devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • Platform.sh Further Extends North American Footprint with Expansion to Canada

    Platform.sh Adds In-Region Customer, Sales and Engineering Roles; Presence Affords Customers Data Residency Flexibility to Help Meet PIPEDA Regulations

    SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 14, 2018 – Platform.sh, provider of the idea-to-cloud application platform that simplifies cloud infrastructures, today announced its formal expansion to Canada. Following the company’s Series C funding in May to accelerate its go-to-market strategy in North America, Platform.sh is now fully available throughout Canada. Canadian enterprises can now utilize Platform.sh to take advantage of the cloud’s speed, performance and security without extensive resources or costs. Additionally, for current and future Canadian customers alike, Platform.sh now offers the option to secure their data locally, helping them meet stringent Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) regulations.

    More than 650 enterprise customers across the globe currently use Platform.sh to develop, test, deploy and run their cloud-based web applications with speed and confidence. The company, which has experienced 110 percent year-over-year revenue growth this year, addresses every major industry vertical and fuels the innovation of some of the world’s leading brands, including the Canadian Football League (CFL), The Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Magento, Gap Inc., The Financial Times, the British Council and Hachette Book Group.

    In order to keep pace with growing customer traction in the region, Platform.sh has appointed Gauthier Garnier as Director of Professional Services and GM for Canada to bolster customer support, sales and engineering efforts. Currently, many Canadian enterprises store their data and host their applications in the U.S., but with the newly expanded services across Canada, customers will have advanced PaaS on Canadian soil and the support they need in both French and English, depending on their needs. As a result, Canadian enterprises can accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and deliver new products and services faster than ever before.

    Designed to support the most complex enterprise-scale production environments, Platform.sh combines an automated cloud with its unique rapid cloning technology that can instantly spin up and deploy exact clones of entire live web applications in less than 60 seconds, allowing development teams to ensure that new features do not break once pushed into production. The unification of production, testing and development workflows results in 90 percent less DevOps efforts as compared to DIY solutions and 40 percent improved productivity as compared to managed hosting providers – at a significantly lower total cost.

    “Platform.sh has experienced rapid customer growth globally since its inception, and our recent round of investment has afforded us the opportunity to expand quickly into Canada to scale our North American efforts from a people and product perspective,” said Frederic Plais, CEO of Platform.sh. “We are now very well-positioned from a global market perspective, as the desire to provide personalized web services and applications is universal and not restricted to a specific region or sector. Essentially, every enterprise looking to improve the customer experience, create new revenue opportunities or reduce their overhead from a hosting perspective can use Platform.sh to not only become more efficient, but more effective in their delivery – which leads to greater profitability.”

    With its new Canadian presence, Platform.sh will aim to attract top talent in the IT sector from both a regional and global perspective. Additionally, to further support the company’s growth in Canada, Platform.sh plans to establish an Excellence Center in Montreal.

    New customers can sign up for a free trial here. Existing customers can try out the new Canadian version risk-free by sending a message via Platform.sh’s contact form or Slack channel.

    To learn more about Platform.sh visit https://platform.sh/
    Connect with us on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/platform.sh/
    Follow us on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/platformsh

    About Platform.sh
    Platform.sh is an idea-to-cloud application platform that simplifies cloud infrastructures. Its unique git-driven technology enables development teams to develop, test, deploy and run with speed and confidence. Adopters of Platform.sh have experienced a 90 percent reduction in DevOps efforts as compared to DIY solutions and 40 percent better productivity as compared to managed hosting providers at a significantly lower total cost. The company is recognized as a leader as a laureate of the European Commission H2020 program. Headquartered in Paris, France and San Francisco, Platform.sh serves thousands of self-serve and enterprise customers worldwide, including The Financial Times, Gap, Magento Commerce, Orange, Hachette, Stanford University, Harvard University, The British Council, and Lufthansa.

