When the Department of Defense finally made a decision in October on the decade-long, $10 billion JEDI cloud contract, it seemed that Microsoft had won. But nothing has been simple about this deal from the earliest days, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that last night Amazon filed a motion to stop work on the project until the court decides on its protest of the DoD’s decision.

The company announced on November 22nd that it had filed suit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims protesting the DoD’s decision to select Microsoft. Last night’s motion is an extension of that move to put the project on hold until the court decides on the merits of the case.

Sources tell us that AWS decided not protest the start of initial JEDI activities at the time of the court filing in November as an accommodation made at DoD’s request. DoD declined to comment on that.

As for why they are doing it now, an Amazon spokesperson had this to say in a statement last night: “It is common practice to stay contract performance while a protest is pending and it’s important that the numerous evaluation errors and blatant political interference that impacted the JEDI award decision be reviewed. AWS is absolutely committed to supporting the DoD’s modernization efforts and to an expeditious legal process that resolves this matter as quickly as possible.”

As we previously reported, the statement echoes sentiments AWS CEO Andy Jassy made at a press event during AWS re:Invent in December:

“I would say is that it’s fairly obvious that we feel pretty strongly that it was not adjudicated fairly,” he said. He added, “I think that we ended up with a situation where there was political interference. When you have a sitting president, who has shared openly his disdain for a company, and the leader of that company, it makes it really difficult for government agencies, including the DoD, to make objective decisions without fear of reprisal.”

This is just the latest turn in a contract procurement process for the ages. It will now be up to the court to decide if the project should stop or not, and beyond that if the decision process was carried out fairly.

In Xerox’s latest effort to get HP to bend to its will and combine the two companies, it announced its intent today to try to replace the entire HP board of directors at the company’s stockholder’s meeting in April. That would be the same board that unanimously rejected Xerox’s takeover bid.

Xerox and HP have been playing a highly public game of tit for tat in recent months. Xerox wants very much to combine with HP, and offered $34 billion, an offer HP summarily rejected at the end of last year. Xerox threatened to take it to shareholders.

Now it wants to take over the board, announcing today that it had nominated 11 people to replace the current slate of directors.

As you might imagine, HP was none too pleased with this latest move by Xerox. “We believe these nominations are a self-serving tactic by Xerox to advance its proposal, that significantly undervalues HP and creates meaningful risk to the detriment of HP shareholders,” HP fired back in a statement today emailed to TechCrunch.

It went on to blame Xerox shareholder Carl Icahn for the continued pressure. “We believe that Xerox’s proposal and nominations are being driven by Carl Icahn, and his large ownership position in Xerox means that his interests are not aligned with those of other HP shareholders. Due to Mr. Icahn’s ownership position, he would disproportionately benefit from an acquisition of HP by Xerox at a price that undervalues HP,” the company stated.

The two companies exchanged increasingly harsh letters in November as Xerox signaled its intent to take over the much larger HP. HP questioned Xerox’s ability to raise the money, but earlier this month it announced had in fact raised the $24 billion it would need to buy the company. HP was still not convinced.

Today’s exchange is just the latest between the two companies in an increasingly hostile bid by Xerox to combine the two companies.

TriggerMesh, a startup building on top of the open-source Kubernetes software to help enterprises go “serverless” across apps running in the cloud and traditional data centers, has raised $3 million in seed funding.

The round is led by Index Ventures and Crane Venture Partners. TriggerMesh says the investment will be used to scale the company and grow its development team in order to offer what it bills as the industry’s first “cloud native integration platform for the serverless era.”

Founded by two prominent names in the open-source community — Sebastien Goasguen (CEO) and Mark Hinkle (CMO), based in Geneva and North Carolina, respectively — TriggerMesh’s platform will enable organizations to build enterprise-grade applications that span multiple cloud and data center environments, therefore helping to address what the startup says is a growing pain point as serverless architectures become more prevalent.

TriggerMesh’s platform and serverless cloud bus is said to facilitate “application flow orchestration” to consume events from any data center application or cloud event source and trigger serverless functions.

“As cloud-native applications use a greater number of serverless offerings in the cloud, TriggerMesh provides a declarative API and a set of tools to define event flows and functions that compose modern applications,” explains the company.

