devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • Datadobi Announces Support for File Data Protection on Microsoft Azure Blob Storage

    Microsoft Azure customers worldwide now have support from DobiProtect to keep storage costs to a minimum, recover data quickly, and protect business-critical unstructured data assets

    Leuven, Belgium – March 16, 2021 – Datadobi, a global leader in unstructured data management software, today announced it has added support for Azure Blob storage in DobiProtect 5.11, enabling customers to protect their data from any NAS or cloud filesystem to Microsoft’s cloud-based object storage solution. As unstructured data continues to grow rapidly, Datadobi allows enterprises to protect against cyberthreats, ransomware, accidental deletions, and software vulnerabilities with a simple, quick, and cost-effective solution.

    Azure Blob storage is a massively scalable and secure object storage service for data lakes, archives, cloud-native workloads, analytics, and machine learning. Using Datadobi, organizations can now maintain protection copies of their file data in Azure Blob Storage.

    Carl D’Halluin, CTO, of Datadobi commented, “We’re seeing a massive shift of customers moving to and protecting data in the cloud and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage is clearly a leading and trusted cloud solution. With the addition of Datadobi solutions, Azure customers can host and protect their unstructured data in the cloud, optimizing storage investment and with one hundred percent data accuracy and integrity.”

    “We’re pleased to welcome Datadobi to the growing Microsoft Azure ecosystem,” said Vamshi Kommineni, group product manager, Azure Storage. “Azure Blob Storage provides a powerful, secure, and cost-effective solution for unstructured data. This addition will address growing demand from our customers for large scale migrations of unstructured data to public cloud along with providing the protection needed in an age of widespread threats and vulnerabilities.”

    Learn more about migrating file data to Azure with DobiMigrate here. And learn more about protecting file data in Azure with DobiProtect here.

    About Datadobi

    Datadobi, a global leader in data management and storage software solutions, brings order to unstructured storage environments so that the enterprise can realize the value of their expanding universe of data. Their software allows customers to migrate and protect data while discovering insights and putting them to work for their business. Datadobi takes the pain and risk out of the data storage process and does it exponentially faster than other solutions at the best economic cost point. Founded in 2010, Datadobi is a privately held company headquartered in Leuven, Belgium, with subsidiaries in New York, Melbourne, Dusseldorf, and London.

    For more information, visit www.datadobi.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

  • Cyware Announces $30M Series B Funding Led by Advent International and Ten Eleven Ventures

    Investment to Support Accelerated Adoption of Virtual Cyber Fusion Platform and Continued Growth to Meet Significant Market Demand

    NEW YORK – March 16, 2021 – Cyware, the industry’s only Virtual Cyber Fusion platform provider, today announced that it raised $30 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Advent International through Advent Tech, as well as Ten Eleven Ventures, with participation from previous investors, including the Prelude Fund (the venture practice at Mercato Partners), Emerald Development Managers, Great Road Holdings and Zscaler. The new investment brings Cyware’s total funding raised to date to $43 million.

    The Series B financing comes amidst significant momentum for the company. In 2020, Cyware achieved over 120 percent year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenue, marking its third straight year with triple-digit growth. The company will use the funds to double down on product innovation, increase hiring across all departments and expand its global sales and channel programs.

    Cyware’s Virtual Cyber Fusion platform combines technical and strategic threat intelligence and next-generation security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) to deliver the visibility security operations teams need to work collaboratively and better protect their organizations from advanced attacks. Its unified platform brings together historically siloed security efforts to deliver a collaborative threat response and increases analyst productivity through intelligent threat scoring, empowering rapid response to high-priority threat alerts.

    “In our increasingly connected environment, companies of all sizes are demanding new and innovative cybersecurity solutions,” said Eric Noeth, a Principal on Advent’s technology team in Palo Alto. “Cyware’s early traction among leading enterprises and major ISACs reflects its ability to bring together all key security functions to seamlessly anticipate, contextualize and remediate threats. We look forward to drawing on our experience in this sector to help the talented Cyware team make its Virtual Cyber Fusion platform the gold standard technology for enterprises around the world.”

    The company’s growing customer base includes several major Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs). Cyware’s platform empowers them to share threat intelligence between their members and enables cross-sector information sharing through automated, ISAC-to-ISAC level alert sharing. ISAC members feature leading cybersecurity practitioners who hold positions at large enterprise organizations across every industry globally. Cyware is also bringing several National CERTs, security alliances and collaboration groups together to build a true global “Network of Threat Sharing Networks,” enabling real-time Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), malware and vulnerability alert sharing between members.

