Controlled Availability Introduction Delivers Environments-as-a-Service from Development to Production
SANTA CLARA, Calif., January 15, 2019 – Quali, the leader in delivering environments-as-a-service for cloud and DevOps automation, today announced CloudShell Colony – a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud management platform for DevOps. CloudShell Colony automates DevOps environments all the way from development to production, while allowing IT and project managers to govern the use of cloud resources from a single pane of glass.
This announcement follows the recent news highlighting Quali’s $22.5 million Series-C funding round in December 2018. CloudShell Colony initially being released as controlled availability (CA) software equips DevOps teams, developers and testers with reusable application environments on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure with support for Kubernetes deployments. Quali is providing varying levels of the solution based on company size.
“Setting up environments is error prone, time consuming and difficult to automate and troubleshoot. It’s even more challenging to do it in a scalable way that would serve more than one team, including team members who know nothing about infrastructure, and still work seamlessly with the CI/CD pipeline,” said Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali. “CloudShell Colony is designed to deliver IT environments more efficiently, eliminate configuration inconsistencies, and empower all stakeholders in the DevOps value chain by improving pipeline stability with less code and better error handling.”
CloudShell Colony features include:
Blueprint Modeling – Use YAML or a visual designer to build reusable environment-blueprints on AWS, Azure and Kubernetes (AKS, EKS and native). Environments include containers, compute instances, load Balancers, network and security elements, cloud services and more. Support complex environment with parameters, initial data, configuration and health-checks.
Self-Service Environments – Role and policy based on-demand environments from a self-service catalog. Colony deploys environments with automatic setup, health-check and teardown that work out of box.
Seamless CI/CD integration – Native integration to the organizational DevOps ecosystem including Azure DevOps, Jenkins, TeamCity, Github and more. Support for manual production update to full automated continuous deployment.
Multi-tenancy, Secret Management, Audit Trail, RBAC – Everything required to make sure scaling, security and compliance are covered while increasing release speed.
Visibility on Cloud Spend – Automatically tag cloud resources to control, analyze and manage cloud usage and expenses. Add custom tags to cloud resources to support specific business needs.
A 30-day trial version will be available for all to try out suitability as well as a limited free tier for small teams. Quali also offers a Team tier and a Premium tier for larger groups of users and with a higher number of concurrent environments supported.
The general availability of this release it targeted for mid-April 2019.
Quali is a software company focused on automation and orchestration software to deliver environments-as-a-service for digital transformation initiatives aligned with cloud, DevOps and Security. Its industry-leading CloudShell platform delivers helps enterprises and service providers increase productivity and efficiency for engineering, sales and security organizations while cutting costs dramatically. Quali’s customers include several of the Fortune 500 and the Global 100. More information about Quali is available at www.quali.com.
Seattle, WA – January 11, 2019 – The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining standards, certifications and best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment, today released the findings from the first research survey on “Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Applications and Cloud Adoption.” The study offers greater insight into cloud preparation and migration, the features and benefits gained, and the security and privacy challenges for ERP systems in a cloud environment.
According to the survey, 69 percent of organizations are migrating data for popular ERP cloud applications to the cloud, moving to major cloud infrastructure-as-a-service providers, with the overwhelming majority, almost 90 percent, stating that these applications are business-critical.
In line with the top three migration concerns – moving sensitive data followed by security and compliance – the research finds that attackers are evolving, too. Over half of the survey respondents stated that they expect security incidents in the cloud to increase in the next year.
Yet, when it comes to accountability, there are troubling misconceptions: While 60 percent of survey respondents claim that they feel the cloud service provider is responsible for a breach, 77 percent believe that it is the responsibility of the organization itself actually to secure their ERP applications. Third-parties are held least accountable and responsible. This perception gap shows that organizations need to take more ownership of their business-critical applications while migrating them to the cloud.
“The cloud computing ecosystem is maturing rapidly and business-critical applications, such as ERP solutions, are being moved to cloud environments. With this shift, organizations are starting to explore the question of whether a cloud environment might alleviate traditional challenges that business-critical applications normally face,” said John Yeoh, Director of Research, Americas for the Cloud Security Alliance. “As moving to the cloud raises its own security and privacy challenges, we wanted to provide some benchmarks regarding the myriad issues surrounding cloud migration and security.”
The study, which was sponsored by Onapsis, a leader in business-critical application security, surveyed 199 managers, C-level executives, and staff from enterprises in the Americas (49%), APAC (26%) and EMEA (25%).
“In any cloud migration, regardless of the provider, security must be implemented from the start and implemented in phases throughout the project. Organizations are concerned about moving sensitive data across environments, then addressing the security and compliance implications that come of that migration. Our studies have found that implementing security in each phase of the migration could save customers over five times of their implementation costs,” stated Juan Pablo Perez-Etchegoyen, CTO of Onapsis and Chair of the CSA ERP Security Working Group.
Among the survey’s other key findings:
Americas (73%) and APAC (73%) were more likely to report that they were currently migrating business-critical applications to the cloud than those in EMEA, where regulations such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) impacted organizational plans for technology purchases, cloud services, and third-party policies.
Companies are taking added measures to protect their ERP applications in the cloud, including identity and access controls (68%), firewalls (63%), and vulnerability assessment (62%).
On-premise models (61%) are employed most commonly, with cloud SaaS (41%), cloud IaaS (23%) and cloud PaaS (17%) following.
