Today on Product Saturday: Neo4j unveils a serverless version of its graph database, Zed claims it has built the "fastest" AI coding editor, and the quote of the week.
Today: ServiceNow outlines an IT-centric plan for rolling AI agents out across enterprise tech, Broadcom puts the screws to VMware customers holding on to old licenses, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
As worries about the economy accelerate, CIOs are regaining control over sprawling application footprints. According to McDermott, "What's happening is technology is the only way out. It's not kind of, sort of; it's the only way out."
Today on Product Saturday: Neo4j unveils a serverless version of its graph database, Zed claims it has built the "fastest" AI coding editor, and the quote of the week.
Welcome to Runtime! Today on Product Saturday: Neo4j unveils a serverless version of its graph database, Zed claims it has built the "fastest" AI coding editor, and the quote of the week.
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Max aura: Neo4j's graph database was the secret sauce behind Klarna's move to reduce its SaaS application footprint and focus on AI, although that experiment appears to have reached its limits. This week the database company introduced Neo4j Aura Graph Analytics, which is a serverless database designed to work with any data source.
The serverless architecture means the new database "requires no infrastructure setup and no prior experience with graph technology or Cypher query language," Neo4j said in a press release. It's also a Zero ETL product, which means users don't have to create data pipelines to extract, transform, and load their data into the database.
Good vibes: Figma's collaborative design tools are widely used across the corporate world, and this week it announced plans to help users turn those designs into actual web sites. Figma Make is "a new prompt-to-code tool for designers and product teams to explore possibilities, no matter where they are in their process—whether it's testing out design directions, editing in code, or prompting a proof of concept," the company said in a blog post.
The tool uses Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet AI model to turn natural-language prompts into working code, the latest in a flurry of "vibe coding" products. It also allows teams to collaborate on the design and coding process, and seems to have been designed to let teams quickly throw together proof-of-concept prototypes to test out design ideas.
A to Zed: Describing any tech product as "the fastest" at what it does is guaranteed to raise eyebrows, given how easy it can be to manipulate benchmarks and other tests. Nevertheless, this week Zed launched new AI features for its coding editor that it claims makes it "the world’s fastest AI code editor."
The new Agent Panel allows developers to do "anything from asking questions about your code base to having it directly make changes and write new code," the company said in a blog post. And unlike other AI coding editors like Cursor and Windsurf, Zed isn't a fork of Microsoft's Visual Studio Code.
Contains multitudes: Nobody was happier about Broadcom's acquisition of VMware than Nutanix, which quickly moved to capitalize on the dissatisfaction of customers faced with rising prices and legal threats. This week it released a new version of its AOS software that supports Kubernetes, allowing users to run its hardened infrastructure services on the popular container orchestrator.
"Integrating persistent data services into cloud native application environments can now be achieved without the need for a hypervisor," Nutanix said in a blog post, making a not-so-subtle point about VMware's core product. "Our vision is that we want customers to be able to run anything, anywhere,” Nutanix's Lee Caswell told Silicon Angle.
Platform dive: Platform engineering emerged from the growth of DevOps as a discipline that encouraged companies to build internal sets of tools, rules, and incentives to help developers ship quality code at a rapid pace. This idea continues to evolve as developers are asked to do new things with new tools, and this week Pulumi introduced a new framework for its customers designed to help them lay down "golden paths" for their developers to follow.
Pulumi IDP was designed to give platform teams a set of "building blocks" that "make the Day 0 through Day 2 experience of operating infrastructure seamless," the company said in a blog post. That includes a private registry that allows teams to "ensure their standardized building blocks are discoverable from a central location" as well as a "self-service workflow" for provisioning infrastructure.
As companies grapple with top-down mandates to introduce AI across their organizations, at some point it makes sense to make that mandate somebody's job. According to new research released this week by AWS, 60% of organizations surveyed have tasked someone with shepherding their AI strategies alongside the traditional CIO or CTO roles, and 86% plan to do so by the end of next year.
"What's happening is technology is the only way out. It's not kind of, sort of; it's the only way out." — ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, predicting in an interview with Runtime that companies worried about the macroeconomic picture will invest in technology that helps them cut costs while maintaining or increasing productivity.
CoreWeave is shopping around in hopes of raising an additional $1.5 billion in debt after scaling back its IPO, according to The Financial Times.
The DOGE dipshits canceled a no-bid sole-source contract with Workday after it was criticized for being, believe it or not, kind of shady.
Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!
Today: ServiceNow outlines an IT-centric plan for rolling AI agents out across enterprise tech, Broadcom puts the screws to VMware customers holding on to old licenses, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
Today: Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside recaps the progress it has made in the last year and looks to the future, OpenAI reportedly buys into the AI coding assistant market, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
Today: AWS and Microsoft were on opposite sides of Wall Street's expectations during the first quarter of the year, Redis returns to open source more than a year after a Big Cloud fork, and the latest enterprise moves.
Today: A deep dive into a dispute between the backers of NATS and the CNCF, which is just the latest example of changing norms in open-source software, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
