I’m on vacation at the moment, but a few bits and pieces from the last week or so that have caught my attention.

AI

  • Amazon ($100Bn), Meta ($65Bn), Microsoft ($80Bn) and Google ($75Bn) all reiterated their ongoing plans to increase capex on AI and Datacenters over the coming year in their most recent earnings calls. This AI infrastructure build out is not slowing down, Deepseek or no Deepseek.

DevOps

  • Harness and Traceable are merging, this brings two companies founded by Jyoti Bansal after he sold AppDynamics to Cisco in 2017 together. More importantly this is a really significant move in the DevSecOps market. Harness is a leader in last years DevOps Magic Quadrant from Gartner (as is Microsoft and GitHub, where I currently work), but expanding this scope with API Security is a really big deal in my opinion. I don’t see API security becoming a criteria for Gartner yet, but I can see other security criteria becoming bigger components in Gartner’s evaluation. Really interesting move.

General Interest

  • Sailpoint, an identity management vendor, IPOed. Sailpoint had previously been taken private by PE firm Thoma Bravo in 2022. This is the first of a host of similar IPOs we can expect to see over the coming year.

  • Tenable, a security vendor focused on exposure management, acquired Vulcan for $150M. Vulcan had raised $55M. Vulcan fills an ASPM gap for Tenable.

  • Dagger, a company focused on making app delivery pipelines programmable, announced an update of Dagger Cloud. As part of this update they have ripped out their previous React based front end and replaced it WebAssembly (WASM) using the Go-App framework. Now this is interesting on a number of fronts. WASM has been coming of age, slowly, over the past few years. The idea of using WASM to unify an entire platform to speed development and allow the entire stack to easily use OpenTelemetry is really rather nice. But this is still early days. I wrote the only dedicated paper in Gartner on WebAssembly (Assessing WebAssembly for Use in Modern Application Design paywalled) back in 2020. This was, to put it politely, way to early for the audience that Gartner serves. Given how innovative the Dagger team (led by Solomon Hykes who previously founded Docker) is, it still feels like more widespread usage of WASM is a long way off.

Data