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Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich will join us for TC Sessions: Enterprise on September 5
Being the CTO for one of the three major hypercloud providers may seem like enough of a job for most people, but Mark Russinovich, the CTO of Microsoft Azure, has a few other talents in his back pocket. Russinovich, who will join us for a fireside chat at our TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event in San Francisco on September 5 (p.s. early-bird sale ends Friday), is also an accomplished novelist who has published four novels, all of which center around tech and cybersecurity.
At our event, though, we won’t focus on his literary accomplishments (except for maybe his books about Windows Server) as much as on the trends he’s seeing in enterprise cloud adoption. Microsoft, maybe more so than its competitors, always made enterprise customers and their needs the focus of its cloud initiatives from the outset. Today, as the majority of enterprises is looking to move at least some of their legacy workloads into the cloud, they are often stumped by the sheer complexity of that undertaking.
In our fireside chat, we’ll talk about what Microsoft is doing to reduce this complexity and how enterprises can maximize their current investments into the cloud, both for running new cloud-native applications and for bringing legacy applications into the future. We’ll also talk about new technologies that can make the move to the cloud more attractive to enterprises, including the current buzz around edge computing, IoT, AI and more.
Before joining Microsoft, Russinovich, who has a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon, was the co-founder and chief architect of Winternals Software, which Microsoft acquired in 2006. During his time at Winternals, Russinovich discovered the infamous Sony rootkit. Over his 13 years at Microsoft, he moved from Technical Fellow up to the CTO position for Azure, which continues to grow at a rapid clip as it looks to challenge AWS’s leadership in total cloud revenue.
Tomorrow, Friday, August 16 is your last day to save $100 on tickets before prices go up. Book your early-bird tickets now and keep that Benjamin in your pocket.
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VMware says it’s looking to acquire Pivotal
VMware today confirmed that it is in talks to acquire software development platform Pivotal Software, the service best known for commercializing the open-source Cloud Foundry platform. The proposed transaction would see VMware acquire all outstanding Pivotal Class A stock for $15 per share, a significant markup over Pivotal’s current share price (which unsurprisingly shot up right after the announcement).
Pivotal’s shares have struggled since the company’s IPO in April 2018. The company was originally spun out of EMC Corporation (now DellEMC) and VMware in 2012 to focus on Cloud Foundry, an open-source software development platform that is currently in use by the majority of Fortune 500 companies. A lot of these enterprises are working with Pivotal to support their Cloud Foundry efforts. Dell itself continues to own the majority of VMware and Pivotal, and VMware also owns an interest in Pivotal already and sells Pivotal’s services to its customers, as well. It’s a bit of an ouroboros of a transaction.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry was always the company’s main product, but it also offered additional consulting services on top of that. Despite improving its execution since going public, Pivotal still lost $31.7 million in its last financial quarter as its stock price traded at just over half of the IPO price. Indeed, the $15 per share VMware is offering is identical to Pivotal’s IPO price.
An acquisition by VMware would bring Pivotal’s journey full circle, though this is surely not the journey the Pivotal team expected. VMware is a Cloud Foundry Foundation platinum member, together with Pivotal, DellEMC, IBM, SAP and Suse, so I wouldn’t expect any major changes in VMware’s support of the overall open-source ecosystem behind Pivotal’s core platform.
It remains to be seen whether the acquisition will indeed happen, though. In a press release, VMware acknowledged the discussion between the two companies but noted that “there can be no assurance that any such agreement regarding the potential transaction will occur, and VMware does not intend to communicate further on this matter unless and until a definitive agreement is reached.” That’s the kind of sentence lawyers like to write. I would be quite surprised if this deal didn’t happen, though.
Buying Pivotal would also make sense in the grand scheme of VMware’s recent acquisitions. Earlier this year, the company acquired Bitnami, and last year it acquired Heptio, the startup founded by two of the three co-founders of the Kubernetes project, which now forms the basis of many new enterprise cloud deployments and, most recently, Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
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Clumio raises $51M to bring enterprise backup into the 21st century
Creating backups for massive enterprise deployments may feel like a solved problem, but for the most part, we’re still talking about complex hardware and software setups. Clumio, which is coming out of stealth today, wants to modernize enterprise data protection by eliminating the on-premise hardware in favor of a flexible, SaaS-style cloud-based backup solution.
