Enterprise

TouchBistro bakes CAD$150M into restaurant management tech recipe • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Enterprise, Francisco Partners, restaurant management, TouchBistro, VentureNo Comments

TouchBistro, an iPad-based restaurant management platform, secured CAD$150 million, or $110 million, in growth financing from Francisco Partners to accelerate its growth, expand its product pipeline and make some strategic acquisitions. It’s been a while since we checked in with the Toronto-based company, which was founded by Alex Barrotti and Geordie Konrad back in 2010. We first profiled the company in 2014 when it raised $1.5 million in funding and was processing around $500 million in transactions from more than 1,000 merchant clients. Both Barrotti and Konrad no longer manage the day-to-day operations of the company, having brought in Samir Zabaneh in 2021 and naming him CEO and chairman. The global pandemic was tough on restaurants, especially those that did not have capabilities to take online orders or manage deliveries. In an email interview, Zabaneh said that much of the adoption of cloud-based technology came during the pandemic so that restaurants could improve the guest experience while also helping their operations as labor shortages and food cost increases have inundated the industry. “We feel this restaurant industry trend is here to stay and the adoption of technology will only continue to increase,” he told ZebethMedia. Indeed, the global restaurant management software market size is forecasted to reach $14.7 billion by 2030. To adapt to those changes, TouchBistro integrated both marketing and customer relationship management capabilities into its suite of tools within the past two years while also increasing its cloud offerings, Zabaneh said. TouchBistro itself was not immune to some of that. The Globe and Mail reported in 2021 that the company’s “growth rate fell from about 50% to roughly 10% in 2020. It lost about a tenth of its customers, and hundreds more asked for a break in fees. It laid off 131 employees and introduced features such as virtual gift cards and online takeout and delivery options to help restaurants stay afloat.” However, it seems the company fought back to now serve over 16,000 restaurant customers to help them increase profitability and efficiency, while improving overall customer experience. TouchBistro has deployed more than 64,000 of its terminals that provide automated online ordering, menu and delivery management, contactless payments, marketing and customer engagement tools. It is also processing over $13 billion in payments annually, The company also acquired TableUp in 2020, a move in which Zabaneh said “became the foundation for our guest engagement, loyalty and marketing tools.” The company also offered online ordering at no cost to its customers while they couldn’t offer in-person dining. “While we are proud of our leadership position in Canada, we also expanded our distribution throughout the United States, where we have built a substantial business,” he added. “We integrated with key partners to provide our customers with best-in-class and complementary solutions, all integrated together on a single platform.” In total, the company has raised around CAD$430 million to date. Zabaneh declined to reveal TouchBistro’s valuation. Meanwhile, seeing the amount of technology adoption by the restaurant industry, the company felt it was the right time to accelerate its growth, he added. In addition to that, the new funding will be deployed into technology development, introducing new value-added and other integrated tools and to complete more strategic acquisitions. “Raising the capital from Francisco Partners provides us with the capital we need to achieve our strategic objectives, while adding deep domain expertise in technology and payments that will be invaluable as we continue this journey,” Zabaneh said. “Our vision is to become one of the most complete end-to-end restaurant management platforms, deliver best in class customer experience and help our customers be successful.”

With Bret Taylor out as Twitter board chair, he can focus entirely on Salesforce • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Bret Taylor, elon buys twitter, Elon Musk, Enterprise, Salesforce, TwitterNo Comments

