Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Sumo Logic has long held the goal to help customers understand their data wherever it lives. As we move into the era of containers, that goal becomes more challenging because containers by their nature are ephemeral. The company announced a product enhancement today designed to instrument containerized applications in spite of that.

They are debuting these new features at DockerCon, Docker’s customer conference taking place this week in San Francisco.

Sumo’s CEO Ramin Sayer says containers have begun to take hold over the last 12-18 months with Docker and Kubernetes emerging as tools of choice. Given their popularity, Sumo wants to be able to work with them. “[Docker and Kubernetes] are by far the most standard things that have developed in any new shop, or any existing shop that wants to build a brand new modern app or wants to lift and shift an app from on prem [to the cloud], or have the ability to migrate workloads from Vendor A platform to Vendor B,” he said.

He’s not wrong of course. Containers and Kubernetes have been taking off in a big way over the last 18 months and developers and operations alike have struggled to instrument these apps to understand how they behave.

“But as that standardization of adoption of that technology has come about, it makes it easier for us to understand how to instrument, collect, analyze, and more importantly, start to provide industry benchmarks,” Sayer explained.

They do this by avoiding the use of agents. Regardless of how you run your application, whether in a VM or a container, Sumo is able to capture the data and give you feedback you might otherwise have trouble retrieving.

The company has built in native support for Kubernetes and Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS). It also supports the open source tool Prometheus favored by Kubernetes users to extract metrics and metadata. The goal of the Sumo tool is to help customers fix issues faster and reduce downtime.

As they work with this technology, they can begin to understand norms and pass that information onto customers. “We can guide them and give them best practices and tips, not just on what they’ve done, but how they compare to other users on Sumo,” he said.

Sumo Logic was founded in 2010 and has raised $230 million, according to data on Crunchbase. Its most recent round was a $70 million Series F led by Sapphire Ventures last June.

San Jose-based Cohesity has closed an oversubscribed $250M Series D funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, bringing its total raised to date to $410M. The enterprise software company offers a hyperconverged data platform for storing and managing all the secondary data created outside of production apps.

In a press release today it notes this is only the second time SoftBank’s gigantic Vision Fund has invested in an enterprise software company. The fund, which is almost $100BN in size — without factoring in all the planned sequels, also led an investment in enterprise messaging company Slack back in September 2017 (also a $250M round).

“Cohesity pioneered hyperconverged secondary storage as a first stepping stone on the path to a much larger transformation of enterprise infrastructure spanning public and private clouds. We believe that Cohesity’s web-scale Google-like approach, cloud-native architecture, and incredible simplicity is changing the business of IT in a fundamental way,” said Deep Nishar, senior managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a supporting statement.

Also participating in the financing are Cohesity’s existing strategic investors Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, along with early investor Sequoia Capital and others.

The company says the investment will be put towards “large-scale global expansion” by selling more enterprises on the claimed cost and operational savings from consolidating multiple separate point solutions onto its hyperconverged platform. On the customer acquisition front it flags up support from its strategic investors, Cisco and HPE, to help it reach more enterprises.

Cohesity says it’s onboarded more than 200 new enterprise customers in the last two quarters — including Air Bud Entertainment, AutoNation, BC Oil and Gas Commission, Bungie, Harris Teeter, Hyatt, Kelly Services, LendingClub, Piedmont Healthcare, Schneider Electric, the San Francisco Giants, TCF Bank, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force, and WestLotto — and says annual revenues grew 600% between 2016 and 2017.

In another supporting statement, CEO and founder Mohit Aron, added: “My vision has always been to provide enterprises with cloud-like simplicity for their many fragmented applications and data — backup, test and development, analytics, and more.

“Cohesity has built significant momentum and market share during the last 12 months and we are just getting started.”

In a DevOps world, the operations part of the equation needs to be on call to deal with issues as they come up 24/7. We used to use pagers. Today’s solutions like PagerDuty and VictorOps have been created to place this kind of requirement in a modern digital context. Today, Splunk bought VictorOps for $120 million in cash and Splunk securities.

It’s a company that makes a lot of sense for Splunk, a log management tool that has been helping customers deal with oodles of information being generated from back-end systems for many years. With VictorOps, the company gets a system to alert the operations team when something from that muddle of data actually requires their attention.

Splunk has been making moves in recent years to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help make sense of the data and provide a level of automation required when the sheer volume of data makes it next to impossible for humans to keep up. VictorOps fits within that approach.

