Salesforce has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the communications platform Slack for approximately $27.7 billion. The company hopes together they can create a new operating system for the digital world of work.
“As software plays a more and more critical role in the performance of every organization, we share a vision of reduced complexity, increased power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of alignment and organizational agility. Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can’t wait to get going,” said Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack.
Slack will be integrated into the Salesforce Cloud and be the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360. More information is available here.
The next major release of Android Gradle plugin
Android is providing more insights into the upcoming release of the Android Gradle plugin. AGP 7.0 will feature a new versioning scheme, require Java 11, and introduce API changes.
With this release, the team explained it would be adjusting the versioning for Gradle and decoupling it from Android Studio’s versioning scheme.
AGP version 7.0.0-alpha01 was released with the first Canary version of Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1).
Weaveworks announces Weave Kubernetes Platform (WKP) 2.4
The latest release of WKP aims to unlock the power of Kubernetes and GitOps at scale. It features the ability to add GitOps to any Kubernetes cluster; multitenancy with team workspaces; application portability; and the ability to install Kubernetes across all major target environments.
“This release helps teams who want to deploy Kubernetes into many different environments, and deploy applications onto their platform in a more secure, reliable and portable way. With this release GitOps can be added to any Kubernetes cluster – whichever Kubernetes you’re using. Major features in this release include: Team Workspaces, RBAC for workspace members, the ability to add GitOps to any Kubernetes cluster and support for adding WKP to existing infrastructure,” the company explained in a blog post.
SUSE completes Rancher Labs acquisition
SUSE first announced plans to acquire the Kubernetes management solution provider in July. Together, the companies will deliver a Linux operating system, Kubernetes management platform and a host of edge capabilities.
“Our customers have made it clear they want powerful technology that is both leading-edge and reliable to accelerate business transformation,” said SUSE CEO Melissa Di Donato. “We have historically delivered innovative solutions that anticipate what enterprises need, and today with Rancher, we are set to make history again. With our powerful and modular approach to open source software, our customers can count on reliability and unmatched agility to innovate everywhere – from the data center, to the cloud, to the edge and beyond.”
Amazon announces SageMaker Data Wrangler
The new solution is designed to make it easier to prepare data for machine learning. It enables users to select and query data, transform data, visualize the data, diagnose and fix issues and automate machine learning data preparation workflows.
“Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes. With SageMaker Data Wrangler, you can simplify the process of data preparation and feature engineering, and complete each step of the data preparation workflow, including data selection, cleansing, exploration, and visualization from a single visual interface,” the company wrote.
