Cloud: hybrid approach, productivity and resilience
Cloud
The forced introduction of smart working in many cases following the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed almost all companies to have to deal with remote work. Among those who have analyzed the phenomenon there is also OpenText, with a survey which shows how companies that have adopted a hybrid approach between cloud-based and on-premise solutions have proven to be able to obtain advantages in terms of flexibility. , collaboration and customer satisfaction.Smart working: cloud and Digital Transformation, the research of OpenText
The study focused on the use of cloud-only, on-premise and hybrid for information storage and management confirming that migration to the cloud is fundamental in the Digital Transformation process. Here are the key points of the findings.A modern approach to content management helps to accelerate digital transformation goals: 76% of companies believe that improving content management is essential for accelerating business and responding to growing needs in terms of collaboration and customer experience. The cloud makes it easy to access and create content, as well as interact with customers and business partners - companies that use the cloud for information storage and management have seen significant improvements over those that rely on exclusively solutions. on-premise. Companies that do not embark on the migration path are left behind: 64% of companies with totally on-premise management feel a competitive disadvantage and 51% struggle to respond to the constantly changing needs of customers. A hybrid architecture is the solution for a gradual approach to the cloud: those who adopt a hybrid approach find greater flexibility (70%), faster sales cycles (73%) and better levels of collaboration (67%) and customer satisfaction ( 80%). The focus is also on the need to create an adequate corporate culture regarding what is called cyber resilience or the ability to cope with any unforeseen events in order to remain operational without ever questioning security practices in order not to expose oneself to threat action. We conclude with the comment of Antonio Matera, Regional Sales Director OpenText Italy.
The crisis following the pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation process that many companies had already undertaken, paving the way for new opportunities to increase business resilience . However, this is not a path that can be completed overnight: on the contrary, success requires time, as well as widespread support at all company levels, from C-levels to end users. In addition, many companies are scared of the idea of large-scale cloud adoption and prefer, therefore, to opt for a hybrid initial approach: it is a valid solution that can prove to be successful, as it offers tangible benefits, but leaves the possibility. to modernize the infrastructure and transform it in the way that best suits the needs of each reality.
Source: OpenText
Yugabyte announces $48M Series C as cloud native database makes enterprise push
As demand for cloud native applications is growing, Yugabyte, makers of the cloud native, open source YugabyteDB database are seeing a corresponding rise in demand for their products, especially with large enterprise customers. Today, the company announced a $48 million Series C financing round to help build on that momentum.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from Greenspring Associates, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Ventures and 8VC. Today’s round comes on the heels of the startup’s $30 million Series B last June, and brings the total raised to $103 million, according to the company.
Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Yugabyte co-founder and president, says the startup saw a marked increase in interest in both the open source and commercial offerings in 2020 as the pandemic pushed many companies to the cloud faster than they might have gone otherwise, something many startup founders have pointed out to me.
“The distributed SQL space is definitely heating up, and if anything over the last six months almost in every vector in terms of enterprise customers — from Fortune 500 companies across financial, retail, ISP or telcos — are putting Yugabyte in production to be the system of record database to meet some of their business critical services needs,” Muthukkaruppan told me.
In addition, he’s seeing a similar rise in the level of interest from the open source version of the product.”Similarly, the groundswell on the community and the open source adoption has been phenomenal. Our Slack [open source] user community quadrupled in 2020,” he said.
That kind of momentum led to the increased investor interest, says co-founder and CTO Karthik Ranganathan. “Some of the primary reasons to go and even ask for funding was that we realized we could accelerate some of this stuff, and we couldn’t do that with the original $30 million we had raised,” he said. The original thinking was to do a secondary raise in the $15-20 million, but multiple investors expressed interest in participating, and it ended up being a $48 million round when all was said and done.
Former Pivotal president Bill Cook came on board as CEO at the same time they were announcing their last funding round in June and brought some enterprise chops to the table. It was his job to figure out how to expand the market opportunity with larger high-value enterprise clients. “And so the last six or seven months has been about that, dealing with enterprise clients on one hand and then this emerging developer led cloud offering as well,” Cook said.
The company has a three tier offering that includes the open source YugabyteDB. Then there is a fully managed cloud version called Yugabyte Cloud, and finally there is a self-managed cloud version of the database called Yugabyte Platform. The latter is especially attractive to large enterprise customers, who want to be in the cloud, but still want to maintain control of their data and infrastructure, and so choose to manage the cloud installation themselves.
The company started last year with 50 employees, doubled that to this point, and now expects to reach 200 by the end of this year. As they add employees, the leadership team is cognizant of the importance of building a diverse and inclusive workforce, while recognizing the challenges in doing so.
“It’s work in progress as always. We’ve added diversity candidates right along the whole spectrum as we’ve grown but from my perspective it’s never sufficient, and we just need to keep pushing on it hard, and I think as a leadership team we recognize that,” Cook said.
The three leaders of the company have been working together remotely now since the announcement in June, and had only met briefly in person prior to the pandemic shutting down offices, but they say that it has gone smoothly. And while they would obviously like to meet in person again when the time is right, the momentum the company is experiencing shows that things are moving in the right direction, regardless of where they are getting their work done.
