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Globant announced that it planned to acquire Avanxo, a cloud transformation company. Financial terms are not disclosed.

Avanxo a leading cloud transformation company with presence in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. Avanxo has 310 IT professionals with cloud capabilities. It is serving different brands like ABInBev, Sulamerica, Ecopetrol, Sika, Allianz, Terpel, Samsung, La Meridional, Audi Argentina, Sodimac and etc. Avanxo is Advanced Consulting and MSP Certified Partner of Amazon Web Services and the first independent Platinum Consulting Partner of Salesforce in Latin America.

According to the announcement, the acquisition will help Globant to focus on creating digital experiences for large organizations worldwide and expand into corporate process optimization and cloud technologies.

Executive Opinion

Globant CEO and Co-founder, Martin Migoya, said, "Avanxo shares our vision on how to deliver profound digital and cognitive transformations for the most demanding customers. With Avanxo, we'll broaden our transformation approach as we keep bringing our digital culture to optimize our customers' corporate processes. We have found an amazing team that complements our model, and we are confident that this acquisition will help us propel our positioning as leaders in the digital and cognitive arena."

Globant Chief of Staff and Co-founder, Martín Umaran, said, "With Avanxo, we are expanding our service offering along with the key partnerships Avanxo holds with Salesforce, Amazon Web Services, Google and Informatica."

Diego Maldonado, Avanxo Founder, and CEO said, "We are thrilled to become part of the Globant team. Globant is a premier leader in digital and cognitive transformations, recognized worldwide for its ability to incorporate cloud into its deliverables to enhance customer experience and success.  Globant shares our core values focused on talent development, employee satisfaction, close alignment with our partners, and customer success. By joining Globant, we will be able to broadly expand our capabilities and provide a vehicle for growth for our employees and our partners."

What's Next

With this acquisition, Globant enters into the Cloud System Integration and expands into its digital and cognitive transformation expertise. and the transaction is expected to close in February 2019.

SpaceChain announced that it has successfully tested its second Qtum blockchain node in space. The node was launched into orbit on October 25, 2018, by a CZ-4B Y34 rocket from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre, Xinzhou, China.

SpaceChain is a community-based space platform and it was founded in 2017. It aims to combine space and blockchain technologies to build the world’s first open-source blockchain-based satellite network to develop and run decentralized applications in space.

The second SpaceChain node is embedded with SpaceChain OS, a smart operating system. It is capable of performing blockchain-related functions on the Qtum blockchain such as running smart contracts and multi-signature transactions. The SpaceChain operating system code is available on GitHub.

On 2nd February 2018, SpaceChain launched its first Qtum blockchain node into low earth orbit. It was based on Raspberry Pi hardware board and blockchain software. The blockchain node could run a full-node program on the Qtum blockchain and could process existing blockchain data.

The announcement noted that, since the launch of its second Qtum blockchain node on October 25, the SpaceChain team ran the number of connectivity tests to ensure the node's full operational capability. During these tests, the node's signal was detected and transaction data has been uploaded to the node to complete the signature and then downloaded via the ground station, and finally verified on the blockchain network. The transaction verification information can be found here.

PC: Snip from https://qtum.info/tx/7dfdfa9322ac5b9b4a89da44f7db90d300c636117f456514f8c27f60d0224a54

SpaceChain co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO), Jeff Garzik, said, "This multi-signature cold wallet service – an application developed by SpaceChain engineers to test the space node – shows proof of technology of being a potential cyber security solution for the blockchain industry. SpaceChain deployed and tested the space-based multi-signature transaction which opens up brand new possibilities in space security models."

SpaceChain co-founder and chief executive officer (CTO), Zee Zheng, said, "It often takes months and years to build the system and to launch hardware into space as there is a need to secure the launch opportunity, obtain permissions, get the frequency and ensure there is ground station support. We are proud to have launched two nodes in our first year of operations, bringing us one step closer to creating a network of blockchain-based satellites in space"

To facilitate the launch, SpaceChain commissioned Tibet Zezheng Information Technology Co. Ltd. And Beijing Xihua Science and Technology Co. Ltd., a carrying and launching service provider.  The new blockchain node also has a geospatial tracking feature. It allows one to watch the node orbit the Earth in real time.

IBM and Vodafone teamed up to form a new venture to help companies drive digital transformation. The new venture provides IBM's cloud offerings to Vodafone Business customers immediately.