For the first time, Clumio also today announced that it has raised a total of $51 million in a Series A and B round since it was founded in 2017. The $11 million Series A round closed in October 2017 and the Series B round in November 2018, Clumio founder and CEO Poojan Kumar told me. Kumar’s previous company, storage startup PernixData, was acquired by Nutanix in 2016. It doesn’t look like the investors made their money back, though.
Clumio is backed by investors like Sutter Hill Ventures, which led the Series A, and Index Ventures, which drove the Series B together with Sutter Hill. Other individual investors include Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas Technologies, and John Thompson, chairman of the board at Microsoft .
“Enterprise workloads are being ‘SaaS-ified’ because IT can no longer afford the time, complexity and expense of building and managing heavy on-prem hardware and software solutions if they are to successfully deliver against their digital transformation initiatives,” said Kumar. “Unlike legacy backup vendors, Clumio SaaS is born in the cloud. We have leveraged the most secure and innovative cloud services available, now and in the future, within our service to ensure that we can meet customer requirements for backup, regardless of where the data is.”
In its current iteration, Clumio can be used to secure data from on-premise, VMware Cloud for AWS and native AWS service workloads. Given this list, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Clumio’s backend, too, makes extensive use of public cloud services.
The company says that it already has several customers, though it didn’t disclose any in today’s announcement.
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Microsoft Azure now lets you have a server all to yourself
Microsoft today announced the preview launch of Azure Dedicated Host, a new cloud service that will allow you to run your virtual machines on single-tenant physical services. That means you’re not sharing any resources on that server with anybody else and you’ll get full control over everything that’s running on that machine.
Previously, Azure already offered isolated Virtual Machine sizes for two very large virtual machine types. Those are still available, but their use cases are comparably limited to these new hosts, which offer far more flexibility.
With this move, Microsoft is following in the footsteps of AWS, which also offers Dedicated Hosts with very similar capabilities. Google Cloud, too, offers what it calls “sole-tenant nodes.”
Azure Dedicated Host will support Windows, Linux and SQL Server virtual machines and pricing is per host, independent of the number of virtual machines you end up running on them. You can currently opt for machines with up to 48 physical cores and prices start at $4.039 per hour.
To do this, Microsoft is offering two different processors to power these machines. Type 1 is based on the 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2673 v4 with up to 3.5 gigahertz of clock speed, while Type 2 features the Intel Xeon® Platinum 8168 with single-core clock speeds of up to 3.7 gigahertz. The available memory ranges from 144GiB to 448GiB. You can find more details here.
As Microsoft notes, these new dedicated hosts can help companies reach their compliance requirements for physical security, data integrity and monitoring. The dedicated hosts still share the same underlying infrastructure as any other host in the Azure data centers, but users have full control over any maintenance window that could impact their servers.
These dedicated hosts can also be grouped into larger host groups in a given Azure region, allowing you to build clusters of your own physical servers inside the Azure data center. Because you’re actually renting a physical machine, any hardware issue on that machine will impact the virtual machines you are running on them, so chances are you’ll want to have multiple dedicated hosts for your failover strategy anyway.
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With the acquisition closed, IBM goes all in on Red Hat
IBM’s massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat closed a few weeks ago and today, the two companies are now announcing the first fruits of this process. For the most part, today’s announcement furthers IBM’s ambitions to bring its products to any public and private cloud. That was very much the reason why IBM acquired Red Hat in the first place, of course, so this doesn’t come as a major surprise, though most industry watchers probably didn’t expect this to happen this fast.
Specifically, IBM is announcing that it is bringing its software portfolio to Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based container platform that is essentially available on any cloud that allows its customers to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
In total, IBM has already optimized more than 100 products for OpenShift and bundled them into what it calls “Cloud Paks.” There are currently five of these Paks: Cloud Pak for Data, Application, Integration, Automation and Multicloud Management. These technologies, which IBM’s customers can now run on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform or IBM’s own cloud, among others, include DB2, WebSphere, API Connect, Watson Studio and Cognos Analytics.
