With Tableau and Mulesoft, Salesforce gains full view of enterprise data
Back in the 2010 timeframe, it was common to say that content was king, but after watching Google buy Looker for $2.6 billion last week and Salesforce nab Tableau for $15.7 billion this morning, it’s clear that data has ascended to the throne in a business context.
We have been hearing about Big Data for years, but we’ve probably reached a point in 2019 where the data onslaught is really having an impact on business. If you can find the key data nuggets in the big data pile, it can clearly be a competitive advantage, and companies like Google and Salesforce are pulling out their checkbooks to make sure they are in a position to help you out.
While Google, as a cloud infrastructure vendor, is trying to help companies on its platform and across the cloud understand and visualize all that data, Salesforce as a SaaS vendor might have a different reason — one that might surprise you — given that Salesforce was born in the cloud. But perhaps it recognizes something fundamental. If it truly wants to own the enterprise, it has to have a hybrid story, and with Mulesoft and Tableau, that’s precisely what it has — and why it was willing to spend around $23 billion to get it.
Making connections
Certainly, Salesforce chairman Marc Benioff has no trouble seeing the connections between his two big purchases over the last year. He sees the combination of Mulesoft connecting to the data sources and Tableau providing a way to visualize as a “beautiful thing.”
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AI security startup Darktrace’s CEO defeats buzzword bingo with trust and transparency
It takes a lot of trust to allow a company to come in and install a mystery box on their network to monitor for threats. It’s like inviting in a security guard to sit in your living room to make sure nobody breaks in.
Yet that’s exactly what Darktrace does. (The box, not the security guard.)
The Cambridge U.K.-founded company, now with a second headquarters in San Francisco, assumes that any network can be breached. Instead of looking at the perimeter of a network, Darktrace uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to scan and identify security weaknesses and malicious traffic inside a company’s network.
Traditional network monitoring typically uses signature-based threat detection of matching against known malicious files, but can be easily modified to evade detection. Instead, Darktrace builds up a profile of the network to understand what the baseline “normal” looks like so it can spot and identify potential issues, like large amounts of data exfiltration or suspect devices.
But how do you win over those who see a sea of meaningless buzzwords? How can you differentiate between the smoke and mirrors and the real deal?
“No one wants the black box making decisions without them knowing what it’s doing,” said Nicole Eagan, Darktrace’s co-founder and chief executive, in a call with TechCrunch.
“So, let them have visibility,” she said.
Darktrace’s founders have roots in the U.K. and U.S. intelligence, where they took what they knew of the cybersecurity threats to the private sector to where the new battleground opened up. In the past half-decade of its existence, the company has gained major clients on its roster — from telcos to banks, tech giants and car makers — supported by 900 staff in over 40 offices around the world.
About a quarter of its customers are in financial services, said Eagan. But it takes a lot for the heavily regulated companies to trust a mystery device on a company’s network where the data and security, like financial services, is highly regulated.
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Razer just launched an energy drink for gamers
Last week it was Xbox body spray. Today it’s a Razer energy drink. E3 is officially upon us, and it’s time for all of the shamless product tie-ins. Though before you go passing judgement on Respawn, note that this is “no ordinary beverage.” No, in a world of entirely too many energy drinks, this one is “for gamers by gamers.”
The company notes, fittingly, that all of this started as a 2010 April Fool’s Day prank, then known as the less palatable “Project Venom.” This however, is very much a real thing — in fact, Respawn is now a standalone spin-off brand from Razer.
The powdered drink has caffeine, green tea extract and B vitamins, made to be mixed in a metal branded shaker (sold separately). “Now you are ready to Respawn,” the company writes somewhat troublingly in the official press release. “Effects should be felt soon after consumption.”
At the very least, the “Mental performance” isn’t loaded with sugar, unlike the vast majority of energy drinks on the market. In fact, it contains zero grams of the stuff, per Razer. The stuff is apparently specially formulated for gamers and esports athletes for periods of long focus and mental stamina… though Razer assures us that other people like content creators and video editors can use it, too.
For everyone else, there’s always coffee.
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Salesforce is officially making Seattle its second HQ after its Tableau acquisition
Here’s an interesting by-product of the news today that Salesforce would be acquiring Tableau for $15.7 billion: the company is going to make Seattle, Wash. (home of Tableau) the official second headquarters of San Francisco-based Salesforce, putting the company directly in the face of tech giants and Salesforce frenemies Microsoft and Amazon.
“An HQ2, if you will,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff quipped right after he dropped the news during the press and analyst call.
