In a world shifting to the cloud, Microsoft has carved out a place trying to help companies caught between two worlds — on-prem legacy solutions and the public and private cloud. To help further that hybrid mission, the company announced it was acquiring Avere Systems today for an undisclosed amount. Microsoft describes Avere as “a leading provider of high-performance NFS and… Read More

 Hyperscale operators are defined as enormous companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google that need to provide computing on a massive scale. You would think that there would be a limited number of this type of highly specialized data center, but recent research from Synergy Research found that 2017 was actually a breakout year for new hyperscale data centers across the world — with… Read More

 AWS had a successful year by any measure. The company continued to behave like a startup with the kind of energy and momentum to invest in new areas not usually seen in an incumbent with a significant marketshare lead. How good a year was it? According to numbers from Synergy Research, the company remains the category leader by far with around 35 percent marketshare. Microsoft sits well behind… Read More

 WeWork had a big year in 2017. The seven-year-old company opened 90 new locations, doubling its global membership, and expanded into new cities in Latin America, Asia and Australia, and Europe and Israel. It is reportedly valued at $20 billion. While 2018 holds more of the same — WeWork plans to launch 1 million square feet of new space each month next year — the company also plans… Read More

 The $40 million Ripcord Series B we reported back in August has just been bumped up to $65 million, courtesy of additional funding led by Google Ventures. The added funding comes as the record keeping company continues to grow at a healthy clip. The Bay Area based service added 100 jobs this year, and is on track to add another 150 in 2018. The service came out of stealth in March of this… Read More

 On the heels of Lemonade raising $120 million from Softbank for its new “peer-to-peer” spin on insurance services, another company aimed at disrupting the insurance market is announcing a major round of its own. Bima, a European startup that builds and sells “microinsurance” services for low-income consumers in Africa, Asia and Latin America, has raised $96.6 million in… Read More

 If you go to any company’s website these days, you’re probably starting to see some chat functionality more and more often — and for good reason, as it’s a quick way for those companies to get in touch with their potential customers. And Sendbird, which launched in February this year out of Y Combinator, has tried to quietly begin eating up this space by giving… Read More

 InVision, the platform for creation and collaboration among designers, has today announced the launch of the InVision Fund. Led by CEO Clark Valberg, the company is designating $5 million to invest in startups working in the design space. “The world is giving birth to all of these little design tools meant to make the world of design better,” said Valberg. “We think of… Read More

 For a technology that the average person has probably never heard of, Kubernetes surged in popularity in 2017 with a particular group of IT pros who are working with container technology. Kubernetes is the orchestration engine that underlies how operations staff deploy and manage containers at scale. (For the low-down on containers, check out this article.) In plain English, that means that as… Read More

 Oracle will pay $1.2 billion in cash to buy construction software developer Aconex, the companies announced today. Based in Melbourne, Aconex’s cloud-based software allow teams working on building projects to collaborate and share documents. Oracle agreed to pay AUD $7.80 (about $5.97) per share in cash for a total of $1.2 billion. This price represents a 47% premium over… Read More