Microsoft’s Azure revenue nearly doubled year-over-year in its second quarter

 Microsoft posted a relatively good second quarter this year that continued the ongoing process of its growth into a major cloud entity, in addition to saying it would be taking a significant charge as part of the major tax bill signed late last year. In particular, Microsoft said that its Azure revenue grew 98% year-over-year…

Polymail looks to unify business email tools into a single web app

 If you’re more of a Gmail power user (or even semi-power user) and other email services geared toward work, you’ve probably installed plenty of plugins like Rapportive to make your job a little bit easier. And while it’s all fine to try to pull together a suite of plugins to make that a little bit…

Fujifilm will take over Xerox, cut 10,000 jobs

 Fujifilm announced this week that it’s set to take a majority stake in Xerox. The news comes as the U.S. tech stalwart and photocopying synonym struggles to cope with an eroding demand for office printers and photocopies. The boards of both companies agreed to the deal this week, giving Fujifilm a 50.1-percent stake in the…

Bench bookkeeping service raises $18 million in funding

 Bench, the TechStars-backed bookkeeping service for SMBs, has today announced the close of an $18 million B-1 funding round led by iNovia Capital. Existing investors, including Bain Capital Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank, also participated in the round. Bench first launched out of TechStars NYC in 2012. Back then, the company was called…

Red Hat acquires CoreOS for $250 million in Kubernetes expansion

 Red Hat, a company best known for its enterprise Linux products, has been making a big play for Kubernetes and containerization in recent years with its OpenShift Kubernetes product. Today the company decided to expand on that by acquiring CoreOS, a container management startup, for $250 million. The company’s core products includes CoreOS, a Linux…

Heptio launches its Kubernetes ‘un-distribution’

 Heptio holds a special place in the Kubernetes startup ecosystem. Its co-founders are, after all, two of the co-founders of the Kubernetes project. Heptio has raised millions, but it was never clear what their business plan looked like beyond offering training and professional services. It’s becoming clearer now, as the company today announced the launch…

Microsoft’s Azure Event Grid hits general availability

 With Event Grid, Microsoft introduced a new Azure service last year that it hopes will become the glue that holds together modern event-driven and distributed applications. Starting today, Event Grid is generally available, with all the SLAs and other premises this entails. Read More

Hyperledger releases Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0, its second distributed ledger project

 Hyperledger, the open source blockchain project from the Linux Foundation, released Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0, its latest open source digital ledger project. Sawtooth joins its sister project, Hyperledger Fabric which reached 1.0 in July last year. Among the features in this latest open source distributed ledger product is on-chain governance, which lets members adjust the rules…

SAP snags CallidusCloud for $2.4 billion

 SAP, the German enterprise software giant, announced it acquired CallidusCloud last night for $2.4 billion or $36 per share. Callidus provides configure price quote (CPQ) and sales performance management tools delivered as a cloud service. The share price is a nice bump for shareholders, representing a 21 percent premium over over the 30-day volume weighted…

SuperPhone is building a Salesforce for texting

 The address book is the last, worst default app you rely on. It’s time it got as smart as the rest of our phones. That’s the idea behind SuperPhone. Email isn’t how you build relationships anymore. Yet most business software sanctifies the spammy inbox when it’s the immediacy of text messaging that keeps people in touch…

Why the Dell rumors might have substance

 By now you’ve probably heard that the Dell board is supposed to be convening later this month to figure out how it might reorganize itself to deal with the mountain of debt it took on when it bought EMC in 2015 for $67 billion. The rumors began on Friday and involved a couple of possible…

Relx acquires ThreatMetrix for $817M to ramp up in risk-based authentication

 Another startup in the area of cyber security has been snapped up as platform businesses serving enterprises look for more ways of securing their own networks and working with customers to secure theirs. Today, the RELX Group (formerly known as Reed Elsevier) announced that it would acquire ThreatMetrix for £580 million (about $817 million) in…