Pivotal improves Postgres for analytics use cases while adding support for operational workloads
Pivotal Greenplum 6 and the new Pivotal Postgres expand workload support from analytics and AI to transaction and streaming processing effectively covering the vast majority of enterprise database use cases
Pivotal is extending its market reach with the launch of Pivotal Postgres, an open source offering for operational workloads
“For 15 years, Pivotal has developed Pivotal Greenplum, the best version of Postgres for business intelligence and analytics at massive scale” says Jacque Istok, VP of Data at Pivotal. “We’re now combining that with our market-leading experience with the platform, tools, and methodologies for modern application transformation, in order to make Greenplum a first-class citizen in a modern software setting. We’re now also applying our Postgres expertise to offer our customers enterprise support for operational databases in the form of Pivotal Postgres.”
“Several factors have contributed to the recent and ongoing renaissance of PostgreSQL, including the addition of critical functionality for developers and the databases’ focus on building a diverse, extensible ecosystem,” said Rachel Stephens, Analyst at RedMonk. “Long a stalwart of traditional relational needs, PostgreSQL has become more versatile over time which has allowed it to expand its footprint across a wide range of database needs.”
Pivotal Greenplum 6 Highlights
In its latest version (v6), Greenplum combines fast analytic reads with improved write performance to help users consolidate a variety of analytic and operational workloads in a single environment—for example, point queries, data science exploration, fast event processing, and long-running analytical queries—all with greater scale and concurrency over Greenplum 5. This workload consolidation in a single database engine, allow users to analyze more data without unwanted movement between niche database environments.
Greenplum for Kubernetes, which is also available for Pivotal Container Service (PKS), helps automate self-service deployment, management, and upgrades for a multitude of Greenplum nodes, so data professionals and application developers can focus on higher-level business needs. Data professionals can now enjoy modern automation and orchestration benefits previously enjoyed by application developers.
Our new Pivotal Postgres operational database offering is open source Postgres, curated and packaged with important modules required in large production deployments, like Replication Manager. Over time we will curate more of these supporting modules, allowing developers to focus on their business problem rather than researching and acquiring all the right modules, with the right version compatibilities across the components.
We’re offering Pivotal Postgres, because of PostgreSQL’s consistent market growth, flexibility and its enterprise readiness. PostgreSQL is a remarkably versatile database. It can handle many data models including relational, object-relational, and graph, as well as many data types and languages. This allows developers to cast a broad net with Postgres and simplify their portfolio with fewer specialized data stores.
In terms of enterprise readiness, Postgres is also proven at scale for mission-critical apps: Postgres offers very reliable data and transaction integrity. The world’s largest organizations trust their most important database apps to PostgreSQL.
Pivotal combines our cloud-native platform, developer tools, and unique methodology to help the world’s largest companies transform the way they build and run their most important software applications. Our technology is used by Global 2000 companies to achieve strategic advantages in software development and IT operations. Learn more at pivotal.io.
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Atlassian Corporation Plc (NASDAQ: TEAM), a leading provider of team collaboration and productivity software, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire AgileCraft, a leading provider of enterprise agile planning software. AgileCraft helps enterprise organizations build and manage a ‘master plan’ of their most strategic projects and workstreams. Business leaders use AgileCraft to map strategic projects to the distributed work required to deliver them, providing better visibility into bottlenecks, risks and dependencies, and more accuracy around capacity planning and measuring return on investment.
AgileCraft helps business leaders answer the most important questions around their most critical projects:
what’s the true cost and expected value of the important work being driven by teams inside my company?
what does the overall roadmap look like for company-wide strategic imperatives?
what are the major dependencies and risks associated with what we’re trying to deliver?
how can we move faster, or do more with less?
how does work at the team level align with the company’s top objectives?
In every industry, there is increased pressure to respond to customers faster, increase the speed of innovation, and find new approaches to working. This pressure is amplified in large enterprises as they race to leverage technology to enhance customer experiences and adapt faster to new competitors and market conditions.
Atlassian tools are already at the forefront of enabling agile transformation for more than two-thirds of the Fortune 500. In particular, Jira serves as the collaborative backbone for how modern engineering and IT teams plan and execute work. AgileCraft helps connect the work of these teams to the business objectives and strategic outcomes of the entire enterprise. This alignment is a critical linchpin in helping large organizations move faster and scale the benefits of agile teamwork more widely across their companies. Many companies, including Anthem, AT&T, Dimension Data, Fidelity, and Nielsen, already trust Atlassian and AgileCraft to scale strategic direction and align top to bottom.
“Many leaders are still making mission-critical decisions using their instincts and best guesses instead of data,” said Scott Farquhar, Atlassian’s co-founder and co-CEO. “As Atlassian tools spread through organizations, technology leaders need better visibility into work performed by their teams. With AgileCraft joining Atlassian, we believe we’re the best company to help executives align the work across their organization – providing an all-encompassing view that connects strategy, work, and outcomes.”
“Organizations lack the ability to easily gather and distill information across siloed teams – making it extremely difficult to assess progress and measure success,” said Steve Elliott, AgileCraft founder and CEO. “We’re excited to be joining the Atlassian family to enable the new digital enterprise, which is able to connect teams and align strategy to outcomes.”
AgileCraft was founded in 2013 and is based in Georgetown, Texas.
