Google has acquired chatbot startup Onward in what’s likely an attempt to improve its own customer service tools or expand the number of products available as part of its business suite of applications.

The technology uses natural language processing to analyse the content of customer messages to support teams, alongside other information such as where they are located, whether they’re logged in to any services, and how they have used the service in the past. This data then allows the chatbot to tailor its replies, offering a much better customer experience.

The company has also created its own visual bot builder, which allows customers to build their own responses based on the answers customers give to questions.

The tool integrates with a whole host of other services, such as Zendesk, Help Scout, Salesforce, Hubspot, Shopify, Spree, and Solidus to manage customer conversations, integrate leads with a CRM and track orders, offering a complete platform for managing customer experience.

Onward’s Agent Q virtual assistant can be used as an extension of this, providing product recommendations, bringing together review and pricing information from across the web to offer super-accurate, real-time data for customers.

It follows Google’s decision earlier in the year to funnel cash into AI startups hoping to exploit the Google Assistant platform.

“We started Onward with the mission of allowing computers to participate in natural, human conversations,” Onward wrote in the announcement on its website. “With Google, we’ll be able to expand the reach of the technologies that power Onward. These core technologies are what got us excited in the first place, and we are excited to bring them to Google.”

Onward’s co-founders Rémi Cossart and Pramod Thammaiah will both join Google, as will some of its team, although it’s not clear which departments they will join.

Palo Alto has bought cloud threat defence company RedLock in a deal said to be worth $173 million.

The purchase will allow Palo Alto Networks to add to its cyber security portfolio, including cloud security analytics, advanced threat detection, continuous security, and compliance monitoring. Palo Alto said new products integrating the new technology will launch on the market next year, helping security teams respond to threats in real time.

The deal will allow Palo Alto customers to automate their responses to cyber risks instead of manually having to assess the potential impact of a hack. At the moment, the company provides API-based security services such as its VM-Series firewall, Aperture, Evident, and GlobalProtect cloud service, in use by more than 6,000 customers worldwide.

“We are thrilled to add RedLock’s technology to our cloud security offerings,” Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks said. “The addition of their technologies allows us to offer the most comprehensive security for multi-cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, and significantly strengthens our cloud strategy going forward.”

“We are excited to join Palo Alto Networks to bring together the strength of our cloud analytics and their industry-leading compliance technologies to help security teams protect their organizations,” Varun Badhwar, co-founder and CEO of RedLock added.

The deal will close during Palo Alto Networks fiscal first quarter, as long as the proposed deal meets the company’s expectations. RedLock co-founders, Varun Badhwar and Gaurav Kumar, will join Palo Alto Networks, although neither company has revealed whether any of its other staff will move over to the Networking business.

In February this year, RedLock security specialists highlighted flaws in Tesla’s cloud network by breaching its systems and stealing resources needed to mine for cryptocurrencies.

Cloud bursting is a rather nebulous buzzword that sounds cool but, I’m afraid, has nothing to do with Kate Bush. Instead, it’s the term used to describe a setup where you run your business mostly on your own kit, but also have a set of cloud accounts sitting idle, ready to take on extra “bursts” of work when demand peaks.

Isn’t that already the idea behind hybrid cloud?

Yes and no. Hybrid cloud is an umbrella term for dividing up your computing resources across local and off-premises servers; cloud bursting is a specific way of using those resources.

In practice, a cloud burst setup might use containerised VMs and some form of load orchestration package to shift containers to locations where user sessions can reach them. It will probably require quite a lot of work at the database design level as well, so that this too can be replicated, multi-homed or remotely accessed. In short, cloud bursting isn’t an architecture or a computing philosophy, but a capability of your entire technology estate.

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Is it just an agile implementation of hybrid cloud?