“The combination of machine data analytics and artificial intelligence from Splunk with incident management from VictorOps creates a ‘Platform of Engagement’ that will help modern development teams innovate faster and deliver better customer experiences,” Doug Merritt, president and CEO at Splunk said in a statement.

In a blog post announcing the deal, VictorOps founder and CEO Todd Vernon said the two companies’ missions are aligned. “Upon close, VictorOps will join Splunk’s IT Markets group and together will provide on-call technical staff an analytics and AI-driven approach for addressing the incident lifecycle, from monitoring to response to incident management to continuous learning and improvement,” Vernon wrote.

It should come as no surprise that the two companies have been working together even before the acquisition. “Splunk has been an important technical partner of ours for some time, and through our work together, we discovered that we share a common viewpoint that Modern Incident Management is in a period of strategic change where data is king, and insights from that data are key to maintaining a market leading strategy,” Vernon wrote in the blog post.

VictorOps was founded 2012 and has raised over $33 million, according to data on Crunchbase. The most recent investment was a $15 million Series B in December 2016.

The deal is expected to close in Splunk’s fiscal second quarter subject to customary closing conditions, according to a statement from Splunk.

Workday, the cloud-based platform that offers HR and other back-office apps for businesses, is making an acquisition to expand its portfolio of services: It’s buying Adaptive Insights, a provider of cloud-based business planning and financial modelling tools, for $1.55 billion. The acquisition is notable because Adaptive Insights had filed for an IPO as recently as May 17.

Workday says that the $1.55 billion price tag includes “the assumption of approximately $150 million in unvested equity issued to Adaptive Insights employees” related to that IPO. This deal is expected to close in Q3 of this year.

IPO filings are known to sometimes trigger M&A. Most recently, PayPal announced it would acquire iZettle just after the latter filed to go public. Skype was acquired by Microsoft in 2011 while it was waiting to IPO after previous owner eBay said it would spin it off.

Workday itself went public in 2012 and currently has a market cap of nearly $27 billion.

The deal will give Workday another string to its bow, in its attempt to become the go-to place for all for back-office services for its business customers: the company plans to integrate Adaptive Insights’ tools into its existing platform.

“Adaptive Insights is an industry leader with its Business Planning Cloud platform, and together with Workday, we will help customers accelerate their finance transformation in the cloud,” said Aneel Bhusri, Co-Founder and CEO, Workday, in a statement. “I am excited to welcome the Adaptive Insights team to Workday and look forward to coming together to continue delivering industry-leading products that equip finance organizations to make even faster, better business decisions to adapt to change and to drive growth.”

The two have been working together as partners since 2015.

In the case of Adaptive Insights, which says it has ‘thousands’ of customers, its growth mirrors that both of cloud services and specifically about how business intelligence has developed into a distinct software category of its own over the years, with not just the CFO but an army of in-house analysts relying on analytics of a business’ data to help make small and big decisions.

“The market opportunity here is huge as the CFO has become a power player in the C-Suite,” CEO Tom Bogan told TechCrunch when it raised $75 million in 2015, when it first passed the billion-dollar mark for its valuation. Bogan previously also held a role as chairman of Citrix. “As a former CFO myself, I have seen this first hand and it is accelerating.” Other examples of this force includes Twitter’s Anthony Noto catapulting from CFO to COO (and is now a CEO running SoFi). Around 25 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are former CFOs.

Adaptive Insights had raised $175 million prior to this.

Bogan will stay on and lead the business and report directly to Bhusri.

“Joining forces with Workday accelerates our vision to drive holistic business planning and digital transformation for our customers,” said Bogan, in a separate statement. “Most importantly, both Adaptive Insights and Workday have an employee-first and customer-centric approach to developing enterprise software that will only increase the power of the combined companies.”

More generally, while we have certainly seen a much wider opening of the door for tech IPOs this year, there is also an argument to be made for continuing consolidation it enterprise IT, in particular with regards to cloud services that might have small or potentially negative margins.

Adaptive Insights was not immune to that: the company in its public listing filing said that its previous fiscal year brough tin $106.5 million in revenues, up 30 percent from the year before, but it also posted a loss of $42.7 million in the same period. That was narrower than the $59.1 million it posted in 2016. Combined with the bigger trend of all-in-one platforms packing a bigger punch with businesses, it might have meant that Workday’s offer was too compelling to refuse. 

