Cisco Investments, Ericsson Invest $6 Million in PubNub

Sep 12, 2016
PubNub Launches World’s First Programmable Data Stream Network SAN FRANCISCO, CA-- Sept 12, 2016 -- PubNub, the world’s leading Data Stream Network, today announced a strategic investment of $6 million from Cisco Investments and Ericsson. The announcement coincides with the launch of PubNub BLOCKS, making networking leaders Cisco and Ericsson a transformational part of the world’s first programmable network for application developers. Over 800 companies signed up for early access to PubNub BLOCKS. PubNub BLOCKS is a groundbreaking service that extends the capabilities of the PubNub Data Stream Network by making the network programmable, delivering a “serverless” environment for application logic that is optimized for modern, real-time applications. This revolutionary offering streamlines application development, reduces endpoint-to-endpoint latency, and allows applications to better leverage the enormous scalability of PubNub’s Data Stream Network. “Online apps are quickly becoming real-time, and must handle massive amounts of streaming social, location, and IoT data. PubNub BLOCKS represents a new way for app developers to code application logic directly into the network, get to market quickly, and never have to worry about scale,’” said Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub. “We’re excited to have Cisco and Ericsson, both giants in the networking industry, put their support behind PubNub BLOCKS.” Both Cisco and Ericsson have evangelized moving business logic closer to the network edge, and saw an opportunity with PubNub BLOCKS to take action on their vision for application development. "PubNub BLOCKS delivers the benefits of Fog Computing to application developers, bringing business logic to the edge," said Rowan Trollope, Cisco senior vice president and general manager of IoT and Applications. "Our investment in PubNub is driven by our shared vision for the future of distributed computing built on global, secure, programmable networks. " Ericsson's deep-reach network has been instrumental in supporting the explosive growth of networked things, deep analytics, and latency-free control. With BLOCKS, PubNub is making the first programmable network, giving application developers direct access to amazing network capabilities" said Per Borgklint, Senior Vice President, Chief Innovation Officer and Head of Business Unit Media, Ericsson . "We're thrilled to be participating in this exciting product launch."" After signing up for an account with PubNub, developers have multiple ways to use PubNub BLOCKS for building real-time apps:
  1. Choose from a catalog of pre-built blocks and customize them
  2. Choose from a catalog 3rd party APIs including IBM Watson, MapBox, Lexalytics, New Relic, RingCentral, SendGrid, and Wolfram Alpha that are manifested as blocks
  3. Create custom blocks from scratch
Using BLOCKS, developers no longer have to run their own app servers to execute business logic. The result is faster time to market, less server overhead, and more secure applications. Example functionality that can be enabled using PubNub BLOCKS includes:
  • Geo Chat: Create a chat group for users within a geographic zone
  • Location Lookup (latitude/longitude): Automatically convert between address and geographic coordinates
  • Natural Language Interface: Automated chatbot interactions or even natural language control for applications
  • Sensor Anomaly Detection: Send an alert when a remote asset displays an abnormal behavior compared to recent history
  • Sentiment Analysis: Identify and categorize opinions expressed in text
  • Spammer Throttle: Allow users to send 1 message every 10 seconds.
  • Text To Speech: Automatically synthesize natural-sounding speech from input text in a variety of language and voices
About PubNub
PubNub is transforming how people live, work and play within virtual environments. Powered by a platform to build and operate real-time interactivity within mobile, web and IOT apps, our chat, live audience engagement, geolocation and dispatch, multi-user collaboration, and other forms of real-time use cases are enjoyed by millions of people across the globe every day. Founded in 2010, over 2000 companies worldwide choose PubNub because of the speed, reliability, and scalability of our platform and because we help their customers feel more connected to one another, the brand, and the product experience.