Google is acquiring Fitbit, a leading wearables brand, for $2.1 billion. Google says the motivation is to “help more people with wearables,” expand its vision of “ambient computing,” and, of course, grab a share of the fast-growing $8-billion digital health market.

A Microsoft Teams client for Linux has been confirmed, with a preview becoming available by the end of 2019.

Databricks, a data processing and analytics platform with a strong focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), is investing 100 million euros (US$111 million) in its European Development Center to take advantage of the European pool of talent and cutting-edge research.

Fluid Framework, unveiled in May at Microsoft’s Build 2019 company conference, lets developers rally the help of near real-time coauthoring, reusable mix-and-match document components, and digital assistants like translator aids in the content creation experience at speeds and scale not available before.

There are many data integration vendors, but very few have managed to provide a comprehensive suite of features to meet integration needs. Dell Boomi is one of the leading Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) vendors announcing an AI bot framework for complex chatbot integration.

Databricks, a data processing and analytics platform with a strong focus on AI and machine learning, recently raised $400 million in a series F funding round. This puts the company value at $6.2 billion. Databricks plans to use the money to hire more engineers to accelerate R&D.

Cambridge Semantics enhanced its Anzo platform to enable data management and analytics over both structured and unstructured data, the firm announced in an August 22 press release.

C3.ai, a leading enterprise AI software provider, announced in October 2019 the launch of Smart Institutions, an AI-powered, holistic energy-as-a-service software solution for universities, municipalities, corporate campuses, and hospitals.

Data governance player Collibra recently announced the acquisition of SQLdep, a leading provider of automated data lineage.

Customer engagement software company FreshWorks announced that it has acquired a cloud-based prototyping and usability testing platform, Bangalore-based CanvasFlip.

Microsoft has invested $1 billion in OpenAI, which by the way is no longer “open.” Founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI recently restructured into a for-profit OpenAI LP so that it could commercialize its AI technologies and attract necessary funding. (Musk left the company a year prior.)

Oracle is aiming to make it extremely easy to shift your VMware workloads to the Oracle Cloud. In addition, it will provide you the capability to choose where your data will reside. This is an important feature for organizations concerned about data sovereignty.

Slack's first earnings release as a publicly-traded company beat expectations on revenue and growth projections. However, a significant outage of the service in July may have put some Slack users back on their heels.

​Many market research firms project that the market for Managed File Transfer (MFT) will grow between 7-10% in the next five years (expressed in compound annual growth rates (CAGR): see here, here and here). Is MFT is a mature technology? Maybe. Is MFT is a stable technology with low risk of disruption? Absolutely not.

Cisco’s shares fell nearly 16% in August. However, the broader context is that Cisco’s poor stock performance might be due to external circumstances.

A new Otka report found that both Slack and Zoom are increasing in popularity with organizations who have Office 365 licenses, despite their having access to Microsoft Teams.

Teradata’s legal action against SAP has serious potential ramifications on customer choice in the enterprise data analytics and warehousing (EDAW) space. SAP customers contemplating a move to HANA (or S/4HANA) may conclude their data is moving into an environment where SAP calls the shots.

Microsoft has announced that it has beat Amazon Web Services to contract with a very well-known telecommunication brand, AT&T, with significant data storage and services for its more than 250,000 staff. This multi-year deal is worth $2B.

Questback has released their Qubie 2.0 team performance app for Microsoft Teams.

Several discussion threads on LinkedIn and other social media have been dedicated to the status of Apache Hadoop and the merged Cloudera/Hortonworks. Many predict their demise is not far off. How substantiated are those predictions?

Monday.com raises $150 million in a series D funding round, and is now valued at $1.9 billion in the team collaboration marketplace.