Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Sumo Logic, a mature security event management startup with a valuation over $1 billion, announced today that it has acquired JASK, a security operations startup that raised almost $40 million. The companies did not share the terms of the deal.

Sumo’s CEO Ramin Sayer, says that the combined companies give customers a complete security solution. Sumo offers what’s known in industry parlance as a security information and event management (SIEM) tool, while JASK provides a security operations center or SOC (pronounced “sock“). Both are focused on securing workloads in a cloud native environment and can work in tandem.

Sayer says that as companies shift workloads to the cloud they need to reevaluate their security tools. “The interesting thing about the market today is that the traditional enterprises are much more aggressively taking a security-first posture as they start to plan for new workloads in the cloud, let alone workloads that they are migrating. Part of that requires them to evaluate their tools, teams, and more importantly a lot of their processes that they’ve built in and around their legacy systems as well as their SOC,” he said.

He says that combining the two organizations helps customers moving to the cloud automate a lot of their security requirements, something that’s increasingly important due to the lack of highly skilled security personnel. That means the more that software can do, the better.

“We see a lot of dysfunction in the marketplace and the whole movement towards automation really compliments and supplements the gap that we have in the workforce, particularly in terms of security folks. This what JASK has been trying to do for four plus years, and it’s what Sumo has been trying to do for nearly 10 years in terms of using various algorithms and machine learning techniques to suppress a lot of false alerts, triage the process and help drive efficiency and more automation,” he said.

JASK CEO and co-founder Greg Martin says the shift to the cloud has also precipitated two major changes in the security space that have driven this growing need for security automation. “The perimeter is disappearing and that fundamentally changes how we have to perform cyber security. The second is that the footprint of threats and data are so large now that security operations is no longer a human scalable problem” he said. Echoing Sayer, he says that requires a much higher level of automation.

JASK was founded in 2015, raising $39 million, according to Crunchbase data. Investors included Battery Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, TenEleven Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Its last round was a $25 million Series B led by Kleiner in June 2018.

Deepak Jeevankumar, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital, whose company was part of JASK’s Series A investment and who invests frequently in security startups, sees  the two companies joining forces as a strong combination.

“Sumo Logic and JASK have the same mission to disrupt today’s security industry which suffers from legacy security tools, siloed teams and alert fatigue. Both companies are pioneers in cloud-native security and share the same maniacal customer focus. Sumo Logic is therefore a great culture and product fit for JASK to continue its journey,” Jeevankumer told TechCrunch.

Sumo has raised $345 million, according to the company. It was valued at over $1 billion in its most recent funding round last May when it raised $110 million.

CRN first reported that this deal was in the works in an article on October 22nd.

With the preview of Azure Arc, Microsoft today announced a major step in the evolution of its hybrid cloud story. Azure Arc takes the work the company has done on projects like Azure Stack, throws in containers and Kubernetes, as well as new infrastructure management features, and then allows its users to use Azure’s management tools and data services like Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale on virtually any platform — including that of its competitors. As long as there is a Kubernetes cluster, you’ll be able to deploy applications to them and manage them using the Azure portal. Arc also supports any Windows and Linux servers.

“Hundreds of millions of Azure resources are organized, governed and secured daily by customers using Azure management,” writes Julia White, Microsoft’s CVP of Azure, in today’s announcement. “Azure Arc extends these proven Azure management capabilities to Linux and Windows servers, as well as Kubernetes clusters on any infrastructure across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge. Customers can now have a consistent and unified approach to managing their different environments using robust, established capabilities such as Azure Resource Manager, Azure Shell, Azure Portal, API, and Azure Policy.”

On these platforms, Azure looks and feels just like on Microsoft’s own. It provides admins a unified way to handle auditing, compliance and role-based access controls across environments and allows developers to build their containerized apps and deploy them across infrastructures.

“Azure Arc enables customers to have a central, unified, and self-service approach to manage their Windows and Linux Servers, Kubernetes clusters, and Azure data services wherever they are,” writes Jeremy Winter, Director of Program Management for Microsoft Azure. “Azure Arc also extends adoption of cloud practices like DevOps and Azure security across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge.”

If this sounds a bit like Google Cloud’s Anthos, that’s probably because it is. Both projects use Kubernetes to enable their customers to build hybrid cloud deployments across platforms.

For now, it looks like Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale are the only two Azure services you can take with you to these other infrastructure providers. I would be very surprised if Microsoft didn’t extend this to other Azure services over time.

