devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • Stratus10 Achieves AWS DevOps Competency status

    Achievement demonstrates the San Diego-based company’s commitment to DevOps

    SAN DIEGO, Calif., November 13, 2020 – Stratus10, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Consulting Partner, announced today that it has achieved the AWS DevOps Competency status.

    AWS DevOps Competency Partners have demonstrated expertise in delivering DevOps solutions on AWS. Leveraging AWS, Stratus10 accelerates time to market and optimizes each stage of the software development lifecycle utilizing DevOps automation best practices.

    “Our expertise customizing, designing and implementing DevOps Automation solutions on AWS makes Stratus10 qualified to build and optimize Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines depending on each customer and their needs,” said Oscar Moncada, CEO and Co-Founder, Stratus10. “By achieving the AWS DevOps Competency designation, Stratus10 is recognized for its technical expertise and proven customer success.”

    Stratus10 leverages the power of AWS to provide a complete cloud services and cloud management portfolio that can give enterprise customers fast, flexible access to the cloud.

    “The Stratus10 team helped us build a fully-automated DevOps process ensuring our environments are in tip-top shape,” said Jon Huss, CTO, Gravity AI. “The team has offered valuable feedback and a plan as we continue to grow.”

    AWS Competency Partners offer a range of services and technology solutions to simplify provisioning and managing infrastructure, deploying application code, automating software release processes, monitoring application and infrastructure performance to accelerate time to market, and optimize each stage of the software development lifecycle with the practice of DevOps.

    Stratus10 is also an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for Microsoft Windows Server Partner, AWS Public Sector Partner, AWS Solution Provider, APN Immersion Day Partner, and AWS Well-Architected Review Partner.

    “In addition to Stratus10’s company achievements, our team has earned over 25 individual AWS Certifications,” said Kevin RisonChu, CTO and Co-Founder, Stratus10. “Stratus10 has been a go-to partner for companies looking to optimize their DevOps process and/or migrate to the cloud in the San Diego area for some time, which is now magnified by this incredible milestone.”

    The company offers a variety of webinars and hands-on training sessions from Certified AWS Solutions Architects. To register, please visit stratus10.com/events.

    ABOUT STRATUS10

    Stratus10 is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Consulting partner helping companies migrate their infrastructure and applications to the cloud and helping them implement best practices. Stratus10 specializes in migration services, DevOps Automation, and Application Modernization to help clients take full advantage of the latest services AWS has to offer. Founded in 2017 by Oscar Moncada and Kevin RisonChu, Stratus10 calls San Diego home. Learn more at stratus10.com.

  • Instana Announces Automated Monitoring and Tracing for Google Cloud Run, Cloud Storage and Cloud PubSub

    Solution is first to have automated support for application monitoring on multiple serverless infrastructure platforms

    Chicago, IL – November 12, 2020 – Instana, a leading provider of APM and Observability Solutions for Cloud-Native and microservice applications, today announced the ability to monitor and trace applications using Google Cloud Run, Pub/Sub and Storage technologies. Like other technologies supported by Instana, automated monitoring and tracing occur with zero configuration and no sampling. This is true for all three new pieces, including Google Cloud Run, the Container and Function as a Service platform.

    While Instana has always managed applications running on Google Cloud Platform, this is the first time that platform specific details for Google Cloud technologies is available through Instana’s automated monitoring and tracing. It’s also the first application monitoring tool to have complete automated support for application and infrastructure performance monitoring for Google Cloud Run applications.

    “As organizations push their applications to run faster and operate more efficiently, they’re taking advantage of cloud-based software infrastructure platforms such as Google Cloud Storage, PubSub and Cloud Run,” said Chris Farrell, Observability Strategist at Instana. “With the ability to automatically monitor performance and trace requests through complicated messaging and serverless systems and all the way to the back end, Instana provides the actionable information needed by Dev and Ops teams to ensure their applications running on Google Cloud Platform run at the desired service levels.”

    Another important platform Instana is debuting monitoring for in this announcement is Google Pub/Sub messaging middleware. It’s critical to Ops and Development teams to see how applications perform across messaging systems, including the performance of message queues. Having PubSub support will make an already quick troubleshooting process with Instana even faster and easier.

    The last piece of today’s announcement includes the ability to monitor and trace requests into the Google Cloud Storage platform. As microservice applications grow more complex and functionality is split among different services, storage technologies have grown in popularity, but can be overlooked by traditional monitoring tools. Having visibility all the way to back-end storage allows Instana to provide the most complete picture of applications and transactions to its users.

    Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated Application Performance Monitoring, discovers and maps all services, infrastructure and their inter-dependencies automatically. Instana ingests all observability metrics, traces each request, profiles every process and updates application dependency maps in real time to deliver the context and actionable feedback needed by Dev+Ops to optimize application performance, enable innovation and mitigate risk to help them add value and efficiency to the pipeline.

    The Google Cloud Platform technology monitoring and tracing capabilities are available today in Instana’s SaaS and self-hosted products. Learn more at https://instana.com/gcp.

    ABOUT INSTANA

    Instana is the leading provider of Observability and Application Performance Management solutions for Cloud-Native Microservice applications. The company’s Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated APM, ingests all observability metrics, traces every request and profiles all processes continuously and automatically, delivering the actionable information with full context to Dev+Ops to help them optimize their application performance and pipelines. Learn more at https://instana.com.