HQ2, of course, is a reference to Amazon and its year-long, massively publicised, often criticised and ultimately botched search (it eventually cancelled plans to build an HQ in NYC, but kept Arlington) for its own second headquarters, which it also branded “HQ2.”
If real estate sends a message — and if you’ve ever seen Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, you know it does for this company — Salesforce is sending one here. And that message is: Hello, Microsoft and Amazon, we’re coming at you.
As we pointed out earlier today, there is a clear rivalry between Microsoft and Salesforce that first began to simmer in the area of CRM but has over time expanded to a wider array of products and services that cater to the needs of enterprise knowledge workers.
The most well-known of these was the tug-of-war between the two to acquire LinkedIn, a struggle that Microsoft ultimately won. Over the years, as both have continued to diversify their products to bring in a wider swathe of enterprise users, and across a wider range of use cases, that competition has become a little more pointed. (Indeed, here’s some perfect timing: just today, Microsoft expanded its business analytics tools.)
I’d argue that the competitive threat of Amazon is a little more remote. At the moment, in fact, the two work very closely: specifically in September last year, Amazon and Salesforce extended an already years-long deal to integrate AWS and Salesforce products to aid in enterprise “digital transformation” (one of Salesforce’s catch phrases).
Placing Salesforce physically closer to Amazon could even underscore how the two might work closer together in the future — not least because cloud storage is now a notably missing jewel in Salesforce’s enterprise IT crown as it squares up to Microsoft, which has Azure. (And it’s not just a Seattle thing. Google, which has Google Cloud Platform, acquired Tableau competitor Looker last week.)
On the other hand, you have to wonder about the longer-term trajectory for Salesforce and its ambitions. The Tableau deal takes it firmly into a new area of business that up to now has been more of a side-gig: data and analytics. Coming from two different directions — infrastructure for AWS and customer management for Salesforce — enterprise data has been a remote battleground for both companies for years already, and it will be interesting to see how the two sides approach it.
Notably, this is not Salesforce’s first efforts to lay down roots in the city. It established an engineering office in the city in 2017 and, as Benioff pointed out today, putting deeper roots into what he described as a “unique market with tremendous talent” will open up the company to tapping it even more.
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Microsoft Power Platform update aims to put AI in reach of business users
Low code and no code are the latest industry buzzwords, but if vendors can truly abstract away the complexity of difficult tasks like building machine learning models, it could help mainstream technologies that are currently out of reach of most business users. That’s precisely what Microsoft is aiming to do with its latest Power Platform announcements today.
The company tried to bring that low-code simplicity to building applications last year when it announced PowerApps. Now it believes by combining PowerApps with Microsoft Flow and its new AI Builder tool, it can allow folks building apps with PowerApps to add a layer of intelligence very quickly.
It starts with having access to data sources, and the Data Connector tool gives users access to more than 250 data connectors. That includes Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe, as well as, of course, Microsoft services like Office 365 and Dynamics 365. Richard Riley, senior director for Power Platform marketing, says this is the foundation for pulling data into AI Builder.
“AI Builder is all about making it just as easy in a low-code, no-code way to go bring artificial intelligence and machine learning into your Power Apps, into Microsoft Flow, into the Common Data Service, into your data connectors, and so on,” Riley told TechCrunch.
Screenshot: Microsoft
Charles Lamanna, general manager at Microsoft, says that Microsoft can do all the analysis and heavy lifting required to build a data model for you, removing a huge barrier to entry for business users. “The basic idea is that you can select any field in the Common Data Service and just say, ‘I want to predict this field.’ Then we’ll actually go look at historical records for that same table or entity to go predict [the results],” he explained. This could be used to predict if a customer will sign up for a credit card, if a customer is likely to churn, or if a loan would be approved, and so forth.
This announcement comes the same day that Salesforce announced it was buying Tableau for almost $16 billion, and days after Google bought Looker for $2.6 billion, and shows how powerful data can be in a business context, especially when providing a way to put that data to use, whether in the form of visualization or inside business applications.
While Microsoft admits AI Builder won’t be something everyone uses, they do see a kind of power user who might have been previously unable to approach this level of sophistication on their own, building apps and adding layers of intelligence without a heck of a lot of coding. If it works as advertised it will bring a level of simplicity to tasks that were previously well out of reach of business users without requiring a data scientist. Regardless, all of this activity shows data has become central to business, and vendors are going to build or buy to put it to work.
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Vectra lands $100M Series E investment for AI-driven network security
Vectra, a seven-year-old company that helps customers detect intrusions at the network level, whether in the cloud or on premises, announced a $100 million Series E funding round today led by TCV. Existing investors, including Khosla Ventures and Accel, also participated in the round, which brings the total raised to more than $200 million, according to the company.