In a related announcement, Microsoft also today launched new features and form factors for Azure Stack Edge, hardware appliance with built-in GPU and FPGA support for AI-enabled edge applications. Azure Stack Edge will get a new ruggedized form factor for harsh environments for users in the defense and energy sector, for example, as well as virtual machine support for edge compute, support for Kubernetes clustering and automatic fail-over when you lose a server in a cluster of machines.

Microsoft today announced that its Chromium-based Edge browser will be generally available on January 15 and that the release candidate for Windows and macOS is now available for download (and that it features a new icon).

The development of the new Edge has progressed pretty rapidly and the latest build have been very stable, even as Microsoft started building in some more differentiated features like Collections into its more experimental builds.

With today’s release, Microsoft is also announcing new privacy features. The marquee feature here is probably the new InPrivate browsing mode that now, in combination with Bing, will keep your online searches and identities private. InPrivate, as the name implies, already deleted any information about your browsing session on your local machine when you closed the window. But now, when you search with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine you’ve probably forgotten about, your search history on Bing and any personally identifiable data will also not be saved or associated back to you.

By default, Edge will also now enable tracking prevention. “One of the things that’s hard on the web is how to balance the desire for privacy and the protection of your data — and yet you still want the web to be personalized,” said Yusuf Mehdi, the corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Modern Life, Search and Devices Group, in a pre-recorded briefing ahead of today’s announcement. “The problem today is, nobody has really nailed it. You’ve got some good companies doing some really innovative work to try and have super-strict privacy controls. The problem is, they break the web. And then you’ve got other ones who say, hey, don’t worry about it, we’re just going to make it all work for you. But in the background, your data is getting tracked.” Mehdi, of course, thinks that Microsoft’s approach is the better one here — and more balanced.

In September, Adobe launched Fresco, its next-gen drawing and painting app, for the iPad. Today, Fresco is also coming to Windows, starting with Microsoft’s Surface line (starting with the Surface Pro 4, the Surface Go and all Surface Studio and Book devices) and Wacom Mobile Studio devices. Like its iPad brethren, Fresco for Windows features Adobe’s vector and raster tools for painting, drawing and sketching.

The company says it built Fresco for Windows from the ground up. “It wasn’t an easy build but we worked closely with Microsoft and Intel to get the brushes right, and to squeeze from the hardware and software as much performance as possible,” the company notes in today’s announcement. Like on the iPad, the Windows version will also feature deep integrations with Adobe’s cloud storage to allow you to move seamlessly between machines and take your drawings to Photoshop and Illustrator.

Fresco for Windows, however, currently has fewer features than the iPad version. Adobe says it’s working to bring those into the app soon. “Because Fresco’s features matter, and we want them to be available no matter the platform, we’re working to get those remaining features in the app—quickly.”

There will be a free version for Windows as well. It’s slightly limited but will give you a good idea of the app’s capabilities.

Ever since the days of Windows NT, the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (better known as ConfigMgr) has allowed companies to manage the increasingly large number of devices they issue to their employees. Then, back in 2011, the company also launched Intune, its cloud-based endpoint management system for corporate and BYOD devices. These days, most enterprises that use Microsoft’s tools use ConfigMgr to manage their PCs and then opt for Intune for mobile devices — and that’s a complex system to manage, even for sophisticated IT departments. So today, at its annual Ignite conference for IT professionals, Microsoft is announcing a way forward for these users to modernize their systems with the launch of the unified Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

As Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Microsoft 365, told me, he takes some blame for this. “A lot of this falls on my shoulders because we just allowed everything to get complex. So we’re just simplifying everything,” he said. “So really at the core, what we think modern management is that modern management is it’s management that is driven by cloud intelligence.”

The general idea here, Anderson explained, is that in earlier eras of IT management, Microsoft and its partners didn’t have the tools to collect and analyze all of the signals it received from these management tools. That’s obviously not a problem anymore today and see the company can use the telemetry it gets from a company’s PC deployments, for example, to figure out where there are problems.

“One of the things that we’re able to do is be learned as cloud-scale as we can help organizations improve their end-user experience,” Anderson noted. Common issues with that experience could be extremely long boot times, which slow down and frustrate employees, or issues with the delivery of important security patches. Today, all of this is often still managed by spreadsheets and complex security policies that are administrated manually — and Anderson argues that these days, you always have to think about security and management together anyway.

To quantify this user experience, Microsoft is also introducing what it calls the Microsoft Productivity Score, which looks at both how employees are working and using their tools, as well as how their technology is enabling them (or not) to do so. “The Productivity Score is all about helping an organization understand the experience their users are having — and then giving them the insights and the actions on what they can do to improve that,” explained Anderson.