Listed among the benefits of moving to the cloud were scalability with new technologies (65%), lower cost of ownership (61%) and security patching and updating by the provider (49%). Barriers listed were moving of sensitive data (65%), security (59%), and compliance challenges (54%).
CSA research prides itself on vendor neutrality, agility, and integrity of results. Sponsors are CSA Corporate Members who support the findings of the research project but have no added influence on the content development or editing rights of CSA research.
About Cloud Security Alliance
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment. CSA harnesses the subject matter expertise of industry practitioners, associations, governments, and its corporate and individual members to offer cloud security-specific research, education, training, certification, events, and products. CSA’s activities, knowledge, and extensive network benefit the entire community impacted by cloud — from providers and customers to governments, entrepreneurs, and the assurance industry — and provide a forum through which different parties can work together to create and maintain a trusted cloud ecosystem. For further information, visit us at www.cloudsecurityalliance.org, and follow us on Twitter @cloudsa.
According to the report, “infrastructure and operations leaders who need to provide automation, governance, lifecycle management and brokering across multicloud resources are discovering cloud management platform markets that will meet their needs.” The report goes on to say that Leaders in the Magic Quadrant “distinguish themselves by offering a product suitable for strategic adoption with an ambitions roadmap. They can serve a broad range of use cases, although they do not excel in all areas, may not necessarily be the best solution for a specific need, and may not serve some use cases at all. They have a track record of successful delivery with referenceable customers.”
In 2018, Embotics announced the availability of vCommander v7, the first hybrid cloud management platform built for automation, orchestration and governance of both traditional and new microservice-based applications while facilitating DevOps.
“Embotics has been at the forefront of the CMP market for a long time, thanks largely to the ease of use and performance of our solutions, our commitment to our customers and our ability to help large organizations with complex hybrid environments,” said Michael Torto, CEO of Embotics. “We believe that Gartner’s first Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms validates that leadership position, and we look forward to striving to maintain it for years to come.”
Gartner Peer Insights documents customer experience through verified ratings and peer reviews from enterprise IT professionals. Embotics reviews include the following:
“vCommander has been of tremendous benefit to our organization in terms of automated and rapid deployment of servers. To many of our users, the ability to get a server on demand has been a great enticement for them to use our standard server platform and for us to retire older legacy platforms which are close to end of life. We have found Embotics extremely easy to work with and very very responsive to our requests for support.” – IT Manager, Manufacturing (read full review)
“Close to their customers and responsive to requirements and specific use cases. Always willing to engage…Best ROI ever.” – IT Senior Director, Manufacturing (read full review)
“The product has worked very well for our needs, which was self-service provisioning. The workflows are all easy to understand and can be customized.” – Director of Digital Product Management in the Manufacturing Industry (read full review)
[1] Gartner – Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms, Dennis Smith, Matthew Cheung, Colin Fletcher, Padraig Byrne, January 7, 2019
Gartner Disclaimers
Gartner Peer Insights reviews constitute the subjective opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and do not represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About Embotics
Embotics harmonizes digital business processes for Global 1000 enterprises to accelerate the speed and agility of their developers while ensuring governance and control for IT. The company’s hybrid cloud management platform delivers unparalleled orchestration, automation, cost optimization and end-user self-service capabilities across on-premise, cloud, and containers to get applications and services to market fast. Embotics vCommander is used by organizations including Nordstrom, NASA, Fanatics and Flexential. For more information, visit http://www.embotics.com, and follow Embotics on Twitter and LinkedIn.
2018 Marked with Exponential Customer Growth, New Offerings, Partnerships and Awards
SAN JOSE, Calif., January 9, 2019 — Pulseway, a leading provider of mobile-first, cloud-first remote monitoring and management (RMM) software, is closing out 2018 recapping major business milestones the industry leader has accomplished. With the addition of over 1,200 new paying customers and 25,000 free users joining the Pulseway community,the company is a hub for IT and network administrators looking for a single pane of glass to view their IT environments.
Pulseway monitors, manages, and controls Windows, Mac, and Linux devices, as well as the applications on those devices for more than 4,500 businesses and managed service providers (MSPs) worldwide.
“As IT organizations continue to migrate to multi-cloud environments across globally distributed enterprises, the need for a single view to monitor and manage IT systems has become increasingly important to communicate across the organization,” said Marius Mihalec, Founder & CEO of Pulseway. “Pulseway has always innovated ahead of the market curve and 2018 was no different. As we look to 2019, continuing to automate (insert prescriptive language here).
2018 New Pulseway Offerings:
● Pulseway 6.0 (Scale): The newest version of Pulseway’s IT systems management platform aimed at supporting growing MSPs and mid-market enterprises. Pulseway Scale empowers IT professionals to remotely monitor and manage IT systems with thousands of endpoints from a smartphone or tablet – anytime, anywhere – and easily take corrective action before clients are impacted.
● Pulseway Backup: Pulseway Backup gives you a unified portal that shows you your backup history, enables you to resolve alerts, and to manage your backup jobs all from one place. Purpose-built for MSPs and IT Departments, you can monitor, manage and report on all of your backups from one simple portal.
