Trello’s basic version is free, and a generous free plan at that. The basic plan includes unlimited boards, unlimited team members allowed to collaborate on team boards, unlimited cards (or tasks) and unlimited Power-Ups or integrations to a combination of third-party apps and services.

The free version is sufficient for businesses that need a productivity tool to organize tasks and collaborate on work between team members. The paid versions allow for businesses to sync data with business software like Slack, GitHub and Salesforce, allowing for Google Workspace sign-on and feature reporting tools to access real-time insights. Trello’s Standard plan is $5 a month, its Premium is $10 a month and its Enterprise plan is $17.50 a month. Prices are per user and billed annually, and increase if billed monthly.

Jira’s free version is good for smaller teams and projects. It allows up to ten users, has 2 GB of file storage and offers basic roadmap access. The free version is limited to cloud users only and does not have dedicated customer service. As one moves up in the priced plans, features increase exponentially.

The Standard plan at $7.50 per month (per user) allows for up to 20,000 users, an audit log to keep track of changes and dedicated support. The Premium plan at $14.50 a month (per user) adds project automation features, advanced administration insights and unlimited storage, while the Enterprise plan offers all of this for an unlimited number of sites. Customers must contact Jira for Enterprise pricing.

Windows 365 is a new way to experience Windows 10 or Windows 11 as a cloud service, streaming the full Windows experience — including apps, data and settings — to any device from the Microsoft Cloud. Windows 365 also creates a new hybrid personal computing category called Cloud PC, which uses both the power of the cloud and the capabilities of the device to provide a full, personalized Windows experience.

Windows 365 is designed to deliver organizations a new, flexible and secure way to empower distributed workforces, temporary and seasonal employees and workers with a need for specialized workloads.

With either Windows 10 now, or Windows 11 once it is generally available later this calendar year, individual users or information technology personnel can choose the size of the Cloud PC that best meets their needs with predictable per user per month pricing. With instant-on boot to their personal Cloud PC, users can stream their applications, tools, data and settings from the cloud across devices.

Enterprise IT can use Microsoft Endpoint Manager to procure, deploy and manage Cloud PCs for their organization. Small businesses can use a simple, self-service model to procure Cloud PCs for their organizations without a need for IT experience. For all businesses, Windows 365 simplifies Windows updates and leverages the power of the cloud to mitigate security risk.

From ISVs to systems integrators to managed services providers to OEMs, Windows 365 creates new opportunities for partners to extend new, full Windows experiences to the cloud.

Learn more about this update on Innovation Stories and the Microsoft 365 Blog, or download visual assets.

Source:  Cliff Saran

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IFS - building an enterprise application platform that meets customers where they are (2/2)

An interview with Christian Pedersen, Chief Product Office of IFS, about building an enterprise application platform from parts that are 'individually deployable yet inherently integrated.'

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According to the Financial Times (paywall), the online payment processing firm Stripe now has a valuation of $95 billion, making it the most valuable firm in Silicon Valley. It comes after the company's latest financing round which saw it raise $600 million in new equity from organisations including Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency, Allianz, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, AXA, and Sequoia Capital.

The 11-year-old company has done well in the pandemic as more businesses have gone online and sought out a payments processor for their online orders. John Collison, one of the founders of Stripe, said that it’s now handling 5,000 requests every second including payments, refunds, and customer data checks.

With the firm being a private company, it doesn’t share its financial information like those which are publicly traded. According to a source for FT, which is close to the company, it handles more payments than Adyen, a European rival that processed €303.6 billion last year. What we do know is that it’s used by several popular companies including Zoom, Salesforce, Atlassian, Shopify, Instacart, Deliveroo, Uber, and Instagram.

With this latest funding, Stripe will hire an additional 1,000 staff members at its Dublin office by 2026 and it will use the money to support its planned launches in new emerging markets including Brazil, India, and Indonesia later in the year. Each of those countries has significant populations that it can tap into and ultimately raise its valuation further if it’s successful.

Hybrid Cloud Up Time (HYCU), a self-described "backup-as-a-service" company for customers managing hybrid and multicloud environments, today announced that it raised $53 million in a "majority equity" Series B round led by Acrew Capital with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Atlassian Ventures and Cisco Investments. In an email interview with TechCrunch, CEO Simon Taylor said that the proceeds will be put toward expanding HYCU's 300-person team with a particular focus on customer success and partnerships as well as funding the development of new products and services, including a software-as-a-service product.

HYCU, pronounced "haiku," was founded in 2018 as part of a rebranding of Comtrade Software, which was headquartered in Boston with offices in Chicago, Ljubljana, Slovenia and Belgrade, Serbia. In 2016, Taylor led the acquisition of Comtrade’s management packs for Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager to Citrix. The deal let HYCU focus on the development of multicloud data protection solutions, he told TechCrunch.

"HYCU is … focused on data resiliency," Taylor said. "The emerging threat to the explosion of data is too important to take risks on. In addition, the emergence of multicloud and hybrid cloud where companies are migrating more workloads and apps from on-prem to public cloud is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Lastly, the number of data silos within enterprises is increasing as well. All of these are reasons why our current and new investors are working with HYCU to address these challenges."

HYCU offers software designed to protect data across multicloud and hybrid cloud environments. While "multicloud" and "hybrid cloud" both refer to deployments with more than one cloud, they differ in the kinds of infrastructure involved. A hybrid cloud blends two or more different types of clouds (e.g., an on-premises data center and public cloud like Amazon Web Services), while multicloud combines different clouds of the same type (e.g., Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform).

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Specifically, HYCU sells products -- most of them self-serve -- for cloud migration, security credential management, disaster recovery and backup and recovery. Taylor sees the company's offerings as competitive with legacy data protection providers with roots in mainframes, app-based data protection and management companies, and cloud-native, "backup-and-recovery-as-a-service" vendors.

"HYCU experienced much of its growth during the pandemic. Much of that was driven by the need to simplify the ransomware recovery experience," Taylor said. "The pandemic also saw the fastest rise in the use of multicloud systems. Many data protection solutions were developed before public clouds existed, and people began to realize the responsibility of protecting cloud data."

There's certainly no shortage of competition in the data backup and recovery sector. In our coverage of HYCU's Series A, my colleague, Ingrid Lunden, noted three major rivals: Rubrik, Veeam, Veritas and CommVault. Veeam was acquired by Insight in 2020 for $5 billion. As of early 2019, Rubrik was valued at a whopping $3.3 billion.

In 2019, IDC estimated that the market for data replication and protection software was worth $9.4 billion. It's almost certainly grown since. Over 80% of companies responding to Flexera's latest State of the Cloud survey reported having either a multicloud or hybrid cloud strategy.

Gartner predicted in a 2020 report that worldwide spending on information security and risk management technology and services would reach $150.4 billion in 2021, driven in part by high-profile ransomware attacks. At the same time, the analytics firm projected spending on public cloud services would climb to $304.9 billion -- up from $257.5 billion in 2020.

HYCU claims to be in a strong position for expansion, with a customer base totaling more than 3,100 organizations including U.S. state and local government agencies, the U.S. Department of Defense and "multiple" branches of the U.S. military. In anticipation of courting future public sector clients, perhaps, HYCU recently announced support for AWS GovCloud, Amazon's cloud regions designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads.

"Wherever the need for cost-efficient, multicloud data protection as a service exists, we service those needs," Taylor said. "HYCU is positioned to continue to thrive. We were approached to start a Series B and were able to do it at a time when many tech companies were challenged to raise money. Protecting data is a need that will always be present, especially as more data is created."

To date, HYCU has raised $140 million.