For no obvious reason, today brings three investments in collaboration systems. Start with purchase of a majority share in work management platform Wrike by Vista Equity Partners. Vista – or VEP to its friends – has bought quite a few well known martech companies, including Marketo, Xactly, and Cvent.
Any chance you’d hear more about Amazon’s pre-Thanksgiving data breach was swept away by Friday’s report that personal information on up to a 500 million guests at Marriott, Sheraton, Westin, and other Starwood hotels was exposed in a hack of its reservation systems. The breach began in 2014 and was only shut down this past September. We also learned last week that more 60 million email accounts were exposed over two years by a breach at the U.S. Postal Service.
Ah, but here’s some good news: Google and anti-ad-fraud vendor White Ops announced they have dismantled one of the biggest and most sophisticated ad fraud operations ever. The :”3ve” botnet infected at least 1.7 million computers at any time, counterfeited more than 10,000 Web sites, and generated from 3 to 12 billion requests per day to sell fake online advertising. The U.S. Attorney in New York filed criminal charges against the fraudsters. This does count as good news, right?
Do not confuse Snow Software, which helps companies track IT costs, with Snowflake, a cloud database often used for CDP-ish solutions. Do take note that Snow has just been sold to Flexera, which also helps companies optimize their return on tech investments. It’s a helpful reminder that cost-conscious IT departments are more than happy to “help” marketers who are doing a poor job of controlling tech spend.