    “By providing our security analysts with a single source of truth for threat intelligence and response actions, Cyware has been a true business enabler and incredible addition to our security stack,” said Anthony Belfiore, Chief Security Officer, Aon, and a Board member at Cyware. “Cyware’s ability to automate threat intelligence has allowed us to scale and bolster our security defenses, allowing our analysts to execute higher level tasks and remain laser focused on high-priority threats to our environment.”

    “Over the past decade, security operations teams have had difficulty with trying to sift through copious amounts of threat data and lacked the humans’ role as part of their security orchestration strategies,” said Anuj Goel, Ph.D., Co-founder and CEO of Cyware. “Our goal with our Virtual Cyber Fusion platform is to help our customers unite their security teams to efficiently respond to high-priority threats by connecting the dots in their environments, and the momentum we’re experiencing is proof that we are executing on that mission. This Series B financing will help us continue to overdeliver for customers, expand our team, improve our platform and truly revolutionize how security operations and threat intelligence teams work together.”

    To learn more about how Cyware’s Virtual Cyber Fusion Center platform improves security operations by combining threat intelligence and next-generation SOAR, visit: www.cyware.com.

    About Cyware

    Cyware helps enterprise cybersecurity teams build platform-agnostic virtual cyber fusion centers. Cyware is transforming security operations by delivering the cybersecurity industry’s only Virtual Cyber Fusion Center Platform with next-generation SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) technology. As a result, organizations can increase speed and accuracy while reducing costs and analyst burnout. Cyware’s Virtual Cyber Fusion solutions make secure collaboration, information sharing, and enhanced threat visibility a reality for enterprises, sharing communities (ISAC/ISAO), MSSPs, and government agencies of all sizes and needs. www.cyware.com

    About Advent International

    Advent International is one of the largest and most experienced global private equity investors. The firm has invested in over 350 private equity transactions in 41 countries, and as of September 30, 2020, had $66.2 billion in assets under management. With 15 offices in 12 countries, Advent has established a globally integrated team of over 200 investment professionals across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The firm focuses on investments in five core sectors, including business and financial services; health care; industrial; retail, consumer and leisure; and technology. Advent has a long history of growth investments dating back to its founding in 1984, and in 2019 launched Advent Tech, a dedicated technology-focused fund focused on growth investments and buyouts of leading technology companies globally. After 35 years dedicated to international investing, Advent remains committed to partnering with management teams to deliver sustained revenue and earnings growth for its portfolio companies.

    For more information, visit:

    Website: www.adventinternational.com

    LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/advent-international

    About Ten Eleven Ventures

    Ten Eleven Ventures is the original venture capital firm focused solely on investing in digital security. The firm invests globally and at all stages, from seed to growth (the latter via its Joint Investment Alliance with KKR). Since its founding in Silicon Valley in 2015, Ten Eleven Ventures has raised nearly $US 500 million and invested in 27 leading cybersecurity companies including Twistlock, Verodin, Cylance, KnowBe4, Darktrace, and Ping Identity. For more information, please visit www.1011vc.com or follow us on Twitter @1011vc.

     

  • DeepSee.ai Announces $22.6M Series A Funding to Enable Enterprises to Turn Data Into Assets for “Months to Minutes” Efficiencies

    Investment fuels company’s leadership as the most advanced AI-powered Knowledge Process Automation platform

    “Executives need business outcomes, not science projects,” says CEO Shillingford

    March 15, 2021 (Salt Lake City) – DeepSee.ai, the leader in AI-powered Knowledge Process Automation, today announced it has closed $22.6 million in Series A funding led by ForgePoint Capital, with participation from previous investors AllegisCyber Capital and Signal Peak Ventures. DeepSee’s total funding to date is now $30.7 million. The series A funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand the platform beyond the capital markets and insurance verticals. Sean Cunningham, Managing Director of ForgePoint Capital will join the DeepSee Board of Directors.

    The DeepSee Knowledge Process Automation (KPA) Platform represents a new category of people-first automation solutions in the wake of frustration with the widespread failure of AI-powered productivity projects to deliver value.

    The funding validates the strength of the company’s successful rollout of its KPA Platform, and comes as the company’s proprietary technology is now registering “months to minutes” reductions in critical operational processes relevant to capital markets and insurance verticals.

    Steve Shillingford, CEO of DeepSee.ai, said: “Executives are telling me they need business outcomes and not science projects. And today, the burgeoning frustration with most AI-centric deployments in large-scale enterprises is they look great in theory but largely fail in production. We think that’s because right now the current ‘AI approach’ lacks a holistic business context relevance. It’s unthinking, rigid, and without the contextual input of subject-matter experts on the ground. We founded DeepSee to bridge the gap between powerful technology and line-of-business, with adaptable solutions that empower our customers to operationalize AI-powered automation – delivering faster, better, and cheaper results for our users.”

