SAP's data double-down; Glean stretches out
Today on Product Saturday: SAP strikes a big partnership with Databricks, Glean introduces its agent builder, and the quote of the week.
Today: cybersecurity software remains in demand despite tight budgets, HPE jumps into the cloud infrastructure business (sort of), and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: cybersecurity software remains in demand despite tight budgets, HPE jumps into the cloud infrastructure business (sort of), and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
Almost across the board, enterprise tech companies have had a rough stretch over the last six to eight months as their customers tightened their tech budgets. But cybersecurity companies are bucking that trend, according to new research released Tuesday.
Worldwide spending on cybersecurity grew 12.5% in the first quarter to $18.6 billion, Canalys announced Tuesday. That's the lowest quarterly growth rate in over a year, but security spending is "outpacing the rest of the tech sector despite worsening macroeconomic conditions," the market researcher said.
Cybersecurity software is a broad market with many segments, and lots of different companies compete for enterprise tech budgets.
The biggest targets are spending the most on new security services, according to the market research.
Cybersecurity spending only accounts for 5% of all IT spending, according to Canalys.
It's been almost eight years since the former HP gave up on the public cloud, but its successor is ready to take another stab thanks to the generative AI frenzy.
HPE introduced HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models Tuesday, which it described as "an on-demand, multi-tenant supercomputing cloud service" in a press release. The service will run on the Cray supercomputers that HPE acquired in 2019 for $1.3 billion, which is a different approach than other AI-oriented cloud services built around Nvidia and AMD's GPUs.
AI developers have been scrambling to get their hands on Nvidia's AI chips not just because of their performance, but because they are so familiar with its CUDA programming model. HPE's approach will require those developers to work with a package of Cray's software, which could be a non-starter for many of them but could tempt HPE's large installed base of enterprises that are probably still wading gently into generative AI.
Render, one of the many startups trying to reinvent platform tools for software development, raised $50 million in Series B funding.
Oso raised $15 million in what it called a Series A-1 round as it tries to get its authorization cloud service that sets access policies across a company into the hands of more customers.
ElevenLabs landed $19 million from Andreessen Horowitz to expand its text-to-speech AI models into new market segments.
Primer Technologies raised $69 million in Series D funding to further its research into generative AI models for corporate data analysis.
Rose Rocket secured $38 million in new Series B funding for its transportation logistics cloud services.
Last week's Azure disruptions were indeed the result of a DDoS attack, Microsoft took the lame step of confirming via a late Friday evening blog post.
OpenAI is thinking about competing with its customers by launching its own enterprise AI app store, which could create a lot of tension given the strategic importance of enterprise software marketplaces to the big platforms.
The Rust Project introduced a new leadership council, acknowledging recent controversies by noting "we do recognize that the governance of the Rust Project has had its shortcomings."
In today's MOVEit disaster news, Progress Software is really unhappy that a security researcher tweeted his discovery of a new zero-day vulnerability.
Oracle released its take on a "sovereign cloud" service, a data-localization concept that is becoming more important to European customers.
An underground market for Nvidia's AI chips has emerged inside China after the Biden administration placed sweeping export regulations on those chips last year.
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!
Correction: Saturday's newsletter misspelled the name of Domain Name Wire's Andrew Allemann.