Friday Tech News

Good morning and Happy Friday!

A surprisingly big week in tech, I enjoyed the funding rounds, M&A, and announcements from vendors in the GenAI space this week.

Read on and let me know what you think!

Thank you so much for making this a part of your Friday morning coffee time. I'm Phil Moroni, and I'm an Account Executive in the Information Technology industry here with another edition of Friday Tech News!

What is this? This is a newsletter that provides updates and insights on the latest trends and developments in the technology industry. I am a professional who specializes in supporting IT leaders in evaluating, investing, and managing people, processes, and technology tools that support their businesses.

Each week, I summarize relevant industry updates from popular Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's), software publishers, and managed providers. The goal of my research and newsletter is to keep you informed about current trends and events that may impact your business from a trusted and reputable source. It's just information I'm sharing, and I follow and work with hundreds of partners in the industry, keeping track of their growth, changes, and evolution so that you don't have to.

Bottom Line: As you focus on improving your business through digital initiatives, my commitment is to keep you informed of the fast-paced changes and trends taking place so that you can plan ahead and stay ahead of the game.

Key areas of focus for me are:

1. Cloud Computing, Security, Trends

2. Developer & Security Tools

3. Networking & Infrastructure Tools

4. End User Tools & Workspace Tech

5. Emerging Technologies and Future Concepts

If you have any questions, would like information about any specific vendors I follow, or would like to have a conversation about any topic that is challenging you, I invite you to engage with me! I value feedback immensely and would love to know what you find valuable about this newsletter so feel free to reach out!

Thank you for reading and stay digitally and physically safe!

Phil

OEM News & Updates 📰

Adobe | Media Alert: Adobe Transforms How Brands Manage Millions of Creative Assets with Generative AI-Powered Content Hub

• Adobe announced the GA of Adobe Content Hub with Experience Manager Assets (AEM).

• Content Hub enables brands to use creative assets more efficiently and comes with an easy to use interface + integration with Adobe Express and Firefly GenAI. Don’t worry. They apparently didn’t forget governance controls.

• Aims to boost productivity by simplifying the content supply chain.

• Be on the lookout for Adobe GenStudio coming soon. It’ll be an AI-first application designed to enhance content creation and management for marketing organizations.

Anthropic | ChatGPT4-o vs Claude 3.5 AI performance comparision - Geeky Gadgets

• Sonnet is positioned between the larger Opus model and the compact Haiku model, offering a balance of performance, speed, and cost.

• Outperforms its predecessor and GPT-4o

  • operating at twice the speed and a lower cost of $3 per million tokens compared to $5 per million tokens with GPT-4o

• Enhancements include:

  • Interpreting charts

  • Interpreting graphs

  • OCR tasks

  • Artifacts feature for dynamic workspace interactions like editing web pages and writing code

• Available thru Anthropic API, AWS Bedrock, and GCP.

Kubernetes | Kubernetes 1.30 Released with Contextual Logging, Improved Performance, and Security

• Named Uwubernetes, it comes with new features like recursive read only mounts, job completion policy, and fast recursive SELinux label change.

• Overhauled support for memory swap on Linux nodes.

• Contextual logging enters beta and the release deprecates outdated features aiming for more streamlined security configs.

Cloudera | Cloudera Unveils New AI Assistants to Drive Valuable Data Insights

• GenAI assistants are all the rage right now.

• Cloudera has released 3 new AI driven assistants for SQL, BI, and ML to accelerate development of business applications and data analysis.

• The assistants aim to address the challenge of developing AI applications and translating AI potential into business impact by enabling faster production of trusted apps and broadening tool access.

• Comes from acquisition of the Verta Operational AI Platform, integrating AI assistants directly to enhance the overall experience for users.

New Relic | New Relic  Integrates its Observability Platform with NVIDIA NIM to Accelerate AI Adoption and ROI

• FSO is important and undertalked about, especially with modern platforms.

• New Relic integrates now with NVIDIA NIM to streamline the development, deployment, and monitoring of GenAI applications optimized for NVIDIA GPUs.

• Offers comprehensive insights into the AI stack performance including throughput, latency, and costs while ensuring data privacy.

• New Relic has over 60 AI integrations at this point

DataStax | DataStax Updates Generative AI Development Platform

• Acquisition of Langflow has led to the release of Langflow 1.0 now hosted on DataStax Cloud. This offers a visual framework for building RAG applications with ease.

• New collaboration with Unstructured.io enables quick conversion of various data types into vector data for AI apps. Comes with fast ingestion and chunking capabilities.

