Author: Ron Miller

Google Cloud makes some strong moves to differentiate itself from AWS and Microsoft Google Cloud held its annual customer conference, Google Cloud Next, this week in San Francisco. It had a couple of purposes. For starters it could introduce customers to new CEO Thomas Kurian for the first time since his hiring at the end of last year. And secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it could demonstrate that it could offer a value proposition that is distinct from AWS and Microsoft. Kurian’s predecessor, Diane Greene, was fond of saying that…

Armis nabs M Series C as IoT security biz grows in leaps and bounds Armis is helping companies protect IoT devices on the network without using an agent, and it’s apparently a problem that is resonating with the market, as the startup reports 700 percent growth in the last year. That caught the attention of investors, who awarded them with a $65 million Series C investment to help keep accelerating that growth. Sequoia Capital led the round with help from new investors Insight Venture Partners and Intermountain Ventures. Returning investors…

Fleetsmith lands M Series B to grow Apple device management platform Fleetsmith launched in 2016 with a mission to manage Apple devices in the cloud. It simplified an IT activity that had previously been complex with help from Apple’s Device Enrollment Program. Over the last year, the startup has beefed up its offering considerably, and today it announced a $30 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures. Tiger Global Management, Upfront Ventures and Harrison Metal also participated. Under the terms of the deal Naomi Pilosof Ionita, a partner at…

On balance, the cloud has been a huge boon to startups Today’s startups have a distinct advantage when it comes to launching a company because of the public cloud. You don’t have to build infrastructure or worry about what happens when you scale too quickly. The cloud vendors take care of all that for you. But last month when Pinterest announced its IPO, the company’s cloud spend raised eyebrows. You see, the company is spending $750 million a year on cloud services, more specifically to AWS. When your business is…

New Celonis tool moves process mining vendor into customer experience Celonis created the idea of process mining, the act of automating the understanding and improvement of internal processes. But understanding the process in and of itself only gets you so far. Ultimately, companies need to use that information to improve the customer experience and a new operational layer announced today could help them do that. When we think about managing the customer experience, we tend to look at the consumer-facing app or the website. If that isn’t working right, or…

Container security startup Aqua lands M Series C Aqua Security, a startup that helps customers launch containers securely, announced a $62 million Series C investment today led by Insight Partners. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), TLV Partners and Shlomo Kramer also participated. With today’s investment, the startup’s investments since inception now total over $100 million, according to the company. Early investors took a chance on the company when it was founded in 2015. Containers were barely a thing back then, but the founders had a vision…

Densify announces new tool to optimize container management in the cloud Densify, a Toronto company that helps customers optimize their cloud resources to control usage and spending, announced a new tool today specifically designed to optimize container usage in the cloud. Company CEO Gerry Smith, says that as containerization proliferates, it’s getting more difficult to track and control cloud infrastructure resource usage as software development and deployment happens with increasing speed. “The whole basis upon which people buy and use cloud and container resources has become wildly expensive because of…

ServiceNow teams with Workplace by Facebook on service chatbot One of the great things about enterprise chat applications beyond giving employees a common channel to communicate, is the ability to integrate with other enterprise applications. Today, Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise collaboration and communication application, and ServiceNow announced a new chatbot to make it easier for employees to navigate a company’s help desks inside Workplace Chat. The beauty of the chatbot is that employees can get answers to common questions whenever they want, wherever they happen to be. The Workplace-ServiceNow integration happens…