As company CEO Hitesh Sheth explained, there are two primary types of intrusion detection. The first is end point detection and the second is his company’s area of coverage, network detection and response, or NDR. He says that by adding a layer of artificial intelligence, it improves the overall results.
“One of the keys to our success has been applying AI to network traffic, the networking side of NDR, to look for the signal in the noise. And we can do this across the entire infrastructure, from the data center to the cloud all the way into end user traffic including IoT,” he explained.
He said that as companies move their data to the cloud, they are looking for ways to ensure the security of their most valuable data assets, and he says his company’s NDR solution can provide that. In fact, securing the cloud side of the equation is one of the primary investment focuses for this round.
Tim McAdam, from lead investor TCV, says that the AI piece is a real differentiator for Vectra and one that attracted his firm to invest in the company. He said that while he realized that AI is an overused term these days, after talking to 30 customers he heard over and over again that Vectra’s AI-driven solution was a differentiator over competing products. “All of them have decided to standardize on the Vectra Cognito because to a person, they spoke of the efficacy and the reduction of their threat vectors as a result of standardizing on Vectra,” McAdam told TechCrunch.
The company was founded in 2012 and currently has 240 employees. That is expected to double in a year to 18 months with this funding.
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Salesforce is buying data visualization company Tableau for $15.7B in all-stock deal
On the heels of Google buying analytics startup Looker last week for $2.6 billion, Salesforce today announced a huge piece of news in a bid to step up its own work in data visualization and (more generally) tools to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data that they use and amass: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7 billion in an all-stock deal.
The latter is publicly traded and this deal will involve shares of Tableau Class A and Class B common stock getting exchanged for 1.103 shares of Salesforce common stock, the company said, and so the $15.7 billion figure is the enterprise value of the transaction, based on the average price of Salesforce’s shares as of June 7, 2019.
This is a huge jump on Tableau’s last market cap: it was valued at $10.79 billion at close of trading Friday, according to figures on Google Finance. (Also: trading has halted on its stock in light of this news.)
The two boards have already approved the deal, Salesforce notes. The two companies’ management teams will be hosting a conference call at 8am Eastern and I’ll listen in to that as well to get more details.
This is a huge deal for Salesforce as it continues to diversify beyond CRM software and into deeper layers of analytics.
The company reportedly worked hard to — but ultimately missed out on — buying LinkedIn (which Microsoft picked up instead), and while there isn’t a whole lot in common between LinkedIn and Tableau, this deal will also help Salesforce extend its engagement (and data intelligence) for the customers that Salesforce already has — something that LinkedIn would have also helped it to do.
This also looks like a move designed to help bulk up against Google’s move to buy Looker, announced last week, although I’d argue that analytics is a big enough area that all major tech companies that are courting enterprises are getting their ducks in a row in terms of squaring up to stronger strategies (and products) in this area. It’s unclear whether (and if) the two deals were made in response to each other, although it seems that Salesforce has been eyeing up Tableau for years.
“We are bringing together the world’s #1 CRM with the #1 analytics platform. Tableau helps people see and understand data, and Salesforce helps people engage and understand customers. It’s truly the best of both worlds for our customers–bringing together two critical platforms that every customer needs to understand their world,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and co-CEO, Salesforce, in a statement. “I’m thrilled to welcome Adam and his team to Salesforce.”
Tableau has about 86,000 business customers, including Charles Schwab, Verizon (which owns TC), Schneider Electric, Southwest and Netflix. Salesforce said Tableau will operate independently and under its own brand post-acquisition. It will also remain headquartered in Seattle, Wash., headed by CEO Adam Selipsky along with others on the current leadership team.
Indeed, later during the call, Benioff let it drop that Seattle would become Salesforce’s official second headquarters with the closing of this deal.
That’s not to say, though, that the two will not be working together.
On the contrary, Salesforce is already talking up the possibilities of expanding what the company is already doing with its Einstein platform (launched back in 2016, Einstein is the home of all of Salesforce’s AI-based initiatives); and with “Customer 360,” which is the company’s product and take on omnichannel sales and marketing. The latter is an obvious and complementary product home, given that one huge aspect of Tableau’s service is to provide “big picture” insights.
“Joining forces with Salesforce will enhance our ability to help people everywhere see and understand data,” said Selipsky. “As part of the world’s #1 CRM company, Tableau’s intuitive and powerful analytics will enable millions more people to discover actionable insights across their entire organizations. I’m delighted that our companies share very similar cultures and a relentless focus on customer success. I look forward to working together in support of our customers and communities.”