This looks like Workday’s biggest acquisition yet, but the company has been on a spree of sorts: just last week it announced the acquisition of RallyTeam to beef up its machine learning.

Sometimes you acquire a company for the assets and sometimes you do it for the talent. Today Workday announced it was buying Rallyteam, a San Francisco startup that helps companies keep talented employees by matching them with more challenging opportunities in-house.

The companies did not share the purchase price or the number of Rallyteam employees who would be joining Workday .

In this case, Workday appears to be acquiring the talent. It wants to take the Rallyteam team and incorporate it into the company’s engineering unit to beef up its machine learning efforts, while taking advantage of the expertise it has built up over the years connecting employees with interesting internal projects.

“With Rallyteam, we gain incredible team members who created a talent mobility platform that uses machine learning to help companies better understand and optimize their workforces by matching a worker’s interests, skills and connections with relevant jobs, projects, tasks and people,” Workday’s Cristina Goldt wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.

Rallyteam, which was founded in 2013, and launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September 2014, helps employees find interesting internal projects that might otherwise get outsourced. “I knew there were opportunities that existed [internally] because as a manager, I was constantly outsourcing projects even though I knew there had to be people in the company that could solve this problem,” Rallyteam’s Huan Ho told TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois at the launch. Rallyteam was a service designed to solve this issue.

Last fall the company raised $8.6 million led by Norwest Ventures with participation from Storm Ventures, Cornerstone OnDemand and Wilson Sonsini.

Workday provides a SaaS platform for human resources and finance, so the Rallyteam approach fits nicely within the scope of the Workday business. This is the 10th acquisition for Workday and the second this year.

Workday raised over $230 million before going public in 2012.

One of the characteristics of cloud computing is that when you launch a virtual machine, it gets distributed wherever it makes the most sense for the cloud provider. That usually means sharing servers with other customers in what is known as a multi-tenant environment. But what about times when you want a physical server dedicated just to you?

To help meet those kinds of demands, Google announced the Beta of Google Compute Engine Sole-tenant nodes, which have been designed for use cases such a regulatory or compliance where you require full control of the underlying physical machine, and sharing is not desirable.

“Normally, VM instances run on physical hosts that may be shared by many customers. With sole-tenant nodes, you have the host all to yourself,” Google wrote in a blog post announcing the new offering.

Google has tried to be as flexible as possible, letting the customer choose exactly what configuration they want in terms CPU and memory. Customers can also let Google choose the dedicated server that’s best at any particular moment, or you can manually select the server if you want that level of control. In both cases, you will be assigned a dedicated machine.

If you want to play with this, there is a free tier and then various pricing tiers for a variety of computing requirements. Regardless of your choice, you will be charged on a per-second basis with a one-minute minimum charge, according to Google.

Since this feature is still in Beta, it’s worth noting that it is not covered under any SLA. Microsoft and Amazon have similar offerings.

Logtrust is now known as Devo in one of the cooler name changes I’ve seen in a long time. Whether they intended to pay homage to the late 70s band is not clear, but investors probably didn’t care, as they gave the data operations startup a bushel of money today.

The company now known as Devo announced a $25 million Series C round led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from Kibo Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $71 million.

The company changed its name because it was about much more than logs, according to CEO Walter Scott. It offers a cloud service that allows customers to stream massive amounts of data — think terabytes or even petabytes — relieving the need to worry about all of the scaling and hardware requirements processing this amount of data would require. That could be from logs from web servers, security data from firewalls or transactions taking place on backend systems, as some examples.

The data can live on prem if required, but the processing always gets done in the cloud to provide for the scaling needs. Scott says this is about giving companies this ability to process and understand massive amounts of data that previously was only in reach of web scale companies like Google, Facebook or Amazon.

But it involves more than simply collecting the data. “It’s the combination of us being able to collect all of that data together with running analytics on top of it all in a unified platform, then allowing a very broad spectrum of the business [to make use of it],” Scott explained.

Devo sees Sumo Logic, Elastic and Splunk as its primary competitors in this space, but like many startups they often battle companies trying to build their own systems as well, a difficult approach for any company to take when you are dealing with this amount of data.

