devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • Modern Cross Browser Testing Report Indicates 18.2x Faster Test Cycles When Using Applitools’ Ultrafast Test Cloud

    3,112 hours of cross browser testing data empirically proves incredible speed and coverage gains helping engineers release higher quality apps faster than ever before

    SAN MATEO, Calif., September 15, 2020 — Applitools (https://applitools.com/), provider of a next generation test automation platform powered by Visual AI and Ultrafast Grid, today announced an industry report empirically proving that modern cross browser testing powered by Visual AI helps engineers test 18.2x faster across the full test cycle including writing, running, analyzing, reporting, and maintaining tests.

    To download the “Modern Cross Browser Testing Through Visual AI Report” visit: https://applitools.com/modern-cross-browser-testing-report

    Data for the report was sourced from 203 engineers across 75 countries who spent 3,112 hours completing the Ultrafast Cross Browser Testing Hackathon in June 2020. The data shows Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud Powered by Visual AI allowed engineers to complete a full test cycle on a modern, responsive e-commerce application in just 1.6 hours versus 29.2 hours when using traditional cloud testing environments.

    Additional highlights from the report include:

    • A detailed breakdown of the 18.2x time savings across the end-to-end test cycle including writing, running, analyzing, reporting, and maintaining tests. Because Applitools runs tests once locally, then renders across all browsers, viewports, and devices, it eliminates the need for slow VMs and multiple connections that traditional test cloud solutions rely on.
    • 99% reduction in the number of lines of test code virtually eliminating the maintenance overhead that plagues traditional cloud testing solutions.
    • 91% reduction in the use of locators due to the use of Applitools Visual AI because it relies on images instead of brittle, flaky locators to support the test scenario.
    • 77% increase in software engineer satisfaction vs. traditional cloud testing approaches. Applitools received a Net Promoter Score (NPS)* of 70 compared to -54 for traditional approaches to cross browser testing.
    • Engineers of any skill level learned Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud in less than 90 minutes and upskilled to modern cross browser testing as a result.

    “The incredible challenges brought on by digital transformation require a modern approach to cross environment testing. Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud combines Visual AI with container-based rendering to address them,” said Gil Sever, CEO and co-founder of Applitools. “Hundreds of software engineers have shown us how Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud is an incredible efficiency multiplier for cross browser testing. It delivers significant time and money savings while helping teams release faster than ever before. It represents the future of testing where continuous quality is key to successful digital transformation for modern engineering teams.”

    “Cross browser testing is ultra fast using Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud. Bugs that I missed (and there were lots!) on different browsers and viewports were easily caught without affecting the time it takes to run my tests,” said Marie Drake, Principal Test Engineer at News UK. “Functional testing frameworks automate browsers, but they are not built to catch the visual changes now incredibly common, cross environment. Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud helps engineers succeed when doing modern cross browser testing.”

    Learn more about the Future of Testing with Angie Jones, Marie Drake, Microsoft Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, Twitter, Salesforce and more. Join an exclusive event for engineering leaders who own quality management: https://applitools.com/future-of-testing-us/

    Data from the report was sourced from the Ultrafast Cross Browser Testing Hackathon which challenged participants to author cross browser and cross device tests against a modern, responsive, ecommerce app. The event challenged engineers to test a new release candidate across seven different browsers and three viewport sizes and ensure the new version is bug free. Participants used both their preferred legacy cloud testing solution and Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud Powered by Visual AI integrated into their preferred test framework and desired programming language using over 50 SDKs.

