CircleCI, a San Francisco-based continuous integration and delivery platform provider whose customers include Facebook, Spotify and Sony, has announced the close of a $31 million (£22.5m) series C funding round.

The funding round was led by Top Tier Capital Partners, alongside Industry Ventures and Heavybit, joining existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal, and DFJ Ventures.

The company helps organisations’ development teams automate the build, test and deploy processes in order to release more quickly and nip bugs in the bud. Take Sony as an example. One project in Sony Japan, written in Go made up of Docker-based microservices, offers shared services, such as authentication and user management, across a variety of web applications. Through CircleCI, once a developer commits to GitHub, CircleCI triggers a build, pulls down the code, compiles the Go binaries, creates a deployable image with Docker Build, runs tests, eventually deploying in around 15 minutes.

It is this combination of speed and solidity that makes the company’s value proposition, as CircleCI CEO Jim Rose explains. “In a few short years, we have become one of the largest build systems on the planet. With this latest round of funding, we can now harness the incredible data and insights we’ve collected to invest in prediction and intelligent automation to help all users of CircleCI build better software, faster,” said Rose in a statement.

“Our mission is to give everyone the ability to build and deliver software at the speed of imagination.”

Perhaps one of the more interesting – and prescient – case studies CircleCI has spoken about is that of Coinbase. The digital currency exchange is a confirmed customer, moving away from software as a service to CircleCI’s enterprise offering, being able to more easily auto-balance test run times as a result.

The company’s total funding now stands at $59 million, following a series B of $18m in 2016, a series A of $6m in 2014, and seed and venture rounds in 2013 and 2012 respectively.

Picture credit: CircleCI

A new study from Amdocs has found that a select number of communications and media providers are rapidly adopting cloud-native technologies, giving them first mover advantage and greater opportunities for innovation.

The study, which was conducted by Analysys Mason, argues that the majority of service providers are moving slowly, hindered by legacy technology and culture. For those who are taking the plunge, the primary reason for moving to cloud-native and DevOps technologies is through greater business agility and innovation – cited by 82% of respondents – rather than cost optimisation (36%).

According to the research, more than 80% of digital, BSS and OSS systems reside on physical or virtualised data centres. By 2022, this is expected to turn on its head, with over 90% of systems being run on cloud infrastructure, more than two thirds of which will be on hybrid cloud.

Different areas have different priorities. 82% of respondents either already have, or are proactively working on, a roadmap to evolve their digital, BSS and OSS systems to be cloud-native. Almost two thirds (64%) say microservices architecture will be a requirement for new systems within two years, while only 46% currently use DevOps in limited areas of their IT environments today.

The report asserts that companies at the forefront of this revolution are Netflix, Amazon and Spotify. Indeed, this publication has covered on multiple occasions how Netflix has used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a wide variety of use cases; a piece from August argues why Netflix is ‘the ideal blueprint for cloud-native computing.’

As the report puts it: “Web-scale companies all deploy their business platforms on virtualised data centre infrastructures that have the advantage [of] inherent lower cost and automatic scaling and reliability features. Some are using private clouds, while others use public clouds. Without software that is designed for the cloud (not just ‘cloud-ready’), it is difficult for web-scale companies to achieve the required reliability, however.”

“Communications and media providers are following the initial lead of web-scale software companies such as Amazon and Netflix in adopting cloud computing, DevOps practices, and cloud-native software architecture,” said Dr. Mark H Mortensen, Analysys Mason research director of digital transformation. “What we see from the survey is that this is mostly being driven by the need to boost agility and innovation.

“Even though full transition is almost a decade away, those providers who can bring these technologies into their everyday operations quickly will secure the strongest competitive advantages,” Mortensen added.

Google Cloud has announced its latest infrastructure expansion plans, opening five new regions this year and commissioning three subsea cables in 2019.

The first quarter of this year will see data centre facilities opened in the Netherlands and Montreal, with Los Angeles, Finland, and Hong Kong to follow, while the cables will cover four continents respectively.

The first cable, Curie, will make Google the first major non-telecom company – in their words – to build a private intercontinental cable, connecting Chile and Los Angeles. Havftue will be a project alongside Facebook, Aqua Comms and Bulk Infrastructure to connect the US to Denmark and Ireland, while HK-G will be a collaboration with RTI-C and NEC, focusing on Hong Kong and Guam alongside other major hubs in Asia.

The plans will put the total number of subsea cables at 11 – four are currently operational with four more in the works – and cloud data centre regions at 53 on 18 locations across five continents.

