1010Computers | Computer Repair & IT Support

Industry experts say it’s full speed ahead as Snowflake files S-1

When Snowflake filed its S-1 ahead of an upcoming IPO yesterday, it wasn’t exactly a shock. The company which raised $1.4 billion had been valued at $12.4 billion in its last private raise in February. CEO Frank Slootman, who had taken over from Bob Muglia in May last year, didn’t hide the fact that going public was the end game.

When we spoke to him in February at the time of his mega $479 million raise, he was candid about the fact he wanted to take his company to the next level, and predicted it could happen as soon as this summer. In spite of the pandemic and the economic fallout from it, the company decided now was the time to go — as did 4 other companies yesterday including J Frog, Sumo Logic, Unity and Asana.

If you haven’t been following this company as it went through its massive private fund raising process, investors see a company taking a way to store massive amounts of data and moving it to the cloud. This concept is known as a cloud data warehouse as it it stores immense amounts of data.

While the Big 3 cloud companies all offer something similar, Snowflake has the advantage of working on any cloud, and at a time where data portability is highly valued, enables customers to shift data between clouds.

We spoke to several industry experts to get their thoughts on what this filing means for Snowflake, which after taking a blizzard of cash, has to now take a great idea and shift it into the public markets.

Pandemic? What pandemic?

Big market opportunities usually require big investments to build companies that last, that typically go public, and that’s why investors were willing to pile up the dollars to help Snowflake grow. Blake Murray, a research analyst at Canalys says the pandemic is actually working in the startup’s favor as more companies are shifting workloads to the cloud.

“We know that demand for cloud services is higher than ever during this pandemic, which is an obvious positive for Snowflake. Snowflake also services multi-cloud environments, which we see in increasing adoption. Considering the speed it is growing at and the demand for its services, an IPO should help Snowflake continue its momentum,” Murray told TechCrunch.

Leyla Seka, a partner at Operator Collective, who spent many years at Salesforce agrees that the pandemic is forcing many companies to move to the cloud faster than they might have previously. “COVID is a strange motivator for enterprise SaaS. It is speeding up adoption in a way I have never seen before,” she said.

It’s clear to Seka that we’ve moved quickly past the early cloud adopters, and it’s in the mainstream now where a company like Snowflake is primed to take advantage. “Keep in mind, I was at Salesforce for years telling businesses their data was safe in the cloud. So we certainly have crossed the chasm, so to speak and are now in a rapid adoption phase,” she said.

So much coopetition

The fact is Snowflake is in an odd position when it comes to the big cloud infrastructure vendors. It both competes with them on a product level, and as a company that stores massive amounts of data, it is also an excellent customer for all of them. It’s kind of a strange position to be in says Canalys’ Murray.

“Snowflake both relies on the infrastructure of cloud giants — AWS, Microsoft and Google — and competes with them. It will be important to keep an eye on the competitive dynamic even although Snowflake is a large customer for the giants,” he explained.

Forrester analyst Noel Yuhanna agrees, but says the IPO should help Snowflake take on these companies as they expand their own cloud data warehouse offerings. He added that in spite of that competition, Snowflake is holding its own against the big companies. In fact, he says that it’s the number one cloud data warehouse clients inquire about, other than Amazon RedShift. As he points out, Snowflake has some key advantages over the cloud vendors’ solutions.

“Based on Forrester Wave research that compared over a dozen vendors, Snowflake has been positioned as a Leader. Enterprises like Snowflake’s ease of use, low cost, scalability and performance capabilities. Unlike many cloud data warehouses, Snowflake can run on multiple clouds such as Amazon, Google or Azure, giving enterprises choices to choose their preferred provider.”

Show them more money

In spite of the vast sums of money the company has raised in the private market, it had decided to go public to get one final chunk of capital. Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insight & Strategy says that if the company is going to succeed in the broader market, it needs to expand beyond pure cloud data warehousing, in spite of the huge opportunity there.

“Snowflake needs the funding as it needs to expand its product footprint to encompass more than just data warehousing. It should be focused less on niches and more on the entire data lifecycle including data ingest, engineering, database and AI,” Moorhead said.

