Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

When Cisco bought AppDynamics in 2017 for $3.7 billion just before the IPO, the company sent a clear signal it wanted to move beyond its pure network hardware roots into the software monitoring side of the equation. Yesterday afternoon the company announced it intends to buy another monitoring company, this time snagging internet monitoring solution ThousandEyes.

Cisco would not comment on the price when asked by TechCrunch, but published reports from CNBC and others pegged the deal at around $1 billion. If that’s accurate, it means the company has paid around $4.7 billion for a pair of monitoring solutions companies.

Cisco’s Todd Nightingale, writing in a blog post announcing the deal said that the kind of data that ThousandEyes provides around internet user experience is more important than ever as internet connections have come under tremendous pressure with huge numbers of employees working from home.

ThousandEyes keeps watch on those connections and should fit in well with other Cisco monitoring technologies. “With thousands of agents deployed throughout the internet, ThousandEyes’ platform has an unprecedented understanding of the internet and grows more intelligent with every deployment, Nightingale wrote.

He added, “Cisco will incorporate ThousandEyes’ capabilities in our AppDynamics application intelligence portfolio to enhance visibility across the enterprise, internet and the cloud.”

As for ThousandEyes, co-founder and CEO Mohit Lad told a typical acquisition story. It was about growing faster inside the big corporation than it could on its own. “We decided to become part of Cisco because we saw the potential to do much more, much faster, and truly create a legacy for ThousandEyes,” Lad wrote.

It’s interesting to note that yesterday’s move, and the company’s larger acquisition strategy over the last decade is part of a broader move to software and services as a complement to its core networking hardware business.

Just yesterday, Synergy Research released its network switch and router revenue report and it wasn’t great. As companies have hunkered down during the pandemic, they have been buying much less network hardware, dropping the Q1 numbers to seven year low. That translated into a $1 billion less in overall revenue in this category, according to Synergy.

While Cisco owns the vast majority of the market, it obviously wants to keep moving into software services as a hedge against this shifting market. This deal simply builds on that approach.

ThousandEyes was founded in 2010 and raised over $110 million on a post valuation of $670 million as of February 2019, according to Pitchbook Data.

In a surprise move, Mirantis acquired Docker’s Enterprise platform business at the end of last year, and while Docker itself is refocusing on developers, Mirantis kept the Docker Enterprise name and product. Today, Mirantis is rolling out its first major update to Docker Enterprise with the release of version 3.1.

For the most part, these updates are in line with what’s been happening in the container ecosystem in recent months. There’s support for Kubernetes 1.17 and improved support for Kubernetes on Windows (something the Kubernetes community has worked on quite a bit in the last year or so). Also new is Nvidia GPU integration in Docker Enterprise through a pre-installed device plugin, as well as support for Istio Ingress for Kubernetes and a new command-line tool for deploying clusters with the Docker Engine.

In addition to the product updates, Mirantis is also launching three new support options for its customers that now give them the option to get 24×7 support for all support cases, for example, as well as enhanced SLAs for remote managed operations, designated customer success managers and proactive monitoring and alerting. With this, Mirantis is clearly building on its experience as a managed service provider.

What’s maybe more interesting, though, is how this acquisition is playing out at Mirantis itself. Mirantis, after all, went through its fair share of ups and downs in recent years, from high-flying OpenStack platform to layoffs and everything in between.

“Why we do this in the first place and why at some point I absolutely felt that I wanted to do this is because I felt that this would be a more compelling and interesting company to build, despite maybe some of the short-term challenges along the way, and that very much turned out to be true. It’s been fantastic,” Mirantis CEO and co-founder Adrian Ionel told me. “What we’ve seen since the acquisition, first of all, is that the customer base has been dramatically more loyal than people had thought, including ourselves.”

Ionel admitted that he thought some users would defect because this is obviously a major change, at least from the customer’s point of view. “Of course we have done everything possible to have something for them that’s really compelling and we put out the new roadmap right away in December after the acquisition — and people bought into it at very large scale,” he said. With that, Mirantis retained more than 90% of the customer base and the vast majority of all of Docker Enterprise’s largest users.

Ionel, who almost seemed a bit surprised by this, noted that this helped the company to turn in two “fantastic” quarters and was profitable in the last quarter, despite COVID-19.

“We wanted to go into this acquisition with a sober assessment of risks because we wanted to make it work, we wanted to make it successful because we were well aware that a lot of acquisitions fail,” he explained. “We didn’t want to go into it with a hyper-optimistic approach in any way — and we didn’t — and maybe that’s one of the reasons why we are positively surprised.”

He argues that the reason for the current success is that enterprises are doubling down on their container journeys and because they actually love the Docker Enterprise platform, like infrastructure independence, its developer focus, security features and ease of use. One thing many large customers asked for was better support for multi-cluster management at scale, which today’s update delivers.

“Where we stand today, we have one product development team. We have one product roadmap. We are shipping a very big new release of Docker Enterprise. […] The field has been completely unified and operates as one salesforce, with record results. So things have been extremely busy, but good and exciting.”

