Google is giving developers a new storage option in its cloud. Cloud Filestore, which will launch into beta next month, essentially offers a fully managed network attached storage (NAS) service in the cloud. This means that companies can now easily run applications that need a traditional file system interface on the Google Cloud Platform.
Traditionally, developers who wanted access to a standard file system over the kind of object storage and database options that Google already offered had to rig up a file server with a persistent disk. Filestore does away with all of this and simply allows Google Cloud users to spin up storage as needed.
The promise of Filestore is that it offers high throughput, low latency and high IOPS. The service will come in two tiers: premium and standard. The premium tier will cost $0.30 per GB and month and promises a throughput speed of 700 MB/s and 30,000 IOPS, no matter the storage capacity. Standard tier Filestore storage will cost $0.20 per GB and month, but performance scales with capacity and doesn’t hit peak performance until you store more than 10TB of data in Filestore.
Google launched Filestore at an event in Los Angeles that mostly focused on the entertainment and media industry. There are plenty of enterprise applications in those verticals that need a shared filesystem, but the same can be said for many other industries that rely on similar enterprise applications.
The Filestore beta will launch next month. Since it’s still in beta, Google isn’t making any uptime promises right now and there is no ETA for when the service will come out of beta.
ZenProspect, a startup that emerged from the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class to help companies use data and intelligence to increase sales, announced today that it was rebranding as Apollo. It also announced a $7 million Series A investment.
The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners. Social Capital and Y Combinator also participated. Apparently Y Combinator liked what they saw enough to continue to invest in the company.
Apollo helps customers connect their sales people with the right person at the right time. That is typically a customer that is most likely to buy the product. It does this by combining a number of tools including a rules engine to automate prospect routing, a lead scoring tool and analytics to measure results at a granular level, among others.
The company also uses data they have collected from 200 million contacts at 10 million companies to match sellers to buyers along with the information in the user’s own CRM tools — typically Salesforce. Apollo is making this vast database of company and contact data available for customers to use themselves for free starting today.
Apollo CEO and founder Tim Zheng says the company was born out of a need at a previous venture. He was working at a startup that was floundering and sales had flatlined. When they couldn’t find a product on the market to help them, they decided to build it and saw the number of users increase from 5000 to 150,000 users in just five weeks. That eventually reached a million users. As he spoke to friends at other Bay area companies about what his company had done, he heard a lot of interest, and decided to turn that sales tool into a company.
[gallery ids="1663275,1663276,1663277,1663278"]The company launched as ZenProspect in 2015 and went through Y Combinator in 2016. They were the third fastest growing company in that YC batch, generating $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) during their tenure. In fact, they were profitable out of the gate, using their own software to sell the product.
Zheng points out that there are thousands of sales tools out there, but he said, even if you bought every one of them and stitched them together you still wouldn’t have a great sales process. Zheng says his company has figured out how to solve that problem and provide that structure to deliver the best prospects to sales people to close deals.
The company works closely with Salesforce as 80 percent of its customers are using data inside of Salesforce in conjunction with the Apollo tool. It’s worth noting, however, that Apollo is not built on top of Salesforce platform. It just integrates with it.
They target both early stage startups looking to increase sales and established enterprise customers with huge sales teams. So far it’s been working. Today, Apollo has 500 customers and 50 employees. With the current influx of money, they expect to get to 120 in the next 12 -18 months.
If a coffee fanatic decides they want to open up a coffee shop somewhere, odds are they’ll have to end up Googling “liability insurance” at some point — and trying to navigate the complex legal web to get all of that nailed down before they even sell their first iced latte.
Inaki Berenguer instead hopes they’ll stumble upon CoverWallet in that Google search, which streamlines the process of setting up commercial insurance for a small business. The company is trying to take another step now by saying it will create an open-ended tool that allows third parties to plug directly into its services, giving small businesses a way to pick up commercial insurance while they are going through the flow of another set of SMB management software. All of this is geared toward ensuring that more and more users are able to start tapping the service, which allows it to pick up additional business — and data — even if it means partially handing off the branding and user experience to another service.
