• Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is purchasing OpsRamp Inc., a startup with a platform that assists businesses in detecting and repairing infrastructure failures.
• In addition to monitoring capabilities, the startup’s platform contains a process automation application.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is purchasing OpsRamp Inc., a startup with a platform that assists businesses in detecting and repairing infrastructure failures.

Recently, HPE announced the transaction, which is the company’s fourth purchase since the beginning of the year.

Fidelma Russo, Chief Technology Officer of HPE, said, “Customers today are managing several different cloud environments, with different IT operational models and tools, which dramatically increases the cost and complexity of digital operations management. The combination of OpsRamp and HPE will remove these barriers.”

When infrastructure monitoring technologies identify a probable fault in one of a company’s systems, they send an alert. Many of these alerts traditionally contained redundant data, making troubleshooting efforts more difficult. There are also false positives and alerts indicating faults that are ordinary system updates.

The OpsRamp platform claims to minimize the number of alerts, which administrators must evaluate. The business claims that its platform can eliminate up to 95% of unwanted alerts. It achieves so by filtering duplicate notifications and false positives using AI-based techniques.

After identifying the alerts that require the attention of administrators, OpsRamp sorts them by urgency. The platform then assigns each alert to the most suited administrator to resolve the issue. According to the company, its AI algorithms reveal critical technical information on each failure to expedite the resolution process.

In addition to monitoring capabilities, the startup’s platform contains a workflow automation tool. The tool enables administrators to generate scripts that automate routine maintenance operations. With OpsRamp, businesses may, for instance, automatically download antivirus updates as they become available.

HPE claims OpsRamp has thousands of global clients. The data center equipment company is both a customer and an investor in the firm. HPE’s venture capital arm, Pathfinder, contributed to OpsRamp’s 2020 USD 37.5 million funding round.

The projected closing date for the transaction is the end of July. With the acquisition, HPE plans to include OpsRamp’s technology in its GreenLake product range. GreenLake is a set of data center infrastructure and software tools that businesses may acquire on a pay-as-you-go basis, similar to the public cloud.

GreenLake is a component of HPE’s revenue growth plan. The firm revealed in the previous quarter that the annualized recurring revenue produced by its product portfolio had surpassed one billion dollars. GreenLake helps 65,000 customers manage over two million connected devices and over one exabyte of data, according to HPE.

This is the fourth acquisition that the corporation has announced since the beginning of the year. It bought Pachyderm Inc., a provider of AI development tools, in January. The software of Pachyderm facilitates the creation of data pipelines, which are automated workflows that aid in managing AI-related data.

This year, HPE has also purchased two network technology vendors. A few weeks ago, it acquired Axis Security Ltd., a startup with a platform that assists businesses in securing the network connections of their workers to work apps. Previously, HPE bought Athonet SRL, a technology provider for constructing 5G infrastructure.

• Locad’s platform moves to next-level and renders store, pack, ship and track orders for e-commerce and retail.
• Also, the funds will be used for further product development and hire more talent across Australia and Southeast Asia.

Logistics startup Locad announced for raising USD 11 million in an early-stage funding round led by Reefknot Investments to expand the network of supply chain capabilities towards Asia-Pacific.

Locad’s platform, which it calls a logistics engine, provides supply chain services for brands and retail outlets to pack, store, ship and track orders for e-commerce and retail using a network connecting shipping partners and warehouses.

With the use of cloud-based engine, Locad can synchronize inventory across sales channel such as Shopee, Shopify, and TiktokShop so that it can provide end-to-end order fulfilment for retail outlets to offer complete service package from storage to delivery. Alongside a geographically distributed routes of warehousing infrastructure, merchant can stock goods closer to customers allowing them to deliver quickly and that too at a lower cost.

Also joining the Series A fund are returning investors are Sequoia India, Southeast Asia’s Surge, Febe Ventures, Antler, as well as investors such as JG Summit, WTI, and Access Ventures. The company said the current funds will help in expanding the network, further product development and hire more talent to help move forward to Australia and Southeast Asia.

