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Tag: cloud solutions

Arlington supply chain tech unicorn hires CFO

Arlington-based supply chain management technology company Interos Inc. has hired Aida Sukys as chief financial officer.

Sukys was previously CFO at Justworks Inc., a human resources tech company. Sukys also was the group CFO and global head of financial business services for Willis Towers Watson PLC, a global risk management and insurance company. In that role, she led acquisitions and growth efforts and supported the company’s transition from a private company to a public one.

“Aida shares our vision to deliver the world’s most powerful operational resilience technology to our discerning — and growing — customer base of procurement and other supply chain professionals worldwide,” Interos founder and CEO Jennifer Bisceglie said in a statement announcing the hire in late August. “Her extraordinary financial acumen, keen strategic focus, and proven track record to scale growth are perfectly aligned with where we are on our journey in providing our customers the technology from which to build trust and operational resilience with their extended third parties.”

In 2021, Interos was valued at $1 billion, launching the woman-led company to unicorn status.

“I’m honored to be joining Interos at this exciting juncture in their history,” Sukys said in a statement. “I can’t think of a more important and relevant business to be part of as the world wrestles with so many material supply chain challenges brought on by third party risk.”

Interos’ software-as-a-service cloud platform uses artificial intelligence to model businesses ecosystems. Its customers include Fortune 500 companies, the Department of Defense and NASA, according to a news release.

Finnish software company establishes North American HQ in Reston

Helsinki-based e-permit software company Cloudpermit has chosen Reston for its North American headquarters, it said Wednesday. Last spring, during Gov. Ralph Northam’s trade visit to Germany, the company decided to locate the office in Fairfax County, with the precise location announced this week.

The company currently has fewer than 10 employees working out of its Reston office but is planning to double its team by the end of this year, according to its news release.

“Virginia is a leader in tech jobs, and we’re happy to announce it has brought another company to the commonwealth as Cloudpermit, a global leader in e-permitting software, has chosen to establish its U.S. headquarters here,” Northam said in a statement.

Cloudpermit works with local government building departments to simplify development processes by hosting their permit processes, from application to approval, on its cloud-based software. The company has almost 500 local government clients across Europe and North America.

“Virginia has the highest concentration of tech talent in the U.S.,” Cloudpermit CEO Jan Pawli said in a statement, “and thousands of tech companies have made Fairfax County home, so we are delighted to join this incredible and growing business hub.”

The Virginia Economic Development Partnership and the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority helped recruit the company.

“We are proud to welcome Cloudpermit to Fairfax County and Northern Virginia for its continental headquarters,” Fairfax County EDA President and CEO Victor Hoskins said in a statement. “A company like Cloudpermit has many options for a North American base. Choosing Fairfax County is an important vote of confidence in our business climate, our assets for company success and the kind of talent it can find here.”

Arlington supply chain tech company joins unicorn club

Following its $100 million Series C financing round, Arlington-based supply chain management technology company Interos Inc. has been valued at $1 billion, reaching coveted unicorn status.

Led by CEO Jennifer Bisceglie, Interos is one of 74 female-led unicorns, according to Crunchbase. Worldwide, there are more than 770 unicorn companies.

Interos’ cloud platform uses artificial intelligence to model the ecosystems of businesses, and its customers include Fortune 500 companies, the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA, according to a news release.

NightDragon, a San Francisco-based investment firm focused on the cybersecurity, safety, security and privacy industries, led the financing round. Current investors Kleiner Perkins and Venrock also participated.

Arlington-based Higher Logic acquires Montreal’s Vanilla

Arlington-based tech company Higher Logic has acquired Canadian cloud-based community software company Vanilla.

Vanilla was owned by New York-based growth equity investment firm Level Equity. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Founded in 2007, Higher Logic offers a community engagement software platform aimed at associations and the corporate B2B market. With the acquisition of Vanilla’s engagement platform, Higher Logic is expanding its reach into the business-to-consumer market, according to a company news release.

The combined company has approximately 400 employees.

“We have always been impressed with Vanilla’s commitment to innovation in engagement and their ability to serve key business use cases in the B2B and B2C space for customers like Oracle, TeamViewer, Acer, Charter Communications and more,” Higher Logic CEO Kevin Boyce said in a statement. “Vanilla’s success in the corporate market complements our success with B2B technology companies like Change Healthcare, Juniper Networks, Imperva, and others. At the same time, our scale, profitability and accelerating growth will allow us to increase our investment in both the association and corporate markets and continue to build industry-leading engagement solutions that connect people, knowledge and ideas. We are excited to welcome the Vanilla team into the Higher Logic family.”

