Experienced Startup CTO and Engineering Lead. Delivered products used by millions of businesses.

Rocket.net, Managed WordPress Hosting Platform, announces the hiring of Dave Koston as its Chief Technology Officer, where he’ll oversee all things Engineering and Infrastructure.

Koston brings over twenty years of experience in enterprise technology to the growing platform. Former VP of Operations and employee number 3 at cPanel, Koston helped grow the business to 75 employees and high double digit MM revenue while also helping cPanel become the leading web hosting control panel software in the world.

Koston also worked at Cloudflare where he led the TLS team, which was responsible for managing SSL Certificates for millions of customers including enterprise customers in banking and other fields. He also led a team at Cloudflare to build the API that powers Cloudflare's joint venture with Baidu, Yunjiasu (​su.baidu.com​).

More recently, Koston was an Area Architect at Coalition, a cyber security startup valued at over $5 Billion, where he helped build products to secure and protect businesses across hundreds of different industries.

Dave Koston on his new position, "Joining Rocket.net is one of the most exciting choices I’ve made in my career. Ben and the team have created amazing value for their customers by focusing on pushing the boundaries of content delivery and security through development of new technologies, and most importantly, by being relentlessly passionate about their clients’ success. I can’t wait to help Rocket.net continue to create new innovations and deliver delightful experiences for consumers."

“Hiring Dave was something I’ve been banking on since the beginning of Rocket.net.” said Ben Gabler, CEO at Rocket.net. “I've successfully worked with Dave on various projects over the last twenty years and his experience across the hosting, edge, security and overall SaaS space is invaluable for the future of the Rocket.net platform.”

With Dave leading up engineering, Rocket.net will be heavily investing in new product development, including its all-new Intelligent Edge Platform that leverages AI to balance traffic across multiple CDN platforms around the globe.

The combined companies plan to make generative AI accessible to any size organization, enabling them to build, own and secure generative AI models with their data.

 Databricks, the Data and AI company, announced it has completed its acquisition of , a leading generative AI platform known for its state-of-the-art MPT large language models (LLMs). Databricks and MosaicML have a shared vision of making generative AI accessible for all organizations, enabling them to build, own and secure generative AI models, including LLMs with their proprietary data.

"Through this acquisition, we will be able to provide our 10,000 customers the ability to use their own data on the Databricks Lakehouse to train and deploy bespoke LLMs that offer a differentiated experience for their end users. Combining MosaicML with the Lakehouse provides a secure and best-in-class generative AI platform," said Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO of Databricks. "We are excited to welcome the MosaicML team of top AI researchers and engineers to the Databricks family and look forward to collaborating with them to build the future of data and AI."

"Together with Databricks, we will empower enterprise customers to more securely and cost-effectively build LLMs and generative AI with their own data," said Naveen Rao, Co-Founder and CEO at MosaicML. "Our team is excited to join the Databricks family and continue innovating for customers and the open source community."

MosaicML's product, which enables companies to efficiently build and deploy large AI models on their own data and business processes, will remain available for direct purchase. In the coming months, the Databricks and MosaicML teams will work to make training custom models even more seamless for Databricks Lakehouse customers.

The Databricks Lakehouse Platform, combined with MosaicML's technology, will offer customers the state-of-the-art generative AI training platform while allowing them to retain control, security, and ownership over their valuable data.

Green Quadrant for ESG Reporting and Data Management Software Highlights FigBytes' Strengths Across Several Key Capabilities and Momentum Categories

FigBytes, creators of the leading Sustainability Platform for impact-focused organizations, today announced its inclusion in independent research and consulting firm Verdantix's latest Green Quadrant for ESG Reporting and Data Management Software 2023¹.

Verdantix notes FigBytes' particular strength in the engagement tools it offers, giving it the second highest score of the 20 solutions identified in the report. Verdantix also highlighted FigBytes' above average score in voluntary reporting, materiality assessments, as well as ESG and sustainability performance management capabilities.

This report provides a detailed, fact-based comparison of the 20 most prominent ESG reporting and data management software vendors. Based on the proprietary Verdantix Green Quadrant methodology, the analysis encompasses two-hour live briefings, desktop research and vendor responses to a 115-point questionnaire covering 15 capability and 11 market momentum categories.