    Engineering leaders that participated in the study commented:

    • “With Applitools, setting up configurations related to viewports, devices and browsers is very easy and saves a lot of time,” said Himanshu Soni, Lead QA at Amadeus Labs. “Frankly speaking, I spent a heck of a lot of time setting the same configuration for traditional tests, whereas using the Ultrafast Grid it was in a blink of an eye.”
    • “The Ultrafast Grid is really the right tool when it comes to cross-browser and responsive design testing,” said Roman Lymariev, Senior Quality Assurance Automation Engineer at Mobiquity. “You can quickly set up your tests and start catching the related bugs really fast. Traditional approaches do not work quite as well in this department.”
    • “I loved how intuitive Applitools Ultrafast Grid is,” said Kerry McKeever, Senior Software Test Engineer at Paylocity. “The speed of learning the API and the dashboard, as well as the speed of developing the tests without the need for dozens of locators, conditional waits, management of drivers/browsers, etc., made testing a breeze.”

    Learn more about the Applitools Ultrafast Grid and get started today: https://applitools.com/ultrafast-grid.

    *Net Promoter Score ranges from +100 (high satisfaction)  to -100 (low satisfaction). NPS is calculated by ignoring the passive responses and subtracting the % of detractors from the % of promoters. Products with an NPS over 50 are considered world-class while products below 0 are in decline and losing users.

    About Applitools

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

     

  • Former Cloudbees Leader and Author Viktor Farcic Joins Codefresh as Principal DevOps Architect

    DevOps Paradox podcast host is well-known in the industry

    Mountain View, Calif., September 15, 2020 – Codefresh has expanded its team to include Viktor Farcic as Principal DevOps Architect to focus on open source contributions and community engagement. Farcic, who is based in Barcelona, comes from Cloudbees where he most recently served as Product Manager. Before that, he was Principal Software Delivery Strategist and Developer Advocate for the company.

    With a deep interest in GitOps, CI/CD, containers, cloud, and Kubernetes, Farcic is a member of Google Developer Experts and Docker Captains Group. He has published several industry books, including The DevOps Toolkit series, Test-Driven Java Development, and DevOps Paradox that is also the title of the podcast he co-hosts with Darin Pope.

    Prior to Cloudbees, Farcic worked as senior software architect for everis and Defie, and as team lead for GTECH. He is a sought-after speaker at Kubecon Europe, 24hrs of Google Tech Talks, SkilUp, SauceCon Europe, and DevOps Pro Europe, as well as workshops and meetups.

    “What Codefresh has already achieved as a small company, and continues to achieve, is exciting for me,” Farcic said. “I see Codefresh becoming synonymous with CI/CD tooling, much like how Google is synonymous with ‘search engine’. Working with Codefresh to achieve that level of recognition by the DevOps community is a very worthy goal.”

    In addition to his new role at Codefresh, Farcic will continue to publish industry books and produce his podcast.

    “Viktor’s contributions to the community are legendary. He’s helped thousands of engineering teams and we think by putting our heads together we can help thousands more,” said Dan Garfield Chief Technology Evangelist.

    Codefresh’s CI/CD platform provides automation for building, testing and deploying modern applications using Kubernetes, serverless and more. Development teams often see 24x faster engineering cycles when using Codefresh.

    About Codefresh, Inc.
    Founded in 2014 by Raziel Tabib and Oleg Verhovsky, Codefresh is the first Kubernetes-native CI/CD platform. After launch in 2017, Codefresh has gained tens of thousands of users. Unlike legacy solutions, Codefresh pipelines are uniquely designed for cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes, Terraform, and Helm. Codefresh is headquartered in Mountain View, CA and backed by world-class investors: M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, Red Dot Capital Partners, Shasta Ventures, Viola Ventures, Vertex Ventures, Hillsven, CEIIF, UpWest Labs and Streamlined Ventures. Learn more about Codefresh at https://codefresh.io/. Follow on LinkedIn and Twitter at @codefresh.

     

     

  • 6sense Projected to Hit 100% Revenue Growth for Third Consecutive Year

    Account engagement leader maintains momentum by aligning sales and marketing, providing visibility into target buyers, and orchestrating the modern customer journey with AI

    San Francisco – Sept. 15, 2020 – 6sense, the leading Account Engagement Platform, today announced the company projects 100% revenue growth for the third year in a row. Despite the challenges of a global pandemic, 6sense continues to thrive by helping businesses predictably grow revenue with AI, big data, and machine learning. The $40 million in funding 6sense secured from Insight Partners in January, combined with its recognition as a Leader in The Forrester New Wave™: ABM Platforms, Q2 2020 report, have helped the company separate from the competitive landscape, fuel record hiring, and deliver on its aggressive product roadmap.

