A line in a new court filing by the Department of Defense suggests that it might reopen investigation into a possible conflict of interest interest in the JEDI contract RFP process involving a former AWS employee. The story has attracted a great deal of attention in major news publications including the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, but a Pentagon spokesperson has told TechCrunch that nothing has changed.

In the document, filed with the court on Wednesday, the government’s legal representatives sought to outline its legal arguments in the case. The line that attracted so much attention stated, “Now that Amazon has submitted a proposal, the contracting officer is considering whether Amazon’s re-hiring Mr. Ubhi creates an OCI that cannot be avoided, mitigated, or neutralized.” OCI stands for Organizational Conflict of Interest in DoD lingo.

When asked about this specific passage, Pentagon spokesperson Heather Babb made clear the conflict had been investigated earlier and that Ubhi had recused himself from the process. “During his employment with DDS, Mr. Deap Ubhi recused himself from work related to the JEDI contract. DOD has investigated this issue, and we have determined that Mr. Ubhi complied with all necessary laws and regulations,” Babb told TechCrunch.

She repeated that statement when asked specifically about the language in the DoD’s filing. Ubhi did work at Amazon prior to joining the DoD and returned to work for them after he left.

The Department of Defense’s decade-long, $10 billion JEDI cloud contract process has attracted a lot of attention, and not just for the size of the deal. The Pentagon has said this will be a winner-take-all affair. Oracle and IBM have filed formal complaints and Oracle filed a lawsuit in December alleging among other things that there was a conflict of interest by Ubhi, and that they believed the single-vendor approach was designed to favor AWS. The Pentagon has denied these allegations.

The DoD completed the RFP process at the end of October and is expected to choose the winning vendor in April.

Tweet This Post

Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Citus Data, a company that focused on making PostgreSQL databases faster and more scalable. Citus’ open-source PostgreSQL extension essentially turns the application into a distributed database and, while there has been a lot of hype around the NoSQL movement and document stores, relational databases — and especially PostgreSQL — are still a growing market, in part because of tools from companies like Citus that overcome some of their earlier limitations.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft plans to work with the Citus Data team to “accelerate the delivery of key, enterprise-ready features from Azure to PostgreSQL and enable critical PostgreSQL workloads to run on Azure with confidence.” The Citus co-founders echo this in their own statement, noting that “as part of Microsoft, we will stay focused on building an amazing database on top of PostgreSQL that gives our users the game-changing scale, performance, and resilience they need. We will continue to drive innovation in this space.”

PostgreSQL is obviously an open-source tool, and while the fact that Microsoft is now a major open-source contributor doesn’t come as a surprise anymore, it’s worth noting that the company stresses that it will continue to work with the PostgreSQL community. In an email, a Microsoft spokesperson also noted that “the acquisition is a proof point in the company’s commitment to open source and accelerating Azure PostgreSQL performance and scale.”

Current Citus customers include the likes of real-time analytics service Chartbeat, email security service Agari and PushOwl, though the company notes that it also counts a number of Fortune 100 companies among its users (they tend to stay anonymous). The company offers both a database as a service, an on-premises enterprise version and the free open-source edition. For the time being, it seems like that’s not changing, though over time I would suspect that Microsoft will transition users of the hosted service to Azure.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. Citus Data, which was founded in 2010 and graduated from the Y Combinator program, previously raised more than $13 million from the likes of Khosla Ventures, SV Angel and Data Collective.

Tweet This Post

That slow clap you hear spreading around the internet today could be due to the fact that Apple has finally added Microsoft Office to the Mac App Store. The package will include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote.

Shaan Pruden, senior director of worldwide developer relations at Apple, says that when the company overhauled the App Store last year, it added the ability to roll several apps into a subscription package with the idea of bringing Microsoft Office into the fold. That lack of bundling had been a stumbling block to an earlier partnership.

“One of the features that we brought specifically in working with Microsoft was the ability to subscribe to bundles, which is obviously something that they would need in order to bring Office 365 to the Mac App Store.”

That’s because Microsoft sells Office 365 subscriptions as a package of applications, and it didn’t want to alter the experience by forcing customers to download each one individually, Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365 explained.

PowerPoint on the Mac. Photo: Apple

Spataro said that up until now, customers could of course go directly to Microsoft or another retail outlet to subscribe to the same bundle, but what today’s announcement does is wrap the subscription process into an integrated Mac experience where installation and updates all happen in a way you expect with macOS.

