Services like video streaming, gaming, media-intensive advertising and marketing technology are putting more strain on bandwidth and backend latency than ever before due to the surge of online traffic in the last year. But for most organizations in today’s usage-based cloud world, that can represent a huge cost in compute power — or a major investment in a company’s own latency technology — to try to address that.

This has created an opportunity for startups building optimization tools. Today, one called Granulate — which has built software for organizations to handle those loads more intelligently and cost-effectively — is announcing a round of funding after seeing a huge boost in business in the last 10 months, with customer growth up 360% and revenues growing 570%.

The Tel Aviv startup has picked up $30 million, a Series B, led by Red Dot Capital Partners, with previous backers Insight Partners, TLV Partners and Hetz Ventures, and new backer Dawn Capital, also participating.

The timing of this Series B speaks to the demand in the market right now: It comes on the back of Granulate closing a $12 million Series A only in April last year. Investors say that its business growth is what prompted them to re-up so soon.

“Granulate’s unique technology and impressive growth since their last funding round reflects a rising market demand for their game-changing optimization solution,” said Yaniv Stern, managing partner at Red Dot Capital Partners, in a statement. “For companies facing rising infrastructure costs or focusing on operating cost reduction, Granulate offers a solution that can drive additional improvement regardless of any other solutions already deployed by their clients.”

Granulate is not disclosing its valuation with this latest round, which brings the total raised by the startup to $45 million. 

The opportunity in the market that Granulate is targeting is the fact that media-heavy content, and services like e-commerce that rely on efficient responsiveness on sites and apps to keep people from abandoning their shopping carts, are all on the rise.

But as companies look to keep customers happy with better-quality services, they are also trying to keep an eye on margins and therefore want to keep infrastructure and computing costs low.

Granulate’s solution is software that sits at the server layer — either in the cloud or on-premises, as a customer prefers — that uses AI to detect workloads that a customer tags as important and prioritize them so that they work more efficiently. Granulate said that its software can improve response times by up to 40%, and throughput up to five times, while reducing costs by up to 60%. The company today has partnerships with AWS and Microsoft’s Azure and is in the “early stages” of talks with Google Cloud Platform.

Bigger tech companies like Netflix, Google and Amazon typically invest huge sums to build their own optimization technology, but it’s an area that smaller organizations (and you can still be huge while still being smaller than companies like Google) will not have the bandwidth — pun intended — to address in the same way.

“We are aware of similar things going on inside of Netflix as what we have built,” Asaf Ezra, co-founder and CEO of Granulate, said in an interview. “But to us, it’s a testament of how large you need to be to address this issue and the talent you need to hire to address the lowest-level issues.”

The company’s customers include at least one major retailer (which it can’t name), AppsFlyer, Period and PicsArt.

What will be interesting to watch is how the growth of 5G will affect the bigger problem: As Ezra notes, it will undoubtedly improve front-end latency.

“5G will not cannibalize Granulate,” he said. “In fact, when it becomes standard, the round trip time will be reduced for data, but the front end will be less of the ratio of the time, while the back-end latency will become more of the problem. 5G would solve only the access to your server, but not latency at the server itself.”

Longer term, it’s likely that Granulate will add more optimization and management solutions around those it already offers for latency, Ezra said, while also looking for ways to stand out apart from others in the same space. Competitors are in the process of some consolidation — witness Spot acquired by NetApp last June — so features based around a wider platform will likely be a key way to keep customers interested.

Chat platforms like Slack have been game-changers when it comes to what business users want and expect out of their work communications. Today, a company that’s aiming to move the goalpost again with an integrated, open-source alternative is announcing some funding to fuel its growth.

Rocket.Chat, a startup and open-source-based platform of the same name used by banks, the U.S. Navy, NGOs and other organizations big and small to set up and run any variety of secure virtual communications services from one place — they can include not just team chat, but also customer service, collaboration platforms covering your staff and outside partners, school classrooms, conferences and more — has raised $19 million.

The company plans to use the funding both to continue adding more customers, but also expanding the platform’s functionality, including more security features, a way to use the service over federated blockchain architecture, apps for marketplaces, options for bots, and more social media and omnichannel customer service integrations, and potentially facilities for virtual events.

As more business interactions have gone virtual, it has essentially opened the door for companies like Rocket.Chat building virtual communications platforms to build in an increasing number of features into what it does.

The Series A round of funding has four lead investors — Valor Capital Group, Greycroft, Monashees and NEA — with e.ventures, Graphene Ventures, ONEVC and DGF also participating. The Porto Alegre, Brazil-based startup (which is incorporated in Delaware) has now raised $27 million to date.