    “6ense was founded upon the vision of transforming B2B sales and marketing with a next-generation platform that engages target buyers at exactly the right time,” said Viral Bajaria, CTO and Co-founder of 6sense. “Our patented AI-powered capabilities, including 6sense’s time-based predictions and industry-leading account identification capabilities, continue to be differentiators in the market — and deliver real business value to our customers.”

    6sense’s customer base has grown 204% since January 1, 2019 and 54% since the beginning of 2020, and the company boasts a net customer retention rate of 109%. The company has doubled down on its growth by delivering weekly product releases throughout 2020, including:

    • Native Retargeting, which programmatically serves display ads to all website visitors or visitors from target accounts
    • An integration with LinkedIn, enabling mutual customers to leverage 6sense’s account data and insights for all LinkedIn ad types
    • Next Best Actions, which uses AI to provide specific, prioritized actions for business development representatives (BDRs) to engage the buying center within a target account
    • Model Metrics, which provide customers with self-service analytics on the impact of 6sense’s AI-driven predictions on pipeline and revenue

    As a result of the company’s continuous focus on innovation, 6sense delivers the most comprehensive account-based sales and marketing platform in the market, including industry-best advertising and orchestration capabilities that deliver the right message to the right buyers at the right time.

    “The most exciting thing about our momentum is the value our customers generate with our platform and approach, like 75% higher conversion rates, 40% higher win rates, and 50% higher contract values,” said Latané Conant, Chief Market Officer at 6sense. Conant recently published “No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls.,” a step-by-step guide for sales and marketing teams to achieve these kinds of results by uncovering customer demand, prioritizing which accounts to work, engaging the entire customer buying team, and measuring real business impact.

    6sense has also received multiple accolades throughout the year for both the quality of product and workplace: Organization of the Year by the Business Intelligence Group, recognition from Inc. Magazine as a Best Workplace, The SaaS Awards, The American Business Awards and the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA CODiE). Additionally, SiriusDecisions awarded PTC Program of the Year for the company’s Revenue Orchestration and Intelligence Engine (ROI Engine) initiative, a collaborative effort involving 6sense, Drift, and People.ai.

    To learn more about the 6sense Account Engagement Platform, visit 6sense.com.

    About 6sense

    The 6sense Account Engagement Platform helps B2B organizations achieve predictable revenue growth by putting the power of AI, big data, and machine learning behind every member of the revenue team. Led by Jason Zintak, 6sense uncovers anonymous buying behavior, prioritizes accounts for sales and marketing, and enables them to engage resistant buying teams with personalized, multi-channel, multi-touch campaigns. 6sense helps revenue teams know everything they need to know about their buyers so they can easily do anything needed to generate more opportunities, increase deal size, get into opportunities sooner, and compete and win more often.

  • ScienceLogic Eclipses AIOps Competition in EMA Report, Signals Mainstream Adoption of AIOps

    Outperforms 17 vendors in key use cases, illustrating dominance in leveraging AIOps to deliver resilient customer experiences

    EMA Radar Ranks ScienceLogic:

    #1 “Value Leader” in Incident, Performance, & Availability Management for Product Strength

    “Strong Value” in Business Impact and IT-to-Business Alignment

    “Strong Value” in Change Impact and Capacity Optimization

    Reston, VA – Sept. 10, 2020 – ScienceLogic, a top provider of monitoring solutions for multi-cloud management and hybrid IT infrastructure, once again leads the way in the inaugural Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) AIOps Radar Report. This latest recognition cements ScienceLogic’s leadership in the AIOps industry and its reputation for delivering resilient and automated IT operations.