● New OS Patch Management Engine: New Pulseway OS Patch Management capabilities increase the response time to Spectre and Meltdown-like security concerns by making sure OS patches are immediately pushed to end users and installed. Using Pulseway, IT admins receive immediate alerts on their mobile devices about critical IT system issues that can lead to system failures or security breaches. When OS patches addressing these issues are released, IT admins can quickly prioritize, schedule, and install patches on network devices remotely with Pulseway from any mobile device.
In 2018, PC Magazine tested and compared the top network infrastructure management services on their depth of reporting on a company’s routers and switches, firewall, virtual private networks, and other network appliances. The publication awarded Pulseway Best Infrastructure Management Software 2018for the company’s innovation in the RMM arena.
For more information about Pulseway’s major 2018 moments, please visit here.
About Pulseway
MMSOFT Design, Ltd. is the maker of Pulseway, a mobile-first IT management software that helps busy IT administrators look after their IT infrastructure on the go. Pulseway is used by over 4,500 businesses worldwide including DELL, Louis Vuitton, Canon and Siemens.
Third annual State of Database DevOps Survey sees closer collaboration between teams, enabling compliance and faster code deployment, and the wider use of DevOps practices across both database and application development.
Cambridge UK, Wednesday 9 January 2019 – DevOps adoption is increasing and spreading across organizations, bringing together application and database development, driving business benefits, and having a positive impact on compliance with data privacy regulations. These are the key findings of the third annual State of Database DevOps Survey, carried out by Redgate Software.
The 2019 survey reveals that 85% of the 1,000+ organizations surveyed have either adopted DevOps, or have plans to do so in the next two years, up from 82% in 2018. Standard DevOps practices, such as version control, continuous integration and automated provisioning are being rolled out across both application and database teams, helping speed development and avoiding the database becoming a bottleneck. Overall, 57% of organizations surveyed have already adopted DevOps across some or all of their projects, a rise of over 20% since the first study, published in 2017.
This progress over the past three years backs up other research like the 2018 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, which called out database development for the first time as key to high performance in DevOps. Leading organizations in the Redgate survey understand this, with 23% seeing traditional database practices increasing the risk of failed deployments, and 20% citing slow development and release cycles as major issues with non-DevOps approaches.
Showing the increased appetite for change, over half of organizations (52%) believe they can move to fully automated database DevOps within a year, a figure that rises to 83% for those that have already adopted DevOps across all their other projects.
However, a hardcore of organizations are failing to move forward with DevOps. 15% of those surveyed have no plans to introduce DevOps within the next two years, with 40% of these citing lack of awareness of the business benefits as the main obstacle to adoption. For those who have already embarked on their DevOps journey, the main challenge is disruption to existing workflows. Across all respondents, a lack of skills (22%) and disruption to business (21%) are highlighted as the largest obstacles to success.
The importance of meeting increasingly strict compliance requirements is also a key driver for database DevOps. 61% of organizations think it has a positive impact on meeting regulatory requirements, rising to 66% amongst those who have already adopted it.
Commenting on the findings, Mary Robbins, Redgate Product Marketing Manager, says: “Our third annual survey finds that DevOps adoption is maturing across many leading organizations, with developers, DBAs and other stakeholders working together and adopting common DevOps practices to drive business benefits. However, the picture is also becoming more nuanced – some organizations and sectors seem to be turning their back on the advantages of DevOps, affecting their competitiveness and productivity.”
This is disappointing because those organizations which are adopting DevOps are seeing the introduction of common practices across both application and database development. Version control is now used by 83% of respondents for application development, and 55% for database development, rising steadily from 81% and 53% respectively in 2018. And the use of continuous integration in development has increased even more, from 40% (application) and 21% (database) to 53% and 27%. This is leading to increased usage of third party tools across DevOps processes.
This closer collaboration between developers and DBAs is essential to successful DevOps, and the survey found that traditional barriers are continuing to break down. 62% of respondents said that collaboration between DBAs and developers was ‘Great’ or ‘Good’, rising to 76% amongst those that have adopted DevOps across all projects. 77% of organizations have developers responsible for both database and application development, although this varies by industry and company size, with larger businesses and those in financial services, healthcare and government more likely to have dedicated database developers.
The 2019 State of Database DevOps Survey was based on a survey of over 1,000 IT professionals from around the world. 59% were based in North America, with 24% in Europe and Russia. 48% worked for organizations employing up to 500 staff, with 10% of respondents working for companies with 1,000+ employees.
To download the full 2019 State of Database DevOps Survey, which includes a foreword from Donovan Brown, Principal DevOps Manager at Microsoft, please visit Redgate online. Donovan Brown will also be discussing the findings of the survey in a special webinar on Tuesday 19 February at 4pm GMT. More details can found on the GoToWebinar page.
Leading CIAM solution to make identity core to real-time security controls on Akamai’s Intelligent Edge offerings
Cambridge, MA |
Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), the intelligent edge platform for securing and delivering digital experiences, today announces the company has entered into an agreement to acquire Janrain, the company that pioneered the customer identity access management (CIAM) category. Janrain enables enterprises to enhance digital trust by offloading login and registration workloads, and its integration with Akamai’s Intelligent Edge Platform is expected to provide world class security, regulatory compliance and massive scale to online engagements.
As enterprises continue to adopt cloud technologies and digitize their businesses, web security and identity awareness have become increasingly integral to keeping businesses safe and secure and establishing digital trust. Akamai already secures its customers’ websites, apps and APIs from DDoS attacks, application vulnerabilities, bots and other advanced threats, with hundreds of millions of login transactions taking place daily on the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform. The acquisition is expected to add critical complementary capability that will help Akamai’s customers establish and maintain digital trust with their users by providing a highly secure and resilient environment for collecting and storing sensitive user information, managing privacy controls, defending against identity fraud, and improving engagement and brand loyalty.
