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Checking the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index

Tom Paine

The BVP (Bessemer Venture Partners) Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index tracks the performance of selected publicly traded Cloud companies .Its performance has far exceeded other major indexes as shown on the above graph. Lately, its growth has been explosive.

The Index trades on Nasdaq under the name EMCLOUD.

The Average Price-to-Revenue multiple is 19.1 The Average Revenue Growth Rate is 39.9%.

Here is the data on the companies that compose the index. Some readers may not follow financial news that closely, but its good to know how companies you may work or partner with are performing, who has the the economic power to buy or dominate others, or who the up & coming stars are. I follow this stuff closely, but am often surprised myself by some changing relative values portrayed in the Index.

One thing you might notice is that there are no Philly-area based companies in the Index, although there are bits & pieces of a few in the region.

Also helpful is the Cloud 100, a list of still-private companies put together by BVP with Forbes and Salesforce Ventures. The Cloud 100 is only published once. per year, so it is more static Several of these companies have already gone public since the end of 2020 when the Cloud 100 was published. No Philly companies here either.

The Layoff Scene in Philly & beyond

Tom Paine

Like many analysts and tech workers, I find the job market for enterprise software workers to be difficult to read right now.

I’ll start with Oracle, which The Information reported as having laid off “several hundred people”, mostly from Advertising and Customer Experience services, while concentrating more on healthcare after completing its Cerner acquisition. Oracle’s cutbacks seem more a result of a long-planned restructuring than a reaction to current economic conditions, but I’m sure the economy is an added factor.

At other major enterprise software companies (Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, Adobe ) there is little evidence of current layoffs. Salesforce, however, did lay off many in Hong Kong as part of a strategy to outsource China operations to Alibaba Cloud.

If you want to look for weakness at Salesforce, a good place to look at is its ecosystem, composed of companies that receive a high percentage of revenue selling to Salesforce customers.

Chicago-based Copado, which creates Devops tools primarily for Salesforce customers, recently laid “more than 100” of its 700 employees. Not clear why; Copado had recently expanded its efforts to the SAP community. Automox, a Boulder-based cloud operations vendor also heavily into the Salesforce space, laid off 18% of its employees (around 75 people) in mid-June, citing economic conditions.

Other than Gopuff’s last large reduction in July, I haven’t seen any other large tech layoffs in the Philly market. That doesn’t mean they aren’t in the process of happening; there can be a lag between the time layoffs happen and the time that news about them seeps out. But sometimes when an emerging startup cuts two or three engineers, it can be a big deal to that company though you may not hear about it.

In a different category, eCommerce, Shopify conceded that it had bet too much on continuing pandemic-fueled growth and was planning to cut up to 10%, or 1,000 employees.

Two of my best sources on the Philly Tech job market are very positive:

Mark Constan

1w

For those who have been #laidoff The July #Jobs Report was released and the US added 528,000 jobs. Unemployment even dipped to 3.5%, which is the lowest it’s been in 50 years. Hold you head up! Enjoy this weekend. Enjoy the time off you have this summer! You will have something soon.

https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:share:6961325982012030977

1w

Trying to be positive.
Many layoffs are happening, and employees and candidates need to do some homwework in financials and product.


T. Brad Kielinski• 1stFounder & CEO at IT Pros1mo • 1 month ago

If there were ever a time to be laid off, now is the time.

Tech unemployment is 2.1%

The hiring market is booming for skilled and accomplished professionals.

There are 348,000+ “Software Engineer” jobs advertised on this platform alone.

Although the rise in salaries have calmed down, the only real challenge becomes which offer do you take?

Good luck out there.

https://ww.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:share:6961325982012030977

Remember, though, that recruiters have a natural bias towards keeping candidates positive and active.

Let me know of any layoff news at [email protected]

Update 8/27:FreshDirect shut down its Philly operations after 12 years. eliminating 40 jobs in the process.

Update 8/31: Things are fairly quiet, though its difficult to ascertain whats going on behind the scenes. Wondering if Comcast will be cutting workforce, given slowing growth.