Rocket.Chat is not disclosing its valuation with this round, but it comes on the back of some significant growth in the last year. The startup now has 16 million registered users across 150 countries, with eight million of them monthly active users. Of that 16 million, 11.3 million users registered for the service in the past six months. It’s currently installed on some 845,000 servers, the company said, and has over 1,500 developers building on its platform.

Rocket.Chat’s funding and expanding business comes as part of a bigger focus overall for open-source platforms.

The promise of open source in the world of enterprise IT has been that it provides a platform to customise a service to fit with how the organization in question wants to use it, while at the same time providing tools to make sure it is robust enough in terms of security, extensibility and more for use in a business environment.

Over the years, it has become a big business opportunity, in line with organizations getting more sophisticated in terms of what they expect and need out of their IT services, where off-the-shelf apps may not always fit the bill.

Rocket.Chat positions itself as something of an all-in-one superstore for any and all communications needs, with organizations putting their own services together in whatever way works for their purposes.

It can either be hosted and managed by customers themselves, or used as a cloud-based SaaS, with its pricing ranging between free (for minimal, self-hosted services) to $4 per user per month, or higher, depending on which services customers want to have, whether its hosted and how much the platform is being used each month.

Image Credits: Rocket.Chat

As you can see in the mock-up here, its basic platform looks a little like Slack. But if you are using it for omnichannel communications for customer service, for example, you can build a platform within Rocket.Chat where you incorporate communications from any other platforms that might be used to communicate with customers.

Its work collaboration platform starts with Rocket.Chat’s basic chat interface, but also allows you to integrate alerts and links to other apps that you regularly use, as well as video calls and more. These and other functions built on Rocket.Chat can then be made to interact with each other — for example handing tickets off in customer service to internal tech support teams — or separately.

The idea is that by providing a version that can be hosted and managed by organizations themselves, it gives them more privacy and control over their electronic messaging.

Its thousands of customers reflect an interesting mix of the kinds of organizations that are looking for solutions that do just that.

Gabriel Engel, the CEO and founder, tells me the list includes several military and public sector organizations including the U.S. Navy, financial services companies like Credit Suisse and Citibank, as well as the likes of Cornell, Arizona State, UC Irvine, Bielefeld University and other educational institutions, and a number of other private companies. 

That flexibility does not always play to Rocket.Chat’s advantage, however. Controversially, it seems that the list also includes the other end of the spectrum of organizations that want to keep their messages limited to a very specific audience: Islamic State it turns out also hosts and runs a Rocket.Chat to disseminate messages.

Engel says that while this is not something that the company supports, and that it works with authorities to shut down users like these as much as it can, it’s a consequence of how the service was built:

“We are not able to track usage if they are running Rocket.Chat servers of their own,” he said. “There’s a reason why the U.S. Navy uses Rocket.Chat. And that’s because we cannot track and know what they’re doing. It’s isolated from any external influence, for better or worse.” He added that the company has policies so that if an illicit organization is using its SaaS version, these get taken down in cooperation with authorities. “But just as with Linux, if you download and run Rocket.Chat on your own computer, then obviously it’s out of our reach.”

Hearing about how a platform built with privacy by design can be abused, with seemingly little to be done about it, does seem to offset some of the benefits. The ethics of that predicament, and whether technology can ever solve it, or whether it will be up to government authorities to address, will continue to be a question not just for Rocket.Chat but for all of us.

In the meantime, investors are interested because of the alternative it provides to those groups that need it.

“In today’s environment, organizations must have a secure communication platform to engage teams internally, communicate with customers and partners externally, and connect with safe interest-based communities,” said Dylan Pearce, partner at Greycroft, in a statement. “Rocket.Chat’s world-class management team and open-source community lead the industry in innovation and provide a communications platform capable of serving every person on the planet.” 

Atlassian has made it clear for some time that it’s all in on the cloud, but now it’s official. The company stopped selling new on-prem server licenses as of yesterday. Perhaps to take away the sting of that move for large organizations, today it announced a new all-inclusive enterprise pricing tier.

Atlassian chief revenue officer Cameron Deatsch says that previously the company had offered a free tier and then standard and premium-level paid tiers. “And now this cloud Enterprise Edition will be our highest tier, and what this will allow is for the most complex deployments, the largest customers who need unlimited scale, the customers that have all the security and regulatory requirements, data residency, you name it, — that is what we’re launching starting [today],” Deatsch told me.

