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Author: Deborah Schalm

  • How open source leads to open doors

    Black Girls CODE awarded IBM Open Source Community Grant

    By Todd Moore, Guillermo Miranda, Yolanda Rabun
    Published October 19, 2020

    In today’s climate, racial equality and equity is top of mind. The tech industry has a renewed focus on giving girls in underrepresented communities access and exposure to STEM, particularly in the pre-teen and teen years that are critical to keeping girls interested in STEM subjects. Giving adolescent girls access to skills like coding and introducing them to open source prepares them for college and career and opens new doors and opportunities

    About the grant

    The Open Source Community Grant is awarded quarterly to nonprofits who teach tech skills to underserved communities. Learn about past winners of the grant.

    IBM has a longstanding commitment to investing in diversity and inclusion. The IBM Open Source Community Grant recognizes a nonprofit organization dedicated to education and skill building for women, under-represented minorities, and underserved communities, while also promoting open source. The grant includes a cash award ($25K) and a technology award (valued at $25K) to directly support education and career development activities. Our internal open source community votes on the winners.

    Black Girls CODE awarded grant

    As part of our continuing social justice efforts and commitment to racially equality, IBM is awarding our next open source community grant to Black Girls CODE. Launched in 2011, Black Girls CODE (BGC), with 15 chapter cities in the U.S. and abroad, is a transformative global movement that hosts technology-focused weekend workshops, hackathons, summer camps, and many other enrichment opportunities for more than 20,000 low-income, Black girls — or as they call themselves, Tech Divas.

    Additionally, IBM has partnered with Black Girls CODE as a National Alumnae Ambassador Program Sponsor to help cultivate the next generation of STEM developers. This partnership allows Black Girls CODE and their Tech Divas to participate in two initial opportunities with IBM — one with IBM’s Call for Code for Racial Justice program and another with IBM offerings for workshops on STEM topics like quantum, artificial intelligence, and hybrid cloud.

    Call for Code for Racial Justice was announced on October 13 following three years of successful global programs addressing natural disasters, climate change, and COVID-19. Call for Code for Racial Justice encourages the adoption and innovation of open source projects to drive progress in three key areas of focus

    • Police & Judicial Reform and Accountability
    • Diverse Representation
    • Policy & Legislation Reform.

    The five solutions that emerged from Call for Code for Racial Justice are being announced and made available to the open source community at the All Things Open Conference where Black Girls CODE will participate on a panel with IBM entitled “Underrepresented Communities in Code.”

    The partnership between IBM and Black Girls CODE will help BGC expand on its unique, culturally sensitive STEM program for underserved girls around the world. IBM seeks to help grow the number of women of color in technology and give underrepresented girls a chance to become the future leaders in technology driving innovation.

    We all have a unique opportunity to help influence young minority women to embrace their brilliance and build upon their skills. The journey to equality in STEM and closing the skills gap should be a proactive one — an open one. This is the power of inclusion.

    Todd Moore is the Vice President of Open Technology and Developer Advocacy at IBM and Guillermo Miranda is the Vice President and Global Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at IBM. Yolanda Rabun is the senior counsel for the IBM Research & Systems group.

     

  • Call for Code for Racial Justice Needs You: Join the Movement

    October 19, 2020 | Written by:  and Willie Tejada

    IBM has never avoided taking on big challenges. At IBM, we are privileged to drive impact at scale. We take on challenges that transform our clients, impact people’s lives and innovate for future generations as we strive to effect systematic societal change. Over the course of our 109-year history, the evidence has become clear that scaled change is best achieved through the focused deployment of technology, and especially tech for good.

    Given the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and too many others, remind us that the fight against systemic racism is more urgent than ever. Today, we are launching Call for Code for Racial Justice, a vital initiative that brings together technology and a powerful ecosystem to combat one of the greatest challenges of our time: racial injustice. As global citizens, we must act now and be part of a tangible change that we want to see today, tomorrow and for generations to come.

    Call for Code for Racial Justice facilitates the adoption and innovation of open source projects by developers, ecosystem partners and communities across the world to drive sustainable change in three focus areas: Police & Judicial Reform and Accountability; Diverse Representation; and Policy & Legislation Reform.

