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Idera acquires Travis CI
Travis CI, the popular Berlin-based open-source continuous integration service, has been acquired by Idera, a company that offers a number of SQL database management and administration tools for both on-premises and cloud applications. The move comes at a time when other continuous integration services, including the likes of Circle CI, seem to be taking market share away from Travis CI.
Idera, which itself is owned by private equity firm TA Associates, says that Travis is complementary to its current testing tools business and that the acquisition will benefit its current customers. Idera’s other tools in its Testing Tools division are TestRail, Ranorex and Kiuwan. “We admire the business value driven by Travis CI and look forward to helping more customers achieve better and faster results,” said Suhail Malhotra, Idera’s General Manager for Travis CI .
Idera clearly wants to move into the DevOps business, and continuous integration is obviously a major building block. This still feels like a bit of an odd acquisition, given that Idera isn’t exactly known for being on the leading edge of today’s technology (if it’s known at all). But Travis CI also brings 700,000 users to Idera, and customers like IBM and Zendesk, so while we don’t know the cost of the acquisition, this is a big deal in the CI ecosystem.
“We are excited about our next chapter of growth with the Idera team,” said Konstantin Haase, a founder of Travis CI, in today’s announcement. “Our customers and partners will benefit from Idera’s highly complementary portfolio and ability to scale software businesses to the next level. Our goal is to attract as many users to Travis CI as possible, while staying true to our open source roots and community.”
That’s pretty much what all founders write (or what the acquiring company’s PR team writes for them), so we’ll have to see how Idera will steer Travis CI going forward.
In his blog post, Haase says that nothing will change for Travis CI users. “With the support from our new partners, we will be able to invest in expanding and improving our core product, to have Travis CI be the best Continuous Integration and Development solution for software projects out there,” he writes and also notes that the Travis CI will stay open source. “This is who we are, this is what made us successful.”
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Contentful raises $33.5M for its headless CMS platform
Contentful, a Berlin- and San Francisco-based startup that provides content management infrastructure for companies like Spotify, Nike, Lyft and others, today announced that it has raised a $33.5 million Series D funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from OMERS Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors General Catalyst, Benchmark, Balderton Capital and Hercules. In total, the company has now raised $78.3 million.
It’s been less than a year since the company raised its Series C round and, as Contentful co-founder and CEO Sascha Konietzke told me, the company didn’t really need to raise right now. “We had just raised our last round about a year ago. We still had plenty of cash in our bank account and we didn’t need to raise as of now,” said Konietzke. “But we saw a lot of economic uncertainty, so we thought it might be a good moment in time to recharge. And at the same time, we already had some interesting conversations ongoing with Sapphire [formerly SAP Ventures] and Salesforce. So we saw the opportunity to add more funding and also start getting into a tight relationship with both of these players.”
The original plan for Contentful was to focus almost explicitly on mobile. As it turns out, though, the company’s customers also wanted to use the service to handle its web-based applications and these days, Contentful happily supports both. “What we’re seeing is that everything is becoming an application,” he told me. “We started with native mobile application, but even the websites nowadays are often an application.”
In its early days, Contentful focused only on developers. Now, however, that’s changing, and having these connections to large enterprise players like SAP and Salesforce surely isn’t going to hurt the company as it looks to bring on larger enterprise accounts.
Currently, the company’s focus is very much on Europe and North America, which account for about 80 percent of its customers. For now, Contentful plans to continue to focus on these regions, though it obviously supports customers anywhere in the world.
Contentful only exists as a hosted platform. As of now, the company doesn’t have any plans for offering a self-hosted version, though Konietzke noted that he does occasionally get requests for this.
What the company is planning to do in the near future, though, is to enable more integrations with existing enterprise tools. “Customers are asking for deeper integrations into their enterprise stack,” Konietzke said. “And that’s what we’re beginning to focus on and where we’re building a lot of capabilities around that.” In addition, support for GraphQL and an expanded rich text editing experience is coming up. The company also recently launched a new editing experience.