    “In an evolving market where ‘AIOps’ is too often simply a branding move, ScienceLogic stands out as a true leader in industry advances—unifying stakeholders to deliver on the promise of transforming business delivery,” said EMA’s Dennis Nils Drogseth, the report’s author. “Their exceptional impact across all three use cases is a culmination of some of the platform’s most notable core strengths. That includes supporting business services from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives, delivering compelling outcomes, and scaling to a level that can assimilate thousands of different sources while also bringing in more than 10 million data points in less than five minutes.”

     As further detailed in the report and supplementary customer feedback, ScienceLogic was recognized for its highly scalable, “richly assimilative” SL1 platform. This automated solution employs analytics and machine learning to assess operational data in real-time across the IT estate, delivering service-level insights that directly impact business outcomes. With SL1, managed service providers (MSPs), large enterprises and global systems integrators (GSIs) can proactively avoid service outages using AI-enabled performance baselines and behavioral correlation.

    “The findings in the EMA report are a powerful validation of the technology investments ScienceLogic has made since its inception, addressing the needs of increasingly large and complex IT estates,” said Michael Nappi, ScienceLogic Chief Product Officer. “Our data collection mechanisms, for example, are extremely capable—ingesting huge volumes and varieties of data across multiple protocols to feed a comprehensive data lake representing IT artifacts and their relationships. Getting the data right is the hardest problem in AIOps—and this is an area where SL1 really shines. With this authoritative data platform in place, our machine learning algorithms can be applied to great effect: efficiently reasoning over the data to derive actionable insights, which in turn drive increased service health and availability for our customers.”

    Other differentiating features of ScienceLogic SL1:

    ● Business service views radically simplify the management of large IT estates

    ● Behavioral correlation extends traditional event correlation with AI/ML

    ● Low code automation with Powerflow allows for rapid creation of automated workflows and integrations

    “We evaluated ScienceLogic against other solutions [and] SL1 stood out as a provider of automation, machine learning and integration. The resulting ease of use, customization and support for nearly every tech vendor gave us the most bang for our buck,” said Doug James, Director of Technology and Business Management, NetDesign. “Now, we’re socializing proactive and intelligent monitoring in our customer conversations. We’ve taken an area previously considered ‘technical’ or a ‘background task’ and shifted it to our priority topics and value propositions. ScienceLogic has enabled and enhanced this B2B transparency, which has helped us engage our customers and prospects in new and different ways.”

    Additional Resources

    ● Download Report: EMA AIOps Radar

    About ScienceLogic

    ScienceLogic is a leader in IT Operations Management, providing modern IT operations with actionable insights to predict and resolve problems faster in a digital, ephemeral world. Its solution sees everything across multi-cloud and distributed architectures, contextualizes data through relationship mapping, and acts on this insight through integration and automation. Trusted by thousands of organizations across the globe, ScienceLogic’s technology is designed for the rigorous security requirements of the United States Department of Defense, proven for scale by the world’s largest service providers, and optimized for the needs of large enterprises. https://sciencelogic.com

    About EMA

    Founded in 1996, EMA is a leading industry analyst firm that specializes in providing deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help their clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at https://www.enterprisemanagement.com.

  • Moogsoft Named a Leader in EMA’s Radar Report on AIOps and Wins DevOps Innovation Award

    Recognized exclusively for delivering self-service and rapid deployment model with the first dedicated DevOps solution in the AIOps market

    SAN FRANCISCO – Sept. 10, 2020 – Moogsoft, the pioneer and leading provider of artificial intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps), today announced that Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has named it a “Value Leader” and recognized the company for its DevOps innovation in the firm’s 2020 AIOps Radar Report. The full report can be viewed online at: moogsoft.com/EMA-Report.

    In the comprehensive report, which ranked 17 AIOps solutions using dozens of key decision-making factors, Moogsoft earned EMA’s Value Leader status across nearly all AIOps use cases: Incident, Performance, and Availability Management as well as Change Impact and Capacity Optimization. EMA also recognized Moogsoft exclusively as an innovator in DevOps, which is the third most common AIOps use case, according to the report.

