Friday Tech News

News & Insights in Enterprise Technology | 01.24.2025

Author

Phil Moroni
January 24, 2025

In partnership with

Good morning and welcome to another edition of Friday Tech News! I hope you’ve had a wonderful week.

This week, we saw a big announcement in the AppSec space, a ridiculously huge investment in the future of AI, President Trump inaugurated, and we celebrated MLK day.

Beehiiv launched some new features this week in beta, so be on the lookout for an enhanced and refined FTN in the coming weeks once I get used to it. It’s pretty slick though.

Also in the coming weeks, I’ll be doing a Founder Focus and hope to dive deep into some popular topics I get questions on seemingly weekly!

Have a great weekend, and stay physically and digitally safe!

Phil

OEM News & Updates 📰

  • More than 10 competing companies (ours included here at phoenix.security) have united to launch Opengrep, a collaborative fork of Semgrep’s code analysis engine. This move is right in the face of Semgrep who said they were restricting their open source project by changing its licensing with a commercial paywall.

  • We are ALL in this together. Nobody deserves shitty code anymore.

  • OpenAI is launching its latest reasoning AI model, o3-mini, within weeks. This model is designed to handle complex tasks across various domains (science, math, coding, etc…)

  • Going through extensive safety testing currently and set to be available by end of this month

  • It’ll have more reasoning power than the previous o1 model.

  • LambdaTest has introduced the SmartUI Figma-Web CLI, enhancing their Figma CLI offerings. It bridges the gap between Figma designs and live web interfaces. Super cool if you know / use this stuff.

  • The new CLI allows users to compare Figma designs directly against live webpages, ensuring visual consistency and alignment for implementation.

  • This will help teams ensure their digital products are visually flawless across devices and platforms.

  • LogicMonitor has announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to enhance their AI-powered data center transformation platform. Aims to advance ITOps.

  • By integrating OpenAI reasoning tech, LogicMonitor’s platform will deliver smarter and more actionable data, intelligent automation, and improved scalability for enterprise teams.

  • Partnership also focuses on upskilling people with AI powered tools.

  • F5 has introduced a new AI-powered assistant in its Distributed Cloud Services. It aims to provide unprecedented network visibility and control over security.

  • The AI helps SecOps and NetOps teams monitor network activity, understand attack patterns, and implement recommended actions quickly.

  • Offering queries for site health, instant summaries of security events ranked by risk, accelerated zero-day threat response, and automation of ongoing security and networking tasks.

  • This is very cool. Sysdig has announced the release of Stratoshark, an OSS tool extending Wireshark’s network visibility into the cloud!

    • Everyone I know has used Wireshark. Super neat they Open-sourced this.

  • It combines Wireshark’s network analysis capabilities with Sysdig Falco’s cloud native security.

  • DigitalOcean has launched its new GenAI platform to allow devs to integrate AI into business apps without requiring advanced AI expertise.

  • The platform supports workflows that facilitate the creation of AI agents using foundational models from 3rd party providers. It also integrates structured and unstructured data, making it versatile for various use cases.

  • They plan to add new features including support for URLs as data sources, agent evaluations, model fine-tuning, and more.

  • Threat Dynamics from AppDome is an AI-native threat management module within their ThreatScope Mobile XDR platform. It uses deep learning to analyze over 400 attack vectors and calculate Mobile Risk Index for businesses.

  • The new module provides continuous benchmarking and management for business and app level risks using data from billions of mobile fraud, scam, bot, and cyber threat events globally.

  • Trying to be more proactive with defenses.

  • HuggingFace has introduced two new models, SmolVLM-256M and SmolVLM-500M which are among the smallest of their kind, designed to work efficiently on devices with limited resources like old laptops with less than 1GB RAM and no chrome browser (jk on that. a gig? seriously?)

  • The models can perform tasks such as describing images or video clips and answering questions about PDFs.

  • They’re small, but outperforming other models of similar size. I wonder how much power they consume.

  • Sonar has launched the latest Long Term Active (LTA) version of SonarQube Server. This release introduces (of course) advanced AI features to improve code quality, security, and overall software development integration.

  • Includes SAST coverage, advanced secrets detection, and compliance with key security frameworks like CWE Top 25, STIG, and CASA.

  • The update offers a more intuitive user interface, faster scans, and quicker first analysis. Also supports new languages like Dart/Flutter and Helm.

Articles I Liked This Week 💡

  • Anyone wanna loan me $2400 so I can play with this for a year? @ $200 x month, this may be what they needed to make the PRO version worth the price tag.

  • If you’ve built an AI Agent, I want to talk to you. Please hit me up!

  • Insightful post. Do Security professionals need to have Dev skills? IMHO we’re coming to a point where the needs blend between both and each should be able to speak each others’ language.

  • Joining Microsoft, Google, & SFDC, you’ll never replace us! Well. Maybe.

  • Ear mark this for later to see what comes true!

Tech Funding & M&A 💸

  • Instabase is a California based company that provides an AI-powered platform designed to automate processes for businesses.

  • Cuein is a California based data analysis and insights company. Their platform helps organizations analyze customer interactions across various channels of communication.

  • Yeah they make AI stuff.

  • Seriously do you not know who these cats are yet? I’ve been fawning over them for like 2 years.

  • Unicorn is a German based company specializing in hybrid work solutions by repurposing existing hardware to make them sustainable, effective, and secure.

Meme of the week 🤣

LOL SO TRUE

Recommendations 👉🏻

Return on Security5 minutes to master cybersecurity's biggest market moves. Zero fluff. Your weekly briefing on the business of security.
Latio PulseThe Latest in Product Security Delivered Weekly

Your daily AI dose

5 Reasons to join Mindstream

  • We’re the only AI newsletter you need

  • We’re so good HubSpot bought us (like they bought The Hustle)

  • 150,000+ strong community staying ahead of the curve

  • We’re actually fun to read

  • Written by an awesome team of real people, not AI tools

P.S - you get a load of free stuff when you subscribe

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

Reply

or to participate.