Update 9/1: Two WARN Notices:

Conduit Global Inc.
3400 Bath Pike
Bethlehem, PA 18017

175 people affected

DHL Supply Chain
120 Commerce Lane
Tatamy, PA 18085

58 Affected

Piano Software Relocates Global Headquarters to Amsterdam to Reflect Steadfast Commitment to European Data ProtectionUSA – English 

(PRNewsfoto/Piano)

NEWS PROVIDED BYPiano Software Inc 

May 16, 2022, 08:00 ET


Company reinforces global operations, staff distribution and commitment to data privacy for digital analytics and activation tools

AMSTERDAM, May 16, 2022/PRNewswire/ — Piano, a leading digital experience platform, today announced that Amsterdam will become its new global headquarters. The relocation reinforces Piano’s commitment to European ideals around data protection and developing software that respects the boundaries set forth by the GDPR and other local regulations around the world.

Since its founding, Piano has acquired companies based in France, Germany, Norway, Slovakia and elsewhere. These transactions and Piano’s organic growth have forged a global footprint with its strongest presence in Europe, including more than two-thirds of Piano employees and over half the organization’s revenue. Piano has considered Amsterdam its European commercial hub since 2018, and the company will open a new flagship office in the city later this summer.

Piano’s software suite has been developed in Europe as an end-to-end solution for organizations to understand their customers and engage them digitally at every touchpoint in their user journey. Its advanced digital analytics tool, Piano Analytics, was built purposefully and entirely in France in adherence with the world’s strictest data protection rules.

“In the midst of a ‘big tech’ reckoning, I’m very proud that Piano has remained true to our values around making great software for good purpose. Europe is leading the way in data privacy, and with the majority of our operations being in Europeanyway, we felt it was time to make our commitment to Europe and to data protections clear,” said Trevor Kaufman, CEO, Piano. “Amsterdamhas been a strong European commercial center for Piano for the last four years, so we’re excited to deepen our investment in the city and continue to grow as part of its exciting tech community.”

As the future of the internet shifts away from anonymous tracking and toward a consent-based system with users in control, committing to the EU’s leadership allows Piano to continue offering solutions that help brands and publishers reach their data goals while maintaining trust with their own customers.

A truly global company, Piano employs more than 650 staff across 15 offices worldwide, including Amsterdam, Paris, Singapore, Berlin, Buenos Aires, New York, and Tokyo. The company has continued to expand its global presence and product offering with the acquisitions of AT Internet and CeleraOne in 2021, and SocialFlow in 2022. Piano has grown more than 240% in the last two years and has been recognized annually on the Inc. 5000 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500 lists.

About Piano

Piano’s Digital Experience Platform empowers organizations to understand and influence customer behavior. By unifying customer data, analyzing behavior metrics and creating personalized customer journeys, Piano helps brands launch campaigns and products faster, strengthen customer engagement and drive personalization at scale from a single platform. Headquartered in Amsterdam with offices across the Americas, Europeand Asia Pacific, Piano serves a global client base, including Air France, the BBC, CBS, IBM, Kirin Holdings, Jaguar Land Rover, Nielsen, The Wall Street Journal and more. Piano has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing, most innovative technology companies in the world by World Economic Forum, Inc., Deloitte, American City Business Journals and more. For more information, visit piano.io.

WITH $12.3 BILLION IN 2021 REVENUE, SHI CONTINUES TO GROW AND INNOVATE

 April 14, 2022  Esther Surden0cloudentrepreneurshipInnovationNewsNJ Tech CompaniesNJ Tech Peopletech entrepreneurshipTech for BusinessTech Workforce

If you travel down Davidson Avenue in Somerset, you’ll find the global headquarters of SHI International Corp., a hardware, software and IT solutions provider.

The company’s origins date back to “Software House” — the $1 million reseller acquired by Thai Lee and Koguan Leo in 1989.  To say the company has grown since then is an understatement.

In 2021, SHI, which is a privately owned company, brought in $12.3 billion in revenue, growing 10% over 2020’s revenues. The company’s momentum was particularly strong in the second half of the year (up 14% over the second half of 2020), and it continued into January, SHI said in a press release.

Recently, SHI changed its branding, introducing a new logo and repositioning itself to make customers aware of the broad swath of offerings it provides. The company has about 2,000 employees in New Jersey, at both its headquarters and its integration centers. SHI employs more than 5,000 people worldwide.  