Details Regarding the Transaction
The acquisition is valued at approximately $166 million, comprising approximately $154 million in cash, and the remainder in Atlassian restricted shares, subject to continued vesting provisions. The purchase price under the definitive agreement is subject to customary adjustments.
The transaction is expected to close in April, subject to certain closing conditions.
For fiscal 2019, the acquisition is expected to add approximately $1-2 million to Atlassian’s revenue. Additionally, for fiscal 2019, the acquisition is expected to reduce Atlassian’s IFRS operating margin by approximately one point and reduce non-IFRS operating margin by approximately half a point. The acquisition is also expected to be dilutive to the company’s IFRS and non-IFRS operating margin in fiscal 2020. These estimates reflect a reduction relating to fair value adjustments to acquired deferred revenue.
Forward-Looking Statements Disclosure
This press release includes forward-looking statements, within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, including risks and uncertainties related to Atlassian’s ability to integrate the business, technology, products, personnel and operations of AgileCraft, and the financial statement impact of the transaction on Atlassian. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including statements regarding: the ability of Atlassian to extend its leadership into enterprise agile planning software and other anticipated benefits of the transaction to Atlassian and to the combined companies; potential benefits of the transaction to Atlassian and AgileCraft customers; the ability of Atlassian and AgileCraft to close the announced transaction and the timing of the closing of the transaction; AgileCraft’s technology; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. These risks, uncertainties and other factors, and the general risks associated with Atlassian’s and AgileCraft’s business, could cause actual results to differ materially from those stated or implied in these forward-looking statements. For a discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties, you should refer to Atlassian’s most recent Form 6-K (reporting our quarterly results) filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as other documents that may be filed by Atlassian from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Atlassian undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this press release to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this press release or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. The achievement or success of the matters covered by such forward-looking statements involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, Atlassian’s results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Forward-looking statements represent our management’s beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made.
About Atlassian
Atlassian unleashes the potential of every team. Our team collaboration and productivity software helps teams organize, discuss and complete shared work. Teams at more than 138,000 customers, across large and small organizations – including General Motors, Walmart Labs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Lyft, Verizon, Spotify and NASA – use Atlassian’s project tracking, content creation and sharing, and service management products to work better together and deliver quality results on time. Learn more about our products, including Jira Software, Confluence, Trello, Bitbucket, Opsgenie and Jira Service Desk, at https://atlassian.com/
NTUC LearningHub and the DevOps Institute collaborate to offer four globally recognised DevOps training and certification programmes
SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 14 March 2019 – NTUC LearningHub and the DevOps Institute have announced their collaboration to accelerate digital transformation within companies through the skills training and adoption of DevOps — an innovative approach and set of processes that brings development and operations teams together to complete software development. The partnership was announced today at the DevOps Institute APAC Roadshow in Singapore themed “Moving ahead in the Digital Era with DevOps”, which was organised in partnership with the Employment and Employability Institute (e2i) as a supporting and outreach partner.
Industries today are being disrupted. New software-driven products and experiences are creating an immense wave of change across sectors — from transport (Grab, Gojek) to retail (Amazon) to cable TV and movies (Netflix) to music (Apple, Spotify) and hospitality (Airbnb). Companies need to create new business models — and this depends on their ability to build and deliver software rapidly, reliably, and repeatedly.
In utilising the DevOps approach, which is rapidly gaining popularity worldwide and in Singapore, organisations can create and improve products at a faster pace than they can with traditional software approaches. The increasing demand for DevOps professionals is most notable amongst employers such as ST Electronics, Singapore Airlines, GovTech Singapore, KPMG, DBS, and Infosys.
Recognising the growing worldwide interest and adoption of DevOps, NTUC LearningHub is excited to partner the DevOps Institute to offer globally recognised DevOps training and certification to our learners. A total of four courses will be launched, with the first — DevOps Foundation — already mapped to the Infocomm Technology (ICT) Skills Framework and scheduled to launch in April this year. The course will be funded by SkillsFuture Singapore, and NTUC LearningHub is the first training provider in Singapore to offer DevOps courses that are eligible for SkillsFuture funding. The other three courses — Certified Agile Service Manager (CASM), DevOps Leader (DOL), and DevSecOps Engineering (DSOE) — will be launched later in May this year. e2i will partner NTUC LearningHub and DevOps Institute to introduce the programme and reach out to more Singaporeans and companies to acquire DevOps capabilities. Together, the target is to train and certify 120 professionals in the DevOps Foundation programme and 60 professionals in each of the other three programmes annually.
“At NTUC LearningHub, we are always on the lookout for the latest industry solutions to improve the skillsets and employability of our Singaporean workforce,” said Mr. Kwek Kok Kwong, Chief Executive Officer of NTUC LearningHub. “With the rising popularity of the DevOps approach and the growing demand for DevOps expertise by industries, we are excited to partner with the DevOps Institute and leverage their DevOps Certification Model to equip our local workforce with expertise in this field. Our partnership with the DevOps Institute will expand our growing repertoire of best-in-class partners and make this emerging skill more accessible and affordable to our local workforce.”