One feature TriggerMesh is specifically talking up and very relevant to legacy enterprises is its integration functionality with on-premise software. Via its wares, it says it is easy to connect SaaS, serverless cloud offerings and on-premises applications to provide scalable cloud-native applications at a low cost and quickly.

“There are huge numbers of disconnected applications that are unable to fully benefit from cloud computing and increased network connectivity,” noted Scott Sage, co-founder and partner at Crane Venture Partners, in a statement. “Most companies have some combination of cloud and on-premises applications and with more applications around, often from different vendors, the need for integration has never been greater. We see TriggerMesh’s solution as the ideal fit for this need which made them a compelling investment.”

Front is raising a $59 million Series C funding round. Interestingly, the startup hasn’t raised with a traditional VC firm leading the round. A handful of super business angels are investing directly in the productivity startup and leading the round.

Business angels include Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian President Jay Simons, Okta co-founder and COO Frederic Kerrest, Qualtrics co-founders Ryan Smith and Jared Smith and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan. Existing investors including Sequoia Capital, Initialized Capital and Anthos Capital are participating in this round as well.

While Front doesn’t share its valuation, the company says that the valuation has quadrupled compared to the previous funding round. Annual recurring venue has also quadrupled over the same period.

The structure of this round is unusual, but it’s on purpose. Front, like many other startups, is trying to redefine the future of work. That’s why the startup wanted to surround itself with leaders of other companies who share the same purpose.

“First, because we didn’t need to raise (we still had two years of runway), and it’s always better to raise when we don’t need it. The last few months have given me much more clarity into our go-to-market strategy,” Front co-founder and CEO Mathilde Collin told me.

Front is a collaborative inbox for your company. For instance, if you want to share an email address with your coworkers (support@mycompany.com or jobs@mycompany.com), you can integrate those shared inboxes with Front and work on those conversations as a team.

It opens up a ton of possibilities. You can assign conversations to a specific person, @-mention your coworkers to send them a notification, start a conversation with your team before you hit reply, share a draft with other people, etc.

Front also supports other communication channels, such as text messages, WhatsApp messages, a chat module on your website and more. As your team gets bigger, Front helps you avoid double replies by alerting other users when you’re working on a reply.

In addition to those collaboration features, Front helps you automate your workload as much as possible. You can set up automated workflows so that a specific conversation ends up in front of the right pair of eyes. You can create canned responses for the entire team as well.

Front also integrates with popular third-party services, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Clearbit and dozens of others. Front customers include MailChimp, Shopify and Stripe.

While Front supports multiple channels, email represents the biggest challenge. If you think about it, email hasn’t changed much over the past decade. The last significant evolution was the rise of Gmail, G Suite and web-based clients. In other words, Front wants to disrupt Outlook and Gmail.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to iterate on the product front with Office 365 support for its calendar, an offline mode and refinements across the board. The company also plans to scale up its sales and go-to-market team with an office in Phoenix and a new CMO.

Meet Harvestr, a software-as-a-service startup that wants to help product managers centralize customer feedback from various places. Product managers can then prioritize outstanding issues and feature requests. Finally, the platform helps you get back to your customers once changes have been implemented.

The company just raised a $650,000 funding round led by Bpifrance, with various business angels also participating, such as 360Learning co-founders Nicolas Hernandez and Guillaume Alary, as well as Station F director Roxanne Varza through the Atomico Angel Programme.

Harvestr integrates directly with Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, Freshdesk, Slack and Zapier. For instance, if a user opens a ticket on Zendesk and another user interacts with your support team through an Intercom chat widget, everything ends up in Harvestr.

Once you have everything in the system, Harvestr helps you prioritize tasks that seem more urgent or that are going to have a bigger impact.

When you start working on a feature or when you’re about to ship it, you can contact your users who originally reached out to talk to you about it.

Eventually, Harvestr should help you build a strong community of power users around your product. And there are many advantages in pursuing this strategy.

First, you reward your users by keeping them in the loop. It should lead to higher customer satisfaction and lower churn. Your most engaged customers could also become your best ambassadors to spread the word around.

Harvestr costs $49 per month for five seats and $99 per month for 20 seats. People working for 360Learning, HomeExchange, Dailymotion and other companies are currently using it.