    “In an eclectic market with many different approaches, Moogsoft has established itself as one of the leaders and a definer of AIOps,” said Dennis Drogseth, Vice President, EMA and author of the report. “Its rich data ingestion capabilities are a credit to Moogsoft’s patented algorithms, while its integrations are among the best in the market. This is enhanced by Moogsoft’s Situation Room, which provides a uniquely rich environment for IT teams to remotely collaborate.”

    The report also recognizes Moogsoft’s extraordinary investments in AI/ML heuristics with well-integrated workflows and automation, as well as out-of-the-box capabilities for data assimilation from third-party sources. “It is designed to deliver compelling value without the significant amount of overhead that often accompanies large, complex AIOps deployments,” continues its evaluation of Moogsoft, which considered user feedback as a significant part of its methodology.

    “We selected Moogsoft after evaluating other AIOps platforms and suites because of its AI/analytic strength and Moogsoft’s guided machine learning,” states the director of IT operations at a global oil and gas industry leader, in the report. “The platform’s embedded capabilities for automation were also an important factor.”

    “This report validates how important AIOps has become for businesses of all sizes as they embrace a fully digital future,” said Moogsoft Founder and CEO Phil Tee. “It also perfectly underscores our vision for a cloud AIOps architecture to deliver DevOps and SRE teams rapidly deployable and automated observability across all their services.”

    Cloud-First Model Recognized as a Game-Changer

    EMA also named Moogsoft the winner of its DevOps Innovation Award, which recognizes strides to democratize AIOps with the arrival of an entirely new cloud-first architecture. Based on the latest developments in modern microservices and cloud-based technologies, this new platform delivers the market a new self-service, rapid-deployment model for DevOps and SRE teams to combine AIOps and observability in a single platform.

    The report calls this new architecture “the first dedicated DevOps solution in the AIOps market, with fast-time-to value and a wide range of features.”

    Additional Resources

    About the EMA Radar Report

    The EMA Radar Report delivers an in-depth analysis of industry-leading vendors and vendor products, including their overall market position in comparison with other vendors. This information is laid out in an easy-to-decipher, detailed Radar Chart, making it simple to see how vendors measure up in the market, as well as against other vendors. The EMA Radar Report also provides a detailed discussion of methodology and criteria, a high-level market segment overview, and a comprehensive analyst write-up on each vendor.

    About Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

    Founded in 1996, EMA is a leading industry analyst firm that specializes in providing deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help their clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals, and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com.

    About Moogsoft

    Moogsoft is a pioneer and leading provider of AIOps solutions that help IT teams work faster and smarter. With patented AI analyzing billions of events daily across the world’s most complex IT environments, the Moogsoft AIOps Platform helps the world’s top enterprises avoid outages, automate service assurance, and accelerate digital transformation initiatives. 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 Moogsoft’s AIOps platform and its customers’ success, visit www.moogsoft.com.

  • JourneyApps Launches OXIDE, Creating a New Paradigm for High-Productivity, High-Control Development of Powerful Business Apps

    Next-gen Integrated Development Environment (IDE) OXIDE introduces a new approach that brings the productivity benefits of low-code platforms to code-centric app development.

    DENVER, September 9, 2020 — JourneyApps, a company empowering developers with flexible and highly-productive application development, today announced the official launch of its OXIDE Integrated Development Environment (IDE) which ushers in a new paradigm of building, deploying and managing secure and powerful business applications. OXIDE fills a gap in the application development market by combining the speed and efficiency of low-code platforms with the flexibility and power of professional development in a single platform.