“DevOps Institute is proud to partner with NTUC LearningHub, which has been instrumental in Continuing Education of Professionals across Singapore over many years,” said Mr. Dheeraj Nayal, Region Head — APJ & Global Community Ambassador of DevOps Institute. “Considering that DevOps Institute’s core objective has been to propagate and deliver Continuous Learning for Professionals in the DevOps & Agile domain, this partnership complements and enhances the value of NTUC LearningHub, and creates a great opportunity for learners to advance their skills for the future. We are really delighted to announce our partnership and welcome NTUC LearningHub as our Strategic Registered Education Partner in Singapore.”
Ms. Jayne Groll, Chief Executive Officer of DevOps Institute said, “DevOps Institute is committed to advancing the careers of the people who will make DevOps a reality for their organizations through our unique skills-based certification model. We are excited to partner with NTUC LearningHub and support their efforts in equipping the Singapore workforce with the skills, knowledge, ideas, and learning (SKIL) that is necessary for the digital age. We welcome them as a Strategic Registered Education Partner in Singapore and look forward to working closely with them.”
“As Singapore steers toward Services 4.0, e2i continues to work with partners, bringing better ways of working to our workforce. In a typical IT environment, Developers and Operations often work in silos causing delays. DevOps is a more holistic approach for an end-to-end software delivery lifecycle, where operations and development engineers work together to improve collaboration among all stakeholders. With DevOps capabilities, our workers and businesses can work faster and more effectively, which will help maintain their competitive edge,” said Mr. Gilbert Tan, CEO of e2i.
About NTUC Learning Hub (LHUB™)
NTUC LearningHub was corporatised in 2004 with the vision of transforming the lifelong employability of working people. We work with both corporate and individual clients and provide learning solutions in areas such as Infocomm Technology, Soft Skills & Literacy, Workplace Safety & Health, Security, Human Resources, and Leadership and Service Excellence.
To date, LHUB™ has helped over 16,700 organisations and achieved over 2 million training places across 600 courses with a pool of 1,300 certified trainers. As a Total Learning Solutions provider to organisations, we also forge partnerships and provide a wide range of relevant end-to-end training solutions and work constantly to improve our training quality and delivery.
The DevOps Institute (DOI) is a global, open continuous learning community dedicated to advancing the human elements of DevOps success.
DevOps Institute helps advance the careers and emerging practices of the DevOps community based on a new human-centered framework consisting of skills, knowledge, ideas, and learning (SKIL). All our work, including accreditation, research, events, and continuous learning programs — is focused on providing the “know-how” to make DevOps succeed.
About Employment and Employability Institute (e2i)
e2i (Employment and Employability Institute) is the empowering network for individuals and companies seeking skills and solutions for growth. Since 2008, e2i has assisted more than 600,000 individuals through our career guidance, professional development, and job matching services. With an extensive network of partners, e2i offers hiring, training and productivity solutions to businesses. We are an initiative of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) to support nation-wide manpower and skills upgrading initiatives.
Deque’s axe accessibility engine is bolstered by Microsoft collaboration, addition of new Windows rules, and the release of Deque’s open source Android and iOS rules
ANAHEIM, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Deque Systems, a leading accessibility software company specializing in digital equality, announced at CSUN 2019 that it is working with Microsoft to add Windows platform support to the axe accessibility rules engine.
Axe has the world’s most widely deployed Web accessibility rules engine, currently deployed to 25 million devices. Microsoft’s new and significant Windows contributions to axe extend this widely adopted de facto Web accessibility ruleset standard.
Now developers across Web, Windows, Android and iOS platforms can all test their code in development using a common, unified approach, allowing them to prevent critical issues from impacting people around the world with disabilities.
“We’ve been working for 20 years building up to this moment,” comments Preety Kumar, CEO of Deque Systems. “Deque’s core mission has been to make accessibility a daily responsibility of every development and design team in the world. This collaboration is a huge step toward making that a reality.”
Keith Ballinger, General Manager, Developer Services, Microsoft said, “Microsoft and Deque share a common vision of a more inclusive digital future. We are excited to expand our collaboration with Deque as it is an essential part of our journey to design, build, and launch more accessible products.”
In addition to the axe contributions, Microsoft is announcing the open sourcing of Accessibility Insights, a set of tools that empowers developers to build more inclusive solutions.
We invite developers across the world to be part of the movement to shift accessibility left by integrating these open sources tools into their inner dev loop. Together, we can achieve digital equality, making the digital world accessible to everyone.
Deque (pronounced dee-cue) is a web accessibility software and services company, and our mission is Digital Equality. We believe everyone, regardless of their ability, should have equal access to the information, services, applications, and everything else on the web.
We work with enterprise-level businesses and organizations to ensure that their sites and mobile apps are accessible. Installed in over 250,000 browsers and with over 1,000 audit projects completed, Deque is the industry standard.
Industry group creates foundation for development and promotion of open source CD-related projects
LONDON, UK – March 12, 2019 4:05PM – CloudBees, the enterprise DevOps leader powering the continuous economy, today announced the launch of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CD Foundation or CDF), a new foundation that will operate under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. CloudBees led the launch initiative, in collaboration with the Jenkins Community, Google and the Linux Foundation itself.
The CDF will focus squarely on developing, nurturing and promoting open source projects, best practices and industry specifications related to continuous delivery. The CDF will house a variety of open source projects, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton. Additional projects are expected to join, with the goal of bringing together a continuous delivery (CD) ecosystem to build specifications and projects around portability and interoperability. CloudBees will participate as a founding member and will contribute technologies and resources to the project on an ongoing basis.
