VMware completes acquisition of Pivotal, connects infrastructure and application owners to boost software delivery, business outcomes

VMware announced Monday that it has completed the acquisition of Pivotal Software. With the completion of the acquisition, Pivotal’s Class A common stock was removed from listing on the New York Stock Exchange with trading suspended prior to the open of the market today, and Pivotal will now operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of VMware. The transaction represented an enterprise value for Pivotal of approximately $2.7 billion.

Under the terms of the transaction, Pivotal’s Class A common stockholders are entitled to receive $15.00 per share cash for each share held (without interest and less applicable tax withholdings), and Pivotal’s Class B common stockholder, Dell Technologies, received approximately 7.2 million shares of VMware Class B common stock, at an exchange ratio of 0.0550 shares of VMware Class B common stock for each share of Pivotal Class B common stock.

Pivotal’s offerings will be core to the VMware Tanzu portfolio of products and services designed to help customers transform the way they build, run and manage their most important applications, with Kubernetes as the common infrastructure substrate. 

The combination of Pivotal’s developer-centric offerings with VMware’s upstream Kubernetes run-time infrastructure and management tools will deliver a comprehensive enterprise solution that enables dramatic improvements in developer productivity in the creation of modern applications. VMware is able to offer product building blocks and integrated solutions that are tested and proven with technical expertise that customers need to accelerate software delivery across data center, cloud and edge environments.

“It's my pleasure to announce Ray O'Farrell as the leader of VMware’s new Modern Applications Platform business unit—uniting the Pivotal and VMware Cloud Native Applications teams,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware. “And as Pivotal is now part of VMware, I want to thank the Pivotal leadership team for building a great company. Together, we’re poised to be the leading enabler of Kubernetes with a deep understanding of both operators and developers.”

“Digital transformation and the applications that drive it should not be restricted only to cloud and software giants,” said Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president and general manager, Modern Applications Platform Business Unit, VMware. “We believe that modern application development solutions and practices need to be easily accessible to everyday enterprises across the globe. With Pivotal’s developer capabilities as the foundation, we’ll focus on delivering consumable, enterprise-ready cloud native offerings to customers to help them achieve better business outcomes.”  

“Pivotal has fundamentally changed how the world’s biggest brands build and manage software with a focus on developer productivity through platform abstractions and development techniques as well as connecting the business with the developer,” said Edward Hieatt, senior vice president, customer success, Pivotal. “The combination of Pivotal and VMware offers the most comprehensive application platform in the industry and is a win for our customers, a win for Pivotal, and a win for VMware. We’re excited to team up with VMware to help more enterprises become like modern software companies by adopting DevOps and Lean techniques developed by internet giants and the startup community.”

Numerous mutual customers including Raytheon have reacted positively to the news of the acquisition. “By working with both Pivotal and VMware, we’ve been able to completely transform how we write software for our military and government customers,” said Todd Probert, vice president for C2, Space and Intelligence at Raytheon. “Combining these companies under a single umbrella is going to make it possible for my team to get code to our customers even faster and easier.”

Portshift syncs Kubernetes policies to container vulnerabilities in CI/CD pipelines for remediation

Portshift announces its new capability that delivers runtime policies for vulnerability remediation, allowing more secure workload communications. Portshift’s risk mitigation engine  connects Kubernetes network policies with discovered vulnerabilities in production workloads, allowing to mitigate the risk potential of vulnerable containers till its replacement with new version that remove the vulnerable component.

With Portshift, the company has taken DevSecOps to the next level with a platform that connects identified vulnerabilities with the identity of the workload, providing a measured balance that prevents workload communications based on the risk level and the potential threat to certain applications.

The technology has the ability to block traffic based on the vulnerability level discovered, providing a single picture for complete visualization of these processes during runtime. This provides protection that is matched to the DevOps applications in production.

According to a 2019 Gartner report, “Security can’t be an afterthought. It needs to be embedded in the DevOps process, which Gartner refers to as “DevSecOps…Integrate an image-scanning process to prevent vulnerabilities as part of an enterprise’s continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) process, where applications are scanned during the build and run phases of the software development life cycle.”

Portshift mitigates vulnerabilities with greater sophistication. Available as part of the company’s identity-based cloud native workload security and risk management platform, the technology ensures that Kubernetes environments are protected from development to runtime. With Portshift, app security is simplified and speeded-up by replacing multiple fragmented firewalls, security groups, and ACLs with automated identity-based workload security that is decoupled from the network infrastructure.

