Anthropic enters the enterprise chat
Today: Anthropic throws its hat in the enterprise AI ring, AT&T has had it with Broadcom's changes to VMware licensing, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
Today: times are a-changing in the market for enterprise Linux, Lawrence Livermore Labs joins the exascale computing club, and the latest in enterprise startup funding.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: times are a-changing in the market for enterprise Linux, Lawrence Livermore Labs joins the exascale computing club, and the latest in enterprise startup funding.
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Companies building and maintaining applications running on Linux have lots of choices for the base operating system layer, from traditional companies like Red Hat and Canonical's Ubuntu to the cloud providers themselves: Even Microsoft has a Linux distribution. But in response to Red Hat's decision last month to clamp down on the Linux clone market, SUSE plans to throw another hat into the ring.
SUSE announced Tuesday that it "will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions," in addition to its own SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution. It will spend up to $10 million "over the next few years" to fork RHEL, which will send a ripple through what had been a pretty calm space until last month.
For those unfamiliar with the decades of history that led to this point, you might be understandably confused.
That decision unleashed a torrent of criticism directed at Red Hat and IBM, which bought the company for $34 billion in 2019 in hopes of finding a new source of enterprise revenue growth.
SUSE will contribute its forked version of RHEL to a foundation to maintain the code and ensure it will be available to whoever needs it.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory spent the last few days assembling what should be the world's most powerful supercomputer once it is fully operational, according to The Next Platform. The El Capitan machine uses CPUs and GPUs from AMD, which are also found in the exascale system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that it is expected to displace as the new leader.
U.S. government agencies have been driving demand for powerful supercomputers for decades, but demand for that level of performance appears to be shifting to the commercial sector. Last year Turing Award winner Jack Dongarra, who helped build the Oak Ridge machine, theorized that cloud providers would be the ones to carry the performance banner into the future.
And that was well before the generative AI craze kicked in. With startups like Coreweave and others pushing Big Cloud to snap up every GPU in sight, the next exascale computers could be available as infrastructure to anyone.
U.S. startup investments by venture capitalists fell by half in the first half of 2023 compared to the prior year, according to data from Pitchbook.
Savvy disclosed it has received $30 million in funding over the last several years and launched its product for securing SaaS application integrations.
Vellum.ai landed $5 million in seed funding for its service that helps companies get better at prompt engineering.
Broadcom's $61 billion acquisition of VMware is expected to get approval from the European Union as soon as tomorrow, according to The Financial Times. U.S. and U.K. regulators are still examining the deal.
TPG Capital acquired the government security division of Forcepoint from Francisco Partners for $2.45 billion, in another validation of the private equity sector's hunger for enterprise software companies.
Microsoft released more details on the severe weather incident that took down Azure in its West Europe last week, which involved hurricane-force winds.
Salesforce will raise prices on most of its core services by an average of 9%, taking the other approach to improve its bottom line after severe cost-cutting earlier this year.
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!