    Sean Cunningham, Managing Director of ForgePoint Capital, said: “ForgePoint Capital is honored to work with this team of industry experts who have proven track records achieving scale and attractive exit outcomes. The strong feedback from customers and our ForgePoint industry experts has made it clear the DeepSee Team has taken automation to the next level with KPA. Using KPA, line-of-business executives can bridge data science and enterprise outcomes, operationalize AI/ML-powered automation at scale, and use predictive insights in real time to grow revenue, reduce cost, and mitigate risk. As a leading cybersecurity investor, ForgePoint sees the daily security challenges around insider threat, data visibility, and compliance. This investment in DeepSee accelerates the ability to reduce risk with business automation and delivers much-needed AI transparency required by customers for implementation.”

    DeepSee.ai brings together a seasoned leadership team and multiple-time category creators from Oracle, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Solera Networks, Citibank, Novell, and the National Football League.

    The DeepSee suite of information-to-insight applications brings an easy-to-use, cloud-agnostic approach to deliver measurable operational improvements and efficiencies. DeepSee solutions are designed to integrate and leverage its customers’ existing systems and tools, and to work across an array of enterprise activities, from complex risk analysis to critical compliance steps in post-trade reconciliations.

    According to Gartner, “The days of singular AI techniques are coming to an end. Software and service providers that cannot provide solutions combining multiple AI techniques through composite AI approaches will quickly find themselves at a disadvantage compared with those that can. The introduction of composite AI techniques, even within existing products, will have a profound impact on their capabilities.” Recently, DeepSee was recognized in Gartner’s October 2020 “Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar: Artificial Intelligence” report as a sample provider in the Composite AI category.

    Mahendra Ramsinghani, Managing Director of Secure Octane Investments, noted enterprise software strategist, and author of The Business of Venture Capital, said: “DeepSee.ai is building operational toolsets on top of powerful compute platforms, all delivered seamlessly via cloud-scale architectures to line of business workers. Since the disruptions of 2020, the pace of change in the world has never been faster and major sectors like capital markets and insurance are witnessing a nightmarish ‘triple witching’ of margin compression, increased competition, and suffocating regulatory pressure.”

     

    Shillingford added: “What started out as a promise to increase business efficiencies, has largely turned into a failure to launch innovative solutions for today’s business leaders. DeepSee’s Knowledge Process Automation platform is providing businesses with the targeted AI-powered insights to exceed current implementation expectations. With KPA, people are in control, projects are operational, and our customers are reaping the benefits.”

     

    To learn more about the DeepSee KPA Platform, visit www.deepsee.ai.

     

    ABOUT DEEPSEE.AI

    DeepSee.ai represents a new category of people-first automation solutions in the wake of frustration with the widespread failure of AI-powered productivity projects to deliver value. We’ve created the world’s first Knowledge Process Automation (KPA) platform to mine unstructured data, operationalize AI-powered insights, and automate results into real-time action for the enterprise. Taking AI-productivity from the lab and into production, the KPA suite is especially useful in highly regulated industries such as the capital markets and insurance verticals, with a business solution flow architecture designed to automate line-of-business problems leveraging the very latest innovations in semantic modeling and natural language processing, all while solving the deployment, scalability, and availability issues that plague most robotic AI initiatives. In a world where enterprises are swimming in data, but very little insight, DeepSee.ai is putting the power of AI and the advantages of knowledge in the hands of the humans.

  • Mabl Partners with VeriServe to Expand Distribution in Japan

    Pioneer in software verification offers quality testing expertise to help meet growing demand for mabl’s intelligent test automation software

     

    BOSTON – March 15, 2021 – Mabl, the leading intelligent test automation company for quality engineering, today announced VeriServe Corporation, a global leader in software verification and validation, is an official reseller of mabl in Japan. This new commercial partnership unites two organizations focused on helping software teams ensure that software meets high quality and reliability standards.

    “We are thrilled to be working with VeriServe, one of Japan’s premier software testing and QA service,” says mabl co-founder Izzy Azeri. “VeriServe’s expertise and dedication to software verification and validation complements mabl’s intelligent test automation capabilities perfectly, and we’re excited to include them as our newest reseller serving the rapidly growing needs of quality-centric brands in Japan.”

    Adoption of mabl’s AI enabled low-code test automation software has grown rapidly in the past year. In 2020, the company increased its Japanese customer base by 425% and revenue by nearly 500% while expanding its community in Japan to over 650 members. The company also recently welcomed Presidio Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Sumitomo Corporation, as a strategic investor.