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  • InfluxData’s Latest Release Delivers LDAP Integration, Advanced Analytics and Self-Healing Capabilities in Leading Time Series Platform

    Organizations Can Now See Established Organizational Policies for Faster Time to Market while Preserving Data Security and Privacy

    SAN FRANCISCO — Aug. 14, 2018 — InfluxData, the modern Open Source Platform built specifically for metrics, events and other time series data that empowers developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics and IoT applications, today announced the latest release of InfluxEnterprise, which delivers LDAP integration, new advanced analytics and self-healing capabilities in the leading time series database platform.

    The increasing complexity of systems is driving the need for observability since even a small improvement in system behavior can have a significant impact on the bottom line. Time series data, collected and stored with InfluxData’s Time Series database platform, is integral to observability and is becoming mission critical for organizations. Today’s enhancements to InfluxEnterprise make it easier for administrators to keep this mission critical data available and secure by checking and verifying every requested action – including creating databases, storing data and running queries – against a user’s stored authorizations and role.

    Updates to InfluxEnterprise include:

    • Integration with LDAP: InfluxEnterprise now supports authenticating users against LDAP, making it easier for site administrators to securely manage critical time series data and users. This also speeds adoption of the InfluxData platform by improving the user experience through single sign-on (SSO) and meeting security compliance requirements of internal operations for protecting private data.
    • Advanced Analytical Functions: InfluxData’s new release adds advanced analytical functions for mathematical and advanced financial modeling, enabling use of time series data to create complex financial models. These functions are important for data analysis to help teams understand system behavior to predict outages in early stages.
    • Advanced Data Replication: InfluxData’s advanced data replication with self-healing automatically detects data inconsistencies, resulting for example from hardware failure or user error, and resolves them so data across all nodes is consistent. This gives the team peace of mind knowing that the data they rely so heavily on to keep their systems running is always available.

    “Time series platforms are being adopted faster than any other database technology, due to their unique abilities to monitor and analyze IoT, DevOps, Cloud, and Containers; and provide analytics for real-time decision making,” said Mark Herring, InfluxData CMO. “As time series platforms continue to gain broader adoption within the enterprise, it’s imperative that these platforms fit well with the rest of the IT systems.”

    Metrics, events, and other time-based data are being generated at an exponential rate, as there is a growing requirement for analyzing today’s complex environments. The InfluxData Platform provides a comprehensive set of tools and services to accumulate metrics and events data, analyze the data, and act on the data via powerful visualizations and notifications. Its InfluxDB database is the overwhelming leader among Time Series Database management systems, according to DB-Engines’ latest results published earlier this quarter. InfluxData’s unique features enable customers to quickly build:

    • Monitoring, alerting and notification applications supporting their DevOps initiatives
    • IoT applications supporting millions of events per second, providing new business value around predictive maintenance and real-time alerting and control
    • Real-time analytics applications that are focused on streaming data and anomaly detection

    InfluxData has rapidly built its developer and customer base across industries – including manufacturing, financial services, energy, and telecommunications – by delivering the fastest growing Open Source Platform that enables customers to derive better business insights, data-driven real-time actions, and a consolidated single view of their entire infrastructure – from applications to microservices, and from systems to sensors. More than 420 customers, including Cisco Systems, Coupa Software, IBM, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Nordstrom, and Tesla, have selected InfluxData as their modern data platform for metrics and events. InfluxData is pioneering the shift to time series in a modern metrics and events platform, and is making it possible for customers to become data-driven and take on digital transformation initiatives.

    Availability

    InfluxData’s new release is available now via download for all existing InfluxEnterprise customers. New customers wanting to try these features can download the free trial at https://portal.influxdata.com/users/new.

