Cloudflare does data; Glean's new AI assistant

Welcome to Runtime! Today on Product Saturday: Cloudflare gets into the data-management game, Glean unveils a new version of its AI work assistant, and the quote of the week.

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Ship it

Tip of the Iceberg: Cloudflare has been building a broad array of cloud infrastructure services alongside its security and anti-ODoS services for the last several years, moving into data storage in 2021 with the launch of R2. This week it introduced a bigger boat for the data lakes of the world, unveiling the Cloudflare Data Platform.

The new service is based on three components  — pipelines, a data catalog, and a SQL data engine — that were all designed around the Iceberg open table format. "That means that you can bring your own Iceberg query engine — whether that's PyIceberg, DuckDB, or Spark — connect with other platforms like Databricks and Snowflake — and pay no egress fees to access your data," Cloudflare said in a blog post.

Proof of delivery: As the fallout from the Shai-Hulud worm continues to reverberate through software development, it highlights the danger of pulling software packages from open repositories like npm. Chainguard has been working on this problem for several years, and this week it introduced a new collection of trusted software packages for one of the most widely used programming languages in the world.

Chainguard Libraries for JavaScript "provides security and engineering teams with confidence that malware has not been inserted during the build or distribution of libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem, eliminating a significant gap in the threat landscape," the company said in a press release. JavaScript developers rely heavily on npm, but it's safe to say anyone affected by the recent malware attack is thinking about a different approach.

My robot friend: Glean soared to a $7.2 billion valuation earlier this year on the strength of its enterprise search product, which helps employees find the needles they need in haystacks of corporate data. It also has designs on playing a much larger role in day-to-day work with its Glean Assistant, and this week it introduced the third version of that tool.

The new version "doesn’t just respond — it understands goals, creates its own plans, and carries out complex, multistep work, adapting as it goes," Glean said in a press release. The company also added MCP support to its agent-building platform, as it jostles with the approximately 7 trillion other enterprise software companies who are trying to own their customers' agentic infrastructure.

When you're part of a team: Asana is one of those companies, and this week it introduced several new agents as part of its project-management platform. The new AI Teammates are "collaborative agents that understand the context of all work across an organization and how that work gets done," the company said in a press release.

Like rival vendors with different platforms, Asana is betting that customers who depend on its tools to manage their businesses will see value in agents that have direct access to that data. Asana said AI Teammates could be used across several different departments, from sales and marketing to IT, where an agent could "[act] as the first line of defense to interpret bug reports, consolidate duplicates, and assess severity," as an example.

IDs for apps: Identity security has been a vital priority for tech organizations for decades, but if AI agents are really going to be a thing, CIOs will need to start making sure they have a system in place for verifying the identities of agents requesting data. This week Okta and several other companies introduced a new proposal for an open protocol that builds on the OAuth standard to secure app-to-app and app-to-agent connections.

Cross App Access, or XAA, "treats AI agents as first-class entities, enabling their actions to be governed, audited, and secured like any other user or application," Okta said in a press release. "Companies have a massive exposure right now when agents are getting from prototype into production without proper governance to make sure that the agentic identity is properly managed, that it’s in a directory, that it’s authenticated, that it’s authorized and that there’s proper governance in place,” said Eric Kelleher, Okta's president and COO, at its Oktane conference this week as reported by The New Stack.

Stat of the week

Generative AI tools have had an obvious impact on software development, but they're also starting to make inroads into operations as well, according to new research from Pager Duty. "Nearly three in four executives (74%) view AI as essential to operations," it said in a recent report, adding that nearly the same amount of directors and VPs think their businesses would "struggle without AI."

Quote of the week

"[Generative AI app usage] is largely about change management and adoption. I think if you just throw it out there and expect people are going to be really using it effectively and being productive with it right away, you might not get the juice out of the squeeze."  — Mastercard's George Maddaloni, chief technology officer, operations, describing how the company used a combo of training classes and new connections to data sources to get employees on board with generative AI tools.

The Runtime roundup

President Trump demanded Microsoft fire Lisa Monaco, its relatively new head of global affairs, for no coherent reason beyond the fact that she worked for the Biden administration.

Google Cloud signed a promotional deal with President Trump's favorite golfer Bryson DeChambeau the same day he went 0-2 in his Ryder Cup matches to help put the American team in a hole going into weekend play.

Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!