Google flexes its Arm; Metronome runs the meter
Today: Google's first custom Arm server processor is now available, Metronome's new tool could help SaaS companies switch to usage-based pricing, and the quote of the week.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: How Cushman & Wakefield got control of a sprawling app portfolio after several mergers, Salesforce plans a hiring freeze, and this week's enterprise moves.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: How Cushman & Wakefield got control of a sprawling app portfolio after several mergers, Salesforce plans a hiring freeze, and this week's enterprise moves.
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The commercial real estate market has been through a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs since Cushman & Wakefield emerged from a series of private-equity deals as a public company in 2018. While the century-old company couldn't have foreseen the rapid changes in this market caused by the pandemic, it did foresee the need to build a new digital platform on which to ride the rails.
Right after that IPO, the company decided to focus on partnering with SaaS vendors rather than maintaining a swath of applications when adopting its cloud strategy, said Sal Companieh, chief digital and information officer. Several different real-estate companies came together through its private equity partners to form the pre-IPO organization, and it wanted a flexible but standardized base to get everyone on the same page.
When Companieh became CDIO across the entire company almost two years ago, a second shift began to take place.
Cushman & Wakefield was ahead of the curve when it came to paring down its enterprise software assets to work closely with a smaller number of vendors.
But companies selling integrated stacks of software overcorrected when chasing their smaller rivals by rushing out new features every quarter, Companieh said.
Read the rest of the full story on Runtime here.
How do you spin a report of a hiring freeze? Take a cue from Salesforce, and throw the author of an authentic internal memo under the bus.
Citing a memo sent to Slack staff from Ross Harmes, chief of staff to Slack CTO Cal Henderson, Fortune reported this week that employees were told to prepare for a hiring freeze across both Salesforce and Slack; "this isn't our first rodeo with hiring pauses, but it’s definitely disruptive and will affect our plans in Q1 and beyond," Harmes wrote. In response, Salesforce told Business Insider and Fortune "we are not freezing hiring in any departments," but it also "did not dispute the authenticity of the memo," according to Fortune, so there you have it.
It's worth noting that this is very similar to the PR strategy Salesforce employed when responding to a report from Protocol's Joe Williams in late 2022 that the company was about to make major layoffs across the board. In response to that report, several publications dutifully reported Salesforce's claim that it had only laid off a few hundred underperforming salespeople, only for the company to turn around and lay off thousands of members of its "ohana" in early 2023.
Khozema Shipchandler is the new CEO of Twilio, replacing co-founder Jeff Lawson, who stepped down under pressure from activist investors.
Mark Moffat is the new CEO of IFS, replacing Darren Roos, who will become chairman of the ERP software company.
Michael Weingartner is the new chief product officer of HashiCorp, joining the company in the newly created role after recent stints at Google Cloud and SAP.
Oliver Parker is the new vice president of AI for Google Cloud's go-to-market organization, after serving as senior vice president and general manager at Okta.
SAP will pay the U.S. Department of Justice $230 million in fines stemming from an investigation into practices of bribery in Indonesia and South Africa.
OpenTofu. the open-source project created as a fork to HashiCorp's Terraform after it announced it would adopt the Business Source License last year, is now generally available.
Harness acquired Armony, a continuous integration startup built on top of Spinnaker that Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal hopes will help build out his vision of the CI/CD pipeline.
Justin Garrison, the AWS employee who aired concerns about its direction during the holiday break, has left the company.
Broadcom eliminated a large portion of VMware's partners after closing its acquisition, confirming earlier worries of such a move according to The Register.
Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!