Usually being a board chair is a job that involves running some meetings and pushing through routine company business, but when Bret Taylor became Twitter board chair last year, he was getting a lot more than he bargained for. Taylor was promoted to the job in November 2021, the same day Jack Dorsey resigned as CEO. That in itself was an inauspicious start, and it would only get rockier. As though that weren’t enough for one person to take on, Bret was also promoted to co-CEO at Salesforce in the same week. It seemed like a good thing at the time, helping run two of the most influential tech companies out there, but the situation with Twitter quickly devolved. By April, Elon Musk bought a 9.2% stake and demanded a board seat before backing off that and making a $43 billion offer to buy the company outright. It’s been a roller-coaster ride ever since, with the board accepting the offer, then Musk trying to back out, the board initiating a court case to force him to go through with it, and finally Musk taking over this week and promptly dissolving the board under the terms of the merger agreement. That’s quite a ride by any measure, and after all that, who would blame Taylor for being anything but relieved that the gig was over. Truth be told, the board chair gig probably took up a bit more of his attention than he had anticipated when he agreed to take the job. But now Taylor can devote himself, fully unencumbered, to his day job being co-CEO at Salesforce, leading the CRM giant with co-founder, chairman and co-CEO Marc Benioff. Meanwhile, Salesforce has been having some issues of its own, with its stock price down 34% this year. To be fair, many SaaS stocks are down double digits this year, but it has left it vulnerable to activist investors. And earlier this month, Starboard Value took an undetermined stake in the company with plans to work with Salesforce to increase its value. That’s enough of a headache to deal with without another job gnawing at your consciousness, especially one that involved the mercurial Musk. The company also announced big plans to reach $50 billion in revenue by FY2026, which pleases investors, even Starboard, but they want to see the company increase growth and profitability. In its most recent earnings report at the end of August, the company reported revenue over $7.7 billion, putting it on a run rate over $30 billion, but that’s a fair distance from the stated goal of $50 billion in about two and a half years. It wasn’t that long ago that $20 billion was the goal, so I wouldn’t put it past them, but it’s going to take focus to get there, and being involved in the Twitter saga could have been an unnecessary irritant pulling Taylor away from this central task. The bottom line is Taylor has a lot going on. He is co-leading a company with over 70,000 employees with activist investors breathing down the company’s neck. Getting let go by Elon Musk frees him to devote his full attention to Salesforce. And that might not be a bad thing.

Arnica raises $7M to improve software supply chain security • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in Arnica, Enterprise, First Rays Venture Partners, funding, Security, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Everybody wants to talk about software supply chain risks these days, whether that’s security teams, developers or government officials. It’s no surprise then, that VCs, despite the current economic climate, continue to fund startups in this space, too. One of the newest members in this club is Arnica, a startup that takes a somewhat broader view of supply chain security than most of its competitors and helps companies. The company today announced that it has raised a $7 million seed round. The round was led by Joule Ventures and First Rays Venture Partners. A number of angel investors, including Avi Shua (co-founder & CEO of Orca Security), Dror Davidoff (co-founder & CEO of Aqua Security) and Baruch Sadogursky (head of Developer Relations at JFrog), also participated in this round. Arnica founding team. Image Credits: Arnica “As a former buyer of application security products, I tested more than a dozen solutions for securing my previous company’s software supply chain but reached a dead end. Most products were expensive visibility dashboards driven by varying definitions of “best practices,” said Arnica CEO and co-founder Nir Valtman. “We decided to provide this visibility for free, for unlimited users, forever. We went further though and developed a comprehensive solution to not only identify risks based on historical and anomalous behavior but also to mitigate them. We do this by using automated workflows with single-click mitigations that empower developers to own security from within the tools they already use.” The team argues that supply chain attacks succeed because of inefficient developer access management or the inability to detect anomalous identity or code behavior. So that’s where Arnica comes in. Its behavior-based approach combines access management and a service that can detect anomalous developer behavior that could be the result of a breach. “Each of our machine learning algorithms have thousands of features that identify whether it was actually the developer who wrote the pushed code,” explained Valtman. “When an anomaly is detected, it kicks off an immediate workflow to validate it with the developer in a simple and secure way. It is not only good for the company, but also good for developers.” There’s also secret detection to avoid leaking those, a service that continuously monitors security and compliance and tools for identifying the open source libraries used across an organization, which can also compile a full software bill of materials (SBOM). The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its go-to-market and R&D efforts, with a focus on expanding its automated workflows and mitigation capabilities. “In a market full of security solutions adding only incremental value, Arnica’s instant resolution-oriented approach is a game changer for enterprise dev teams,” said Brian Rosenzweig, partner at Joule Ventures. “Arnica goes beyond just flagging security problems — every issue that is identified can be immediately addressed with a provided one-click fix. This allows businesses to quickly protect their software supply chain from attacks, while behavior-based detection ensures it remains secure in the long term. Arnica’s pragmatic approach and advanced technology enable companies to avoid costly breaches without compromising on agility.”

