MongoDB hits 8.0; Microsoft's open-source data project
Today on Product Saturday: MongoDB focuses on performance and resilience, Microsoft tackles event handling with a new open-source project, and the quote of the week.
Today on Runtime: Microsoft's most interesting announcement from Build '23, more from our interview with Tomasz Tunguz, and this week in enterprise startup funding.
Hi there, and welcome to Runtime! You received this newsletter because you either subscribed to Protocol Enterprise or signed up after our announcement, or if it was forwarded to you, sign up here.
Today on Runtime: Microsoft's most interesting announcement from Build '23, more from our interview with Tomasz Tunguz, and this week in enterprise startup funding.
Microsoft's annual Build developer conference kicked off Tuesday in Seattle, and as might be expected from Microsoft in 2023, most of the focus was on AI. However, its major enterprise-focused announcement could help companies develop a more organized approach to their data analytics efforts, which will be an important part of anything they'll do with AI.
Microsoft Fabric takes several updates to the Azure Synapse Analytics platform and weaves them together with new versions of PowerBI and Azure Data Factory to produce a single dashboard of data-analytics options. All the tools in Fabric can access data stored in OneLake, Microsoft's new Delta Lake-compatible version of a data lake.
But Fabric and OneLake were also designed to be compatible with several different cloud storage and data warehousing services, allowing users to pull data from outside Microsoft's orbit.
Fabric was a brief interlude in Microsoft's otherwise AI-heavy dog and pony show, but it looks like it could be a foundational layer for the future of its data strategy.
We published the full interview with Theory Ventures' Tomasz Tunguz this morning on Runtime, after a preview went out to newsletter subscribers last weekend. His main thesis? After a long bull market run, both companies and investors forgot about the basics.
"When you're selling software, you're selling a promotion; the person who's buying the software is hoping to get promoted," Tunguz said. "And they do that one of two different ways: They make more money for the business, or they materially reduce the cost of the business. … If you can't answer that question in a very concrete way, then you're in trouble."
And it's no surprise that Tunguz, like most of enterprise tech these days, is focused on data.
"Data volumes are growing at 45% a year, and so people are spending more and more time, effort, and dollars in order to understand and get value from it," he said.
Read the full interview on Runtime here.
Anthropic raised $450 million from several different companies, including Google, as it tries to compete with OpenAI for the hearts and minds of AI developers and providers.
Stacklok, founded by Kubernetes co-creator Craig McLuckie and sigstore founder Luke Hinds, raised $17.5 million to build out its approach to securing the software supply chain.
Union AI raised $19.5 million to build out Flyte, its open-source tool for managing data analytics and ETL workflows.
TikTok promised to actually live up to its deal with the U.S. government by having Oracle audit its source code and algorithms, after The Information reported last week Oracle was basically just enjoying the spoils of having such a huge customer on its cloud infrastructure service, rather than doing the agreed-upon work.
Zoom raised profit and revenue expectations for the full year in a welcome sign for business spending, but acknowledged that it's not adding as many enterprise customers as it had hoped.
Intel no longer plans to ship a data-center chip with a CPU, GPU and memory chip integrated into a single package, as it tries to regain its footing in the server market.
Chainguard launched a new container image registry, which allows developers to use a secure bundle of code in their own applications, as part of its overall strategy to improve the software supply-chain security.
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!