     

  • InfluxData advances possibilities of time series data with general availability of InfluxDB 2.0

    The leading open source software features enhanced IoT and edge capabilities & company launches new project for innovative storage engine

    SAN FRANCISCO — InfluxData, creator of the time series database InfluxDB, today announced the general availability of the next-generation open source platform for time series data, InfluxDB 2.0. Developers can now ingest, query, store and visualize time series data in a single unified platform, leverage new tools and integrations, and use familiar skills — making it faster and easier than ever to develop and deploy modern time-based applications. In addition, the company announced a new open source project to reimagine storage.

    The amount of data being produced is expected to grow exponentially from 45 zettabytes in 2019 to 175ZB in 2025, primarily from applications, networks, containers, and a projected 60 billion IoT devices — and most of this is time-stamped data (IDC, 2020). While there is a tremendous opportunity for organizations to leverage this data to enhance customer experiences, improve employee and process productivity, and to create competitive advantage, it will be challenging to store and analyze the large volumes and high-frequency streams of data. These workloads will require rapid ingestion, advanced querying, and edge processing to maintain resource and cost efficiency, and maximize the value to end users. InfluxDB 2.0 is built to handle these data challenges of the future.

    InfluxDB 2.0 is a time series platform for building IoT, analytics and monitoring applications powered by time series data. New features in InfluxDB 2.0 are designed to reduce the amount of time developers spend writing code to get started and manage existing projects, including:

    • Flux – the first functional query and programming language built specifically for time series data, which makes it possible to enrich and transform data, build forecasts, and identify anomalies and correlations

    • InfluxDB Templates – a growing gallery of single-file monitoring configurations for common use cases, like network and IoT sensor monitoring, that allow users to share their expertise and get up and monitoring in minutes

    • Edge functionality – able to aggregate and analyze time series data at the point of ingestion, where it’s most valuable to take action

    • Client libraries – support for writing and querying from popular languages, dramatically easing integration with other applications and empowering teams to use existing programming language skills

    InfluxDB 2.0 is also tightly integrated with InfluxDB Cloud, the serverless, elastically scalable, fully managed time series database platform. With a shared API, it’s easy to move data and workloads between InfluxDB 2.0 and InfluxDB Cloud, and powerful to use them together as components of a single time series platform designed to give developers the flexibility and tools to meet changing business and application requirements.

    “Developers today are looking for open source software, delivered as a managed service,” said James Governor, RedMonk co-founder. “InfluxDB 2.0 responds to this convergence with an integrated OSS, edge and cloud services play designed to make it easier to build and manage high-scale time series-based applications.”

    The company also unveiled plans for the next-generation storage engine — project InfluxDB I0x. InfluxDB I0x is a new powerful storage engine designed to execute increasing query workloads over time. InfluxDB I0x lifts restrictions on cardinality, data size and cluster size that are inherent in the open source version of InfluxDB 2.0 — expanding the possibilities for workloads across thousands of servers and petabytes of data — a significant jump from current and other product allowances. Most time series solutions are designed around a rigid database structure, which limits the ability to work with high- cardinality data, but InfluxDB I0x separates storage from compute by using object storage as the durability layer and a management layer to control many stateless query, ingest, and indexing servers running ephemerally in Kubernetes. It also significantly broadens the InfluxDB ecosystem using industry-standard protocols and persistence, like Apache Arrow Flight and Apache Parquet. The InfluxDB I0x project expands the permissiveness of open source and is dual-licensed with MIT and Apache 2.0 to emphasize InfluxData’s commitment to pure open source. Dix opened the InfluxDB I0x project codebase repository during his talk at InfluxDays North America and now welcomes comments.

    “We’re driven by our commitment to developer productivity and are eager for our community to start using InfluxDB 2.0 so they can start doing more with time series data,” said Paul Dix, CTO and founder of InfluxData. ”But InfluxDB 2.0 is just the start of our journey. We want developers to build awesome apps with our open source software, uninhibited by licensing restrictions and limitations.”

    InfluxDB 2.0 is MIT License permissive — one of the most liberal open source licenses. InfluxDB 2.0 is the successor to InfluxDB 1.0, which was made generally available in September 2016. Over the last four years, there have been millions of downloads of the open source software and there are currently more than 400,000 daily active instances around the world.

    It’s quick and easy to get started with InfluxDB 2.0. For existing InfluxDB users, it’s a seamless upgrade from 1.x versions that can be done by downloading InfluxDB 2.0 and running a single command to transfer data. New users can get started by downloading and installing InfluxDB 2.0, and can be collecting time series data in under one minute.

    About InfluxData
    InfluxData is the creator of InfluxDB, the leading time series platform. We empower developers and organizations, such as Cisco, IBM, Lego, Siemens, and Tesla, to build transformative IoT, analytics and monitoring applications. Our technology is purpose-built to handle the massive volumes of time-stamped data produced by sensors, applications and computer infrastructure. Easy to start and scale, InfluxDB gives developers time to focus on the features and functionalities that give their apps a competitive edge. InfluxData is headquartered in San Francisco with a workforce distributed throughout the U.S. and across Europe. For more information, visit www.influxdata.com and follow us @InfluxDB.