    The new initiative emerged from an internal IBM program called the Call for Code Emb(race) Challenge. It was started by Black IBMers who, along with Red Hatters and IBM allies, applied their ingenuity and expertise to design and develop technology solutions to address the problem of systemic racism. These solutions are now being opened up to the world as open source projects through the Call for Code tech-for-good platform.

    Call for Code has a proven record of successful global programs that for three years have been addressing some of the most pressing challenges of our time,  including Covid-19, climate change and natural disasters. Call for Code has grown to include an impressive ecosystem of technology and humanitarian experts, and more than 400,000 developers across 179 nations.

    Today, the IBM Call for Code for Racial Justice team is contributing solution starters to the open source community. These projects were built using technologies such as Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud, IBM Watson, Blockchain ledger, Node.js, Vu.js, Docker, Kubernetes and Tekton. We’re asking developers and ecosystem partners to join us in combatting racial injustice by testing, extending and implementing these open source solutions, and contributing their own diverse perspectives and expertise to make them even stronger:

    • Five Fifths Voter: This web application empowers Black people and other minorities to ensure their voices are heard by exercising their right to vote. It is a virtual one-stop-shop to help determine optimal voting strategies for each individual and limit the impact of previous suppression issues.
    • Legit-info: Local legislation and policies can have significant impact on areas as far-reaching as jobs, the environment and safety. Legit-info helps individuals understand in their own language the legislation that shapes their lives.
    • Incident Accuracy Reporting System: This platform for police incident reporting allows witnesses and victims to corroborate evidence from multiple sources and assess against an official police report. The system creates a more reliable record of all accounts of the incident.
    • Open Sentencing: To help public defenders better serve their clients, Open Sentencing identifies racial bias in data such as demographics that can help make a stronger case.
    • Truth Loop: This app helps communities simply understand the policies, regulations and legislation that will impact them the most.

    Together, we’re harnessing open source technology to drive scalable innovation and meaningful change. This will be a persistent, open, always-on initiative and will continue to introduce new open source solutions to inspire global adoption and innovation to help dismantle systemic racism and strive for equality and equity.

    IBM is providing the technology. But in keeping with the principles of Call for Code, we know it takes an ecosystem to scale change. Call for Code’s growth and success is a product of the unique ecosystem that IBM and Call for Code creator David Clark Cause have convened to unite the technology development community with humanitarian organizations to ensure  that solutions are robust, efficient, innovative and easy to use.

    United Nations Human Rights (UNHR) advocates for solutions to tackle racial discrimination and encourages global mobilized ecosystems, like Call for Code, to create scalable solutions.

    Together with partners like Black Girls Code, Collab Capital, Dream Corps, The United Way Worldwide, American Airlines, Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Red Hat, Call for Code for Racial Justice is inviting developers to apply their skills and ingenuity to combat systemic racism. Black Girls Code is also the most recent recipient of IBM’s Open Source Community Grant and has also formed a newly expanded partnership with IBM. We’re counting on the diversity of the global open source community to lean in and help build real solutions to serious problems.  It’s easy to get involved. If you’re a developer, expand upon the solution starters and spread the word. You have the skillset and ingenuity to make a difference. If you’re an organization, we invite you to join our growing partner ecosystem. Together, we have the power and responsibility to help scale and implement solutions for this important cause.

  • Rookout Launches a ‘Live Debugging Heatmap’ To Find Applications On Fire

     | Source: Rookout

    • According to the 2020 State of Software Quality report, two out of three software developers estimate they spend at least a day per week troubleshooting issues in their code, and close to one-third spend even more time.
    • DEJ’s research shows that organizations are losing $2,129,000 per month, on average, due to delays in application releases.

    TEL AVIV, Israel, Oct. 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Rookout, the modern debugging platform built for developers, today announced a Live Debugging Heatmap that visualizes which applications are causing the most problems within a business. In the age of cloud, where distributed teams can spend hours debugging the same problematic application without even knowing it, the ability to instantly identify where developers are wasting time and resources is incredibly powerful.

    “We want to give meaningful insights in a quick and visually appealing way,” said Shahar Fogel, CEO at Rookout. “We have unique insights into where software developers are spending the most time debugging frustrating applications, and can visualize this information so that management can quickly see where time, money, and resources are being exhausted.”