Over the course of the last few months, Microsoft actually worked with some large customers and took over the management of their Windows 365 and Office deployments, meaning those machines ran nothing but Microsoft 365 agents (and a control group that was managed in a more traditional way). The devices with the modern management system saw an 85 percent reduction in boot time and an 85 percent reduction in crashes and a doubling of battery life. Unsurprisingly, the employees that used the devices were also far happier.

As far as the device management experience goes, the new Endpoint Manager and the licensing changes that come with that are meant to not just simplify the branding but also the experience. And Microsoft definitely wants people to move to this modern system, so it’s giving everybody who has ConfigMgr licenses Intune licenses, too, so that they can co-manage their PCs with both tools and get access to the cloud-based features of Intune. The Microsoft Endpoint Manager console will show a single view of all devices managed by either product. “It’s all about simplifying — and we’re taking that simplifying deep and broad from a branding, licensing and product perspective,” said Anderson.

Today, ConfigMgr and Intune manage well over 190 million Windows, iOS and Android devices. Yet Microsoft knows that not every company is ready to move to this modern device management system just yet. That’s why it’s making these licensing changes to help get people on board, but also leaving the existing systems in place and giving them an onramp to move to provisioning new machines to be cloud-managed, for example.

At its annual Ignite event in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft today announced that  AzureFarmBeats, a project that until now was mostly a research effort, will be available as a public preview and in the Azure Marketplace, starting today. FarmBeats is Microsoft’s project that combines IoT sensors, data analysis and machine learning.

“The goal of FarmBeats is to augment farmers’ knowledge and intuition about their own farm with data and data-driven insights,” Microsoft explained in today’s announcement. The idea behind FarmBeats is to take in data from a wide variety of sources, including sensors, satellites, drones and weather stations, and then turn that into actionable intelligence for farmers, using AI and machine learning. 

In addition, FarmBeats also wants to be somewhat of a platform for developers who can then build their own applications on top of this data that the platform aggregates and evaluates.

As Microsoft noted during the development process, having satellite imagery is one thing, but that can’t capture all of the data on a farm. For that, you need in-field sensors and other data — yet all of this heterogeneous data then has to be merged and analyzed somehow. Farms, also often don’t have great internet connectivity. Because of this, the FarmBeats team was among the first to leverage Microsoft’s efforts in using TV white space for connectivity and, of course, Azure IoT Edge for collecting all of the data.

Space-based businesses don’t all have to be about communications or Earth observation – European startup Space Cargo Unlimited, for instance, is focused on what operating in a microgravity environment can unlock for research and manufacturing. Accordingly, the company just launched an unusual payload to the International Space Station (ISS) – twelve bottles of wine.

The wine is not leisure-time supplies for the astronauts on board the ISS; instead, it’s part of an experiment that will study how the aging process for wine is affected by a microgravity, space-based environment. Wine samples taken from the same batch will be aged simultaneously on Earth over the same 12-month period, and then the results will be compared when the ISS wine shipment returns on a future cargo craft trip back.

One of the wine samples in its protective container prior to launch.

Both the Earth and the ISS wine samples will remain sealed in their glass bottle environments, and they’ll be kept at a constant temperature of around 18 degrees celsius (or around 64 degrees Fahrenheit), undisturbed to let the interior complex biological environment of the bottles do their work. Researchers predict their will be taste differences that result from the effect that microgravity and spaceb-ased radiation will have on physics and chemical reactions, but the only way to find out for sure is to give it a shot.

It sure sounds like this could set up a new line of literally ‘Space-aged’ wines that command a pretty premium, but Space Cargo Unlimited says that their work is more “following in the footsteps of Louis Pasteur,” who essentially developed pasteurization though experiments with wine fermentation. To that end, it’s hoping this experiment will produce results that could have broader applications across food preservation and the rrelated technologies.

Space Cargo Unlimited’s wine samples launched aboard a Northrop Grumman Antares rocket, loaded onto a Cygnus cargo spacecraft, which successfully docked with the ISS on Monday morning.

Barbershops and salons in the U.S. represent a $315 billion industry counting nearly 3 million small businesses and 4 million independent aestheticians among their ranks. It’s a business that has been slow to adopt modern technologies because it’s both specialized and fragmented, meaning that it’s a huge opportunity for the kind of niche software developers who have cropped up in the Los Angeles tech ecosystem in recent years.

True to form, two former technology executives from the LA ecosystem have launched Boulevard, to be a provider of back-office management software for the salon and spa industry.

Co-founders Matt Danna and Sean Stavropoulos first crossed paths at the Los Angeles startup Fullscreen before rejoining professionally in 2016 to begin working on Boulevard.

In the three years since they formed the company, Boulevard has grown in headcount to over 50 full-time employees and is processing over $100 million in customer payments.