Forrester’s Yuhanna agrees that Snowflake needs to look at new markets and the IPO will give it the the money to do that. “The IPO will help Snowflake expand it’s innovation path, especially to support new and emerging business use cases, and possibly look at new market opportunities such as expanding to on-premises to deliver hybrid-cloud capabilities,” he said.

It would make sense for the company to expand beyond its core offerings as it heads into the public markets, but the cloud data warehouse market is quite lucrative on its own. It’s a space that has required a considerable amount of investment to build a company, but as it heads towards its IPO, Snowflake is should be well positioned to be a successful company for years to come.

Powered by WPeMatico

New Zendesk dashboard delivers customer service data in real time

Zendesk has been offering customers the ability to track customer service statistics for some time, but it has always been a look back. Today, the company announced a new product called Explore Enterprise that lets customers capture that valuable info in real time, and share it with anyone in the organization, whether they have a Zendesk license or not.

While it has had Explore in place for a couple of years now, Jon Aniano, senior VP of product at Zendesk says the new enterprise product is in response to growing customer data requirements. “We now have a way to deliver what we call Live Team Dashboards, which delivers real-time analytics directly to Zendesk users,” Aniano told TechCrunch.

In the days before COVID that meant displaying these on big monitors throughout the customer service center. Today, as we deal with the pandemic, and customer service reps are just as likely to be working from home, it means giving management the tools they need to understand what’s happening in real time, a growing requirement for Zendesk customers as they scale, regardless of the pandemic.

“What we’ve found over the last few years is that our customers’ appetite for operational analytics is insatiable, and as customers grow, as customer service needs get more complex, the demands on a contact center operator or customer service team are higher and higher, and teams really need new sets of tools and new types of capabilities to meet what they’re trying to do in delivering customer service at scale in the world,” Aniano told TechCrunch.

One of the reasons for this is the shift from phone and email as the primary ways of accessing customer service to messaging tools like WhatsApp. “With the shift to messaging, there are new demands on contact centers to be able to handle real-time interactions at scale with their customers,” he said.

In order to meet that kind of demand, it requires real-time analytics that Zendesk is providing with this announcement. This arms managers with the data they need to put their customer service resources where they are needed most in the moment in real time.

But Zendesk is also giving customers the ability to share these statistics with anyone in the company. “Users can share a dashboard or historical report with anybody in the company regardless of whether they have access to Zendesk. They can share it in Slack, or they can embed a dashboard anywhere where other people in the company would like to have access to those metrics,” Aniano explained.

The new service will be available starting on August 31 for $29 per user per month.

Powered by WPeMatico

Eden intros SaaS tools in a bid to become a more comprehensive office management platform

Eden, the office management platform founded by Joe du Bey and Kyle Wilkinson, is today announcing the launch of several new enterprise software features. The company, which offers a marketplace for office managers to procure services like office cleaning, repairs, etc., is looking to offer a more comprehensive platform.

The software features include a COVID team safety tool that tracks who is coming into the office, and lets them reserve a specific desk to help ensure social distancing precautions are being taken.

“For us, the pandemic really accelerated our plans around enterprise tools,” said Joe du Bey. “We realized by talking to our clients that what they need right now isn’t services. Services are important, but what they really want in this moment is to have software so they can get back into the office.”

Eden is also introducing a service desk ticketing tool to allow workers to make requests or file a ticket for a broken piece of equipment from their own desktop, as well as a visitor management tool and a room booking tool.

The company’s acquisition of Managed By Q, its biggest competitor in the services space, also greatly accelerated its ability to deliver software. Managed By Q, which was acquired by WeWork in 2019 for $220 million, was already on the trajectory of building out software well before its acquisition by Eden, and had itself acquired companies like Hivy to offer SaaS-based tools to customers.

As Eden grows its product portfolio, competition still abounds. Envoy (with just under $60 million in funding) has been in the visitor management space since its inception and is looking to broaden its product portfolio beyond office visitors. UpKeep is charging into the service ticket space with a mobile app to make it easier for service workers within an office to do their job and move seamlessly from task to task. Meanwhile, Robin is in the mix with its own room booking platform.

The point? There is clearly a rush to build out a platform that helps folks manage the physical space of an office and the people within it. Eden, with $40 million in total funding, is well positioned to duke it out for the top spot among a variety of competitors who are angling to ‘do it all.’