    “In recent years we’ve seen low-code become an appropriate solution for businesses to develop simple apps really quickly — however, there is much higher ROI for companies in building more powerful apps that address harder digitization and automation problems,” said Conrad Hofmeyr, CEO of JourneyApps. “The problem is that when you’re using low-code / no-code platforms and apps become more complex, the visual point-and-click development approach becomes unwieldy and the speed of development slows down dramatically. On the other hand, IT groups are so backlogged that it’s not feasible for them to build all these apps using their traditional professional development tools. This is why there is a clear need for an app development platform that allows complex apps to be built primarily with code in a rapid and highly productive way — which is exactly what OXIDE is pioneering.”

    OXIDE is a next-generation web-based IDE where apps are built using a combination of code and visual tools. Logic is developed using JavaScript or TypeScript, whereas screen layouts and data models are built using either visual tools or code — developers can instantly switch between the two. OXIDE allows developers to build cross-platform apps that automatically run on any supported device type and operating system (iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux) without additional configurations. Additionally, any app built in OXIDE can be run as a web app in a browser – making it ideal for use cases like customer portals.

    The live co-editing and GitHub integration in OXIDE also allows developers to collaborate easily in real-time, from anywhere. All apps built on the platform automatically have zero-configuration, secure offline bi-directional data sync — allowing users to work from remote environments without any connectivity.

    “COVID-19 has spurred many companies to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives,” said Kobie Botha, Chief Product Officer at JourneyApps. “The code-centric approach at the heart of OXIDE enables companies to respond to this challenge by rapidly scaling the delivery of ambitious apps without scaling developer headcount.”

    Through an Early Access Program, key JourneyApps customers in a variety of industries including medical equipment, oil and gas, and industrial manufacturing have been able to test and use OXIDE before its official launch. The IDE has enabled them to sustain high development velocity even as application requirements become more advanced, and provides complete control over their code without proprietary restrictions or vendor lock-in.

    “I like the JourneyApps and OXIDE approach, where code is still a first-class citizen, and it’s still so easy to build views and advanced logic — you are able to do a lot without having to know a lot, and you don’t feel restricted.” said Anthony Licona, Director of Innovation and Technology at EDGE OFS. “I’ve used other low-code platforms, and it seems they put much more emphasis on the no-code part of their products than the low-code part — so when you’re using their visual editing tools, your hands feel tied in terms of what you can do. And then when you get to the code part, it is just so overly complex that it stands in stark contrast to the visual editing.”

    “All companies need apps, and if your core business is not software, the investment required to build those apps can be a big barrier,” said Jonathan Villamil, Systems Specialist at Parker Drilling. “JourneyApps is a great platform to overcome that barrier. In the past, if we wanted an app, we would get a 3rd party to develop it. Now we can actually build everything we need in-house.”

    OXIDE is the new command center for the overall JourneyApps platform — a complete stack for developing and running custom enterprise apps, including a cross-platform on-device application runtime, an integrated cloud backend and a serverless computing engine.

    For more information about OXIDE and to request a demo, please visit journeyapps.com.

    About JourneyApps 

    JourneyApps is an app platform company that offers the ultimate fusion of low-code and pro-code app development for software engineers. Based in Denver, JourneyApps allows companies to quickly and cost-efficiently scale the delivery of complex apps that can run in highly challenging environments. More information at journeyapps.com

  • Hazelcast Advances Leadership, Lowers Barrier of Adoption to In-Memory Digital Integration Hubs

    Latest version of Hazelcast IMDG adds SQL support, improves reliability, simplifies cluster discovery in the cloud and more

    San Mateo, Calif., September 9, 2020 – Hazelcast, the leading open source in-memory computing platform, today announced a new major feature and a number of enhancements to its in-memory data grid (IMDG), Hazelcast IMDG. Among the updates are preview support for managing distributed data using SQL, out-of-the-box support for Kerberos, additional tuning options for Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory Modules and quicker cluster rebalancing. With the latest version of Hazelcast IMDG, use cases such as digital integration hubs gain improved performance, scalability and resiliency.