"Corporates are facing an increasing amount of regulation and pressure from stakeholders," said Jessica Pransky, Principal Analyst, Verdantix.  "Reporting on ESG and sustainability metrics for environmental topics as well as social and governance issues is an absolute necessity. Furthermore, ESG data management is more and more critical for corporates to make decisions on how they drive sustainability performances across their businesses and value chains. As a result, ESG reporting and data management software has shifted from being 'nice to have' to 'must have' for many corporates."

In addition to FigBytes' platform capabilities, the report also highlights the company's customer support, dedicated customer success manager, 24-hour support, instructor-led training and its comprehensive approach to implementation.

"The ESG reporting and data management landscape is rapidly evolving, across all industries and jurisdictions," explains Ted Dhillon, CEO and co-founder, FigBytes. "The challenges organizations face today and the frameworks they're reporting to, will continue to change. Considering this, a unified, modular platform approach is one of the best ways an organization can future-proof their ESG and sustainability program. I thank Verdantix for their ongoing commitment to raising awareness about sustainability solutions and acknowledging the power of a fully integrated ESG platform for organizations."

FigBytes' customers mentioned in the report include AECOM, Akamai, Ford Motor Company, Horizon, and Toyota Tsusho.

Addition of certified pre-owned alerts closes lead-pursuit blind spot, empowers sellers to more effectively focus time and resources on customers still in market

Urban Science^® today announced significant enhancements to its SalesAlert™ solution, introducing an industry first feature that delivers certified pre-owned (CPO) lead-defection alerts to franchise car dealers in the U.S., empowering them to identify sales lost to CPO vehicle purchases at same- and competitive-brand stores on a daily basis. Adding CPO alerts expands SalesAlert's best-in-class defection-notification capabilities by addressing a critical dealer blind spot in lead pursuit, and by empowering sellers to more effectively focus their time and marketing budgets on leads that are still in market.

"Simply put, adding CPO lead-defection alerts to SalesAlert's best-in-class capabilities empowers dealers to make decisions rooted in certainty, not speculation, regarding new and used leads to ensure their time and resources are dedicated to opportunities still available to them," said Rick Jones, vice president, adtech and dealer direct, Urban Science. "Even better, through our latest enhancements, SalesAlert creates richer opportunities to identify – and reverse – defection trends that may not have been identified otherwise. This solution is a critical element of top dealerships' technology arsenals and our latest upgrades will ensure it remains as such in the short and long terms."

Additional SalesAlert enhancements

Beyond daily CPO defection alerts, Urban Science's SalesAlert enhancements deliver several new features developed to guide the company's dealer clients to business certainty in even the most ambiguous market conditions:  

1. QuickSights dashboard: provides valuable insights regarding critical lead-defection trends, including information about zip codes, salespeople, models and segments associated with sales lost to other stores.
2. Defection DNA: offers in-depth insights regarding potential reasons behind lead defections with a single click. This granularity empowers more specific and relevant training.
3. Dealer group view: allows leaders to easily analyze defections within dealer groups; defections can be compared against competitors and other stores within a group, and to group-level performance.

AuthenticID’s security practices demonstrate the highest level of commitment to information security management

AuthenticID, a global leader in identity proofing and fraud prevention solutions, has announced that it has successfully obtained the SOC 2 Type II recertification and the ISO 27001:2013 certifications for the sixth straight year. These certifications demonstrate AuthenticID’s core commitment to protecting its customers’ data and maintaining top information security standards.

To achieve recertification, AuthenticID’s holistic security measures and processes were comprehensively reviewed in an independent audit process by SRI and Forvis.

The ISO/IEC 27001:2013 specifies the processes to enable a business to establish, implement, review and monitor, manage and maintain an effective information security management system. The certification is an international standard that provides the framework for organizations to manage the security of their information while complying with best practices in risk management and protecting customers' data.

The SOC 2 Type II compliance was established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and serves as the industry standard for a provider’s overall cybersecurity hygiene. It examines an organization's internal controls and systems regarding security, processing integrity, confidentiality, and data privacy.

Successfully achieving these certifications offers validation that AuthenticID solutions offer enterprise-level security.

“Protecting AuthenticID's reputation against security threats is a core objective to our business operations and in offering high customer confidence when purchasing strategically mature identity verification product services,” said Chris Borkenhagen, AuthenticID Chief Digital Officer and Information Security Officer. “As a result of AuthenticID's ongoing commitment to achieving both complementary SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001's standards certification for three years running, the company can assure its customers that its business process has the tools and controls in place to strengthen the organization across the three pillars of cyber security: people, processes and technology through independent third party audits.”

