Technology

In a DevOps world, the operations part of the equation needs to be on call to deal with issues as they come up 24/7. We used to use pagers. Todaysolutions like PagerDuty and VictorOps have been created to place this kind of requirement in a modern digital context. Today, Splunk bought VictorOps for $120 million in cash and Splunk securities.

Ita company that makes a lot of sense for Splunk, a log management tool that has been helping customers deal with oodles of information being generated from back-end systems for many years. With VictorOps, the company gets a system to alert the operations team when something from that muddle of data actually requires their attention.

Splunk has been making moves in recent years to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help make sense of the data and provide a level of automation required when the sheer volume of data makes it next to impossible for humans to keep up. VictorOps fits within that approach.

&The combination of machine data analytics and artificial intelligence from Splunk with incident management from VictorOps creates a ‘Platform of Engagement& that will help modern development teams innovate faster and deliver better customer experiences,& Doug Merritt, president and CEO at Splunk said in a statement.

In a blog post announcing the deal, VictorOps founder and CEO Todd Vernon said the two companies& missions are aligned. &Upon close, VictorOps will join SplunkIT Markets group and together will provide on-call technical staff an analytics and AI-driven approach for addressing the incident lifecycle, from monitoring to response to incident management to continuous learning and improvement,& Vernon wrote.

It should come as no surprise that the two companies have been working together even before the acquisition. &Splunk has been an important technical partner of ours for some time, and through our work together, we discovered that we share a common viewpoint that Modern Incident Management is in a period of strategic change where data is king, and insights from that data are key to maintaining a market leading strategy,& Vernon wrote in the blog post.

VictorOps was founded 2012 and has raised over $33 million, according to data on Crunchbase. The most recent investment was a $15 million Series B in December 2016.

The deal is expected to close in Splunkfiscal second quarter subject to customary closing conditions, according to a statement from Splunk.

While Uber has changed the way that many think about transportation, italso changed the way that many drunk people find their way home at night. Rather than haphazardly hailing a cab or driving home under the influence, Uber provides a relatively safer way to get from point A to B on an indulgent evening.

The company has been curious about its drunk users, applying for a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for a system that would use machine learning to determine the ‘state& of a passenger.

While the patent limits itself to a dry discussion of ‘user state,& it seems that what Uber is really interested in is detecting the difference between users of sound mind and users who are under the influence.

CNN first spotted the patent, which describes a method of measuring the userbehavior on their phone against their usual behavior, using information like location, data input accuracy, data input speed, interface interaction behavior, the angle at which the user is holding their device, or even the speed at which they&re walking.

The patent also describes a system that would notify drivers of the passenger‘state&, theoretically letting them prepare for the adventure ahead.

The patent says that riders in a particularly unusual state may be matched with drivers who have special training or expertise, or may not be provided service at all.

In the vast majority of cases, hailing an Uber is one of the safest ways for a drunk person to get home. On the other hand, Uber has run into issues with drivers who have sexually assaulted passengers. CNN reports that at least 103 Uber drivers in the US have been accused of sexually assaulting or abusing passengers in the last four years, with many of the police reports noting that the passengers were inebriated or had been drinking before getting into the car.

Notifying drivers when a passenger is drunk could save those drivers the headache of hauling around an out-of-control passenger, or prevent drivers from dealing with passengers who puke in their car, which may lead to disputed charges. But the system described in this patent could also allow for predatory behavior by malicious drivers.

There is also the broader implications of Uber knowing when you&re drunk. The company has not been a beacon of trust with regards to user data, having to pay $20,000 for using &God View& to spy on users and reportedly paying to cover up a massive data breach.

Of course, only a fraction of a companypatents ever make it into the final product. Only time will tell if Uberidea to monitor the state of passengers will end up in the app.

Workday, the cloud-based platform that offers HR and other back-office apps for businesses, is making an acquisition to expand its portfolio of services: Itbuying Adaptive Insights, a provider of cloud-based business planning and financial modelling tools, for $1.55 billion. The acquisition is notable because Adaptive Insights had filed for an IPO as recently as May 17.

Workday says that the $1.55 billion price tag includes &the assumption of approximately $150 million in unvested equity issued to Adaptive Insights employees& related to that IPO. This deal is expected to close in Q3 of this year.

IPO filings are known to sometimes trigger M-A. Most recently, PayPal announced it would acquire iZettle just after the latter filed to go public. Skype was acquired by Microsoft in 2011 while it was waiting to IPO after previous owner eBay said it would spin it off.

Workday itself went public in 2012 and currently has a market cap of nearly $27 billion.

The deal will give Workday another string to its bow, in its attempt to become the go-to place for all for back-office services for its business customers: the company plans to integrate Adaptive Insights& tools into its existing platform.

&Adaptive Insights is an industry leader with its Business Planning Cloud platform, and together with Workday, we will help customers accelerate their finance transformation in the cloud,& said Aneel Bhusri, Co-Founder and CEO, Workday, in a statement. &I am excited to welcome the Adaptive Insights team to Workday and look forward to coming together to continue delivering industry-leading products that equip finance organizations to make even faster, better business decisions to adapt to change and to drive growth.&

The two have been working together as partners since 2015.

In the case of Adaptive Insights, which says it has ‘thousands& of customers, its growth mirrors that both of cloud services and specifically about how business intelligence has developed into a distinct software category of its own over the years, with not just the CFO but an army of in-house analysts relying on analytics of a business& data to help make small and big decisions.

&The marketopportunity hereis huge as the CFO has become apower player in the C-Suite,& CEO Tom Bogan told TechCrunch when it raised$75 million in 2015, when it first passed the billion-dollar mark for its valuation. Bogan previously also held a role as chairman of Citrix. &As a former CFO myself, I have seen this first hand and it is accelerating.& Other examples of this force includes TwitterAnthonyNoto catapulting from CFO to COO (and is now a CEO running SoFi). Around 25 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are former CFOs.

Adaptive Insights had raised $175 million prior to this.

Bogan will stay on and lead the business and report directly to Bhusri.

&Joining forces with Workday accelerates our vision to drive holistic business planning and digital transformation for our customers,& said Bogan, in a separate statement. &Most importantly, both Adaptive Insights and Workday have an employee-first and customer-centric approach to developing enterprise software that will only increase the power of the combined companies.&

More generally, while we have certainly seen a much wider opening of the door for tech IPOs this year, there is also an argument to be made for continuing consolidation it enterprise IT, in particular with regards to cloud services that might have small or potentially negative margins.

Adaptive Insights was not immune to that: the company in its public listing filing said that its previous fiscal year brough tin $106.5 million in revenues, up 30 percent from the year before, but it also posted a loss of $42.7 million in the same period. That was narrower than the $59.1 million it posted in 2016. Combined with the bigger trend of all-in-one platforms packing a bigger punch with businesses, it might have meant that Workdayoffer was too compelling to refuse.

This looks like Workdaybiggest acquisition yet, but the company has been on a spree of sorts: just last week it announced the acquisition of RallyTeam to beef up its machine learning.