Writing in a blog post confirming the news, Google Cloud VP Ben Treynor explained: “Simply put, it wouldn’t be possible to deliver products like Machine Learning Engine, Spanner, BigQuery, and other Google Cloud Platform and G Suite services at the quality of service users expect without the Google network. Our cable systems provide the speed, capacity and reliability Google is known for worldwide, and at Google Cloud, our customers are able to make use of the same network infrastructure that powers Google’s own services.

“While we haven’t hastened the speed of light, we have built a superior cloud network as a result of the well-provisioned direct paths between our cloud and end-users,” Treynor added.

While the new investments are certainly good news to those involved – Chile will see its first subsea cable land in the better part of two decades – the one continent Google’s cloud misses is Africa. AWS fares no better with Microsoft – announcing data centres in Cape Town and Johannesburg in May – the only of the big three cloud providers with a presence on the world’s second most-populous continent.

You can read the full blog post here.

The band is getting together again at Veeam – to a point. The Swiss-based backup software provider has announced the acquisition of N2WS, a company specialising in Amazon Web Services (AWS) backup and disaster recovery, on whose board sits Veeam co-founder and former CEO Ratmir Timashev.

The deal, for $42.5 million (£30.8m), will see N2WS remain as a standalone company, with the firm being branded as ‘A Veeam Company’ going forward.

Founded in 2012, N2WS offers a cloud-native backup tool built specifically for AWS. The company’s partnership with the IaaS leader includes being distributed as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in the AWS Marketplace, while the company’s customers include Cisco, Coca-Cola, Harvard University and Oracle. The company received two rounds of funding in 2017 – a non-equity assistance in January and a venture round in May – with the total raised undisclosed on both occasions.

Writing in the company’s official blog, Peter McKay, Veeam CEO, said the acquisition would help position the company ‘for continued hyper-growth’ in its cloud business. “Veeam saw the potential in N2WS early on, and during the short period of time N2WS has proven itself as a leader in the backup and recovery market for AWS,” McKay wrote. “We saw great potential, not only with the company, but also the AWS market, such that a full acquisition of the company made sense strategically.

“This deal is a major plus for our family,” McKay added. “The acquisition strengthens our technology prowess even further, and allows the two teams to work closely together, benefitting from each other’s expertise.”

In its own blog post announcing the deal, N2WS said its plans for the coming year include product UI and UX updates and support for hybrid workloads.

Last week Veeam posted its financial results with $827 million in total bookings revenue for 2017. The company said it was ‘well-poised’ to become a billion-dollar software company by the end of 2018, adding it had secured more $500,000-plus deals in 2017 than in the previous six years combined.

A majority of organisations had to deploy their disaster recovery solution at least once in the past year with many unsure as to the specifics of their availability plans, according to a new report from Syncsort.

The study, which gathered results from several reports polling more than 5,600 IT professionals globally, found that 85% of respondents either had no recovery plan or were ‘less than 100% confident’ in their plan. 31% of organisations lost a day or more due to failover, with 28% losing a few hours and 35% losing up to an hour.

Naturally, security is at the top of the conversation when it comes to challenges for cloud deployments. Flipping the question slightly, respondents most frequently cited cloud (43%) as their top security challenge, ahead of sophistication of attacks (37%) and ransomware (35%). Security is also at the top for initiatives companies will undertake in the coming 24 months, cited by 49% of respondents, ahead of business continuity (47%).

Almost two in three companies say they perform security audits on their systems, with 39% doing it annually and 10% auditing every two years or more, while 42% of companies polled said they had experienced a migration failure when transforming their legacy technology.

Writing for this publication earlier this month, Paul Blore, managing director at cloud networking provider Netmetix, noted the benefits of cloud-based disaster recovery systems. “If it isn’t already, business continuity must become a priority for organisations,” Blore wrote. “It’s now easier than ever to migrate to the cloud and take advantage of the inbuilt backup and disaster recovery options available.”

“IT leaders are under immense pressure to provide an enterprise infrastructure that can sustain severe threats and secure vital information while enabling data accessibility and business intelligence,” said Terry Plath, vice president of global services at Syncsort. “Business resilience requires the right mix of planning and technology, and this survey did a thorough job of uncovering how businesses are tackling this increasingly complex and multi-faceted challenge.”

According to the latest data from Synergy Research, five metros comprise more than a quarter of the worldwide colocation market and the top 20 account for 59% of worldwide retail and wholesale colocation revenues.

London, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo and Washington were the top five metros, with Chicago, Dallas, Frankfurt, Silicon Valley and Singapore comprising the top 10. Amsterdam, Atlanta, Beijing, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Paris, Phoenix, Seattle, Sydney, and Toronto were in the top 20.