Contract lifecycle management vendor Icertis secures $150M in debt to stave off rivals • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in contract lifecycle management, Enterprise, Fintech, Icertis, silicon valley bank, StartupsNo Comments

It’s Halloween. And, if you’re contract management software company Icertis, it’s payday. After raising $115 million in 2019, Icertis today secured $150 million — $75 million in convertible debt and a $75 million revolving credit facility — in a combined tranche from Silicon Valley Bank that brings the company’s total capital raised to $520 million. By going the debt route, Icertis avoids having to answer the tricky question of valuation in an especially challenging economic environment. (Icertis was valued at $2.8 billion as of March 2021 and reportedly as high as $5 billion earlier this year, but valuations in tech are on a steep downswing.) Convertible debt allows Icertis to pay its loan obligation with equity or stocks, while the credit facility lets it borrow and repay on an ongoing basis. CEO Samir Bodas was rather vague about the plans for the new cash, but told ZebethMedia in an interview that it would involve “accelerating the application of transformational technologies like artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning and blockchain to deliver material, unique and consequential value to customers.” That’s all rather ambitious (and, truth be told, a little buzzwordy), but Bodas asserted that Icertis is well-positioned to fend off rival startups in the cutthroat contract management space. “Industry analysts like Gartner and Forrester refer to our category as contract lifecycle management (CLM), but Icertis differentiates from traditional CLM vendors,” Bodas said. “We not only deliver efficiencies in contract creation and negotiation, but we use AI and natural language processing to structure contract information into on-demand data and connect that data to operational systems … to automate processes, maximize contract value and ensure compliance.” Founded in 2009 by Bodas (a veteran of Microsoft and Aztecsoft) and Monish Darda (previously an executive at BladeLogic), Icertis provides cloud-hosted tools for managing procurement, sales and corporate contracts — including tools that can read and analyze contracts to deliver risk management reports and automatic obligation tracking. The platform systemizes contracts and the associated documentation, extracting data like contact information and clauses to figure out contractual commitments and monitor them to ensure compliance. Ingested contracts can be used to model commercial relationships in Icertis, letting users identify contracts missing clauses necessary to complying with regulations like GDPR. Bodas claims the AI systems powering this and other features of the Icertis platform are among the most capable of their kind, able to process over 7,000 different types of contracts across 11 verticals. Icertis’ contract management software, which runs in the cloud. Image Credits: Icertis “We are forging and leading a new category of technology — contract intelligence — which uses AI to automate processes and deliver insights with structured, connected contract data to digitally memorialize the purpose of every commercial relationship and ensure the intent of those agreements is fully realized,” Bodas said. That’s a bold statement. But it’s true Bellevue, Washington-based Icertis is already one of the larger and more successful contract management software vendors to emerge in recent years. Bodas says that the company exited 2021 with an annual recurring revenue north of $100 million and recently surpassed $200 million in recurring revenue. He declined to disclose the size of Icertis’ customer base, but he noted that current clients include Microsoft, Boeing, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, Mercedes-Benz and Qantas and unnamed public sector agencies. This year, Icertis announced a partnership with SAP to make Icertis the CLM solution of choice for SAP customers. (Alongside SoftBank, SAP holds a minority stake in Icertis.) Bodas says it’ll create a contract management “ecosystem” for SAP clients through integrations with SAP solutions like Ariba, Fieldglass, S/4HANA and SuccessFactors. “In this economic downturn, we believe contracts, which govern every dollar in and out of the enterprise, will emerge as the go-to asset because they are an untapped source of invaluable business value to reduce costs, manage risk, ensure compliance and drive revenue,” Bodas said. “We are bullish that contract intelligence will emerge from this downturn as the fifth system of record in the enterprise, and that Icertis is positioned to lead it for the long term.” Investors see promise in contract management legal technology for procurement, sales, finance, legal and HR like Icertis’ — perhaps because of the enormous addressable market. The contract management lifecycle market is expected to grow from $1.5 billion in 2019 to $2.9 billion by 2024, according to Markets and Markets. The early adoption metrics certainly have been promising, with one recent Bloomberg Law survey showing that more than half of in-house lawyers were using contract management programs in 2020. Bodas says that Icertis’ platform alone has handled more than 10 million contracts worth over $1 trillion in more than 40 languages and over 90 countries. “Contracts are an invaluable source of original data — documenting and governing the entitlements and obligations between a company and its suppliers, customers and employees. In other words, contracts provide a single source of truth for commercial relationships,” Bodas said. He gave an example: “Recently, customers have been turning to Icertis to help them navigate inflation as best they can. Do their contracts have clauses that enable them to adjust prices in the event of inflation, how often can they raise prices, and by how much? We deliver these insights instantly, so every entitlement within a company’s contracts can be realized for maximum value.” Among Icertis’ competitors are ContractPodAI and SirionLabs, which raised $55 million in July and $85 million in May, respectively, for their automation-fueled contract management software. Another formidable rival is LinkSquares, which landed $100 million in April to grow its platform that combines legal analysis with contract lifecycle capabilities. For what it’s worth, Icertis dwarfs them in size, with more than 2,000 employees spread across its offices in New Jersey, Chicago and elsewhere.