• Vectorize: A new feature that simplifies vector generation by allowing access to multiple embedding providers thru one API.

• RAGStack 1.0 Release: The latest version includes new features and integrations to provide a comprehensive solution for RAG implementation at an enterprise scale.

Databricks | Databricks Creates Databricks LakeFlow: A Unified, Intelligent Platform for Data Engineering - Database Trends and Applications

• Feels like it wouldn’t be right to not continue with the DB love.

• LakeFlow offers a single solution that simplifies all aspects of data engineering, from ingestion to orchestration.

• Includes:

  • Real Time Mode: for Apache Spark, enabling stream processing with ultra low latency

  • Automated Pipelines: Features automation for deploying, operating, and monitoring pipelines with built in support for CI/CD and advanced workflows.

  • Data Intelligence Platform: Built on the DB Data Intelligence Platform, LakeFlow provides end-to-end governance and serverless compute for efficent execution.

• Set to enter preview soon

Databricks | Databricks bids to marry AI and BI

• At their Data+AI summit, Databricks introduced a new product aimed at integrating AI with BI (Business Intelligence), termed lovingly, “AI/BI”.

• Generative AI in BI. The product features a conversational interface called “AI/BI Genie” and interactive dashboards powered by an AI system.

• AI/BI is designed to make analytics accessible to anyone in an organization so you can do ad-hoc queries in natural language.

• Huge forward-thinking step in the industry. The integration of AI and BI is massive for business operations and has huge potential on decision making.

Sisense | Sisense adds embeddable chatbot to generative AI toolkit

• Despite being later that competitors like Tableau and Qlik, Sisense comes with a unique approach here with its semantic knowledge graph and generative AI capabilities.

• Chatbot can be integrated into business apps, extending analytics to non-expert users.

WatchGuard | WatchGuard Supercharges Comprehensive Threat Detection

• WatchGuard announces the launch of ThreatSync+ NDR designed for businesses with smaller IT teams. It automates threat monitoring, detection, and remediation using an advanced AI detection engine.

• Result of CyGlass acquisition in 2023

• Available to businesses of all sizes, offering advanced protection without the need for hardware installation.

• Comes with Compliance Reporting to offer a simple report framework with automated reporting to align to various regulatory standards like NIST, ISO, GDPR, etc.

Atlassian | Atlassian Announces Compass, a Developer Experience Platform

• Been a minute since we’ve mentioned them.

• New developer experience platform called Compass is designed to improve software architecture performance

• Key Features:

  • Software Architecture Catalog

  • Code Repo Integration

  • Toolchain Data Storage

  • Health standards for tracking software project improvements

• Benefits:

  • Save time by providing contextual information about code such as ownership, dependencies, and communication channels.

Datadog | Datadog LLM Observability Is Now Generally Available to Help Businesses Monitor, Improve and Secure Generative AI Applications

• The team at Datadog keeps releasing.

• New Product: LLM Observability. What is it? A tool for monitoring and securing LLM applications.

  • Offers visibility into LLM chains

  • Operational metrics monitoring

  • quality evaluations to ensure performance and safety

• Tackles challenges of deploying GenAI apps.

Datadog | Datadog On-Call Launches to Deliver Observability-Enriched Paging and Unified Incident Management Capabilities

• Datadog has launched Datadog On-Call which integrates observability enriched paging with incident management workflows for a modern on-call experience.

• Aims to tackle the overwhelming alerts, confusion overservice ownership, and disjointed paging strategies that hinder quick issue resolution.

• Offers clear service and team ownership, really intuitive scheduling, performance analytics and more.

• In beta. Sign up with them to learn more about the capabilities here.

  • Or call me for support!

Datadog | Datadog Launches Cloud and Application Security Capabilities Covering Development and Production Environments

• MORE FROM DATADOG MY WORD.

• New security capabilities including:

  • Agentless Scanning

  • Data Security

  • Code Security

• All aimed at enhancing app sec in the cloud.

• Currently in beta.

MuleSoft | MuleSoft unveils composability solution for gen AI | CIO

• New AI powered solution to help organizations build AI services that can be the foundation for more complex systems and applications.

• Emphasizes the importances of APIs in accessing AI in the enterprise allowing for calls to internal and third-party AI models, including LLMs.

• They’re aiming the integrate AI with business processes to execute API calls through NL inferences and conversational agents.

• Big release from MuleSoft, a subsidiary of Salesforce.

VMware | VMware unveils first Cloud Foundation overhaul since Broadcom acquisition

• focuses on infrastructure management, updates, and improved experiences for developers and security teams.