“This is a board meeting question: are we fighting too many battles or is comprehensiveness our most important asset?” said du Bey. “We have a completeness to our vision. A lot of our customers are saying they want a few tools from one place versus the very fragmented experience they have today. But there are trade offs in comprehensiveness. It means that someone can can spend all day building a hundred integrations for their app that for us might not be possible. So, there are some really interesting trade offs.”

That’s not without hardship, however. Eden had to layoff about 40 percent of its workforce amid the coronavirus pandemic. And though COVID has slowed growth, du Bey says that revenue in April 2020 was still higher than it was the year prior.

Alongside trying to support marketplace partners and customers through the pandemic, Eden has also introduced new ways to search for service providers, including a way to solicit a bid from black-owned businesses in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Eden team is 52 percent female. Black employees represent 12 percent of the workforce, and Latinx employees represent 8 percent of the workforce.

Powered by WPeMatico

Facebook is bringing a Shop section to its app, while Instagram expands Live Shopping

Facebook is announcing a number of new e-commerce features both within the main Facebook app and on Instagram.

The pandemic has forced many businesses to shift online, and Facebook made a big announcement in May around the ability of merchants to create Facebook Shops that are viewable on both Facebook and Instagram. More recently, Instagram launched a redesigned Shop section, where users can browse products from their favorite brands and creators.

Now the company is bringing a similar experience to the main Facebook app. The company said that in the United States, it’s started testing a new section called Facebook Shop — like Instagram Shop, it’s basically a shopping destination where you can find products from a variety of different businesses. (This is distinct from Facebook Marketplace, which is designed for peer-to-peer sales.)

Director of Product Management George Lee told me the goal is to create something that’s “unique to the Facebook app and the Facebook community.”

Facebook Shop

Image Credits: Facebook

“That’s not to say that there aren’t learnings across the board,” he said. “[Instagram Shop and Facebook Shop] probably look like slightly different on day one, and the goal is not to have them be cookie cutters of the same experience.”

In addition, the company is announcing new tools for businesses running Facebook Shops, including new design layouts, the ability to see a real-time preview of collections, the ability to automatically create Shops if you’re a new seller and new data in Commerce Manager. Shops will also feature a new messaging option for customers to send sellers a message through Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram Direct.

On the Instagram side, the company said all sellers in the United States will be able to use the Instagram checkout feature “in the coming weeks,” managed either through Facebook’s Commerce Manager or through partners platforms BigCommerce and Shopify (with more integrations planned). Instagram will waive its selling fee for checkout through the rest of the year.

The company has also been testing a live shopping experience, where businesses can show off products in a live video, while consumers can browse the highlighted products and make purchases. Instagram Live Shopping should now be available to all sellers using Instagram Live Shopping in the United States.

Instagram Live Shopping

Image Credits: Facebook

“We’ve seen live shopping take off in other parts of the world,” said Instagram’s vice president of product Vishal Shah. “The pandemic has really changed behavior from a consumer perspective, so we’re moving as fast as we can to bring out these tools to help [businesses respond].”

Powered by WPeMatico

Microsoft brings transcriptions to Word

Microsoft today launched Transcribe in Word, its new transcription service for Microsoft 365 subscribers, into general availability. It’s now available in the online version of Word, with other platforms launching later. In addition, Word is also getting new dictation features, which now allow you to use your voice to format and edit your text, for example.

As the name implies, this new feature lets you transcribe conversations, both live and pre-recorded, and then edit those transcripts right inside of Word. With this, the company goes head-to-head with startups like Otter and Google’s Recorder app, though they all have their own pros and cons.

Image Credits: Microsoft

To get started with Transcribe in Word, you simply head for the Dictate button in the menu bar and click on “Transcribe.” From there, you can record a conversation as it happens — by recording it directly through a speakerphone and your laptop’s microphone, for example — or by recording it in some other way and then uploading that file. The service accepts .mp3, .wav, .m4a and .mp4 files.

As Dan Parish, Microsoft principal group PM manager for Natural User Interface & Incubation, noted in a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement, when you record a call live, the transcription actually runs in the background while you conduct your interview, for example. The team purposely decided not to show you the live transcript, though, because its user research showed that it was distracting. I admit that I like to see the live transcript in Otter and Recorder, but maybe I’m alone in that.