When unknown, and possibly malicious workloads are detected, they are quickly identified and rapidly removed using Portshift’s innovative DevOps security platform. The company’s workload management processes offer an alternative to the use of IP addresses, ports and firewalls to secure the network perimeter as it addresses the unique security requirements of cloud-native microservices running in containers both inside and outside of the network perimeter.

“With the availability of this identity-based approach, we are actively collaborating with industry leading vulnerability scanning providers including Twistlock, Aqua and Clair to move the industry forward,“ said Zohar Kaufman, co-founder and VP, R&D for Portshift. “Having Portshift’s information-rich view of containers in real time will be exceedingly important in 2020 as more determined hackers continue their efforts to attack earlier in the development process in order to exploit vulnerabilities before they are addressed by DevSecOps.“

Optiv Security expects election hacking, ‘hybrid threat actors’ to top the list of 2020 cyber threats

Optiv Security announced its cybersecurity industry predictions for 2020 and beyond. A focus on privacy, evolving threat actors, pervasive deepfake videos, and increased election interference are among the issues Optiv sees taking on greater importance in the New Year.

Optiv expects the most common issues that the industry may face in 2020 include hybrid threat actors may become more commonplace. Optiv’s 2019 Cyber Threat Intelligence Estimate (CTIE) found a growing number of “hybrid threat actors.” These are attackers who impersonate one type of adversary to disguise their true intentions (for example, a nation state imitating a generic hacker targeting a customer database, when its true aim is to steal intellectual property). 

Optiv believes a possible increase in the number of adversaries to adopt this technique and launch “imposter” attacks to obfuscate their true intentions, adding yet another layer of complexity to threat hunting and incident response.

Apple’s “privacy as a human right” campaign should cause others to follow. As the world’s foremost technology organization going all-in on privacy will shift the competitive landscape, security and privacy could become a competitive differentiator for companies that follow Apple’s lead and grab “first mover” status in their markets. Laggards may risk meeting the unseemly fate of past organizations that failed to embrace important technology paradigms such as internet, cloud, and mobile computing.

Election misinformation campaigns could proliferate. The effectiveness of the Russian misinformation campaign of 2016 increases the possibility of increased copycat attacks for the 2020 election. These attacks could come from nation states as well as domestic groups supporting rival U.S. politicians. This activity threatens to trigger a major public/private response to the online misinformation problem.

Optive expects to see the first cases of deepfakes used to manipulate stock prices. There has been much publicity around the potential to impact elections using deepfakes (AI-doctored videos that enable individuals to make it appear people said things they never said). However, not enough attention has been paid to how cybercriminals can make money using deepfakes against businesses. 

This might change in 2020, as it’s possible we will see the first deepfake attacks designed to impact stock prices, by having CEOs, financial analysts, Federal Reserve leaders or other powerful economic figures make phony statements that will cause stock market movements. Cybercriminals would use these videos to make quick fortunes in the market.

There should be widespread realignment of IT and security organizations. As boards view cybersecurity as a peer-level risk to traditional enterprise risks, such as lawsuits and product recalls, more CISOs should become peers of CIOs and other executives, rather than direct or indirect reports. This would cause a realignment of the IT and security organizations to eliminate conflicts and encourage collaboration. 

The most critical of these will be the continued expansion of DevSecOps, in which security is fully integrated into the application development process; and patch management, which will move from being divided between security and IT (security finds vulnerabilities, IT patches them), to becoming a unified process with a single point of accountability.

Cybersecurity basics may continue to vex consumers and enterprise organizations.Whether insufficient passwords, lack of education and training around phising attacks, or simple upkeep and compliance, the tiny details of cybersecurity will continue to be the cause of a vast portion of compromises if left unaccounted for. Simple passwords (those without special characters or are extremely obvious, such as “password123”) only take minutes to crack by professional hackers and can be done inexpensively.

“As we look beyond 2019 and into 2020, we have a solid idea of what threats the industry is facing, and not just ransomware and phishing attacks, but new, hard-to-combat threats,” said Anthony Diaz, Division Vice President, Emerging Services at Optiv. “As is always the case, us ‘good guys’ are forced to play catch up with bad actors, who constantly remain a step ahead. There is much IT and business leaders must be aware of when it comes to cybersecurity, as the pace of change is quite high. That is why we recommend cybersecurity programs focus on proactive risk mitigation and build out from there. This ensures your organization is actively looking for, combating, and identifying threats before they can cause damage.”

Kioxia introduces Twin BiCS FLASH, its 3D semicircular flash memory cell structure that helps boost bit density

Kioxia announced development of the initial three-dimensional (3D) semicircular split-gate flash memory cell structure “Twin BiCS FLASH” using specially designed semicircular Floating Gate (FG) cells. Twin BiCS FLASH achieves superior program slope and a larger program/erase window at a much smaller cell size compared to conventional circular Charge Trap (CT) cells. 