“The apps themselves are updated through the App Store, and we’ve done a lot of great work between the two companies to make sure that the experience really feels good and feels like it’s fully integrated,” he said. That includes support for dark mode, photo continuity to easily insert photos into Office apps from Apple devices and app-specific toolbars for the Touch Bar.

A subscription will run you $69 for an individual or $99 for a household. The latter allows up to six household members to piggy back on the subscription, and each person gets one terabyte of storage to boot. What’s more, you can access your subscription across all of your Apple, Android and Windows devices and your files, settings and preferences will follow wherever you go.

Businesses can order Microsoft Office bundles through the App Store and then distribute them using the Apple Business Manager, a tool Apple developed last year to help IT manage the application distribution process. Once installed, users have the same ability to access their subscriptions complete with settings across devices.

Microsoft OneNote on the Mac. Photo: Apple

While Apple and Microsoft have always had a complicated relationship, the two companies have been working together in one capacity or another for nearly three decades now. Neither company was willing to discuss the timeline it took to get to this point, or the financial arrangements between the two companies, but in the standard split for subscriptions, the company gets 70 percent of the price the first year with Apple getting 30 percent for hosting fees. That changes to an 85/15 split in subsequent years.

Apple noted that worldwide availability could take up to 24 hours depending on your location, but you’ve waited this long, you can wait one more day, right?

Tweet This Post

If your company uses a VPN and/or a mobile device management service to give you access to its intranet and internal web apps, then you know how annoying those are. AWS today launched a new product, Amazon WorkLink,  that promises to make this process significantly easier.

WorkLink is a fully managed service that, for $5 per month and user, allows IT admins to give employees one-click access to internal sites, no matter whether they run on AWS or not.

After installing WorkLink on their phones, employees can then simply use their favorite browser to surf to an internal website (other solutions often force users to use a sub-par proprietary browser). WorkLink the goes to work, securely requests that site and — and that’s the smart part here — a secure WorkLink container converts the site into an interactive vector graphic and sends it back to the phone. Nothing is stored or cached on the phone and AWS says WorkLink knows nothing about personal device activity either. That also means when a device is lost or stolen, there’s no need to try to wipe it remotely because there’s simply no company data on it.

IT can either use a VPN to connect from an AWS Virtual Private Cloud to on-premise servers or use AWS Direct Connect to bypass a VPN solution. The service works with all SAML 2.0 identity providers (which is the majority of identity services used in the enterprise, including the likes of Okta and Ping Identity) and as a fully managed service, it handles scaling and updates in the background.

“When talking with customers, all of them expressed frustration that their workers don’t have an easy and secure way to access internal content, which means that their employees either waste time or don’t bother trying to access content that would make them more productive,” says Peter Hill, Vice President of Productivity Applications at AWS, in today’s announcement. “With Amazon WorkLink, we’re enabling greater workplace productivity for those outside the corporate firewall in a way that IT administrators and security teams are happy with and employees are willing to use.”

WorkLink will work with both Android and iOS, but for the time being, only the iOS app (iOS 12+) is available. For now, it also only works with Safar, with Chrome support coming in the next few weeks. The service is also only available in Europe and North America for now, with additional regions coming later this year.

For the time being, AWS’s cloud archrivals Google and Microsoft don’t offer any services that are quite comparable with WorkLink. Google offers its Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy as a VPN alternative and as part of its BeyondCorp program, though that has a very different focus, while Microsoft offers a number of more traditional mobile device management solutions.

Tweet This Post

Oracle says the racial discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs is “meritless.” This comes after Oracle declined yesterday to comment on the OFCCP’s filing that alleges Oracle withheld $400 million in wages from underrepresented employees.

“This meritless lawsuit is based on false allegations and a seriously flawed process within the OFCCP that relies on cherry picked statistics rather than reality,” Oracle EVP and General Counsel Dorian Daley said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We fiercely disagree with the spurious claims and will continue in the process to prove them false. We are in compliance with our regulatory obligations, committed to equality, and proud of our employees.”

In a filing yesterday, the OFCCP alleged Oracle withheld $400 million in wages from racially underrepresented workers (black, Latinx and Asian) as well as women. The department argues that Oracle’s “stark patterns of discrimination” started back in 2013 and continues into the present day. More specifically, the OFCCP alleges Oracle discriminated against black, Asian and female employees. This has all ultimately resulted in the collective loss of more than $400 million for this group of employees, the suit alleges.