    About InfluxData

    InfluxData, the creator of InfluxDB, delivers a modern Open Source Platform built from the ground up for analyzing metrics and events (time series data) for DevOps and IoT applications. Whether the data comes from humans, sensors, or machines, InfluxData empowers developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics, and IoT applications faster, easier, and to scale delivering real business value quickly. Based in San Francisco, InfluxData’s more than 420 customers include Cisco, eBay, IBM and Siemens. Visit https://www.influxdata.com/. Twitter: @influxdb.

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    InfluxData, InfluxCloud, InfluxDB and InfluxEnterprise are all trademarked by InfluxData. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

  • Tripwire for DevOps SaaS Debuts – The first dynamic container vulnerability assessment service for the DevOps Pipeline

    Now generally available, Tripwire’s DevOps SaaS provides security assessments as part of the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline

    PORTLAND, Ore. – August 08, 2018 – Tripwire, Inc., a leading global provider of security and compliance solutions for enterprises and industrial organizations, today announced the debut of Tripwire® for DevOps. After pre-releasing DevOps capabilities in an early access program earlier this year, Tripwire has launched Tripwire for DevOps as a generally available software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution.  Tripwire for DevOps integrates security assessments into the DevOps life cycle and toolchain, providing visibility into the security state of underlying application infrastructure throughout the pipeline.

    Complementing application and source code analysis tools, Tripwire for DevOps assesses container images and container registries for vulnerabilities, with additional features, such as the ability to assess configurations for compliance with security policies, in near-term release. It integrates with the CI/CD pipeline to ensure components meet security standards as they move through build and deploy DevOps stages.

    “As organizations move their application and service deployment to a DevOps model, it’s vital that they integrate security into the actual process,” said Tim Erlin, vice president of product management and strategy at Tripwire. “In addition to securing custom code, businesses need to ensure that the application infrastructure and inherited code remain secure throughout the life cycle. We’re excited to introduce a solution that embodies what’s been referred to as ‘DevSecOps,’ true integration of security into the DevOps workflow.”

    Tripwire for DevOps fully automates the assessment of container images in the CI/CD pipeline and can dynamically test live instances of application containers in an isolated, cloud-based sandbox. It can be used to establish quality gates at each stage to fail builds that don’t meet defined security standards. It can also be used to simply monitor and assess repositories, providing visibility of potential risk without interfering with the roll-out process.

    In a report, Gartner analysts said, “Traditional application security testing relies on heavyweight, one-time gating inspections, typically performed during testing, taking days if not weeks and requiring security professionals to perform them. This won’t work and it won’t scale for DevSecOps. DevOps emphasizes continuous feedback and improved automation. Security needs to adopt and support a mindset where security starts at the very beginning of the service creation, throughout the DevOps processes, and is continuous, automated and improves with each subsequent iteration.”[1]

    Simplifying deployment and set-up, Tripwire for DevOps is a fully self-contained SaaS solution that features:

    • Integration with popular DevOps CI/CD build tools, including Jenkins, & TeamCity, with additional tools coming soon.
    • Compatibility with all Docker v2 repositories for container assessment.
    • A complete REST API and command line interface for DevOps engineers to write custom integrations.

    For more information please visit: https://www.tripwire.com/products/tripwire-for-devops

    About Tripwire

    Tripwire is a leading provider of integrity assurance solutions that improve security, compliance and IT operations in enterprises, industrial organizations, service providers and government agencies. Tripwire solutions are based on high-fidelity asset visibility and deep endpoint intelligence combined with business context; together, these solutions integrate and automate security and IT operations. Tripwire’s enterprise-class portfolio includes file integrity monitoring, configuration management, asset discovery, vulnerability management and log collection that supports all widely used industry-standard frameworks.

    Learn more at https://www.tripwire.com/get security news, trends and insights at www.tripwire.com/blog, or follow us on Twitter @TripwireInc.