“It is challenging to conduct business online without an inherent and expected level of digital trust,” said Rick McConnell, president of Akamai Technologies and general manager of Akamai’s web division. “Janrain’s Identity Cloud, working together with Akamai’s Intelligent Edge Platform, will provide an added layer of security to allow our customers to know more about their end users and potentially drive additional revenues from that deepened relationship.”
Integrating Janrain’s Identity Cloud into the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform is expected to provide immediate security benefits to CIAM customers in two critical areas: bot management and threat intelligence. Akamai Bot Manager mitigates the risks associated with credential abuse by detecting and managing bot activity at login and registration time and reducing fraud without negatively impacting the user experience. By leveraging Akamai threat intelligence, customers can make smart decisions about which users should be allowed to access registration and login pages based on reputation built on past online behavior.
The integrated technology will also be designed to enable highly accurate, scalable, and secure risk-based adaptive authentication solutions to safeguard against malicious account activities including fraudulent account creation and credential compromise.
Janrain has been focused on creating an innovative solution for establishing digital trust through authentication and authorization for each individual consumer and even connected devices that interact with a digital enterprise,” said Jim Kaskade, chief executive officer, Janrain. “By combining the scale and intelligence of Akamai’s Intelligent Edge Platform with Janrain’s Identity Cloud, we believe we can realize the promise of delivering a more accurate and sophisticated customer identity management solution and enable trusted digital experiences that are unique for every user.”
Janrain is a privately-funded company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. The all-cash transaction is expected to close early in the first quarter of 2019. Akamai anticipates the Janrain acquisition to be slightly dilutive to its non-GAAP net income per share for 2019, in the range of $0.05 to $0.06, and to become accretive in 2020. The acquisition is not expected to impact Akamai’s previously-stated goal of achieving a non-GAAP operating margin of 30% by 2020.
Use of Non-GAAP Financial Measures
In addition to providing financial measurements based on generally accepted accounting principles in the United States of America (GAAP), Akamai provides additional financial metrics that are not prepared in accordance with GAAP (non-GAAP). Management uses non-GAAP financial measures, in addition to GAAP financial measures, to understand and compare operating results across accounting periods, for financial and operational decision making, for planning and forecasting purposes, to measure executive compensation and to evaluate Akamai’s financial performance. The non-GAAP financial measures used in this release are non-GAAP operating margin and non-GAAP net income per share.
Management believes that these non-GAAP financial measures reflect Akamai’s ongoing business in a manner that allows for meaningful comparisons and analysis of trends in the business, as they facilitate comparing financial results across accounting periods and to those of peer companies. Management also believes that these non-GAAP financial measures enable investors to evaluate Akamai’s operating results and future prospects in the same manner as management. These non-GAAP financial measures may exclude expenses and gains that may be unusual in nature, infrequent or not reflective of Akamai’s ongoing operating results.
The non-GAAP financial measures do not replace the presentation of Akamai’s GAAP financial results and should only be used as a supplement to, not as a substitute for, Akamai’s financial results presented in accordance with GAAP. Akamai has provided a reconciliation of each non-GAAP financial measure used in its financial reporting and investor presentations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure. This reconciliation captioned “Reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP Financial Measures” can be found on the Investor Relations section of Akamai’s website.
Akamai provides forward-looking statements in the form of guidance and other expressions of expectations about future performance. These forward-looking projections are provided on a non-GAAP basis and cannot be reconciled to the closest GAAP measure without unreasonable effort because of the unpredictability of the amounts and timing of events affecting the items we exclude from non-GAAP measures. For example, stock-based compensation is unpredictable for Akamai’s performance-based awards, which can fluctuate significantly based on current expectations of future achievement of performance-based targets. Amortization of intangible assets, acquisition-related costs and restructuring costs are all impacted by the timing and size of potential future actions, which are difficult to predict. In addition, from time to time, Akamai excludes certain items that occur infrequently, which are also inherently difficult to predict and estimate. It is also difficult to predict the tax effect of the items we exclude and to estimate certain discrete tax items, like the resolution of tax audits or changes to tax laws. As such, the costs that are being excluded from non-GAAP projections are difficult to predict and a reconciliation or a range of results could lead to disclosure that would be imprecise or potentially misleading. Material changes to any one of the exclusions could have a significant effect on our guidance and future GAAP results.
Akamai’s definitions of non-GAAP measures used in this press release are outlined below:
Non-GAAP income from operations – GAAP income from operations adjusted for the following items: amortization of acquired intangible assets; stock-based compensation; amortization of capitalized stock-based compensation; amortization of capitalized interest expense; acquisition-related costs; restructuring charges; benefit from adoption of software development activities; gains and other activity related to divestiture of a business; gains and losses on legal settlements; costs from professional service providers related to a non-routine stockholder matter; costs incurred related to the establishment of an endowment to the Akamai Foundation; costs incurred with respect to Akamai’s internal FCPA investigation; transformation costs; and other non-recurring or unusual items that may arise from time to time.
Non-GAAP operating margin – Non-GAAP income from operations stated as a percentage of revenue.