“When we had three employees and we moved to New York, we were told, if you want to sign a lease you have to buy insurance.” Berenguer said. “I wanted to go to a website, and input my square footage, and my revenue, and get a quote, and do everything else in five to ten minutes — but I was told that didn’t exist for business insurance. I had to go to a general provider, complete a 20-page PDF, which the broker sends it to the insurance company, and then they’ll come back with a quote. This process is analog and time consuming and opaque. I know this process can be reinvented. There are 25m small businesses in the U.S., and they all need to buy insurance.”
CoverWallet is much like what Berenguer explained in his dream scenario when he was moving his last company into an office. The insurance policies are personalized for restaurants, startups, retail stores, contractors, or various other types of commercial insurance products. Users input their business information, and then are able to pay for the policies — up front or in monthly installments — and get their policy set up in short order. If that doesn’t work, CoverWallet also has a team of agents to cover the rest of the questions they have, and users can modify any of those policies whenever they want.
But in the end, it may be that users are looking to keep things simple – especially if it’s a small- to medium-sized business that isn’t the kind of technically savvy ones you’ll often find in a major metropolitan area like New York or San Francisco. While CoverWallet looks to simplify the whole process of getting commercial insurance, which can be a major roadblock to getting something as simple as a coffee shop off the ground, integrating into other tools and making the whole process more and more seamless ensures that it’ll be able to keep that flow of businesses coming in — and those businesses may eventually start to spread the word on their own.
“Businesses might already be using accounting software or payroll,” Berenguer said. “Those systems have all the company info. Why do they need to come to a platform, and type everything, when that info is somewhere else. It’s like white labeling your solution. But if you want to be customer centric, the less they have to type the better.”
There likely isn’t much stopping the larger insurance carriers from offering a similar sort of plug-and-play API. But Berenguer said building a whole aggregation across all of those insurance providers, and then giving that pipeline to customers as they look to pick up insurance through another SMB tool like Gusto (though Gusto isn’t one of the clients, Berenguer said), gives them enough of a compelling argument for those employment suites to bring them in. Certain providers may only offer certain kinds of policies, or cover certain geographic regions, and CoverWallet hopes it will make a good enough case that it can cover all those gaps.
In the age of digital transformation, it’s important to understand your business processes and find improvements quickly, but it’s not always easy to do without bringing in expensive consultants to help. Celonis, a New York City enterprise startup, created a sophisticated software solution to help solve this problem, and today it announced a $50 million Series B investment from Accel and 83North on a $1 billion valuation.
It’s not typical for an enterprise startup to have such a lofty valuation so early in its funding cycle, but Celonis is not a typical enterprise startup. It launched in 2011 in Munich with this idea of helping companies understand their processes, which they call process mining.
“Celonis is an intelligent system using logs created by IT systems such as SAP, Salesforce, Oracle and Netsuite, and automatically understands how these processes work and then recommends intelligently how they can be improved,” Celonis CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke explained.
The software isn’t magic, but helps customers visualize each business process, and then looks at different ways of shifting how and where humans interact with the process or bringing in technology like robotics process automation (RPA) when it makes sense.
Celonis process flow. Photo: Celonis
Rinke says the software doesn’t simply find a solution and that’s the end of the story. It’s a continuous process loop of searching for ways to help customers operate more efficiently. This doesn’t have to be a big change, but often involves lots incremental ones.
“We tell them there are lots of answers. We don’t think there is one solution. All these little things don’t execute well. We point out these things. Typically we find it’s easy to implement, ” he said.
Screenshot: Celonis
It seems to be working. Customers include the likes of Exxon-Mobile, 3M, Merck, Lockheed-Martin and Uber. Rinke reports deals are often seven figures. The company has grown an astonishing 5,000 percent in the past 4 years and 300 percent in the past year alone. What’s more, it has been profitable every year since it started. (How many enterprise startups can say that?)
The company currently has 400 employees, but unlike most Series B investments, they aren’t looking at this money to grow operationally. They wanted to have the money for strategic purposes, so if the opportunity came along to make an acquisition or expand into a new market, they would be in a position to do that.