  • Eggplant Adds Predictive Insights to its Digital Automation Intelligence Suite to Minimize Product Release Risks

    Provides intuitive insights that visualize the business risk, improve product quality and optimize the customer experience

    London, & Boulder, Colo August 9th, 2018 Eggplant, the provider of user-centric, intelligent testing and performance solutions, today announced the addition of Eggplant Release Insights to its Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) Suite. The technology enhances Eggplant’s market-leading automation capabilities, providing intuitive analytics and insights that help teams finally understand the impact on user satisfaction and business outcomes if they release another version of their product now. This helps accelerate the continuous delivery of applications and software and provides organizations with a competitive advantage.

    Releasing new applications and software provides development teams with a wide array of technical data. However, organizations are missing out on a critical business opportunity by not collating this information, making decisions driven by experience rather than data. Eggplant Release Insights addresses this issue by providing an aggregate, visual summary of key information, enabling teams to immediately understand the business impact and take action. This allows teams to make data-backed decisions that improve the quality of each release and enhance the customer experience.

    Eggplant Release Insights works in conjunction with Eggplant AI, providing an ever-expanding set of comprehensive predictors that determine the overall release quality. This creates an intuitive, real-time understanding of the release rating, enabling companies to fine-tune their testing and address any issues prior to release.

    Predictors Include:

    • Bug Content Predictor: Predicts the expected number of undiscovered defects and assess all aspects of the build process.

    • Development Quality Predictor: Identifies the biggest risk factors within the release and assess their impact. The result is to assess the quality of the entire development process and identify the key risks that will impact quality.

    • Test Coverage Predictor: Using coverage data from regression and exploratory tests it provides an assessment of the level of coverage on the current product.

    • Usability Quality predictor: The UI under development is analyzed and a visual metric is generated ofhow usable and consistent the current release is.

    About Eggplant

    Eggplant, the fastest growing test automation provider and a portfolio company of The Carlyle Group, provides user-centric, intelligent testing and performance solutions designed to optimize the digital experience, delight customers, and drive business success. Only Eggplant enables organizations to test, monitor, analyze, and report on the quality and responsiveness of software applications across different interfaces, platforms, browsers, and devices, including mobile, IoT, desktop, and mainframe. Learn more at eggplant.io

     

     

  • Tasktop Named a Best Fit for Companies that Want a Best-of-Breed DevOps Stack

    Tasktop Making Complimentary Copies Available of Independent Value Stream Management ToolsReport

    VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 9, 2018 – Tasktop, the leader in Value Stream Integration, today announced that The Forrester New Wave™: Value Stream Management Tools, Q3 2018 by Christopher Condo and Bill Seguin cites it as a strong performer in Value Stream Management (VSM) Tools.

    Tasktop is making that report available to interested parties at no cost.

    Beyond naming Tasktop as a strong performer, it gave a differentiated rating to Tasktop’s VSM tool in the integration, vision, roadmap, market approach and common data model criteria.

    According to the Forrester New Wave, “VSM is an emerging tool category that connects an organization’s business to its software delivery capability. VSM tools provide multiple roles — product managers, developers, QA, and release managers — a view into planning, health indicators, and analytics, helping them collaborate more effectively to reduce waste and focus on work that delivers value to the customer and the business.”

    The report also notes that “Tasktop is a best fit for companies that want a best-of-breed DevOps stack. Tasktop aims to integrate and coordinate value streams across your DevOps stack from ideation to production, but it will leave domain-specific work to other specialized tools.”

    “In supporting the digital transformations of Fortune 500 organizations over the past 10 years, we recognized that Agile and DevOps were critical, but not sufficient for success,” said Mik Kersten, CEO, Tasktop.  “I believe that Forrester’s call to elevate Agile and DevOps with Value Stream Management speaks directly to the frustration that IT leaders I work with are feeling around their digital transformations failing to meet business needs.  It is only by deploying a solution for Value Stream Management that supports today’s best-of-breed toolchains that enterprises can scale their software innovation initiatives.  Tasktop is a unique Value Stream Management vendor as we focus on integration and management across the many value-creation tools involved in modern software delivery.  We are honored to be in the company of the other vendors in this report, many of whom we partner with, in order to provide enterprises with both the value creation and the integration needed to succeed with complex and multi-vendor toolchains.  Tasktop’s strategy is all about end-to-end flow and feedback, and we are thrilled to see this recognized as a critical component of Value Stream Management strategy.”