“Higher Logic has a proven track record in building community engagement and facilitating meaningful connections for organizations,” Vanilla CEO Luc Vezina said. “With more interactions happening digitally, community has become mission-critical for almost every organization. We are thrilled to be joining forces with Higher Logic to create the preeminent online community solution.”

Teresa Carlson leaves Amazon Web Services

Teresa Carlson, the Herndon-based executive who founded Amazon Web Services’ public sector business, is leaving Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing subsidiary to become president and chief growth officer of Splunk Inc., the San Francisco tech company announced today.

Carlson was an influential and visible presence in the Washington, D.C., region for a little more than a decade in her role as vice president of worldwide sector and industries at AWS. She previously served as an executive at Microsoft.

Carlson’s former boss, Andy Jassy, was tapped to replace Jeff Bezos as CEO of Amazon in February. That led to some speculation that Carlson could be an internal candidate to become CEO of AWS. But Jassy announced in March that Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky was taking the job.

With Carlson moving to the data management and cloud services company Splunk, her replacement will be Max Peterson, currently vice president of the public sector’s international business, an AWS spokesperson confirmed.

Carlson’s will start her newly created role at Splunk effective April 19. The company says she will be responsible for driving go-to-market business segments, advancing cloud-first initiatives, accelerating growth and pursuing new market opportunities.

Splunk reported revenue of $2.23 billion last fiscal year — $554 million of which was attributable to cloud revenue, an increase of 77% from the previous fiscal year. Splunk’s customers include Tide, Lockheed Martin Space, California Pizza Kitchen, The New York City Fire Department and the U.S. Census Bureau.

“Together,” Carlson said in a statement, “we will build on Splunk’s legacy of innovation as one of the fastest growing companies in the history of enterprise software.”

Regarding Carlson’s departure, an AWS spokesperson said in an email, “We’re really proud about the work Teresa has done to help public sector customers around the world reimagine digital transformation and achieve mission success, and we wish her the best moving forward.”

Lynchburg software firm names federal biz VP

Lynchburg-based CloudFit Software LLC in February hired Tom Sampson as its vice president for federal and regulated industries. 

Sampson previously served as the chief information officer of the U.S. Navy’s F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO). He has 22 years of leadership experience in Navy active and reserve service and 15 years of tech experience. In his new role, he will focus on services for the Department of Defense, the federal government and regulated industry customers.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and his master’s degrees in ITM management and business administration from American University. 

Founded in 2018, CloudFit works to implement, manage and secure critical services and applications to the cloud.

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Tysons analytics firm Qomplx plans to go public

Tysons-based risk analytics firm Qomplx Inc. announced Monday its plan to go public through a merger agreement with Tailwind Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company backed by Philip Krim, co-founder and CEO of online mattress retailer Casper Sleep Inc. 

The deal values Qomplx, which will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol QPLX, at $1.4 billion, or $10 per share. Since its $78.6 million financing round from Cannae Holdings Inc. in 2019, Qomplx has seen steady growth. The company, which provides risk analytics services through a cloud platform that uses artificial intelligence, expects its 2021 pro forma revenue to be $141 million. It reported $96 million in 2020 revenue. 

“Reaching public markets via our partnership with Tailwind expedites Qomplx’s ability to reach more customers globally and supports our continued development of the core technology platform for mission-critical customer applications,” Qomplx co-founder and CEO Jason Crabtree said in a statement.

The merger is expected to be complete in mid-2021.

As part of the transaction, Qomplx will also acquire two cyber intelligence companies: Columbia, Maryland-based Sentar and Tyche, a European company. Financial details of the transactions were not released, but the acquisitions will add more software capabilities to Qomplx’s current offerings.

“Qomplx is differentiated in its ability to link specific data, security controls, and simulations to financial risk,” said Krim, who is also chairman of blank-check company Tailwind, in a statement. In September 2020, Tailwind announced its own $300 million initial public offering. Casper is also a public company, selling sleep products online and at retail locations.

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Salesforce to acquire McLean-based Acumen Solutions

On Dec. 1, the same day it announced that it was acquiring workplace communication service company Slack for $27.7 billion in cash and stock, cloud-services company Salesforce.com Inc. revealed that it’s also acquiring McLean-based professional services firm Acumen Solutions.

San Francisco-based Salesforce has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Acumen Solutions. In a statement that didn’t disclose the financial terms of the acquisition, Salesforce said that Acumen would become part of Salesforce Professional Services. The statement called Acumen “a leading professional services firm with deep Salesforce knowledge and extensive industry expertise across public sector, manufacturing, financial services and more.”