Non-GAAP net income – GAAP net income adjusted for the following tax-affected items: amortization of acquired intangible assets; stock-based compensation; amortization of capitalized stock-based compensation; acquisition-related costs; restructuring charges; benefit from adoption of software development activities; gains and other activity related to divestiture of a business; gains and losses on legal settlements; costs from professional service providers related to a non-routine stockholder matter; costs incurred related to the establishment of an endowment to the Akamai Foundation; costs incurred with respect to Akamai’s internal FCPA investigation; transformation costs; loss on early extinguishment of debt; amortization of debt discount and issuance costs; amortization of capitalized interest expense; certain gains and losses on investments; and other non-recurring or unusual items that may arise from time to time
Non-GAAP net income per share – Non-GAAP net income divided by basic weighted average or diluted common shares outstanding. Basic weighted average shares outstanding are those used in GAAP net income per share calculations. Diluted weighted average shares outstanding are adjusted in non-GAAP per share calculations for the shares that would be delivered to Akamai pursuant to the note hedge transaction entered into in connection with the issuance of $1,150 million of convertible senior notes due 2025 and $690 million of convertible senior notes due 2019. Under GAAP, shares delivered under hedge transactions are not considered offsetting shares in the fully-diluted share calculation until they are delivered. However, the company would receive a benefit from the note hedge transaction and would not allow the dilution to occur, so management believes that adjusting for this benefit provides a meaningful view of operating performance. With respect to the convertible senior notes due 2025, unless and until Akamai’s weighted average stock price is greater than $95.10, the intial conversion price, and with respect to the convertible senior notes due 2019, unless and until Akamai’s weighted average stock price is greater than $89.56, the initial conversion price, there will be no difference between GAAP and non-GAAP diluted weighted average common shares outstanding.
The non-GAAP adjustments, and Akamai’s basis for excluding them from non-GAAP financial measures, are outlined below:
Amortization of acquired intangible assets – Akamai has incurred amortization of intangible assets, included in its GAAP financial statements, related to various acquisitions Akamai has made. The amount of an acquisition’s purchase price allocated to intangible assets and term of its related amortization can vary significantly and are unique to each acquisition; therefore, Akamai excludes amortization of acquired intangible assets from its non-GAAP financial measures to provide investors with a consistent basis for comparing pre- and post-acquisition operating results.
Stock-based compensation and amortization of capitalized stock-based compensation – Although stock-based compensation is an important aspect of the compensation paid to Akamai’s employees, the grant date fair value varies based on the stock price at the time of grant, varying valuation methodologies, subjective assumptions and the variety of award types. This makes the comparison of Akamai’s current financial results to previous and future periods difficult to interpret; therefore, Akamai believes it is useful to exclude stock-based compensation and amortization of capitalized stock-based compensation from its non-GAAP financial measures in order to highlight the performance of Akamai’s core business and to be consistent with the way many investors evaluate its performance and compare its operating results to peer companies.
Acquisition-related costs – Acquisition-related costs include transaction fees, advisory fees, due diligence costs and other direct costs associated with strategic activities. In addition, subsequent adjustments to Akamai’s initial estimated amounts of contingent consideration and indemnification associated with specific acquisitions are included within acquisition-related costs. These amounts are impacted by the timing and size of the acquisitions. Akamai excludes acquisition-related costs from its non-GAAP financial measures to provide a useful comparison of Akamai’s operating results to prior periods and to its peer companies because such amounts vary significantly based on the magnitude of the acquisition transactions and do not reflect Akamai’s core operations.
Restructuring charges – Akamai has incurred restructuring charges that are included in its GAAP financial statements, primarily related to workforce reductions and estimated costs of existing facility lease commitments. Akamai excludes these items from its non-GAAP financial measures when evaluating its continuing business performance as such items vary significantly based on the magnitude of the restructuring action and do not reflect expected future operating expenses. In addition, these charges do not necessarily provide meaningful insight into the fundamentals of current or past operations of its business.
Amortization of debt discount and issuance costs and amortization of capitalized interest expense – In May 2018, Akamai issued $1,150 million of convertible senior notes due 2025 with a coupon interest rate of 0.125%. In February 2014, Akamai issued $690 million of convertible senior notes due 2019 with a coupon interest rate of 0%. The imputed interest rates of these convertible senior notes were 4.26% and 3.20%, respectively. This is a result of the debt discounts recorded for the conversion features that are required to be separately accounted for as equity under GAAP, thereby reducing the carrying value of the convertible debt instruments. The debt discounts are amortized as interest expense together with the issuance costs of the debt. The interest expense excluded from Akamai’s non-GAAP results is comprised of these non-cash components and is excluded from management’s assessment of the company’s operating performance because management believes the non-cash expense is not representative of ongoing operating performance.
Gains and losses on investments – Akamai has recorded gains and losses from the disposition, changes to fair value and impairment of certain investments. Akamai believes excluding these amounts from its non-GAAP financial measures is useful to investors as the types of events giving rise to them are not representative of Akamai’s core business operations and ongoing operating performance.
Legal and stockholder matter costs – Akamai has incurred losses related to the settlement of legal matters, costs from professional service providers related to a non-routine stockholder matter and costs with respect to its internal U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) investigation. Akamai believes excluding these amounts from its non-GAAP financial measures is useful to investors as the types of events giving rise to them are not representative of Akamai’s core business operations.
