Ron Miller

Enterprise Reporter at TechCrunch

May 29, 2020

Aaron Levie: ‘We have way too many manual processes in businesses’

Box CEO Aaron Levie has been working to change the software world for 15 years, but the pandemic has accelerated the move to cloud services much faster than anyone imagined. As he pointed out yesterday in an Extra Crunch Live interview, who would…

May 29, 2020

Salesforce stock is taking a hit today after lighter guidance in yesterday’s earning’s report

In spite of a positive quarter with record revenue that beat analysts’ estimates, Salesforce stock was taking a hit today because of lighter guidance. Wall Street is a tough audience. The stock was down $8.29/share, or 4.58%, as of 2:15 pm ET. The…

May 29, 2020

Cisco to acquire internet monitoring solution ThousandEyes

When Cisco bought AppDynamics in 2017 for $3.7 billion just before the IPO, the company sent a clear signal it wanted to move beyond its pure network hardware roots into the software monitoring side of the equation. Yesterday afternoon the company…

May 28, 2020

Wasabi announces $30M Series B as cloud storage business continues to grow

We may be in the thick of a pandemic with all of the economic fallout that comes from that, but certain aspects of technology don’t change, no matter the external factors. Storage is one of them. In fact, we are generating more digital stuff than…

May 27, 2020

Docker expands relationship with Microsoft to ease developer experience across platforms

When Docker sold off its enterprise division to Mirantis last fall, that didn’t mark the end of the company. In fact, Docker still exists and has refocused as a cloud-native developer tools vendor. Today it announced an expanded partnership with…

May 27, 2020

Toro snags $4M seed investment to monitor data quality

Toro’s founders started at Uber helping monitor the data quality in the company’s vast data catalogs, and they wanted to put that experience to work for a more general audience. Today, the company announced a $4 million seed round. The round was…

May 27, 2020

Census raises $4.3M seed to put product info in cloud data warehouses to work

Companies spend inordinate amounts of time and money building data warehouses and moving data from enterprise applications. But once they get the data in, how do they get specific information like product data back out and distribute it to business…

May 26, 2020

Robotic process automation for legacy environments

MSPs often deal with customers who are using older technology, sometimes years or decades old. In small and medium businesses if it’s not broken you probably aren’t going to invest resources by modernizing the toolset. But one thing you can do is…

May 26, 2020

Baton raises $10M Series A to organize post-sale implementation

Baton, an early-stage startup that wants to help customers organize the post-sales implementation process, emerged from stealth today with a $10 million Series A investment. Activant Capital led the round, with help from Global Founders Capital and…

May 22, 2020

IBM confirms layoffs are happening, but won’t provide details

IBM confirmed reports from overnight that it is conducting layoffs, but wouldn’t provide details related to location, departments or number of employees involved. The company framed it in terms of replacing people with more needed skills as it tries…

May 21, 2020

Extra Crunch Live: Join Box CEO Aaron Levie May 28th at noon PT/3 pm ET/7 pm GMT

We’ve been on a roll with our Extra Crunch Live Series for Extra Crunch members, where we’re talking to some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley about business, investment and the startup community. Recent interviews include Kirsten Green from…

May 21, 2020

12 VCs share their thoughts on enterprise startup trends and opportunities

Compared to other tech firms, enterprise companies have held up well during the pandemic. If anything, the problems enterprises were facing prior to the economic downturn have become even more pronounced; if you were thinking about moving to the…

May 21, 2020

Salesforce Commerce Cloud releases four quick-start pandemic business packs

As we move deeper into the pandemic, it’s clear that the way we conduct business is changing, maybe forever. That means that business has to change too — and fast. But if you’ve never conducted business digitally or only nominally, how do you…

May 20, 2020

Google Cloud earns defense contract win for Anthos multi-cloud management tool

Google dropped out of the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud contract battle fairly early in the game, citing it was in conflict with its “AI principals.” However, today the company announced a new 7 figure contract with DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a big…

May 20, 2020

BetterCloud scores $75M Series F as SaaS management needs grow

BetterCloud gives IT visibility into its SaaS tools providing the means to discover, manage and secure those tools. In the middle of a crisis that has forced most companies to move workers home, being able to manage SaaS usage in this way is growing…

May 20, 2020

FireHydrant lands $8M Series A for disaster management tool

When I spoke to Robert Ross, CEO and co-founder at FireHydrant last week, we had a technology adventure. First the audio wasn’t working correctly on Zoom, then Google Meet. Finally we used cell phones to complete the interview. It was like a case…

May 19, 2020

Gremlin brings chaos engineering to Windows platform

Chaos engineering is about helping companies set up worst case scenarios and testing them to see what causes the operating system to fall over, but up until now, it has mostly been for teams running Linux servers. Gremlin, the startup that offers…

May 18, 2020

Verizon wraps up BlueJeans acquisition lickety split

When Verizon (which owns this publication) announced it was buying video conferencing company BlueJeans for around $500 million last month, you probably thought it was going take awhile to bake, but the companies announced today that they has closed…

May 14, 2020

Adobe announces AI toolbox for Experience Platform

Most companies don’t have the personnel to do AI well, so they turn to platform vendors like Adobe for help. Like other platforms, it has been building AI into its product set for several years now, but wanted to give marketers a set of tools that…

May 13, 2020

Beware as COVID-19 is bringing out spammers and scammers

I was going through one of my email accounts the other day and I noticed a bunch of 1990s-style spam emails. There was the promise of sharing some uncollected inheritance with me from some deceased African royalty if I only shared my bank…