The announcement further said that IBM and Vodafone signed a new strategic commercial agreement that will further provide $550 million valued IBM managed services to Vodafone Business' cloud and hosting unit. The arrangement will allow Vodafone customers to leverage IBM's optimization, automation and cognitive capabilities to run their business effectively in a cloud environment.

With Vodafone's leadership in the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G and edge computing and IBM's multicloud, industry expertise and professional services capabilities, the new venture between IBM and Vodafone will co-develop new digital solutions for their clients.

As announcement noted that 70 percent of organizations using up to 15 cloud environments. The clients will able to integrate multiple clouds and prepare for the next wave of digital transformation enabled by AI, 5G, edge, and Software Defined Networking (SDN).

Executive Opinion

IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty, said, "IBM has built industry-leading hybrid cloud, AI and security capabilities underpinned by deep industry expertise. Together, IBM and Vodafone will use the power of the hybrid cloud to securely integrate critical business applications, driving business innovation – from agriculture to next-generation retail."

Vodafone CEO Nick Read, said, "Vodafone has successfully established its cloud business to help our customers succeed in a digital world. This strategic venture with IBM allows us to focus on our strengths in fixed and mobile technologies, whilst leveraging IBM's expertise in multicloud, AI and services. Through this new venture we'll accelerate our growth and deepen engagement with our customers while driving radical simplification and efficiency in our business."


Companies will benefit from reduced complexity and technological barriers as IBM and Vodafone Business will ensure that data and applications flow freely and securely across their organizations. The newly announced venture will be operational in the first half of 2019.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced its new AWS Backup, a centralized and fully-managed backup service.

The newly launched AWS Backup Service will allow customers to back up their data across AWS services & on-premises easily and at a faster speed.

AWS Backup will protect storage volumes, databases, and file systems with a single service. It will allow AWS users to configure and audit the AWS resources they backup, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor recent backups and restores in a single place.

Multiple AWS services for databases, block storage, object storage, and file systems to provide backup capabilities, but the announcement noted that AWS users are creating custom scripts to automate scheduling, enforce retention policies, and consolidate backup activity across several services in order to better meet their business and regulatory compliance requirements.
As enterprise data gets distributed across multiple services among databases, block storage, object storage, and file systems, there is a need to standardize backup mechanisms across all services including on-premise data. AWS is trying to achieve this objective with its AWS Backup service.

Once the backup policies are defined for resources in AWS management console, AWS backup services handle all backup tasks for those AWS resources across different AWS services along with their retention period.

Executive Opinion

VP of Storage, Automation, and Management Services, AWS, Bill Vass, said, “As the cloud has become the default choice for customers of all sizes, it has attracted two distinct types of builders. Some are tinkerers who want to tweak and fine-tune the full range of AWS services into the desired architecture, and other builders are drawn to the same breadth and depth of functionality in AWS but are willing to trade some of the service granularity to start at a higher abstraction layer so they can build even faster. We designed AWS Backup for this second type of builder who has told us that they want one place to go for backups versus having to do it across multiple, individual services. Today, we are proud to make AWS Backup available with support for block storage volumes, databases, and file systems, and over time, we plan to support additional AWS services."

AWS Backup Availability

To start with, AWS Backup is available and integrated with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Storage Gateway to AWS Simple storage (S3). The AWS backup service also supports tiering of older backups to Amazon Glacier. Support of other AWS services will come in future. As AWS Backup service now integrates with AWS Storage Gateway, it is now possible to backup on-premises application data.

More details are available here.

Veeam Software, Switzerland-based data management, and Backup solutions company, announced that it has raised $500 million investment from Insight Venture Partners and strategic investor Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).

Looks like 2019 has started with the big investment bang! This month Rubrik raised $261 Million investment in series E funding with $3.3 billion valuations and just recently, another cloud major Infor announced $1.5 billion investment ahead of its planned IPO. This development underlines that cloud and data management segments are still a hot investment.

Veeam will use newly raised funding to position Veeam Data Management solutions for the public and private cloud in $30 billion enterprise market. Veeam Availability Platform delivers agility, availability and business acceleration to customers across the globe and its software runs in on-premises and across multiple clouds. It also ships Veeam Backup & Replication product in data protection segment. The investment will help Veeam to accelerate expanding its geographical footprint and overall organic growth via mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity to expand into adjacent markets.
Veeam claimed approximately $1 billion in revenue and more than 325,000 customers. It is adding 50,000 new customers every year.