Till date the company has touched over 200 brands across Singapore, the Phillippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Australia. Also, it has shipped over 2 million orders while maintaining same-day fulfillment rate higher than 99%.

The company’s platform is operated by global consumer brands such as sandals merchant Havaianas, health product company Reckitt Benckiser and mattress retailer Emma Sleep. Add to it, there will be continued expansion of access to its logistics network infrastructure for direct-to-consumer brands and the merchants.

With hundreds of brands having access to Locad logistics engine, and so many customers and business taking path of online systems, it is becoming essential to reduce costs and for packaging and shipping.

Experts’ say

“As modern consumer brands are transforming to direct-to-consumer and omnichannel retail, we have seen that the supply chain and fulfillment infrastructure is a key barrier to scaling the business for many brands,” said Locad co-founder and Chief Executive Constantin Robertz. “And, the bar is only rising further, due to higher customer expectations for fast delivery, and the complexity driven by an increasing number of sales channels.”

“Success in omnichannel commerce for modern consumer brands requires a powerful supply chain orchestrated by software that seamlessly integrates the infrastructure of warehouses and shipping carriers,” said Robertz. “And that’s what we’re building here at Locad.”

“Over the next five years, we expect to build the region’s largest network of warehouses, enabling next-day delivery in Tier 1 to 3 cities across the region, and make this available to brands and merchants in one integrated platform,” said Robertz.

• Chaos Genius’ patent-pending technology analyzes Snowflake workloads with millions of queries by using query patterns.
• Chaos Genius says it can help an organization cut costs by up to 30% by giving them instant visibility into their Snowflake footprint and optimizing workloads to improve query performance.

Chaos Genius, a DataOps observability startup, plans to expand after closing on a USD 3.3 million seed funding round, led by Elevation Capital.

Angel investors like former Cloudera Inc. General Manager Charles Zedlewski, Kabam Inc. co-founder Holly Liu, and Sumon Sadhu were part of the round, along with Y Combinator.

Chaos Genius, officially called GoodHealth Technologies Inc., has developed a distinct data infrastructure observability and an optimization product first aimed at Snowflake Inc.’s cloud data warehouse platform.

As the company says, many enterprise data teams have become dependent on third-party data warehouses like Snowflake to organize their data.

Data warehouses make it simple for teams to consolidate their data in a single location, making it easier to examine. But cloud data warehouse services can cost thousands of dollars a month, so it’s essential to figure out how to use them most efficiently.

This is what Chaos Genius does. Its Snowflake observability and cost optimization tools take the load from data teams.

The company’s patent-pending technology analyzes Snowflake workloads with millions of queries using query patterns. The platform works by figuring out which queries in a workload are the least efficient. Then it gives smart suggestions to make them more efficient and save money.

Chaos Genius says it can help an organization cut costs by up to 30% by giving them instant visibility into their Snowflake footprint and optimizing workloads to improve query performance. Chaos Genius explicitly stated that this number was not chosen randomly.

It cites a McKinsey paper from earlier last year that details how firms may reduce their data spending by 15% to 35% by optimizing their data sources, infrastructure, governance, and consumption.

Chaos Genius also helps data engineers avoid the time-consuming task of analyzing database workloads to identify expense peaks. According to the startup, these jobs have typically always been carried out manually.

The business claimed that several Snowflake clients who spend over one million dollars annually are testing out their platform, which is presently accessible in beta.

Preeti Shrimal, co-founder and CEO of Chaos Genius claimed that her company’s products are even more useful now as businesses are under pressure to make cuts due to the economic slump. “With a unique set of features, like analyzing query patterns, finding unused data, and intelligent recommendations, our product makes a massive impact on how data teams use their warehouses and saves up to 30% in data costs for our customers,” she added.

