Zendesk has mostly confined itself to customer service scenarios, but it seems that’s not enough anymore. If you want to truly know the customer behind the interaction, you need a customer system of record to go with the customer service component. To fill that need, Zendesk  announced it was acquiring Base, a startup that has raised over $50 million.

The companies did not share the purchase price, but Zendesk did report that the acquisition should not have a significant impact on revenue.

While Base  might not be as well known as Salesforce, Microsoft or Oracle in the CRM game, it has created a sophisticated sales force automation platform, complete with its own artificial intelligence underpinnings. CEO Uzi Shmilovici claimed his company’s AI could compete with its more well-heeled competitors when it was released in 2016 to provide salespeople with meaningful prescriptive advice on how to be more successful.

Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane  certainly sees the value of adding a company like Base to his platform. “We want to do for sales what Zendesk has already done for customer service: give salespeople tools built around them and the customers they serve,” he said in a statement.

If the core of customer data includes customer service, CRM and marketing, Base gives Zendesk one more of those missing components, says Brent Leary, owner at CRM Essentials, a firm that keeps close watch on this market.

“Zendesk has a great position in customer service, but now to strengthen their position with midmarket/enterprise customers looking for integrated platforms, Base adds a strong mobile sales force automation piece to their puzzle,” Leary told TechCrunch.

As he points out, we have seen HubSpot make a similar move with HubSpot Apps, while SugarCRM, which was recently sold to Accel-KKR, could be shopping too, with its new owner’s deeper pockets. “This is almost like a CRM enterprise software Hunger Games going on,” he joked. But he indicates that we should be expecting more consolidation here as these companies try to acquire missing pieces of their platforms to offer more complete solutions.

Matt Price, who previously had the title of senior vice president for product portfolio at Zendesk will lead the Base team moving forward.

Base was founded in 2009 and boasts more than 5,000 customers. It’s worth pointing out that Base was already available for sale in the company app marketplace, so there was some overlap here, but the company intends to try to move existing customers to Base, of course.

Zendesk has indicated it will continue to support all Base customers. In addition, Base’s 125 employees have been invited to join Zendesk, so there will be no blood-letting here.

IRVINE, Calif., July 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Levyx Inc., a provider of system software for low latency big data platforms and applications to dramatically reduce Big Data infrastructure costs, announced today the availability of its newest product Radon™ for early beta customers. Radon is a large-scale distributed key-value store intended for low latency operations and optimized for Flash and non-volatile memories (NVMs), requiring much less DRAM and fewer nodes than in-memory solutions that have proven difficult to scale. It is engineered for Exascale use cases requiring +1000 node clusters such as financial services, Internet of Things (IoT) including Connected Car initiatives, telecommunications, cybersecurity and data center management — all of which involve storing, analyzing, and retrieving billions to trillions of objects with very low latency.

Bill Moore, Dell/EMC Fellow, co-creator of ZFS and founder/CEO of DSSD said: “The rise of massively scaled applications that process billions of objects related to sensor data, connected cars, threat detection, and dynamic pricing has created a fundamental need for a software stack that provides scalable and low-latency building blocks for these applications, while at the same time using commodity off-the-shelf hardware and storage. Levyx has done a great job to bridge this gap, thereby making these applications not only possible, but economically feasible as well.”

John Overton, CEO of Kove IO, Inc., a leading Software Defined Memory vendor said: “Mission-critical commercial and public-sector customers require Quality-of-Service that are best-of-breed today for both cost and performance. Radon brings enterprise-class feature sets to large-scale distributed real-time analytics, without concerns for scale. It’s important to us that Levyx’s technologies have been proven in some very demanding use cases.”

Pete Goddard, CEO of Deephaven Data Labs, a FinTech research-platform-as-a-service company, said: “Radon is a state-of-the-art key-value solution that’s engineered for environments like ours in the Derivatives industry. It’s ability to help us store, track and process time-sensitive data across global networks can prove to be game-changing for the major players in our industry.”

Tim Marsh, CEO of Serisys, a global FinTech solutions provider, said: “As a provider of core applications to some of the world’s leading financial institutions, we at Serisys see excellent opportunities to apply Levyx’s distributed key-value solution on a grand scale. One such opportunity that we are targeting together is bringing major efficiencies to Java-based Enterprise applications through a very low latency persisted distributed object cache.”

Radon leaps ahead of existing distributed key-value systems by breaking the +1000 node barrier and Exabyte data capacity limit while providing sustained performance. To achieve this, every core subsystem of Radon (e.g., distributed consensus algorithm, synchronization mechanisms, cluster-wide locking primitives, remote-procedure-call pipelines, consistent hashing scheme, etc.) had to be reenvisioned. A key innovation in architecting Radon was to distribute objects uniformly across a very large cluster, enabling high performance point operations, while also devising mechanisms to perform efficient range-query and ordered traversal of data. Radon’s performance profile is high enough to address the needs of applications demanding in-memory data access speeds at Flash/NVM memory persistency and operating costs.