“The time has come for a robust, vendor-neutral organization dedicated to advancing continuous delivery,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, creator of Jenkins and CTO at CloudBees. “The CDF represents an opportunity to raise the awareness of CD beyond the technology people. For projects like Jenkins and Jenkins X, it represents a whole new level of maturity. We look forward to helping the CDF grow the CD ecosystem and foster collaboration between top developers, end users and vendors.”
The CDF will create a way for other commercial companies to invest in the growth and success of open source projects like Jenkins, helping to extend the project and the ecosystem around it. It also will give top developers, end users and vendors the ability to advocate for open source CD solutions, share ideas and promote open standards in the DevOps space.
Sacha Labourey, CEO and co-founder of CloudBees, said the move of the Jenkins project to the CDF enhances CloudBees’ longstanding support of the Jenkins community. “We believe this is the right path for the Jenkins and Jenkins X projects, as well as the industry,” Labourey said. “To date, CloudBees has been the primary supporter of all things Jenkins – and that support will unequivocally continue. However, the move of Jenkins to the CDF means the project will grow even more quickly than it has, with more contributors behind it. The CDF was a CloudBees-driven initiative, and we see it as vital to furthering CD. It benefits us all to do this.”
The CDF will be staffed and operated by the Linux Foundation. Members are expected to include a cross-section of cloud infrastructure providers, DevOps vendors, enterprise software providers, system integrators and end users from many different industries.
“As the market has shifted to containerized and cloud native technologies, the ecosystem of CI/CD systems, DevOps and related tools has radically changed. The number of available tools has increased, and there’s no defining industry specifications around pipelines and other CI/CD tools,” said Chris Aniszczyk, vice president of developer relations, Linux Foundation. “CloudBees, Google and the other CDF founding members recognize the need for a neutral home for collaboration and integration to solve this problem. The CDF will establish a community to advance industry best practices and innovation around CI/CD.”
CloudBees is powering the continuous economy by building the world’s first end-to-end system for automating software delivery, the CloudBees Suite. The CloudBees Suite builds on emerging DevOps practices and continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) automation adding a layer of governance, visibility and insights necessary to achieve optimum efficiency and control new risks. Since every company in the world is now a software company, this new automated software delivery system is becoming the most mission-critical business system in the modern enterprise. As today’s clear leader in CI/CD, CloudBees is uniquely positioned to define and lead this new category. CloudBees puts companies on the fastest path to transforming great ideas into great software and returning value to the business more quickly.
Backed by Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Verizon Ventures, Delta-v Capital, Golub Capital and Unusual Ventures, CloudBees was founded in 2010 by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey and an elite team of continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps professionals. Follow CloudBees on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
PLEASANTON, Calif. – March 12, 2019 – ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company, today announced that ADSelfService Plus, its integrated Active Directory (AD)self-service password management and single sign-on solution, supports self-service password management for Linux end users. Now, ADSelfService Plus allows end users to reset their passwords and unlock their accounts in AD from the login screen of Linux machines.
When end users forget passwords, their productivity is affected because of how long it takes the technician or admin to verify identities and reset passwords. According to Forrester, a single password reset ticket could cost an organization as much as $70. To avoid this cost, organizations must give end users an option to quickly reset their passwords on their own, without depending on the help desk. This option must be available where users most often realize that they have forgotten their passwords — the login screen of desktops or laptops, irrespective of the platform they use.
“Password resets are one of the major sources of help desk tickets and often end up being the most expensive burden for the IT department. A self-service password management solution can address this issue, but it will only be effective if it’s accessible to all users in an organization — irrespective of the computer or mobile platform they use,” said Parthiban Paramasivam, director of product management, ADSelfService Plus. “The latest version of ADSelfService Plus provides end users the flexibility to reset their passwords from their Linux machines, in addition to Windows, macOS, and mobile devices that run on Android and iOS. This ensures that all users have access to the self-service password reset capability 24/7.”
Highlights of Self-Service Password Management for Linux
The new feature adds a Reset Password link on the login screen of the Linux machines. Clicking this link will open a password reset wizard, through which end users can quickly and securely reset their Windows Active Directory passwords. With ADSelfService Plus, organizations now have a cost-effective way to decrease the number of password-related tickets and reduce the burden on the help desk, all while keeping end users productive. Some other highlights of self-service password management for Linux in ADSelfService Plus include:
Support for multi-factor authentication techniques, including email-based OTP, SMS-based OTP, Duo Security, RSA SecurID, Google Authenticator, and biometric authentication, for enhanced security.
Ability to notify end users and IT admins through email and SMS, and automatically create a ticket in a help desk solution after a successful password reset.
Real-time password synchronization support to sync passwords across Active Directory, Office 365, G Suite, Salesforce, and other enterprise applications.
Support for password blacklisting and other advanced password policy settings.
Audit reports to monitor who is using the self-service functionality, from where, and when.
ADSelfService Plus is an integrated AD self-service password management and single sign-on solution. It offers password self-service, password expiration reminders, a self-service directory updater, a multiplatform password synchronizer, single sign-on for cloud applications, and TFA for Windows logons. Use the ADSelfService Plus Android and iPhone mobile apps to facilitate self-service for end users anywhere at any time. ADSelfService Plus supports the IT help desk by reducing password reset tickets and spares end users the frustration caused by computer downtime. For more information, please visit www.manageengine.com/products/self-service-password.
