Today at AWS Re:invent in Las Vegas, AWS announced a new service for satellite providers with the launch of AWS Ground Station, the first fully-managed ground station as a service. With this new service, AWS will provide ground antennas through their existing network of worldwide availability zones, and data processing services to simplify the entire

Some consolidation is afoot in the world of business software. TechCrunch has learned that Parallels, the virtualization specialist with millions of users, is getting acquired by Corel, the Canadian company behind design apps like CorelDraw and other productivity apps like WordPerfect. Some employees at Parallels have already been briefed on the acquisition, which is expected

Tonight at AWS re:Invent, the company announced a new tool called AWS Transit Gateway designed to help build a network topology inside of AWS that lets you share resources across accounts and bring together on premises and cloud resources in a single network topology. Amazon already has a popular product called Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Many AWS customers have to run in multiple zones for many reasons, including performance requirements, regulatory issues or fail-over management. Whatever the reason, AWS announced a new tool tonight called Global Accelerators designed to help customers route traffic more easily across multiple regions. Peter DeSantis, VP of global infrastructure and customer support at AWS speaking

Diane Greene announced on Friday that she was stepping down after three years running Google’s cloud business. She will stay on until the first of the year to help her successor, Thomas Kurian in the transition. He left Oracle at the end of September after more than 20 years with the company, and is charged with making Google’s

Diane Greene announced in a blog post today that she would be stepping down as CEO of Google Cloud and will be helping transition former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian to take over early next year. Greene took over the position almost exactly three years ago when Google bought Bebop, the startup she was running. The

Uber announced today at the 2018 Uber Open Summit that it was joining the Linux Foundation as a Gold Member, making a firm commitment to using and contributing to open-source tools. Uber CTO Thuan Pham sees the Linux Foundation as a place for companies like his to nurture and develop open-source projects. “Open source technology

As large organizations grapple with adopting modern work practices without throwing out all of their legacy software, a company that works with them is making an acquisition that it hopes will help with that process. Citrix today is announcing that it has acquired Sapho, a startup that develops “micro apps” for legacy software so that workers

It’s been 14 years since Mark Shuttleworth first founded and funded Canonical and the Ubuntu project. At the time, it was mostly a Linux distribution. Today, it’s a major enterprise player that offers a variety of products and services. Throughout the years, Shuttleworth self-funded the project and never showed much interest in taking outside money.

The market for RPA — Robotic Process Automation — is getting a hat trick of news this week: Automation Anywhere has today announced that it has raised $300 million from the SoftBank Vision Fund. This funding, which values Automation Anywhere at $2.6 billion post-money, is an extension to the Series A the company announced earlier

We hear so much about managing the customer relationship, but companies have to manage the products they sell, too. Propel, a Santa Clara startup, is taking a modern cloud approach to the problem, and today it landed an $18 million Series B investment. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners. Previous investors Cloud Apps

Docker and MuleSoft have announced a broad deal to sell products together and integrate their platforms. As part of it, Docker is getting an investment from Salesforce, the CRM giant that acquired MuleSoft for $6.5 billion last spring. Salesforce is not disclosing the size of the stake it’s taking in Docker, but it is strategic:

If data is the new oil, you might think of apps are the cars that need it to move. Now, a startup that has built a platform to let everyone — not just those with technical expertise — make and drive their own “cars” has raised a significant round of funding to grow its business.