“Red Hat is unlocking innovation with Linux-based technologies, including containers and Kubernetes, which have become the fundamental building blocks of hybrid cloud environments,” said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, in today’s announcement. “This open hybrid cloud foundation is what enables the vision of any app, anywhere, anytime. Combined with IBM’s strong industry expertise and supported by a vast ecosystem of passionate developers and partners, customers can create modern apps with the technologies of their choice and the flexibility to deploy in the best environment for the app – whether that is on-premises or across multiple public clouds.”
IBM argues that a lot of the early innovation on the cloud was about bringing modern, customer-facing applications to market, with a focus on basic cloud infrastructure. Now, however, enterprises are looking at how they can take their mission-critical applications to the cloud, too. For that, they want access to an open stack that works across clouds.
In addition, IBM also today announced the launch of a fully managed Red Hat OpenShift service on its own public cloud, as well as OpenShift on IBM Systems, including the IBM Z and LinuxONE mainframes, as well as the launch of its new Red Hat consulting and technology services.
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Amazon acquires flash-based cloud storage startup E8 Storage
Amazon has acquired Israeli storage tech startup E8 Storage, as first reported by Reuters, CNBC and Globes and confirmed by TechCrunch. The acquisition will bring the team and technology from E8 in to Amazon’s existing Amazon Web Services center in Tel Aviv, per reports.
E8 Storage’s particular focus was on building storage hardware that employs flash-based memory to deliver faster performance than competing offerings, according to its own claims. How exactly AWS intends to use the company’s talent or assets isn’t yet known, but it clearly lines up with their primary business.
AWS acquisitions this year include TSO Logic, a Vancouver-based startup that optimizes data center workload operating efficiency, and Israel-based CloudEndure, which provides data recovery services in the event of a disaster.
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DigitalOcean gets a new CEO and CFO
DigitalOcean, the cloud infrastructure service that made a name for itself by focusing on low-cost hosting options in its early days, today announced that it has appointed former SendGrid COO and CFO Yancey Spruill as its new CEO and former EnerNOC CFO Bill Sorenson as its new CFO. Spruill will replace Mark Templeton, who only joined the company a little more than a year ago and who had announced in May his decision to step down for personal reasons.
“DigitalOcean is a brand I’ve followed and admired for a while — the leadership team has done a tremendous job building out the products, services and, most importantly, a community, that puts developer needs first,” said Spruill in today’s announcement. “We have a multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity in front of us and I’m looking forward to working closely with our strong leadership team to build upon the current strategy to drive DigitalOcean to the company’s full potential.”
Spruill does have a lot of experience, given that he was in CxO positions at SendGrid through both its IPO in 2017 and its sale to Twilio in 2019. He also previously held the CFO role at DigitalGlobe, which he also guided to an IPO.
In his announcement, Spruill notes that he expects DigitalOcean to focus on its core business, which currently has about 500,000 users (though it’s unclear how many of those are active, paying users). “My aspiration is for us to continue to provide everything you love about DO now, but to also enhance our offerings in a way that is meaningful, strategic and most helpful for you over time,” he writes.
Spruill’s history as CFO includes its fair share of IPOs and sales, but so does Sorenson’s. As CFO at EnerNOC, he guided that company to a sale to investor Enel Group. Before that, he led business intelligence firm Qlik to an IPO.
It’s not unusual for incoming CEOs and CFOs to have this kind of experience, but it does make you wonder what DigitalOcean’s future holds in store. The company isn’t as hyped as it once was and while it still offers one of the best user experiences for developers, it remains a relatively small player in the overall cloud game. That’s a growing market, but the large companies — the ones that bring in the majority of revenue — are looking to Amazon, Microsoft and Google for their cloud infrastructure. Even a small piece of the overall cloud pie can be quite lucrative, but I think DigitalOcean’s ambitions go beyond that.