Executive Opinion:

Co-Founder and Executive Vice President (EVP), Sales and Marketing, at Veeam, Ratmir Timashev, said, “We have a long-standing relationship with Jeff Horing and Michael Triplett from Insight Venture Partners, having worked with them since 2002 when Insight invested in our first company, Aelita Software. Back then, we relied on Insight to provide strategic counsel and support, and after we sold that company to Quest Software in 2004, we continued our relationship. Over the years, Insight has been a trusted advisor to Bill Largent, Andrei Baronov and me, even acquiring a minority share in Veeam back in 2013. Today, Veeam is leading the data management space, with more than 325,000 customers, 60,000 partners, 82 percent of the Fortune 500 relying on our solutions, and with industry analysts heralding us as Leaders across all sectors; with Insight and CPPIB’s, investment I know we will take this to the next level.”

Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners, and member of the Board of Directors at Veeam, Michael Triplett, said, “Over the past decade, Veeam has established itself as the premier vendor for on-premises backup and recovery software, and is now No.1 in the market for providing data management for public and private cloud environments.  Only great companies like Amazon and Apple have been able to pivot into market leading positions in multiple markets, and Veeam now joins this elite group. Veeam has unparalleled leadership in terms of technology, vision and go-to-market strategies, which we believe will only further extend its No.1 market position.  Insight is thrilled to continue this journey with Veeam’s management.”

Vision and Acquisitions: 

The announcement also noted that the investment from Insight Venture Partners validates its leadership's vision to be the most trusted provider of Backup solutions that enable Intelligent Data Management. The newly raised investment will help Veeam to accelerate its organic growth via mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity.

Back in January 2018, Veeam acquired N2WS in an all-cash transaction deal valued at $42.5 million. N2WS software to deliver cloud-native enterprise backup and disaster recovery for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Infor, a NewYork based business cloud software provider, announced that it has raised $1.5 billion investment from Koch Equity Development (KED) and Golden Gate Capital in the latest funding round.

This substantial development comes ahead of Infor's possibly planned IPO in 2019 or 2020. Earlier in 2016, Infor raised $2.5B from Koch Equity Development (KED) in private funding round.  The newly raised capital will be used to reduce $6 billion debt ahead of its IPO.


Infor clocked more than $3 billion of revenue in the fiscal year 2018. The 70% (percent) of their revenue now comes from cloud applications. The announcement claimed that Infor is the first company to move mission-critical ERP application suites to public clouds and Infor CloudSuite is now the only fully multi-tenant ERP suite spanning front and back office applications, as well as logistics with global support (in terms of languages, currencies, and localizations). Overall 20,700 industry features are released into the CloudSuite product line.

In the last five years, Infor has heavily invested $2.5 billion in product development and released 475 new products, 1,870 integrations.

Infor’s CloudSuites are the foundation for digital transformation for more than 9,500 customers in 110 countries with its presence in key industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail, the public sector, and hospitality.  Over 72% of all hospitals in the U.S. run Infor applications, as well as 19 of the top 20 automotive suppliers and 8 of the top 10 fashion brands.

Executive Opinion

CEO of Infor, Charles Phillips, said, "Koch and Golden Gate Capital have been phenomenal partners for Infor, and all of our 17,300 employees are excited about this milestone as we prepare for the next stage of growth,"

Koch Executive Vice President and CEO of Enterprises for Koch Industries, Inc, Jim Hannan, said, “Koch was a customer of Infor before we became an investor in the Company, and Koch Industries’ companies continue to move their most mission critical applications to Infor CloudSuites. Infor’s innovative products have helped lead our digital transformation as we continue to deploy them globally for 120,000 employees.”

Recent Acquisitions

In September 2018, Infor acquired an industry leader in cloud-based hospitality solutions, Vivonet. In October 2018, Infor also acquired GitLinks. Infor has around 17,300 employees and over 68,000 customers in more than 170 countries.

Jelurida, the Blockchain Software company, recently announced their smart contract life cycle management framework to integrate enterprise systems with their blockchain software.

Jelurida enables enterprises to adopt and develop Blockchain applications using the Nxt and Ardor technologies. Ardor platform based Ignis Lightweight Contracts are coded in Java and uses two-step deployment process minimizing data stored in smart contracts and at the same time provide maximum data security.

