Enterprise

Surely just about everyone was surprised when the Department of Defense last month named Microsoft as the winner of the decade-long, $10 billion JEDI cloud contract — none more so than Amazon, the company everyone assumed all along would be the winner. Today the company confirmed earlier reports that it was challenging the contract award

The customer data platform (CDP) is the newest tool in the customer experience arsenal as big companies try to help customers deal with data coming from multiple channels. Today, Adobe announced the general availability of its CDP. The CDP is a like a central data warehouse for all the information you have on a single

Moveworks, a startup using AI to help resolve Help Desk tickets in an automated fashion, announced a $75 million Series B investment today. The round was led by Iconiq Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Sapphire Ventures. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Comerica Bank also participated. The round also included a personal investment

Big changes are afoot for Wire, an enterprise-focused end-to-end encrypted messaging app and service that advertises itself as “the most secure collaboration platform”. In February, Wire quietly raised $8.2 million from Morpheus Ventures and others, we’ve confirmed — the first funding amount it has ever disclosed — and alongside that external financing, it moved its

Atlassian today announced a set of new templates and workflows for Jira Service Desk that were purpose-built for HR, legal and facilities teams. Service Desk started six years ago as a version of Jira that was mostly meant for IT departments. Atlassian, however, found that other teams inside the companies that adopted it started to

Startups building work software for other startups have been a huge focus of investment in Silicon Valley as eager VCs hope to grab a piece of the next Slack. Notion Labs, a profitable work tools startup that recently hit a reported $800 million valuation, isn’t making it easy for VC firms to give them money,

In September, Salesforce Ventures, the venture of arm of Salesforce, announced a hefty $300 million investment in Automattic, the company behind WordPress, the ubiquitous content management system (CMS). At the same time, the company was putting the finishing touches on Salesforce CMS, an in-house project it released last week. The question is, why did it

ZenHub, the popular project management tool that integrates right into GitHub, today announced the launch of Roadmaps. As you can guess from the name, this is a roadmapping feature that allows teams to better plan their projects ahead of time and visualize their status — all from within GitHub. “We’re diving into a brand new

Salesforce has its fingers in a lot of parts of the customer experience, so why not content management? Today, the company announced a brand new tool called Salesforce Content Management System, which it says is designed from the ground up to deliver a quality customer experience across multiple channels. The idea is to provide a

Microsoft Research is a globally distributed playground for people interested in solving fundamental science problems. These projects often focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence, and since Microsoft is on a mission to infuse all of its products with more AI smarts, it’s no surprise that it’s also seeking ways to integrate Microsoft Research’s innovations

Reserved instances (RIs) have provided a mechanism for companies, who expect to use a certain level of AWS infrastructure resources, to get some cost certainty, but as AWS’s Jeff Barr points out they are on the complex side. To fix that, the company announced a new method called Savings Plans. “Today we are launching Savings

European startup studio eFounders recently reached a portfolio valuation of $1 billion across 23 companies. And the company doesn’t want to stop there as it is currently launching three new companies and products. While software-as-a-service companies are trendy, eFounders has been exploring this space for a few years now. The company regularly comes up with

Neo4j, a popular graph database, is available as an open source product for anyone to download and use. Its enterprise product aimed at larger organizations is growing fast, but the company recognized there was a big market in between those two extremes, and today it introduced a new managed cloud service called Aura. They wanted

Immersive Labs, a cybersecurity skills platform, has raised $40 million in its Series B, the company’s second round of funding this year following an $8 million Series A in January. Summit Partners led the fundraise with Goldman Sachs participating, the Bristol, U.K.-based company confirmed. Immersive, led by former GCHQ cybersecurity instructor James Hadley, helps corporate

Search and personalization services continue to be a major area of investment among enterprises, both to make their products and services more discoverable (and used) by customers, and to help their own workers get their jobs done, with the market estimated to be worth some $100 billion annually. Today, one of the big startups building