    “Mabl is one of the most advanced and easy-to-use test automation tools I’ve ever seen,” says Hayato Yabusaki, Test Engineer at VeriServe.

    Yoshiki Ito, Test Automation Evangelist at VeriServe said “When I used mabl I could easily see how it helps test engineers be more productive and creative. We are excited to partner with mabl to help our customers improve the quality of their applications and improve team efficiency.”

    Visit https://www.mabl.com [https://www.mabl.com/japan] to learn more about mabl’s intelligent test automation for web, mobile, and API or start your free trial today.

    About mabl

    Mabl is the intelligent test automation company that empowers high-velocity software development teams to integrate automated end-to-end testing into the entire development lifecycle. Mabl users benefit from a unified platform for easily creating, executing, and maintaining reliable tests that result in faster delivery of high quality applications. That’s why customer-centric brands like LOB – a Rakuten Group Company, note, Riot Games, jetBlue and many other enterprises rely on mabl for testing their business critical apps.

    h ttps://www.mabl.com.

    About VeriServe

    VeriServe is a global leader in software verification and validation. As a software verification pioneer, they have served more than 1,000 companies and supported the development of everything from smartphones and digital cameras to vehicles, aircraft and enterprise systems. With more than 35 years at the forefront of software quality, VeriServe continues to deliver unparalleled service to cutting-edge organizations in manufacturing, healthcare, aerospace and more. https://www.veriserve.co.jp/en/

  • Groove Adds Real-Time Opportunity and Pipeline Management to its Suite of Revenue Intelligence Capabilities

    Revenue intelligence has emerged as one of the hottest new categories in sales tech, and its importance has skyrocketed in a digital-first, remote-selling environment.

    According to a recent blog post by Forrester Research, “Revenue intelligence solutions capture human engagement activity between buyers and sellers and automatically upload that data to CRM platforms.”

    In the same post, Forrester predicts that the sales technology landscape will continue to consolidate in 2021, stating that “this notion of the sales engagement platform as a cockpit for sellers is likely to continue to drive further integrations between other sales tech categories and these platforms as the advantages of bringing everything to the seller where they sell (the original vision for CRM technology) become more widely recognized.”

    Turns out they were right.

    Today, Groove strengthened its position in Revenue Intelligence with real-time opportunity and pipeline management capabilities, building on the inherent strengths of our platform’s Salesforce-native architecture.

    Groove has always had the most advanced activity capture in the industry, ensuring that sales leaders can trust their Salesforce data and keep a finger on the pulse of their business at all times. However activity capture is only part of the revenue picture.

    All too often, sales teams have an incomplete picture of deals in play and overall pipeline health. Forrester Consulting found that nearly two-thirds of B2B decision-makers firms struggle with CRM data that is stale, distorted, or limited in nature, in a July 2020 study.

    “We had major issues with getting our sales teams to document what they were doing in Gmail, and this is where Groove really shines,” said Bart Johnson, Director of User Engagement & Training at Aquent. “Groove isn’t just a huge timer saver for our reps, it also gives them ‘cross-vision’ into the different orgs and groups selling into account.”

    Because Groove is native to Salesforce, it pulls real-time account and opportunity data into a collaborative workspace where team members can run live pipeline reviews and instantly push updates back to Salesforce. With this latest release, Groove provides revenue teams with an easy-to-use alternative to spreadsheet collaboration that can lead to deals falling through the cracks and the proliferation of shadow CRM.

    “From incomplete sales activity data to out-of-date information stored in shadow CRMs, there are many challenges that prevent sales organizations from trusting their pipeline and conducting comprehensive reviews,” said Chris. “Today’s release solves a critical usability challenge that Salesforce users have faced since the platform’s inception, in a way that establishes transparency and trust between the rep and the seller.”

    You can learn more about Groove’s suite of revenue intelligence capabilities in the platform section of our website.

     

  • Rocket Software Releases MultiValue Integration Server Enhancements, Announces Free Availability for Maintenance Partners and Customers

    MVIS 1.3 opens the API economy and the cloud, giving customers free access to powerful new functionality required by development teams for creating apps that are available 24x7x365

    WALTHAM, Mass. – March 11, 2021

    News Summary

    • Rocket® MultiValue Integration Server (MVIS) 1.3 empowers developer teams to leverage modern languages and frameworks to access MultiValue data and business logic, allowing enterprises to join and thrive in the API economy and the cloud 
    • Rocket MVIS 1.3 enables teams to modernize and innovate their environments without replatforming
    • Rocket MVIS 1.3 comes loaded with new, cloud-ready features with 24x7x365 connectivity that deliver an optimized experience while minimizing the total cost of ownership (TCO)
    • Rocket MVIS 1.3 is now free-of-charge to Rocket UniVerse and UniData® customers on maintenance

    Full Story

    Rocket Software, a global technology leader that develops enterprise modernization and optimization solutions for Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies, today released version 1.3 of the new Rocket MultiValue Integration Server (MVIS) and announced that MVIS is now available at no cost to maintenance partners and customers on the Rocket UniVerse and UniData® components of the MultiValue application platform.