    Rookout is installed as an SDK and deployed across all of the organization’s environments. This allows for unique insight into which applications are on fire, making them bright red within the Rookout UI for quick identification. Rookout’s dashboard also visualizes how much time developers waste debugging, which developers have found the most bugs in production, and ultimately how much money has been saved using Rookout versus more traditional debugging methods (e.g. endless logging or trying to re-create production environments on local machines).

    Product Highlights:

    • Quick installation via a hosted SaaS solution that takes minutes to configure
    • Color-schemed heatmap quickly identifies the most buggy applications
    • Leaderboard shows how many bugs have been found in production
    • ROI calculator indicates how much time and money is being saved by using Rookout (versus traditional debugging methods)

    “We’re looking forward to leveraging Rookout’s new heatmap to give cross-team visibility into where our developers are wasting the most time,” said Yan Davidovsky, Engineering Director at Amdocs. “We spend many hours each week debugging code, it’s an inevitable part of the workflow. But anything that helps us locate exactly where that time is being spent, and also helps us measure the ROI of those efforts, is invaluable.”

    About Rookout
    Rookout is a modern debugging solution that provides an unparalleled ability to collect any piece of data, from the deepest levels of live code, on-demand. This empowers engineers to find the data they need instantly and deliver it anywhere, in order to understand and advance their software. With Rookout, software teams save hours of work and reduce debugging and logging time by 80% — with zero friction, overhead, or risk.

  • JumpCloud Launches New Integrations with Slack, Salesforce, GitHub, Atlassian, and AWS

    User identity lifecycle management across multiple apps from single cloud directory platform saves IT hours of onboarding / offboarding work 

    LOUISVILLE, CO – Oct. 15, 2020 – JumpCloud today announced new integrations that provide IT admins easier user identity lifecycle management across multiple applications from a single platform. These new integrations with Slack, Salesforce, Atlassian, GitHub, and AWS provide streamlined user management to the most common business applications, reducing the time IT admins spend onboarding and offboarding users from hours to minutes.

    Tweet this: The release of @JumpCloud’s new SCIM integrations streamline access to critical apps in the age of #COVID, including @slackhq @salesforce @atlassian @github and @awscloud. Learn more: http://ow.ly/wr0g50BStrc

    JumpCloud will be adding new integrations at a rapid pace with integrations for Zoom, GitLab, and Keeper releasing later this month. Leveraging standards-based SCIM integration adds an automated, deeper level of control over the full user lifecycle so that any user status changes made within JumpCloud are immediately updated in the corresponding applications. IT admins can instantly create new users, update existing users, manage privileged access, and deactivate users for the integrated application from a single cloud console, without the manual effort of managing users individually on each application.

    Admins can also take advantage of JumpCloud SAML SSO and JIT for end user access and admin management of more than 700 preconfigured business-focused apps and thousands of other applications from the same platform used to manage devices, networks, servers, storage and network infrastructure, and more. With the addition of SCIM to the preexisting SAML capabilities, JumpCloud continues to centralize the management of business applications.

    About JumpCloud

    JumpCloud has reimagined directory services to transform how IT delivers workers secure and easy access to technology. The rise of cloud, web apps, and remote work made it hard for IT to secure employees while supporting their need to work however and wherever they want: as a result IT teams have wrestled with an increasing number of identity, access, and device management products as they try to recreate what Active Directory achieved in an on-premises centric world. The JumpCloud Directory Platform gives IT and devops a modern solution to securely manage and connect users to IT resources regardless of platform, provider, protocol, or location. With JumpCloud, organizations increase employee productivity and protect identities, while enabling convenient connection.

  • BlackSwan Technologies Launches World’s First AI Operating System, Raises $28 Million in Funding to Pioneer Next Generation of Enterprise Software

    Groundbreaking AI Software Highlighted by Gartner As “Bringing AI Closer to Human Learning and Intelligence”

    Company’s Stealth Mode Successes Include Tens of Millions in Revenue, Long-Term Contracts & Partnerships with the World’s Largest Consultancies & Fortune 500 Clients

    BlackSwan Technologies launches as the world’s first enterprise AI operating system, enabling any company to leverage the most advanced artificial intelligence for an unprecedented level of operational efficiency and data-driven decision making. Since it began offering its technology to a limited customer base earlier this year, BlackSwan Technologies has generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue through multi-year contracts with many leading businesses. The company has also established a groundbreaking partnership with Deloitte to provide leading global banks an AI-powered platform that is already proven to increase revenue and drive efficiencies.