On the vendor side, in Q3 Equinix was the market leader by revenue in eight of the top 20 metros. Digital Realty will comprise five more once their acquisition of DuPont Fabros operations reaches a full quarter. Other vendors in the mix include 21Vianet, China Telecom, and CyrusOne.

“While we are seeing reasonably robust growth across all major metros and market segments, one number that jumps out is the wholesale growth rate in the Washington/Northern Virginia metro area,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy.

“It is by far the largest wholesale market in the world and for it to be growing at 20% is particularly noteworthy.

“The broader picture is that data centre outsourcing and cloud services continue to drive the colocation market, and the geographic distribution of the world’s corporations is focusing the colocation market on a small number of major metro areas,” Dinsdale added.

Earlier this month, Synergy Research argued that data centre mergers and acquisitions in 2017 surpassed 2015 and 2016’s figures combined, producing 48 transactions last year compared with 45 for the previous two years.

Cloud storage provider Dropbox has filed confidentially for IPO, according to a Bloomberg report.

According to the report, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan will lead the potential listing, with Dropbox aiming to list in the first half of this year. The company’s most recent valuation, in 2014, was at $10 billion.

The move, alongside Spotify’s bid to go public at the very start of this year, represents the first tech IPOs of 2018. Writing in October, venture capitalist Fred Wilson said that 2018 and 2019 will be ‘bumper years’ for tech IPOs ‘assuming the markets behave.’ Dropbox regularly made pundits’ lists of potential tech IPOs this year, including this MarketWatch piece on New Year’s Eve.

It was the better part of 11 years ago when Drew Houston posted his app idea onto Hacker News with the tagline ‘throw away your USB drive.’ Initial feedback from users was positive – apart from one user who insisted it was ‘trivial’ to build such a system in Linux – and the product officially launched in September 2008. A series A funding round of $6 million followed in November, with total funding exceeding $2 billion up to series D and including credit lines.

Major rivals include Microsoft’s OneDrive and Box – although the two companies were at pains to say they weren’t direct competitors – while Houston regaled the story of how Steve Jobs was interested in acquiring Dropbox, adding that he saw the company as a feature, rather than a product.

Unlike Box, whose focus on the enterprise was clear pretty much from its inception, Dropbox took longer to move in. the company made its most concerted push to the enterprise market in November 2015 with Dropbox Enterprise, although by this time it already had Dropbox for Business with a major user base. Earlier that year, Dropbox said its total number of users had exceeded 400 million.

In more recent times, the company hit a $1 billion annual run rate at the start of last year, becoming one of only five software as a service (SaaS) providers to do so as well as being the fastest. In comparison, it took Salesforce approximately 10 years to hit this figure; by August 2017, the original SaaS king passed the $10 billion run rate.

More than anything else, Dropbox continually refused to be rushed or drawn in to IPO discussions. Houston always insisted that Dropbox would move when the time was right. As Recode put it, the joke was that the company was set to go public in the fourth quarter of that year… every year.

In the annual Forbes Cloud 100 list, first published in 2016 showcasing the hottest private cloud companies – privately owned, rather than ‘private cloud’, of course – Dropbox secured second place in both years. As this publication put it earlier this week when Veeam – another company on the list and another company not rushing going public – issued its financial results, the list has always been an excellent barometer of the best private companies who could be ready to take the next step.

If all goes to plan, Dropbox will become the first Y Combinator-backed company to go public.

As more organisations get deeper into their cloud initiatives, their infrastructures become more complex – yet according to new research from WinMagic, security and compliance is struggling to keep up.

The study, conducted by Viga, polled more than 1,000 IT decision makers and found that while an overwhelming 98% of respondents say they use the cloud in some capacity – with on average half of a company’s infrastructure being cloud-based – security is lacking in comparison. Only one in three respondents said their data was at least partially encrypted in the cloud, while a greater percentage (39%) admitted they did not have unbroken security audit trails across VMs in the cloud.

Despite these failings, security remains, as it always has done, the biggest concern about cloud-based workloads. 58% cited security specifically as their largest issue, followed by protecting sensitive data from unauthorised access (55%) – which amounts to pretty much the same thing – and the increased complexity of infrastructure (44%).

The report also finds that the common concept of shared responsibility is – again – not a universal concept among IT decision makers. One in five said they thought sole responsibility for the compliance of data stored on cloud services rested with the vendor, while only 39% correctly noted they considered themselves ultimately responsible.

Each cloud provider differs of course – although it does not quite mitigate the 20% in the survey who believed they were covered by their vendor’s SLA – but to illustrate, AWS outlines it thus. The vendor, according to this document, is responsible for security ‘of’ the cloud – compute, storage, networking – while the customer is responsible for security ‘in’ the cloud, such as customer data, applications, and identity and access management.