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Workato raises $25M for its integration platform
Workato, a startup that offers an integration and automation platform for businesses that competes with the likes of MuleSoft, SnapLogic and Microsoft’s Logic Apps, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B funding round from Battery Ventures, Storm Ventures, ServiceNow and Workday Ventures. Combined with its previous rounds, the company has now received investments from some of the largest SaaS players, including Salesforce, which participated in an earlier round.
At its core, Workato’s service isn’t that different from other integration services (you can think of them as IFTTT for the enterprise), in that it helps you to connect disparate systems and services, set up triggers to kick off certain actions (if somebody signs a contract on DocuSign, send a message to Slack and create an invoice). Like its competitors, it connects to virtually any SaaS tool that a company would use, no matter whether that’s Marketo and Salesforce, or Slack and Twitter. And like some of its competitors, all of this can be done with a drag-and-drop interface.
What’s different, Workato founder and CEO Vijay Tella tells me, is that the service was built for business users, not IT admins. “Other enterprise integration platforms require people who are technical to build and manage them,” he said. “With the explosion in SaaS with lines of business buying them — the IT team gets backlogged with the various integration needs. Further, they are not able to handle all the workflow automation needs that businesses require to streamline and innovate on the operations.”
Battery Ventures’ general partner Neeraj Agrawal also echoed this. “As we’ve all seen, the number of SaaS applications run by companies is growing at a very rapid clip,” he said. “This has created a huge need to engage team members with less technical skill-sets in integrating all these applications. These types of users are closer to the actual business workflows that are ripe for automation, and we found Workato’s ability to empower everyday business users super compelling.”
Tella also stressed that Workato makes extensive use of AI/ML to make building integrations and automations easier. The company calls this Recipe Q. “Leveraging the tens of billions of events processed, hundreds of millions of metadata elements inspected and hundreds of thousands of automations that people have built on our platform — we leverage ML to guide users to build the most effective integration/automation by recommending next steps as they build these automations,” he explained. “It recommends the next set of actions to take, fields to map, auto-validates mappings, etc. The great thing with this is that as people build more automations — it learns from them and continues to make the automation smarter.”
The AI/ML system also handles errors and offers features like sentiment analysis to analyze emails and detect their intent, with the ability to route them depending on the results of that analysis.
As part of today’s announcement, the company is also launching a new AI-enabled feature: Automation Editions for sales, marketing and HR (with editions for finance and support coming in the future). The idea here is to give those departments a kit with pre-built workflows that helps them to get started with the service without having to bring in IT.
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Google expands its identity management portfolio for businesses and developers
Over the course of the last year, Google has launched a number of services that bring to other companies the same BeyondCorp model for managing access to a company’s apps and data without a VPN that it uses internally. Google’s flagship product for this is Cloud Identity, which is essentially Google’s BeyondCorp, but packaged for other businesses.
Today, at its Cloud Next event in London, it’s expanding this portfolio of Cloud Identity services with three new products and features that enable developers to adopt this way of thinking about identity and access for their own apps and that make it easier for enterprises to adopt Cloud Identity and make it work with their existing solutions.
The highlight of today’s announcements, though, is Cloud Identity for Customers and Partners, which is now in beta. While Cloud Identity is very much meant for employees at a larger company, this new product allows developers to build into their own applications the same kind of identity and access management services.
“Cloud Identity is how we protect our employees and you protect your workforce,” Karthik Lakshminarayanan, Google’s product management director for Cloud Identity, said in a press briefing ahead of the announcement. “But what we’re increasingly finding is that developers are building applications and are also having to deal with identity and access management. So if you’re building an application, you might be thinking about accepting usernames and passwords, or you might be thinking about accepting social media as an authentication mechanism.”
This new service allows developers to build in multiple ways of authenticating the user, including through email and password, Twitter, Facebook, their phones, SAML, OIDC and others. Google then handles all of that authentication work. Google will offer both client-side (web, iOS and Android) and server-side SDKs (with support for Node.ja, Java, Python and other languages).
“They no longer have to worry about getting hacked and their passwords and their user credentials getting compromised,” added Lakshminarayanan, “They can now leave that to Google and the exact same scale that we have, the security that we have, the reliability that we have — that we are using to protect employees in the cloud — can now be used to protect that developer’s applications.”