    Full Report Available at No Cost from Tasktop

    To obtain the full report from Tasktop, interested parties should click here.

    About Tasktop

    Over one million users employ Tasktop’s Value Stream Integration technology to transform software development and delivery. Tasktop not only unifies the software development and delivery team, but also provides unprecedented visibility into the business critical processes of software delivery. Tasktop customers are the global leaders in financial services, insurance, government and manufacturing, and include 43 of the Fortune 100, 11 of the top banks in the world, six of the top six health plans and four of the top ten US insurance companies. Partners, including CA, Micro Focus and IBM, rely on our independent, vendor-neutral role to connect their customers’ software delivery disciplines via OEM distributions of our products. For more information about Tasktop, please visit: http://tasktop.com.

  • New Redgate partner, Nexus Technology, demonstrates the growing importance of database DevOps in the banking sector

    Cambridge UK, Tuesday, 7 August 2018 – In its ongoing quest to offer clients expert on-the-ground advice as well as software to introduce DevOps to database development, Redgate Software has added Channel Islands based Nexus Technology to its worldwide partner roster.

    Over the last two years, Redgate has expanded and extended its portfolio of database development software to enable clients to include the database in their DevOps processes. By integrating with and plugging into the software already in use for applications, the faster development and release of features that DevOps promises can be delivered upon without the database being a bottleneck.

    At the same time, IT consultancy Nexus has been building a reputation in the Channel Islands for its skills in delivering technology solutions, from software development to project management, particularly in the banking and financial sectors. The consultancy’s expertise in advising customers how to drive productivity and revenue by using insights from data is a notable strength.

    As Dave Edge, Nexus Co-Founder and CTO comments: “Every company has data, but not all of them know what to do with it and they may be ticking along, unaware of how data can take their business up a gear. That’s why the new partnership is good news. It matches our skills in data analytics, forecasting and predicting, with Redgate’s software solutions that make database development faster while keeping data safe.”

    New legislation like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as increasing customer concerns about data breaches, also mean banks and other financial institutions are seeking ways to protect customer data while still being able to improve the services they offer.

    Conversely, perhaps, introducing DevOps to the development of the database as well as applications helps companies to stay compliant with data privacy legislation while streamlining the process. Laborious tasks are automated in a reliable, repeatable manner to remove human error from the equation, and an audit trail of what changes were made, who made them, and when they were deployed is provided that can be used to demonstrate compliance.

    Redgate’s software is already used by 91% of companies in the Fortune 100, and the new partnership with Nexus now means companies in the Channel Islands are in the ideal position to explore how too they can take advantage of database DevOps.

    As Cass Lloyd, Partner Manager for Redgate, concludes: “Once businesses start to demand more from their data, the way their databases are maintained and protected also becomes more critical. This often means adapting the development process as well as introducing new software. Our growing list of partners around the world demonstrates the value they can offer to companies who want to use our software to improve their database development, and Nexus is a welcome addition.”

     

  • Instana Personalizes the APM Experience With New Application Perspectives Capabilities

    Flexible, Continuous, and Ad-hoc, Application Perspectives Personalizes Monitoring Viewpoints Tailored to Specific Needs of Any Devops Stakeholder.

     

    SAN MATEO, CALIF., AND SOLINGEN, GERMANY – AUGUST 07, 2018 – Instana, a leading provider of application monitoring for containerized microservice applications, today announced a set of customization features across their solution, creating the first Personalized APM experience for users. The new capabilities, called Application Perspectives, go beyond traditional custom dashboarding to deliver the first automated personal guided APM experience.