The company, which was founded in Spain is now based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has close to 100 employees. Scott says he has the budget to double that by the end of the year, although he’s not sure they will be able to hire that many people that rapidly

Mode, a San Francisco-based startup, came out of stealth today with a new approach to software-defined wide area networks they call software-defined core network (SD-CORE), which they say will dramatically reduce the cost of running these networks over traditional methods.

The company also announced a total of $24 million in funding led by GV and NEA to build on that vision. That vision, according to CEO Paul Dawes, involves spinning up private networks very quickly at a much lower price point than traditional networking typically offered by telcos for a high fee.

“Traditional hardware-defined private networking solutions like MPLS guarantee reliability, but are inelastic, hard to manage and costly. Mode Core was built to enhance SD-WAN, leveraging our breakthrough in routing efficiency to deliver the performance and reliability of networks like MPLS, but with the flexibility, elasticity and affordability of a cloud service,” Dawes explained in a statement.

Some use cases that could benefit from this approach include  interactive streaming, multiplayer gaming, real-time machine learning and remote command and control, according to the company.

The company was formed after a research breakthrough by a couple of researchers at Cornell, Kevin Tang and Nithin Michael. They figured out how to characterize network traffic in mathematical terms, which up to that point was thought to be impossible. “Michael came up with the first math-based description of how a packet-switched network works,” Dawes explained.

This allowed him to build a software-defined, automated way to route traffic on each node on the network. “It doesn’t need any intervention from anybody to tell it how to route packets,” he said. Once he had that figured out, it removed the need for more complex and expensive solutions.

This caught the attention not just of networking theorists, but of investors who saw tremendous business potential in their approach. “A number of VCs familiar with networking problems approached them [and encouraged them] to productize it” he said. NEA was the lead investor on the $8.3 million A round and they also got a grant from the National Science Foundation. More recently they got a $16 million Series B for a total of $24.3 million to date.

To make this all work because they aren’t a telco, they built Mode Core and partnered with Ericsson UDN and 100 other partners to provide that networking power that they lack as a startup. You could think of it as a cloud service for wide area networking, allowing companies access to this kind of advanced networking for a price closer to business internet than private WANs.

On June 6th, 2014 Kubernetes was released for the first time. At the time, nobody could have predicted that 4 years later that the project would become a de facto standard for container orchestration or that the biggest tech companies in the world would be backing it. That would come later.

If you think back to June 2014, containerization was just beginning to take off thanks to Docker, which was popularizing the concept with developers, but being so early there was no standard way to manage those containers.

Google had been using containers as a way to deliver applications for years and ran a tool called Borg to handle orchestration. It’s called an orchestrator because much like a conductor of an orchestra, it decides when a container is launched and when it shuts down once it’s completed its job.

At the time, two Google engineers, Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, who would later go on to start Heptio, were looking at developing an orchestration tool like Borg for companies that might not have the depth of engineering talent of Google to make it work. They wanted to spread this idea of how they develop distributed applications to other developers.

Hello world

Before that first version hit the streets, what would become Kubernetes developed out of a need for an orchestration layer that Beda and McLuckie had been considering for a long time. They were both involved in bringing Google Compute Engine, Google’s Infrastructure as a Service offering, to market, but they felt like there was something missing in the tooling that would fill in the gaps between infrastructure and platform service offerings.

“We had long thought about trying to find a way to bring a sort of a more progressive orchestrated way of running applications in production. Just based on our own experiences with Google Compute Engine, we got to see firsthand some of the challenges that the enterprise faced in moving workloads to the cloud,” McLuckie explained.

He said that they also understood some of the limitations associated with virtual machine-based workloads and they were thinking about tooling to help with all of that. “And so we came up the idea to start a new project, which ultimately became Kubernetes.”

Let’s open source it

When Google began developing Kubernetes in March 2014, it wanted nothing less than to bring container orchestration to the masses. It was a big goal and McLuckie, Beda and teammate Brendan Burns believed the only way to get there was to open source the technology and build a community around it. As it turns out, they were spot on with that assessment, but couldn’t have been 100 percent certain at the time. Nobody could have.

“If you look at the history, we made the decision to open source Kubernetes and make it a community-oriented project much sooner than conventional wisdom would dictate and focus on really building a community in an open and engaged fashion. And that really paid dividends as Kubernetes has accelerated and effectively become the standard for container orchestration,” McLuckie said.

The next thing they did was to create the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an umbrella organization for the project. If you think about it, this project could have gone in several directions, as current CNCF director Dan Kohn described in a recent interview.