In addition to Cloud Identity for Customers and Partners, Google is also launching a new feature for the existing Cloud Identity service, which brings support for traditional LDAP-based applications and IT services like VPNs to Cloud Identity. This feature is, in many ways, an acknowledgment that most enterprises can’t simply turn on a new security paradigm like BeyondCorp/Cloud Identity. With support for secure LDAP, these companies can still make it easy for their employees to connect to these legacy applications while still using Cloud Identity.
“As much as Google loves the cloud, a mantra that Google has is ‘let’s meet customers where they are.’ We know that customers are embracing the cloud, but we also know that they have a massive, massive footprint of traditional applications,” Lakshminarayanan explained. He noted that most enterprises today run two solutions: one that provides access to their on-premise applications and another that provides the same services for their cloud applications. Cloud Identity now natively supports access to many of these legacy applications, including Aruba Networks (HPE), Itopia, JAMF, Jenkins (Cloudbees), OpenVPN, Papercut, pfSense (Netgate), Puppet, Sophos and Splunk. Indeed, as Google notes, virtually any application that supports LDAP over SSL can work with this new service.
Finally, the third new feature Google is launching today is context-aware access for those enterprises that already use its Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (yes, those names are all a mouthful). The idea here is to help enterprises provide access to cloud resources based on the identity of the user and the context of the request — all without using a VPN. That’s pretty much the promise of BeyondCorp in a nutshell, and this implementation, which is now in beta, allows businesses to manage access based on the user’s identity and a device’s location and its security status, for example. Using this new service, IT managers could restrict access to one of their apps to users in a specific country, for example.
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After its acquisition, Magento starts integrating Adobe’s personalization and analytics tools
It’s been less than six months since Adobe acquired commerce platform Magento for $1.68 billion and today, at Magento’s annual conference, the company announced the first set of integrations that bring the analytics and personalization features of Adobe’s Experience Cloud to Magento’s Commerce Cloud.
In many ways, the acquisition of Magento helps Adobe close the loop in its marketing story by giving its customers a full spectrum of services that go from analytics, marketing and customer acquisition all the way to closing the transaction. It’s no surprise then that the Experience Cloud and Commerce Cloud are growing closer to, in Adobe’s words, “make every experience shoppable.”
“From the time that this company started to today, our focus has been pretty much exactly the same,” Adobe’s SVP of Strategic Marketing Aseem Chandra told me. “This is, how do we deliver better experiences across any channel in which our customers are interacting with a brand? If you think about the way that customers interact today, every experience is valuable and important. […] It’s no longer just about the product, it’s more about the experience that we deliver around that product that really counts.”
So with these new integrations, Magento Commerce Cloud users will get access to an integration with Adobe Target, for example, the company’s machine learning-based tool for personalizing shopping experiences. Similarly, they’ll get easy access to predictive analytics from Adobe Analytics to analyze their customers’ data and predict future churn and purchasing behavior, among other things.
These kinds of AI/ML capabilities were something Magento had long been thinking about, Magento’s former CEO and new Adobe SVP fo Commerce Mark Lavelle told me, but it took the acquisition by Adobe to really be able to push ahead with this. “Where the world’s going for Magento clients — and really for all of Adobe’s clients — is you can’t do this yourself,” he said. “you need to be associated with a platform that has not just technology and feature functionality, but actually has this living and breathing data environment that that learns and delivers intelligence back into the product so that your job is easier. That’s what Amazon and Google and all of the big companies that we’re all increasingly competing against or cooperating with have. They have that type of scale.” He also noted that at least part of this match-up of Adobe and Magento is to give their clients that kind of scale, even if they are small- or medium-sized merchants.
The other new Adobe-powered feature that’s now available is an integration with the Adobe Experience Manager. That’s Adobe’s content management tool that itself integrates many of these AI technologies for building personalized mobile and web content and shopping experiences.
“The goal here is really in unifying that profile, where we have a lot of behavioral information about our consumers,” said Aseem. “And what Magento allows us to do is bring in the transactional information and put those together so we get a much richer view of who the consumers are and how we personalize that experience with the next interaction that they have with a Magento-based commerce site.”
