Monday.com, announced version 2.0 of its flexible workflow platform today, making it easier for customers to build custom apps on top of Monday.

Company co-founder and CEO Roy Mann says his product is a multi-purpose and highly flexible workflow tool, aimed mostly at medium-sized businesses. “It’s process management, portfolio management, project management, CRM management, hotel management, R&D management. It’s anything you want because we give you the building blocks to build whatever you want,” he said.

With the release of 2.0, the company is offering a code-free environment to take these building blocks and build custom applications to meet the needs of any organization or team. This can include workflow elements to set up a process inside Monday or integrate with other apps or services.

In fact, the new release includes over a hundred prebuilt automation recipes and code-free custom-automations along with more than 50 integrations with other apps, allowing project managers to build fairly sophisticated workflows without coding.

This example shows a company building a custom app to manage a hotel. Screenshot: Monday.com

The company is also opening up the Monday platform to developers who want to build applications on top of the platform. Mann says this is just the start, and the plan is to eventually add a marketplace for these apps.

“The first step will be we’re opening [the platform to developers] up in beta. [Initially], it will be for their own use and for their customers, and then we will open it up pretty soon for them to offer those apps [in a marketplace]. That’s obviously the direction,” Mann said.

With $120 million in ARR and 100,000 customers, the company has quietly gone about its business. It has 370 employees, mostly based in Israel, and has raised $273 million, according to Mann. Its most recent investment came last July — $150 million on a lofty $1.9 billion valuation.

Infor announced today that Koch Industries has bought the company in a deal sources peg at close to $13 billion.

Infor, which makes large-scale cloud ERP software, has been around since 2002 and counts Koch as both a customer and an investor, so the deal makes sense on that level. Koch was lead investor last year in a $1.5 billion investment, wherein the company indicated that it was a step before going public.

It’s not clear if that is still the goal, as sources suggested that staying private might provide the company with more capital flexibility in the future. Daniel Newman, founder and principal analyst at Futurum Research, says staying private longer could benefit Infor in the long run.

“There have been thoughts of an IPO, but remaining private should give the company flexibility without the quarterly pressure to refine its strategy, make necessary investments in the platform and achieve the growth rates that would make the company more of an exciting IPO,” he said.

Under the terms of the deal, Koch will be buying out the remaining equity stake in Golden Gate Capital, a secondary investor in last year’s investment. The company’s management team will remain in place and Infor will act as a standalone subsidiary of Koch.

Company CEO Kevin Samuelson, as you would expect, saw the deal as a positive move that allowed the company to operate with a well capitalized parent behind it. “As a subsidiary of a $110 billion+ revenue company that re-invests 90% of earnings back into its businesses, we will be in the unique position to drive digital transformation in the markets we serve,” he said in a statement.

Jim Hannan, executive vice president and CEO of enterprises for Koch Industries, saw it similarly, with Koch’s deep pockets helping to propel Infor in the future. “As a global organization spanning multiple industries across 60 countries, Koch has the resources, knowledge and relationships to help Infor continue to expand its transformative capabilities,” he said in a statement.

Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, says it’s a strange deal on its face, but if Koch leaves Infor alone, it might work out. “When you think you have seen it all, something new comes along: A regular enterprise buys a top-five ERP vendor. Now [we’ll have to see] if Koch can ensure Infor keeps building market leading software, using Koch as showcase, or becomes the Koch software affiliate.

“The latter would be an unfortunate outcome. On the positive side, enterprise software built from real user validation, that can also serve as a reference, can be very powerful,” Mueller told TechCrunch. He said it could work out great, but also has the potential to go very wrong, depending on how Koch manages a software asset.

Infor is a huge company. As we reported last year at the time of its investment:

Infor may be the largest company you never heard of, with more than 17,000 employees and 68,000 customers in more than 100 countries worldwide. All of those customers generated $3 billion in revenue in 2018. That’s a significant presence.

Microsoft Teams, the collaboration platform that competes with Slack, has been down since about 8:30 am ET. Microsoft reports the outage was due to an expired certificate.

Microsoft first posted that an outage was in progress on its Office 365 Status Twitter feed about 9:00 am ET, stating the company was looking into the problem.

At approximately 10:00 am ET, the company posted the reason for the problem, an expired certificate, which frankly, has to be pretty embarrassing for the group responsible for keeping the Teams service running.

About an hour ago, the company updated the status again, indicating it had begun deploying the updated certificate.

Some customers have begun reporting on Twitter that service has been restored.

Microsoft has kept the status updates pretty business like, but has not apologized to its 20 million users as of publication. The company is in the midst of a battle for hearts and minds in the enterprise collaboration space with Slack, and a preventable outage has to be awkward for them.

The company will no doubt do a post-mortem to figure out how this mistake happened and how to prevent this kind of issue from taking down the site again. While every service is going to experience an outage from time-to-time, it’s up to the organization to understand why it happened and put systems in place to keep a preventable incident like this one from happening again in the future.

Back in 2016, Nutanix decided to take the big step of going public. Part of that process was creating a pitch deck and presenting it during its roadshow, a coming-out party when a company goes on tour prior to its IPO and pitches itself to investors of all stripes.

It’s a huge moment in the life of any company, and after talking to CEO Dheeraj Pandey and CFO Duston Williams, one we better understood. They spoke about how every detail helped define their company and demonstrate its long-term investment value to investors who might not have been entirely familiar with the startup or its technology.

Pandey and Williams reported going through more than 100 versions of the deck before they finished the one they took on the road. Pandey said they had a data room checking every fact, every number — which they then checked yet again.

In a separate Extra Crunch post, we looked at the process of building that deck. Today, we’re looking more closely at the content of the deck itself, especially the numbers Nutanix presented to the world. We want to see what investors did more than three years ago and what’s happened since — did the company live up to its promises?

Plan of attack

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