    BlackSwan Technologies was recently recognized in Gartner’s 2020 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report as a pioneer in “bringing AI closer to human learning and intelligence.” The company’s signature Platform as a Service (PaaS), ELEMENT, accomplishes this by combining multiple AI technologies — including machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning, neural network and data operation facilities — into a single platform.

    Unlike other enterprise AI offerings, ELEMENT does not require well-organized data sets, countless hours of data normalization or technical in-house expertise to implement. ELEMENT’s Low code/No code, cloud-agnostic system includes several advanced enterprise applications including for Risk Management, Compliance, Lead Generation, Personalization and Market Intelligence. The platform also allows users to build enterprise applications up to 60 times faster and at a fraction of the cost of market alternatives. ELEMENT is designed to continuously learn and evolve with the enterprise and has a completely customizable structure with a simple, drag-and-drop interface, democratizing the development and execution of large, industrial enterprise applications.

    “We believe this represents a true paradigm shift in enterprise software, eliminating all barriers to digital transformation so that enterprises can easily harness big data and artificial intelligence to generate immediate and actionable business insights,” said BlackSwan’s founder and CEO Michael Ouliel. “Our aim is to completely disrupt the enterprise software market by finally making the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence available to any company.”

    BlackSwan Technologies is also announcing it has raised a new Series A financing round of $28 million led by investors Prytek, FinTLV and MS&AD Ventures. The new funding will be used to accelerate growth, continue developing new advanced AI applications and expand the BlackSwan Technologies team.

    While other enterprise software companies offer targeted products that address only a small portion of an organization’s AI needs, ELEMENT’s end-to-end system transforms raw data into actionable insights that companies can leverage to identify opportunities, reduce costs and manage risk. Leading financial institutions have already seen incredible success with the platform. For example, a top-15 global bank was able to reduce the cost of onboarding a corporate client from +$2,000 to $150 by leveraging ELEMENT to address the entire compliance process.

    Ouliel conceptualized the idea for BlackSwan Technologies while reflecting on his years as an Israeli intelligence officer and consultant for Oracle. He realized that existing data processing systems were leaving large and complex organizations exposed to unforeseen risks due to the limited scope of data they could access and understand. With ELEMENT, he designed a platform that enables companies to harness and organize data, reveal non-obvious relationships, identify unseen risks, reveal overlooked opportunities and predict the future by harnessing the full potential of data to detect far-reaching risks and opportunities. Now available widely across industries, BlackSwan Technologies’ pioneering AI operating system is poised to lead a new era of digital transformation.

    About BlackSwan Technologies:

    BlackSwan Technologies is a PaaS/SaaS product company. Its Flagship software ELEMENT is an operating system powering the rapid development of enterprise AI applications that mimic the cognitive functions of human intelligence. ELEMENT can be used by enterprises across multiple industries to collect and organize data, gain competitive intelligence, improve compliance, drive new business opportunities and make predictions – all while cutting costs and improving efficiencies. BlackSwan’s ELEMENT is trusted by some of the largest global organizations.

    BlackSwan Technologies is based in Tel Aviv, Israel with offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Poland and Germany. For more information, visit blackswantechnologies.ai.

     

  • New Relic Introduces “Observability for Good” Nonprofit Donation Program

    Partners with Code for America to leverage the power of observability to make government work for the people, and by the people in the digital age

    SAN FRANCISCO — NERD DAYS 1.0 — October 13, 2020 –  New Relic, Inc. (NYSE: NEWR), the observability platform company, today announced “Observability for Good”, a new product donation program designed to help NGOs, nonprofits, and charities around the world leverage the benefits of observability in order to advance their missions.

