Welcome to Mostly Cloudy! Today: why a prominent blockchain infrastructure company was so eager to jump into the AWS Marketplace, Cloudflare continues its security push, and Walmart wants to sell its retail tech to Salesforce customers.
Photo: Jielin Chen on Unsplash.
Where the buyers are
One of my favorite types of press releases issued by enterprise tech startups is the big, breathless “partnership” annoucement with any of the Big Three cloud providers, promsing a new era of collaboration and synergy now that they’ve managed to make friends with the coolest kid on the block. Nine times out of ten, those announcements boil down to “we listed our stuff in their third-party marketplace,” and that’s exactly what happened this week with Ava Labs and AWS.
Ava Labs operates the Avalanche blockchain platform, which allowes developers to deploy their own “decentralized apps” on its technology without having to do the heavy lifting of setting up their own infrastructure to enable the "smart contracts” that make the blockchain the blockchain. The enterprise blockchain is still something of a running joke — especially after IBM and Maersk shuttered their incredibly hyped partnership last month — but Ava Labs thinks that could change if its customers had access to AWS infrastructure.
As we covered in our four-part series on cloud marketplaces last year, the AWS Marketplace is a central app store for application providers or platform operators that want to tap into the enormous number of companies with AWS accounts. Having a presence in that marketplace is essential for software companies looking for additional sources of distribution, even if they grumble about the terms from time to time.
But companies like Ava Labs that preach the virtues of decentralized computing are now turning to one of the most centralized computing systems ever — cloud infrastructure — to find new ways to grow. This is a bit of an old story, as AWS already claims to run 25% percent of all Ethereum workloads, but it’s still fascinating how quickly the backers of Web3 technologies have come to embrace the operating models they claimed were the root of all evil.
After all, AWS will get a cut of the proceeds from blockchains enabled through Avalanche’s AWS Marketplace listing, and its servers and networks will become a centralized point of failure for those blockchain applications. Ava Labs is also joining the AWS Partner Network, which means it will be incentivized to help its customers move their blockchain workloads to AWS.
Enterprise blockchain still seems like a solution in search of a problem, but it’s quite possible that the right product and the right use case could emerge. While that search continues, it’s starting to look like the road to the Web3 glory will run straight through the cloud.
Inbox zero-day
Businesses spend billions of dollars each year on sophisticated firewalls, sweeping threat-detection services, and even penetration testing in hopes of hardening their corporate infrastructure against security threats. But after more than 20 years of cybersecurity development, the easiest way to infilitrate a target remains the email inbox.
Cloudflare has expanded into lots of different types of services over the last several years but security has always been one of its core concerns. This week it introduced a new service that it hopes will convince customers to let it oversee and secure those email inboxes against malware and data leaks.
The new security features are the result of Cloudflare’s $162 million acqusition of Area 1 Networks last year, and could be part of the puzzle CEO Matthew Prince will need to complete if he wants his company to truly become “the fourth major public cloud,” as he told me in September 2021. They will also be another test of how tech buyers are thinking about bundling as cost-cutting becomes the enterprise mantra for 2023; if you’re already using Cloudflare for anti-DDoS services, for example, it might be easier to simply bundle email security services into an overall enterprise contract than buying those capabilities piecemeal from several different vendors.
Around the enterprise
Speaking of enterprise app store listings touted as “partnership announcements,” Walmart hopes to use Salesforce AppExchange to sell its homegrown retail technology to other retailers.
Google Cloud’s Kirsten Klipphouse, who was named head of sales in the U.S. just last year, is out, according to The Information.
Chik-Fil-A is running a edge Kubernetes cluster inside every single one of its retail locations.
This is not a great time to raise money: Outsystems was forced to slash its valuation in half to raise about $230 million in new funding, according to Forbes.
Buyers of data analytics tools might be best served by an Atlassian-style loose comglomerate, Benn Stancil argued, rather than the usual process of startups eventually consolidating under big platform players that force you to buy three other things to actually get the thing you want.
Thanks for reading — see you next week!