  • Chorus.ai Analyzes 35 Million Calls To Understand and Guide Critical Revenue Operations

    Launches new interactive site, providing benchmarks and best practices to inform Revenue strategy for 2021 and beyond

    SAN FRANCISCO – November 10, 2020 – Chorus.ai, the No. 1 Conversation Intelligence Platform for high growth Revenue teams, today provides proprietary data to inform business goals and strategies for 2021 with the launch of an on-demand State of Conversation Intelligence 2020 Q4 Benchmarks report.

    The data, updated monthly,  provides insights and guidance into 10 critical revenue operations components such as c-suite participation in sales calls, how many cold calls or demos are needed to make a sale, how revenue organizations create virtual pipelines and more. Designed as an on-demand and interactive resource, the insights provide cutting-edge intelligence only Chorus.ai can provide. Each dataset is aggregated from over 35 million anonymized customer calls on both won and lost deals.

    “Revenue teams are nimble and innovative, but with so many changes in 2020, what businesses need is a single source of truth to truly compare their goals, strategies and pipeline. With our State of Conversation Intelligence benchmarks data, we’ve analyzed the patterns across millions of calls to share what’s actually driving positive, revenue-impacting outcomes,” said Jim Benton, CEO of Chorus.ai. “Chorus insights are critical for Revenue teams looking to see gaps and opportunities in their GTM strategies.”

    Chorus has been freely providing best practices and Conversation Intelligence for months, as Benton has hosted the Weekly Briefing throughout the year with GTM executives. The reports recapture these insights, expanding topics and providing more information through updated interactive dashboards business leaders can access on-demand, like:

    • C-Suite Participation in Sales Calls. C-Level executives have been joining sales calls at a rate 108% higher than they were in January, but there is an 81% drop in C-Suite meeting attendance from the first to the second call. Sales teams must ensure meetings are airtight and up-leveled from the first interaction.

    • How Many Cold Calls Does it Take to Make a Sale? Cold Call Connect Rates have fluctuated throughout the year, with a 6% dip in average quarterly voicemail connect rates from Q2 to Q3, but people are still picking up the phone. Phone connections cannot be the only method of interaction, with multi-channel processes and targeting well defined.

    • Sales Demo Best Practices. A great demo doesn’t just tell a story, it shows the real day-to-day impact. Reps should be prepared for these discussions to happen quickly, as 78% of first calls will include some form of a demo.

    Insights like these have helped Trey Boyer, the VP of Sales and CS at Hudl, “Sales reps may be familiar with adages like, ‘time kills all deals,’ but the depth of analysis available from Chorus proves these points with accurate data that energizes and informs our team.”

    Other reports now available are: How Often Are Sales People Working; C-Suite Participation by ACV; C-Suite Behaviors in Sales Calls; C-Suite Factor in Your Deals; How Many Meetings to Close a Deal; and, How Revenue Orgs Create Virtual Pipeline; and How Many Touchpoints in the Ideal Sales Cycle.

    To see how the reports can help Revenue teams deliver world-class experiences to customers and prospects, visit Chorus.ai.

    About Chorus.ai
    Chorus.ai is the No.1 Conversation Intelligence Platform for high-growth sales teams. Founded in 2015, Chorus.ai’s Conversation Intelligence Platform identifies and helps teams replicate the performance of top-performing reps by analyzing their sales meetings. These insights serve as the foundation of an effective coaching strategy for sales and customer success teams and provide insight into the voice-of-the-customer across the entire organization. Customers like Zoom, Mavenlink, Qualtrics, Adobe, and GitLab ramp new hires to productivity 30-50% faster and see an increase in quota attainment from 20-to-100%. Chorus.ai is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Tel Aviv and Boston.

  • SAFE Identity Achieves Major Standards Milestone in Cross-Industry Effort to Complete Interoperable Trust Framework for Digital Identities for Healthcare

    RESTON, V.a. – Nov. 10, 2020 –  SAFE Identity and its healthcare industry-led Policy Management Authority (PMA) have achieved a major milestone in their effort to enable a standards-based, interoperable Trust Framework for digital identities across all stakeholders in the highly distributed healthcare industry.

    Today, the healthcare industry consortium and certification body announced it has published the new SAFE Identity Certificate Policy. Carefully curated and ratified by industry consensus through the PMA, the Certificate Policy is a set of technical specifications, interoperability criteria, compliance guidelines and liability rules that govern the SAFE Identity Trust Framework.

    A Strategy for the Future of Digital Identity

    The SAFE Identity Trust Framework is an accreditation program for identity providers and offers healthcare organizations a strategy for collaborating with vendors and partners externally, where each vendor or partner uses credentials that have been certified under the Trust Framework. Healthcare organizations can rely on the accreditation programs that the SAFE Identity Trust Framework offers, thereby eliminating the need for configuring system-to-system federations with external parties and mitigating many of the risks and costs inherent in relying on external identity credentials.

    SAFE offers an open, standards-only and product-agnostic approach to relying on external identity credentials without requiring a healthcare organization to take on the burden of evaluating the issuance practices of each external identity provider themselves. SAFE Identity is also developing procurement guidance that helps healthcare organizations implement the Trust Framework within their supply chains.