Endowment of Akamai Foundation – During the second quarter of 2018, Akamai incurred a charge to endow the Akamai Foundation. Akamai believes excluding these amounts from non-GAAP financial measures is useful to investors as this one-time expense is not representative of its core business operations.
Transformation costs – Akamai has incurred professional services fees associated with internal transformation programs designed to improve its operating margins and that are part of a planned program intended to significantly change the manner in which business in conducted. Akamai believes excluding these amounts from its non-GAAP financial measures is useful to investors as the types of events and activities giving rise to them occur infrequently and are not representative of Akamai’s core business operations and ongoing operating performance.
Income tax effect of non-GAAP adjustments and certain discrete tax items – The non-GAAP adjustments described above are reported on a pre-tax basis. The income tax effect of non-GAAP adjustments is the difference between GAAP and non-GAAP income tax expense. Non-GAAP income tax expense is computed on non-GAAP pre-tax income (GAAP pre-tax income adjusted for non-GAAP adjustments) and excludes certain discrete tax items (such as recording or releasing of valuation allowances), if any. Akamai believes that applying the non GAAP adjustments and their related income tax effect allows Akamai to highlight income attributable to its core operations.
The release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai’s management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements about expected benefits to Akamai from the acquisition. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, failure to close the transaction expeditiously or at all, inability to successfully integrate the technology and personnel of Janrain, failure to achieve expected post-closing financial results, failure to provide expected benefits of combined technologies, and other factors that are discussed in the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC.
About Akamai
Akamai secures and delivers digital experiences for the world’s largest companies. Akamai’s intelligent edge platform surrounds everything, from the enterprise to the cloud, so customers and their businesses can be fast, smart, and secure. Top brands globally rely on Akamai to help them realize competitive advantage through agile solutions that extend the power of their multi-cloud architectures. Akamai keeps decisions, apps and experiences closer to users than anyone – and attacks and threats far away. Akamai’s portfolio of edge security, web and mobile performance, enterprise access and video delivery solutions is supported by unmatched customer service, analytics and 24/7/365 monitoring. To learn why the world’s top brands trust Akamai, visit www.akamai.com, blogs.akamai.com, or @Akamai on Twitter.
Taught by industry expert Angie Jones, “Setting the Foundation for Successful Test Automation” is the first course available to jumpstart your pathway to becoming a QA automation superstar
SAN MATEO, Calif., January 2, 2019 — Applitools (applitools.com), the leader in Application Visual Management, today released the first of several 2019 courses for Test Automation University – a community-driven collection of educational training courses to help improve test automation skill sets (https://testautomationu.applitools.com/setting-a-foundation-for-successful-test-automation/). Course education materials help improve results from the test automation efforts critical to app release velocity and quality in today’s global business climate. Provided free of charge, these online courses help address the lack of accessibility to an industry-vetted collective of training resources. Instructors include leading test automation experts Angie Jones, Dave Haeffner, Jonathan Lipps, Joe Colantonio, Amber Race, Elisabeth Hocke, Manoj Kumar, Jason Arbon, Raja Rao, and Gil Tayar with many more to be announced throughout 2019.
Every course includes several chapters with video tutorials, transcripts, additional resources, and quizzes to confirm and reinforce learning. Students who successfully complete courses are rewarded with credits that accumulate and count towards their overall ranking, as well as profile badges to celebrate progress and learning.
Anyone who completes the first Test Automation University course by January 15, 2019, will receive an exclusive New Year’s Resolution badge and an additional 500 credits. Sign-up to participate at https://testautomationu.com.
Setting the Foundation for Successful Test Automation
The first course in the curriculum is now available and contains the following chapters to help students learn about:
Designing a Test Automation Strategy
Creating a Culture for Test Automation Success
Developing for Test Automatability
Tooling for Test Automation
Future-proofing Your Test Automation Efforts
Scaling Your Test Automation
Measuring the Value of Your Test Automation
“At Test Automation U, we don’t want to limit learning to any one particular school of thought, which is why we are providing a wealth of training materials from a variety of industry veteran instructors all in one centralized location,” said Angie Jones, senior developer advocate at Applitools. “Our first course, meant for all stages of skill sets and career paths, helps students set a foundation for test automation success by thinking through and identifying the core elements of good test automation and applying them before starting a project.” .”
In the face of digital transformation, as well as continuous integration and continuous deployment initiatives (CI-CD), the shortage of test automation skills is being further exacerbated. Numerous reports from analysts across the globe estimate this gap in skills and talent to reach the hundreds of thousands within only a few years’ time. Test Automation University is a program committed to helping address this challenge. As an open, community-driven educational training program, the community is responsible for identifying, aggregating, and amplifying techniques that will help automation professionals succeed more often. In particular, those responsible for QA (test automation engineers, QA teams, and developers) can take advantage of these offerings immediately. To learn more about Test Automation University, take the demo course at (https://testautomationu.applitools.com/demo-course/).