We may be in the thick of a pandemic with all of the economic fallout that comes from that, but certain aspects of technology don’t change, no matter the external factors. Storage is one of them. In fact, we are generating more digital stuff than ever, and Wasabi, a Boston-based startup that has figured out a way to drive down the cost of cloud storage, is benefiting from that.

Today it announced a $30 million Series B led led by Forestay Capital, the technology innovation arm of Waypoint Capital, with help from previous investors. As with the previous round, Wasabi is going with home office investors, rather than traditional venture capital firms. Today’s round brings the total raised to $110 million, according to the company.

While founder and CEO David Friend wouldn’t discuss the specific valuation, he did say it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Friend says the company needs the funds to keep up with the rapid growth. “We’ve got about 15,000 customers today, hundreds of petabytes of storage, 2,500 channel partners, 250 technology partners — so we’ve been busy,” he said.

He says that revenue continues to grow in spite of the impact of COVID-19 on other parts of the economy. “Revenue grew 5x last year. It’ll probably grow 3.5x this year. We haven’t seen any real slowdown from the coronavirus. Quarter over quarter growth will be in excess of 40% — this quarter over Q1 — so it’s just continuing on a torrid pace,” he said.

The challenge for a company like Wasabi, which is looking to capture a large chunk of the growing cloud storage market, is the infrastructure piece. It needs to keep building more to meet increasing demand, while keeping costs down, which remains its primary value proposition with customers.

The money will be used mostly to continue to expand its growing infrastructure requirements. The more they store, the more data centers they need, and that takes money. It will also help the company expand into new markets where countries have data sovereignty laws that require data to be stored in-country.

The company launched in 2015. It previously raised $68 million in 2018.

Note: This article originally stated this was a debt financing round. The company has clarified that it is an equity round.

This week, Verizon Communications CEO Hans Vestberg joined us for an episode of Extra Crunch Live.

Vestberg is leading the company through the midst of one its biggest rollouts to date with the push into 5G connectivity. In our discussion, he spoke about how he’s managing the organization during this global crisis, his thoughts on work from home and acquisition strategy, and the ways in which 5G will change the way we work and live.

(Disclosure: Verizon Communications is TechCrunch’s parent company.)

Extra Crunch members can check out a partial transcript of the conversation (edited for length and clarity) or watch it in its entirety via YouTube video below.

Extra Crunch Live features some of the brightest minds in tech and VC, including Aileen Lee, Roelof Botha, Kirsten Green and Mark Cuban. Upcoming episodes will include Aaron Levie from Box, GGV’s Hans Tung and Jeff Richards, Eventbrite’s Julia Hartz and others. Extra Crunch members can submit questions to speakers in real time, so please sign up here if you haven’t already.

His initial reaction to news of the lockdown

We’re a large company with 135,000 employees in 70 different countries around the globe. So, of course, we had an early warning when it started actually in Asia. We have employees in Asia, so we got the feeling that this could be really serious. It was early in the first week of February, we moved to the highest emergency or crisis level in the company. That means that we go to a certain crisis mode on how we organized and how we galvanized the company.

That’s usually put into place every time there is a big national disaster because you need to split between people taking care of the crisis and people taking care of running the business. So we were very early on with that. In the beginning of February, we started the emergency crisis operations center that was taking care of employee questions and prioritization of important things. At the same time, we continued to run the business. That was the first thing we did very early on.

The other thing we did very early on is that we understood that this was something unprecedented. I mean, you have been in crisis before. I mean, I’ve been in the telecom crisis, and we’ve been in the banking crisis when everything just went boom. This is something totally different. You cannot use any of your historical experience when it comes to this pandemic, which actually impacts each and every one of us when it comes to health. So I was honest, and thought that they’re going to be a lot of questions. We decided very early on to run our noon live webcast to our employees. We are on our… I think it’s the 11th week, where at noon every day, we run the webcast for all our employees. That was two of the first things we did.

We didn’t think we were going to run for 11 weeks on the new live webcast, but we have done it because we see there’s a very good tool to communicate with all our employees.

When Docker sold off its enterprise division to Mirantis last fall, that didn’t mark the end of the company. In fact, Docker still exists and has refocused as a cloud-native developer tools vendor. Today it announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft around simplifying running Docker containers in Azure.

As its new mission suggests, it involves tighter integration between Docker and a couple of Azure developer tools including Visual Studio Code and Azure Container Instances (ACI). According to Docker, it can take developers hours or even days to set up their containerized environment across the two sets of tools.

The idea of the integration is to make it easier, faster and more efficient to include Docker containers when developing applications with the Microsoft tool set. Docker CEO Scott Johnston says it’s a matter of giving developers a better experience.

“Extending our strategic relationship with Microsoft will further reduce the complexity of building, sharing and running cloud-native, microservices-based applications for developers. Docker and VS Code are two of the most beloved developer tools and we are proud to bring them together to deliver a better experience for developers building container-based apps for Azure Container Instances,” Johnston said in a statement.

Among the features they are announcing is the ability to log into Azure directly from the Docker command line interface, a big simplification that reduces going back and forth between the two sets of tools. What’s more, developers can set up a Microsoft ACI environment complete with a set of configuration defaults. Developers will also be able to switch easily between their local desktop instance and the cloud to run applications.

