Aug
24
2020
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Meet the anti-antitrust startup club

When Congress called in tech CEOs to testify a few weeks ago, it felt like a defining moment. Hundreds of startups have become unicorns, with the largest worth more than $1 trillion (or perhaps $2 trillion). Indeed, modern tech companies have become so entrenched, Facebook is the only one of the Big Five American tech shops worth less than 13 figures.

The titanic valuations of many companies are predicated on current performance, cash on hand and lofty expectations for future growth. The pandemic has done little to stem Big Tech’s forward march and many startups have seen growth rates accelerate as other sectors rushed to support a suddenly remote workforce.

But inside tech’s current moment in the sun is a concern that Congress worked to highlight: Are these firms behaving anti-competitively?

By now you’ve heard the arguments concerning why Big Tech may be too big, but there’s a neat second story that we, the Equity crew, have been chatting about: Some startups are racing into the big kill zone.

They have to be a bit foolhardy to take on Google Gmail and Search, Amazon’s e-commerce platform or Apple’s App Store. Yet, there are startups targeting all of these categories and more, some flush with VC funding from investors who are eager to take a swing at tech’s biggest players

If the little companies manage to carve material market share for themselves, arguments that Big Tech was just too big to kill — let alone fail — will dissolve. But today, their incumbency is a reality and these startups are merely bold.

Still, when we look at the work being done, there are enough companies staring down the most valuable companies in American history (on an unadjusted basis) that we had to shout them out. Say hello to the “anti-antitrust club.”

Hey and Superhuman are coming after Gmail

Gmail has been the undisputed leader in consumer email for years (if not enterprise email, where Microsoft has massive inroads due to Exchange and Outlook). Startups have contested that market, including Mailbox, which sold to Dropbox for about $100 million back in 2013, but whenever a new feature came along that might entice users, Gmail managed to suck it up into its app.

Mar
31
2020
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Amid shift to remote work, application performance monitoring is IT’s big moment

In recent weeks, millions have started working from home, putting unheard-of pressure on services like video conferencing, online learning, food delivery and e-commerce platforms. While some verticals have seen a marked reduction in traffic, others are being asked to scale to new heights.

Services that were previously nice to have are now necessities, but how do organizations track pressure points that can add up to a critical failure? There is actually a whole class of software to help in this regard.

Monitoring tools like Datadog, New Relic and Elastic are designed to help companies understand what’s happening inside their key systems and warn them when things may be going sideways. That’s absolutely essential as these services are being asked to handle unprecedented levels of activity.

At a time when performance is critical, application performance monitoring (APM) tools are helping companies stay up and running. They also help track root causes should the worst case happen and they go down, with the goal of getting going again as quickly as possible.

We spoke to a few monitoring vendor CEOs to understand better how they are helping customers navigate this demand and keep systems up and running when we need them most.

IT’s big moment

Mar
28
2019
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Vizion.ai launches its managed Elasticsearch service

Setting up Elasticsearch, the open-source system that many companies large and small use to power their distributed search and analytics engines, isn’t the hardest thing. What is very hard, though, is to provision the right amount of resources to run the service, especially when your users’ demand comes in spikes, without overpaying for unused capacity. Vizion.ai’s new Elasticsearch Service does away with all of this by essentially offering Elasticsearch as a service and only charging its customers for the infrastructure they use.

Vizion.ai’s service automatically scales up and down as needed. It’s a managed service and delivered as a SaaS platform that can support deployments on both private and public clouds, with full API compatibility with the standard Elastic stack that typically includes tools like Kibana for visualizing data, Beats for sending data to the service and Logstash for transforming the incoming data and setting up data pipelines. Users can easily create several stacks for testing and development, too, for example.

Vizion.ai GM and VP Geoff Tudor

“When you go into the AWS Elasticsearch service, you’re going to be looking at dozens or hundreds of permutations for trying to build your own cluster,” Vision.ai’s VP and GM Geoff Tudor told me. “Which instance size? How many instances? Do I want geographical redundancy? What’s my networking? What’s my security? And if you choose wrong, then that’s going to impact the overall performance. […] We do balancing dynamically behind that infrastructure layer.” To do this, the service looks at the utilization patterns of a given user and then allocates resources to optimize for the specific use case.

What VVizion.ai hasdone here is take some of the work from its parent company Panzura, a multi-cloud storage service for enterprises that has plenty of patents around data caching, and applied it to this new Elasticsearch service.

There are obviously other companies that offer commercial Elasticsearch platforms already. Tudor acknowledges this, but argues that his company’s platform is different. With other products, he argues, you have to decide on the size of your block storage for your metadata upfront, for example, and you typically want SSDs for better performance, which can quickly get expensive. Thanks to Panzura’s IP, Vizion.ai is able to bring down the cost by caching recent data on SSDs and keeping the rest in cheaper object storage pools.

He also noted that the company is positioning the overall Vizion.ai service, with the Elasticsearch service as one of the earliest components, as a platform for running AI and ML workloads. Support for TensorFlow, PredictionIO (which plays nicely with Elasticsearch) and other tools is also in the works. “We want to make this an easy serverless ML/AI consumption in a multi-cloud fashion, where not only can you leverage the compute, but you can also have your storage of record at a very cost-effective price point.”