About ManageEngine
ManageEngine is bringing IT together for IT teams that need to deliver real-time services and support. Worldwide, established, and emerging enterprises—including more than 60 percent of the Fortune 500—rely on our real-time IT management tools to ensure tight business-IT alignment and optimal performance of their IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, applications, desktops, and more. ManageEngine is a division of Zoho Corporation with offices worldwide, including in the Netherlands, United States, India, Singapore, Japan, and China. For more information, please visit buzz.manageengine.com; follow the company at blogs.manageengine.com/, on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/manageengine, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ManageEngine, and on Twitter @ManageEngine.
Three-day industry event hosts speakers from BMW Group, Comcast, ITV, Jet.com, Royal Bank of Scotland, Verizon, and more to help business and technology leaders of large, complex organizations implement IT transformation practices
PORTLAND, Ore., March 12, 2019 – IT Revolution (http://itrevolution.com), the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today announced the second round of speakers for DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019 (https://events.itrevolution.com/eur/speakers/). From 25-27 June, industry practitioners, business leaders, and subject domain experts from the UK and Continental Europe will meet at the InterContinental London – The O2 for three full days of immersive learning about IT and DevOps transformation practices.
To register for DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019, visit: (http://bit.ly/DOES19EUREB). Early bird registration is extended to March 18 and is highly encouraged, as the event is expected to sell out.
The second round of speakers announced for DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019 are:
Christoph Brinck, VP IT Governance, BMW Group
Ross Clanton, Executive Director – Technology Modernization, Verizon
Scott Havens, Director of Software Engineering, Jet.com and Walmart Labs
Maks Kiamos Shah, Domain Head Chemical Development & Product Life Cycle Management, Syngenta
Stephen Magill, Principal Scientist, Galois, Inc.
Nithya Ruff, Head of Open Source, Comcast
Steve Spear, Principal, HVE LLC
Jérôme Tassel, TV and Broadband Services Engineering Director, BT
Ralf Waltram, Head of IT Systems Research & Development, BMW Group
Jenny Wood, Head of Performance and Business Management, Royal Bank of Scotland
Attendees will experience the unfolding documentary of the ongoing transformations that these leaders are helping drive in their large, complex organizations. In addition, the programming for DevOps Enterprise Summit will focus on:
Spanning the Business and Technology Divide
Next Generation Operations and Infrastructure
Overcoming Old Ways Of Working (e.g. Infosec, Compliance, ITIL, Project Management, Audit)
Dynamic Learning Organizations
Leadership Lessons, Transformational Leadership, Recognition, and Human Resources
“The DevOps Enterprise Summit London will feature fantastic industry experience reports and knowledge that the global IT community needs to transform their technology organizations,” said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook and Accelerate. “The programming committee is putting together an amazing lineup of speakers, and we’re creating many ways for delegates to network and learn from each other during the three-day event this June.”For more information about DOES19 London, please visit: (https://events.itrevolution.com/eur/).
About IT Revolution
IT Revolution assembles technology leaders and practitioners through publishing, events, and research. Our goal is to elevate the state of technology work, quantify the economic and human costs associated with suboptimal IT performance, and to improve the lives of technology professionals.
F5, the global leader in multi-cloud application services, announces the acquisition of NGINX, an open source leader in application delivery.
Strategic acquisition and organic investment to secure long-term revenue and EPS growth.
Together, F5 and NGINX will enable multi-cloud application services across all environments, providing the ease-of-use and flexibility developers require while also delivering the scale, security, reliability and enterprise readiness network operations teams demand.
F5 is committed to continued innovation and increasing investment in the NGINX open source project to empower NGINX’s widespread user communities.
F5 will maintain the brand with current NGINX CEO, Gus Robertson, and founders, Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov, joining F5 to continue to lead NGINX.
SEATTLE & SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV) and NGINX today announced a definitive agreement under which F5 will acquire all issued and outstanding shares of privately held NGINX for a total enterprise value of approximately $670 million, subject to certain adjustments.
“F5’s acquisition of NGINX strengthens our growth trajectory by accelerating our software and multi-cloud transformation,” said François Locoh-Donou, President & CEO of F5. “By bringing F5’s world-class application security and rich application services portfolio for improving performance, availability, and management together with NGINX’s leading software application delivery and API management solutions, unparalleled credibility and brand recognition in the DevOps community, and massive open source user base, we bridge the divide between NetOps and DevOps with consistent application services across an enterprise’s multi-cloud environment.”
“We believe every organization can benefit from the agility and flexibility enabled by modern technologies without compromising on security, manageability, and reliability,” continued Locoh-Donou. “The combined company will enable every customer—from the app developer to the network engineer to the security specialist—with the tools they need to ensure their apps are available and secure across every platform, from the enterprise data center to private and public clouds.”
F5 will enhance NGINX’s current offerings with F5 security solutions and will integrate F5 cloud-native innovations with NGINX’s software load balancing technology, accelerating F5’s time to market of application services for modern, containerized applications. F5 will also leverage its global sales force, channel infrastructure, and partner ecosystem to scale NGINX selling opportunities to the enterprise.