“I see the funding as a confirmation and commitment, a sign from our investors and an indicator about what we’ve built and the traction we have. But for us it’s more important, and our investors share this, what they really invested in was the future of the company,” Rinke said. He’s sees an on-going commitment to help his customers as far more important than a billion valuation.
But that doesn’t hurt either as it moves rapidly forward.
At the Identiverse conference in Boston today, Ping Identity announced that it has acquired Elastic Beam, a pre-Series A startup that uses artificial intelligence to monitor APIs and help understand when they have been compromised.
Ping also announced a new product, PingIntelligence for APIs, based on the Elastic Beam technology. They did not disclose the sale price.
The product itself is a pretty nifty piece of technology. It automatically detects all the API IP addresses and URLs running inside a customer. It then uses artificial intelligence to search for anomalous behavior and report back when it finds it (or it can automatically shut down access depending on how it’s configured).
“APIs are defined either in the API gateway because that facilitates creation or implemented on an application server like node.js. We created a platform that could bring a level of protection to both,” company founder Bernard Harguindeguy told TechCrunch.
It may seem like an odd match for Ping, which after all, is an enterprise identity company, but there are reasonable connections here. Perhaps the biggest is that CEO Andre Durand wants to see his company making increasing use of AI and machine learning for identity security in general. It’s also worth noting that his company has had an API security product in its portfolio for over five years, so it’s not a huge stretch to buy Elastic Beam.
With this purchase, Ping has not only acquired some advanced technology, it has also acqui-hired a team of AI and machine learning experts that could help inject the entire Ping product line with AI and machine learning smarts. “Nobody should be surprised who has been watching that Ping will drive machine learning AI and general intelligence into our identity platform,” Durand said.
Harguindeguy certainly sees the potential here. “I think we can over time bring a high level of monitoring and intelligence to Ping to understand whether an identity may have been used by someone else or being misused somehow,” he said.
Elastic Beam interface. Photo: Elastic Beam website
Harguindeguy will join Ping Identity as Senior Vice President of Intelligence along with his entire team. Neither company would divulge the exact number of employees, but Durand did acknowledge it fell somewhere between the 11 and 50 mentioned in the company Crunchbase profile. The original team consisted of around 10 according to Harguindeguy and they have been hiring for some time, so fair to say more than 11, but less than 50.
Harguindeguy says they were pursued by more than one company (although he wouldn’t say who those other companies were), but he felt that Ping provided a good cultural match for his company and could take them where they wanted to go faster than they could on their own, even with Series A money.
“We realized this is going to be really big. How do we go after the market really strongly really fast? We saw that we could could fuse this really fast with Ping and have strong go- to market with with them,” he said.
Durand acknowledged that Ping, which was itself acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $600 million two years ago, couldn’t have made such an acquisition without the backing of a larger firm like this. “There was there was no chance we could have done either UnboundID (which the company acquired in August 2016) or Elastic Beam on our own. This was purely an artifact of being part of the Vista family portfolio,” he said.
PingIntelligence for APIs, the product based on Elastic Beam’s technology, is currently in private preview. It should be generally available some time later this year.
The Future of Data Storage Data is everywhere. In the security industry, there are close to 300 million surveillance cameras churning out billions of hours worth of video. In the smartphone world, 2.1 billion users are generating a constant stream
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As companies prepare for those storm clouds, some have turned to a different kind of cloud to support business operations — no matter what the weather.
A mid-size reinsurance company in the southeastern United States adopted …
The U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation written to help protect industrial control systems (ICS) against digital threats. On 25 June, lawmakers in the House passed a bill called “H.R. 5733, DHS Industrial Control Systems Capabilities Enhancement Act of 2018.” The legislation would require the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) in the Department of […]… Read More
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(Reuters) – Orlando has stopped testing Amazon’s facial recognition program after rights groups raised concerns that the service could be used in ways that could violate civil liberties. The Florida city ended a pilot program last week after its contract
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Telecom, Banking and Utilities companies most prepared NEW YORK; June 26, 2018 – With only a quarter of business leaders globally very confident they will achieve their 2020 growth targets, and 56 percent concerned that current growth strategies are at
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In your home, a little spring cleaning can go a long way to freshening up your space. While it’s easy to neglect some of these irregular maintenance tasks, an annual focused effort can make sure that things don’t get out of hand.