In recent testing, four billion 500-byte objects were processed by Radon on a 12-node cluster consisting of AWS instances using Flash SSDs. For processing workloads similar to a heavy transactional object storage use case, Radon was able to process nearly 2 million inserts/sec and approximately 5 million lookups/sec, both with latencies of less than 400 microseconds and 5 million ordered iterates/sec with latencies of less than 40 microseconds. Performance thresholds improved an average of 6X when expanding from three nodes to twelve distributed nodes, demonstrating Radon’s extreme scalability and potential for high nodal density in processing massively distributed workloads, whereby performance improves (better than) linearly as nodes are added while keeping latency in check.

Reza Sadri, CEO of Levyx, said: “Radon is the next evolution of our product capabilities. It combines our ultra-fast Helium key-value store and our Xenon analytics platform in a distributed object store solution with enterprise reliability. Whereas our previous products were enabling technologies, Radon is a point solution that can be applied to solve major problems in the world’s most demanding datacenters – unifying a wide spectrum of workloads, including transactions and analytics, in a distributed cluster at Exabyte scale and on persisted media, bringing enterprise characteristics to very large live datasets. This solution will be an excellent software complement to our partners’ current and next-generation NVMe drives, storage-class Memory (SCM), and all-flash arrays.”

Built on top of Levyx’s Helium™, one of the world’s fastest embedded key/value store solutions, Radon is highly optimized for ultra-low latency inserts, lookup and iterate operations, non-volatile memory (NVM) storage fabrics such as NVMe Flash and SCM and serves as a data-centric compute offload. Unlike Helium and other single node KVS object stores, Radon offers an extensive set of enterprise features including replication, elasticity, consistency, and support for transactions. In addition, Radon uses Levyx’s Xenon™, a distributed analytics platform, to offload compute and analytics and imposes a schema on key/value pairs to apply just-in-time compilation to run analytics on bare-metal. Finally, Radon is written entirely in C and is backed by 16 patents and patent applications.

About Levyx Inc.
Levyx’s software solutions fundamentally disrupt the economics of Big-Data applications, bringing the benefits of high-speed Big-Data processing to the masses. No longer reserved for the largest enterprises, Levyx technology can process hundreds of millions of queries per second on commodity servers on a few nodes, making Big-Data processing much more accessible to organizations of all sizes. More information is available at www.levyx.com.

Levyx, the Levyx logo, Helium, Radon, and Xenon are trademarks of Levyx Inc. All other trademarks or brand names referred to in this press release are the property of their respective owners.

Levyx Press Contact:
Luis Morales
(949) 466-2738
morales@levyx.com

Levyx Inc. and Serisys Solutions Ltd. announced plans to provide real-time, cost-effective access to the large amount of “static” data required for effective real-time processing of securities transactions through the entire post-trade life cycle. Their joint solution brings together best-of-class technologies from Serisys’ advanced securities processing platform and Levyx’s system software that optimizes the performance of the underlying hardware. More specifically, the solution takes full advantage of the high-performance and low-latency attributes of recent major innovations in storage media, including NVMe SSDs, 3D XPoint from Intel and Micron Technology, and other versions of storage-class memory.

Tim Marsh, CEO of Serisys, said: “At the core of any successful implementation that we do is how seamlessly our platform integrates into our customer’s trading infrastructure. The Levyx team’s domain expertise makes them a great partner and their software stack helps our platform solution achieve peak performance on any hardware in any on-premise or cloud environment. The financial back-office straight through processing (STP) workload is typically heavy for any financial institution’s datacenter. Therefore, partnerships like this one that help lighten the burden for our common customers is a win-win.”

Reza Sadri, CEO of Levyx, said: “There’s tremendous opportunity for solution providers that make transaction-intensive, large-scale back-office operations more efficient in the financial industry. Serisys is an ideal partner for us because their platform solution is designed precisely with that goal in mind and our software is a great fit on the data management side.”

Levyx’s Helium data engine is one of the fastest key-value technologies in production today. It provides a very fast and scalable platform for storing and retrieving data items. It is specifically designed for applications, such as financial STPs that manipulate a large amount of data (billions of data items), while at the same time need to be very responsive; essentially enabling performance characteristics of in-memory data stores in non-volatile memory solutions.

Serisys leverages Levyx’s Helium to implement a cross-transactional cache for large amounts of reference data, making the data available to OLTP processes as if it were memory resident, without the need for a database round-trip. This combination significantly reduces the SQL load on the primary database, enabling the same OLTP load to be supported on a lower specification (typically lower cost) database server.