    Rocket® MVIS 1.3 empowers teams to leverage modern languages and frameworks to access MultiValue data and business logic, allowing enterprises to join and thrive in the API economy and the cloud. With this release, customers on the latest versions of UniVerse and UniData now gain access free of charge to powerful new functionality required by development teams with a low-code/no-code approach that is cloud-ready and provides users with round-the-clock connectivity.

    “Across every industry and geography, Rocket customers power the global economy,” said P. Gary Gregory, President, Database & Connectivity Business Unit, Rocket Software. “With MVIS 1.3, our customers can build on their investment and augment their environments with the latest technology, which can now live side-by-side with the existing MV application.”

    Rocket MVIS can help enterprises extend business opportunities, attract and retain younger developers, and get products to market faster while minimizing Total Cost of Ownership with flexible and efficient deployment options.

    By empowering developers to quickly and easily create RESTful APIs, MVIS is the path forward for enterprises powered by Rocket MultiValue to continue creating legendary outcomes. The latest release offers new features for modernizing the development and deployment of existing MV applications as well as developing new ones.

    Additional features of the new MVIS 1.3 include:

    • New licensing and pricing – free to existing customers using Rocket UniVerse and UniData on maintenance programs
    • Cloud-ready low-code/no-code approach
    • Support for vanity URLs for segmenting and managing access to application and data to meet business requirements
    • Auto Swagger definitions for easily understandable API explanations
    • Support of OAuth to allow APIs to integrate with third-party authentication providers and authorization servers such as Auth0 and Okta, ensuring seamless integration with enterprise application security configurations
    • Decreased TCO with flexible and efficient deployment options

    “The Rocket suite of tools has answered all my needs,” said Geoff Bishop, Engagement Manager, Eurotunnel Le Shuttle. “Python is meeting the requirements of a maturing workforce, and we’re doing quite a lot of modernization with this and MVIS as a combined technology stack. The MV platform continues to evolve to meet our business challenges and technical needs, making it the logical choice to modernize.”

     

    About Rocket Software

    Rocket Software empowers organizations to create legendary impact in the world through innovation in legacy technologies. With deep expertise in IBM Z, IBM Power, and database and connectivity solutions, Rocket provides solutions that power tens of thousands of global businesses, solving real problems and making real-world impact. Rocket is a privately held U.S. corporation headquartered in the Boston area with centers of excellence strategically located throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

     

  • Vertica in Eon Mode Now Available for Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage to Deliver High-Performance Analytics in On-Premises Environments

    Combined Offering Provides More Choice to Leverage Cloud Innovation for Predictive Analytics

     

    Santa Clara, CA – March 10, 2021 – Vertica and Dell EMC today announced the general availability of Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), delivering data-driven organizations more freedom to leverage cloud innovation for analytics. This combined predictive analytics offering gives data-driven organizations more freedom to leverage cloud innovation for analytics wherever their data resides, supporting hybrid deployments and on-premises data center use cases. By “right sizing” the compute resources for analytical queries and storage resources for data, data engineering teams can more cost-effectively and confidently manage variable workloads.

    Most companies are embracing a multi-cloud and hybrid approach to infrastructure, and many workloads will remain on-premises. Modern analytics architectures must ensure that operational efficiency and workload flexibility is not limited to only data that resides in the public clouds. Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC ECS delivers the advantages of separating compute from storage to enterprise data centers as a highly scalable, highly performant solution for the most demanding analytic workloads.

    “Our customers trust us to provide the greatest freedom in how they consume the highest performance analytics – flexibility for the broadest deployment options, whether it’s deploying Vertica on any major public cloud or on-premises with more leading object storage options,” said Colin Mahony, senior vice president and general manager of Vertica. “With Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC ECS, organizations can choose our cloud-optimized architecture to manage variable workloads in hybrid or on-premises environments with Dell EMC’s market-leading software-defined cloud object storage platform.”

    Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC ECS provides organizations with operational simplicity and workload isolation to meet ever-stringent SLAs and business objectives. Dell EMC ECS provides customers with the flexibility to deploy object storage as an appliance-based solution or in a software-defined model to fit the performance and financial requirements of organizations. Together, Vertica in Eon Mode and Dell EMC ECS give companies a consistent platform for analytics across all of their environments, whether their data resides in the cloud or on-premises, or in a hybrid architecture.

