Runtime News

It's always us-east-1 Today: Monday's big AWS outage illustrates yet again why us-east-1 is the biggest problem in cloud computing, further evidence that bitcoin mining is so very 2019 these days, and the latest funding ro...

After sifting through the fallout from a massive outage, it's clear that both AWS and its customers are still putting too many of their eggs into one very old and very worn basket. See why us-east-1 is the biggest problem in cloud computing.

Meanwhile, the fallout from a recent interview with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is mounting. Longtime Bay Area venture capitalist Ron Conway resigned from the Salesforce Foundation board, saying "I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired."

The U.S. is losing a cyberwar Today: F5's disclosure that hackers had "long term" access to its systems is just the latest sign that the federal government is focused on the wrong problems, Salesforce does damage control on behalf...

F5 says a nation-state hacker gained long-term access to some of its servers. The hack comes as attacks on American software companies appear to be ramping up and as the Trump administration pulls staffers away from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to focus on deportations.

Why future-proofing the workplace for AI starts at the network Any business that survived the digital revolution is very familiar with how quickly networking requirements can shift. But few are prepared for the speed with which emerging technologies today are cha...

If you want to make sure your business is able to deliver the high-performance throughput and low latency AI applications require, you'd better make sure your network is ready. Read why in this post, sponsored by @cisco.com www.runtime.news/why-future-p...

What is the best way to think about hybrid cloud application deployment? For companies with sensitive data requirements or substantial investments in data centers, a hybrid cloud strategy offers the best of both worlds — and a significant management challenge. Eight member...

A hybrid cloud strategy solves a lot of problems, especially for companies in heavily regulated industries or that have big investments in data centers. But it also comes with its own set of challenges. We asked members of the Runtime Roundtable how they think about hybrid cloud app deployment.

How Mastercard encouraged AI adoption with training and data Last year Mastercard conducted a review of the different workflow patterns used by employees across the 35,000-person payments giant. In some cases generative AI tools didn't really move the needle, b...

New on @runtime.news: The latest in our How We Built It series, this time featuring Mastercard's George Maddaloni. We talked about how Mastercard onboarded generative AI tools across its employees and its current approach to AI agents, where MCP is spurring a lot of internal agent building.

Agentic AI is still up for grabs Today: Workday jostles for position in the race to bring agents to the enterprise, a new type of software supply-chain attack is spreading, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.

Workday is one of many companies trying to convince enterprises to use its software as the foundation for their agentic AI strategies, and at Workday Rising it unveiled new tools that it hopes will close the deal. "The era of one-size-fits-all enterprise software is over," said CTO Peter Bailis.

Plus, we track new funding raised in the last week by:
-Crusoe
-KnowledgeLake
-Attio
-Seemplicity
-OpenLight
-Zed

Broadcom wants to party like it's 2005 Today: Broadcom rolls out new VMware services aimed at convincing customers to run next-generation workloads the old-fashioned way, we're starting to learn what DOGE did with some of the country's mos...

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan says the future of the enterprise is private. Cloud provider earnings reports tell a different story. But for tech organizations going the hybrid cloud route, VMware unveiled several new ways it gives customers cloud-like performance capabilities inside their own data centers.

Also in this edition of the Runtime newsletter, we tally the biggest funding rounds in enterprise tech, including:
-Databricks – $1 billion (not a typo!)
-Cohere – $500 million
-Lambda – $275 million
-Aalo Atomics – $100 million
-Functionize – $41 million
-Parallel Web Systems – $30 million

Voice phishing is turning into a big problem Today: Voice-phishing attacks are turning into a serious problem without an easy solution, Google Cloud furthers its nuclear plans, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.

Voice-phishing (or "vishing") attacks are on the rise, with Workday being the latest company to disclose that it had been targeted by hackers. You can bet we'll all see more about this in our next corporate security training sessions.

Don't make WIMPy GenAI apps Today: Why generative AI technology presents an opportunity for app developers to move beyond a decades-old standard for app design, the Trump administration is thinking about throwing out years of wo...