Later this year, the Chaos Genius platform will go generally available thanks to the financing from the recent round. The business also plans to broaden the scope of its tools to include other well-known data lakes and warehouses, like Databricks, Google BigQuery, and Amazon Redshift.

• On Sunday, South Korean media claimed that Samsung Electronics Ltd. will raise chip manufacturing capacity at its main semiconductor fabrication plant next year, while competitor chipmakers are cutting spending.
• Samsung plans to add 12-inch wafer capacity for dynamic random-access memory chips, used in PCs and servers, to its P3 semiconductor fab in Pyeongtaek, South Korea.

South Korean media reported on Sunday that Samsung Electronics Ltd. plans to increase chip manufacturing capacity at its largest semiconductor fabrication unit next year when rival chipmakers are reducing their investments.

Despite projections of an economic slowdown, Samsung intends to grow its chip manufacturing. Notably, this contrasts with several of Samsung’s chipmaker competitors, who plan to scale back their operations and lay off employees due to a decline in microprocessor demand.

According to a report by Reuters, the company’s perseverance will likely help it grow its market share in the dominant memory chip segment. The move will also likely boost Samsung’s stock price whenever chip demand resumes.

The Seoul Economic Daily reports that Samsung intends to expand its P3 semiconductor fab in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, by adding a 12-inch wafer capacity for dynamic random-access memory chips, primarily utilized in personal computers and servers. In addition, the business intends to expand the plant with a new four-nanometer chip capacity, enabling it to produce more advanced chips under foundry contracts — that is, chips tailored to individual clients’ needs.

This year, the P3 facility, which is thought to be Samsung’s largest chipmaking fab, began manufacturing advanced NAND flash memory chips used in mobile devices.

According to the Seoul Economic Daily, as part of its expansion strategy, Samsung intends to buy at least ten new extreme ultraviolet equipment used in chip fabrication over the next year.

Two months ago, Samsung disclosed that its fiscal third-quarter earnings had decreased by more than 31% due to a downturn in sales of memory chips. Samsung reported that its semiconductor sector, which accounts for most of its sales and earnings, witnessed a profit decrease of about 50% due to a decline in demand for computer chips from electronics manufacturers, server companies, and cloud service providers. However, at the time, Samsung officials informed analysts that the company had no intentions to scale back its chip production operations, contrary to industry trends that have seen numerous chipmakers reduce output.

Han Jin-man, executive vice president of Samsung’s memory business, said, “We plan to stand behind our original infrastructure investment plans.”

Micron Technology Inc., Samsung’s largest competitor in the memory chip industry, said last week that it will revise its investments and capital expenditure estimates for the fiscal year 2023. It has revealed plans to lay off up to 10% of its workforce.

• According to Intel, their most recent research could enable chips with more than a trillion transistors by 2030, significantly expanding the concept of Moore’s Law.
• Because Intel’s work is typically five to ten years ahead of commercially available technology, the methods and processes the organization is developing now could very well meet the 2030 target.

Last weekend, Intel Corp. researchers unveiled a variety of technological breakthroughs and concepts, including advancements in packaging that might lead to computer chips that are ten times more powerful than the most cutting-edge silicon currently available.

The business claims that its most recent research could enable chips with more than a trillion transistors by 2030, greatly extending and expanding the concept of Moore’s Law.

Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel and a former CEO, first proposed Moore’s Law in 1965, and the computer chip industry has followed it for a long time. The law, which is more of a chipmaker option, asserts that the number of transistors on a microchip will double every two years as chip manufacturing technology develops. As a result, we can anticipate new computers becoming faster and more powerful every two years while paying less for them.

For many years, Moore’s Law held true, but chipmakers have recently warned that they are finding it challenging to keep up! This year, the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, was the most recent in a long series of individuals to declare that Moore’s Law is no longer valid. Intel, though, is not prepared to concede defeat.

On Sunday, Intel presented new research at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting 2022 that highlighted many methods, materials and technologies it intends to use to produce chiplet-based trillion-transistor processors by 2030.

