Startups need to live in the future. They create roadmaps, build products and continually upgrade them with an eye on next year — or even a few years out.
Big companies, often the target customers for startups, live in a much more near-term world. They buy technologies that can solve problems they know about today, rather than those they may face a couple bends down the road. In other words, they’re driving a Dodge, and most tech entrepreneurs are driving a DeLorean equipped with a flux-capacitor.
That situation can lead to a huge waste of time for startups that want to sell to enterprise customers: a business development black hole. Startups are talking about technology shifts and customer demands that the executives inside the large company — even if they have “innovation,” “IT,” or “emerging technology” in their titles — just don’t see as an urgent priority yet, or can’t sell to their colleagues.
How do you avoid the aforementioned black hole? Some recent research that my company, Innovation Leader, conducted in collaboration with KPMG LLP, suggests a constructive approach.
Rather than asking large companies about which technologies they were experimenting with, we created four buckets, based on what you might call “commitment level.” (Our survey had 211 respondents, 62% of them in North America and 59% at companies with greater than $1 billion in annual revenue.) We asked survey respondents to assess a list of 16 technologies, from advanced analytics to quantum computing, and put each one into one of these four buckets. We conducted the survey at the tail end of Q3 2020.
Respondents in the first group were “not exploring or investing” — in other words, “we don’t care about this right now.” The top technology there was quantum computing.
Bucket #2 was the second-lowest commitment level: “learning and exploring.” At this stage, a startup gets to educate its prospective corporate customer about an emerging technology — but nabbing a purchase commitment is still quite a few exits down the highway. It can be constructive to begin building relationships when a company is at this stage, but your sales staff shouldn’t start calculating their commissions just yet.
Here are the top five things that fell into the “learning and exploring” cohort, in ranked order:
Technologies in the third group, “investing or piloting,” may represent the sweet spot for startups. At this stage, the corporate customer has already discovered some internal problem or use case that the technology might address. They may have shaken loose some early funding. They may have departments internally, or test sites externally, where they know they can conduct pilots. Often, they’re assessing what established tech vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco can provide — and they may find their solutions wanting.
Here’s what our survey respondents put into the “investing or piloting” bucket, in ranked order:
By the time a technology is placed into the fourth category, which we dubbed “in-market or accelerating investment,” it may be too late for a startup to find a foothold. There’s already a clear understanding of at least some of the use cases or problems that need solving, and return-on-investment metrics have been established. But some providers have already been chosen, based on successful pilots and you may need to dislodge someone that the enterprise is already working with. It can happen, but the headwinds are strong.
Here’s what the survey respondents placed into the “in-market or accelerating investment” bucket, in ranked order:
Kyklo, a startup that helps wholesale distributors of electrical and automation products launch e-commerce stores, is announcing that it has raised $8.5 million in seed funding.
The industry may sound a bit arcane, but it’s one that founders Remi Ducrocq (Kyklo’s CEO) and Fabien Legouic (CTO) know from having worked at Schneider Electric. Ducrocq said that the process of selling these products to manufacturers and electricians remains a cumbersome process that relies largely on PDF catalogs.
Shifting these businesses to digital is a much bigger challenge than creating your standard online store, both because of the number of products being sold and the needs for accurate listings.
“Even the small folks sell 100,000 SKUs [distinct products], up to 1 million SKUs,” Ducrocq told me. “If you choose the wrong product, your factory gets shut down. [It’s essential] to have accurate information present on the web store to have a transaction happen.”
Kyklo doesn’t automate the process completely, Ducrocq added, because “you can’t just create content or apply AI to something that is so unstructured.” Sreating these stores remains a manual process for the Kylo team, but the company has built “technology to make that manual process as easy as possible.”
That includes standardized data structures and a variety of scripts to create these product listings more quickly. Ultimately, Ducrocq said Kyklo can get distributors up and running with an online store within 30 days, and sometimes as quickly as two weeks.
In total, Kyklo has created a catalog of more than 2.5 million products for more than 35 distributors. It’s also been endorsed by manufacturers like Schneider Electric, Wago, Festo US and Mitsubishi Electric Automation as their preferred e-commerce partner.
Ducrocq suggested that creating going digital with Kyklo helps these businesses both by allowing them to reach new customers with improved SEO and by giving them tools to expand their sales with existing customers. For example, IEC Supply says that its online sales increased 600% for the first six months after launching with Kyklo, while new customer interactions tripled.
“Market maturity accelerated because of the pandemic,” he added. “These B2B traditional businesses were reluctant to go towards digitization, with only visionaries embarking on the journey. But during the pandemic, salespeople haven’t been able to see ther customers in person for six months, so many distributors are reassessing how they should effectively go to market.”