In 2021, the company hired more than 500 solution engineers and continued to invest in its Stratascale (Austin, Texas) division, which provides business transformation through consulting services. The company launched Stratascale in November 2020.

NJTechWeekly.com spoke with Ed McNamara, director of communications and marketing at SHI, about some new directions the company is taking and how it thrived during the pandemic. Our conversation starts here:

ES: SHI came back like gangbusters during the pandemic. How did you manage this?

EM: I think the most important thing was that we were mostly prepared internally. There was a good bit of planning and a good bit of good fortune. We have two warehouses / integration centers, Ridge and Knox, named after the streets they reside on in Piscataway.  The Knox one had been opened for years and the Ridge one came online in 2019. As you know, for the first four or five months of the shutdown there was an increased need for hardware sales, so having that increased capacity benefited us, so we could help our customers as they moved their people to remote locations.

We flipped the switch for our own employees in March of 2020. We were very much an in-office company, whether we are working here in Somerset or its down in Austin, Texas, or in Milton Keynes, in the U.K., our top three office locations.  We believed in that model for collaboration and training and several other reasons. We went from being an in-office company to a work-from-home company over the course of a weekend. Between Friday and Monday, 94 percent of our employees went from in-office work to remote work.

We were prepared because, about 18 months before this, a couple of bad winter storms had knocked out our New Jersey office’s ability to be there for our customers. Thai Lee, our CEO, decided that we couldn’t tolerate the office disruption, and she decided that everyone would have the ability to work remotely at a moment’s notice. Everyone was equipped with laptops and mobile devices to be able to support remote work. During the shutdown, we just had to make some adjustments on the IT side to scale up in terms of our virtual private network to handle a greater capacity over a longer period of time.

The 6 percent of our employees who could not work remotely should not be overlooked. They were in our integration center and were warehouse employees. They did a massive amount of work, sometimes working double shifts to accommodate all of the IT needs of our customers. They were what kept our customers going through the lockdowns. Our customers all over the world were part of that.

ES: What were your most in-demand items during the various stages of the pandemic?

EM: Laptops, monitors, docking stations, you know, anything that you would see if you looked around that you would need to create an a remote office.

The logistics was the hard part, and where we could make the most impact. For example, a financial company with 1,000 employees in New York used to have everything shipped to their New York address. With the lockdown, suddenly these items had to be shipped out to individual employees. You might ask, “Does that make a difference?” And it really does. Shipping pallets of equipment is very different than shipping individual monitors. We were able to do very well with this because we were able to meet our customers’ needs.

ES: What do you think is the main reason SHI has been so successful?

EM: At SHI we always point back to our very loyal customers. We have customers who have been with us for years and decades. It’s not always the case. We do get new customers coming on board. But our long-term customer IT needs have increased, and as our relationship evolves with these customers, we continuously refine what is available to them. When we opened our Ridge facility, it was in response to new opportunities. Customers who might have just been coming to us for Microsoft Volume Licensing now are using us for rack and stack, configurations, and delivery, for example. Also, we are expanding now on an international level in a way we haven’t done before. That has helped us find new customers, and was one of the reasons for the rebrand.

ES: What were some of the other reasons behind the rebrand?

EM: The rebrand was not just about finding new customers, but also about getting existing customers who have known SHI for 20 years to recognize that what they knew about SHI 20 years ago is not necessarily what SHI is now. And we really wanted to invite people to take the opportunity to really look at us in a new light, which just so happens is our marketing tag line. And we had our third logo for 20 years or so. We are now on our fourth logo and we are saying, “Hey, if you’ve known us for a very long time, we invite you to take a look at us and see what’s different.” It’s not just the brand, it’s the offering.

Also, in 2020, SHI established Stratascale, located in Austin, Texas, which brings a consultancy-first approach to helping organizations rapidly adapt in response to business changes and challenges through technology innovation.  We call this “digital agility.” As a wholly owned subsidiary of SHI, Stratascale’s researchers, technical advisors, consultants and field service professionals integrate with SHI’s procurement, implementation and managed-services capabilities, giving customers access to an integrated end-to-end partner for their business transformation journey.

ES: What is SHI’s relationship to New Jersey?