Intel has already made such a pledge, which asserts that to meet the world’s unending demand for computing power, Moore’s Law must be maintained. It mentions how increased data consumption and the development of artificial intelligence have increased the demand for computing power.

The increased performance and efficiency of central processing units are among the areas in which Intel’s new transistor and packaging research is concentrated. Additionally, it is considering how to reduce the gap between new chiplet-based designs and conventional single-die processors.

To boost performance, one idea it presented entails drastically reducing the spaces between chiplets. Another illustrates transistors that can maintain their state even after losing power. The research also involves “stackable memory solutions,” as described by Intel, that help improve overall chip performance.

Intel has made advances in a number of areas. For instance, its most recent hybrid bonding research shows a 10-fold increase over the presentation from the previous year. A deeper knowledge of interface flaws that might affect data storage and retrieval is also included in its submissions, along with designs that use new materials with a thickness of under three atoms.

One of the most significant internal research groups at Intel, the Components Research and Design Enablement team, is where the new concepts came from! Engineers and designers at this company are entrusted with creating and refining new processes and materials to aid semiconductor producers in their ongoing efforts to reduce computer chip technologies to the atomic scale.

For instance, the CR group developed Intel’s extreme ultraviolet lithography technology. Because of this, it has been able to keep reducing node sizes while improving the performance of its semiconductors.

The methods and processes the organization is developing now could very well achieve the 2030 goal because their work usually is five to ten years ahead of commercially available technology.

According to Gary Patton, Vice President and General Manager of the CR group at Intel, “Seventy-five years since the invention of the transistor, innovation driving Moore’s Law continues to address the world’s exponentially increasing demand for computing. At IEDM 2022, Intel is showcasing both the forward-thinking and concrete research advancements needed to break through current and future barriers, deliver to this insatiable demand and keep Moore’s Law alive and well for years to come.”

• The Aurora supercomputer from the Argonne National Laboratory will be powered by the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series and the Intel Xeon CPU Max Series, code-named Sapphire Rapids HBM.
• According to Intel, the Xeon Max CPU is the company’s first and only x86-based processor with high-bandwidth memory that can speed up HPC workloads without modifying their code.

In a bid to compete with competitors like Advanced Micro Devices inc and Nvidia Corp in the high-performance computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) markets, Intel Corp has launched its newest product family, the Intel Max.

The Intel Max series consists of Central Processor Units (CPU) and Graphics Processing Units (GPU). Both the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series and the Intel Xeon CPU Max Series, code-named Sapphire Rapids HBM, will power the Aurora supercomputer from the Argonne National Laboratory. It is planned to go online in the coming year.

Aurora will be the first supercomputer in the world to surpass two exaflops of peak double-precision compute performance. It will also be the first system to match the Max Series CPUs and GPUs together. Furthermore, it will have over 10,000 server blades, each with six Max Series GPUs and two Xeon Max CPUs.

According to Intel, although Aurora will highlight the Max series’ power, the new products are more about making HPC and AI available to a broader market. According to Jeff McVeigh, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s Super Compute Group, “We’re trying to help solve the world’s biggest challenges faster and do that in a sustainable way.”

The executive added that with HPC and AI, various challenges related to global health and climate change might be resolved more quickly. He said that Intel plans to address a wide variety of workloads in those domains, with some heavily compute-bound and others hampered by memory capacity. “Our view is, all these are important, and we need to have the right solutions to address them,” McVeigh continued.

The open, standards-based, and cross-architecture programming framework oneAPI from Intel, which creates a single programming environment for both new processors, unites the Max Series chips.

According to Intel, the Xeon Max CPU is the company’s first and only x86-based processor with high-bandwidth memory that can speed up HPC workloads without modifying their code. With over 100 billion transistors crammed onto a 47-tile device and 128 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory, it is said to be Intel’s highest-density CPU.