    “APM tools historically have been designed for experts and only used by a few highly skilled engineers on the ops team. Instana’s Application Perspectives isn’t just a new function or feature. It’s a set of capabilities across the Instana solution that allow any Ops user to create tailored personal views of services, service maps and trace analytics,” said Mirko Novakovic, Instana co-founder and CEO. “Instana’s personalized APM experience makes performance data available to the whole devops organization, with each team getting the exact visualization and information they need to optimize the microservices they’re responsible for.”

    Instana’s new Application Perspectives includes the ability to define ad-hoc groupings of services for any reason. Any newly created Application Perspective is immediately available to every member of the team. Actionable performance information is then presented automatically in a unique view for each Application Perspective upon definition. Users can set custom filters as needed, pre-tag their respective services, or use pre-set dashboards for optimizing performance and quality. Personalized views then automatically stay aligned to the changing tech stack so teams never have to rebuild their dashboards.

    “Embracing agile methodologies and the microservice architecture has led us to create smaller development teams aligned to specific services, managing the full life cycle of the service include operations and optimization,” said David Merryweather, VP of Infrastructure and Site Reliability at Macmillan Learning. “With Instana’s new Application Perspectives, every team member has seamless access to the specific information and visualizations they need to meet their responsibilities. In fact, Instana has now delivered an application monitoring tool that our whole organization can use.”

    Application Perspectives is available today as part of Instana’s automatic APM solution for dynamic applications. Learn more at http://www.instana.com.

    About Instana:
    As the leading provider of Application Performance Management solutions for containerized microservice applications, Instana applies automation and artificial intelligence to deliver the visibility needed to effectively manage the performance of today’s dynamic applications across the DevOps lifecycle. Founded by Application Monitoring veterans, Instana provides true AI-powered APM to help organizations deliver high performance applications today and in the future. Visit us at https://instana.com to learn more.

  • CollabNet VersionOne Announces New Release of its VS Solution, an Innovative Offering that Enables Organizations to Achieve Enterprise Value Stream Management

    SAN DIEGO – Agile 2018, August 6, 2018 – CollabNet VersionOne (www.collabnet.com), a global leader in enterprise value stream management, ALM, agile management, Git version control and DevOps, announces the latest release of its VS solution. This release enables organizations to establish and practice Value Stream Management (VSM) at the enterprise level for software development and delivery.

    This new release of VS makes enterprise VSM feasible and achievable by overcoming industry barriers to establishing a value stream model. Existing barriers of current tools can be summed up as a struggle and incapacity to scale agile and extend DevOps across the enterprise. These barriers and limits are caused by disconnects across planning, version control and underutilization of DevOps for rapid innovation. Those major disconnects raise risk and cost. Therefore, customers want to eliminate them and advance to the next level, which is possible with Enterprise Value Stream Management.

    VS removes those barriers and struggles. Customers can scale agile, apply DevOps orchestration and business intelligence and take advantage of Git across the enterprise to align software development and delivery processes with business goals.

    “This release is significant because organizations want to establish VSM to be competitive in the next wave of digital transformation that will demand more speed, quality, efficiency and market alignment,” said Flint Brenton, CEO at CollabNet VersionOne, “But they lack a solution for effective VSM at the enterprise scale. We solve that.”

    “There’s no other way to benefit from enterprise VSM than by tapping into the full promise of scaling agile and DevOps orchestration. VS enables that due to its unique way of bringing together planning, Git version control and DevOps to close the gaps and remove barriers to smooth value streams that span the enterprise,” said Brenton.

    Well known subject-matter expert and technologist Eric Robertson, who leads product marketing management at the company explains further, “Our innovation in VS is ahead of the pack. It lets organizations establish enterprise VSM that is anchored by transparent software development and delivery that is aligned with the broader operations of the business. Our VS solution frees businesses to innovate with confidence, which is vital for digital transformation.”