Like with other services, Transcribe in Word lets you click on individual paragraphs in the transcript and then listen to that at a variety of speeds. Because the automated transcript will inevitably have errors in it, that’s a must-have feature. Sadly, though, Transcribe doesn’t let you click on individual words.

One major limitation of the service right now is that if you like to record offline and then upload your files, you’ll be limited to 300 minutes, without the ability to extend this for an extra fee, for example. I know I often transcribe far more than five hours of interviews in any given month, so that limit seems low, especially given that Otter provides me with 6,000 minutes on its cheapest paid plan. The max length for a transcript on Otter is four hours while Microsoft’s only limit for is a 200MB file upload limit, with no limits on live recordings.

Another issue I noticed here is that if you mistakenly exit the tab with Word in it, the transcription process will stop and there doesn’t seem to be a way to restart it.

It also takes quite a while for the uploaded files to be transcribed. It takes roughly as long as the conversations I’ve tried to transcribe, but the results are very good — and often better than those of competing services. Transcribe for Word also does a nice job separating out the different speakers in a conversation. For privacy reasons, you must assign your own names to those — even when you regularly record the same people.

It’d be nice to get the same feature in something like OneNote, for example, and my guess is Microsoft may expand this to its note-taking app over time. To me, that’s the more natural place for it.

Image Credits: Microsoft

The new dictation features in Word now let you give commands like “bold the last sentence,” for example, and say “percentage sign” or “ampersand” if you need to add those symbols to a text (or “smiley face,” if those are the kinds of texts you write in Word).

Even if you don’t often need to transcribe text, this new feature shows how Microsoft is now using its subscription service to launch new premium features to convert free users to paying ones. I’d be surprised if tools like the Microsoft Editor (which offers more features for paying users), this transcription service, as well as some of the new AI features in the likes of Excel and PowerPoint, didn’t help to convert some users into paying ones, especially now that the company has combined into a single bundle Office 365 and Microsoft 365 for consumers. After all, just a subscription to something like Grammarly and Otter would be significantly more expensive than a Microsoft 365 subscription.

 

Powered by WPeMatico

COVID-19 blamed as smartphone sales plummet 20% in Q2

The last couple of years have been tough on the smartphone industry, as sales plateaued and eventually eroded. But nothing could have prepared manufacturers for 2020. This was supposed to be the year numbers began bouncing back, courtesy of 5G and some radical new designs. But the real figures have been utterly dismal.

According to new numbers out of Gartner, worldwide sales dropped 20.4% for the second quarter. The numbers are in keeping with the drops seen in Q1. The culprit is, of course, COVID-19. Global lockdowns and slowed economies have led to further decreasing interest in smartphones. As many users have shifted disposable income to upgrading their home offices, they’ve understandably deprioritized mobile devices, accelerating recent trends.

Samsung was the hardest hit of the top five, dropping a massive 27.1% year-over-year. “Demand for its flagship S Series smartphones did little to revive its smartphone sales globally,” Gartner Senior Research Director Anshul Gupta said in a release tied to the news. The company is no doubt banking on the recent Galaxy Note 20 launch to help reverse course.

Samsung’s decline puts it in a virtual tie with Huawei for first place, with the two companies accounting for 18.6% and 18.4% of the overall market, respectively. While Huawei sales actually decided 6.8% overall, its figures were still strong enough to see an increase in the overall market share for the quarter. The company also saw a rise in sales of 27.4% between Q1 and Q2. Apple, meanwhile, experienced a slight y-o-y dip of 0.4% — a relatively strong showing, all things considered.

In terms of markets, China dipped 7% for the quarter. India, meanwhile, saw the largest drop — down 46%, courtesy of lockdown protocols.

Powered by WPeMatico

MIT CSAIL grad launches machine learning platform with $10M Series A

Manasi Vartak, founder and CEO of Verta, conceived of the idea of the open-source project ModelDB database as a way to track versions of machine models while she was still in grad school at MIT. After she graduated, she decided to expand on that vision to build a product that could not only track model versions, but provide a way to operationalize them — and Verta was born.