EM: Our headquarters is here and we are staying here. We are also expanding outside of New Jersey. We have about 1,300 employees in Austin, at Stratascale. You know, 2022 is our 14th year in Austin. We’ve been in the U.K. for 20 years, and we continue to expand in the U.K., and we are putting an integration center there. We will also be expanding on mainland Europe, and will be creating an integration center there, as well. We need to continue to support the integration needs for our hardware and software customers, both in Europe and in the U.K., in particular. We will need to put the employees close to the customers.

ES: Is SHI back to the office in its locations?

EM: New Jersey is back two days a week, and we just started coming back in. In Austin, as well, it’s also generally two days a week. We think that for a very long time going forward there will be a hybrid model — sometimes at home, sometimes in the office. We still think that there is a big benefit to our employee base in terms of collaboration among teams, learning and training of all employees, but especially training of employees that are recently onboarded. And we’ve always felt that there was a lot of energy and enthusiasm and positive learning opportunities for people to be in the office. So, being back two days a week feels right.

This article originally appeared in NJ https://njtechweekly.com Tech Weekly, Esther Surden, founder & publisher, and is republished here with her permission.

Austin-based LoveSeat recently raised $7 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners (Philly angle)

Tom Paine

Actually, the concept that would become LoveSeat was hatched in
Philly back around 2013 by Wharton grad and TicketLeap founder Chris Stanchak and his wife Jennifer Stanchak, who was one of the earliest employees of Venmo, which was founded in Philly. The couple moved to Southern Califomia and formally launched LoveSeat, which was in the business of finding, restoring and reselling vintage furniture.

Although the vintage business could be fun and profitable, it was limited by the difficulty in obtaining inventory and was hard to scale. But the Stanchacks in the process found a more attractive business to pivot to: purchasing almost new furniture and other household fixtures that were returned to stores within a company’s return policy. Stores or online retailers have little use for the returned product. It often ended up in landfills.

A key to making the concept work
was use of live auctions to sell product. This model dictates that live auctions be locally based (which also eliminates shipping costs), though that may slow the pace of expansion.


After the pivot, LoveSeat showed margins and unit growth potential strong enough to get the attention of top of the line VCs, such as Bessemer. That firm is known for its Bessemer Cloud Index, which tracks the performance of publicly traded cloud computimg ventures. Love Seat was more of a hybrid, combining physical and virtual elements; the company has built a SasS app to help manage the business.

The investment round included participation from angels who had backed the venture previously, including DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg.

LoveSeat will use the funds to round out its senior management team and expand its physical locaions with an initial concentration on Texas.

But Chris Stanchack told me in a phone interview that he wanted to give a shoutout to people in Philly, which fits into LoveSeat’s longer term expansion plans.


	

CHICAGO, March 15, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — The Association for Corporate Growth (ACG) is excited to announce that it has acquired GF Data, the leading provider of middle-market transaction multiples and other deal data. The acquisition will provide additional benefits to ACG members as well as grow GF Data contributors and subscribers going forward.

“This is a company that fits squarely in ACG’s wheelhouse,” said Tom Bohn, ACG’s President and CEO. “GF Data’s unique, proprietary research methodology provides objective, transaction-based clarity for mid-market dealmakers – a key component of ACG’s membership. This acquisition is truly an example of ACG living its mission of driving middle-market growth through M&A.”

Founded in 2006, GF Data provides aggregated data and analysis to subscribers through electronically delivered reports and access to its valuation database. Data can be filtered by NAICS code, total enterprise value, revenue, EBITDA and more. Acquisition details are provided anonymously by more than 250 private equity firms through a secure online interface. To date, GF Data has tracked more than 4,000 transactions valued between $10 million and $250 million.

GF Data recently expanded its coverage to deals valued at as much as $500 millionand will be adding this data to its M&A,LeverageKey Deal Terms and Industry Drilldown reports. These quarterly reports provide users with more than valuation multiples. A variety of detailed exhibits parse the data by deal structure and lender type, and provide granular insight into financing and deal terms for PE platforms, add-ons and SBIC-backed acquisitions.

“In ACG we found the ideal partner to continue to build GF Data as ACG’s membership is really the lifeblood of GF Data – the data providers and subscribers to the product,” said Andrew T. Greenberg, GF Data’s CEO and Co-Founder. “With ACG’s reach and audience we believe they’ll be able to continue to grow GF Data and further develop our proprietary research model.”