Going cloud native

Kohn said Kubernetes was unique in a couple of ways. First of all, it was based on existing technology developed over many years at Google. “Even though Kubernetes code was new, the concepts and engineering and know-how behind it was based on 15 years at Google building Borg (And a Borg replacement called Omega that failed),” Kohn said. The other thing was that Kubernetes was designed from the beginning to be open sourced.

He pointed out that Google could have gone in a few directions with Kubernetes. It could have created a commercial product and sold it through Google Cloud. It could have open sourced it, but had a strong central lead as they did with Go. They could have gone to the Linux Foundation and said they wanted to create a stand-alone Kubernetes Foundation. But they didn’t do any of these things.

McLuckie says they decided to something entirely different and place it under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, but not as Kubernetes project. Instead they wanted to create a new framework for cloud native computing itself and the CNCF was born. “The CNCF is a really important staging ground, not just for Kubernetes, but for the technologies that needed to come together to really complete the narrative, to make Kubernetes a much more comprehensive framework,” McLuckie explained.

Getting everyone going in the same direction

Over the last few years, we have watched as Kubernetes has grown into a container orchestration standard. Last summer in quick succession  a slew of major enterprise players joined CNCF as AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware and Pivotal all joined. They came together with Red Hat, Intel, IBM Cisco and others who were already members.

Each these players no doubt wanted to control the orchestration layer, but they saw Kubernetes gaining momentum so rapidly, they had little choice but to go along. Kohn jokes that having all these big name players on board is like herding cats, but bringing in them in has been the goal all along. He said it just happened much faster than he thought it would.

In a recent interview with TechCrunch, David Aronchick, who runs the open source Kubeflow Kubernetes machine learning project at Google, was running Kubernetes in the early days. He is shocked by how quickly it has grown. “I couldn’t have predicted it would be like this. I joined in January, 2015 and took on project management for Google Kubernetes. I was stunned at the pent up demand for this kind of thing,” he told TechCrunch.

As it has grown, it has become readily apparent that McLuckie was right about building that cloud native framework instead of a stand-alone Kubernetes foundation. Today there are dozens of adjacent projects and the organization is thriving.

Nobody is more blown away by this than McLuckie himself who says seeing Kubernetes hit these various milestones since its initial release has been amazing for him and his team to watch. “It’s just been a series of these wonderful kind of moments as Kubernetes has gained a head of steam, and it’s been  so much fun to see the community really rally around it.”

SAP announced today at its Sapphire customer conference it was making the SAP Leonardo Blockchain service generally available. The latter is a cloud service to help companies build applications based on digital ledger-style technology.

Gil Perez, senior vice president for product and innovation and head of digital customer initiatives at SAP, says most of the customers he talks to are still very early in the proof of concept stage, but not so early that SAP doesn’t want to provide a service to help move them along the maturity curve.

“We are announcing the general availability of the SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain Services.” This is a generalized service on top of which customers can begin building their blockchain projects. He says SAP is taking an agnostic approach to the underlying ledger technology whether it’s the open source Hyperledger project, where SAP is a platinum sponsor, MultiChain or any additional blockchain or decentralized distributed ledger technologies.

Perez said part of the reason for this flexibility is that blockchain technology is really still being defined and SAP doesn’t want to commit to any underlying ledger approach until the market decides which way to go. He says this should allow them to minimize the impact on customers as the technology evolves.

They join other enterprise companies like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon who have previously released blockchains services for their customers. For SAP, which many companies use for the back-office management of everything from finance to logistics, the blockchain could present some interesting use cases for its customers such as supply chain management.

In this case, the blockchain could help reduce paperwork, bring products to market more quickly and provide an easy audit trail. Instead of requesting a scanned copy of a signed document, you could simply click on a node on the blockchain and see the approval (or denial) and follow the products through the shipping process to the marketplace.

But Perez stresses that just because it’s early doesn’t mean they aren’t working on some pretty substantial projects. He cited one with a pharmaceutical company to ensure the provenance of drugs that involved over a billion transactions already.

SAP is simply trying to keep up with what customers want. Prior to the GA announced today, the company conducted a survey of 250 customers and found, that although it was early days, there is enterprise interest in exploring blockchain technology. Whether this initiative can expand into a broader business is hard to say, but SAP sees blockchain as logical adjacent technology to their core offerings.