Google gives large businesses more options to connect directly to its cloud

In September, Google launched the beta of its dedicated interconnects for Google Cloud enterprise users. These direct connections to the Google Cloud Platform essentially give enterprises a private on-ramp to the Google Cloud, which is especially important if they want to mix and match their own data centers with applications that run in Google’s data…

Facebook’s Workplace, now at 30,000 orgs, adds Chat desktop apps and group video chat

 It’s been once year since Workplace, Facebook’s social network designed specifically for businesses and other organizations, came out of beta to take on the likes of Slack, Atlassian, Microsoft and others in the world of enterprise collaboration. Now, with 30,000 organizations using Workplace across some 1 million groups (more than double the figures Facebook published April)… Read…

TechStars alums will now get discounted WeWork space

 WeWork and TechStars are buddying up, the organizations announced today. TechStars, the global accelerator program responsible for companies like ClassPass, Sphero and Digital Ocean, will be bringing its program into the WeWork community by running its curriculum at WeWork locations in Toronto, Boston, Kansas City, and New York City. As a part of the deal,…

Spotinst delivers spot cloud infrastructure services at discount prices

 Cloud infrastructure vendors offer a range of prices for their services including aggressively priced virtual machines available on the spot market on an as-available basis. The catch is that the vendor can shut down these VMs whenever they happen to need them. Spotinst, a Tel Aviv-based startup, developed a service to buy and distribute that…

Google and Cisco announce hybrid cloud partnership

 Google and Cisco today announced a new partnership around helping their customers build more efficient hybrid cloud solutions. Unsurprisingly, given Google’s recent focus, this partnership centers around the Google-incubated Kubernetes container orchestration tool, as well as the Istio service mesh for connecting and securing microservices across clouds. “Google Cloud and Cisco… Read More

Microsoft’s rebranded Azure Container Service shifts its focus to Kubernetes

 As far as container orchestration goes, Kubernetes is quickly becoming the de facto standard, even as Docker Swarm and Mesos/Mesosphere DC/OS continue to find their own niches. For the longest time, Microsoft argued that one of the advantages of its managed Azure Container Service (ACS) was its support for multiple orchestration tools, but that’s shifting…

New Neo4J platform gives developers a set of tools for building enterprise graph applications

 Neo4j builds tools for creating graph databases, and today at its GraphConnect conference in New York City, it announced a new platform for developers to build graph-based applications using a common set of services. Emil Eifrem, Neo4j co-founder, says while the concept of graph databases has steadily gained in popularity in recent years, the databases…

LinkedIn boosts its messaging with smart replies, pre-written, AI based interactions

 LinkedIn — the Microsoft-owned platform for those who want to network with professional contacts and advance their own careers — has been in the middle of a long-term makeover of its social tools, as it looks to drive more usage. Today comes the latest chapter in that story: the site is unveiling a new smart…

HashiCorp raises $40M for its cloud infrastructure automation services

 HashiCorp is probably best known for Terraform, its open source tool for automatically provisioning infrastructure by describing it as code.  But the company also offers a whole range of additional open source security tools and products that enable multi-cloud deployments, as well as enterprise versions of these tools that add features for larger teams on…

Primer helps governments and corporations monitor and understand the world’s information

 When Google was founded in 1998, its goal was to organize the world’s information. And for the most part, mission accomplished — but in 19 years the goal post has moved forward and indexing and usefully presenting information isn’t enough. As machine learning matures, it’s becoming feasible for the first time to actually summarize and…

Hearsay acquires Mast Mobile’s tech for adding work numbers and CRM integration on your smartphone

 Hearsay Systems is announcing that it has acquired technology and intellectual property from Mast Mobile. The Mast service allowed businesses to manage work and personal numbers on a single mobile phone, and to connect those phones to their customer database. It was backed by Samsung, FirstMark Capital and others. Hearsay, meanwhile, offers marketing and communication tools…

Cisco scoops up BroadSoft for $1.9 billion to boost communications tools portfolio

 One thing is clear, Cisco is not afraid to use its considerable cash on hand to fill in holes in its product portfolio. Today it wrote out a big fat check for $1.9 billion to acquire BroadSoft, a Maryland company that delivers unified communications via service providers. The purchase gives Cisco a new way to…