According to McVeigh, “To ensure no HPC workload is left behind, we need a solution that maximizes bandwidth, maximizes compute, maximizes developer productivity, and ultimately maximizes impact. The Intel Max Series product family brings high bandwidth memory to the broader market, along with oneAPI, making it easy to share code between CPUs and GPUs and solve the world’s biggest challenges faster.”

Intel is eager to establish itself in the HPC industry, which many consider the forefront of computer technology. It includes using the most cutting-edge silicon technologies at scale to solve the toughest challenges in the world. For a corporation like Intel, having a reputation as a leader in the industry is vital for maintaining prestige.

The Max family offers the HPC sector an attractive new choice. On actual HPC workloads, Intel Xeon Max CPUs are estimated to run 4.8 times faster than competing silicon. For instance, according to Intel, it consumes 68% less power than AMD’s Milan-X to offer the same HCPG performance. Additionally, its AMX extensions significantly improve AI performance, with some applications seeing an eight-fold increase in peak throughput.

Speaking about the specifics of some popular HPC workloads, Intel claimed that the Max CPUs are 2.4 times faster than the AMD Milan-X for climate modeling workloads and 2.8 times faster regarding molecular dynamics.

With up to 128 Xe-HPC cores, the Intel Max Series GPU is designed to serve as the core architecture for the most demanding HPC tasks. According to Intel, it has 64 megabytes of L1 cache and 408 megabytes of L2 cache, representing the highest levels in the industry and significantly increasing throughput and performance.

This is not all; there’s more to come soon. Intel guaranteed that a new Intel Data Center Max Series GPU, the successor to the Max Series GPU, is scheduled to debut in 2024 and will include a considerable performance boost. Around the same time, Intel said that Falcon Shores, a future auxiliary processing unit that will combine x86 and Xe cores on a single device, will be their next significant architecture breakthrough for the future of HPC.

• Quantum Optimized Device Architecture (QODA), a new platform from Nvidia, will establish a single, open environment for both conventional computers and quantum processors.
• By the end of the year, Nvidia hopes to have a closed beta of QODA running. The platform is going to be cost-free when it launches.

The advent of quantum computing is leading to significant advancements in various fields, including investment, engineering for electric vehicles, and pharmaceuticals.

But in reality, most applications that drive these advancements won’t entirely depend on quantum computing. They’ll probably employ hybrid quantum-classical computing, with specific algorithms running on classical computer infrastructure and others optimized for quantum computing.

However, a piece of the puzzle is still missing: A method for most High-Performance Computing (HPC) developers to use quantum computers to speed up their current applications.

Quantum Optimized Device Architecture (QODA), a new platform being introduced by Nvidia, promises to establish a single, open environment for both conventional computers and quantum processors to solve this issue.

According to Nvidia, developers can use open and interoperable standards across different software and hardware platforms, and hybrid quantum-classical computing will be within reach.

Tim Costa, Nvidia’s director of HPC and quantum computing products, believes that the platform would prompt a “revolution in the accessibility of hybrid quantum-classical computing.”

Thanks to QODA’s programming model and compiler toolchain, modern scientific computing applications can be quantum accelerated. This means that the toolchain and programming model was created to integrate into and interoperate with the tools, methods, and languages that current scientific developers already use in their applications.

Nvidia hopes to have a closed beta of QODA running by the end of this year. The platform is going to be cost-free when it is launched.

Nvidia does not create quantum processors; it creates the traditional GPU supercomputing infrastructure that will coexist in a hybrid system with quantum processors. As a result, the QODA platform is an open platform. Nvidia is building it in conjunction with the top manufacturers of quantum computing hardware, software, and research organizations.

At the launch, Nvidia will have five leading quantum computing hardware providers from different qubit modalities supported by QODA. These five include Pasqal, Xanadu, IQM Quantum Computers, Quantum Brilliance, and Quantinuum. Software companies like QC Ware and Zapata and supercomputing centers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Forschungszentrum Jülich, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are a few launch partners.