    “We’ve re-envisioned the way identity will work between organizations in the future by learning from the lessons of our past,” said Kyle Neuman, managing director of SAFE Identity. “We know that people and devices need the ability to own their credential and use their credential between multiple organizations. We know that issuing credentials to all entities outside of the enterprise boundary is expensive and does not scale. We know that assuming an external party is issuing secure credentials to its employees due to the party’s own interest in securing their systems is a misconception that has resulted in numerous compromises. Lastly, we know that federating identities was last decade’s achievement, and that federating trust will be the challenge to overcome this decade. All of these considerations have gone into designing the new SAFE Identity Trust Framework that any organization can rely on to prevent vendor lock, increase credential re-use and increase the adoption of cryptography throughout healthcare.”

    Services that Move the Needle

    To help support SAFE’s approach to federating trust behind identity credentials, the certification body is bringing to bear a number of services to help enable the Trust Framework and make it easier for healthcare organizations to rely on. These services include lab-testing of applications to ensure conformance and interoperability with the most common standards in cryptography, a Bridge Certification Authority which cryptographically connects commercial and enterprise identity providers together as part of a global ecosystem, and a directory to enable encryption between organizations using SAFE Certified digital certificates.

    To round out the strategy healthcare organizations can leverage, the Trust Framework supports the consolidation of identity use cases across the industry. When many organizations hear the term “identity” they naturally think “authentication.” While authentication is a very common use case for identity, it only makes up 33% of the ways in which a digital identity can be employed. The SAFE Identity Trust Framework supports all identity use cases to include authentication as well as legally binding digital signatures and identity-based encryption. This consolidated approach offers healthcare organizations the ability to use the same uniform standards in identity across all vectors of collaboration with external parties thereby ensuring a consistent level of measurable risk for all use cases.

    The industry-led Policy Management Authority and associated working groups will soon start modernizing the SAFE Certificate policy around device identities with the goal of enabling medical device manufacturers the ability to ship medical devices with “birth certificates” on the device from the factory. The goal is for medical device manufacturer birth certificates to be relied upon out of the box by healthcare providers, labs, research centers and other consumers of medical devices.

    Putting the SAFE Trust Framework to Work in Healthcare

    To help healthcare organizations, their partners and technology providers better understand some of the most important ways to put the SAFE Identity Trust Framework to work, SAFE created a series of executive briefs that are available online.

    More information about SAFE Identity is available at makeidentitysafe.com.

    About SAFE Identity

    SAFE Identity is an industry consortium and certification body that provides an ecosystem for identity assurance in the healthcare sector to enable trust, security and user convenience. It reduces risk and assures the integrity of identities and data in virtual clinical trials, medical devices and trusted data exchange in healthcare supply chains.

  • Masergy Receives Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation Leadership Award for Managed SD-WAN Solution with AIOps

    Recognized as market mover for unique combination of secure SD-WAN, AI technology, unmatched SLAs and successful commercialization

    DALLAS — November 10, 2020 — Masergy, the software-defined network and cloud platform for the digital enterprise, today announced it has received a Frost & Sullivan 2020 Technology Innovation Leadership Award for Managed SD-WAN Service Market North America. Masergy’s industry-first AIOps solution was a key driver in the recognition, along with the company’s innovative managed SD-WAN service, unmatched service-level agreements (SLAs), and a successful commercialization strategy that positively impacted growing businesses. Masergy’s AIOps provides an AI-powered digital assistant for network, application and security optimization. The solution enhances application performance, predicts bandwidth needs, and optimizes network throughput based on anomaly detection and predictive analytics.

    “We are honored that Frost & Sullivan has recognized Masergy with a Technology Innovation Leader Award for our Managed SD-WAN,” said Chris MacFarland, Masergy Chairman and CEO. “Masergy has been at the forefront of technology innovation for over 20 years, and our secure, fully managed SD-WAN solution, including AIOps, was purpose-built with IT organizations in mind to help them accelerate the digital transformation of their businesses. AIOps is another key deliverable as we continue on a path to build the autonomous network of the future.”

    The Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation Leadership Award recognizes companies that lead the development and successful introduction of high-tech solutions to customers’ most pressing needs, altering the industry or business landscape in the process. These companies shape the future of technology and its uses.

    “Masergy’s innovative AIOps solution was the first such offering in the SD-WAN market giving the company the first-mover advantage,” said Roopa Honnachari, industry director, Frost & Sullivan. “Masergy’s unique combination of secure SD-WAN, AI technology and unmatched network service level agreements positions the company as a technology innovation leader in the managed SD-WAN market.”

    The Managed SD-WAN market has experienced explosive growth over the past several years, and managed SD-WAN solutions are now becoming mainstream. According to Frost & Sullivan, North American market revenues for 2019 exceeded $1.7 billion, with more than 160,000 SD-WAN sites operational today. Masergy experienced more than 100% growth in SD-WAN revenue in FY 2020 and continues to see demand grow. As companies accelerate their cloud journeys to meet the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, secure SD-WAN enables them to manage routing and security policies at the application layer.

    Masergy offers the industry’s most Innovative fully managed secure SD-WAN service. In addition to the AIOps virtual network assistant, the solution features security visibility into cloud applications to enable shadow IT discovery, along with identity-based WAN analytics to enable Zero Trust.