    As part of the announcement, New Relic introduced a new partnership with Code for America, a non-partisan, non-political nonprofit dedicated to improving how government serves the American public, and how the public improves government. New Relic will provide Code for America’s volunteer Brigades around the country free access to New Relic One to support the creation of new apps and services. The announcements were made at New Relic’s Nerd Days 1.0 event for its developer community, where Code for America CTO Lou Moore participated in a keynote fireside chat.

    Mission-driven organizations are under more pressure than ever to deliver their programs through digital channels. Like their for-profit peers, these organizations often have complex software ecosystems they need to manage to ensure the performance of their systems. Observability can help nonprofits visualize, analyze and troubleshoot their entire software stack, so they can pinpoint outages and performance problems and quickly get their systems back up and running in moments.

    New Relic’s Observability for Good program, part of the NewRelic.org Social Responsibility division of the company, includes free access to New Relic One, including one terabyte of data ingest for the Telemetry Data Platform, five standard seats for Full Stack Observability each month, and additional discounts for Applied Intelligence. In addition, NewRelic.org will offer enablement and pro bono support to drive nonprofit success. New Relic partners with TechSoup to verify all global nonprofits for eligibility.

    “As a values-driven organization, New Relic established NewRelic.org with a mission of creating a more just, equitable, and accessible tech sector,” said Lew Cirne, CEO and founder, New Relic. “I firmly believe in the power of software to improve our world, and am proud to help social impact organizations further advance their missions.”

    “We chose to partner with New Relic because of a core mission we both share: helping engineers and many other people be effective and equitable,” said Lou Moore, chief technology officer, Code for America. “Our partnership allows us to gain the benefits of the Observability for Good program and continue to build out projects that make government work better for the people we serve.”

    “With COVID-19 school closures, Quill experienced a huge surge in traffic as schools started using our online tools to help their students improve their writing skills. New Relic One provided our team with clear visibility into our bottlenecks, enabling us to rapidly and effectively scale our platform to support millions of students. As a small engineering team serving millions of students, New Relic has played a critical role in enabling us to achieve our mission of helping low-income students across the United States become strong writers and critical thinkers.” — Peter Gault, executive director, Quill.org

    About New Relic One

    New Relic One is the most powerful cloud-based observability platform built to help companies create more perfect software. Engineering teams around the world rely on New Relic One to improve uptime and performance, achieve greater scale and efficiency, and accelerate time to market. It includes everything organizations need to achieve observability:

    ·  Telemetry Data Platform to collect, visualize, and alert on all types of application and infrastructure data at petabyte scale. It is designed to be the single source of truth for all operational data.

    ·  Full-Stack Observability to easily analyze and troubleshoot the entire software stack across APM, infrastructure, logs, and digital customer experience in one connected experience.

    ·  Applied Intelligence to detect, understand, and resolve incidents faster.

    To get started with the Observability for Good program, please visit newrelic.org/signup. Learn more about the program in this blog post.

    About NewRelic.org

    NewRelic.org is the social responsibility arm of New Relic (NYSE: NEWR). Through our product donations and discounts, employee volunteerism and giving and community impact partnerships and events, we are committed to creating a more equitable, just and accessible tech sector. NewRelic.org focuses on three key areas of focus: Making the tech sector more diverse, equitable and inclusive, STEAM education and technology enablement and access for the nonprofit sector. For more information about our initiatives, go to www.newrelic.org.

     

    About New Relic

    The world’s best engineering teams rely on New Relic to visualize, analyze, and troubleshoot their software. New Relic One is the most powerful cloud-based observability platform built to help companies create more perfect software. Learn why customers trust New Relic for improved uptime and performance, greater scale and efficiency, and accelerated time to market at newrelic.com.

  • Optimiz Deploys Moogsoft Cloud for Observability of Modern Digital Infrastructure

    AI-driven observability leader enables managed service provider to accelerate alignment of clients’ IT and digital business models for unparalleled customer experience

    SAN FRANCISCO — Oct. 13, 2020 — Moogsoft, the AI-driven observability leader, today announced that Optimiz, a premier IT operations optimization partner for enterprises in the digital era, has deployed the Moogsoft Observability Cloud to help clients quickly align their IT operations and digital business goals, and deliver epic customer experiences.