Tweet This Post

Alchemist, which began as an experiment to better promote enterprise entrepreneurs, has morphed into a well-established Silicon Valley accelerator.

To prove it, San Francisco-based Alchemist is announcing a fresh $2.5 million investment ahead of its 20th demo day on Wednesday. Juniper Networks, a networking and cybersecurity solutions business, has led the round, with participation from Siemens’ venture capital unit Next47.

Launched in 2012 by former Draper Fisher Jurvetson investor Ravi Belani, Alchemist provides participating teams with six months of mentorship and a $36,000 investment. Alchemist admits companies whose revenue stream comes from enterprises, not consumers, with a bent toward technical founders.

According to numbers provided by the accelerator, dubbed the “Y Combinator of Enterprise,” 115 Alchemist portfolio companies have gone on to raise $556 million across several VC deals. Another 25 have been acquired, including S4 Capital’s recent $150 million acquisition of media consultancy MightyHive, Alchemist’s largest exit to date.

Other notable alums include Rigetti Computing, LaunchDarkly, which helps startups soft-launch features and drone startup Matternet.

Alchemist has previously raised venture capital funding, including a $2 million financing in 2017 led by GE and an undisclosed investment from Salesforce.

Nineteen companies will demo products onstage tomorrow. You can live stream Alchemist’s 20th demo day here.

Tweet This Post

Okta, the Nasdaq-listed cloud identity management company, has recruited former Charles Schwab chief marketing officer Becky Saeger to its board of directors. The latest appointment comes one month after the company named Shellye Archambeau, former chief executive officer of MetricStream, to its board.

Saeger becomes Okta’s third female board member. Michelle Wilson, a former senior vice president and general counsel at Amazon, joined the company’s board in 2015. According to data collected by Women on Boards, women hold just over 17 percent of corporate board seats, up from 16.0 percent in 2017.

“A board is there for a few reasons,” Okta co-founder and CEO Todd McKinnon told TechCrunch. “One is to oversee a company’s management and strategy. A company like Okta is in a fast-growing industry and there is too much of a tendency for groupthink. You need someone around you to question the basis of what you’re thinking about.”

McKinnon has spoken openly about his commitment to diversity. In a letter to employees in early 2017, for example, he denounced President Donald Trump’s temporary ban on refugee admissions to the U.S. “Diversity of thought and experience are fundamental values at Okta, that includes religious beliefs, gender diversity, sexual orientation and political views,” he wrote. “No matter who you voted for, our opposition to this policy is not just about our business — it is also about our belief in the American freedoms and protections that have made our country so innovative and accepting of those most in need.”

Okta’s C-suite, though majority male, includes chief customer officer Krista Anderson-Copperman, executive vice president and chief of staff Angela Grady, and chief people officer Kristina Johnson.

Saeger, who McKinnon chose for her marketing and financial services acumen, also sits on the board of E*TRADE, an online broker.

“I am excited about the notion that as this company grows and evolves, the brand can become more visible and more meaningful,” Saeger told TechCrunch.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Okta debuted on the stock exchange in April 2017, closing up 38 percent on its first day of trading.

Tweet This Post

Smartsheet, the project management and collaboration tool that went public last April, announced the acquisition of Seattle-based TernPro, Inc., makers of Slope, a collaboration tool designed for sharing creative assets.

The companies did not share the acquisition price.

Bringing Slope into the fold will enable Smartsheet users to share assets like video and photos natively inside the application, and also brings the ability to annotate, comment or approve these assets. Smartsheet sees this native integration through a broad enterprise lens. It might be HR sharing training videos, marketing sharing product photos or construction company employees inspecting a site and sharing photos of a code violation, complete with annotations to point out the problem.

Alan Lepofsky, an analyst at Constellation Research who specializes in collaboration tools in the enterprise, sees this as a significant enhancement to the product. “Smartsheet’s focus is on being more than just project management, but instead helping coordinate end-to-end business processes. Slope is going to allow content to become more of a native part of those processes, rather than people having to switch context to another tool,” he explained.

That last point is particularly important, as today’s collaboration tools, whether Slack or Microsoft Teams or any other similar tool, have been working hard to provide that kind of integration to keep people focused on the task at hand without having to switch applications.