    About Masergy
    Masergy is the software-defined network and cloud platform for the digital enterprise. Recognized as the pioneer in software-defined networking, Masergy enables unrivaled, secure application performance across the network and the cloud with Managed SD-WAN, UCaaS, CCaaS and Managed Security solutions. Industry leading SLAs coupled with an unparalleled customer experience enable global enterprises to achieve business outcomes with certainty. Learn more and follow us on our blog Transforming Enterprise IT, Twitter @Masergy, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

     

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  • Applitools Announces Online Shopping Holiday Hackathon

    See how Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud can help Online Retailers shape up their apps ahead of the busy holiday shopping season 

    SAN MATEO, Calif., November 10, 2020 — Applitools, provider of a next generation test automation platform powered by Visual AI and Ultrafast Test Cloud, today announced the Applitools Holiday Shopping Hackathon. The holiday themed contest provides developers, quality assurance (QA) professionals, and test automation engineers with a fun, real-world scenario that shows how next generation test automation cloud and Visual AI can help online retailers deliver perfect apps to make the most of the holiday sales season.

    Each participant competes to win prizes as they spend roughly two hours to test the functional and visual quality of the “Applifashion” retail app and make sure it is impeccable ahead of the busy online holiday shopping season.

    To sign up and learn more about the Applitools Holiday Shopping Hackathon, visit: (https://info.applitools.com/ucS1t).

    Applitools_Hackathon_Winter_1080x1080.jpg

    Holiday e-commerce sales totaled $167.8 billion in 2019 according to the National Retail Federation. This year, 96% of retailers expect online holiday sales to increase.*

    Applitools helps retailers make the most of that sales spree! This can save retailers millions of dollars of revenue and help them improve their online shopping experience and customer satisfaction.

    “With the busy holiday shopping season upon us, Applitools created something fun and relevant for this time of year when e-commerce apps will be overloaded by online shoppers,” said Angie Jones, principal developer advocate and director of Test Automation University. “We’re excited to provide an easy but engaging experience that gives engineers the opportunity to learn and use modern AI-based approaches to test automation.”

    During the hackathon, participants practice modern testing techniques, and learn how Visual AI technology combined with the Ultrafast Test Cloud can transform the testing experience. Each participant authors three tests, and runs each test three times to catch bugs with the Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud platform. Contestants choose between popular open source test frameworks such as Selenium, Cypress, TestCafe, and WebdriverIO. Participants may also use their preferred language among Java, Javascript, Python, or C#.

    The Applitools Holiday Shopping Hackathon is a great opportunity to learn new skills, ramp up on modern validation approaches, and win exciting prizes. It’s free for anyone to join and is intended to only require two hours of time to complete. To be eligible for a prize, participants must complete the hackathon and submit test results by December 7, 2020. Additional criteria for the prize eligibility can be found in our terms and conditions.

    According to the 2019 State of Automated Visual Testing Report, [visual] bugs are common and cost the typical R&D team between $1.75m and $6.9m annually to fix. The number of screens across applications, websites, and devices are growing at breakneck speed, with the cost of testing rising accordingly. Managing the quality of apps effectively is a competitive advantage for engineers and businesses.

    “The efforts to implement a comprehensive strategy using traditional approaches are astronomical. Applitools has TOTALLY changed the game with the Ultrafast Grid. What took me days of work with other approaches, only took minutes with the Ultrafast Grid!” said Oluseun Olugbenga Orebajo, Lead Test Practitioner at Fujitsu and diamond winner of the Applitools Cross Browser Testing Hackathon. “Not only was it easier, it’s smarter, faster, and provides more coverage than any other solution out there. I’ll be recommending the Ultrafast Grid to all of the clients I work with from now on.”

    *https://infogram.com/1pl6g2ln9kwmqmfqe9z7n9kxpjsz7zkj1m0

    About Applitools

    Applitools delivers a Next Generation Test Automation Platform through Visual AI and Ultrafast Grid. We enable engineering teams to release high quality web and mobile apps at incredible speed and at a reduced cost.

    Applitools Visual AI modernizes important test automation use cases — Functional Testing, Visual Testing, Web and Mobile UI/UX Testing, Cross Browser Testing, Responsive Web Design Testing, Cross Device Testing, PDF Testing, Accessibility Testing and Compliance Testing — to transform the way organizations deliver innovation at the speed of CI/CD at a significantly lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

    Hundreds of companies from verticals such as Tech, Banking, Insurance, Retail, Pharma, and Publishing — including 50 of the Fortune 100 — use Applitools to deliver the best possible digital experiences to millions of customers on any device and browser, and across every screen size and operating system.

    Applitools is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with an R&D center in Tel Aviv, Israel. For more information, please visit applitools.com.

     

  • Applause Labs Prototypes New Initiatives to Improve the Tester Experience

    Geo-location, device recommendations and virtual device cloud capabilities are the latest wave of innovations from Applause Labs

    Boston–November 10, 2020 – Applause, the worldwide leader in digital quality and crowdsourced testing, today revealed three new initiatives from Applause Labs – the company’s R&D and innovation engine.

    The Applause Labs team is focused on accelerating innovation, with the goal of exploring and developing new features and solutions that will benefit both Applause’s clients and community of testers. Applause’s crowdsourced community, uTest, is the world’s largest, most diverse group of digital experts. Consisting of vetted and trained testers in a variety of disciplines – including manual, automated, usability and accessibility testing, among other areas – the community enables the world’s leading brands to test in the real world, in a flexible, responsive and efficient way.

    The first two features to come out of Applause Labs – the Applause Quality Score and the Applause Accessibility Tool – were designed to help clients and end users. The latest Applause Labs initiatives are primarily focused on improving the tester experience.