    Today’s digital business relies on making sense of rapidly growing and changing volumes of data about their digital connections with customers. Optimiz is using Moogsoft’s cloud-native observability platform within its innovation lab to deliver its clients contextualized business-level visualizations of real-time alert and event data, and its effect on customer experiences. The company will also integrate Moogsoft into its managed services portfolio serving North American clients ranging from innovative small businesses to the Fortune 1000.

    “The global pandemic has revealed just how critical a high-quality digital experience is to customer loyalty, and has sent businesses of all sizes scrambling for ways to find meaning about that experience amongst zettabytes of constantly growing and changing data,” said Optimiz Chief Strategy Officer Tom McIlwham. “Moogsoft helps us intelligently correlate these disparate data points about our clients’ digital services, help them reduce service interruptions and better use data to guide business leaders towards smart innovation for the digital era. Moogsoft was so easy to deploy and integrate, we got it up and running in no time.”

    “2020 has accelerated the need for companies of all sizes to embrace a fully digital future and quickly adapt to rapidly changing business and customer requirements,” said Moogsoft Founder and CEO Phil Tee. “Moogsoft’s intelligent monitoring and observability platform helps experts like Optimiz harness the power of Observability 2.0, using AI to start turning metrics and events into intelligent incidents in the time it takes to make a cappuccino.”

    From Data to Dashboards: Intelligent Monitoring as a Differentiator

    As an extensible cloud platform, Moogsoft enables Optimiz to quickly integrate its existing portfolio of monitoring and reporting tools —from AppDynamics to Grafana— into a comprehensive SRE and DevOps tool to turn data about events, metrics, logs and traces into c-level dashboards which show how their essential resources are actively building and improving customer experiences.

    Moogsoft Delivers Instant Scale for Managed Services

    The Moogsoft Observability Cloud’s self-service architecture helps MSPs quickly bolster their service portfolios with intelligent noise-reduction, alert correlation, and native observability capabilities, including metrics collection and anomaly detection. In the time it takes to make a cappuccino, Moogsoft can be provisioned to operate across cloud workloads, microservices- and Kubernetes-based infrastructure and a vast array of standard tools. This means an SRE deploying Moogsoft can begin maximizing ops efficiency in minutes while those using old-fashioned monitoring tools are only starting to connect their first events.

    For more information on Moogsoft and its cloud-native AIOps and observability solution, please visit: www.moogsoft.com.

    Additional Resources

    About Optimiz

    Optimiz is an IT Operations optimization partner that helps enterprises adapt and thrive in the digital era by simplifying the process of monitoring digital products and services, and empowering teams by learning the optimal ways to use monitoring tools to make data driven decisions. 

    A leader in providing services and solutions across the AIOps spectrum, Optimiz delivers clients APM, Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) and infrastructure monitoring, in addition to Event Correlation and ITSM process workflow automation. Its goal is to help reduce the number of incidents and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), while delivering the best digital experience for clients’ customers. More information at www.optimiz.ca.

    About Moogsoft

    Moogsoft is the AI-driven observability leader that provides intelligent monitoring solutions for smart DevOps. Moogsoft delivers the most advanced cloud-native, self-service platform for software engineers, developers and operators to instantly see everything, know what’s wrong and fix things faster. Founded in 2012, Moogsoft has more than 140 customers worldwide including American Airlines, Fannie Mae, Fiserv, HCL Technologies, SAP SuccessFactors, and Verizon Media. It has established strategic partnerships with leading managed service providers and outsourcing organizations including AWS, Cisco, HCL Technologies, TCS and Wipro. 

    Moogsoft® and the Moogsoft logo are proprietary trademarks of Moogsoft Inc. All other products or names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

    For more information about the Moogsoft Observability Cloud and its customers’ success, visit www.moogsoft.com.

  • Instana Achieves Advanced Technology Partner Status in the AWS Partner Network and Membership in the APN Global Startup Program

    Company Builds on Customer Success and AWS Marketplace Offerings Allowing Direct Purchase of SaaS Offering with an AWS Account

     

    Chicago – October 13, 2020 – Instana, a leading provider of real-time application performance management (APM) and Observability solutions for cloud-native microservice applications, today announced that the company has achieved Advanced Technology Partner status in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN), the highest Technology Partner tier for software vendors in the APN, and has joined the APN Global Startup Program.