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Google teams up with VMware to bring more enterprises to its cloud
Google today announced a new partnership with VMware that will make it easier for enterprises to run their VMware workloads on Google Cloud. Specifically, Google Cloud will now support VMware Cloud Foundation, the company’s system for deploying and running hybrid clouds. The solution was developed by CloudSimple, not VMware or Google, and Google will offer first-line support, working together with CloudSimple.
While Google would surely love for all enterprises to move to containers and utilize its Anthos hybrid cloud service, most large companies currently use VMware. They may want to move those workloads to a public cloud, but they aren’t ready to give up a tool that has long worked for them. With this new capability, Google isn’t offering anything that is especially new or innovative, but that’s not what this is about. Instead, Google is simply giving enterprises fewer reasons to opt for a competitor without even taking its offerings into account.
“Customers have asked us to provide broad support for VMware, and now with Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple, our customers will be able to run VMware vSphere-based workloads in GCP,” the company notes in the announcement, which we got an early copy of but which for reasons unknown to us will only go live on the company’s blog tomorrow. “This brings customers a wide breadth of choices for how to run their VMware workloads in a hybrid deployment, from modern containerized applications with Anthos to VM-based applications with VMware in GCP.”
The new solution will offer support for the full VMware stack, including the likes of vCenter, vSAN and NSX-T.
“Our partnership with Google Cloud has always been about addressing customers’ needs, and we’re excited to extend the partnership to enable our mutual customers to run VMware workloads on VMware Cloud Foundation in Google Cloud Platform,” said Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer, customer operations at VMware. “With VMware on Google Cloud Platform, customers will be able to leverage all of the familiarity and investment protection of VMware tools and training as they execute on their cloud strategies, and rapidly bring new services to market and operate them seamlessly and more securely across a hybrid cloud environment.”
While Google’s announcement highlights that the company has a long history of working with VMware, it’s interesting to note that at least the technical aspects of this partnership are more about CloudSimple than VMware. It’s also worth noting that VMware has long had a close relationship with Google’s cloud competitor AWS, and Microsoft Azure, too, offers tools for running VMware-based workloads on its cloud.
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Google Cloud makes it easier to set up continuous delivery with Spinnaker
Google Cloud today announced Spinnaker for Google Cloud Platform, a new solution that makes it easier to install and run the Spinnaker continuous delivery (CD) service on Google’s cloud.
Spinnaker was created inside Netflix and is now jointly developed by Netflix and Google. Netflix open-sourced it back in 2015 and over the course of the last few years, it became the open-source CD platform of choice for many enterprises. Today, companies like Adobe, Box, Cisco, Daimler, Samsung and others use it to speed up their development process.
With Spinnaker for Google Cloud Platform, which runs on the Google Kubernetes Engine, Google is making the install process for the service as easy as a few clicks. Once up and running, the Spinnaker install includes all of the core tools, as well as Deck, the user interface for the service. Users pay for the resources used by the Google Kubernetes Engine, as well as Cloud Memorystore for Redis, Google Cloud Load Balancing and potentially other resources they use in the Google Cloud.
The company has pre-configured Spinnaker for testing and deploying code on Google Kubernetes Engine, Compute Engine and App Engine, though it also will work with any other public or on-prem cloud. It’s also integrated with Cloud Build, Google’s recently launched continuous integration service, and features support for automatic backups and integrated auditing and monitoring with Google’s Stackdriver.
“We want to make sure that the solution is great both for developers and DevOps or SRE teams,” says Matt Duftler, tech lead for Google’s Spinnaker effort, in today’s announcement. “Developers want to get moving fast with the minimum of overhead. Platform teams can allow them to do that safely by encoding their recommended practice into Spinnaker, using Spinnaker for GCP to get up and running quickly and start onboard development teams.”
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Announcing the agenda for TC Sessions: Enterprise | San Francisco, September 5
TechCrunch Sessions is back! On September 5, we’re taking on the ferociously competitive field of enterprise software, and thrilled to announce our packed agenda, overflowing with some of the biggest names and most exciting startups in the enterprise industry. And you’re in luck, because $249 early-bird tickets are still on sale — make sure you book yours so you can enjoy all the agenda has to offer.