Additional Test Automation University courses will be released every few weeks throughout 2019 with the following instructors and courses already scheduled:
January 1, 2019: Setting a Foundation for Successful Test Automation from Angie Jones
January 18, 2019: Design Patterns for Test Automation from Eran Barlev
February 1, 2019: Exploring Tools for API Test Automation from Amber Race
February 8, 2019: Scaling Automated Tests with Docker from Carlos Kidman
February 15, 2019: Automated Visual Testing: A Fast Path To Test Automation Success from Angie Jones
March 1, 2019: Incredibly Fast Front-end Testing with Cypress from Gil Tayar
March 1, 2019: Codeless Test Automation using the new Selenium IDE from Dave Haeffner
March 15, 2019: The Whole Team Approach to Continuous Testing from Elisabeth Hocke
March 15, 2019: Advanced Topics in Automated Visual Testing from Raja Rao
March 29, 2019: Performance Testing Tools and Techniques: Preparing For The Masses from Amber Race
April 12, 2019: Automated Visual Testing of Mobile Apps Using Appium from Jonathan Lipps
About Applitools
Applitools is the creator of Application Visual Management (AVM) to help companies release, test and monitor flawless mobile, web, and native apps in a fully automated way. Founded in 2013, Applitools uses sophisticated AI-powered image processing technology to ensure that an application appears correctly and functions properly on all mobile devices, browsers, operating systems, and screen sizes.
Applitools’ Visual AI engine mimics the human eye and brain to avoid undetected visual bugs, minimizing false positive bug alerts. Applitools Eyes can instantly validate entire application pages and detect layout issues on even the most complex and dynamic pages. When development teams are confident they can fix visual bugs faster, they are unleashed to push more high-quality code than ever before.
Applitools has customers from a range of verticals, including Fortune 100 companies in software, banking, online retail, insurance, and pharmaceuticals. Applitools is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with an R&D center in Tel Aviv, Israel. For more information, please visit applitools.com.
Topaz Empowers Teams to Better Leverage Core Mainframe Resources While Achieving Application Development Excellence
Topaz Team Profiles enable top mainframe professionals to share their methods, techniques, and assets, quickly onboarding less-experienced peers and bringing familiarity to unfamiliar mainframe code and data.
New Jenkins plugin accelerates fast, secure use of JCL in cross-platform DevOps pipelines.
As a result, enterprises can more quickly and successfully adopt Agile and DevOps on their mainframes, despite the generational loss of mainframe expertise.
DETROIT—January 3, 2019—Compuware today announced significant enhancements to Topaz, the leading mainframe DevOps solution for empowering next-gen developers to bring modern development best practices and third-party tools-of-choice to the mainframe. With these enhancements, organizations can quickly get new developers up to speed and build seamless mainframe-inclusive DevOps pipelines.
Quickly on-board new developers
Developers and testers can now easily group both mainframe and Java projects, preferences, configurations and/or working sets into Topaz Team Profiles and share them with other individuals and teams. This sharing provides access to high-value knowledge that can be used to jump-start common tasks such as editing data, debugging programs, or running unit tests. Topaz’s use of Eclipse projects has also been enhanced so the mainframe developer experience is even more like that of a Java developer.
This knowledge sharing empowers new staff to become dramatically more productive in less time, while eliminating redundant work. It also ensures that mainframe teams consistently embrace best practices honed by more experienced developers.
“We are hiring a lot of bright and talented developers, and we need to get them productive as quickly as possible,” said Raju Debroy, Director of IT, Cloud & Digital Operation at Pekin Insurance. “Topaz’s Eclipse interface and the new ability to share the work of more experienced developers will help us achieve our onboarding goals, while also accelerating our adoption of DevOps on the mainframe.”
Build better DevOps pipelines
A new Jenkins plugin for Topaz makes it easier to automate and integrate mainframe processes into a cross-platform DevOps pipeline. The plugin enables DevOps professionals and Release Managers to execute Job Control Language (JCL), an essential scripting language that controls mainframe tasks such as setting up test data and directing programs to run, in their DevOps pipelines.
The Compuware Topaz Utilities plugin accesses the mainframe using a technology that is faster and more reliable than conventional FTP—which many consider an unacceptable security risk.
Expand automated testing
Compuware has also enhanced Topaz for Total Test, the premier automated unit testing solution for the mainframe, to support CICS—the mainframe’s dominant transaction processing technology. The patent-pending technology creates virtual CICS commands, eliminating the need to access active CICS test regions. The CICS test cases can be automatically executed through a Jenkins plugin.
These Topaz innovations mark the 17th consecutive quarter that Compuware has delivered significant innovations that empower enterprises to modernize and mainstream their mainframes, so they can better leverage their mainframe intellectual property—as well as the platform’s unmatched performance, scalability, reliability, efficiency and security.
“The next generation of developers can deliver extraordinary business value by applying their skills to mainframe applications,” said Chris O’Malley, CEO of Compuware. “Topaz gives these development artisans the familiar, intuitive, automated and richly functional environment they need—and prefer—to fulfill this critical mission and continuously improve in the measures of velocity, quality and efficiency.
Compuware Corporation
Compuware empowers the world’s largest companies to excel in the digital economy by fully leveraging their high-value mainframe investments. We do this by delivering highly innovative solutions that uniquely enable IT professionals with mainstream skills to manage mainframe applications, data, and platform operations. Learn more at compuware.com.
Hosted at the InterContinental London – The O2 from 25-27 June, technology and business leaders gather for three days of immersive learning about IT transformation
PORTLAND, Ore., December 18, 2018 – IT Revolution (http://itrevolution.com), the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today announced its call for papers for DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019 is open (https://events.itrevolution.com/eur/). The DevOps Enterprise Summit is the premier industry event for technology and business leaders of large, complex organizations implementing DevOps and IT transformation practices in the UK and Continental Europe. Presentation proposals may be submitted through the event website (http://bit.ly/DOES19EURCFP) before the submission portal closes 1 February 2019.