“NGINX and F5 share the same mission and vision. We both believe applications are at the heart of driving digital transformation. And we both believe that an end-to-end application infrastructure—one that spans from code to customer—is needed to deliver apps across a multi-cloud environment,” said Gus Robertson, CEO of NGINX, Inc. “I’m excited to continue this journey by adding the power of NGINX’s open source innovation to F5’s ADC leadership and enterprise reach. F5 gains depth with solutions designed for DevOps, while NGINX gains breadth with access to tens of thousands of customers and partners.”
NGINX’s thriving open source community was one of the most attractive elements of this combination, and F5 recognizes the trust that the user community has in NGINX’s technology. Open source is a core part of F5’s multi-cloud strategy and a driver for F5’s next phase of innovation. As such, F5 is committed to continued innovation and increasing investment in the NGINX open source project to empower NGINX’s widespread user communities. F5 expects the combination with NGINX will accelerate its product integrations with leading open source projects and will enhance its strong technology partnerships with open source vendors.
Upon closing of the acquisition, F5 will maintain the NGINX brand. Gus Robertson, along with NGINX founders Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov, will join F5 and will continue to lead NGINX. Robertson will join F5’s senior management team, reporting to François Locoh-Donou. F5 will maintain NGINX’s operations in San Francisco, California and other locations globally.
Transaction Details
The acquisition of NGINX is expected to increase F5’s software revenue growth and increase the Company’s software revenue mix in fiscal year 2019. It secures F5’s Horizon 2 (fiscal year 2021 to fiscal year 2022) objectives of mid-to-high single-digit revenue and double-digit non-GAAP earnings per share growth. Short-term, the Company expects that the acquisition and organic investment in new and emerging solutions will result in modest earnings dilution in fiscal years 2019 and 2020.
F5 provided the following regarding its Horizon 1 (fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2020) outlook, following the completion of the NGINX acquisition:
Analyst and Investor Meeting Horizon 1 (FY19-FY20) Outlook, March 2018
Software includes standalone Virtual Editions, including subscriptions & utility, and as a Service offerings
All forward-looking non-GAAP measures included in the outlook exclude estimates for amortization of intangible assets, share-based compensation expenses, significant effects of tax legislation and judicial or administrative interpretation of tax regulations, including the impact of income tax reform, non-recurring income tax adjustments, valuation allowance on deferred tax assets, and the income tax effect of non-GAAP exclusions, and do not include the impact of any restructuring charges, facility exit costs, or other non-recurring charges that may occur in the period. F5 is unable to provide a reconciliation of non-GAAP guidance measures to corresponding U.S. generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP measures on a forward-looking basis without unreasonable effort due to the overall high variability and low visibility of most of the foregoing items that have been excluded. Material changes to any one of these items could have a significant effect on our guidance and future GAAP results. Certain exclusions, such as amortization of intangible assets and share-based compensation expenses, are generally incurred each quarter, but the amounts have historically varied and may continue to vary significantly from quarter to quarter.
F5 intends to fund the transaction through cash on its balance sheet. In conjunction with the transaction, the Company is suspending its common stock share repurchase program. The Company will continue to evaluate market conditions and other factors including F5’s capital requirements in determining when and whether to continue such program and the levels of such program. The program does not require the purchase of any minimum number of shares and the program may be modified, suspended, or discontinued at any time.
The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both F5 and NGINX and, following execution of the definitive agreement, received the requisite shareholder approval of NGINX. It is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2019.
Foros acted as financial advisor and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati provided legal counsel to F5 on this transaction. Qatalyst Partners served as financial advisor to NGINX.
Investor Conference Call Details
F5 will host a live webcast and conference call to discuss the transaction beginning at 5:30 p.m. ET, today, March 11, 2019. The live webcast can be accessed at: https://www.f5.com/company/investor-relations.
To participate in the live call via telephone in the U.S., dial 800-593-9913. Outside the U.S., dial +1-212-287-1824. Please call 10 minutes prior to the call start time. The webcast replay will be archived on F5’s website.
F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV) gives the world’s largest businesses, service providers, governments, and consumer brands the freedom to securely deliver every app, anywhere—with confidence. F5 delivers cloud and security application services that enable organizations to embrace the infrastructure they choose without sacrificing speed and control. For more information, go to f5.com. You can also follow @f5networks on Twitter or visit us on LinkedIn and Facebook for more information about F5, its partners, and technologies.
About NGINX
NGINX, Inc. is the company behind the popular open source project trusted by more than 375 million sites. We offer a suite of technologies for developing and delivering modern applications. The NGINX Application Platform enables enterprises undergoing digital transformation to modernize legacy, monolithic applications as well as deliver new, microservices-based applications. Companies like Netflix, Starbucks, and McDonalds rely on NGINX to reduce costs, improve resiliency, and speed innovation. NGINX investors include Blue Cloud Ventures, e.ventures, Goldman Sachs, Index Ventures, MSD Capital, NEA, Runa Capital, and Telstra Ventures.