More than 5,000 deal professionals — including investment banks, private equity groups, lenders and debt providers, accounting and valuation firms, law firms, family offices and institutional investors — use GF Data’s benchmarks for their own deals and when advising clients.

“Our model ensures that customers receive trustworthy, accurate information taken from real transactions — not estimates or extrapolations,” said B. Graeme Frazier, Partner and Co-Manager of GF Data.

Going forward, GF Data will become an integral part of ACG’s content strategy and membership experience, providing a standardized baseline of deal terms. ACG is excited about continuing to work with Andy and Graeme to integrate that platform into the ACG universe.

“With the acquisition of this subscription product, ACG members will see greater clarity into purchase price multiples, and more importantly, greater clarity into other key market terms through GF Data’s proprietary research,” said Bob Dunn, Managing Director of GF Data.

About ACG
We Drive Middle-Market Growth

Founded in 1954, ACG is the premier M&A dealmaking community with a mission of driving middle-market growth. ACG’s 

NJTW NEWS: DAVID SORIN AND OTHER MCCARTER TECH PARTNERS HEAD TO BROWN RUDNICK; APPRENTICE GETS $100 MILLION SERIES C 

David Sorin
David Sorin of Brown Rudnick | file photo

Home »  Around New Jersey »  Emerging technologies »  entrepreneurship »  Innovation »  News»  NJ Tech People » NJTW News: David Sorin And Other McCarter Tech Partners Head To Brown Rudnick; Apprentice Gets $100 Million Series C

 January 25, 2022  Esther Surden0Around New JerseyEmerging technologiesentrepreneurshipInnovationNewsNJ Tech People

[This article was taken from NJTW News, an NJTechWeekly.com newsletter. Sign up for it here.]

Sorin And Colleagues Leave McCarter & English

  • Boston-based law firm Brown Rudnick, which has a significant presence in New York, is the new home to the venture capital and technology practice of David Sorin and several other partners from Newark-based McCarter & English.
  • Sorin was the chair of the Venture Capital Group and Emerging Growth Companies practice at McCarter.
  • Known for his championship of the New Jersey tech and entrepreneurship ecosystem, Sorin has served as attorney and advisor to many local startups, and he helped found the New Jersey Technology Council, now TechUnited:NJ.
  • Sorin, Scott Smedresman, Jared Sorin, Joseph Ferino, and Matthew Uretsky, along with their associates Ken Franklin, Morgan Jones and Thomas Rezach also joined  Brown Rudnick, where they focus on emerging growth tech and tech-enabled companies..
  • Sorin told us that  Brown Rudnick hopes to open a small office in Princeton in the near future.

Pharma AR/AI Startup Apprentice Gets $100 Million

How the Apprentice team has grown! A partial team photo. | Courtesy Apprentice
  • Jersey City-based Apprentice, founded in 2014, recently raised $100 million in a Series C round, led by new investor Alkeon Capital Management.
  • Apprentice found great success during the pandemic as the pharmaceutical industry transformed processes to produce mRNA vaccines.
  • This was the first large-scale application of cutting-edge cell therapies that require a profoundly different production process, the company said.
  • The company’s intelligent cloud platform integrates augmented reality, voice recognition, and artificial intelligence into wearable, mobile, and desktop devices to offer a virtual collaboration application and a robust manufacturing and lab-execution system, the company said.
  • Congratulations to Angelo Stracquatanio III, cofounder and CEO, and cofounders Gary Pignata and Alexandra Buttke.

This article originally appeared in NJTechWeekly. Esther Surden, Editor & Publisher, and is reposted here with her permission.

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Blue Bell-based Tx3 Services acquired

Tom Paine

Tx3 has 35 employees according to LinkedIn. Founded in 2011, its been a partnership with Jason Tepfenhard as general partner. Tricensus management indicates its been working with Tx3 for quite some time. One thing that’s clear is that Tricentus is close to SAP, though the prime investors appeared to have been Wipro and Insight Ventures.