Throughout the day, you can expect to hear from industry experts and partake in discussions about the potential of new technologies like quantum computing and AI, how to deal with the onslaught of security threats, investing in early-stage startups and plenty more.
We’ll be joined by some of the biggest names and the smartest and most prescient people in the industry, including Bill McDermott at SAP, Scott Farquhar at Atlassian, Julie Larson-Green at Qualtrics, Wendy Nather at Duo Security, Aaron Levie at Box and Andrew Ng at Landing AI.
Our agenda showcases some of the powerhouses in the space, but also plenty of smaller teams that are building and debunking fundamental technologies in the industry. We still have a few tricks up our sleeves and will be adding some new names to the agenda over the next month, so keep your eyes open. In the meantime, check out these agenda highlights:
AGENDA
Investing with an Eye to the Future
Jason Green (Emergence Capital), Maha Ibrahim (Canaan Partners) and Rebecca Lynn (Canvas Ventures)
9:35 AM – 10:00 AM
In an ever-changing technological landscape, it’s not easy for VCs to know what’s coming next and how to place their bets. Yet, it’s the job of investors to peer around the corner and find the next big thing, whether that’s in AI, serverless, blockchain, edge computing or other emerging technologies. Our panel will look at the challenges of enterprise investing, what they look for in enterprise startups and how they decide where to put their money.
Talking Shop
Scott Farquhar (Atlassian)
10:00 AM – 10:20 AM
With tools like Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence, few companies influence how developers work as much as Atlassian. The company’s co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar will join us to talk about growing his company, how it is bringing its tools to enterprises and what the future of software development in and for the enterprise will look like.
Q&A with Investors
10:20 AM – 10:50 AM
Your chance to ask questions of some of the greatest investors in enterprise.
Innovation Break: Deliver Innovation to the Enterprise
DJ Paoni (SAP), Sanjay Poonen (VMware) and Shruti Tournatory (Sapphire Ventures)
10:20 AM – 10:40 AM
For startups, the appeal of enterprise clients is not surprising — signing even one or two customers can make an entire business, and it can take just a few hundred to build a $1 billion unicorn company. But while corporate counterparts increasingly look to the startup community for partnership opportunities, making the jump to enterprise sales is far more complicated than scaling up the strategy startups already use to sell to SMBs or consumers. Hear from leaders who have experienced successes and pitfalls through the process as they address how startups can adapt their strategy with the needs of the enterprise in mind. Sponsored by SAP.
Coming Soon!
10:40 AM – 11:00 AM
Box’s Enterprise Journey
Aaron Levie (Box)
11:15 AM – 11:35 AM
Box started life as a consumer file-storage company and transformed early on into a successful enterprise SaaS company, focused on content management in the cloud. Levie will talk about what it’s like to travel the entire startup journey — and what the future holds for data platforms.
Bringing the Cloud to the Enterprise
George Brady (Capital One), Byron Deeter (Bessemer Venture Partners) and a speaker to be announced
11:35 AM – 12:00 PM
Cloud computing may now seem like the default, but that’s far from true for most enterprises, which often still have tons of legacy software that runs in their own data centers. What does it mean to be all-in on the cloud, which is what Capital One recently accomplished. We’ll talk about how companies can make the move to the cloud easier, what not to do and how to develop a cloud strategy with an eye to the future.
Keeping the Enterprise Secure
Martin Casado (Andreessen Horowitz), Wendy Nather (Duo Security) and a speaker to be announced
1:00 PM – 1:25 PM
Enterprises face a litany of threats from both inside and outside the firewall. Now more than ever, companies — especially startups — have to put security first. From preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of your network, enterprises have it tough. How can you secure the enterprise without slowing growth? We’ll discuss the role of a modern CSO and how to move fast… without breaking things.