Mike Gotta, a longtime analyst at Gartner, says collaboration that happens within the flow of work can help make employees more productive, but being able to build specific use cases is even more critical. “The collaboration space remains open for innovation and new ways to addressing old challenges. For organizations though, the trick is how to create a collaboration portfolio that balances broad-based foundational investments with the more domain-specific or situational scenarios they might have where this type of use-case driven collaboration can make more sense,” Gotta told TechCrunch.

That is precisely what Smartsheet is trying to achieve with this purchase, giving them the ability to incorporate workflows involving creative assets, whether that’s including all of the documents required to onboard a new employee or a training workflow that includes learning objectives, lesson plans, photos, videos and so forth.

Smartsheet, which launched in 2005, raised more than $113 million before going public last April. The company’s stock price has held up, gaining ground in a volatile stock market. It sits above its launch price of $19.50, closing at $25.24 yesterday.

Slope was founded in 2014 and has raised $1.4 million, according to Crunchbase data. Customers include Microsoft, CBS Sports and the Oakland Athletics baseball team. The company’s employees, including co-founders Dan Bloom and Brian Boschè, have already joined Smartsheet.

Tweet This Post

There is a growing demand for stronger security at every point in the IT ecosystem, and today, one of the the more successful enterprise startups to emerge in the last several years is announcing a big round of funding to provide that.

Rubrik, which provides enterprise data management and backup services across on-premise, cloud and hybrid networks, has raised $261 million in funding at a $3.3 billion valuation from Bain Capital Ventures and previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and IVP. It intends to use the funding to build (and buy) tech to expand deeper into security and compliance services alongside its existing data management products.

“As we have demonstrated leadership in data recovery, our customers have been demanding new products and services from us,” CEO and co-founder Bipul Sinha said in an interview, “so we’ve raised capital to double down on that.”

This Series E brings the total raised by Rubrik to $553 million, and it is a big leap for the company: its last raise of $180 million, in 2017, valued Rubrik at $1.3 billion.

Rubrik is not disclosing any other specific financial numbers with the news — Sinha’s response to the question was that he thinks the valuation jump speaks for itself. He also confirmed the company is not profitable, but intentionally so.

“Our goal is to build a long-term, iconic company, and so we want to become profitable but not at the cost of growth,” he said. “We are leading this market transformation while it continues to grow.”

That market transformation is to provide services — and up to now, specifically data back-up services — for enterprises that operate their networks across a hybrid environment, with data used and stored on premises, in the cloud, and sometimes in multiple clouds.

There are a number of other companies that compete with it in backup including biggies like Druva, CommVault and EMC, but Rubrik was an early mover in identifying a need to backup and provide data recovery across a mix of locations.

Moving into security and compliance is a natural progression for the company.

There has always been a synergy between Rubrik’s core business and security/compliance. Often the need for backup and recovery arises specifically as a result of security breaches or other glitches that result from people accessing data when they are not supposed to, and that issue gets compounded when you have data stored and used across multiple locations.

“The fragmentation across cloud and on-prem services creates issues around security and data management,” Sinha said. “The more fragmentation you have, the more important Rubrik [or other data management services] get.”

Similarly, moving into security and compliance together goes hand-in-hand because both address similar needs at companies to be handling information responsibly. “Security and compliance are joined at the hip from a regulatory perspective,” Sinha said.

Up to now, Rubrik has mostly built its service from the ground up. One notable exception has been that it made an acquisition — its first — last year when it acquired NoSQL data backup specialist Datos IO, which helped Rubrik further expand from appliance-based management to cloud-based.

In the case of adding on more security and compliance offerings, it’s not clear yet whether that will be built organically or via acquisition (and there are indeed a number of security startups out there that could be candidates if it’s the latter).

“Rubrik is fundamentally an innovation driven company,” Sinha said. “We like coherent and consistent architecture. Having said that, as a responsible and ambitious company, we are always looking at the marketplace, at where there are the teams that we can acquire.”

Notably, the company has started to signal its growing interest in this area in recent months. The latest build of its flagship Andes data management platform placed security features center stage, and now we can expect to see more of that.

Existing customer loyalty has always attracted investors to the company, and that’s been the case here, too.