Consumers today expect their financial institutions to provide them with real-time transaction processing from their smartphones 24×7, across all instruments and markets worldwide, whether traditional or crypto trading venues and OTC markets. The existing disparate, disjointed, overlapping and inflexible systems cannot meet this consumer demand.

Over the last five years, Serisys has built ADYPT, one of the most advanced, cloud-based, post-trade processing systems in the world in order to solve this consumer problem. The ADYPT platform processes all instruments and client information in all markets, 24×7, in real time or at specified settlement times.  Designed to run in any on-premise or cloud environment, ADYPT provides resilience and security, continuous availability across multiple business entities and time zones, linear scalability and complete auditability. ADYPT provides not only real time STP for trades throughout their life cycle of enrichment, validation, agreement, clearing and settlement; but also real time trade break and exception handling workflows with notifications and automatic escalation by elapsed time or deadline.

Levyx’s Helium datastore allows ADYPT to take advantage of the significant cost and performance benefits of modern NVME SSDs as well as upcoming storage class memory technology to create very large persistent caches accessible across the ADYPT platform at the speed of RAM and utilizing a much more cost effective and smaller hardware footprint.

Levyx and Serisys expect to offer their joint solution for early access users this summer and to be generally available in Q4 2018. Please contact info@levyx.com for additional information.

About Serisys Solutions Ltd.
Serisys is a global financial technology provider to the capital markets headquartered in Hong Kong, with offices in Bangkok and London. To learn more, visit us at www.serisys.com.

About Levyx Inc.
Levyx’s software solutions fundamentally disrupt the economics of Big-Data applications, bringing the benefits of high-speed Big-Data processing to all enterprises and commodity hardware. Optimized for all of the latest hardware innovations, Levyx’s products make running large-scale workloads in real-time far more efficient than conventional methods and brings all of the enterprise features required by the most demanding datacenter environments to those interactive data sets. More information is available at www.levyx.com.

Levyx, the Levyx logo, and Helium are trademarks of Levyx Inc.  All other trademarks or brand names referred in this press release are the property of their respective owners.

Columbia College, a private non-profit college headquartered in Columbia, Missouri, has announced a new partnership with Ed Map, Inc. to serve as the official etext and book provider for the college’s Adult Higher Education and Online Education divisions.

For more than 160 years, Columbia College has demonstrated a strong commitment to ensuring student access to quality and engaging higher education. What started as the first women’s college west of the Mississippi River has grown to become a network of more than 35 nationwide locations and an online program that, in total, serve more than 20,000 students annually.

The college offers all students access to an affordable, individualized and quality education. Starting this fall, the college will be offering its new and current online and adult students free textbooks and eTexts and will charge no fees as part of its new Truition^SM initiative. The partnership with Ed Map will ensure students have their course materials on or before day one of their classes.

Dr. Piyusha Singh, vice president of Online Education and interim provost at Columbia College understands first-hand the importance of student access.

“We knew our course materials strategy needed improvement,” said Dr. Singh. “Students were either paying a high price at the college bookstore, turning elsewhere to the open market or choosing not to buy at all.”

That dilemma put students and the institution at risk.

“Innovation, affordability and access are key to Columbia College’s vision and values. Ed Map is excited to be their partner. We look forward to providing support and expertise as they implement an inclusive access course materials strategy focused on student success,” said Ed Map President Kerry Pigman.

“We wanted to bring course materials back into the teaching and learning environment, rather than having it be something our students needed to worry about,” said Singh. “Our Truition^SM initiative will help alleviate those concerns, offering free etexts and books to our students as part of an affordable tuition rate.”

Today, students expect personalized, engaging and adaptive learning content at their fingertips at a price they can afford. Together, Columbia College and Ed Map are meeting these demands.

“Using our OPENVUE® platform, All-In-Model (AIM)®, and support services, we will provide an all-inclusive digital access program to ensure affordable content for all Columbia College students on or before the first day of classes.” said Kerry

About Ed Map
Ed Map is a content strategy and logistics company. Through its people and technology, Ed Map enhances the discovery, management, and access to quality and engaging course materials. Helping institutions lower the cost of education and improve outcomes with CURATE by Ed Map™, OPENVUE®, and the All In Model (AIM)®. For more information, please visit http://www.edmap.com/.

About Columbia College
Founded in 1851 in Columbia, Missouri, Columbia College has been helping students advance their lives through higher education for more than 165 years. As a private, nonprofit institution, the college takes pride in its small classes, experienced faculty and quality educational programs. With more than 30 locations across the country, students may enroll in day, evening or online classes. The college is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. Columbia College educates more than 20,000 students each year and has more than 86,000 alumni worldwide. For more information, visit ccis.edu.