Kyklo has now raised a total of $10.2 million. The new funding was led by Felicis Ventures and IA Ventures, with participation from Jungle Ventures, partners at Wavemaker, Seedplus and strategic angel investors.
“With 80% of the $640 billion electrical, industrial and automation distribution industry still relying on PDF catalogs and phone and emails for its operations, distributors face a challenge in the market,” said Felicis Managing Director Sundeep Peechu in a statement. “KYKLO’s platform helps these companies keep pace with crucial industry needs and reassess how digital tools can transform their sales force.”
The Citrix Workspace app for HTML5 team works closely with our customers to deliver a flexible, secure and reliable experience. With Apple’s new macOS 11.0.1 Big Sur release, we are excited to announce Day 0 support for the Citrix Workspace …
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To all of our Mac users out there, we know you’ve been excited about Apple’s newest macOS 11.0.1 Big Sur, and so have we. Our excitement around the Mac release is heightened by the fact that we are offering …
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The number of successful ransomware attacks on the education sector increased 388% in the third quarter of 2020. According to Emsisoft, the education sector reported 31 ransomware incidents in Q3 2020. That’s a 388% increase over the 8 incidents that occurred in the previous quarter. Nine of the 31 ransomware attacks disclosed in the third […]… Read More
The post Successful Ransomware Attacks on Education Sector Grew 388% in Q3 2020 appeared first on The State of Security.
An undisclosed number of customers of outdoor clothing retailer The North Face have had their passwords reset by the company, following a credential-stuffing attack. The company has revealed that on October 9, 2020, it became aware that hackers had used usernames and passwords stolen from a third-party website to gain unauthorised access to customer accounts. […]… Read More
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10月29日にCitrix Security Summitが開催されました。バーチャルイベントとして開催された今回のサミットでは様々は発表があり、今回のブログではCitrix Security Summitで公開されたCitrixのクラウド戦略について、ご説明します。
Citrixは、従業員が生産性を高めるために必要なアプリケーションを安全かつ一貫して提供するためのパートナーとして、長い間信頼されてきました。しかし、従業員とアプリケーションの両方を保護することは容易ではありません。まず、CitrixのCEO、David Henshallによるセキュリティの概要を説明するセッションでは、お客様の組織に最適な方法で従業員とアプリケーションのセキュリティを確保するために、Citrixがどのようにイノベーションを行っているかを紹介しています。
Citrixのセキュリティ戦略：概要
過去10年の間に、企業がセキュリティを確保したいアプリケーションの種類は、データセンターやデスクトップ上で実行されるものから、モバイルアプリケーション、ウェブアプリケーション、SaaSアプリケーション、その他のサードパーティのサービスにまで広がってきました。
新しいワークモデルは機会を生み出し、攻撃の対象となる可能性を高めています。しかし、個々のアプリやデバイスを保護するために設計されたツールの導入と統合は、一貫性のないセキュリティポリシー、コストと複雑さの増大、ユーザーエクスペリエンスの低下をもたらしています。
Citrixは、ワークスペースを保護することでユーザーを保護し、統合されたアクセスセキュリティとアプリ制御を備えた安全なコンテナを提供することで、データの漏洩を防ぎ、エンドポイントの脅威からユーザーを保護します。ユーザーやアプリケーションにおいて、何も信用しないというゼロトラストの理念に基づき、ユーザーがより多くの有効な検証を提示すればするほど、信頼度が高まり、より多くのアクセスを与えることができる環境を実現しています。
これは、一度侵入すればすべてにアクセスが可能なVPNのアプローチとは異なります。ゼロトラストモデルでは、相応なタイミングでそのアプリケーションに適切なアクセスを提供するために、ユーザーやデバイスの信頼性を継続的にリスクベースで分析し、評価することができます。
しかし、ゼロトラストを単独で行うことはできません。そのためには、包括的なパートナーエコシステムが必要です。たとえば、Citrix Ready Workspace Security Programでは、アプリケーションとネットワークセキュリティ、分析と可視性、データとデバイスのセキュリティなど、さまざまな統合の互換性に対応しています。
Secure Workspace Access、Citrix Endpoint Management、Citrix Analytics for Securityと統合されたゼロトラスト原則を用いたパートナーソリューションで、このプログラムを拡大することを発表できることを嬉しく思います。これにより、お客様は既存の投資を活用してゼロトラストの成果を実現しながら、セキュリティベンダーの選択を簡易化することができます。
私たちは、Cisco、Google Cloud、…
The post ワークスペースの安全を確保し、従業員を守る first appeared on Citrix Blogs.