AuthenticID continues its commitment to upholding strong information security policies and data privacy practices throughout all aspects of its business operations. Upholding these certifications demonstrates trust and transparency and a secure environment for all AuthenticID customers.

Singular cloud infrastructure helps lower cost and complexity for AWS and Syniti customers, as well as providing flexibility of how and where to store data.

Syniti, a global leader in enterprise data management, announced today that its Syniti Knowledge Platform (SKP) is now available in AWS Marketplace. AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Additionally, the company has joined the AWS Partner Network (APN). 

Businesses continue to invest in key projects to drive business value and competitive advantage, including critical migration and consolidation projects like mergers, acquisitions and divestitures and enterprise resource planning (ERP) migrations – including the journey to SAP S/4HANA^®. Every one of these transformation projects is underpinned by a massive need for data transformation. Inefficient processes, limited velocity and visibility and lack of knowledge capture can make data migrations time consuming, complex and have high resource costs, delaying enterprise customers time to value from these critical investments. Rightsizing data can make these digital transformations less complex; critical business processes run as expected and the customer achieves full value from their investment in new systems like SAP S/4HANA.

Breaking down the silos that have traditionally defined the enterprise data management industry, the SKP provides a unified, cohesive enterprise data management platform in a single, cloud-based solution. Leveraging advanced machine learning and process automation, it streamlines migration initiatives while maintaining the highest quality of data to help optimize and simplify customers' cloud transformations. SKP runs on AWS and provides a data migration and quality platform hosted on a trusted cloud infrastructure. Shared customers can benefit from:

• Singular cloud infrastructure: Lower cost and less complexity with a singular cloud infrastructure to certify and manage.
• Pay by volume: Rightsized data can provide better cost efficiency, reduced processing power and smaller data storage needs.
• Flexible data residency: Data and application will be co-resident on the same infrastructure, providing flexibility of choice on how and where to store data. 
• Foundation for analytics & increased innovation: New insights will drive real-time visibility and better decision making, providing a better foundation for innovation with more reliable analytics.

Rex Ahlstrom, CTO & EVP, innovation & growth, Syniti, said: "Becoming an APN member provides our customers with additional peace of mind that we are the right team to shepherd their organization through a complex data migration. Having the SKP available in the AWS Marketplace can provide benefits to new and existing customers in terms of simplicity and cost efficiency, and we are pleased to continue to provide an avenue for faster, lower risk data migrations to drive better business outcomes."

Matthew Schwartz, global head of AWS SAP Alliance and Partner Network, AWS, said, "The goal of the APN is to provide innovative and effective solutions and services for our customers to succeed in a dynamic environment. We look forward to deepening our relationship with Syniti by enabling our customer's access to the tools they need to successfully complete critical data transformation projects."

Davey Sehwani, vice president, business technology corporate functions, Organon, said: "With advanced analytics and generative AI at the forefront of every conversation, data and the quality of that data has become even more important to businesses. Thankfully, investing in quality data is nothing new for Organon as we've been on a journey to stand up our own applications with our own data post-divesture from Merck. This is a monumental effort for us, and failure is not an option given the highly regulated industry we operate in. Thankfully, we've worked with Syniti and leveraged the Syniti Knowledge Platform to manage the data, while reducing project overruns and helping to ensure success."

The Syniti Knowledge Platform joins Syniti's data replication software, Syniti Replicate, in AWS Marketplace

New product line enables users to build unified customer profiles directly within the cloud data warehouse

Hightouch, the leading Data Activation company, announced today $38 million in additional funding to launch and grow its Customer 360 offering. The round, led by Bain Capital Ventures, was used to create a new Customer 360 Toolkit that enables data analysts to build unified customer profiles on top of their raw customer data without months of engineering effort.

For years, businesses have struggled to deeply understand their customers and communicate with them in a personalized way. One of the biggest challenges has been resolving a single identity in a sea of disorganized and disjointed data. Customer data is often incomplete and spread across multiple systems and dozens to thousands of tables.