Amperity announced today that it’s acquiring another company in the customer data business, Custora. Amperity co-founder and CEO Kabir Shahani told me that Custora’s technology complements what Amperity is already offering. To illustrate this point, he said that customer data tools fall into three big buckets: “The first is know your customer, the second is

Seismic is announcing that it’s acquiring Percolate in a deal that it says is combining “two essential pillars of the marketing technology stack.” It sounds like the two companies aren’t direct competitors, but they offer related tools: Seismic helps companies create and manage the content they use in sales and marketing, while Percolate expanded from

It’s Microsoft Ignite this week, the company’s premier event for IT professionals and decision-makers. But it’s not just about new tools for role-based access. Ignite is also very much a forward-looking conference that keeps the changing role of IT in mind. And while there isn’t a lot of consumer news at the event, the company

Workday announced this afternoon that it has entered into an agreement to acquire online procurement platform Scout RFP for $540 million. The company raised over $60 million on a post valuation of $184.5 million, according to Pitchbook data. The acquisition builds on top of Workday’s existing procurement solutions, Workday Procurement and Workday Inventory, but Workday

Volterra is an early stage startup that has been quietly working on a comprehensive solution to help companies manage applications in hybrid environments. The company emerged from stealth today with a $50 million investment and a set of products. Investors include Khosla Ventures and Mayfield along with strategic investors M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), Itochu Technology

As we move from a world dominated by virtual machines to one of serverless, it changes the nature of monitoring, and vendors like New Relic certainly recognize that. This morning the company announced it was acquiring IOpipe, an early-stage Seattle serverless monitoring startup to help beef up its serverless monitoring chops. Terms of the deal

Just around 9:45 a.m. Pacific Time on February 28, 2017, websites like Slack, Business Insider, Quora and other well-known destinations became inaccessible. For millions of people, the internet itself seemed broken. It turned out that Amazon Web Services was having a massive outage involving S3 storage in its Northern Virginia datacenter, a problem that created

Google open-sourced its TensorFlow machine learning framework back in 2015 and it quickly became one of the most popular platforms of its kind. Enterprises that wanted to use it, however, had to either work with third parties or do it themselves. To help these companies — and capture some of this lucrative market itself —

Chances are you mostly think of Samsung as a consumer-focused electronics company, but it actually has a very sizable B2B business as well, which serves over 50,000 large enterprises and hundreds of thousands of SMB entrepreneurs via its partners. At its developer conference this week, it’s putting the spotlight squarely on this side of its

Yext helps businesses manage their presence on search and across the web; starting today, with the launch of Yext Answers, it’s also helping them provide a better experience on their own websites. “It lets any company with a website answer a question about their own brand in a Google-like experience on their own site,” CEO

Datameer, the company that was born as a data prep startup on top of the open source Hadoop project, announced a $40 million investment and a big pivot away from Hadoop, while staying true to its big data roots. The investment was led by existing investor ST Telemedia . Other existing investors including Redpoint Ventures,

Searchable.ai wants to solve an old problem around search in the enterprise. The stealthy startup announced a $2 million seed round. Defy Partners led the round with a slew of other participants including Paul English, co-founder of Kayak; Wayne Chang, co-founder of Crashlytics; Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot; Jonathan Kraft, president and COO

The DoD JEDI contract saga came to a thrilling conclusion on Friday afternoon, appropriately enough, with one final plot twist. The presumptive favorite, Amazon did not win, stunning many, including likely the company itself. In the end, Microsoft took home the $10 billion prize. This contract was filled with drama from the beginning, given the

Kandji, a new Apple MDM solution that promises to go far beyond Apple’s base MDM protocol and other solutions on the market, emerged from stealth today with a $3.375 million seed investment. The product is also publicly available for the first time starting today. The round, which closed in March, was led by First Round

As designers grow both in sheer numbers and within the hierarchy of organizations, design tool makers are adapting to their evolving needs in different ways. Figma, the web-based collaborative design tool, is taking a note from the engineering revolution of the early aughts. “What if there were a GitHub for designers?” mused Dylan Field, early