This is a guest blog post from Citrix Ready partner Yubico.
Over the past few years, organizations have started to implement flexible work policies, empowering teams to work at home or in the office at their convenience. More recently, …
The post Go passwordless with YubiKeys for Citrix Workspace first appeared on Citrix Blogs.
Solo.io, a Cambridge, MA service mesh startup, announced some big changes to its approach today with a full-stack platform of services aimed squarely at the enterprise. The culmination of this will be Gloo Mesh Enterprise, a new product that will be available in Beta by the end of the year.
Service meshes are part of a cloud native, containerized approach to development that enable micro services to communicate with one another.
Idit Levine, founder and CEO at Solo, says that she began by creating individual components since launching the company in 2017 because she knew that it was early for service meshes. Today’s announcement is about bringing all of these components the company has created into a more coherent and connected enterprise product.
While she was worried at first that the pandemic would have a negative impact on business, she says that her company has been busier than ever and today’s announcement is really about giving customers what they have been asking for throughout this tumultuous year.
Most of Solo’s customers are running Kubernetes and they needed some missing pieces that Solo was happy to provide for them. The first problem is the primary reason the company started, which was to manage service meshes, and Gloo Mesh, which is based on the open source Istio service mesh, helps developers manage their service mesh clusters.
Another problem involved running containers at the edge, which required an API gateway. To that end, the company announced Gloo Edge, an API gateway built on the Envoy Proxy, an edge service proxy. Running applications at the edge means they get the resources they need to improve performance and save bandwidth.
The third piece is called Gloo Portal. This provides a centralized, self-service catalog of services that developers can tap into as they are building their applications. The final piece is Gloo Extensions, which provides a way for developers to access or build extensions called web assembly modules.
All of these pieces are available as open source, but companies that want additional functionality and support and a way to connect all of these pieces will need to buy the enterprise product. Among the additional features in the enterprise version is the ability to apply roles to the APIs in Gloo Edge to control who has access. Gloo Mesh users get production Istio support including updates and patches. It also includes a dashboard for managing clusters and developer tools for building web assembly pieces in Gloo Extension
The company has raised over $36 million, according to Pitchbook data. The most recent deal was $23 million in September. Levine says the startup has several dozen large customers at this point and 35 employees. She said she is actively hiring and expects to be at 50 soon.
mmhmm, the presentation software developed by Evernote founder Phil Libin, is today coming out of beta. The mmhmm app is now officially available for Mac.
The software allows folks to spice up their video calls with the ability to add different backgrounds, play videos, add images, and use filters, among other cool effects. The app has been invite only since its inception, but today it becomes available to all.
Alongside the launch of the free app, mmhmm is also introducing Premium Tools.
This includes customizable rooms, presenter controls and extra add-ons like laser pointers. Users can get a free seven-day trial of the Premium Tools, and after the trial will have access to these tools for one hour per day. The Premium Tools will cost $99/year or $9.99/month, but free users will still be able to videochat, record, collaborate and use the basic present with a default background and simple presenter mode.
Another important note: mmhmm has decided to make its Premium Tools free to students and educators for one year.
The public launch also brings a handful of new features, including Big Hand Mode (which lets folks in the video call visually react), improvements to the appearance of mmhmm’s virtual green screen, and mmhmm Creative Services.
Big Hand Mode is only available on Apple’s new M1-powered Macs.
Creative Services represent another revenue channel for the company, which will now offer white-glove bespoke services to folks running large events or experiences.
For now, mmhmm is only available on MacOS, but the company is working on a Windows beta as we speak.
As an admin, are you looking to automate and streamline your monitoring and troubleshooting efforts? Would you like to resolve issues more quickly and spend less time with support so you can focus on your strategic initiatives?
If the answer …
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One of the major improvements that the avionics industry is undergoing is an Internet of Things (IoT) upgrade. And this is inevitably affecting how airlines approach aircraft safety. From the beginning, safety has been paramount to the aviation industry. But while it is a welcome innovation, the incorporation of IoT devices in aircraft comes with […]… Read More
The post Avionics Safety and Secured Connectivity: A Look at DO-326A/ED-202A, DO-355 and DO-356 appeared first on The State of Security.
Fishtown Analytics, the Philadelphia-based company behind the dbt open-source data engineering tool, today announced that it has raised a $29.5 million Series B round led by Sequoia Captial, with participation from previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Amplify Partners.