    VS Availability and Solution 

    VS is generally available.  Deep innovation lies in VS features that let users scale agile and connect planning, Git version control and DevOps into transformative value streams, allowing the business to measure the throughput of software value to the business.

    This release of the VS solution is comprised of VersionOne and its new features for scaling agile, TeamForge SCM for Git enterprise version control and Continuum for DevOps orchestration and rapid innovation.  Together, with other capabilities such as tool-chain integration, analytics and governance, development teams gain flexibility and visibility into planning and managing their software development and delivery processes across the lifecycle. The company’s expertise in training and consulting combined with the technology enables the VS solution to deliver enterprise VSM.

    “I’m proud of this solution and honored to announce it on this anniversary of CollabNet and VersionOne becoming one organization and advancing our industry,” added Brenton. “I invite all leaders who want to learn more to meet us and share your Agile, DevOps and enterprise VSM challenges and objectives.”

    To learn more about VS, please visit: https://www.collab.net/products/vs.

    CollabNet VersionOne is exhibiting this week at the Agile 2018 conference at the Marriot Marquis San Diego. For a demonstration of VS, please visit booth #101. For more information about the conference, please visit: https://www.agilealliance.org/agile2018/.

    Share This: New solutions for Enterprise #ValueStream Management introduced by @CollabNetV1 at #Agile2018! VS breaks down barriers between tools and enables scaling agile and #DevOps orchestration.

    About CollabNet VersionOne

    CollabNet VersionOne is the Enterprise Value Stream Management leader that accelerates high value software development and delivery, while improving quality and reducing risk. Our offerings provide global enterprise and government market leaders a cohesive solution, spanning idea through delivery, that enable them to capture, create, deliver and measure the flow of business value throughout their application development lifecycles.

    www.collab.net

    CollabNet VersionOne is a Vector Capital Company.

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  • Ada Launches on the Genesys AppFoundry

    Ada’s automated chatbot combines with Genesys Customer Experience Platform to enable enterprises to provide incredible 24/7 customer service

    Toronto, Ontario, Canada – <August 2, 2018> – Today, Ada announced its leading customer service chabot is now available on the Genesys® AppFoundry, a dedicated customer experience marketplace. Genesys is the global leader in omnichannel customer experience and contact center solutions that powers 25 billion of the world’s best customer experiences each year. The AppFoundry allows Genesys customers from all market segments to discover and rapidly deploy a broad range of solutions that make it easier to interact with consumers, engage employees and optimize their workforce.

    With Ada, Genesys customers can automate customer service from one easy-to-use platform deployed from a company’s website with a single line of code. By offloading phone calls, live chats and emails, Ada has helped enterprise companies – from telecom to financial institutions– reduce costs, increase productivity, and improve the overall customer experience. “We’ve made powerful machine learning easy to deploy in a solution that saves time for both our clients and their customers,” said Mike Murchison, CEO of Ada. “We’re excited to be partnering with Genesys, who like Ada, is redefining what it means to provide meaningful customer service for the modern day consumer.”

    Ada’s chatbot combines with the Genesys Customer Experience Platform to deliver true Blended AITM. By reducing the number of requests that escalate to assisted service, Ada empowers agents to focus on the more complex inquiries that deepen the customer-brand relationship. When a live agent is required, users are seamlessly escalated via Genesys Chat or Genesys Web Callback. With full multilingual capabilities, Ada’s chatbot is also now available with Genesys PureEngageTM, an omnichannel customer engagement suite for global businesses to deliver competitively superior experiences – providing real-time contextual journeys, world-class orchestrated routing, and digital transformation at any scale.

    To learn more about the specific features and benefits of the Ada chatbot for Genesys, visit the Ada’s profile on the AppFoundry.

    About Ada
    Ada builds a leading AI-powered platform that automates millions of customer conversations per month for enterprise businesses around the world. Using the power of machine learning, Ada enables 24/7 multilingual customer service that saves time, reduces cost and improves the customer experience. Learn more at Ada.Support.