It’s worth noting that Magento is also launching a number of other new features to its Commerce Cloud that include a new drag-and-drop editing tool for site content, support for building Progressive Web Applications, a streamlined payment tool with improved risk management capabilities, as well as a new integration with the Amazon Sales Channel so Magento stores can sync their inventory with Amazon’s platform. Magneto is also announcing integrations with Google’s Merchant Center and Advertising Channels for Google Smart Shopping Campaigns.
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Elastic’s IPO filing is here
Elastic, the provider of subscription-based data search software used by Dell, Netflix, The New York Times and others, has unveiled its IPO filing after confidentially submitting paperwork to the SEC in June. The company will be the latest in a line of enterprise SaaS businesses to hit the public markets in 2018.
Headquartered in Mountain View, Elastic plans to raise $100 million in its NYSE listing, though that’s likely a placeholder amount. The timing of the filing suggests the company will transition to the public markets this fall; we’ve reached out to the company for more details.
Elastic will trade under the symbol ESTC.
The business is known for its core product, an open-source search tool called ElasticSearch. It also offers a range of analytics and visualization tools meant to help businesses organize large data sets, competing directly with companies like Splunk and even Amazon — a name it mentions 14 times in the filing.
“Amazon offers some of our open source features as part of its Amazon Web Services offering. As such, Amazon competes with us for potential customers, and while Amazon cannot provide our proprietary software, the pricing of Amazon’s offerings may limit our ability to adjust,” the company wrote in the filing, which also lists Endeca, FAST, Autonomy and several others as key competitors.
This is our first look at Elastic’s financials. The company brought in $159.9 million in revenue in the 12 months ended July 30, 2018, up roughly 100 percent from $88.1 million the year prior. Losses are growing at about the same rate. Elastic reported a net loss of $18.5 million in the second quarter of 2018. That’s an increase from $9.9 million in the same period in 2017.
Founded in 2012, the company has raised about $100 million in venture capital funding, garnering a $700 million valuation the last time it raised VC, which was all the way back in 2014. Its investors include Benchmark, NEA and Future Fund, which each retain a 17.8 percent, 10.2 percent and 8.2 percent pre-IPO stake, respectively.
A flurry of business software companies have opted to go public this year. Domo, a business analytics company based in Utah, went public in June raising $193 million in the process. On top of that, subscription biller Zuora had a positive debut in April in what was a “clear sign post on the road to SaaS maturation,” according to TechCrunch’s Ron Miller. DocuSign and Smartsheet are also recent examples of both high-profile and successful SaaS IPOs.
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Meta SaaS raises $1.5 million from Mark Cuban and others
Meta SaaS is a product that helps you cancel other products. Like Cardlife and Cleanshelf, Meta SaaS looks at all of your software-as-a-service subscriptions and tells you which ones you use and, more important, which ones you don’t. Founded by Arlo Gilbert and Scott Hertel, the product raised $1.5 million in seed from Mark Cuban with participation from Barracuda Networks, Capital… Read More
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Salesforce aims to save you time by summarizing emails and docs with machine intelligence
We have all seen the studies — some American workers spend upwards of six hours a day handling email. It’s not a great use of time, it destroys productivity and it ultimately costs businesses money. A new paper written by a team Salesforce MetaMind researchers could eventually provide summaries of professional communication. More effective text summarization tools would… Read More
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Is Qualtrics about to go public? A chat with founder Ryan Smith on the IPO question
Qualtrics, an online survey research platform, is listed as tops among likely candidates to go public this year. But is it really going to file and, if so, how close is it to doing that? I’m betting yes and very soon based on some interesting answers in a recent interview with founder Ryan Smith. Read More
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Xplenty raises another $4 million to help you integrate all your data
The internet has changed a lot over the last two decades, but many companies are still using legacy technologies to extract, transform and load their data into warehouses. One new entrant, Xplenty, is hoping that its fresh approach, prioritizing cloud services, will provide a solid foothold in the massive market for data integration tools. Having grown to serve over 100 customers, Xplenty… Read More
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