This principle is not limited to your home. Spring cleaning your small business can be an essential way to keep your systems optimized and your processes functioning smoothly.
Want to improve your business communications? These three spring cleaning tips are a great place to start.
Just because you’re running a small business, that doesn’t mean you can’t sound like a big business. We’ve previously explained some ways you can use your CRM to give the appearance that you’re a big deal, but your communications systems need to be on point too.
Whatever phone system you use, make sure it’s a reliable service and a high-quality line that provides clear audio for customers.
Next, implement advanced functions such as setting your business hours and holiday hours so that your customers are immediately aware if your business is closed. After all, it would be very unprofessional if customers showed up to your workplace only to find that you were already closed for the day or were on vacation.
Additionally, many phone systems now offer automated answering services included with their business phone service. These virtual receptionist tools can add a personal touch that helps callers connect with the employee that they’re trying to reach. You can also use these systems as messaging machines to provide easy ways for customers to hear about product updates, pop-up events, discounts, and weather closings. With a virtual receptionist, “someone” is there 24/7 to answer your calls and provide helpful information.
We get it: it’s tough to provide the level of customer service that’s necessary for business growth and customer retention. However, in the face of the ongoing challenge of providing top-caliber support with a limited staff, consider how your communications technology can work to your advantage.
For example, telephone features such as ring groups let you group your employees’ phone numbers together into categories such as sales, accounting, etc. By using the simultaneous ring function, incoming callers can connect with any employee in the accounting department when they want to pay their bill. By reducing a caller’s dependency upon the availability of a single employee, communications processes can be smoother and more efficient.
Ring group functions can also offer a sequential call setting. When using sequential ring groups, incoming callers will be routed through a series of phone numbers until someone picks up. Therefore, if someone on your sales team can’t answer an incoming call, that caller can be seamlessly redirected to the receptionist who can field questions or take a message.
Smart telephone systems can help callers connect with people instead of answering machines. Keep in mind that some telephone services also offer a free calling app with their service so employees have mobility tools to make and receive calls on their work line while they’re out of the office on a sales trip, making a delivery, or working from home.
When you signed up for your business phone service, you may have been unsure of how your business would develop or evolve. Thus, you may be paying for add-on features that you don’t really need.
Just as spring cleaning your home would involve cleaning out your closets, a communications audit is a great way to cut costs on extra expenses that you don’t need. Growing your business’ profitability can be challenging and cutting extraneous costs is an easy way to add to your bottom line.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone plans typically include a wide set of calling features for one low price. That way, if you need a conference bridge one month, you won’t end up paying for the add-on feature until you remember to cancel it. With VoIP, it’s easy to get smart about your communications costs.
About Ooma Office
Ooma Office is an affordable way to advance your small business’ phone communications. With 35+ features included, small businesses have access to enterprise-grade phone tools including a virtual receptionist, music on hold, conference bridge, a free calling app, and more.
We think our phone service is pretty great, but don’t just take our word for it. PC Magazine’s Business Choice Awards have named Ooma as the #1 VoIP phone service for businesses, noting its reliability, quality, ease of use, and likelihood of customers to recommend the service.
Want to see if Ooma Office is right for your business? The videos, white papers, and articles on our website explain key points to consider about telephone service.
Ken Narita’s marketing career spans two decades helping businesses large and small grow. Whether it’s been advising emerging startups, guiding clients from the agency side, or currently, leading SMB marketing at Ooma, Ken has always taken an empathetic approach to addressing goals, gaps, and opportunities. Previously at TriNet, from 2011 to 2017, he grew and led the revenue marketing team through a period of rapid change and growth where net service revenue consistently grew in a range of 15-20% per year and reached $650 million at the end of his tenure. Ken has led demand generation, field marketing, customer marketing, and marketing operations teams and enjoys the ability to integrate campaigns across all functions to drive results.