• They’re really claiming to have taken customer sentiment into their feedback upon release.

• New features:

  • VCF Import: allows seamless integration of siloed vSphere and vSAN environments into VCF without re-architecting existing setups.

  • ESXi Live Patching

  • vSAN Data Protection

• All at an amazingly low price for yours today 😊.

ReversingLabs | ReversingLabs Launches Spectra Assure Community

• We talked about RL last week and their Spectra platform.

• ReversingLabs introduced a free community resource for vetting open source software packages. It’ll give you a fully comprehensive risk analysis.

• 1300% increase in malicious open source packages was reported from 2020-2023. Def need to vet those software dependencies.

• Free risk assessment for open source components from popular repos like npm, PyPi, and RubyGems.

Articles I Liked This Week 💡

Google Cloud | Announcing Google Cloud Marketplace Channel Private Offers

• Big updates for Channel partners and customers.

The Record | CDK expects car dealership system outage to last until at least June 30

• This one is bad. Major software provider for car dealerships went down last week and isn’t expecting to recover until the end of the month.

• They’ve reportedly negotiated with the BlackSuit ransomware Group and may end up paying out.

CSO | 6 ways the CISO role is evolving today | CSO Online

• The role of the CISO is evolving to include developing comprehensive strategies while breaking down siloes across businesses.

• GenAI. The adoption of GenAI has expanded the risk landscape for leaders and is presenting tons of challenges for most CISOs.

• Shouldn’t security of a business be the #1 priority? This is just my opinion outside of making money and helping people.

Bleeping Computer | LockBit lied: Stolen data is from a bank, not US Federal Reserve

• Can’t trust a hacker lol

Help Net Security | 1 out of 3 breaches go undetected

• absurd stats. Convince your businesses to modernize and upgrade the stuff that’s been working for 25+ years.

Tech Funding & M&A 💸

TONS OF ACTIVITY THIS WEEK.

Rockset | OpenAI acquires Rockset to strengthen its retrieval capabilities

• Rockset is a California based search and analytics database that enables users, devs, and enterprises to index data, process queries on CDC streams and vectors.

Multi | OpenAI buys a remote collaboration platform

• Multi is a New York based remote collaboration platform that provides solutions such as simultaneous screen sharing and application management for workers using Mac computers.

TechWolf | TechWolf raises $42.75M for AI-driven talent management solutions

• TechWolf is a Belgium based AI skills intelligence platform that allows businesses to analyze, track, and predict the skill development of employees.

Cloudian | Cloudian Secures $23 Million, Total at $256 Million

• Cloudian is a California based data management platform that offers solutions such as hybrid cloud data and ransomware protection for businesses.

Creatio | Creatio raises $200M at a $1.2B valuation for its no-code CRM and workflow platform

• Creatio is a Massachusetts based no-code platform that provides solutions such as workflow automation and CRM for businesses.

Qwak | JFrog Acquires Qwak, Forwarding Holistic, End-to-End AI Initiatives

• Qwak is an Israel based software supply chain platform that enables businesses to build, deploy, and manage and monitor AI workflows.

• Very exciting for JFrog. Big fan of their work and what they’re doing.

xAI | HEALWELL AI Announces Strategic Investment in xAI to Accelerate Development of Healthcare Focused Large Language Models That Benefit from xAI Developer Ecosystem

• xAI is a California based technology company that engages in the development of interpretable AI models to understand the true nature of the universe.

CData | CData raises $350M in growth capital to enhance data connectivity solutions

• CData is a CHARLOTTE BASEDdata connectivity company that provides solutions such as low-code connectivity, API development, and data virtualization for businesses.

Dust | Dust grabs another $16M for its enterprise AI assistants connected to internal data

• Dust is a France based Generative AI platform that enables businesses to design and deploy LLM apps.

Odaseva | Odaseva raises $54M to secure Salesforce users

• Odaseva is a California based Salesforce data security platform that offers solutions such as data protection and cloud replication for businesses.

PortSwigger | Brighton Park Capital Invests $112 Million in PortSwigger to Fuel Innovation and Product Development

• PortSwigger is an England based Cybersecurity platform that provides solutions such as web application security and testing for security engineers and pen testers.

Cohere | Cohere secures US $475M Series D at US $4.6B valuation

• Cohere is a Canada based API enabled enterprise AI platform that allows devs and businesses to build and access LLMs and NLP tools.

Meme of the week 🤣

Recommendations 👉🏻

This is a section that I intend to build out more! Know fantastic newsletter resources for information? Please let me know so I can start linking appropriate reads here!