Generative AI apps could help software designers break out of a decades-old rut when it comes to how we use their tools. At the very least, they need to rethink their approach to avoid frustrating users. Read about that, plus the latest moves by enterprise tech execs, in the Runtime newsletter.

Why Microsoft's decision to bury GitHub in its CoreAI group is the end of an era GitHub's independence within the Microsoft ecosystem was treasured by company executives in the years following in 2018 acquisition. But that era is over, and GitHub is now just another Microsoft prod...

Times have changed. Microsoft executives used to celebrate GitHub's independence within the larger company ecosystem. But that era is over, and today GitHub feels like just another Microsoft product.

Putting the open back in OpenAI Today: OpenAI releases two open-weight models ahead of the expected launch of GPT-5, why China was already deeply involved in Microsoft SharePoint before last month's security fiasco, and the latest f...

OpenAI is living up to its name again. It hadn't shipped any major LLMs that could claim a degree of openness since 2019's GPT-2. But that just changed with the release of two new open-weight models the company says are as powerful as some of its leading closed models.

The huge stakes behind AI-driven coding Today: several wild days prove why AI-driven coding is at the center of enterprise tech, Nvidia will once again be allowed to sell chips designed around export controls to Chinese customers, and the l...

It's been a choppy few months for Windsurf. First, news leaked that OpenAI intended to acquire the company for $3 billion. Then Google came along with a billion-dollar acquihire, agreeing to pay $2.4 billion for a non-exclusive license to Windsurf's technology and hire about 40 of its employees.

Don't rank Grok Today: xAI's new Grok 4 model looks impressive assuming you can ignore everything else about the company, MCP's security flaws are becoming apparent, and the latest enterprise moves.

Grok 4 could be a tempting choice for developers and enterprises looking for competitive but lower-cost alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic. But it's impossible to understand why any serious business would put Grok at the heart of its AI strategy. Grok is unsafe at any speed for business use.

Buying data centers is easier than building them Today: Why CoreWeave just shelled out $9 billion in stock for Core Scientific, Ingram Micro begins to recover from a holiday weekend ransomware attack, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech...

CoreWeave says it plans to acquire Core Scientific for $9 billion. The deal would allow CoreWeave to take direct control of infrastructure it's already renting from Core Scientific and will provide the additional capacity it needs to fulfill nearly $16 billion in orders from OpenAI.

Two takes on the future of software development Today: Two legendary software engineers sum up the current state of AI coding in mid-2025 and what comes next, Microsoft and OpenAI continue to trial balloon their contract negotiations, and the lates...

This week, a pair of legends in the software engineering space shared their insights on the "Software 3.0 era" and laid out just how much disruption is coming for workers in the software mines. Plus, we bring you the latest in the Microsoft-OpenAI negotiations and two big executive moves.

What is Microsoft going to do with OpenAI? Today: OpenAI's attempts to alter its sweeping deal with Microsoft will force some interesting decisions in Redmond, Google Cloud offers more details about last Thursday's outage, and the latest fundi...

The conscious uncoupling of Microsoft and OpenAI is sticky. We unpack where things stand now, and how some big factors — like OpenAI's pending acquisition of Windsurf and a slate of other powerful LLMs now on the market — are complicating things.

Amazon CSO Steve Schmidt: AI is changing security, but defenders are still ahead of attackers Schmidt discussed the frequency and style of the attacks Amazon fends off every day, the capabilities that cybersecurity defenders can bring to bear thanks to generative AI, and the potential that mac...

In this one-on-one interview, Amazon CSO Steve Schmidt tells us about:
*Increasing nation-state attacks on tech companies
*How generative AI is — and isn't — changing cybersecurity, on both the offensive and defensive sides
*How Amazon works to prevent unforced errors in code

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi's goal of a universal data format is close. But new efforts are aiming higher Last year at the Databricks Data & AI Summit Ghodsi pledged to bring Delta Lake and Iceberg together in a "USB-C format" for data. The communities behind both formats have made progress toward that go...