    “Building our partnership between Vertica and ECS enables our joint analytics customers to deliver a flexible and efficient architecture by separating compute and storage,” said John Shirley, Vice President of Unstructured Storage Product Management at Dell.

    Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC ECS provides organizations from any industry with analytically intensive needs to achieve fast analytical insight from the largest volumes of data to:

    • Scale infrastructure resources independently – Storage can grow without adding expensive compute, and compute can be scaled up or down with variable or intermittent workloads.
    • Isolate workloads – Business analysts and data scientists can work independently from a single source of truth without competing for resources.
    • Simplify database options – Customers can experience improved node recovery, superior workload balancing, and more rapid compute provisioning.
    • Hibernate compute nodes – Customers can start and stop analytics more efficiently by hibernating compute nodes when they’re not needed.

    Additional Information

    For more information about Vertica, please visit www.vertica.com and www.dell.com. To learn more about Vertica on Twitter, please follow @VerticaUnified and join Vertica on LinkedIn.

    About Vertica

    The core analytical platform within the Micro Focus software portfolio, Vertica is the Unified Analytics Platform, based on a massively scalable architecture with the broadest set of analytical functions spanning event and time series, pattern matching, geospatial, and end-to-end in-database machine learning. Vertica enables many customers – from Philips to The Trade Desk to MassMutual to many others – to easily apply these powerful functions to the largest and most demanding analytical workloads, arming businesses and its customers with predictive business insights faster than any data analytical platform in the market. Vertica provides its Unified Analytics Platform across all major public clouds and on-premises data centers and integrates data in cloud object storage.

    About Dell EMC

    Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) helps organizations and individuals build their digital future and transform how they work, live, and play. The company provides customers with the industry’s broadest and most innovative technology and services portfolio for the data era.

     

  • Deque Study Shows Its Automated Testing Identifies 57 Percent of Digital Accessibility Issues, Surpassing Accepted Industry Benchmarks

    Results of Extensive Data Set Redefine Limits of Automated “Accessibility Coverage”

    HERNDON, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Deque Systems, the trusted leader in digital accessibility, today announced results of a large study which shows the total of digital accessibility issues identified through its automated technology – 57 percent – is much higher than the widely-accepted belief that automated accessibility testing only provides 20-30 percent of coverage.

    Study Synopsis: Deque’s study used anonymized data from over 2,000 audits in various industries, spanning over 13,000 pages (all first-time page assessments) covering nearly 300,000 issues. The automated testing in this data set was conducted using Deque’s axe™ suite of tools, powered by the open source axe-core rules library. Deque found that, on average, 57 percent of accessibility issues were completely covered by this automated testing.

    “When we shifted the definition of ‘accessibility coverage’ beyond the number of WCAG Success Criteria to total volume of issues, the true impact of automated testing became clear,” says Dylan Barrell, CTO, Deque Systems. “This study expands the realm of what is possible through automation, and can speed the mission of accessibility testing professionals: to ensure their digital assets are accessible to all, including people with disabilities.”

    Redefining “Automated Coverage”: Measures of automated testing coverage are often based on the percentage of WCAG Success Criteria that can be tested using automated accessibility tools. Deque’s analysis shows this method of measurement downplays the effectiveness of automated testing. Measuring the total volume of issues detected by severity and impact is a more meaningful and accurate metric.

    In practice, some types of issues occur much more frequently than others, which can result in a much higher percentage of total accessibility issues discovered using automated tools. It should be noted that the axe-core rules library places a huge emphasis on not reporting false positives or erroneous issues.

    To download the full report, visit: https://deque.com/coverage-report/.

    “It’s clear that accessibility coverage should be calculated based on the volume of real-world data of issues that occur in the wild. This allows development teams to make a much greater impact,” says Preety Kumar, CEO, Deque Systems. “Combining automated testing with Intelligent Guided Testing™, enabled through tools such as our just-announced axe DevTools Pro, empowers organizations to achieve quick wins and sustain accessibility testing over time without having to learn the ins and outs of accessibility.”

    Today’s agile development practices rely on automation to achieve maximum throughput. Managers need to plan for resources in advance, and require the ability to forecast how much work can be handled by automation. The higher the number of issues that can be caught and addressed in early stages of product development, the lower the cost. Automated tools with high coverage reduce the reliance on specialized skills and make it possible to mainstream the development of an accessible product.