IT Revolution has opened registration for DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019. Attendees should register before 1 February 2019 to save with Blind Bird pricing (http://bit.ly/DOES19EURBB).
DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019 (DOES19) will be held at the InterContinental London – The O2 – from 25-27 June 2019. Early registration is highly encouraged, as past events have sold out early.
What is the DevOps Enterprise Summit?
The DevOps Enterprise Summit is a conference for technology and business leaders who are transforming how large, complex organizations deliver software to help their organizations win in the marketplace.
Entering its fourth year in Europe and sixth year in the US, its goal is to accelerate DevOps adoption and increase the likelihood of those initiatives succeeding, enabling the cultural norms, technical practices, and architectures that help organizations achieve the highest levels of performance.
Through keynotes, breakout sessions, collaborative workshops, and space to interact within an expo hall, attendees gain insights into the evolving technical and architectural practices and the methods needed to lead widespread change efforts in large organizations. This year, the programming focuses on the following areas:
Experience Reports from Top Global Brands
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
“Since the first DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014, we have had technology leaders from large, complex organizations presenting their ongoing DevOps transformations, allowing us to document their journeys and progress over time,” said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook and Accelerate. “By featuring experience reports across different industries and subject matter expert talks from the domains we need most, our goal is to help technology and business leaders use DevOps to help their organizations win in today’s software-driven economy.”
Share This: DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019 Announces Call for Papers and Bling Bird Registration https://events.itrevolution.com/eur/ @DOES_EUR #DOES19 #DevOps
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.
EVANSTON, IL (December 14, 2018) – Today, LOCO Innovations, LLC announced the release of Loco v1.5, the latest update to the no-code app development platform that launched earlier this year. In the new version, Loco users have the ability to generate and format custom reports using standard word processing features using Google Docs. Once the format is set, a PDF is generated and available to all app users on the schedule that an admin specifies.
Loco v1.5 comes on the heels of a previous update announced in October that added Slack integration as a major new feature, allowing users to instantly access data from their custom-built Loco apps directly within the Slack interface via the Loco App in Slack’s App Directory.
“We are continuing to add new features and functionality to Loco so that our users can integrate their data into the programs and tools they’re already using in their businesses and enterprises,” said Doug Wilson, product manager at LOCO Innovations, LLC. “Our goal is to provide a platform that allows anyone to become a citizen developer, building applications for their enterprises and allowing them to access and use their data in powerful new ways.”
These new reporting tools are another step towards doing just that,” Wilson continued. “There is no reporting tool on the planet that allows users to modify styles and layouts of their data as easy as using the features in Microsoft Word.”
With the previous Slack integration, Loco gave dynamic new functionality to the eight million people who currently use Slack on a daily basis. By creating apps in Loco and integrating them with Slack, users can access their data using conversational commands, including a simple structured find operation.
Other updates to Loco also allow users to create “Visual Rules” using a visual puzzle-piece drag-and-drop mechanism, which can, among other things, notify users via text, email, or Slack when data is created, modified.
Loco was launched earlier this year as a new way to empower every person to become a citizen developer, building their own applications with no software development or coding knowledge necessary. Loco is the easiest way on the planet to create databases, either from scratch or directly from the library of pre-built apps.
Other recent updates have added a suite of pre-built HR apps, including apps designed to facilitate performance reviews, salary tracking, and employee information; private decks that allow data to be seen only by their author and the app administrator; a better look and feel in the iOS view of the Loco app; and the ability to import data directly from the cloud using Google Sheets.
Organizations today have more data than ever to manage, compile, track, aggregate, sort, collate, and tabulate. In the past, citizens who needed a custom app solution to achieve these tasks were forced to hire developers to build it, even though the problem they were looking to solve only required a simple digital solution. Loco gives these citizen developers the power to take app development into their own hands, building and customizing apps to their own specifications.
Loco is completely customizable, allowing users to build the app they need to solve the problem they have. Apps can be designed within minutes from any device without any formal programming training, then deployed to the cloud in seconds and made available to teams immediately. Basic usage plans for Loco start at $100 per month, with a cost of $400 per month for unlimited usage.
Because Loco is completely customizable, the apps that can be developed are restricted only by the user’s imagination. Since the user invents the data and the structure, there are no limits to the types of apps that they can construct. Each app is available to team members of the user’s choosing, or can be designed for private use
About Loco Innovations, LLC
Loco Innovations, LLC is an offshoot of Breakthrough Technologies, a company that for 20 years, has helped associations, nonprofits, small businesses, and other clients build web applications, websites, mobile applications, and enterprise solutions to address the complex problems they face. Breakthrough Technologies combines proven and emerging technologies with innovative thinking and high-functioning teams. The company has completed more than 800 projects ranging in value from $10,000 to $10 million, and its work has been recognized by organizations like Technology in Motion, Inc5000, Crain’s Fast 50, the CODiE Awards, and the Stevie Awards. Breakthrough Technologies focuses on open-source solutions and modular, forward-thinking architecture. They leverage proven platforms like Drupal, TAO, and Jaspersoft to deliver .NET, Cloud Services, and other end-to-end services. Breakthrough Technologies is 100 percent based in the United States with offices north of Chicago, next to Northwestern University.