    The combination of business leaders requiring tailored views of data and the proliferation of data sources is stressing legacy architectures and infrastructure. An emerging answer to these challenges is a new architecture, digital integration hubs, that is a  data architecture that provides a single access point and standardized API that can be called upon by multiple applications. These hubs are often deployed to reduce workloads on backend systems, to accelerate access to data hosted in backend databases and mainframes, and to provide a common API to a variety of data sources  to integrate new technologies into legacy architectures. Hazelcast empowers proven, in-memory digital integration hubs by providing object storage in RAM, write-through caching, distributed processing and predefined connectors to many popular data sources.

    “Evolving legacy architectures, especially those with heterogeneous backends, toward new data channels pose a technological challenge of how to put all the pieces together while keeping the overall complexity maintainable. Digital integration hubs provide a central access point to those backend data sources that multiple applications can call upon uniformly,” said Kelly Herrell, CEO of Hazelcast. “Given that the hubs are the central component of these architectures, it needs to be fast, scalable, reliable and secure. The Hazelcast In-Memory Computing Platform provides the necessary capabilities that not only fulfill the requirements of the largest enterprises, but significantly simplifies the deployment and operational experiences when working with these innovative new digital integration hub architectures.”

    Introducing SQL Support

    To complement the existing APIs for languages including Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, C++ and Go, Hazelcast IMDG is introducing SQL support. Adding this capability to Hazelcast IMDG enables digital integration hubs to retrieve data using a common well-known API. Usage of indexes to speed up the queries, along with the ability to filter results on attributes extends Hazelcast IMDG beyond the limited query-by-key capability of basic key-value stores. The familiarity equates to simplified development and reduced implementation costs as well.

    “Given its widespread familiarity among developers, the addition of SQL support significantly reduces the learning curve and opens up new opportunities for enterprises to tap into the benefits of an in-memory computing platform,” said David Brimley, chief product officer at Hazelcast. “With SQL, it’s even more straightforward to let Hazelcast IMDG do the heavy lifting of retrieving data from multiple nodes, in parallel and ensuring correctness without introducing extra development costs.”

    In this release, the SQL support is intended for “select” queries on Hazelcast IMDG maps already populated with data. Additional capabilities, such as joins, aggregations and sorting will be added in future releases.

    Accelerated Cluster Rebalancing And Improved Network Failure Detection

    Since a digital integration hub is the primary access point for business-critical applications, any downtime can carry significant penalties, including potentially lost revenue and/or customers. Should a hardware failure occur, such as a computer crash, the cluster must restore the lost data immediately by promoting the backups of the lost partitions. However, the restoration process still requires the rebalancing of partitions across the cluster. In this release, Hazelcast is introducing parallel partition migrations which accelerates cluster rebalancing and reduces the time spent in a suboptimal state by an order of magnitude. As an example, should a network disconnect one node in a 10-node cluster responsible for storing four terabytes of data, Hazelcast IMDG will be able to complete partition rebalancing in approximately 2 minutes when it would have previously required at least 33 minutes.

    To further reduce the possibility of downtime, Hazelcast IMDG improves its partial network failure detection capabilities utilizing the implementation of the Bron–Kerbosch algorithm. This enhancement translates to improved high-availability in scenarios where a Hazelcast IMDG cluster must recover from hard-to-detect network failure scenarios.

    Out-of-the-Box Kerberos Authentication

    Hazelcast is introducing first-class, out-of-the-box support for Kerberos, a widely used authentication protocol. By integrating Kerberos support into Hazelcast IMDG, the engineering time and risks associated with manual integration are greatly reduced. The Kerberos protocol complements the enterprise-grade security suite of Hazelcast IMDG Enterprise.

    Cost-Efficient Data, Cloud-Friendly Updates and More

    Through the on-going co-engineering activities with Intel, Hazelcast continues to optimize its platform to take full advantage of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Modules. This release features the ability to use all Intel Optane Persistent Memory Modules installed in a system resulting in the ability for enterprises to build cost-efficient, terabyte-sized in-memory deployments. In addition, Hazelcast added performance tuning options that can increase the throughput of the system by 50% to gain near RAM-like speeds for half the cost in select use cases.