With Hightouch Customer 360 Toolkit, the common work that data teams are tasked with is simplified and provides the ability to complete that work faster with built-in best practices. It works by sitting directly on top of data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, or Google BiqQuery and allows companies to quickly and easily prepare their customer data for activation. The new product is the first warehouse-native solution that lets analytics and marketing teams handle customer data preparation without engineering support. It includes:

• Visual schema builder to organize data with an intuitive visual UI
• Warehouse enrichment to add additional or missing attributes the business needs
• Identity resolution to transparently gather the data into actionable user profiles and write them back to the customer's data warehouse

The product was born out of Hightouch's rapid growth, supporting the data needs of enterprise customers like Chime, Petsmart, Warner Music, Spotify, and the NBA.

"Over the last three years, we've helped hundreds of large brands activate their customer data for sales and marketing. Along the way, we studied how companies clean, organize, and prepare their customer data for activation. In every industry, we found teams spending time on repetitive work, like identity resolution algorithms and data enrichment," said Kashish Gupta, co-CEO of Hightouch. "This new funding allows us to build out the product and engineering team necessary to embark on this large endeavor and to shoot for the stars with a larger vision."

More than 400 enterprise analytics and marketing teams now use Hightouch to quickly and efficiently activate their customer data. Many see this new capability as a game changer for their marketing initiatives.

"The Hightouch team just 'gets it' when it comes to customer data activation in the real world," said Jason Feng at Zeplin. "The ROI from our partnership with Hightouch is the highest amongst our marketing and data investments. This new customer 360 capability is exactly what we need to move even faster on our data activation journey."

The launch of Customer 360 Toolkit builds on a year of industry-leading product innovation. Hightouch recently launched its 200th connector for platforms like CRM, e-mail, customer support, and advertising. In the last six months, the company also launched a real-time Personalization API, a Match Booster advertising product, and an upgraded no-code audience builder product Customer Studio.

Bain Capital Ventures led this investment round, joined by existing investors ICONIQ Capital and Amplify Partners.

"As investors since the Series A, we've had front-row seats as Hightouch pioneered the Reverse ETL category, becoming in just a few years an essential component of modern data infrastructure," said Kevin Zhang, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. "Hightouch is taking their market opportunity to the next level with Customer 360 Toolkit. Even in a difficult market for software, we've seen exceptional customer adoption from business teams confident in Hightouch and eager to personalize and enrich campaigns without needing expensive, time-consuming integration work."

Leading Industry Analyst Firm Provides Guidance on Core and Extended Zero Trust Platform Use Cases

Absolute Software™ , the only provider of self-healing, intelligent security solutions, today announced that Forrester, an industry-leading analyst firm, has recognized Absolute in its recent report, The Zero Trust Platforms Landscape, Q2 2023. The publication advises readers on what Zero Trust platforms are, the business value they deliver, and on the dynamics and vendors driving the market.

The report also highlights how organizations can discover how to “use Zero Trust platforms to unite disparate security tools, apply effective security controls across hybrid business and operational models, and align essential functionalities to industry frameworks.”

As an included vendor, Absolute Software self-reported that clients select them for the use cases of “Extend and enhance visibility into enterprise assets” and “Enhance Segmentation across distributed enterprise.”

“Absolute is pleased to be recognized by Forrester for, in our opinion, delivering on the promise of Zero Trust with a unique platform approach that supports the enhanced segmentation and asset visibility capabilities required to enable ZTNA and continuous device posture assessment for today’s distributed enterprises,” said John Herrema, EVP of Product and Strategy at Absolute. “With the ability to establish and maintain resilient Zero Trust for every user that needs to access sensitive data and applications to stay productive and get their work done, Absolute’s customers can be certain that they are not only minimizing risk and maximizing security and compliance but also delivering the best possible user experience at all times.”

Anchored by our patented Persistence® technology embedded in more than 600 million devices globally distributed, Absolute’s Secure Endpoint and Secure Access product lines enable nearly 21,000 customers with unique and resilient Zero Trust security across their organizations. With Absolute, enterprises have an unbreakable, two-way connection to monitor mission-critical security applications’ health and behavior, including network access connections, identify if any are missing or corrupted, and automatically repair or reinstall components when necessary – without requiring human intervention.

Additionally, the report offers five core use cases Zero Trust platform providers fulfill: Enable and protect the hybrid (anywhere) workforce, Monitor and secure network traffic across the enterprise, Prevent lateral movement of unauthorized activity, Enforce least privilege on all entities, and Centrally manage key security controls.