At a time when many tech observers are wondering if we are gearing up for a “winter” in the startup ecosystem — where, in a buoyant climate, investors have gone all-in with perhaps too much exuberance that will not bear out in terms of startups’ actual performance — the thinking is that Rubrik’s track record will help it continue to win business both on its legacy services, and as it ventures into newer areas.

“Rubrik has won the trust and loyalty of large enterprise customers around the globe by offering a simple and reliable solution that solves the challenge of protecting and managing data in a hybrid cloud world,” said Enrique Salem, former CEO at Symantec and Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, in a statement. “Given my experience leading the largest enterprise data protection company, we are confident that Rubrik is positioned to win and be the market leader in enterprise cloud data management.”

Tweet This Post

There is a growing demand for stronger security at every point in the IT ecosystem, and today, one of the the more successful enterprise startups to emerge in the last several years is announcing a big round of funding to provide that.

Rubrik, which provides enterprise data management and backup services across on-premise, cloud and hybrid networks, has raised $261 million in funding at a $3.3 billion valuation from Bain Capital Ventures and previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and IVP. It intends to use the funding to build (and buy) tech to expand deeper into security and compliance services alongside its existing data management products.

“As we have demonstrated leadership in data recovery, our customers have been demanding new products and services from us,” CEO and co-founder Bipul Sinha said in an interview, “so we’ve raised capital to double down on that.”

This Series E brings the total raised by Rubrik to $553 million, and it is a big leap for the company: its last raise of $180 million, in 2017, valued Rubrik at $1.3 billion.

Rubrik is not disclosing any other specific financial numbers with the news — Sinha’s response to the question was that he thinks the valuation jump speaks for itself. He also confirmed the company is not profitable, but intentionally so.

“Our goal is to build a long-term, iconic company, and so we want to become profitable but not at the cost of growth,” he said. “We are leading this market transformation while it continues to grow.”

That market transformation is to provide services — and up to now, specifically data back-up services — for enterprises that operate their networks across a hybrid environment, with data used and stored on premises, in the cloud, and sometimes in multiple clouds.

There are a number of other companies that compete with it in backup including biggies like Druva, CommVault and EMC, but Rubrik was an early mover in identifying a need to backup and provide data recovery across a mix of locations.

Moving into security and compliance is a natural progression for the company.

There has always been a synergy between Rubrik’s core business and security/compliance. Often the need for backup and recovery arises specifically as a result of security breaches or other glitches that result from people accessing data when they are not supposed to, and that issue gets compounded when you have data stored and used across multiple locations.

“The fragmentation across cloud and on-prem services creates issues around security and data management,” Sinha said. “The more fragmentation you have, the more important Rubrik [or other data management services] get.”

Similarly, moving into security and compliance together goes hand-in-hand because both address similar needs at companies to be handling information responsibly. “Security and compliance are joined at the hip from a regulatory perspective,” Sinha said.

Up to now, Rubrik has mostly built its service from the ground up. One notable exception has been that it made an acquisition — its first — last year when it acquired NoSQL data backup specialist Datos IO, which helped Rubrik further expand from appliance-based management to cloud-based.

In the case of adding on more security and compliance offerings, it’s not clear yet whether that will be built organically or via acquisition (and there are indeed a number of security startups out there that could be candidates if it’s the latter).

“Rubrik is fundamentally an innovation driven company,” Sinha said. “We like coherent and consistent architecture. Having said that, as a responsible and ambitious company, we are always looking at the marketplace, at where there are the teams that we can acquire.”

Notably, the company has started to signal its growing interest in this area in recent months. The latest build of its flagship Andes data management platform placed security features center stage, and now we can expect to see more of that.

Existing customer loyalty has always attracted investors to the company, and that’s been the case here, too.

At a time when many tech observers are wondering if we are gearing up for a “winter” in the startup ecosystem — where, in a buoyant climate, investors have gone all-in with perhaps too much exuberance that will not bear out in terms of startups’ actual performance — the thinking is that Rubrik’s track record will help it continue to win business both on its legacy services, and as it ventures into newer areas.

“Rubrik has won the trust and loyalty of large enterprise customers around the globe by offering a simple and reliable solution that solves the challenge of protecting and managing data in a hybrid cloud world,” said Enrique Salem, former CEO at Symantec and Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, in a statement. “Given my experience leading the largest enterprise data protection company, we are confident that Rubrik is positioned to win and be the market leader in enterprise cloud data management.”

Tweet This Post