F5 is a trademark or service mark of F5 Networks, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
F5 Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding the continuing strength and momentum of F5’s business, future financial performance, sequential growth, projected revenues including target revenue and earnings ranges, income, earnings per share, share amount and share price assumptions, share repurchases, demand for application delivery networking, application delivery services, security, and software products, expectations regarding future services and products, expectations regarding future customers, markets and the benefits of products, and other statements that are not historical facts and which are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors. Such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions and other factors that, if they do not fully materialize or prove correct, could cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the company, or industry results, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: customer acceptance of our new traffic management, security, application delivery, optimization, and software and F5aaS offerings; the timely development, introduction and acceptance of additional new products and features by F5 or its competitors; competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures, industry consolidation, entry of new competitors into F5’s markets, and new product and marketing initiatives by our competitors; increased sales discounts; the business impact of the acquisition of NGINX and potential adverse reactions or changes to business or employee relationships, including those resulting from the announcement or completion of the acquisition; uncertainties as to the timing of the transaction; uncertain global economic conditions which may result in reduced customer demand for our products and services and changes in customer payment patterns; global economic conditions and uncertainties in the geopolitical environment; overall information technology spending; litigation involving patents, intellectual property, shareholder and other matters, and governmental investigations; natural catastrophic events; a pandemic or epidemic; F5’s ability to sustain, develop and effectively utilize distribution relationships; F5’s ability to attract, train and retain qualified product development, marketing, sales, professional services and customer support personnel; F5’s ability to expand in international markets; the unpredictability of F5’s sales cycle; F5’s common stock repurchase program and activities thereunder and differences may result from, among other things, actions taken by the Company or its management or Board regarding operations or strategy, and activities and conditions relating to pricing, trading, capital requirement and repurchasing of shares of F5 common stock including continued suspension or modification or discontinuation of the common stock repurchase program; future prices of F5’s common stock; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K and other documents that we may file or furnish from time to time, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. The financial information contained in this release should be read in conjunction with the consolidated financial statements and notes thereto included in F5’s most recent reports on Forms 10-Q and 10-K as each may be amended from time to time. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available as of the date hereof and qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. F5 assumes no obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements.
GAAP to non-GAAP Reconciliation
F5’s management evaluates and makes operating decisions using various operating measures. These measures are generally based on the revenues of its products, services operations and certain costs of those operations, such as cost of revenues, research and development, sales and marketing and general and administrative expenses. One such measure is net income excluding stock-based compensation, amortization of purchased intangible assets, acquisition-related charges, net of taxes, and certain non-recurring tax expenses and benefits, which is a non-GAAP financial measure under Section 101 of Regulation G under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. This measure consists of GAAP net income excluding, as applicable, stock-based compensation, amortization of purchased intangible assets, litigation expense, restructuring charges, facility exit costs, gain on sale of patents, non-recurring tax expenses and benefits, and acquisition-related charges. This measure of non-GAAP net income is adjusted by the amount of additional taxes or tax benefit that the company would accrue if it used non-GAAP results instead of GAAP results to calculate the company’s tax liability. Stock-based compensation is a non-cash expense that F5 has accounted for since July 1, 2005 in accordance with the fair value recognition provisions of Financial Accounting Standards Board (“FASB”) Accounting Standards Codification (“ASC”) Topic 718 Compensation—Stock Compensation (“FASB ASC Topic 718”). Amortization of intangible assets is a non-cash expense. Investors should note that the use of intangible assets contribute to revenues earned during the periods presented and will contribute to revenues in future periods. Acquisition-related expenses consist of professional services fees incurred in connection with acquisitions. In addition, non-recurring costs associated with the relocation of the company’s corporate headquarters have been excluded from GAAP net income for the purpose of measuring non-GAAP earnings and earnings per share in the first quarter of fiscal year 2019.
Management believes that non-GAAP net income per share provides useful supplemental information to management and investors regarding the performance of the company’s core business operations and facilitates comparisons to the company’s historical operating results. Although F5’s management finds this non-GAAP measure to be useful in evaluating the performance of the core business, management’s reliance on this measure is limited because items excluded from such measures could have a material effect on F5’s earnings and earnings per share calculated in accordance with GAAP. Therefore, F5’s management will use its non-GAAP earnings and earnings per share measures, in conjunction with GAAP earnings and earnings per share measures, to address these limitations when evaluating the performance of the company’s core business. Investors should consider these non-GAAP measures in addition to, and not as a substitute for, financial performance measures in accordance with GAAP.
F5 believes that presenting its non-GAAP measures of earnings and earnings per share provides investors with an additional tool for evaluating the performance of the company’s core business and is used by management in its own evaluation of the company’s performance. Investors are encouraged to look at GAAP results as the best measure of financial performance. However, while the GAAP results are more complete, the company provides investors these supplemental measures since, with reconciliation to GAAP, it may provide additional insight into the company’s operational performance and financial results.
New Linux Foundation Project to Foster Flexible, Next-Generation Chip Design for Diverse Data-Centric Applications and Workloads
SAN FRANCISCO – March 11, 2019 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced its intent to form the CHIPS Alliance project to host and curate high-quality open source code relevant to the design of silicon devices. CHIPS Alliance will foster a collaborative environment that will enable accelerated creation and deployment of more efficient and flexible chip designs for use in mobile, computing, consumer electronics, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
Early CHIPS Alliance backers include Esperanto, Google, SiFive and Western Digital, all committed to both open source hardware and continued momentum behind the free and open RISC-V architecture. “The RISC-V community is working to foster open source foundation technologies that will help unlock market innovation to move [artificial intelligence/machine learning and infrastructure composability] forward,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president of IDC’s Infrastructure Systems, Platforms, and Technologies Group, via a recent IDC report.
The project will create an independent entity so companies and individuals can collaborate and contribute resources to make open source CPU chip and system-on-a-chip (SoC) design more accessible to the market.