    About Deque Systems

    Deque (pronounced dee-cue) is a web accessibility software and services company, and our mission is Digital Equality. We believe everyone, regardless of their ability, should have equal access to the information, services, applications, and everything else on the web.

    We work with enterprise-level businesses and organizations to ensure that their sites and mobile apps are accessible. Installed in over 250,000 browsers and with over 4,000 audit projects completed, Deque is the industry standard.

    Axe and Intelligent Guided Testing are trademarks of Deque Systems, Inc.

  • Kitewheel Introduces New “Journey as a Service” Offering to Make Customer Journey Management Simple and Accessible to all Enterprises, Regardless of Size and Maturity

    New offering from Kitewheel drives sales up by 10%, increases marketing conversions by 10x, and raises customer service performance by 10 NPS points

    March 10, 2021 – BOSTON, MA – Kitewheel, the leading solution provider for customer journey orchestration and analytics, today announced its new Journey as a Service (JaaS) offering, an expansion of its services designed for mid-market businesses looking to deploy customer journey management tools for the first time to increase revenue and drive business success. In a market first, Kitewheel is offering a simple, scalable, and affordable solution for businesses that have not previously invested in customer journey management. By providing a streamlined entry point, Kitewheel is enabling enterprises of every size to capitalize on the benefits of data-driven customer journeys. Leveraging Kitewheel’s advanced methodologies and technology, the JaaS offering helps brands guide their customers from initial point of contact to points of engagement, purchase, service and loyalty.

    Last year demonstrated the importance of the customer experience (CX) for every business. According to Gartner’s recent Market Guide for Customer Journey Analytics, customer journey mapping and automation was ranked second among brands’ CX priorities in 2020, and this trend is expected to continue as more businesses adopt customer-first strategies in 2021. Additionally, for the first nine months of 2020, Gartner inquiries on customer journeys and journey analytics rose more than 40% from 2019.

    All enterprises have room to grow when it comes to CX; in fact, only 20% of US brands earned a “good” or higher CX ranking in Forrester’s 2020 CX Index. While they are few and far in between, these more innovative, mature enterprises have set the bar when it comes to delivering quality customer experience, which has enabled them to grow market share and overtake competitors. This is because these brands have made CX a top priority across the organization, and they have the necessary resources to invest in customer journey management. Interestingly, Gartner’s research indicates that the divide between mature and immature organizations widened during the pandemic, with less mature organizations deprioritizing customer journey management and more mature organizations increasing their focus on CX technology in 2020. In order to compete, less mature organizations will need to rethink their CX strategies and start embracing new technologies.

    “Remaining competitive in 2020 requires more than siloed, touchpoint-specific actions; real-time capabilities across touchpoints is what is increasing agility and turns a clear vision on customer journeys into a competitive advantage,” said Gartner analysts David Norrie, Melissa Davis, Don Scheibenreif, Jessica Ekholm, and Varun Agarwal in the report.

    Introducing Kitewheel’s JaaS

    Kitewheel’s JaaS offering is a perfect fit for this gap in the market. By lowering the bar to entry in terms of price, deployment complexity, and effort, Kitewheel is creating an opportunity for more businesses – the other 80% – to capitalize on the benefits of its customer journey technology.  The offering is able to drive an increase in the effectiveness of businesses’ sales, marketing, and customer service programs by a factor of 10. On average, brands that work with Kitewheel garner 10% more sales, drive 10x more paid media engagements and see at least a 10-point increase in their Net Promoter Score (NPS).

    The Kitewheel JaaS offering will make journeys more accessible and tailored to the needs of mid-market organizations at different levels of CX maturity. Kitewheel has developed five different JaaS packages allowing brands to choose the level of service most appropriate for their business needs and immediately deploy one or multiple pre-designed, cross-channel journeys. The five-tier lineup spans from the “Essentials-1” offering, with just one journey, up to 1 million customers, and a suite of business rules and performance metrics, to the “Enterprise” level with unlimited journeys, users, and connections as well as system API access.

    “As journey management continues to be at the forefront of business success, we felt that all enterprises, not just the top tier, should have access to our tools at a scalable price,” said Mark Smith, president of Kitewheel. “Our industry-leading offering also comes at a time when inquiries into customer journey management and analytics have greatly increased, underscoring the importance of journey management across industries, especially as many businesses continue to weather the storm of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

    To learn more about Journey as a Service, visit www.Kitewheel.com/journey-as-a-service/.

    About Kitewheel

    Kitewheel empowers the world’s largest businesses to understand and improve the consumer experience with the leading customer journey management platform. Kitewheel’s innovative Customer Journey Hub orchestrates intelligent customer journeys by unifying decisions across disparate systems, touchpoints, and technologies and provides seamless customer experiences that drive real-time revenue as well as long-term loyalty. Kitewheel serves its global partner and client base from offices in Boston and London.