Tricensus, a well-funded cloud-based software testing business that raised $172 million a few years back, has made a string of acquisitions lately. Its most recent, announced yesterday, is Blue Bell-based Tx3 Services, described as ”Devops for Life Sciences. “

Tx3 works with clients to hekp them keep their systems and data in compliance.

k inddiicates that it has bsen workking with

with Tx3 for sone time.

Tx3 Says it works with custoners to

keep thwir dara & ststemd in regukariry compliance.

Friday inight is my

EPAM dives on war uncertainty

Tom Paine

EPAM Systems this morning withdrew its guidance for the firsr quarter and full year 2022 ”due to heightened uncertainties and regional impacts resulting from military actions in Ukraine”.

Newtown-based EPAM Systems, whicb has significant chunks of it workforce in Russia and Belarus as well as Ukraine, is down a stunning 47& at mid-day (NYSE:EPAM)

This is a very successful, muti-billion dollar company listed on the NYSE.

Over the weekend, EPAM CEO Arkadiy Dobkin issued a statement that included the following:

“With over 14,000 people in Ukraine, we are for the first time in the middle of real civil and humanitarian crisis, in the middle of the war with tens of millions of people in danger. We do know everything firsthand, in real time. And despite the unity of practically the entire world against the aggression, we are seeing a catastrophic loss of life happening as we speak. 

At this point, we are doing absolutely everything we can to save, help and support logistically and financially Ukrainian EPAMers and their families. We are doing it through a network of tens of thousands of volunteers, and with help of all our regional support teams in locations across Europe and EPAM global. And we will continue to do so relentlessly.

Today we stand United in support of the people of Ukraine and against all forms of aggression against them. The war must be stopped NOW.”


dbt Labs raises $222M in Series D funding at $4.2B valuation led by Altimeter with participation from Databricks and Snowflake

The Series D funding round is the latest in a series of milestones solidifying dbt’s position as the industry standard for data transformation in the cloud

dbt Labs

NEWS PROVIDED BYdbt Labs 

Feb 24, 2022, 09:15 ET


PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 24, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — dbt Labs, the pioneer in analytics engineering, today announced that it has raised $222 million in Series D financing at a $4.2 billion valuation. The round was led by existing investor, Altimeter, with participation from existing investors Amplify Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia. New investors participating in the Series D include Coatue, Tiger Global, ICONIQ Growth, GV, and GIC. Three strategic investors representing leaders in the shift to the cloud – Databricks, Salesforce Ventures, and Snowflake – also participated. No new board members are joining the team.Continue Reading 

dbt Labs
dbt Labs

Demand for dbt is driven by the industry-wide shift to cloud-based data platforms like Snowflake, Google Bigquery, and Databricks. Over the past two years, dbt has emerged as the industry standard for data transformation in the cloud. dbt enables data teams to transform data in-warehouse, and deploy analytics code following software engineering best practices. This new way of working, known as analytics engineering, has been pioneered by dbt Labs alongside the global dbt Community of more than 25,000 data professionals.

The new round of funding will allow dbt Labs to build the next layer in the modern data stack. “As dbt has become accepted as the industry standard for data transformation, our most forward-thinking community members have begun musing publicly about the future of the modern data stack and about dbt’s role in it,” said Tristan Handy, Founder and CEO of dbt Labs. “As a data practitioner, I could not be more excited about our product roadmap: an open layer to define an organization’s single source of truth, accessible via every BI and analytics tool.”

Investment from the leading cloud data platforms is the latest milestone solidifying dbt’s position as the accepted industry standard. Notable milestones from the past year include:

  • Community growth: The dbt Community now includes 25,000 data professionals, 12 dbt Meetups in 8 countries, and more than 9,000 companies using dbt.
  • Customer growth: dbt Labs increased annual recurring revenue by 6x in 2021, growing to a customer base of 1,800 accounts including JetBlue, Nasdaq, Lendlease, Dunelm, and Canva.
  • User conference growth: dbt Labs hosted the largest global conference dedicated to analytics engineering with more than 7,000 attendees. Coalesce 2022 is scheduled for October 17-21.
  • Deepened partnerships: The number of partner products supporting data transformation workloads with dbt increased by 2x in 2021. dbt Labs added integrations with partners including Firebolt, Materialize, Microsoft, Rockset, Starburst, and Teradata, in addition to existing integrations with AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, and Snowflake products.
  • New use cases: dbt Cloud APIs now powers more than 25 enterprise applications delivering solutions across categories of business intelligence, operational analytics, data discovery, data quality, and data governance.