These attributes make this new cell design a promising candidate to surpass four bits per cell (QLC) for significantly higher memory density and fewer stacking layers. This technology was announced at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) held in San Francisco, California.

3D flash memory technology has achieved high bit density with low cost per bit by increasing the number of cell stacked layers as well as by implementing multilayer stack deposition and high aspect ratio etching. In recent years, as the number of cell layers exceeds 100, managing the trade-offs among etch profile control, size uniformity and productivity is becoming increasingly challenging. 

To overcome this problem, Kioxia developed a new semicircular cell design by splitting the gate electrode in the conventional circular cell to reduce cell size compared to the conventional circular cell, enabling higher-density memory at a lower number of cell layers.

The circular control gate provides a larger program window with relaxed saturation problems when compared with a planar gate because of the curvature effect, where carrier injection through the tunnel dielectric is enhanced while electron leakage to the block (BLK) dielectric is lowered. In this split-gate cell design, the circular control gate is symmetrically divided into two semicircular gates to take advantage of the strong improvement in the program/erase dynamics. 

The conductive storage layer is employed for high charge trapping efficiency in conjunction with the high-k BLK dielectrics, achieving high coupling ratio to gain program window as well as reduced electron leakage from the FG, thus relieving the saturation issue. The experimental program/erase characteristics reveal that the semicircular FG cells with the high-k-based BLK exhibit significant gains in the program slope and program/erase window over the larger-sized circular CT cells. 

The semicircular FG cells, having superior program/erase characteristics, are expected to attain comparably tight QLC Vt distributions at small cell size. Further, integration of low-trap Si channel makes possible more than four bits/cell, e.g., Penta-Level Cell (PLC). These results confirm that semicircular FG cells are a viable option to pursue higher bit density.

Going forward, Kioxia’s research and development efforts aimed at innovation in flash memory will include continuing Twin BiCS FLASH development and seeking its practical applications.

Diamanti joins AI/ML sector with its GPU platform that supports containerized workloads on Kubernetes

Diamanti announced availability of its enterprise platform with GPU support for running containerized workloads under Kubernetes, ideal for the demanding requirements of emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications. 

In conjunction with its recent announcement of Diamanti Spektra, customers can now provide to their end users GPU capacity in cloud clusters for scaling AI/ML workloads on premises out to public clouds to accelerate model development and training.

Diamanti recently announced the close of a $35 million Series C funding round that the company plans to use to ramp global go-to-market initiatives, along with increased investment in engineering resources to drive the roadmap for Diamanti Spektra, as well as new software, SaaS, and hardware solutions for emerging AI and ML workloads.

“AI is quickly proving to be the most disruptive set of new technologies in decades thanks to breathtaking advances in computing power, volume, velocity and variety of data,” said Tom Barton, CEO of Diamanti. “Our platform offers unmatched extensibility and flexibility for containerized workloads and now our customers can add GPU support for a heterogeneous environment under the same Kubernetes umbrella to help with even the most demanding AI/ML requirements.”

The Diamanti platform for AI/ML workloads fully supports Nvidia’s NVLink cross connect GPU card technology for higher performing workloads, as well as Kubeflow, a machine learning framework for Kubernetes that provides highly-available Jupyter notebooks and ML pipelines.

“Cloud-native methodology and software are crossing over with AI and machine learning, with Kubernetes an increasingly attractive option for data scientists to orchestrate the distributed architecture required to run multiple machine learning libraries and frameworks in production at scale,” said Matt Aslett, research vice president, 451 Research. “One key use case across several verticals involves infrastructure that can be quickly spun up or down to support massive simulations.”

Early access Diamanti customers are already benefiting from the new platform support for GPUs in industries as varied as financial services, energy and travel, among others.

For AI/ML applications requiring GPUs, the new Diamanti Spektra solution can also now manage the full lifecycle of containerized workloads across on-premises and public clouds, moving applications and data between Kubernetes clusters as necessary. 

Diamanti Spektra combines the power of Diamanti’s hardware-boosted x86 platform along with cloud-based infrastructure to provide Kubernetes-as-a-Service. Diamanti Spektra is in technology preview.

Keysight, Marvin Test Solutions come together to speed manufacturing of mmWave semiconductors

Keysight Technologies announced this week that its collaboration with Marvin Test Solutions Inc. (MTS) – a supplier of functional test solutions – has resulted in the development of a fast and accurate 5G semiconductor manufacturing test platform.