Those figures attracted the interest of investors and allowed the company to rake in $11 million in its recent Series A round from investors including Index Ventures and Bonfire Ventures. As a result of their new stake in the company, Damir Becirovic from Index Ventures and Jim Andleman of Bonfire will both take seats on the company’s board of directors.

The company said it would use the money from its latest round to expand its headcount across all departments.

Through the company’s software toolkit salons and spas can handle booking and scheduling, payroll, commissions, inventory management and payments along with customer relationship management to improve the customer experience.

“Competitors in the space have been trying to shoehorn a product that was built for yoga and pilates studios into the beauty industry, but the two have completely different needs,” said Damir Becirovic of Index Ventures. “Boulevard was built specifically for personal care businesses and is a high tech solution for a high touch market where no one else comes close.”

Using the company’s software, customers like Chris McMillan the Salon, Ken Paves Salon, MèCHE Salon,  Sev Laser, Spoke & Weal, and  TONI&GUY have seen results like 16% increases in service booked, 18% increases in retail revenue, 24% increases in tips, and an 81% decrease in no-shows or late cancellations within the first six months, the company said.

Adobe has released Photoshop for the iPad, after announcing that it would be bringing its popular professional photo-editing software to Apple’s tablets officially last October. Adobe said that it would be launching the app in 2019, and it has made good on that schedule with the release today. Photoshop for iPad is a free download, and includes a 30-day free trial – after that it’s $9.99 per month via in-app purchase for use of just the app, or included as part of an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.

As Adobe said right from the start, this initial version of Photoshop for the iPad isn’t at feature parity with its desktop editing software. It does, however, support Apple Pencil for iPad Pro and more recent iPad models, and it allows editing of PSD files. Adobe says it has focused on features that will benefit from touch and Apple Pencil input on this first release, including “core compositing and retouching tools,” with other improvements, including added support of brushes and masks, as well as things like smart selection, to come later.

For what it’s worth (I haven’t spent any meaningful amount of time with the software), there are features like spot healing and clone stamp that can be highly useful for refining edits on the go available right now. A workflow that incorporates Lightroom on iPad can probably serve pros looking to maximize portability decently well, even if it can’t match the sheer range of things you can do on the desktop just yet. Plus, PSDs you store in Creative Cloud will be available to edit right where you left off everywhere.

Regardless of its current state, it’s good to see Adobe sticking to their schedule for developing and releasing Photoshop on the iPad, even if there’s still work to be done to ensure that it gets to a place where the iPad doesn’t feel like a backup option for when you’re unable to fire up a desktop or notebook computer.

Adobe is hosting its Adobe MAX 2019 conference this week, and there should be plenty of news coming out of that event, so stay tuned to TechCrunch for more from that show.

With roughly one million customers across Brazil and a new round of financing, the mobile phone insurance provider Pitzi now finds itself with a $100 million valuation.

The size of its latest round, which was led by QED Investors and included commitments from existing investors like Thrive Capital and Valiant Partners, was undisclosed.

PItzi acts as a reseller for insurance companies to offer products around mobile phone insurance across Brazil. Founded in 2012, the company’s mobile handset insurance offerings were a service that was in the right place at the right time, as low cost handsets caused the market in Latin America’s most populous country to explode.

Pitzi previously raised $20 million from investors including Thrive, Kaszek Ventures, Flybridge and DCM. Even with the company’s success, cell phone insurance in Brazil stands at 4%, compared with global standards of more than 40%. This despite the fact that there are more than 200 million phones in Brazil alone.

“Today, only 4% of smartphones here are protected but we’re driving that towards 90% in the coming years and using those phones to unlock even more transformation in the space,” said Daniel Hatkoff, Founder & CEO of Pitzi, in a statement.

The investment by QED Investors puts Pitzi in some pretty good company when it comes to Latin American financial technology startups. Other Latin American investments in the firm’s portfolio include the multi-billion dollar credit card startup, Nubank; the personal finance lender, Creditas; the business lender, Konfio; and the rental financing company Quinto Andar.

As a result of the investment, Bill Cilluffo, a former president of Capital One International and a general partner with QED will take a seat on the company’s board of directors, according to a statement.

For Hatkoff, the cell phone is a window into other products and services in the insurance industry thanks to the ways that the device has transformed so many experiences for the emerging Brazilian middle class.

“The smartphone will be profoundly transformational in Brazil, allowing the emerging middle class to finally emerge and do things it never imagined possible,” said Hatkoff. “As market leaders, we at Pitzi are obsessed with unlocking the Brazilian consumer’s ability to use their phones in ever more powerful ways. Cell phone protection is just the beginning.”