    Geo-Location Capabilities for Customer Journey Testing

    Applause’s Customer Journey Testing solution is in high demand. Restaurants and retailers are continuing to reinvent themselves by offering new customer journeys, such as contactless payments and curbside pickup. These types of customer journeys are new to many brands – often being added as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure customer safety – and require the real-world testing that only Applause can deliver.

    The growth of Applause’s Customer Journey Testing solution has required a new way to more easily target testers with projects based on their locations, and enable them to seamlessly participate in Customer Journey Testing opportunities.

    As part of the annual Vista Equity Partners Hackathon, and using the recently released uTest mobile app, Applause Labs developed a way for testers to opt-in to provide their geo-location data, enabling them to receive more personalized and geo-specific invitations to test cycles. This gives testers more opportunities to test and earn money while also providing clients with a more targeted group of testers with which to work.

    Device Recommendations & Virtual Device Cloud

    The more devices a tester has access to, the more project opportunities they have. Most testing must be done on a specific device (such as an iPhone 11 or Samsung Galaxy s9) to accurately represent the real-world experience on particular devices. Applause Labs prototyped ways to provide testers with insight into the devices that were most sought after and requested by clients, so that they understand what devices they should invest in to get more testing project invites.

    Applause Labs also prototyped a virtual device cloud, which enables users to conduct manual functional testing – including both exploratory testing and test case execution – without actually owning the physical device that is being tested. With this virtual device cloud, a community member could, for example, complete exploratory testing on a virtual iPhone 12 without actually owning or having access to a physical iPhone 12. The technology for this virtual device cloud is all handled by Applause, so that testers don’t need any coding experience themselves to complete the testing.

    “We are fully committed to innovation and delivering the best possible features to our clients, their end users and our community members,” said Jonathan Zaleski, Head of Applause Labs. “Our most recent exploration, ideation and prototypes have been focused on improving the tester experience to give community members more opportunities to test and earn money. These innovations would also benefit clients over time as they will have a larger pool of testers with the relevant devices to leverage.”

    Additional Resources:

     

    About Applause

    Applause is the worldwide leader in crowdtesting and digital quality. Software is at the heart of how all brands engage users, and digital experiences must work flawlessly everywhere. With highly vetted testers available on-demand around the globe, Applause provides brands with a full suite of testing and feedback capabilities. This approach drastically improves testing coverage, eliminates the limitations of offshoring and traditional QA labs, and speeds time-to-market for websites, mobile apps, IoT, and in-store experiences.

    Thousands of leading companies — including Ford, Fox, Google and Dow Jones — rely on Applause as a best practice to deliver high-quality digital experiences that customers love.

    Learn more at https://www.applause.com.

  • CMO and CIO Partnership Outcome – Human Experience Powered Digital Transformation: Infosys Study

    Nearly 44% of top-tier companies expect a collaborative CMO-CIO relationship to boost profitability by 5% or more

    Bengaluru, India – November 5, 2020

    Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, today unveiled its market study titled, ‘CMO and C-Suite: The DNA of Partnership.’ This latest research by the Infosys Knowledge Institute focuses on how the pandemic has influenced CMO and CIO roles to converge and digitally transform multiple dimensions within an enterprise. The survey revealed that a CMO’s people-centered skill set and CIO’s insights into enterprise IT systems are vital to the success of this new collaborative ecosystem. The research identifies both current and future initiatives that can serve as a guide for CMOs and CIOs in their endeavor to build adaptability and resilience within their organizations.

    In the era of pervasive data intelligence, data is becoming more dynamic and transformative. The COVID-19 pandemic was a wake-up call, and enterprises have begun to embrace the opportunities presented by digital technologies to survive and thrive in this new normal. Two of the core business disciplines are at the fore front of this digital transformation: IT and Marketing. The pandemic has accelerated the need for marketing and IT teams to interconnect and radically transform the business. The CMO-CIO collaboration will serve as a force multiplier to drive revenue and digital maturity while evolving the organizational DNA in this digital age.

    For this study, Infosys surveyed 970 business leaders and interviewed CIOs and CMOs to get insights into the crisis-induced collaboration between the two departments, and to test the proposition of stakeholder capitalism as a viable path forward:

    Key findings:

    • A push for stakeholder capitalism: The drive to include stakeholder capitalism is clearly coming from the top as 83% of surveyed senior executives strongly agree that CMO-CIO collaboration can play a pivotal role in mapping and aligning business needs with stakeholder demands.
    • Evolving CX (customer experience) to HX (human experience): Although 51% of IT respondents believed the CMO role would be replaced altogether, this is not the twilight of the CMO — the role instead will evolve beyond CX to delivering HX.
    • Understanding collaboration and culture: IT demonstrated a higher rating in grasping the significance of collaboration between the departments to drive digital transformation across the enterprise (62% IT vs. 46% Marketing). IT and Marketing in tandem can plan and model the future, creating a culture that fosters collaboration in any situation, remote or in-person.
    • Weight on the ESG scale: CMOs must work with CIOs and the wider C-Suite to deliver on ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and stakeholder capitalism strategy. CMOs are in a unique position to ensure the human experience is at the center of everything a company does. They are also well-placed to communicate the company’s social purpose to stakeholders
    • Collaboration for profitability: Nearly 44% of top-tier companies expect a collaborative CMO-CIO relationship to boost profitability by 5% or more. In comparison, only 20% of lowest-tier and 15% of middle-tier companies share these expectations.
    • Challenges in the shifting operating environment: Compared to IT, Marketing respondents identified agility (69% vs. 46%) and CX to HX evolution (58% vs. 35%) more critical.