“Open collaboration has repeatedly proven to help industries accelerate time to market, achieve long-term maintainability, and create de facto standards,” said Mike Dolan, vice president of Strategic Programs, the Linux Foundation. “The same collaboration model applies to the hardware in a system, just as it does to software components. We are eager to host the CHIPS Alliance and invite more organizations to join the initiative to help propel collaborative innovation within the CPU and SoC markets.”
CHIPS Alliance will follow governance practices consistent with other Linux Foundation projects, which will include a Board of Directors, a Technical Steering Committee, and community contributors who will work collectively to manage the project. Initial plans will focus on establishing a curation process aimed at providing the chip community with access to high-quality, enterprise grade hardware.
Planned Contributions
Google
Google is planning to contribute a Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) based instruction stream generator environment for RISC-V cores. The environment provides configurable, highly
stressful instruction sequences that can verify architectural and micro-architectural corner-cases of designs.
Western Digital
Western Digital is planning to contribute their high performance, 9-stage, dual issue, 32-bit SweRV Core, together with a test bench, and high performance SweRV Instruction set simulator. Additional contribution will be specification and early implementations of OmniXtend cache coherence protocol.
SiFive
SiFive was founded by the inventors of the free and open RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture, who, together with their colleagues at UC Berkeley, developed the first open-source RISC-V microprocessors and a new open-source hardware description language Chisel. This initial work at UC Berkeley also developed the RocketChip SoC generator, including the initial version of the TileLink coherent interconnect fabric.
SiFive remains committed to maintaining and improving the RocketChip SoC generator and the TileLink interconnect fabric in open-source as a member of the CHIPS Alliance, and contributing to Chisel and the FIRRTL intermediate representation specification and transformation toolkit. SiFive will also contribute and maintain Diplomacy, the SoC parameter negotiation framework.
“Intellectual property for VLSI chip designs ought to be able to reap similar benefits as open source software has for years. We hope that the CHIPS Alliance will be a catalyst where all hardware designers feel comfortable both contributing and finding useful designs for their projects,” said Dave Ditzel, founder and CEO of Esperanto Technologies, Inc.
Google
“We are entering a new golden age of computer architecture highlighted by accelerators, rapid hardware development and open source architecture and implementations. Google is committed to fostering an open community of collaboration and innovation in both hardware and software,” said Dr. Amir Salek, senior director, Technical Infrastructure, Google Cloud. “TheCHIPS Alliance will provide the support and framework needed to nurture a vibrant open source hardware ecosystem for high-quality, well-verified and documented components to accelerate and simplify chip design.”
SiFive
“Semiconductor design starts have evaporated due to the skyrocketing cost of building a custom SoC,” said Yunsup Lee, co-founder and CTO, SiFive. “A healthy, vibrant semiconductor industry needs a significant number of design starts, and the CHIPS Alliance will fill this need. SiFive is excited to continue to work on and contribute to the RocketChip generator, Chisel and FIRRTL projects as we push the boundaries of open source innovation.”
Western Digital
“The data-centric universe continues to grow and expand in ways many of us never imagined,” said Dr. Zvonimir Bandic, senior director of next generation platforms architecture at Western Digital, a co-founder of RISC-V as well as CHIPS Alliance. “The CHIPS Alliance will provide access to an open source silicon solution that can democratize key memory and storage interfaces and enable revolutionary new data centric architectures. It paves the way for a new generation of compute devices and intelligent accelerators that are close to the memory and can transform how data is moved, shared, and consumed across a wide range of applications. By extending Western Digital’s commitment to the RISC-V architecture and instruction set, and teaming up with fellow industry leaders to form the CHIPS Alliance, we make another important stride forward toward unlocking the true potential of the data.”
About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Tricentis is proud to announce that its cloud load testing solution, Flood, has recently released an industry leading integration to Microsoft Azure. With this integration, customers can now leverage their own Azure account to host their cloud load tests.
This landmark release adds increased security and flexibility for Tricentis’ most demanding enterprise customers. Specifically, many Microsoft customers may be looking for a replacement to the load testing capabilities in Visual Studio which will be deprecated after Visual Studio 2019. With this release, Flood is positioned as the leading solution to replace the native load testing functionalities that Microsoft customers have come to depend on.
At Flood, we believe strongly in the benefits of using the cloud for load testing your applications, especially those wanting to achieve the economy of scale that this approach leverages. With Azure as a consistent leader in IaaS, we will continue to invest in this fast growing Azure ecosystem with several key enhancements planned. Tricentis has already achieved the Gold partnership status and is scheduled to participate in key Microsoft events including Microsoft Ignite in November.
Azure customers will be hard pressed to find a more complete solution than Flood. With Flood’s hosted deployment option, you can use your own Azure account to create load injectors. This is the most flexible option, being that it can create load within a VPC and allows for easier access behind firewalls using Static Public IP’s. Teams now have the flexibility to leverage their existing agreement with Azure to allow them to choose any supported region or instance type. Hosted accounts require some configuration and expertise with Azure, as well as billing both from Flood and Azure (for the server usage). We have detailed the process of connecting your Azure account with Flood for expedited configuration.
If you are looking to load test in the cloud using Azure, we are eager to speak with you and share our expertise helping thousands of companies load test in the cloud. Please feel free to reach out to us and schedule a consultation where we can walk you through the process.