Rising energy costs are making the cloud more expensive • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in cloud, data center, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, energy, EnterpriseNo Comments

Since winter, around the start of the war in Ukraine, energy costs have risen drastically — particularly in parts of Europe historically dependent on Russian fuel. That’s impacted data centers, which aren’t directly reliant on resources like natural gas but which often draw on power grids and backup generators that generate a portion of their electricity using fossil fuels. According to a July report from power generation supplier Aggreko, data center operators in the U.K. and Ireland have seen their energy bills increase by as much as 50% over the last three years, with the steepest climbs occurring within the last year. Fifty-eight percent of those in the U.K. said that energy bills have had a “significant impact” on their company’s margins. It seems inevitable that the energy premium data center operators are being forced to pay will be passed along to customers. Indeed, it’s already happening. Way back in November 2021, Manchester-based cloud services provider M247 hiked prices a whopping 161%, blaming “unprecedented times in the European energy markets.” Cloud providers OVHcloud, based in France, and Hetzner, based in Germany, both recently announced that they would raise prices by 10% in the coming months to combat soaring energy costs and inflation. In an earnings report, OVHcloud told investors that it expects “electricity costs in 2023 will account for around a mid-to-high-single digit percentage of its revenue, up from mid-single digit in 2022,” Reuters reported. In a conversation with ZebethMedia, Gartner senior director analyst René Buest noted that the era of constantly falling cloud prices has been over for some time. (Google Cloud, for instance, increased the prices of its core services in March independent of rising energy costs.) But she agreed that rising costs — and the associated inflation — have accelerated the upward cloud pricing trend.

Pinecone vector database can now handle hybrid keyword-semantic search • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in Enterprise, keyword search, machine learning, Pinecone, semantic search, vector databaseNo Comments

When Pinecone announced a vector database at the beginning of last year, it was building something that was specifically designed for machine learning and aimed at data scientists. The idea was that you could query this data in a format that machines understand, making it much faster. Originally this involved semantic searches where users could search based on meaning instead of specific words. It turns out, however, that as people put Pinecone to work, there were use cases where specific keywords mattered, and today the company announced that it’s now possible to conduct searches combining both semantic and keyword searches, what company founder and CEO Edo Liberty calls hybrid search. “We’ve conducted a lot of research on this topic and we found that, in fact, hybrid search ends up being better [in many cases]. It’s better in the sense that if you can combine both semantic search, this is the deep NLP encoding of sentences that gets the context and the meaning and so on, but you can also infuse that with specific keywords…the combination of those two ends up being significantly better,” Liberty told ZebethMedia. In fact he says the two complement each other well, especially in cases where industry-specific terms matter. This could be something like a doctor searching for keywords related to a specific disease. In those cases, the medical context may return better results by combining a question and some specific keywords around a given disease. He says that the keywords never take precedence over the semantic question the user is asking, but they provide some extra information to help return more meaningful results. “You might know exactly what you’re looking for, and you might be able to provide extra oomph when you make your semantic search keyword-aware – and that actually helps a lot. So I don’t want to throw away the good parts of keyword search [by relying completely on semantic search]. I don’t want the keywords to be in the driver’s seat, but I don’t to ignore them completely either,” he said. As Liberty told us at the time of the company’s $28 million Series A last year, search has become a big use case for the company: “The predominant use of the vector databases is for search, and search in the broad sense of the word. It’s searching through documents, but you can think about search as information retrieval in general, discovery, recommendation, anomaly detection and so on,” he said at the time. Pinecone launched in 2019 and has raised $38 million, per Crunchbase.