    Sumit Virmani, CMO at Infosys said, “As the marketing spend on digital channels continues to grow in this new normal, human experience has taken center stage across businesses. The pandemic has not only altered the way engagement is viewed across every touch point, it has also accelerated digital transformation, creating a need for relevant and personalized experiences. Now is the time, more than ever, for CMOs and CIOs to collaborate to deliver tangible business outcomes. When the dust settles, companies that will emerge stronger will be the ones where the marketing and technology functions took joint ownership to drive digital transformation and engage customers in a meaningful way.”

    Carol Kruse, Former CMO of ESPN and Cambia Health and former Head of Global Digital for The Coca-Cola Company said, “The work styles tend to be very different between a technical person and a marketing person, which leads to work culture differences. Traditionally, this cultural difference has hindered collaboration and that’s what this report highlights — that intense collaboration between the CMO and the CIO has to be our new reality. Fostering a culture of collaboration between these two groups brings tangible benefits, and the report proves that working together, across the C-Suite, has never been more critical.”

    Max Chan, Chief Information Officer, Avnet commented, “During the pandemic, we learned just how quickly we could implement cloud technology and scale digital transformation. Now we need to make the most of that rapid scaling. We are working with the marketing team to align our digital strategy with our business strategy. One of the focuses is to redesign our digital customer journey. Instead of providing an alternate digital channel for our customers to interact with us, we are working with marketing to redesign our customer interaction by making digital as an integrated aspect of our end-to-end process.”

    Skyler Mattson, President of WONGDOODY added, “Since the pandemic began, companies see that the personal is powerful. HX puts the consumer, client or employee at the center of everything we do — end to end. This research shows that companies that have excelled in digital transformation have mastered HX, resulting in greater digital maturity than their peers.”

    For a full copy of the report please visit: https://www.infosys.com/navigate-your-next/research/cmo-csuite-dna-partnership.html

    To see experts, discuss key findings from the report, click here and watch an InfyTV video.

    Methodology

    In early 2020, the Infosys Knowledge Institute used an anonymous format to conduct an online primary survey of more than 750 CXO and other senior-level executives from companies with more than $500 million in revenue. Respondents represented 12 industries and were based in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In April 2020, we conducted a follow-up survey with another 220 leaders to understand CMO-CIO collaboration in a hybrid world and to test the extent to which stakeholder capitalism is a viable path forward. To enrich insights, we conducted phone interviews with industry practitioners, executives, and subject matter experts, before and during the pandemic.

    About Infosys Ltd.

    Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in 46 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With nearly four decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem.

    Visit www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise navigate your next.

    Safe Harbor

    Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects, financial expectations and plans for navigating the COVID-19 impact on our employees, clients and stakeholders are forward-looking statements intended to qualify for the ‘safe harbor’ under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding COVID-19 and the effects of government and other measures seeking to contain its spread, risks related to an economic downturn or recession in India, the United States and other countries around the world, changes in political, business, and economic conditions, fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry and the outcome of pending litigation and government investigation. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2020. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the Company unless it is required by law.

  • Qumulo Introduces New Suite of Data Services to Radically Simplify File Data Management at Scale

    New Capabilities Simplify, Secure and Lower Operational Costs

    SEATTLE, Nov. 9, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Qumulo, the leading file data platform that helps organizations easily store and manage file data so they can build and scale their applications with unrivaled freedom, control and real-time visibility, today announced a new suite of data services that radically simplify managing massive amounts of file data. Qumulo unveiled two new data services, Qumulo® Secure and Qumulo Dynamic Scale, and introduced advancements including Instant Software Upgrade to Qumulo Core®, the industry’s first NVMe Cached Performance and Qumulo Shift’s new visual interface.

    “Radical simplicity is critical for customers to be successful with unstructured data. Our software-driven file data platform offers enterprise-level capabilities that radically simplify the process of today’s digital transformation,” said Ben Gitenstein, VP of Product, Qumulo. “With the data services we announced today, Qumulo’s customers can simplify the complexity of their infrastructure, accelerate innovation, and unleash the power of their data, wherever it resides.”

    NVMe Cached Performance: Significantly lowering the cost of performance

    Although many workloads, such as data analytics, research computing, and rich media content creation, benefit from low latency and massive throughput, access to the most performant leading-edge technologies has historically been accessible only to specialized workloads with large budgets.

    Qumulo has broken this paradigm, introducing the file industry’s first software to provide machine learning optimized read and write cache leveraging NVMe. The intelligent cache manages data on the optimal storage media to get both high performance and cost-effective capacity. With the introduction of the latest release of Qumulo Core software and two new qualified hardware options (C-192T and C-432T), Qumulo now offers NVMe performance at the price of disk.

    “The new Qumulo Core capability to use NVMe as cache enables us to meet our performance and budget needs by providing great economics from very dense hard drives combined with its great caching capabilities on extremely fast NVMe drives,” said Serkan Yalcin, Director of IT, Infrastructure Dev/Ops, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “Qumulo’s intelligent caching, without managing policies, has been great and provides even more value for us with NVMe as the caching layer. These features, combined with their great customer success experience, really empower us to focus on our mission of bringing population health data to the world.”