WASHINGTON/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Financial watchdogs from North America, Britain and Asia are urgently seeking a formal exemption from the European Union’s tough new data privacy law to avoid hampering cross-border investigations, regulatory officials told Reuters. Failure by the EU to
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Android P has a lot of new features for the enterprise, adding more security for corporate devices, a new way to transition between work and personal apps, and flexible kiosk options for …
Remaining competitive in today’s modern workplace is all about supporting the vastly different and diversified requirements of an increasingly mobile workforce. You need to flexibly manage, reliably deliver, and completely secure business applications, devices, and data, end to end. Anything …
BigID announced a big $30 million Series B round today, which comes on the heels of closing their $14M A investment in January. It’s been a whirlwind year for the NYC data security startup as GDPR kicked in and companies came calling for their products.
The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from previous investors ClearSky Security, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Information Venture Partners and SAP.io.
BigID has a product that helps companies inventory their data, even extremely large data stores, and identify the most sensitive information, a convenient feature at a time where GDPR data privacy rules, which went into effect at the end of May, require that companies doing business in the EU have a grip on their customer data.
That’s certainly something that caught the eye of Ariel Tseitlin from Scale Venture Partners. “We talked to a lot of companies, how they feel more specifically about about GDPR, and more broadly about how they think about data within in their organizations, and we got a very strong signal that there is a lot of concern around the regulation and how to prepare for that, but also more fundamentally, that CIOs and chief data officers don’t have a good sense of where data resides within their their organizations,” he explained.
Dimitri Sirota, CEO and co-founder, says that GDPR is a nice business driver, but he sees the potential to grow the data security market much more broadly than simply as a way to comply with one regulatory ruling or another. He says that American companies are calling, even some without operations in Europe because they see getting a grip on their customer data as a fundamental business imperative.
BigID product collage. Graphic: BigID
The company plans to expand their partner go-to market strategy in the coming the months, another approach that could translate to increased sales. That will include global systems integrators. Sirota says to expect announcements involving the usual suspects in the coming months. “You’ll see over the next little bit, several announcements with many of the names that you’re familiar with in terms of go-to market and global relationships,” he said.
Finally there are the strategic investors in this deal, including Comcast and SAP, which Sirota thinks will also ultimately help them get enterprise deals they might not have landed up until now. The $30 million runway also gives customers who might have been skittish about dealing with a young-ish startup, more confidence to make the deal.
BigID seems to have the right product at the right time. Scale’s Tseitlin, who will join the board as part of the deal, certainly sees the potential of this company to scale far beyond its current state.
“The area where we tend to spend a lot of time, and I think is what what attracted Dimitri to having us as an investor, is that we really help with the scaling phase of company growth,” he said. True to their name, Scale tries to get the company to that next level beyond product/market fit to where they can deliver consistently and continually grow revenue. They have done this with Box and DocuSign and others and hope that BigID is next.
Democratization of Software Advances in the cloud have changed the way we interact with the world. From how we pay our bills to how we communicate to how we navigate city streets, the cloud’s arrival has proven disruptive to the
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Digital transformation, cloud capabilities, blockchain, machine learning and automation, the subscription economy and cybersecurity… these are just a few of the priorities facing Government CIOs today. There’s no question that in 2018, government CIOs and senior IT leaders face innumerable …
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) received instructions to investigate HealthEngine’s practice of sharing clients’ personal information with lawyers. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), a spokesperson for Australia’s health minister Gregory Andrew Hunt confirmed that that OAIC and the Australian Digital Health Agency had both received instructions to look into the […]… Read More
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Adobe Systems Inc. is the latest foreign technology giant planning to open an artificial intelligence lab in Canada. The Silicon Valley software giant, best known for document-creation products Photoshop and Acrobat, says it is looking for a Toronto-based AI lab
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Russian telecoms company Veon already stopping hundreds of DDoS attacks every day, with further spikes expected MAHWAH, N.J., June 25, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Radware® (NASDAQ:RDWR), a leading provider of cyber security and application delivery solutions, provides the power behind
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