“Salesforce’s incredible success has always been based on anticipating the needs of our customers and providing them the solutions they need to grow their businesses,” said Keith Block, co-CEO, Salesforce. “Data is the foundation of every digital transformation, and the addition of Tableau will accelerate our ability to deliver customer success by enabling a truly unified and powerful view across all of a customer’s data.”
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Doom, Fallout and the rest of the trailers from Bethesda’s E3 press conference
E3 may not officially start until Tuesday, but the announcements are coming fast and furious. A few short hours after Microsoft previewed its streaming service and next-gen console, Bethesda took to the stage a few blocks a way, with footage from new Elder Scroll and Doom titles, along with a lot more Fallout 76 gameplay.
Here’s what you missed.
Elder Scrolls: Blades for Switch – The mobile game is heading to Switch this fall — and best of all, it’s free.
Fallout 76: Nuclear Winter – As the company noted, Fallout 76 didn’t get off to the most auspicious of starts. The publisher announced a number of new updates for the post-apocalyptic title, including, the addition of Nuclear Winter, a battle royale mode.
Ghostwire: Tokyo – A new creepy action adventure game from Resident Evil director, Shinji Mikami.
Commander Keen – The 90s id game returns as a free-to-play iOS title.
Elder Scrolls: Legends – The mobile title is getting additional content.
Rage 2 – The first-person shooter gets new enemies, new vehicles and more.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood – More footage of the Terror Twins doing a number on Nazis.
Deathloop: We didn’t get a lot of info on this one, but it sure did look purdy.
Doom: Eternal – More info, more footage and now, finally, a date. Doom: Eternal arrives November 22.
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Fallout 76 is getting a 52-player battle royale mode
Tonight’s Bethesda E3 press conference was all about free additions. In fact, the company actually took to the stage to apologize for Fallout 76’s rocky launch. The publisher quickly added that it’s continued to improve on the title since late last year, listening to player feedback and adding all sorts of additional content.
That includes the arrival of a bunch of NPCs, and, more importantly, the launch of Nuclear Winter, a 52-player battle Royale mode that is arriving as an update tomorrow. The mode will be free to play on all platforms for the week of June 10 to 17.
Asked last year whether a battle royale mode was in the works for the post-apocalyptic title, SVP Pete Hines noted that the company doesn’t like to follow trends set out by other companies, stating, “just because battle royale is popular doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for us.” He did leave open the possibility — though seemingly unenthusiastically — and now here we are.
Of course, the mode has become tremendously popular in recent years, thanks to the likes of Fortnite and PUBG. Bethesda’s embrace of the mode has been met with…mixed reaction on Twitter, though the audience at tonight’s presser was appropriately enthusiastic.
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Here are the game trailers from Microsoft’s E3 2019 press conference
Trailers. You love them, Microsoft’s got them. According to the company, there were a ridiculous 60 games trotted out on stage at today’s big E3 kickoff. Looks like the Xbox got a little extra love at the event since Sony’s MIA this year. Along with more information on its streaming service Project XCloud a sneak peek at its next console and a very special appearance by Keanu, the company had a LOT of games to show off.
Here are the biggest trailers from today’s event.
Minecraft: Dungeons – Everyone’s favorite building block title gets its very own single and multiplayer RPG adventure.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps: Announced in 2017, Moon Studio’s platformer finally arrives next February.
Bleeding Edge: Ninja Theory’s latest is a multiplayer melee combat title.
Flight Simulator: You know, you love it — or are otherwise indifferent. The classic simulator returns in 2020.
Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition – Coming later this year, the title will also be available for Xbox Game Pass for PC.
Wasteland 3: The party-based role-playing sequel takes players to…Colorado Springs?
Battletoads: Don’t call it a comeback. Zitz, Pimple and Rash return for a new Gamepass title.
Gear 5: Probably the most eagerly anticipated game of the press conference, the new Gears is launching September 10.
Gears 5: Terminator Dark Fate – Here’s a fun reveal. Those who buy Gears 5 by September 16 with get a character pack, featuring the T-800 Endoskeleton from the forthcoming Terminator sequel.
Forza Horizon 4 Lego Speed Champions: The popular racing series gets the Lego treatment.
Kitten Around with RAAM: A series of animated shorts based on characters from Gears POP.
State of Decay Heartland: A new DLC pack for Heartland 2, features two stories and will be available as part of GamePass.
CrossfireX: The latest version of Smilegate’s FPS is arriving on Xbox One.
Halo: Infinite – What’s this, then? Why it’s a brand new Halo title, launching alongside Microsoft’s next-gen Project Scarlett console during the 2020 holiday season.
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