    “As cloud platform users have moved from simply accessing virtual servers to running business applications on a cloud-based full stack, the need to monitor application performance with full-stack visibility has become a critical need of IT Development and Ops teams,” said Lars Kamp, vice president of platform sales at Instana. “Becoming an APN Advanced Technology Partner is confirmation of Instana’s ability to help AWS customers deliver fast, secure, and reliable containerized software.”

    The APN Advanced Technology Partner designation is based on AWS business history and references from Instana customers who are currently using Instana to monitor and manage the performance of their AWS infrastructure and applications. Achieving this status strengthens Instana’s relationship with AWS and comes with access to expertise in AWS Training and

    Certification for growth and development of Instana’s technical resources on AWS.

    The APN Global Startup Program is a unique “white glove” support and go-to-market (GTM) Program for selected startup APN Partners, so that they can build on their AWS expertise, better serve shared customers, and accelerate their growth.

    To be selected for the APN Global Startup Program, Instana met predefined criteria, including a clear, demonstrated product market fit for an innovative enterprise tech product, be backed and recommended by a top-tier venture capital firm, and have a strategic commitment to building their cloud expertise.

    Instana today also announced immediate availability of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Contracts through Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. This opportunity allows for an automated and accelerated purchasing process for AWS customers and expedites their time-to-value with Instana. AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog of ISV solutions running on AWS, providing a simplified procurement process, easier method for software deployment, consolidated billing and visibility of purchasing across all business units of AWS customers.

    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, mitigate risk, and add value & efficiency to the pipeline.

    Instana is tightly integrated with container services on AWS such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon AWS Fargate and Lambda. Learn more at https://instana.com.

  • IT Revolution Announces New Book, ‘The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy’

    Author Mark Schwartz reveals a new and empowering playbook for business and technology leaders to turn bureaucracy into a powerful tool

    PORTLAND, Ore., October 13, 2020 — IT Revolution, the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today announced its newest book, The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy:
    Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler    . Paperback, eBook and Audio editions are available October 13. To order, visit: (https://itrevolution.com/delicate-art-of-bureaucracy/).  

    Authored by Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist at Amazon Web Services (AWS), The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy presents humor, history, and real-life examples from his days as a government bureaucrat. Schwartz puts forth a one-of-a-kind playbook to show technology and business leaders how to wield bureaucracy as a superpower and bust through it at the same time.

    “People are really good at creating bureaucracy, so we find it everywhere. The only way we can accomplish large-scale change like digital transformation,” Schwartz says, “is to make the bureaucracy become lean, learning and enabling.”

    “What I’ve learned is the frustrations of bureaucracy can be addressed by techniques that are analogous to the ones that we use in DevOps and digital transformation.”

    To download a free excerpt or the audiobook companion of The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy, visit: (https://itrevolution.com/delicate-art-of-bureaucracy/).

    About the Author
    As an Enterprise Strategist for Amazon Web Services, Mark Schwartz uses his extensive CIO wisdom to advise the world’s largest companies on how to meet their business objectives by moving to the cloud. As the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices. Mark speaks frequently on innovation, change leadership, thriving despite bureaucracy, and using Agile practices in low-trust environments. With a BS in computer science from Yale, a master’s in philosophy from Yale, and an MBA from Wharton, Mark brings multidisciplinary insights to his writings on business leadership.

    Mark is the author of The Art of Business Value, A Seat at the Table, and War and Peace and IT and the winner of a Computerworld Premier 100 award, an Information Week Elite 100 award, a Federal Computer Week Fed 100 award, and a CIO Magazine CIO 100 award. As he points out, there are probably 99 or fewer people more worth listening to on these subjects.

    Join IT Revolution’s Book Club for The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy starting October 19. Sign up at: (https://itrevolution.com/bookclub/). 
    Book Review Quotes:
    “Mark Schwartz turns the tables on bureaucracy, offering a practical guide to stripping out a labyrinth of rules and replacing them with simplicity, ease, and automation. His version of a benevolent bureaucracy paves the path for digital transformation and facilitates creativity and innovation,” said Kimberly Johnson, COO, Fannie Mae.