The company is building a platform that allows data analysts to more easily create and disseminate organizational knowledge. Its focus is on data modeling, with its dbt tool allowing anybody who knows SQL to build data transformation workflows. Dbt also features support for automatically testing data quality and documenting changes, but maybe most importantly, it uses standard software engineering techniques to help engineers collaborate on code and integrate changes continuously.
If this all sounds a bit familiar, it’s probably because you saw that Fishtown Analytics also announced a $12.9 million Series A round in April. It’s not often we see both a Series A and B round within half a year, but that goes to show how the market for Fishtown’s service is expanding as companies continue to grapple with how to best make use of their data — and how much investors want to be part of that.
Image Credits: Fishtown
“This was a very productive thing for us,” Fishtown Analytics co-founder and CEO Tristan Handy told me when I asked him why he raised again so quickly. “It’s standard best practice to do quarterly catch-ups with investors and eventually you’ll be ready to fundraise. And Matt Miller from Sequoia showed up to one of these quarterly catch-ups and he shared the 40-page memo that he had written to the Sequoia partnership — and he came with the term sheet.”
Initially, Handy declined. “We’re very bullheaded people, I think, as many founders are. It took some real reflection and thinking about, ‘is this what we want to be doing right now?'”
In the end, though, the team decided to go ahead with this round — mostly because this round allowed the team to think long-term and provided stability and certainty.
One thing Handy has always been very clear about is that he did not found Fishtown to purely build the largest possible company but to solve its users’ problems, even as the market looked at companies like Databricks and Snowflake — and their financial success — as potential analogs. “My worry was that the financial markets were driving things that weren’t necessarily going to be good for our users,” Handy said.
Last week was a busy week, what with an election in Myanmar and all (well, and the United States, I guess). So perhaps you were glued to your TV or smartphone, and missed out on our conversation with Asheem Chandna, a long-time partner at Greylock who has invested in enterprise and cybersecurity startups for nearly two decades now, backing such notable companies as Palo Alto Networks, AppDynamics and Sumo Logic. We have more Extra Crunch Live shows coming up.
Enterprise software is changing faster this year than it has in a decade. Coronavirus, remote work, collaboration and new cybersecurity threats have combined to force companies to rethink their IT strategies, and that means more opportunities — and challenges — for enterprise founders than ever before. In some cases, we are seeing an acceleration of existing trends, and in others, we are seeing all new trends come to the forefront.
All that is to say that there was so much on the docket to talk about last week. Chandna and I discussed what’s happening in early-stage enterprise startups, whether vertical SaaS is the future of enterprise investing, data and no-code platforms, and then this rise of “shift left” security.
The following interview has been edited and condensed from our original Extra Crunch Live conversation.
Chandna has been a long-time backer of startups at their earliest stages, with some of his investments being literally birthed in Greylock’s offices. So I was curious how he saw the landscape today given all that prior experience.
TechCrunch: What sort of companies are exciting for you today? Are there particular markets you’re particularly attuned to?
Asheem Chandna: One is digital transformation. Every company is trying to figure out how to become more digital, and this has been accelerated by COVID-19. Second is information technology today and its journey to the cloud. I would say we might be about 10% or 15% of the way there. Some of the trends are clear, but the journey is actually still relatively early, and so there’s just a ton of opportunity ahead.
The third one is leveraging data for better predictability along with analytics. Every CEO is looking to make better decisions. And you know, most leaders make decisions based on gut instinct and a combination of data. If the data can tell a story, if the data can help you better predict, there’s a lot of potential here.
I view these as three macro trends, and then if one was to add to that, I would say cybersecurity has never been more important than it is today. I’ve been around cyber for over two decades, and just the prominence and importance and priority has never been more important than today. So that’s kind of another key area.
I want to dive into your first category, digital transformation. This is a phrase that I feel like I’ve heard for a decade now, with “Data is the new oil” and all these sorts of buzzwords and marketing phrases. Where are we in that process? Are we at the beginning? Are we at the end? What’s next from a startup perspective?
Due to COVID-19 and because of the way people are working today, digital’s become the primary medium. I would still say we’re early, and you can literally look sector by sector to see how much more work there is to do here.
Take enterprise sales itself, which is early in what I consider digitalization. It’s even more important today than it was a year ago. I’m using video to basically communicate, and then the next piece would basically be trialing of software. Can I allow even complex software to be self trials and can I measure the customer journey through that trial? Then there’s the contracting of the software, and we go to the sale process, can all that be done digitally?
So even when you take something as very mundane as enterprise sales, it’s being transformed. Winning teams, winning software entrepreneurs, they understand this well, and they’d be wise to examine every step of this process, and instrument it and digitize it.