    Qumulo Dynamic Scale: Leverage new processor, storage and memory innovation to scale existing deployments

    Data is growing more rapidly every year. Users need access to new technology to keep pace. Historically, organizations have had to worry about when to invest in new technology, concerned they may miss the window to access new advancements that may be imminently released. The introduction of Qumulo Dynamic Scale enables administrators to leverage newly qualified platforms with the latest processors, memory and storage devices without the need for forklift upgrades, data migrations, or complex storage pool management. Qumulo users now can add new qualified platforms into existing environments with no need to manage different storage pools or perform a data migration. The new platforms are simply added to the existing environment, data is automatically redistributed, and the increased performance and capacity are automatically made available to users and applications.

    “Everyone from the marketing group to our dot-com and interactive groups is relying on it. We needed the storage equivalent of a reliable Swiss army knife, and unfortunately, our old system wasn’t cutting it anymore,” said Raoul Edwards, Director, Network Systems Engineering and Field Ops at MSG Networks.

    Qumulo Secure: Automated data encryption, for free

    To help make data encryption easy and cost effective, today Qumulo is introducing AES 256-bit software encryption at-rest as part of the Qumulo Secure set of data services. For new deployments, Qumulo now encrypts all data, automatically. No additional third-party applications or key managers are needed, and there is no added cost. Encryption now comes standard, as do all Qumulo features as part of the standard software subscription.

    Qumulo Secure provides a wide range of security features, including role-based authentication (RBAC), audit, and encryption in-flight. And with today’s announcement, the Qumulo software will now encrypt all data automatically, on any deployment type, at no additional cost. “With Qumulo making industry-standard AES-256 encryption a standard in their solution, I never need to worry about if my data is at risk,” said Hanoz Elavia, Storage Administrator at Atomic Cartoons.

    Instant Upgrade to Qumulo Core: No downtime to users or applications, no maintenance windows

    Software upgrades to IT infrastructure historically required time-consuming planning, maintenance windows, and scheduled downtime. When using Instant Upgrade, the system starts the new version in a container, changes the system to point to the new version, and stops the old version in under 20 seconds, making upgrades fast and consistent across cluster sizes and different underlying hardware. And when OS updates are needed, Instant Upgrade automates those as well, applying updates and rebooting nodes as needed to achieve a fully upgraded environment with ease.

    “Managing data with Qumulo is so simple that it’s hard to describe the impact. It has given us tremendous ROI in terms of time saved and problems eliminated. Having such reliable storage makes us eager to use it more broadly throughout the company,” said John Beck, IT Manager at Hyundai Mobis.

    Qumulo Shift: Simplify transformation of data from file to object now with a visual interface

    Data is typically created in a file format, but applications and developers often want to leverage capabilities and services connected to cloud object stores such as AWS S3. Qumulo Shift makes it simple to copy data from a file solution into Amazon S3. The new visual interface makes it even easier to leverage data in the location and format that makes innovation fastest. When data needs to be transformed from file to object, customers can simply select their choice Amazon S3 target buckets and initiate a data copy with the click of a button.

    With Qumulo Shift, customers can:

    • Leverage legacy and cloud-native applications without having to re-build their architecture
    • Retain S3-native and file-native properties to maintain full data control and ownership
    • Avoid having to refactor applications or use third-party data movement packages

    The simplicity of Qumulo’s file data platform makes it easy and affordable for organizations to leverage the value of massive data sets distributed across on-prem and multi-clouds and ensures visibility into the data with uncompromising security and data protection.

    Learn more about leveraging the Qumulo file data platform and start innovating faster with Qumulo today; contact us for a demo.

    Availability

    • NVMe Cached Performance
      • Software optimizations for NVMe as cache – available today in software release 3.0.2
      • New qualified platforms
        • C-192T – available to order today, general availability November 25, 2020
        • C-432T – available to order today, general availability November 10, 2020
    • Qumulo Dynamic Scale – available December 15, 2020
    • Qumulo Secure – available today in software release 3.1.5
    • Instant software upgrade for Qumulo Core – available November 25, 2020, in software release 3.3.3
    • Qumulo Shift included in a visual interface – available today in software release 3.3.0

    Tweet This: @Qumulo makes managing massive amounts of data radically simple; Launches new suite of data services, defines the future of data management. https://bit.ly/3oZPv0n

    Resources
    Qumulo File Data Platform Software Architecture Whitepaper
    What’s New in the Qumulo File Data Platform
    Register for November 18, 2020 Webinar – Why Users Choose Qumulo

    About Qumulo, Inc.
    Qumulo is the leading file data platform for multi-cloud environments, providing unrivaled freedom, control and real-time visibility for file data at massive scale. Fortune 500 companies, major film studios, and the largest research facilities in the world trust Qumulo to help them innovate with their mission-critical digital files. The Qumulo experience makes file data management simple with continuous new features, a single solution for all workloads, and access to customer success experts on your schedule. www.qumulo.com.

    Qumulo and the Qumulo logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Qumulo, Inc. All other marks and names herein may be trademarks of other companies. Copyright © 2020. All Rights Reserved.

    SOURCE Qumulo