    For more information, please visit http://www.kitewheel.com and follow Kitewheel on Twitter and LinkedIn.

  • Linearb Secures $16 Million Series A Funding Led By Battery Ventures For Software Delivery Intelligence

    New investment comes after six months of hypergrowth during which more than 1,100 Agile and DevOps teams adopted the LinearB platform  

    LOS ANGELES AND TEL-AVIV, March 10, 2021 – LinearB, the team behind Software Delivery  Intelligence, today announced $16 million in Series A funding to fundamentally change the way dev teams operate. The new investment was led by Battery Ventures, and includes existing investors 83North and Ariel Maislos, and new investor TechAviv Founder Partners. The investment brings LinearB’s total funding to $21 million.

    Launched in 2019, LinearB offers a new approach to traditional software development project management and metrics. Software Delivery Intelligence helps dev teams continuously accelerate delivery by correlating development pipeline data from code, Git, projects and releases to provide visibility, context and workflow automation for every member of the team.

    Visit https://linearb.io/ to activate Software Delivery Intelligence for your dev team in less than 5 minutes.

    “Every part of the software development process is driven by data today, except the writing and creation of code—which is impeding productivity for developers,” said Dharmesh Thakker, a Battery general partner. “LinearB is helping dev teams fix bottlenecks across the entire development process so they can work better with fewer interruptions. We are excited to partner with the LinearB team as they work to improve developer productivity and workflow, as well as better align engineering and business leaders.”

    “More than 1,100 dev teams adopted LinearB in the last six months alone. So it’s clear there’s demand for Software Delivery Intelligence,” said Gil Goren, Partner at 83North. “Ori and Dan have built a committed team and a passionate community of the best start-up engineering leaders in the world. We’re partnering with LinearB to take Software Delivery Intelligence into every dev team.”

    1,500+ software development teams in total use LinearB including many hyper-growth start-ups and unicorns like Axonius, BigID, Unbabel, Appcues and Clubhouse.

    “LinearB helps us analyze, triage and fix process problems. We get a full view of our engineering lifecycle we never had before,” said Zach Ozer, VP of Engineering at Clubhouse.” It’s been transformational for our dev team.”

    Unlike traditional project management and metrics tools which are useful for executives but create more work for developers, Software Delivery Intelligence provides value to every member of the team:

    Visibility: Team-based metrics help CTOs and VPs of Engineering understand efficiency and quality, detect process bottlenecks, visualize team health, and ensure alignment between engineering work and business priorities.

    Context: Intelligent project board correlates code, Git logs, project data and releases to help dev team leads see accurate, real-time project updates, predict delivery delays, identify scope-creep and run efficient, fact-based meetings.

    Workflow: Configurable policies, alerts and commands eliminate manual tasks for developers through automation, deliver personal insights at the right time where they work and help enforce team guardrails.
    The result is happier developers with more time to build, continuous team improvement and tighter alignment to business priorities which leads to accelerated delivery. Dev teams using LinearB SDI improve their time-to-value (Cycle Time) by 48 percent on average after 90 days.

    “Metrics alone do not improve dev teams. This is the mistake first-generation engineering efficiency tools made. Software Delivery Intelligence takes visibility and turns it into insight and active improvement,” said Ori Keren, CEO of LinearB. “Helping engineering teams improve and scale is not about managing developers more strictly with top down control. It’s about empowering developers by giving them more context, less bureaucracy and more time to build.”

    A driving factor in LinearB’s rapid growth is its focus on community and facilitating new thinking. Its fast-growing Dev Interrupted online community and podcast for progressive dev leaders facilitates open discussions and shared experiences around scaling teams, building culture and using Software Delivery Intelligence. LinearB co-founder Dan Lines, DZone’s 2020 Agile Person of the Year, leads these efforts.

    Visit https://discord.com/invite/tpkmwM6c3g to join the Dev Interrupted Discord community. To listen to the podcast, visit https://linearb.io/dev-interrupted-podcast-2/

    About LinearB

    Metrics alone don’t improve dev teams. Software Delivery Intelligence (SDI) helps dev teams continuously improve by turning insight into action. Unlike top-down engineering metrics tools which become shelf-ware, LinearB is a dev-first platform and provides value to every member of the team. Development organizations using LinearB’s SDI cut their Cycle Time in half after only 90 days. The result for developers is less bureaucracy, fewer interruptions and more time to build. The result for teams is fewer process bottlenecks and accelerated delivery. Activate Software Delivery Intelligence for your dev team in 5 minutes at linearb.io.

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