What the enterprise tier delivers is unlimited instances across the Atlassian product line for each enterprise customer. That means a big company with multiple divisions could, for instance, have 20 instances of Jira and Confluence deployed with one for each division and a central management console.

While the company is supporting existing on-prem server customers until 2024, the idea is to now move them to the cloud and this offering should help. One thing we have clearly seen is that the pandemic has accelerated the move to the cloud by companies of every size, and this should encourage the company’s largest customers to make the move.

“The reality is, the demand was there, which was great to see, but we actually had this huge pipeline of our largest customers, basically trying to build their plan over the next couple of years to get to our cloud. The general availability of our Enterprise Edition is going to accelerate that even more,” he said.

It’s a move the company has been working toward for some time, but it really began to take shape when they shifted their operations to AWS and rebuilt the entire stack as a set of microservices beginning in 2016. This was the first step toward being able to handle the increased kinds of workloads an enterprise tier would require.

The company reported earnings at the end of last month with revenue of $501.4 million up 23% YoY with over 11,000 net new subscribers, a record for the company. The new enterprise tier won’t help with new customer volume, but it should help with overall revenue as more customers look for cloud solutions and pricing that meets their needs.

Blockbuster news struck late this afternoon when Amazon announced that Jeff Bezos would be stepping back as CEO of Amazon, the company he built from a business in his garage to worldwide behemoth. As he takes on the role of executive chairman, his replacement will be none other than AWS CEO Andy Jassy.

With Jassy moving into his new role at the company, the immediate question is who replaces him to run AWS. Let the games begin. Among the names being tossed about in the rumor mill are Peter DeSantis, vice president of global infrastructure at AWS and Matt Garman, who is vice president of sales and marketing. Both are members of Bezos’ elite executive team known as the S-team and either would make sense as Jassy’s successor. Nobody knows for sure though, and it could be any number of people inside the organization, or even someone from outside. Amazon was not ready to comment on a successor yet with the hand-off still months away.

Holger Mueller, a senior analyst at Constellation Research, says that Jassy is being rewarded for doing a stellar job raising AWS from a tiny side business to one on a $50 billion run rate. “On the finance side it makes sense to appoint an executive who intimately knows Amazon’s most profitable business, that operates in more competitive markets. [Appointing Jassy] ensures that the new Amazon CEO does not break the ‘golden goose’,” Mueller told me.

Alex Smith, VP of channels, who covers the cloud infrastructure market at analyst firm Canalys, says the writing has been on the wall that a transition was in the works. “This move has been coming for some time. Jassy is the second most public-facing figure at Amazon and has lead one of its most successful business units. Bezos can go out on a high and focus on his many other ventures,” Smith said.

Smith adds that this move should enhance AWS’s place in the organization. “I think this is more of an AWS gain, in terms of its increasing strategic importance to Amazon going forward, rather than loss in terms of losing Andy as direct lead. I expect he’ll remain close to that organization.”

Ed Anderson, a Gartner analyst also sees Jassy as the obvious choice to take over for Bezos. “Amazon is a company driven by technology innovation, something Andy has been doing at AWS for many years now. Also, it’s worth noting that Andy Jassy has an impressive track record of building and running a very large business. Under Andy’s leadership, AWS has grown to be one of the biggest technology companies in the world and one of the most impactful in defining what the future of computing will be,” Anderson said.

In the company earnings report released today, AWS came in at $12.74 billion for the quarter up 28% YoY from $9.6 billion a year ago. That puts the company on an elite $50 billion run rate. No other cloud infrastructure vendor, even the mighty Microsoft, is even close in this category. Microsoft stands at around 20% marketshare compared to AWS’s approximately 33% market share.

It’s unclear what impact the executive shuffle will have on the company at large or AWS in particular. In some ways it feels like when Larry Ellison stepped down as CEO of Oracle in 2014 to take on the exact same executive chairman role. While Safra Catz and Mark Hurd took over at co-CEOs in that situation, Ellison has remained intimately involved with the company he helped found. It’s reasonable to assume that Bezos will do the same.

With Jassy, the company is getting a man who has risen through the ranks since joining the company in 1997 after getting an undergraduate degree and an MBA from Harvard. In 2002 he became VP/technical assistant, working directly under Bezos. It was in this role that he began to see the need for a set of common web services for Amazon developers to use. This idea grew into AWS and Jassy became a VP at the fledgling division working his way up until he was appointed CEO in 2016.