“The data industry is converging around unified cloud data architectures supporting machine learning, data science, and business intelligence use cases,” said Jamin Ball, Partner at Altimeter. “dbt is uniquely well-positioned for this future. dbt provides a transformation framework suited for the needs of data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts–multiple users with multiple use cases working from a single knowledge layer.”

“Like the dbt Labs team, we believe that all data users should have access to the same powerful tools and workflows used by engineers,” said Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks. “With Databricks SQL, we’re now enabling data warehouse workloads. And with dbt, analysts are able to access Databricks machine learning and data science capabilities. We’re looking forward to deepening our partnership with dbt Labs over the coming years as, together, we expand what’s possible in the modern data stack.”

“The work the dbt Labs team does to help analysts create and disseminate organizational knowledge aligns with our mission to help our customers easily find insights, make better decisions and thrive in this new data-driven world,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer of Tableau. “We are excited to see dbt Labs innovate the ways in which data is accessed, transformed and analyzed.”

“Snowflake and dbt Labs share a common vision of data democratization. We see organizations unlock the power of their data when more people are able to participate in analytics processes,” said Christian Kleinerman, SVP of Product at Snowflake. “By deepening our partnership with dbt Labs, we offer joint customers the ability to solve their business problems in a simple, scalable, and secure environment using the power of the Snowflake Data Cloud.”

“We are looking forward to enhancing our data strategy with dbt,” said Summer Collins, Head of Data and Growth Capability at Vodafone New Zealand. “We are undertaking a large digital transformation project in New Zealand to migrate to a modern platform and framework. Working with dbt greatly helps our speed of development, collaboration standards, and data quality.”

For more information, visit: https://www.getdbt.com/

About dbt Labs
Since 2016, dbt Labs has been on a mission to help analysts create and disseminate organizational knowledge. dbt Labs pioneered the practice of analytics engineering, built the primary tool in the analytics engineering toolbox, and has been fortunate enough to see a fantastic community coalesce to help push the boundaries of the analytics engineering workflow. Today there are 9,000 companies using dbt every week, 25,000 practitioners in the dbt Community Slack, and 1,800 companies paying for dbt Cloud.

EPAM: Great earnings, but a storm warning

Tom Paine

Newtown-based EPAM Systems reported its 4th quarter and full year 2021 results on Friday. 2021 revenue was $3.758 billion, up 41.3% year-over-year. GAAP Diluted EPS was $2.40, an increase of 64.4%, and Non-GAAP Diluted EPS was $2.76, an increase of 52.5% year-over-year

Celebrating the 10th anniversary of its IPO, EPAM (NYSE:EPAM) has continued its strong performance (aided by a snapback from Covid-19 delays), which has led to a current market value of $25 billion.

EPAM’s business model is built around deploying mostly Eastern European talent to deliver systems solutions primarly for Western European and US customers. EPAM operates at a higher level of strategic engagement than some other large outsourcers. and this is reflected in the more attractive margins it earns.

Arkadiy Dobkin, a Belarus native, founded EPAM in 1993.. As the company’s CEO, he has successfully guided EPAM through the political currents of Eastern Europe. But it could be tested to a greater extent this time due to current Russian threat to Ukraine. In a 2020 regulatory filing, EPAM stated that 22% of its workforce was based in Ukraine and 15% in Russia. In adddition to its workforce, EPAM also has important physical assets (such as data centers) in the two countries.

EPAM has 54,000 employees, of which only about 350 are in the greater Philadelphis area.

EPAM shares are off about 30% since last Fall. Some of that is likely due to the general tech stock malaise, but some of it is due to EPAM’s geopolitical situation.

EPAM Systems EPAM : “We too well remember 2014 and 2015 and then 2020 as well,” Arkadiy Dobkin, CEO of the software-consulting company, said Feb. 17. “In 2021, to navigate this situation, we continued something which we started actively implementing since 2014, both organic and M&A-based efforts to improve our geographic talent diversification and to do it without any degradation in the quality of our delivery.”