The two parties focused on advancing beamformer integrated circuit (IC) test technology to help manufacturers of semiconductors accelerate the production of high performance 5G integrated ICs. Marvin integrated Keysight’s PXIe-based Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) to achieve accurate and fast measurements in its TS-960e-5G mmWave Test System.

The Keysight M980xA PXIe Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) meets the most demanding multiport challenges with a true multiport architecture that offers exceptional performance no matter how many ports you use. Gain deeper insights into devices with the widest available line of measurement applications for PXI VNAs, including spectrum analysis and noise figure measurements.

The M980xA Series offers the performance required for testing passive components, amplifiers, mixers or frequency converters. It provides key PXI VNA specifications such as dynamic range, measurement speed, trace noise and temperature stability. 

Keysight’s recently introduced M980xA Series network analyzers offer the scalability required to test multi-port components, front end modules (FEMs) and base stations that rely on beamforming technology. Mobile operators are deploying beamforming technology to extend cellular coverage and deliver higher data rates, leading to improved mmWave 5G network reliability and efficiency. 

To ensure reliable and efficient 5G mmWave communications, the performance of critical elements that form part of the beamformer IC need to be rigorously tested under linear and nonlinear conditions across the entire workflow from design, validation to manufacturing.

“Our collaboration with Marvin Test Solutions demonstrates that scalable production testing of beamformer solutions can be achieved with Keysight’s PXI VNAs,” said Kailash Narayanan, vice president and general manager of Keysight's wireless test group. “We’re excited to help shape the future of 5G mmWave production testing with our beamformer IC test solutions using integrated component and system-level simulation tools to deliver high precision measurements at mmWave frequency bands.”

TigerGraph Cloud improves graph database-as-a-service with improved performance and productivity

TigerGraph announced new functionality and performance for TigerGraph Cloud, its distributed native graph database-as-a-service, is an intuitive way to build and run applications that work with highly connected and complex datasets. 

TigerGraph’s latest distributed system and high availability enhancements help enterprises leverage advanced analytics on graph at scale, which requires larger and more varied dataset combinations, which means more variables and relationships to analyze, explore and test to make machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) better.

“To survive and thrive in today’s business world, enterprises should accelerate their approach to AI and ML applications, both of which benefit from graph analytics, as this helps identify new patterns across the data sources, create new models and better algorithms, using data at scale,” said Todd Blaschka, COO, TigerGraph. “TigerGraph Cloud’s enhanced services provide our customers with an even better platform for analytical and transactional processing. Users can start for free and expand to a distributed production system as their applications scale. Starting a distributed graph system with high availability is simply choosing the number of machines and the number of replicas on TigerGraph Cloud.”

  

TigerGraph Cloud delivers on one promise: graph analytics is the way forward. Until now, organizations had to rely on data scientists, developers and architects to design their graph-based data analysis solutions. TigerGraph Cloud has addressed this innovation gap with an easy-to-use, cloud-based graph service that makes graph database and analytics accessible to everyone; the solution is the only distributed graph service with high availability. 

TigerGraph Cloud provides the ideal cloud-based service to model, search, and traverse relationships for analytical, transactional and real-time workloads. Users can start for free, then as their data expands they can expand across the cloud.  At the same time, with TigerGraph’s ability to do SQL-like database computation along with ACID-compliant transactions, users benefit with a lower TCO compared to other analytic products.

TigerGraph Cloud allows users to get started in minutes, build a proof-of-concept model in hours and deploy a solution to production in days. It eliminates the need to set up, configure or manage servers, schedule backups or look for security vulnerabilities. Also, TigerGraph offers a free tier of TigerGraph Cloud in perpetuity that enables data scientists, developers, business analysts, students and other enthusiasts to experience this technology’s unique power to handle real-world data challenges. 

With this version of TigerGraph Cloud that includes configuration for distributed graphs and replica instances for high availability, as well as the ability to leverage EFS for backup and restore. 

In addition to elastic, pay-only-for-what-you-use pricing, subscribers can provision distributed TigerGraph services for large production datasets; have the choice to deploy high availability TigerGraph services; and have more TigerGraph Cloud starter kits to choose from for fast application development, including new neural networks, cybersecurity and payment fraud detection kits. Starter kits are built with sample graph data schema, dataset, and queries focused on specific use cases such as fraud detection, real-time recommendation, machine learning, and explainable AI.

Going into 2020, Microsoft Azure will soon be one of the backend options for users of TigerGraph Cloud, making it the first truly cloud neutral graph database-as-a-service in the market.