These and other integrations are designed to make it easier for Azure and Docker common users to work in in the Microsoft cloud service without having to jump through a lot of extra hoops to do it.

It’s worth noting that these integrations are starting in Beta, but the company promises they should be released some time in the second half of this year.

RudderStack, a startup that offers an open-source alternative to customer data management platforms like Segment, today announced that it has raised a $5 million seed round led by S28 Capital. Salil Deshpande of Uncorrelated Ventures and Mesosphere/D2iQ co-founder Florian Leibert (through 468 Capital) also participated in this round.

In addition, the company also today announced that it has acquired Blendo, an integration platform that helps businesses transform and move data from their data sources to databases.

Like its larger competitors, RudderStack helps businesses consolidate all of their customer data, which is now typically generated and managed in multiple places — and then extract value from this more holistic view. The company was founded by Soumyadeb Mitra, who has a Ph.D. in database systems and worked on similar problems previously when he was at 8×8 after his previous startup, MairinaIQ, was acquired by that company.

Mitra argues that RudderStack is different from its competitors thanks to its focus on developers, its privacy and security options and its focus on being a data warehouse first, without creating yet another data silo.

“Our competitors provide tools for analytics, audience segmentation, etc. on top of the data they keep,” he said. “That works well if you are a small startup, but larger enterprises have a ton of other data sources — at 8×8 we had our own internal billing system, for example — and you want to combine this internal data with the event stream data — that you collect via RudderStack or competitors — to create a 360-degree view of the customer and act on that. This becomes very difficult with the SaaS-hosted data model of our competitors — you won’t be sending all your internal data to these cloud vendors.”

Part of its appeal, of course, is the open-source nature of RudderStack, whose GitHub repository now has more than 1,700 stars for the main RudderStack server. Mitra credits getting on the front page of HackerNews for its first sale. On that day, it received over 500 GitHub stars, a few thousand clones and a lot of signups for its hosted app. “One of those signups turned out to be our first paid customer. They were already a competitor’s customer, but it wasn’t scaling up so were looking to build something in-house. That’s when they found us and started working with us,” he said.

Because it is open source, companies can run RudderStack anyway they want, but like most similar open-source companies, RudderStack offers multiple hosting options itself, too, that include cloud hosting, starting at $2,000 per month, with unlimited sources and destination.

Current users include IFTTT, Mattermost, MarineTraffic, Torpedo and Wynn Las Vegas.

As for the Blendo acquisition, it’s worth noting that the company only raised a small amount of money in its seed round. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition.

“With Blendo, I had the opportunity to be part of a great team that executed on the vision of turning any company into a data-driven organization,” said Blendo founder Kostas Pardalis, who has joined RudderStack as head of Growth. “We’ve combined the talented Blendo and RudderStack teams together with the technology that both companies have created, at a time when the customer data market is ripe for the next wave of innovation. I’m excited to help drive RudderStack forward.”

Mitra tells me that RudderStack acquired Blendo instead of building its own version of this technology because “it is not a trivial technology to build — cloud sources are really complicated and have weird schemas and API challenges and it would have taken us a lot of time to figure it out. There are independent large companies doing the ETL piece.”

Toro’s founders started at Uber helping monitor the data quality in the company’s vast data catalogs, and they wanted to put that experience to work for a more general audience. Today, the company announced a $4 million seed round.

The round was co-led by Costanoa Ventures and Point72 Ventures, with help from a number of individual investors.

Company co-founder and CEO Kyle Kirwan says the startup wanted to bring to data the kind of automated monitoring we have in applications performance monitoring products. Instead of getting an alert when the application is performing poorly, you would get an alert that there is an issue with the data.

“We’re building a monitoring platform that helps data teams find problems in their data content before that gets into dashboards and machine learning models and other places where problems in the data could cause a lot of damage,” Kirwan told TechCrunch.

When it comes to data, there are specific kinds of issues a product like Toro would be looking at. It might be a figure that falls outside of a specific dollar range that could be indicative of fraud, or it could be simply a mistake in how the data was labeled that is different from previous ways that could break a model.

The founders learned the lessons they used to build Toro while working on the data team at Uber. They had helped build tools there to find these kinds of problems, but in a way that was highly specific to Uber. When they started Toro, they needed to build a more general-purpose tool.

The product works by understanding what it’s looking at in terms of data, and what the normal thresholds are for a particular type of data. Anything that falls outside of the threshold for a particular data point would trigger an alert, and the data team would need to go to work to fix the problem.

Casey Aylward, vice president at Costanoa Ventures, likes the pedigree of this team and the problem it’s trying to solve. “Despite its importance, data quality has remained a challenge for many enterprise companies,” she said in a statement. She added, “[The co-founders] deep experience building several of Uber’s internal data tools makes them uniquely qualified to build the best solution.”

The company has been at this for just over a year and has been keeping it lean with four employees, including the two co-founders, but they do have plans to add a couple of data scientists in the coming year as they continue to build out the product.