In June, Salesforce closed on its deal to acquire San Francisco cloud and mobile software provider Vlocity for $1.3 billion. In the Acumen statement, Salesforce said that the acquisitions meant that “customers can go digital faster and transform their industry.”

 

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Texas company starts building second data center in Ashburn

Plano, Texas-based data center infrastructure company Aligned Energy LLC has started construction on its second data center in Loudoun County’s Ashburn area, the company announced Tuesday. 

Aligned finished construction on its first 370,000-square-foot, 60-megawatt data in 2019. The new data center will add 513,000 square feet and 120 megawatts to the existing campus.

“The first phase of Aligned’s Ashburn data center campus was completed in approximately six months, and we’re now on target to deliver the initial phase of our second Ashburn facility, a fully-commissioned 40 [megawatt center], by the close of 2020,” Aligned CEO Andrew Schaap said in a statement.

Aligned also has data centers in Dallas, Phoenix and Salt Lake City. Loudoun County is the primary data center hub of the world, with more than 70% of all internet traffic passing through Ashburn.

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Managing during crisis

Virginia Business virtually sat down with Craig Halliday, CEO of Dulles-based software company Unanet, which provides project management software, timesheet software, expense reporting software and other human resources software to federal government contractors, architects and engineers. This is part of an ongoing series of conversations with Virginians about how their work lives and businesses have changed during the pandemic.

Virginia Business: How has business changed for Unanet during the crisis?

Halliday: Overall, because we’re a cloud-based company, we haven’t noticed a huge change. It’s really just been more about making sure that we keep our customers going and making sure that we take care of our employees and that they have everything they need to work remotely. 

However, we have seen a very large change in the last month. We were just in the process to launch our 24/7 support, so the timing of that was excellent as it related to our customers because they do need a lot of support right now.

What we’re seeing from our customers is a large increase in the amount of support they need to deal with the new provisions and the new legislation coming out: how they need to record time, record expenses and be able to report on that. A lot of our customers are government contractors, so need to have DCAA [Defense Contract Audit Agency] compliance. They have quite strict government reporting deadlines. 

VB: What new legislation are federal government contractors having to respond to?

Halliday: The Families First Coronavirus Response Act [which allows private employers with fewer than 500 employees to keep workers on payroll by reimbursing employers with tax credits for the cost of providing employees with paid sick leave related to COVID-19], especially for our customers who have less than 500 employees. There will be quite a few of those provisions that will apply to them and they will be able to support their employees and also get some relief from the government. But they need to be sure they’re tracking things appropriately. 

VB: What has the bandwidth looked like in terms of  cloud storage?

Halliday: Bandwidth has not been a problem. Honestly we haven’t missed a beat. That’s not to say that as things go on there won’t be increased loads.

Gwendolyn Hess, a Unanet senior technical trainer, working from home. Photo courtesy Unanet

VB: How have employees adapted to supporting clients around the clock?

Halliday: There’s been a large increase in the amount of calls to our support line, especially to help with how to adapt to new provisions.  We’ve been putting articles out there about how you deal with it. We have a customer forum where customers can go in and interact. We’re also doing a lot of customer surveys saying, “What do you need this week?” Because last week was last week, this week is this week. Everything is changing very rapidly, so [we’re asking,] “What do you need from us now?”

VB: Have you noticed clients using project planning software differently?

Halliday: We [sell] project planning software both to government contractors and architects and engineers. They’re planning and replanning their projects. Having those resources right now is good for them. We’re seeing a lot of the architects and engineers getting their projects [moving], but then waiting and seeing [what happens next]. Similarly, for government contractors, they have to plan and replan their work right now, and we have to support them to do that. 

VB: Have any new customers reached out during the crisis?

Halliday: We’re seeing a lot of interest in the products we’ve got, but we’re really focused right now in supporting our current customers and making sure that they can do what they need to do. Everybody now is realizing that they should be on the cloud, so any of our customers who are not fully cloud-enabled are certainly wanting to make sure that they are. For example, we created an invoicing module that we just released and we’re seeing interest in that because people want to be able to be efficient in getting the bills out and making sure that they can automate a lot of these things, which are somewhat impacted by remote working.

VB: How have your employees responded to the increased workload?

Halliday: On the support side, they’ve been busier than usual. On our development side, we’re just continuing as usual. There’s an impact of working remotely, especially for families with kids. With kids not being at school, that has an impact. There’s no doubt. We need to support our employees to make sure that they can take care of them. We’re just doing a lot more virtual meetings. We have a virtual happy hour tomorrow and making a point of having these employee communications where everybody is in contact with everyone else. I think it’s very important for morale and to keep everyone connected.

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