Microsoft Azure vs Neon

Clockworks Analytics Launches Sprocket AI Chat for Facilities

Clockworks Analytics, a smart building intelligence platform, has launched Sprocket AI Chat, an AI assistant integrated into its platform. Sprocket allows facilities teams to query building diagnostics, tasks, equipment, and trend data in natural language, with answers grounded in the platform's own structured data and expert-system diagnostics. Every response provides links to the underlying diagnostics or tasks, and it can generate interactive charts. The AI model runs on Azure, adheres to the platform's security principles, and does not train on customer data. The company also previewed future enhancements including integration across all Clockworks features and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for connectivity with external AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Sprocket is part of a longer roadmap towards AI-driven automation in facilities management.

• Clockworks Analytics launched Sprocket AI Chat at Client Summit 2026.
• Sprocket provides natural language queries on building diagnostics, tasks, equipment, and trend data.
• The AI model runs on Microsoft Azure within the Clockworks environment.

Zendesk Names Rachita Sundar as CFO

Zendesk announced the appointment of Rachita Sundar as Chief Financial Officer, effective September 28, 2026. Sundar, who brings over 20 years of experience in finance and operations at technology companies including Microsoft Azure, HubSpot, and Qualtrics, succeeds Julie Swinney, who transitions to Chief Administrative Officer and executive sponsor of Zendesk's Employee Service business. At Qualtrics, Sundar helped finance and close the $6.75 billion acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta. CEO Tom Eggemeier highlighted her financial rigor and operational expertise as Zendesk scales toward a multi-billion-dollar AI business.

• Rachita Sundar appointed CFO of Zendesk, effective September 28, 2026.
• Sundar has over 20 years of experience at Microsoft Azure, HubSpot, and Qualtrics.
• At Qualtrics, Sundar helped finance and close the $6.75 billion acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta.

Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 5.5 Despite Slowdown Call

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, its flagship AI model and the first in the 5.5 family, on September 22, 2026. It achieves the highest-ever score (58) on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and leads six out of ten benchmarks, including outperforming OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on Terminal-Bench 4.0. Priced at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens (20% lower), it promises a 40% cost reduction for typical workloads, though savings depend on config. It is 30% faster, now defaults in Claude Code and the Claude app, and matches Claude Fable 5.1 on most tasks. Early tests show efficiency gains but also more concurrency issues and security test failures. Anthropic cites external safety evaluations, and OpenAI responded with GPT-6 Sol and Luna, priced ~50% lower and offering up to 90% cache discounts.

• Claude Opus 5.5 scores 58 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, the highest recorded, and leads six out of ten benchmarks.
• Pricing reduced to $4 per million input tokens, $20 per million output tokens, and cache reads at $0.20 per million tokens, promising a 40% cost reduction per task (though configuration may affect savings).
• Opus 5.5 is 30% faster, supports multi-agent scaling up to 100 parallel agents, and is now default in Claude Code and the Claude app.

Databricks Powers Agentic Future with $7B Run Rate

Databricks, the data and AI company, has revealed it has surpassed a $7 billion revenue run rate, growing 80% year-over-year, and is valued at $190 billion. The company, which began as a Spark-based data processing platform, has evolved through multiple technology S-curves—Spark, Lakehouse, Lakebase, and now AI agents. Databricks' Lakehouse architecture unifies data lakes and warehouses, while its new Lakebase product, built on the acquisition of Neon, brings operational databases onto the same lakehouse foundation. The company is positioning itself as the 'system of record for agents,' with tools like Genie and Agent Bricks enabling employees to build and manage AI agents. With over 17 million databases launched by agents daily, Databricks is betting on the rise of agentic automation transforming the nature of work and the structure of firms, shifting from managerial hierarchy to human-agent collaboration.

• Databricks surpassed $7 billion revenue run rate, growing 80% year-over-year.
• Databricks is valued at $190 billion.
• More than 17 million databases are launched by AI agents on Databricks every day.

Major update to our Free Plan: now with 1 GB of Postgres storage per project, 100 projects included

Database storage on the Neon Free plan is now 1 GB per project, up from 0.5 GB. You still get 100 projects, with existing projects getting the new limit automatically.

Claimable Neon: Provisioned by agents, claimed by humans

Claimable Neon implements the anonymous registration method in auth.md, the open agent registration protocol authored by WorkOS, to give agents a way to provision a temporary Neon project without creating an account or collecting payment details.