    “Bureaucracy has never been discussed in such an entertaining and educational way before. Learn how to clean out the organizational ‘scar tissue’ that is slowing you down,” said Adrian Cockcroft, VP Cloud Architecture Strategy, Amazon Web Services.

    “Mark Schwartz has done it again, and this time he draws upon experiences as government CIO to share how to make bureaucracy a competitive advantage,” said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Unicorn Project, and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook and Accelerate. “For anyone frustrated by roadblocks, irritated the business can’t move fast enough, or suffering under the weight of crushing procedures, this book is for you.”

    About IT Revolution
    IT Revolution (https://itrevolution.com/) assembles technology leaders and practitioners through publishing, events, and research. Our goal is to elevate the state of technology work, quantify the economic and human costs associated with suboptimal IT performance, and to improve the lives of technology professionals.

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  • Exadel QA Automation Practice Helps Enterprises Build Ultra-modern Digital Products

    Through a robust range of services, frameworks and professional support, the Exadel Automation QA Practice employs the latest QA Automation solutions and technologies for flawless end-user experience

    WALNUT CREEK, Calif., October 13, 2020 — Exadel (www.exadel.com), a global provider of digital software engineering solutions and services, announced its QA Automation (QAA) Practice, created to help clients work industry-standard QA Automation into their development processes to save time, money, and resources, while improving the quality of their software. The QA Automation Practice is part of a broader initiative from Exadel to offer direct solutions to customer needs, freeing them up to spend more time and energy focusing on their ultimate business goals.

    Learn more about Exadel’s QA Automation Practice: (https://www.exadel.com/services/engineering/quality-assurance/)

    The Exadel QA Automation Practice offers the following services and solutions: 

    • QA Consulting: the Exadel QA consulting team analyzes clients’ current QA systems, where and how they are using QAA and then designs and builds QAA processes from scratch, providing recommendations on tools, coverage, and team composition to ensure that they benefit from QA Automation integration for the entire lifecycle of their products.
    • QA Services: The Exadel QAA practice can provide a range of specific testing services to clients using a solution model, a partnership model or a staff augmentation model of engagement. Exadel takes a test-first approach to QAA. Exadel brings expertise in a range of testing methodologies including unit testing, integration testing, API testing, GUI end-to-end testing, performance testing and non-functional testing practices. No matter the system, architecture or device, Exadel’s QAA experts can quickly add quality to every step of the development process. 
    • QA Automation Frameworks: with years of experience working in QAA, Exadel has combined the industry’s standard best practices into two frameworks: 
      • Gherkin-based Component Testing Framework for End-to-End Automation: In this framework, Manual QAs use Gherkin-based predefined steps and can send requests for additional keyword (step definition) to verify functionality without coding. This maximizes teams by turning Manual QAs into Automation QAs. 
      • Web-based Component Testing Framework for End-to-End Testing: With this framework, Manual QAs can prepare a combination of test data (according to requirements) with no prior coding experience, while Automation QA engineers can add test methods for the Manual QA team to execute.

    “Quality is what differentiates leaders from bystanders but is also one of the most challenging tasks to achieve consistently as a software company,” said Lev Shur, president of Exadel Solutions. “With the Exadel QA Automation Practice, customers can offload their most challenging QA problems onto us. QA Automation is not just an add-on—when done correctly it’s an integral part of the development process from ideation to delivery. We’re proud to offer robust services around QA and will continue to evolve this Practice as digital transformation becomes more complex.”

    Learn more about the Exadel QA Automation Practice and frameworks: https://exadel.com/services/engineering/quality-assurance/qa-automation/

    Tweet this: New from @exadel: QA Automation Practice offers consulting, services and frameworks to build quality into every step of the development lifecycle

    About Exadel

    Exadel is a leading digital platform engineering services provider. Through technical software development, Exadel helps Fortune 500 clients accelerate their digital transformations by providing innovative solutions, services and engineering expertise. Exadel enables clients to engage competitively with their customers by delivering products and platforms at optimal efficiency. With 20+ locations and delivery centers across the US and Europe, Exadel solves the most complex engineering problems using recognized agile practices, offering a high-quality and skilled mix of multi-shore resources with deep knowledge of advanced technologies.