Costa compared the development of QODA by Nvidia to that of CUDA, the company’s parallel computing platform and programming model that enables programmers to use GPUs to speed up their computationally expensive applications.

“It’s really part of our DNA as a company to improve the accessibility of disruptive technologies,” Costa said. “We did it with GPU computing, and now we’re looking at the same problem in hybrid quantum-classical computing.”

• The Autopatch service is only for Microsoft’s customers on big-ticket Windows Enterprise/Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 licenses.
• It is expected to make the second Tuesday of every month, which is generally known as patch Tuesday, a breeze.

This week Microsoft announced that a function called Autopatch, which automatically updates Windows and Office applications on enrolled endpoints, would now be generally available.

The Microsoft-managed service aims to automate orchestration patches for administrators responsible for tens of thousands of PCs under them. Every month, those administrators deploy up to 100 fixes, including zero-days, but occasionally the upgrades disrupt essential Windows services like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and virtual machines. But Microsoft promises the service will make Patch Tuesday “just another Tuesday.”

The rollout will be accessible only to users with Windows Enterprise E3 and E5 licenses. The launch has come one day before Microsoft is anticipated to release its monthly batch of security patches. However, it does not support Windows Front Line Worker (F3) or Windows Education (A3) license. It follows that everyone else who does not have one of those licenses will continue to receive Patch Tuesday security upgrades. At the same time, E3 and E5 users can participate in a simplified patch process.

“Microsoft will continue to release updates on the second Tuesday of every month, and now Autopatch helps streamline updating operations and create new opportunities for IT pros,” Lior Bela said.

When using Autopatch, security updates are initially installed on devices in the Test ring, which comprises a minimum number of representative devices. Following a validation period, the updates are distributed to the First (1 per cent of devices), Fast (9 per cent), and Broad (90 per cent) rings.

The IT juggernaut teased the service for the first time in April 2022 to install Patch Tuesday updates promptly and stop potential attack vectors.

In addition to Windows 10 and 11 updates, Autopatch also covers Microsoft Edge and Microsoft 365 applications. It also enables businesses to set up testing rings, keep track of upgrades, and even halt and roll back changes in case of problems. If danger is deemed critical, the service also has provisions for an expedited release schedule. (e.g., a zero-day flaw).

“Windows Autopatch aims to keep at least 95% of eligible devices on the latest Windows quality update 21 days after release,” the company notes in its documentation.

“When running an expedited release, the regular goal […] no longer applies. Instead, Windows Autopatch greatly accelerates the release schedule of the release to update the environment more quickly.”

• The business sustainability corporation works with over 95,000 businesses in 200 industries and 175 countries.
• EcoVadis plans to allocate some of the new investment to enhance its software platform.

Recently, EcoVadis, the leading provider of globally trusted business sustainability ratings, announced that it had raised USD 500 million in a new funding round from investors who firmly believe that aggressive monitoring can help improve the environmental impact of every company along the supply chain. The most trusted provider of business sustainability ratings plans to use the proceeds to expand its delivery of what it calls “sustainability intelligence” so that its clients – and their investors – can enhance business processes from the start to the end.

The business sustainability corporation works with over 95,000 businesses in 200 industries and 175 countries. It evaluates and delivers scorecards that help companies assess their inputs and efforts toward creating a more sustainable economy. The insights provided by EcoVadis also help guide financing decisions made by private investors and banks who prioritize ESG (environment, social, governance) goals.

Frederic Trinel, a cofounder who serves as co-CEO, explained, “We do this for procurement, and we do this for the finance world as well so that the private equity can monitor their investments for you.”

“They can select new targets based on ESG performance and, overall, the market is incentivized to improve on those subjects. That’s really what EcoVadis is after: To guide all companies towards sustainability.”