Remote work is here to stay. Here’s how to manage your staff from afar • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 30, 2022Posted in EC Future of Work, EC TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Enterprise, mural, remote work, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, workboardNo Comments

Over the last two and a half years, remote and hybrid working has become the norm — a majority of employed Americans have the option of working from home for all or part of the week, and 87% of workers who were offered remote work embraced the opportunity heartily. While some companies are pushing for a return to the office, today’s strapped labor market is giving employees more power to push back for remote, or at least flexible, jobs. This isn’t just a pandemic response anymore — it’s a way of life, and it has the potential to make some businesses better. People who work from home have been reporting an uptick in their productivity levels without the distractions that come with an office — Oh, it’s Beth’s birthday. Cupcakes in the kitchen! But both employers and employees have reported some downsides to remote work. Isolation can make people feel lonely and disconnected, leading to mental health issues. Learning and collaboration have taken a hit without the human element of being in the same room. And it can be difficult to create and maintain a company culture remotely. Luckily, some seriously smart people have thought hard about how to address these challenges and make it work. We put a few of them onstage last week at ZebethMedia Disrupt, and while you can watch the whole video, here are some of their best insights. Be hyper-intentional when coming together IRL Two and a half years into the pandemic, people are “actually clamoring to spend more time together,” said Adriana Roche, chief people officer at Mural, during a panel discussion at Disrupt. Ironically, one of the main solutions to the woes of remote work is finding ways to bring staff together IRL. That might mean a couple of times per week in the office if everyone lives in the same city, but if the team is fully remote, companies have to be more intentional with how they plan monthly or quarterly off-sites.

Should early-stage startups join in on the cloud marketplace fun? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 29, 2022Posted in cloud marketplaces, Enterprise, enterprise software, Startups, TechCrunch Exchange newsletter, The ExchangeNo Comments

Welcome to The ZebethMedia Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily ZebethMedia+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. From the future of cloud management to cloud spend in the age of machine learning, our latest cloud investor survey has given me lots of food for thought. It once again came to mind when I read a new report on cloud marketplaces. These have consolidated as a new revenue avenue, but is it ever too early for startups to go that route? Let’s look into it. — Anna Where the money’s at The sky’s the limit for the cloud market. If Alphabet’s earnings missed expectations in Q3, it is certainly not because of Google Cloud, whose revenue grew 37.64% year on year last quarter, from $4.990 billion to $6.868 billion. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s “Azure and other cloud services” grew 35%. One of the key factors that make cloud revenue resilient even in a more morose macroeconomic context is committed spend. This creates tailwinds not just for AWS and its competitors, but also for independent software vendors selling through their marketplaces.