“The simple fact is that businesses must get the controls in place to manage their data, including taking the strategic decision that anything they would not want to see in the public domain must be encrypted,” said Mark Hickman, WinMagic chief operating officer.

Cloud backup software provider Veeam says it is “well-poised” to become a billion dollar software company by the end of 2018 after posting $827 million (£611m) in total bookings revenue for 2017.

The Swiss-based company said it secured more $500,000-plus deals in 2017 than in the previous six years combined, taking its total number of customers to 282,000. Deals which were $1 million and above saw 500% growth in 2017.

Customers include more than half (57%) of the Forbes Global 2000, the company added, while client wins in 2017 included The Ameritas Life Insurance Company and Industrial Scientific. Speaking of Forbes, 2017 also saw Veeam being placed in the Forbes Cloud 100 list of top private cloud companies for the first time, being ranked #27, while the company added more than 1,000 employees last year, saying 2018 will be where Veeam makes its people “a major priority”.

“Organisations across the globe are dealing with massive data sprawl, and the need to ensure availability of data and applications across a complex multi-cloud environment has never been greater,” said Peter McKay, Veeam president and co-CEO in a statement. “Veeam continues to grow at double-digit rates as legacy competitors experience a decline.

“Our leadership and momentum in delivering available for any app, any data, across any cloud has us well poised to be a billion dollar software company by the end of 2018,” McKay added.

With these excellent results – allied to a $600m-plus year in 2016 – the company has been under the microscope of investors for some time. As far back as 2015, Veeam was telling the media it planned to stay private. Ratmir Timashev, co-founder and then-CEO, told CNBC that staying private would give the company “the ability to execute without pressure from external investors.” The company is also rare in the space in not being propped up by venture capital rounds, although it does have a strategic partnership in place with Insight Venture Partners, the firm acquiring a minority stake in Veeam in 2013.

The cloud tech M&A position is an interesting one right now. This time last year, received wisdom – according to Byron Deeter of Bessemer Venture Partners – was that the IPO space was running a little dry with greater emphasis on acquisitions as a result. This changed with a healthy 2017 for cloudy IPOs, including MongoDB, Cloudera, Okta, and MuleSoft. Speaking to this publication in June after securing $46 million in series D funding, Dan Phillips, co-founder of CloudHealth Technologies, noted the market was “showing some positive signs”, outlining the company’s future plans did involve going public.

Of the inaugural Forbes Cloud 100 list in 2016, 10 companies did not make it to the 2017 offering because they had ‘graduated’, as Forbes put it, to sale or IPO. Cloudera was in the top 10 that year, alongside AppDynamics, acquired by Cisco in March. The Forbes Cloud 100 therefore is always an interesting benchmark of companies who are ripe on the vine – even if Veeam’s only plans right now are to grow into a billion dollar company.

A new report from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) and Ensono argues that while the vast majority of organisations are undertaking digital transformation initiatives – led by various members of the C-suite – KPIs are not aligning with objectives.

The study, conducted by Vanson Bourne, polled 200 IT and business decision makers in the UK, finding the usual disparity between IT and business. For instance, 22% on respondents on the biz side said they believed their organisation had completed its digital transformation initiative, compared with only 10% for IT.

Saving costs was considered the primary driver for digital transformation, cited by 72% on the IT side and 68% on business – yet many of the metrics which organisations look to measure the success of their initiatives do not focus on cost-saving. 53% on the biz side said they used costs as a metric, but other areas such as customer satisfaction (52%), profitability (49%) and customer retention (45%) are also highly cited.

36% of all respondents said their CTO was ‘responsible’ for their company’s digital transformation, compared with 28% for the CIO and 26% for the CEO. 34% of respondents said their CIO was a ‘key driver’, compared with 32% and 30% for the CEO and CTO respectively.

“Digital transformation is fundamentally about business transformation. It is about seeing change – facilitated by technology and hybrid IT – as a revenue generator rather than a cost reduction function,” said Simon Ratcliffe, principal consultant at Ensono.

“Primarily, it needs to be seen as an opportunity for growth – growth though innovation and the delivery of the best service, product and experience to customers and through finding new and quicker routes to market,” Ratcliffe added. “The focus on cost savings is outdated and will negate transformation efforts, limiting its scope and impact.

“This could ultimately have longer-term implications for the business in the digital era.”

The blurred lines between IT and business makes for an interesting case in point. Earlier this week, a report from Interoute – focusing on respondents from the IT side – found that more than half of IT leaders in the UK were struggling to secure boardroom approval for digital transformation objectives.