According to the announcement, trigger transaction serves input data to Ignis Lightweight Contracts process and the output results are registered on the blockchain. Thus, the whole process of upgrading a smart contract is simplified just by deploying a new version of the code and updating future trigger transactions. Ignis Lightweight Contracts do not store any state information, like token balances, and hence it is now possible to develop apps that interface between external data sources and the Ardor blockchain. Ignis smart contract can now serve as a secure bridge between legacy systems and the blockchain.


Innovative "hashed secret" solution along with the security framework elevates the level of confidence in financial and data security while using the Ardor platform's public distributed ledger. Security framework allows ease of deployments for verification and approval nodes to replicate contract calculations and outputs of the executing account. Jelurida's "hashed secret" solution ensures funds are never permanently locked in an Ignis Lightweight Contract if a contract fails to trigger.

Jelurida also activated Asset Properties and the Max Property Group (MPG) child chain. Asset Properties allows linking asset relationships and asset states on blockchain simplifying supply chain processes. KYC / AML verified users of Max Property Group will have on-chain real estate and investments.

The Max Property Group (MPG) child chain is the Ardor platform's most distinct real-world use case. The new guidance demonstrates three simple steps for tokenizing an agricultural supply chain.

Rubrik, Cloud data management company has raised $261 million Series E funding round from Bain Capital Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, and IVP. The total equity raised is more than $553 million.

This puts Rubrik at $3.3 billion valuation which is more than double the valuation of $1.3 Billion when it raised $180 Million in Series D funding round in 2017.

According to announcement, Rubrik will use the latest funding to support the launch of major new products planned for 2019 and for general corporate purposes. These new products are geared towards the enterprise transition to the public cloud and the explosion of data.

Rubrik launched many new products such as Polaris, the award-winning and first SaaS platform of record for enterprise data, and Rubrik Andes 5.0, the most comprehensive release to date of the Company's core Cloud Data Management solution. Rubrik also launched purpose-built Rubrik Accelerator product for Azure to provide enterprise data protection and application mobility across data centers to Microsoft Azure cloud.

Executive Opinion:

Former CEO at Symantec and Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, Enrique Salem, said, "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. When we met Bipul, we were instantly impressed with his vision as well as the skill and tenacity of his team. 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."

Co-founder and CEO at Rubrik, Bipul Sinha, said,  "Our previous fundraising in 2017 was focused on global expansion and increasing our reach into the enterprise market. Now, with thousands of customers around the world, industry-leading customer satisfaction ratings, and numerous analyst and industry awards, we have customers asking us to solve new challenges. This new capital will speed the introduction of exciting new products in 2019 that will solve those customer challenges and significantly expand our strategic footprint in the enterprise."

The announcement cited IDC estimate of $48 billion data management market and Rubrik is set out to disrupt existing data management with their cloud solutions. Rubrik also said that with investment in go-to-market activities with the Company's partners including Microsoft, Cisco, AWS, SAP, Nutanix, Oracle, VMware, Google Cloud, Pure Storage, and others.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an Indian IT conglomerate, announced the launch of its new offering TCS Connected Intelligence Data Lake for Business on AWS Marketplace.

Data lake is a centralized data repository that allows one to store structured and unstructured data at any scale. Non-relational and relational data from IoT devices, websites, mobile apps, social media, and corporate applications are generally stored in data lake. Such data can further be analyzed for different use cases as Machine Learning, Predictive analytics, data discovery, and profiling etc.

The platform launched on AWS marketplace helps capture and manage all types of data in a central Hadoop repository. To solve business challenges, users can then pull elements with the help of a simple drag and drop interface to quickly generate analytics and gain insights. TCS’ Connected Intelligence Platform

General Manager and Group Head, Digital Software & Solutions Group, TCS,  Seeta Hariharan, said,
“Getting customer-centric initiatives powered by big data launched quickly is a business imperative for all companies. Our Connected Intelligence Data Lake for Business simplifies the process by rendering the complex underlying technology invisible to business and IT users, empowering them to take a more hands-on approach, build their own analytics and potentially identify new use cases for digital transformation.”

The Data Lake is backed by TCS’ Connected Intelligence Platform and serves as a single data platform to use analytics in solving business challenges. The TCS data lake platform is pre-integrated with AWS cloud, thus saving the time taken to install and integrate multiple Hadoop components to work together. The platform allows users to use the data visualization tools of their choice and allows businesses to quickly connect, transform, and publish their data

TCS Connected Intelligence Data Lake for BusinessTM is available now on AWS Marketplace on Amazon Web Services (AWS).