Structure News: A Pinteresting interview, Docker gears up, and why frenemies are the future

Where Summer's End Means It's Structure Season September 11th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about how two cloud natives -- Pinterest and Airbnb -- plot their infrastructure strategy, what Docker plans to do with its new money man, and why thinking outside the Box is no longer a cliche (maybe). STRUCTURE NEWS HOW PINTEREST IS PREPARING FOR ITS FUTURE IN THE CLOUD - OR ON ITS OWN We published an interview this week with Pinterest's Raj Patel (left), which I teased in this space a few weeks back, on the challenges of scaling a consumer-facing web company based entirely in the public cloud. Check it out: it's a good preview of what Patel and I will be talking about in November at Structure 2015, and if it gives any of you ideas for specific things we should talk about, let us know. Structure 2015 will take place November 18th and 19th at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in downtown San Francisco. There's a lot more information here, and you can buy your tickets here. Also, follow our new Medium publication, which will highlight Structure speakers and themes over the next few weeks, here. INDUSTRY NEWS MICROSOFT ACQUIRES ADALLOM TO ADVANCE IDENTITY AND SECURITY IN THE CLOUD We're getting more and more interest in security-related topics for Structure 2015, and that will probably only increase as more and more businesses sign up for cloud services. Microsoft bolstered its security story this week with the purchase (for a reported $250 million, according to Techcrunch) of Adallom, a startup that helps companies protect their data as employees use multiple cloud services. FORMER TWITTER CFO MIKE GUPTA ON WHY HE JOINED THE STARTUP DOCKER When a company brings in a big-time money manager, it's a sign they're planning to get big. The Wall Street Journal interviews Mike Gupta, who took Twitter public, on his plans for Docker's revenue growth and the inevitable successful exit for its investors. OKTA IS NOW A UNICORN AFTER $75 MILLION FUNDING ROUND Speaking of investors, Okta hit up its existing investors for another $75 million, pushing its valuation into that mythical $1 billion "unicorn" territory. Recode reports that Okta, which helps IT departments manage access to internal applications across desktop and mobile devices, has now raised $230 million. ALIBABA'S CLOUD BUSINESS HAS BUILT A DATA CENTER COOLED BY LAKE WATER Cooling a data center is an expensive task (Facebook even built one near the Arctic Circle), but Alibaba has come up with an interesting way of cooling a data center using lake water. Fortune's Derrick Harris (who, ICYMI, is back in the Structure fold and planning Structure Data for next year) takes a look at Alibaba's technique, which the company says allows it to eliminate 90 percent of its data center cooling costs. SALESFORCE LAUNCHES APP CLOUD, PUTS DEVELOPER RESOURCES UNDER ONE ROOF Things might have gotten a little simpler for Salesforce customers now that they can log into several different Salesforce products all at once. ZDNet reports that the "overdue" App Cloud will make it easier for Salesforce users to see all their app data in one place, rather than logging into separate things like Heroku or Lightning. AIRBNB SHARES THE KEYS TO ITS INFRASTRUCTURE Along the lines of the Raj Patel interview noted above, The Platform has a similar but more in-depth look at Airbnb's infrastructure strategy with Mike Curtis, vice president of engineering at the company. It also touches on how Airbnb handles all its data and machine-learning techniques employed at the company.   BIG PICTURE It's been a rough year for Box: once a darling of the cloud startup scene, life as a public company has been a little trickier for CEO Aaron Levie (above). But after reporting revenue growth this week that made Wall Street a little more forgiving of Box's still quite-large losses, Levie expanded on a theme we've been hearing more and more from the Structure community: the future of cloud services has to involve interoperability. "Vendors realize that to stay relevant to customers, they have to open up to others, even if they compete in other ways,” Levie told financial analysts Wednesday, as reported by Forbes. “That’s how you get the head of Microsoft Office on stage with Apple. Everybody has to compete for customer value, which means you can’t win by closing off your technology.” Until Wednesday's earnings report, Box's stock price had fallen below its IPO price in January, a sign that investors aren't totally sure that Box will ever make money. And as I've noted in this space before, the notion that cloud enterprise software companies might have to struggle to match the margins of older enterprise software companies -- who loved to lock you into their playgrounds -- could have interesting ramifications down the road for the future of this movement. But this push is great for cloud users. True cloud interoperability will make it easier and less expensive to manage workloads across different vendors, and will give CIOs the ability to piece together different products for app development, payroll, storage, and hosting without having to buy everything from a single vendor that does a few of those things well, but not all of those things. And if Levie (and many of our Structure speakers) are right that a second era of cloud services is dawning in which big enterprise companies, rather than startups, will provide growth as they choose the right service provide for the right problem, there will be plenty of money to go around. (Photo courtesy Techcrunch/Flickr via Creative Commons 2.0.)       DISCOVER MORE   Unsubscribe subbusmr.enjoyment@blogger.com from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2015 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend Update your profile