Nov
09
2017
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Elastic acquires search startup Swiftype

Shay Banon Swiftype isn’t just a startup that we write about — we also use the technology to provide site search on TechCrunch itself. Now it’s being acquired by Elastic, the company behind the open source technology Elasticsearch. It turns out the two companies are already connected, because Swiftype uses Elasticsearch for indexing and storing its search content. In fact, Swiftype CTO… Read More

Dec
29
2016
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How viral open-source startups can build themselves into enterprise-IT powerhouses

Striped Halftone Pattern Hordes of new enterprise-IT upstarts have popped up in Silicon Valley, with some drawing lofty valuations from investors. They’re driven by new, more-advanced technologies in areas such as databases, software development, networking and cloud computing. And many are taking aim at incumbents like Dell, EMC, Oracle and IBM. But will these new companies ever be as valuable as those big names? Read More

Oct
26
2016
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Elastic brings order to its product line with Elastic Stack

Woman with reflection of search button in her glasses. For the last several years, Elastic has offered a range of analytics and visualization tools to go with its open source search engine. Today, it announced it was pulling those pieces together into an integrated stack. The new product known as Elastic Stack includes all of the company’s products: Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash and Beats. It’s available for download or as part of… Read More

Oct
02
2016
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Percona Live Europe featured talk with Philipp Krenn — Elasticsearch for SQL Users

Percona Live EuropeWelcome to another Percona Live Europe featured talk with Percona Live Europe 2016: Amsterdam speakers! In this series of blogs, we’ll highlight some of the speakers that will be at this year’s conference. We’ll also discuss the technologies and outlooks of the speakers themselves. Make sure to read to the end to get a special Percona Live Europe registration bonus!

In this Percona Live Europe featured talk, we’ll meet Philipp Krenn, Infrastructure | Developer Advocate at Elastic. His talk will be on Elasticsearch for SQL Users. Elasticsearch is a document store with its own query DSL. In his talk, he will look at several well-understood concepts and SQL queries from the relational paradigm and map these to their Elasticsearch equivalents.

I had a chance to speak with Philipp and learn a bit more about SQL searches:

Give me a brief history of yourself: how you got into database development, where you work, what you love about it.

I have switched between development and operations a few times and have been focusing on cloud and databases lately. This includes relational and non-relational databases, and how to find the right mix of solutions for projects. Since I started participating in more and more meetups and events, I was lucky to join the great team at Elastic. I now get to spread the good word and work on the infrastructure team. Now I can be found at lots of events, and I absolutely love to get out to the community and talk about all things search, database, metrics, operations and tech in general.

Percona: Your talk is called “Elasticsearch for SQL Users.” What is Elasticsearch? How can businesses use it to improve their database environment?

Philipp: Elasticsearch started off as a full-text search engine, providing the distribution, REST interface and Query DSL around the well-known Apache Lucene library. By now it covers logging, metrics, analytics, security and many more uses cases – but we’ll focus on search.

Many businesses have the need for a search that just works. While this sounds very simple, it can be challenging to implement, and many databases are just not for this task. That’s why Elasticsearch is a fantastic tool that you can add when you need a powerful search.

Percona: Why is bridging the worlds of relational and NoSQL databases important?

Philipp: Both sides are around to stay. I feel that the relational and the NoSQL worlds are growing closer together. Relational systems are getting better at scaling and replicating, as well as adding more flexible data types. Whereas NoSQL systems are adding more features, such as SQL-like interfaces, and slowly improving their tooling. Bridging these two worlds seems to be very fruitful to both, so anybody using both databases can only profit.

Percona: Where do you see MySQL and NoSQL heading in order to deal with some of the database trends that keep you awake at night?

Philipp: It’s a very dynamic landscape, so picking the right tools is not getting easier. And neither of the two systems will replace the other one anytime soon. I imagine a healthy competition for the future, which will hopefully allow all of us to have fewer sleepless nights, because I don’t consider being awake at night a feature!

Percona: What are looking forward to the most at Percona Live Europe this year?

Philipp: Lively discussions and arguments. Building products is just the start. Spreading the word, getting feedback, seeing how you can integrate with other solutions: these are all reasons why conferences are so valuable.

You can read more about Philipp and his thoughts on searches at his website and Twitter handle.

Want to find out more about Philipp, Elasticsearch and database searches? Register for Percona Live Europe 2016, and come see his talk Elasticsearch for SQL Users.

Use the code FeaturedTalk and receive €25 off the current registration price!

Percona Live Europe 2016: Amsterdam is the premier event for the diverse and active open source database community. The conferences have a technical focus with an emphasis on the core topics of MySQL, MongoDB, and other open source databases. Percona live tackles subjects such as analytics, architecture and design, security, operations, scalability and performance. It also provides in-depth discussions for your high-availability, IoT, cloud, big data and other changing business needs. This conference is an opportunity to network with peers and technology professionals by bringing together accomplished DBA’s, system architects and developers from around the world to share their knowledge and experience. All of these people help you learn how to tackle your open source database challenges in a whole new way.

This conference has something for everyone!

Percona Live Europe 2016: Amsterdam is October 3-5 at the Mövenpick Hotel Amsterdam City Centre.

Amsterdam eWeek

Percona Live Europe 2016 is part of Amsterdam eWeek. Amsterdam eWeek provides a platform for national and international companies that focus on online marketing, media and technology and for business managers and entrepreneurs who use them, whether it comes to retail, healthcare, finance, game industry or media. Check it out!

Dec
10
2015
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Elastic Joins Azure Marketplace As It Strengthens Relationship With Microsoft

Search box with word enterprise in it. Elastic announced today that it was deepening its relationship with Microsoft by adding its open source and commercial products to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Elastic (which used to be known as ElasticSearch) has been working with Microsoft for some time. It runs search on MSN.com, is embedded in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and also built into the Azure framework. With today’s… Read More

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