Last year, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi pledged to bring Delta Lake and Iceberg together in a "USB-C format" for data. The communities behind both formats have made progress toward that goal, but the last mile is tricky, and new tools could let end users worry about other problems.

Red Hat's plan for AI inference; Google's AI coding tool Today on Product Saturday: Red Hat leads a consortium of companies working on an open-source AI inference framework, Google makes Gemini Code Assist generally available, and the quote of the week.

From our roundup of the week's biggest product releases and updates:
-A new open source project from Red Hat
-A catalog of container images from Docker
-Google Cloud's Gemini for Code Assist and for GitHub
-Messaging directly with AI agents in Slack
-Glean's Agents tool

Anthropic moves the AI coding race forward Today: Anthropic's new Claude models deliver what the company says is the best AI coding performance on the market, how two employees of a security software company pulled off a massive breach of fede...

Anthropic unveiled its latest Claude models, saying Claude Opus 4 "is our most powerful model yet and the best coding model in the world." The big breakthrough seems to be an ability to complete tasks unsupervised over long periods of time, compared to earlier versions that glitched out pretty fast.

Microsoft's plan to keep its AI coding lead takes shape Today: How Microsoft is trying to hold on to its position at the center of professional software development, Qualcomm gears up — again — to enter the server market, and the latest funding rounds in e...

At the Build conference, Microsoft said it will release the GitHub Copilot code extension inside Visual Studio Code under an open-source license and add a new coding agent to GitHub Copilot. Also, Qualcomm wants in on the lucrative server processor market. And see where two big funding rounds went.

OpenAI's coding tool; AWS tackles mainframes Today on Product Saturday: OpenAI previews a coding agent, AWS launches a new service designed to migrate old workloads to the cloud, and the quote of the week.

Don't miss our regular roundup of the week's most important new enterprise tech product releases and updates, including:
-Coding agents from OpenAI and Google
-AWS's Transform service
-Updates to Celonis's Process Intelligence API
-Boomi AgentStudio

How Linear became the new Jira Today: An interview with Linear CEO Karri Saarinen on the role of AI in product-management software, CoreWeave's up and down year has an up and down week, and the latest enterprise moves.

Jira is the bug-tracking system software developers love to hate. We sat down with the CEO of Linear, which has raised over $50 million to build a modern alternative, to talk about product strategy, generative AI, and AI agents.

Also: Good news and bad news for CoreWeave, and four big exec moves

Why SBOMs went over like a bomb Today: Chainguard's Dan Lorenc shares his thoughts on the state of open-source software and security challenges in the AI era, believe it or not, but OpenAI might be having trouble getting Project Sta...

SBOMs are a great idea in theory. But are they really helping companies? We talk to Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc about one key problem with them, as well as other challenges in the era of AI code. Plus: Project Stargate is behind schedule, and we clock six big rounds of enterprise tech funding.

Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside: We can be the ServiceNow alternative Under Woodside, Freshworks is taking direct aim at ServiceNow, which has been the leading company in several aspects of IT management software for several years. "Three years ago, our product wasn't a...

We sat down with Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside after a strong earnings report. For years, Freshworks has provided help desk and customer-service software to small and medium-size businesses, but Woodside is trying to take on bigger players like ServiceNow by moving into the enterprise market.

How should companies make sure they are shipping secure generative AI apps while still moving quickly? Companies around the world have rushed to deploy generative AI applications over the last year, and the security considerations for genAI apps are somewhat different than traditional software. Nine me...

9 executives give their insight into how companies rushing to deploy GenAI apps can ensure what they're shipping is secure while still innovating quickly.

How Synadia's attempt to exit the CNCF by holding a trademark hostage might have backfired When the CNCF accepts open-source projects, it requires that any trademarks related to the project be handed over. Synadia never did that, and is now backing down from an attempt to use its ownership ...

After a week of back-and-forth between Synadia and the CNCF, it appears the company will relinquish the NATS trademark after all. Here's how the unusual conflict over an open-source project went down.