    Contact:
    Leigh LePage
    leigh.lepage@ada.support

  • Robert Reeves 2018 DevOps Predictions – Mid-year Check-in

    Last December, I made some predictions for 2018. Now that we’re at the halfway point, let’s check in and see how those predictions are faring. After all, a key tenant of DevOps is measuring performance and seeking ways to improve it. With that in mind, I’ll evaluate what data we’ll need to either prove or disprove the predictions.

    Artificial Intelligence is the next big thing in DevOps

    More and more DevOps tool vendors are starting to look closely at artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning. Harness has functionality to determine if application performance has regressed after a new deployment. Interestingly, this is baked in and does not require the user to make any special configurations to access functionality. What this means is that if you deploy an application, Harness will know if the new version is less performant than the previous. Of course, this only watches the response time of the application, so other areas like database and network performance can affect it. However, it’s a good sign that DevOps tool vendors are starting to incorporate machine learning into their products.

    Platform as a service will deliver on cloud promises

    Anecdotally, Datical is seeing more and more Pivotal Cloud Foundry implementations that are in production and enabling new functionality in record time. However, it turns out that there are more challenges to overcome, specifically around the database. As Scott Yara from Pivotalstated, “At the end of the day, if we’ve moved the applications onto [Pivotal] Cloud Foundry, but we still haven’t touched the database system, and those database systems are still managed the same way that they’ve been over the last 20 years, then we really haven’t solved the whole problem.” It’s outstanding that PaaS providers are seeking to address all areas of the application to offer a complete solution to customers! The cloud providers are not really focused on this, and it will be up to the PaaS vendors to provide the level of abstraction developers need to focus on their applications and not cloud plumbing.

    RDBMS will continue to see growth and NoSQL will not replace it

    Since revenue numbers are not released until the end of the year, I’m going to claim this is a push. We just don’t have enough data to make a call on how correct the prediction was.

    The race for second place in cloud services will be fun

    This one has been spot-on. If you like tech drama, you’ll love watching the cloud providers’ war of words. Specifically, things have become entertaining with software vendors and cloud providers teaming up against Amazon’s bid for a Pentagon contract. In fact, it has made for some very interesting partnerships such as a coalition of Oracle, Microsoft and IBM.

    Just as entertaining was the Google Cloud Next conference with the announcement of Google Kubernetes Engine On-Premise. Companies can now have the GKE in their data center. The hope from Google is that when companies have that completed, it will be a no-brainer in moving to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). I certainly expect more cloud providers to offer the ability to run the same services in both on-prem and cloud to smooth the transition to the cloud. This is a very different approach than “lift and shift,” and I expect that sort of orthogonal thinking from providers who are not in the top two.

    Security will shift-left and development will claim it was all their idea

    Well, this was certainly a cheeky prediction. But, if you do a Google search on “DevSecOps <random security company>”, you’ll see blog posts as recent as last month on topics like “5 Tips for Getting the Most Out of DevSecOps.” Also, security software companies are now urging their customers to adopt DevSecOps quickly after adopting DevOps. And that’s a great idea. After all, the Equifax breach would not have happened if they had adopted DevOps and were able to patch their version of Apache Struts quickly.

    Fewer and fewer companies will forget the database with DevOps

    With software company executives from Pivotal, XebiaLabs and Delphix urging their customers to bring the database to the DevOps party, this prediction appears to be proving correct.

    The Astros will repeat as World Champions

    The Astros lead the AL West and are second to the Red Sox in the AL. So, looks like they are on track to the get to the postseason. Of course, their secret has been data analytics and convincing their staff to use the findings. Here’s a great article about the process.

    My man, Chris Devenski, is having a good year, but not the All Star year he was having last year. So, unless he starts getting a save every game from now until the end of the year, a Cy Young award is not in the cards for this year.