That’s a question of semantics. A cloud bursting setup should quickly respond to unforeseen changes in demand, but this isn’t quite what’s conventionally meant by “agile”. Agility is about being able to retool your code quickly to adapt to changing circumstances, whereas cloud bursting requires everything to be in place well before the high-load day comes.

You need to have your cloud accounts in place and paid up, you need to be sure that your code platform will run on the cloud, and you need to make sure that it’s actually capable of meeting the demands you want to place on it. Doing this properly involves a great deal of pre-emptive development and testing. I’d be very wary of a business that went into a cloud bursting project with an “agile” mindset.

Is a cloud bursting setup is cheaper than regular cloud hosting?

It might work out that way, but the two models aren’t perfectly comparable. Hybrid cloud usually tends to imply an IAAS model, whereas cloud bursting finds most interest from heavy SAAS users.

Cloud bursting also relies on your orchestration software correctly working out when to spin up the offsite services and incur the associated charges – which involves an element of voodoo, as it’s exquisitely difficult to distinguish between blips and booms as they’re happening. A hybrid cloud setup with plenty of slack capacity may or may not work out cheaper, but it’s likely to be more dependable, and have a more predictable cost.

When is cloud bursting the right answer?

There are some such scenarios, but they’re mostly inside the world of IT itself. For example, if you’re an antivirus developer combatting zero-day exploits, you’ll want the ability to scale your download links out into the cloud on bad virus days. Some classes of simulation can also easily parcel up workloads and hand them off to compute nodes with no regard for where those nodes are hosted. Unfortunately, this model has become controversial, since it’s currently mostly employed by Bitcoin-mining trojans.

What’s the key downside of a cloud bursting approach?

Finance directors probably aren’t going to love cloud burst projects, because (as we’ve noted) the costs are unpredictable by design. What’s more, since the whole point of cloud bursting is that you don’t use it regularly, it’s only when you really need to fire up those cloud servers that you discover that a recent update has unexpectedly broken your meticulously crafted handover routines.

These inherent risks will tend to push most businesses back in the direction of a more traditional hybrid architecture.

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Why are vendors pushing cloud bursting as the next big thing?

I suspect that the vendors aren’t trying to get you specifically into cloud bursting. They want to make you think more generally about where your computing resources live.

A little research, and my own anecdotal experience, suggests that very few companies have actually committed to a full-on cloud bursting model – which probably tells you everything you need to know.

Oracle has unveiled its Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database, helping developers deploy massive applications, with low latency, high-security and simple scaling.

The company explained the addition to its autonomous database portfolio has been specifically designed for apps such as those that demand heavy UI personalisation, shopping carts, online fraud detection, gaming and advertising, thanks to its flexibility.

It uses simple APIs for developers to introduce into their apps to cut down the amount of manual manipulation they need to do in order to get the apps up and running. For example, instead of dealing with and managing servers, storage expansion, cluster deployments, software installation, or backup, they can instead focus on the output – ie., the applications themselves.

Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database also supports Python, Node.JS and Java, as well as offering interoperability with standard relational and standard JSON data models, whether a business wants to deploy their apps in the cloud or on-premises.

“We continue to leverage our revolutionary autonomous capabilities to transform the database market,” said Andrew Mendelsohn, executive vice president, Oracle Database. “Our latest self-driving database cloud service, Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database, provides extreme reliability and performance at very low costs to achieve a highly flexible application development framework.”

Oracle’s autonomous database was first introduced last October, with its automated cybersecurity the first product in the line. It now comprises the Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud and an autonomous transaction processing service under the same brand name. IT also includes Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud, Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud and Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud – all launched in May.

“Embedding AI and machine learning in these cloud services will help organizations innovate in revolutionary new ways,” Amit Zavery, executive vice president of development at Oracle Cloud Platform said after the launch of Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud, Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud, and Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud. “These new cloud services are the latest in a series of steps from Oracle to incorporate industry-first autonomous capabilities that will enable customers to significantly reduce operational costs, increase productivity, and decrease risk.”