When Oracle filed a protest in August with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI RFP process was unfair, it probably had little chance of succeeding. Today, the GAO turned away the protest. The JEDI contract has been set up as a winner-take-all affair. With $10 billion on the table, there has

PagerDuty, an eight-year-old, San Francisco-based company that sends companies information about their technology, doesn’t receive a fraction of the press that other fast-growing enterprise software companies receive. In fact, though it counts as customers heavyweight companies like Capital One, Spotify and Netflix; it employs 500 employees; and it has five offices around the world, it

It’s not always easy to do the right thing or to make ethical decisions in a complex business environment. People get lost inside large organizations and group think can overwhelm even normally ethical individuals. Convercent has created a platform to help, and today it announced a new benchmarking dashboard to allow companies to measure just

ServiceTitan, a startup out of Glendale, Calif. that has built a software platform for home services businesses — in areas like air conditioning, plumbing and electrical repairs — to manage their work, has raised $165 million in what it claims is the “largest software raise in Southern California history.” (That distinction might be specifically for

UiPath, a startup that works in the growing area of RPA, or robotic process automation — where AI-based software is used to help businesses run repetitive or mundane back-office tasks, to free up humans to tackle more sophisticated work — has raised money for the third time this year. The company is today announcing that

A wave of security startups have built solutions for enterprises that are meeting the challenges of “consumerization”, where IT organizations are tasked with securing a range of devices and apps — some brought in by employees, not issued by IT — that are on the organization’s networks. Today, a startup based out of Israel that

Imagine coating an expensive part with a layer of diamond dust the width of a human hair, capturing its light pattern as a unique identifier, then storing that identifier in a traditional database or on the blockchain. That’s precisely what Dust Identity, a Boston-based startup, is trying to do, and today it got $2.3 million

Zendesk has always been strongly focused on customer service in the cloud. They began to look at this more broadly in September when they purchased Base to move into sales automation and CRM. Today, the company announced Zendesk Sunshine, a new platform for creating customer-focused applications on top of Zendesk’s toolset. All of this appears

Today, Real Estate Technology Ventures (RET Ventures) announced the final close of $108 million for its first fund. RET focuses on early-stage investments in companies that are primarily looking to disrupt the North American multifamily rental industry, with the firm boasting a roster of LPs made up of some of the largest property owners and operators

SAP CEO Bill McDermott was jacked up today about his company’s $8 billion Qualtrics acquisition over the weekend. You would expect no less for such a big deal. McDermott believes the data Qualtrics provides could bridge the gap between his company’s operational data and customer, data wherever that resides. The idea behind Qualtrics is to

Some consolidation and subsequent divestment are in play in the worlds of imaging and voice recognition. Today, Kofax and Nuance announced that Kofax would be acquiring Nuance’s imaging division, for $400 million in cash. The deal, which had been rumoured in recent days, is expected to close in Q1 2019. The acquisition is a notable move

Ceph is an open source technology for distributed storage that gets very little public attention but that provides the underlying storage services for many of the world’s largest container and OpenStack deployments. It’s used by financial institutions like Bloomberg and Fidelity, cloud service providers like Rackspace and Linode, telcos like Deutsche Telekom, car manufacturers like

Abbyy has been around for a long time helping companies with scanning and workflow tools, but like many older vendors it has been looking for ways to extend its traditional business model. One way to do that is by teaming up with robotics process automation companies like UIPath. Today, the company announced it has launched

Today, Google Cloud announced Kubeflow pipelines and AI Hub, two tools designed to help data scientists put to work across their organizations the models they create. Rajen Sheth, director of product management for Google Cloud’s AI and ML products, says that the company recognized that data scientists too often build models that never get used.

DevOps platform CircleCI today announced a new partner program that will open up its platform and allow third-party tools to integrate with it. In addition, the company is launching Orbs, which it describes as “the world’s first package manager designed specifically for configuration of software delivery automation.” Fresh off its $31 million funding round earlier

Spotify’s ad-supported tier has long been one of the service’s differentiators. Naturally, the model’s not nearly as feature-rich as its paid counterpart, though the company’s removing one of those key distinctions as of this morning. In a press release, the company notes that free users will soon be able to stream music through Spotify Connect-sporting speakers.

Every day, there are around 650,000 emergency service callouts via 911 for medical, police and fire assistance in the US; and by their nature these are some of the most urgent communications that we will ever make. But ironically for the age of smartphones, connected things and the internet, these 911 calls are also some