Here’s why ServiceNow’s stock soared in a week of dismal tech earnings reports • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 28, 2022Posted in Bill McDermott, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC News Analysis, Enterprise, SaaS, ServiceNow, stock marketNo Comments

If you’re a regular reader of this publication, chances are you know that it hasn’t been a great year for many tech company stocks — one in which giants like Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet have been mauled by the markets after less than stellar earnings reports. Even an enterprise stalwart like Salesforce is behind hounded by activist investors. The fact is that few have been spared, whether startups or established public companies. We’ve seen a litany of stories on hiring freezes, layoff announcements, and tech stocks taking bigger hits than an NFL quarterback behind a bad offensive line — in other words, getting crushed. SaaS stocks in particular are having a rough year, so when a SaaS stock does well, well, that’s news. And that’s what happened to ServiceNow this week when it reported Q32022 earnings. It bucked the odds with a mostly positive earnings report — good revenue, good guidance, the whole nine yards — and believe it or not, Wall Street rewarded the company, with the stock up over 13% at the bell on Thursday, a number that held steady throughout the day. (It was down around 1% so far in trading today.) Maybe we’re not the only ones looking for some good news. Perhaps investors are, too. But what led to this positive 2022 earnings anomaly? To find out, let’s explore the earnings report and the impact of hiring former SAP CEO Bill McDermott to lead the company. A look at the numbers Given the general carnage we’ve seen in the public markets for tech earnings this quarterly cycle — Snap kicked things off with a raspberry, followed quickly by other leading tech shops failing to meet Wall Street’s stringent expectations — the ServiceNow share-price boomlet caught our eye and made us curious what the company had managed that was so worthy of investor praise.

As overall cloud infrastructure market growth dips to 24%, AWS reports slowdown • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 28, 2022Posted in Amazon, cloud infrastructure market share, Enterprise, Google, Microsoft, Synergy ResearchNo Comments

With the big three — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — reporting earnings this week, we learned that the cloud infrastructure market topped $57 billion for the quarter, up $11 billion over the same period last year. That adds up to 24% growth, according to data from Synergy Research. It might not be the growth we are used to seeing from this market, but at a time of economic instability, it continues to perform remarkably well. Still, it is a step back from the days when we saw growth steadily in the 30s. It’s even down from last quarter when the market grew 29%. So it’s fair to say that growth is slowing in an area that’s seen explosive expansion over the last several years. Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale attributed this slowdown to several factors. First of all, there’s the law of large numbers, which states that as a market size increases, growth decreases. When you combine that with a strong dollar affecting earnings outside the U.S. and a shrinking market in China, it is having an impact. “It is a strong testament to the benefits of cloud computing that despite two major obstacles to growth, the worldwide market still expanded by 24% from last year. Had exchange rates remained stable and had the Chinese market remained on a more normal path, then the growth rate percentage would have been well into the thirties,” Dinsdale said in a statement. The other news here is that of the big three, Google Cloud was the only one to gain share, up a tick to 11%, as the work that CEO Thomas Kurian is doing to build the business continues to pay dividends. Meanwhile, Amazon held steady as the market leader at 34%, good for around $19 billion for the quarter, with Microsoft in second at 21% with revenue of almost $12 billion. Google’s 11% came in at around $6 billion. But that doesn’t tell the whole story as Amazon’s cloud growth slowed to 27.5% in the quarter, down from 33% growth the prior quarter. As the chart below showing third-quarter data back to 2017 illustrates, the market has grown in leaps and bounds over the five-year period, from just over $10 billion to almost $60 billion. Image Credits: Synergy Research It’s also worth noting that only Google beat analysts’ expectations for cloud revenue, while both AWS and Microsoft came up short of their predictions. The usual caveats apply here around numbers matching publicly reported amounts. Synergy counts public platform, infrastructure and hosted private cloud services in its numbers. Total revenue reported by individual companies may also include other elements, which Synergy doesn’t count. The fact is that in spite of economic headwinds, the market remains surprisingly strong, and while companies may be looking for places to cut, as we wrote back in June, it’s not that easy to reduce cloud spending because it’s fundamental to most businesses these days. Most companies born in the cloud aren’t going to suddenly build a data center, and those in the midst of shifting to the cloud need to keep moving workloads because of all the benefits the cloud brings around business agility. Companies looking to cut spending can and should be looking for waste, but regardless, the cloud market will likely continue to produce decent numbers, even if the economics force down overall revenue and slow growth in the short term. We usually include Canalys data as a means of comparison in these reports, but the data was not available yet at the time we published. As soon as Canalys publishes its data, we will update the article.