Today, that company emerged from stealth with a $10 million Series A led by Intel Capital with participation from General Catalyst, which also led the company’s $1.7 million seed round.

Beyond providing a place to track model versioning, which ModelDB gave users, Vartak wanted to build a platform for data scientists to deploy those models into production, which has been difficult to do for many companies. She also wanted to make sure that once in production, they were still accurately reflecting the current data and not working with yesterday’s playbook.

“Verta can track if models are still valid and send out alarms when model performance changes unexpectedly,” the company explained.

Verta interface

Image Credits: Verta

Vartak says having that open-source project helped sell the company to investors early on, and acts as a way to attract possible customers now. “So for our seed round, it was definitely different because I was raising as a solo founder, a first-time founder right out of school, and that’s where having the open-source project was a huge win,” she said.

Certainly Mark Rostick, VP and senior managing director at lead investor Intel Capital, recognized that Verta was trying to solve a fundamental problem around machine learning model production. “Verta is addressing one of the key challenges companies face when adopting AI — bridging the gap between data scientists and developers to accelerate the deployment of machine learning models,” Rostick said.

While Vartak wasn’t ready to talk about how many customers she has just yet at this early stage of the company, she did say there were companies using the platform and getting models into production much faster.

Today, the company has 9 employees, and even at this early stage, she is taking diversity very seriously. In fact, her current employee makeup includes four Indian, three Caucasian, one Latino and one Asian, for a highly diverse mix. Her goal is to continue on this path as she builds the company. She is looking at getting to 15 employees this year, then doubling that by next year.

One thing Vartak also wants to do is have a 50/50 gender split, something she was able to achieve while at MIT in her various projects, and she wants to carry on with her company. She is also working with a third party, Sweat Equity Ventures, to help with recruiting diverse candidates.

She says that she likes to work iteratively to build the platform, while experimenting with new features, even with her small team. Right now, that involves interoperability with different machine learning tools out there like Amazon SageMaker or Kubeflow, the open-source machine learning pipeline tool.

“We realized that we need to meet customers where they are at their level of maturity. So we focused a lot the last couple of quarters on building a system that was interoperable so you can pick and choose the components kind of like Lego blocks and have a system that works end to end seamlessly.”

Powered by WPeMatico

Self-charging, thousand-year battery startup NDB aces key tests and lands first beta customers

Pleasanton-based green energy startup NDB, Inc. has reached a key milestone today with the completion of two proof of concept tests of its nano diamond battery (NDB) . One of these tests took place at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the other at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, and both saw NDB’s battery tech manage a 40% charge, which is a big improvement over the 15% charge collection efficiency (effectively energy lossiness relative to maximum total possible charge) of standard commercial diamond.

NDB’s innovation is in creating a new, proprietary nano diamond treatment that allows for more efficient extraction of electric charge from the diamond used in the creation of the battery. Their goal is to ultimately commercialize a version of their battery that can self-charge for up to a maximum lifespan of 28,000 years, created from artificial diamond-encased carbon-14 nuclear waste.

This battery doesn’t generate any carbon emissions in operation, and only requires access to open air to work. And while they’re technically batteries, because they contain a charge which will eventually be expended, they provide their own charge for much longer than the lifetime of any specific device or individual user, making them effectively a charge-free solution.

NDB ultimately hopes to turn their battery into a viable source of power for just about anything that consumes it — including aircraft, EVs, trains and more, all the way down to smartphones, wearables and tiny industrial sensors. The company is currently now at work creating a prototype of its first commercial battery in order to make that available sometime later this year.

It has also just signed its first beta customers, who will actually be receiving and making use of those first prototypes. While it hasn’t named them specifically, it did say that one is “a leader in nuclear fuel cycle products and services,” and the other is “a leading global aerospace, defense and security manufacturing company.” Obviously, this kind of tech has appeal in just about every sector, but defense and power concerns are likely among the deepest-pocketed.

Powered by WPeMatico

Google Cloud Anthos update brings support for on-prem, bare metal

When Google announced Anthos last year at Google Cloud Next, it was a pretty big deal. Here was a cloud company releasing a product that purported to help you move your applications between cloud companies like AWS and Azure — GCP’s competitors — because it’s what customers demanded.

