survey, 40% of IT leaders said their data integrations are getting too expensive while 19% believe their current data integration solutions can’t handle all data sources. “The existing app- and API-centric architecture requires individual apps to manage their own data, and this means every new app or API adds yet another data silo,” DeMers said. “It’s like a tax on innovation that only gets worse with every new solution that’s delivered.” Cinchy aims to solve this by enabling organizations to decouple data from apps and other silos by connecting them to a “network-based” platform. Project teams first connect data from core systems, software-as-a-service apps and spreadsheets to the platform — Cinchy handles things like data backup, data versioning and data engagement tracking without actually hosting the data. Admins can access the platform to view, edit or query data for individuals and teams. Other users with the right permissions can engage with the data to build data models. Image Credits: Cinchy Cinchy uses the platform itself to run its business. Employees have self-serve access to discover, query, create and change data, DeMers says. Changes to data are version-controlled, access-controlled and available to apps and users based on granular controls. “Anyone who’s experienced the collaboration and efficiency of collaboration tools like Google Drive and Docs will understand the significance of bringing those capabilities to organizational data,” DeMers said. “The outcomes in terms of speed, efficiency, control and creative problem-solving are staggering.” DeMers sees Cinchy competing with any vendor that promises to simplify data integration. There’s a fair number out there, including Equalum, Airbyte, Hevo Data and Jitsu — all chasing after a market that could be worth $22.28 billion by 2027. Demand for data integrations solutions certainly appears high, with a 2020 survey from Dresner Advisory Services finding that 67% of enterprises were relying on data integration to support analytics and business intelligence platforms and that 24% were planning to in the next 12 months. But DeMers argues that most are focused on workarounds to better deal with data fragmentation, particularly in the context of analytics. “Most products that may be seen to be competing with Cinchy are in fact only exacerbating the challenges to agility and compliance associated with data integration,” he said. Rivals no doubt disagree. It’s true, though, that Cinchy has a growing customer base, particularly in the financial industry — suggesting that it’s winning over businesses. Adopters span institutions like TD Bank, National Bank and Natixis; Cinchy recently launched a credit union edition of the platform to better serve financial institutions. “Organizations everywhere are looking for ways to save money while continuing to capitalize on market opportunities with new solutions. This is why we’re confident that the Cinchy platform will increasingly appeal to chief experience officers and team leaders tasked with bridging these priorities,” DeMers said. “Cinchy … enables organizations to liberate their data from applications, spreadsheets, and other silos and make it [available] for real-time collaboration whenever and wherever it’s needed.” Toronto-based Cinchy, which has just over 50 employees, is currently hiring.

Samsung names Jay Y Lee executive chairman amid global economic downturn • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Enterprise, Jay Y. Lee, Samsung, south koreaNo Comments

Samsung Electronics has appointed Jay Y. Lee as the executive chairman to lead the world’s largest smartphone and memory chipmaker, two months after the heir received a presidential pardon that erased the 54-year-old’s criminal record. Lee, who has been vice chairman of Samsung since 2012, had been expected to take over the tech giant after the death of his father Kun-hee Lee, the late Samsung Group chairman, in 2020. In August, Lee received a special presidential pardon, which allowed Lee to officially participate in the management, restoring his right to work at Samsung and accelerating its decision-making on major strategies from chipmaking to investment plans. The long-anticipated appointment comes amid shrinking global demand for chips and smartphones and market uncertainty driven by the economic downturn. “The Board cited the current uncertain global business environment and the pressing need for stronger accountability and business stability in approving the recommendation,” Samsung said in a statement. South Korea’s largest memory chip maker said today its operating profit for the third quarter tumbled 31.39% from the year-ago period to 10.85 trillion KRW ($7.7 billion). Earnings in its memory chip and the System large-scale integration (LSI) businesses dropped to 5.12 trillion KRW, from 10.07 trillion KRW a year earlier, due to weak demand for consumer products, mobile phones and TVs, according to the company. This is Samsung’s first year-on-year drop in profit since 2019. Samsung reported sales of 76.78 trillion KRW (~$54 billion) in the three months ending September, representing a 3.79% rise from the year-ago quarter. The company expects demands for electronic devices and chips to cover to some extent in 2023 though macroeconomic uncertainties are likely to persist. “In the memory business, after a dampened first half, demand is expected to rebound centering on servers as data center installations resume,” the company said in its statement. The downbeat earnings come nearly three weeks after the Biden administration announced sweeping new rules aimed at blocking China from gaining access to advanced chip items. The restrictions prevent exporting certain semiconductors and selling equipment using advanced technologies to China-based chipmakers. Leading global semiconductor makers, including Samsung Electronics, TSMC, and SK Hynix have been granted one-year permission to use U.S. technology for selling advanced semiconductor chips for supercomputers and artificial intelligence to Chinese firms. SK Hynix, which competes with Samsung in the memory chip sector, said Wednesday it plans to slash its capital expenditure in 2023 by more than 50 percent after reporting a 60% drop in its profits in 3Q. Samsung sells NAND and DRAM chips used in laptops, smartphones and data storage. The tech behemoth said earlier this month it plans to more than triple producing advanced chips for high-performance computers, artificial intelligence, 5G and 6G telco and automotive. Samsung aims to start manufacturing 2-nanometer chips by 2025 and 1.4-nanometer chips by 2027.

Where cloud management is going next • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in cloud cost optimization, cloud infrastructure, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, Enterprise, finops, product-led growth, Startups, usage-based pricing, VentureNo Comments

“There’s a big wave of innovation in managing cloud costs,” Team8 co-founder and managing partner Liran Grinberg told ZebethMedia as part of our latest cloud investor survey. Having noticed tailwinds for the wave of B2B startups that offer cloud cost-optimization solutions, and cloud management more broadly, we were curious to know where VCs thought the space was headed — and the answers we heard show promise. Indeed, the tailwinds we are referring to aren’t limited to the current macroeconomic climate. The need to better manage cloud spend is undoubtedly fueled by the downturn, which makes everyone more cost-conscious. But, as we will explore, innovation in this field is also a corollary to broader trends, such as the rise of product-led growth among B2B SaaS companies, which have become both practitioners and consumers of usage-based pricing. There are also reasons to think that we haven’t seen all of it yet. “We continue to see tremendous opportunity in the cloud management space given how early we are in the cloud adoption journey,” Battery Ventures venture investor Danel Dayan said. So what might be next? Let’s dive in. Beyond cost optimization The first wave of cloud optimization solutions did the obvious: help companies track and lower their cloud spend. Per Team8’s Grinberg: “The first generation of cloud cost management (represented by Cloudability, CloudHealth) helped provide visibility and clarity on the spend on AWS, Azure and GCP. Meanwhile, cloud cost-optimization tools (represented by Spot, Granulate) allowed for tactical changes to lower costs.” Consolidation followed, ZebethMedia’s Kyle Wiggers noted, “as incumbents in adjacent sectors saw the opportunities presented by cloud cost optimization. Microsoft in 2017 acquired Cloudyn [ … ]. Then, in 2019, Apptio snatched up [ … ] Cloudability, while VMware and NetApp bought CloudHealth and Spot (formerly Spotinst), respectively, within the span of a few years.” And this April, Intel bought Granulate for $650 million. As time and mergers went by, it became clear that there was more than startups in this space could do for their customers. First and foremost, cloud teams required more than cost optimization — they needed cloud management.