Reaching ESG goals

Several other groups also help companies reach ESG goals but often, they take very different paths. For example, Ayana and Bright Funds hope to help companies engage their workers by helping them find opportunities to volunteer. Millie helps build a “social impact program” around philanthropy. Selflessly offers a portal that allows you to track, guide, and celebrate giving throughout the workforce.

Some firms focus more on environmental goals and assist companies with their overall supply chain. GreenBizCheck monitors what it terms Corporate Social Responsibility and offers CSR (Certificate Signing Request) certifications after inspecting the energy, water, recycling, and transportation systems used throughout the procurement process.

Esolidar offers its clients a single portal that keeps track of all ESG and CSR goals in one place, including the environmental concerns. FigBytes provides a platform that tracks all ESG goals, something that can help companies file the necessary paperwork with the SEC.

EcoVadis plans to allocate some of the new investment to enhance its software platform. The negotiations are already in process to either merge or acquire several firms. This will enhance the general software platform used to score corporate ESG practices.

Balancing scalability, cost, automation

EcoVadis hopes that the proper use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will allow it to make wiser and mechanized decisions about the companies. Algorithms that take a deeper look into corporate data come in handy to explicitly improve its scorecard.

Frédéric Trinel, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of EcoVadis explained,  “There are many areas where cutting edge tech like AI is helping along the process. We’re increasing the reliability of the score by really looking at how the company is providing evidence and statistically analyzing whether the company is in a normal pattern.”

To reach such significant goals means relying heavily on technology. Some firms offer elaborate, human-run audits that are labor-intensive. While they can be helpful, they can be expensive for many companies.

Frédéric Trinel explained, “You could spend six months in a company if you’re an auditor, but that will not scale. We are finding the right balance between automation, scalability and cost. We [work with] 95,000 companies today and need to go after millions – three or four million companies.”

The business sustainability corporation also hopes and is working towards improving the reliability and accuracy of its assessments. It also hopes to expand the current criteria by which companies are graded and enhance the evolution of the process.

Frédéric Trinel said, “Many people are focusing on the carbon footprint, and this is one of the 21 criteria that we are assessing because, as you know, decarbonization of the society and in particular of the supply chain is a huge challenge and innovation here will help. But there are many others because the ESG spectrum is maturing worldwide. As it matures, we are going into further detail on, for instance, water pollution or DNI (diversity and inclusion). There will be tools to help our customer better manage each of those subjects as the maturity grows.”

The company also plans to boost its evaluation of biodiversity, particularly by judging how a firm and its practices either help or hurt biodiversity in its ecosystems.

Astorg, a European private equity fund and BeyondNetZero, the climate-focused fund from General Atlantic, led the current round of funding worth USD 500 million. Some other participants include Singapore-based GIC Private Limited and Princeville Capital.

• The company wants to use the funding to invest in the development of its product and for business growth by increasing its user list.
• The market of enterprise architecture is witnessing growth, and experts predict the trend will continue.

As organizations constantly evolve their digital architecture, a new type of enterprise software has emerged to help them manage that process. Ardoq – a company that designs enterprise architecture tools to provide businesses a transparent picture of their digital network, including information about who is working on what, when, and where – has closed a round of funding that will help it grow its business. This enterprise architecture startup has bagged USD 125 million in a Series D, increasing its market by over USD 300 million.

Based in Oslo, approximately 30% of Ardoq’s enterprise customer base is from Nordics; the rest are located in Europe and the US. Carlsberg, Conde Nast, and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission are included in the list.

In an interview, the co-founder and CEO of Ardoq, Erik Bakstad, said that they want to use the funds to invest in the development of their product and for business growth by increasing their user list. At present, this enterprise architecture tool is helpful to get an overview of the network and send notifications when something crashes or when there is a potential threat to security or data protection protocol. It will even suggest strategies to fix it. The long-term goal is to develop better predictive analytics and modeling tools to leverage the “digital twin” that Adroq builds of a network.

