Rootstock buys Kenandy: There is ERP consolidation happening in the Salesforce ecosystem, with Rootstock's announcement it will buy Kenandy. Both companies have built out ERP applications for manufacturers and distributors using Salesforce's technology platform. Here are the key details from the announcement:
“By combining the talent, skills and intellectual property of both companies, Rootstock will achieve greater economies of scale to compete with the likes of Oracle-NetSuite, Microsoft and SAP, while giving us the ability to create more cutting-edge capabilities for Kenandy and Rootstock customers,” said Patrick Garrehy, CEO of Rootstock.
The combination of Rootstock Cloud ERP, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud and the underlying Salesforce Platform technologies, such as Salesforce IoT and Einstein Analytics, form a compelling choice for manufacturers, distributors and supply chain organizations aiming to compete more effectively and better serve their customers.
POV: Kenandy was founded in 2010 by Sandy Kurtzig, a Silicon Valley pioneer. It has raised more than $50 million in venture capital and at one point was valued at $350 million. Terms of the deal with Roostock weren't disclosed.
While there are many questions left unanswered, including how Rootstock will rationalize the combined company's product portfolio, the deal is an important additional validation of Salesforce's platform as fit for mission-critical application development. Rootstock competitors include the likes of Plex, SAP ByDesign, Epicor and Infor, which may seek to capitalize on customer uncertainty, as with any acquisition. But Rootstock has been gaining good momentum of late, even managing to replace SAP at Mipox, which makes polishing abrasives. That deal will see the rollout of Rootstock to some 400 users in 12 countries.
As Rootstock noted in its announcement, a key part of growing the business lies not just in application functionality, but smarter and smoother implementation processes. As a combined entity, with a more diverse set of customers the company should be able to mature those processes faster.
Microsoft previews encrypted Skype: Going into 2018, online privacy is a hotter topic than ever. Microsoft is hoping to capitalize on this with the introduction of end-to-end encryption for Skype. Here are the key details from its announcement:
With Private Conversations, you can have end-to-end encrypted Skype audio calls and send text messages or files like images, audio, or videos, using the industry standard Signal Protocol by Open Whisper Systems. The content of these conversations will be hidden in the chat list as well as in notifications to keep the information you share private.
After the recipient accepts your invite, all calls and messages in that conversation will be encrypted end-to-end until you choose to end it.
POV: Microsoft's decision to base Skype encryption on Signal is an interesting one. The messaging protocol has gotten the thumbs-up from the likes of Edward Snowden and to date, there have been no reports of it being cracked or compromised. Overall, encryption is fast become a must-have, rather than nice-to-have feature in messaging applications, and Skype has lagged behind other products in this area.
As of now, only members of Microsoft's Skype Insider program can test out the features, but general availablity will likely follow later this year. Still, there are gaps in the functionality; video and group chats aren't included, and the fact encryption will be an opt-in, rather than fully baked into the product, are weaknesses that Microsoft will hopefully address soon.
EU creating €1 billion supercomputing fund: The European Commission is planning to join with member states to fund €1 billion into supercomputer research, in a bid to keep pace with the U.S. and China and ease privacy concerns. But it appears that due to Brexit, the effort may not include the UK. Here's how the EU described the project in a press release:
Supercomputers are needed to process ever larger amounts of data and bring benefits to the society in many areas from health care and renewable energy to car safety and cybersecurity.
Today's step is crucial for the EU's competitiveness and independence in the data economy. Today, European scientists and industry increasingly process their data outside the EU because their needs are not matched by the computation time or computer performance available in the EU. This lack of independence threatens privacy, data protection, commercial trade secrets, and ownership of data in particular for sensitive applications.
A new legal and funding structure – the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking – shall acquire, build and deploy across Europe a world-class High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. It will also support a research and innovation programme to develop the technologies and machines (hardware) as well as the applications (software) that would run on these supercomputers.
POV: The goal is to invest €1 billion in public funding by 2020; private contributions will also be solicited. Currently, the EU doesn't have any supercomputers in the top-10 rankings globally in terms of power. The EU wants to acquire two pre-exascale supercomputers and at least two midrange machines by 2020, which is an ambitious but doable goal, particularly given the level of funding it plans to commit. The machines will be jointly owned by participating member countries and private companies and institutions.
As of yet, the U.K. hasn't signed onto the proposal and a government spokesman declined to give a reason why, according to Bloomberg. Resolving the U.K.'s role in the project should be a crucial task for EU officials, but one made uncertain by the prospect of Brexit and exactly what relationship the U.K. will have with EU countries going forward.