Keeping an Enterprise Behemoth on Course
Bill McDermott (SAP)
1:25 PM – 1:45 PM
With over $166 billion is market cap, Germany-based SAP is one of the most valuable tech companies in the world today. Bill McDermott took the leadership in 2014, becoming the first American to hold this position. Since then, he has quickly grown the company, in part thanks to a number of $1 billion-plus acquisitions. We’ll talk to him about his approach to these acquisitions, his strategy for growing the company in a quickly changing market and the state of enterprise software in general.
How Kubernetes Changed Everything
Brendan Burns (Microsoft), Tim Hockin (Google Cloud), Craig McLuckie (VMware) and Aparna Sinha (Google)
1:45 PM – 2:15 PM
You can’t go to an enterprise conference and not talk about Kubernetes, the incredibly popular open-source container orchestration project that was incubated at Google. For this panel, we brought together three of the founding members of the Kubernetes team and the current director of product management for the project at Google to talk about the past, present and future of the project and how it has changed how enterprises think about moving to the cloud and developing software.
Innovation Break: Data: Who Owns It
(SAP)
2:15 PM – 2:35 PM
Enterprises have historically competed by being closed entities, keeping a closed architecture and innovating internally. When applying this closed approach to the hottest new commodity, data, it simply does not work anymore. But as enterprises, startups and public institutions open themselves up, how open is too open? Hear from leaders who explore data ownership and the questions that need to be answered before the data floodgates are opened. Sponsored by SAP.
AI Stakes its Place in the Enterprise
Bindu Reddy (Reality Engines), Jocelyn Goldfein (Zetta Venture Partners) and a speaker to be announced
2:35 PM – 3:00 PM
AI is becoming table stakes for enterprise software as companies increasingly build AI into their tools to help process data faster or make more efficient use of resources. Our panel will talk about the growing role of AI in enterprise for companies big and small.
Q&A with Founders
3:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Your chance to ask questions of some of the greatest startup minds in enterprise technology.
The Trials and Tribulations of Experience Management
Julie Larson-Green (Qualtrics), Peter Reinhardt (Segment) and a speaker to be announced
3:15 PM – 3:40 PM
As companies gather more data about their customers, it should theoretically improve the customer experience, buy myriad challenges face companies as they try to pull together information from a variety of vendors across disparate systems, both in the cloud and on prem. How do you pull together a coherent picture of your customers, while respecting their privacy and overcoming the technical challenges? We’ll ask a team of experts to find out.
Innovation Break: Identifying Overhyped Technology Trends
James Allworth (Cloudflare), George Mathew (Kespry) and Max Wessel (SAP)
3:40 PM – 4:00 PM
For innovation-focused businesses, deciding which technology trends are worth immediate investment, which trends are worth keeping on the radar and which are simply buzzworthy can be a challenging gray area to navigate and may ultimately make or break the future of a business. Hear from these innovation juggernauts as they provide their divergent perspectives on today’s hottest trends, including Blockchain, 5G, AI, VR and more. Sponsored by SAP.
Fireside Chat
Andrew Ng (Landing AI)
4:00 PM – 4:20 PM
Few technologists have been more central to the development of AI in the enterprise than Andrew Ng . With Landing AI and the backing of many top venture firms, Ng has the foundation to develop and launch the AI companies he thinks will be winners. We will talk about where Ng expects to see AI’s biggest impacts across the enterprise.
The Quantum Enterprise
Jim Clarke (Intel), Jay Gambetta (IBM) and Krysta Svore (Microsoft)
4:20 PM – 4:45 PM
While we’re still a few years away from having quantum computers that will fulfill the full promise of this technology, many companies are already starting to experiment with what’s available today. We’ll talk about what startups and enterprises should know about quantum computing today to prepare for tomorrow.
Overcoming the Data Glut
Benoit Dageville (Snowflake), Ali Ghodsi (Databricks) and a speaker to be announced
4:45 PM – 5:10 PM
There is certainly no shortage of data in the enterprise these days. The question is how do you process it and put it in shape to understand it and make better decisions? Our panel will discuss the challenges of data management and visualization in a shifting technological landscape where the term “big data” doesn’t begin to do the growing volume justice.
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