EQT Growth led this round with contributions from One Pick. This was an effective round for Ardoq as it had raised less than USD 40 million since it was founded in 2013. With the present round of funding, Ardoq is growing exponentially; its ARR increased by 80% in 2021.

Ardoq’s growth represents everything that’s happening in the global enterprise software market overall. The pandemic led to a spike in the need for digital transformation for almost every organization. Irrespective of the business type, size, or industry, SMEs have invested in upgraded applications, hardware, and workflow to leverage cloud services to overcome the challenges of evolving business requirements.

However, this has also led to the emergence of an issue: More intricate, interconnected systems and workforce working less in silos and interdependently, which means if something fails or creates a glitch in some part of the system, it may impact multiple people, teams, and applications.

Enterprise architecture tools are designed to set the house in order by giving an overview of how the system looks and how it works.

This, in turn, becomes insightful data to ensure the smooth running of a network and to feed other functions, for instance, the security teams use digital twin pictures to design and execute better defense strategies and spot loopholes in the networks. Furthermore, if the system crashes or is breached, it will assist in re-developing that part or even the entire network.

Especially for businesses planning to make an I.T. investment, this tool will give a clear picture of where the resources are being allocated and whether it aligns with the business goals. Those managing information at an organization can use enterprise architecture models and data as a part of their network audits to ensure the data usage complies with all the organizational data protection policies.

It does not come as a surprise that multiple players have already entered the area of enterprise architecture. Players include Orbus Software, which was acquired by P.E. firm Silvertree equity in 2021. Another player, LeanIX, raised USD 120 million in 2020 and aimed to grab another raise in 2021, which did not happen, according to Pitchbook data. Enterprise businesses that deliver warehousing, cloud computing, operational and network tools might explore the market opportunities over time.

Many vendors may offer this type of data to their clients to some extent – for instance, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched a service in November – an argument in favor of a third party managing the database is that it is platform-agnostic and more objective when we talk about forecasting, modeling, and recommending strategic changes or investments.

Bakstad and its co-founder Magnulf Pilskog started this startup because they wanted a solution to fix their problems.

“It was 2013, and we were doing work for large enterprises: banks, insurance companies, financial services, and telcos. In all of them, we struggled with the ‘iceberg problem.’ Companies were making large investments in digital transformation, but they did so on a very small amount of information. The risk of failing was tied to the underlying complexity of those investments. I.T. wasn’t succeeding,” Pilskog remembered. He had founded Miles, an I.T. consultancy, where Bakstad worked as a senior engineer.

Hence, they devised a tool to address this issue. They wanted to figure a way out to map out systems, data, and people “to process [and] understand how things were connected and what the impact would be if you moved one piece,” Pilskog said. “That is why many projects fail, moving one piece and the impact it has. Many people fail to understand that.” He emphasizes the influence of the Excel sheet: “If you change one cell, it impacts all the others.”

The organization has a bit of a mechanical Turk approach to how it works, which expresses more about effective enterprise technology. Ardoq relies a lot on technology and has been built to track and read networks. But Bakstad also highlighted that it also complements that with “workflow surveys” that it carries out consistently with its customers to get users’ perceptions of how things work.

“The fundamentals are here: we have more developers in Europe compared to the U.S., but valuations are still lower in general,” Englesson said, making it “a very attractive market to operate in as an investor.” Ardoq has the potential to stand apart from the crowd, he added, because their enterprise architecture model has immense potential. Additionally, the market value of enterprise architecture tools is estimated approx. €3 billion because it is delivering remarkable results on its strategy already.

Experts’ view:

“Enterprise architecture today is very much about the scaffolding in the organization. Our vision is to combine that with behavioral data and metrics [based on the] digital twin. This means that you can also then run, for example, scenario analysis. We will be accelerating that product roadmap,” Bakstad said.

“Erik and his team have built Ardoq into one of the world’s top enterprise architecture SaaS companies.” Englesson, the partner at EQT growth, said in another statement.