Google tapped into genuine anxiety that tech leaders at customer companies are having over vendor lock-in in the cloud. Back in the client-server days, most of these folks got locked into a tech stack where they were at the mercy of the vendor. It’s something companies desperately want to avoid this go-round.

With Anthos, Google claimed you could take an application, package it in a container and then move it freely between clouds without having to rewrite it for the underlying infrastructure. It was and remains a compelling idea.

This year, the company is updating the product to include a couple of specialty workloads that didn’t get into version 1.0 last year. For starters, many customers aren’t just multi-cloud, meaning they have workloads on various infrastructure cloud vendors, they are also hybrid. That means they still have workloads on-prem in their own data centers, as well as in the cloud, and Google wanted to provide a way to include these workloads in Anthos.

Pali Bhat, VP of product and design at Google Cloud, says they have heard customers still have plenty of applications on premises and they want a way to package them as containerized, cloud-native workloads.

“They do want to be able to bring all of the benefits of cloud to both their own data centers, but also to any cloud they choose to use. And what Anthos enables them to do is go on this journey of modernization and digital transformation and be able to take advantage of it by writing once and running it anywhere, and that’s a really cool vision,” Bhat said.

And while some companies have made the move from on prem to the cloud, they still want the comfort of working on bare metal where they are the only tenant. The cloud typically offers a multi-tenant environment where users share space on servers, but bare metal gives a customer the benefits of being in the cloud with the ability to control their own destiny as they do on prem.

Customers were asking for Anthos to support bare metal, and so Google gave the people what they wanted and are releasing a beta of Anthos for bare metal this week, which Bhat says provides the answer for companies looking to have the benefits of Anthos at the edge.

“[The bare metal support] lets customers run Anthos […] at edge locations without using any hypervisor. So this is a huge benefit for customers who are looking to minimize unnecessary overhead and unlock new use cases, especially both in the cloud and on the edge,” Bhat said.

Anthos is part of a broader cloud modernization platform that Google Cloud is offering customers that includes GKE (the Kubernetes engine), Cloud Functions (the serverless offering) and Cloud Run (container run time platform). Bhat says this set of products taps into a couple of trends they are seeing with customers. First of all, as we move deeper into the pandemic, companies are looking for ways to cut costs while making a faster push to the cloud. The second is taking advantage of that push by becoming more agile and innovative.

It seems to be working. Bhat reports that in Q2, the company has seen a lot of interest. “One of the things in Q2 of 2020 that we’ve seen is that just Q2, over 100,000 companies used our application modernization platform and services,” he said.

Powered by WPeMatico

Palo Alto Networks to buy digital forensics consulting firm for $265M

It’s been quite a day in the tech world, with a bushel of S-1s being filed to go public. Not to be left out, the ever acquisitive Palo Alto Networks announced its intent to acquire The Crypsis Group, an incident response, risk management and digital forensics consulting firm, for a crisp $265 million.

Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO at Palo Alto Networks, sees a company that builds on the foundation of services the cybersecurity giant already provides, giving customers a set of services to lean on when a breach happens.

“By joining forces, we will be able to help customers not only predict and prevent cyberattacks but also mitigate the impact of any breach they may face,” he said. While the kinds of tools that Palo Alto provides are designed to prevent attacks, the fact is no set of tools is foolproof, and it’s always going to be a cat and mouse game between companies like Palo Alto and the attackers trying to breach their defenses.

Crypsis can help figure out how a breach happened and ways to close up the cracks in the foundation to prevent access through that particular weak point in the future. “We have dedicated ourselves to creating a more secure world through the fight against cybercrime. Together with Palo Alto Networks, we will be able to help businesses and governments better respond to threat actors on a global scale,” Bret Padres, CEO of The Crypsis Group said in a statement.

When the deal closes, and The Crypsis Group is in the fold, Palo Alto will gain more than 150 highly trained consultants, who have been handling approximately 1,300 incidents a year. This gives Palo Alto some serious consulting fire power to deal with those times when attackers get through their defenses.

The Crypsis Group has up until now been part of a larger security consultancy called ZP Group. The deal is expected to close in the fiscal first quarter of 2021, which just started when Q42020 closed today. Per usual, the acquisition will be subject to regulatory scrutiny, as Palo Alto is a public company.

Powered by WPeMatico