October 11, 2021

Welcome to Protocol | Enterprise, your comprehensive roundup of everything you need to know about cloud and enterprise software. This Monday: Fivetran's big moment, Figma hires a sales chief, and Genesys weighs an IPO.
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Last month, data integration startup Fivetran announced it was acquiring quasi-competitor HVR for $700 million. By enterprise technology standards, it was no blockbuster Salesforce-Slack deal.
But the acquisition could have significant implications for the industry and is bound to worry rival vendors like Informatica, Talend and IBM. The combined companies excel at two different — but equally important — data management tasks.
For Fivetran, the deal was massive.
Fivetran provides an overlooked, but critical service for enterprises: It helps move data from siloed systems into one common repository.
That's where Fivetran comes in. While companies can build those connections themselves, it's very labor intensive — both to build the streams and then manage them. Given the tech skills shortage plaguing corporate America, that effort is an increasingly unattractive option for many organizations.
Now, the acquisition of HVR gives Fivetran access to a whole new part of the enterprise tech stack. While Fivetran is great at working with cloud-based applications, its products fall flat when trying to deal with legacy systems — or, as Fraser puts it, the "crown jewels" of a company's IT operations.
But combining the two products will be a major challenge for Fivetran. With HVR, organizations can route data from one location to many different end repositories. Fivetran can take data from many applications, but can only route them to one location.
A combined Fivetran-HVR is, in some ways, a throwback to the systems that helped establish vendors like Informatica nearly three decades ago.
It's clear that the market opportunity for Fivetran is immense. But there are a huge number of rivals that are also tackling the same problem.
Ultimately, the acquisition gives Fivetran a much bigger opportunity in the enterprise market. That's bound to put it in closer competition with vendors like Informatica and MuleSoft.
Zoom — the communications platform that has become synonymous with streaming video calls — experienced an even greater increase in that same time period. In June 2020, close to 3 million consults took place through Zoom's 100 top EPIC integrations. With its simple, reliable interface that patients — and health care workers — already knew, Zoom became the go-to for health care offices everywhere.
Category creation: Enterprise tech vendors have a new strategy to stand out: creating a new category. In the early days of SaaS, just duplicating on-premises software packages in the cloud was an easy ticket to growth, but these days, the path is more difficult.
ServiceNow is quickly becoming one of enterprise technology's most well-known names. The company started by focusing on helping the IT department manage its workload, but is quickly expanding to other verticals and, on the way, becoming a deeper rival to other software giants like Salesforce.
We'll talk to CEO Bill McDermott on Oct. 12 at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET to learn what's ahead for the company and how it plans to hit $15 billion in annual revenue. RSVP here.
Figma hired Shaunt Voskanian as chief revenue officer, the company told Protocol. Voskanian was previously the senior vice president of global sales at Datadog.
Pali Bhat, formerly vice president of product and design at Google Cloud,will join Reddit as chief product officer.
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!
Correction: This story was corrected to reflect the right investors for Fivetran's latest round.
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