    The latest release enables even easier ways to incorporate Hazelcast IMDG into existing architectures as part of application modernization initiatives. In particular, Hazelcast IMDG is now able to:

    • Form a cluster in the cloud with a single line of configuration, which shrinks the setup time to seconds
    • Adjust the configuration without touching configuration files to reduce the DevOps overhead of distributed setups like with Kubernetes

    Availability

    Hazelcast IMDG 4.1 beta is available today and general availability (GA) is expected later this year.

    Additional Resources

    About Hazelcast, Inc.

    Hazelcast delivers the in-memory computing platform that empowers Global 2000 enterprises to achieve ultra-fast application performance – at any scale. Built for low-latency data processing, Hazelcast’s cloud-native in-memory data store and event stream processing software technologies are trusted by leading companies such as JPMorgan Chase, Charter Communications, Ellie Mae and National Australia Bank to accelerate data-centric applications.

    Hazelcast is headquartered in San Mateo, CA, with offices across the globe. To learn more about Hazelcast, visit https://hazelcast.com.

  • Pypestream Announces Integration With Conviva, Providing OTT Brands With AI-Powered, Proactive Customer Experience

    Integration resolves user concerns proactively and more efficiently, increasing customer satisfaction while eliminating call center queries

    September 9, 2020 – NEW YORK – Pypestream, the leading customer experience automation platform with all-in-one cloud messaging and conversational AI, announces its integration with the leader in global streaming media intelligence, Conviva. The joint offering delivers proactive customer experiences within digital conversational experiences through notifications, eliminating the need for customers to reactively call or email a call center. Sling TV uses the feature to provide customers with smart self-service solutions and always-on conversational brand experiences.

    “Our integration with Conviva allows us to deliver true AI-driven customer experiences that help a business’s bottom line while exceeding customer expectations,” said Richard Smullen, CEO at Pypestream. “Customer service today is built on reactivity, but for the first time ever, Pypestream enables OTT service providers to proactively handle user concerns or service issues. Proactive initiatives are the future of user experience and, now, OTT brands can take another step towards fully automating all steps of their customer support workflow.”

    According to customer experience industry data, 68% of consumers say proactive customer service increases brand perception and affinity. With Pypestream’s proactive, OTT customer experience integration, Conviva triggers Pypestream to send a notification to the user experiencing viewability issues, eliminating call center outreach and reactive customer service initiatives. Streaming video and OTT brands can now solve troubleshooting concerns without the need for human intervention through automation capabilities and conversational AI.

    “By partnering with Pypestream to offer fully automated proactive outreach, we’re allowing brands to update their user experience journey with touchpoints customers actually want and need,” said Sean Wilkinson, Head of Corporate Development at Conviva. “Now, instead of disjointed communication via email or interactions with call-center representatives, users will receive a message right away when an issue arises, saving them time and alleviating frustration.”

    With Pypestream’s pre-built conversation designs and AI training data, streaming video and OTT brands can more easily manage subscription changes, technical troubleshooting and account management.

    “At SLING TV, we are hyper-focused on the customer experience, and the Pypestream-Conviva integration allows us to serve our customers in innovative ways,” said Seth Van Sickel, vice president of Operations and Customer Experience at SLING TV. “We’ve seen an increase in user satisfaction now that our customers are able to access smarter self-service tools for SLING.”

    “With our market-first integration with Conviva, brands alleviate not only customer frustrations but internal frustrations, while saving time and money,” said Smullen. “Video streaming companies have the power and ability to eliminate call center interactions in favor of customer-preferred conversational AI experiences.”This announcement follows Pypestream’s market-first integration with DocuSign and the introduction of its Conversational Ads product. To learn more about Pypestream’s integration with Conviva, visit Pypestream.com.

    About Pypestream
    Pypestream provides all-in-one cloud messaging to usher customer-centric enterprises into the digital age with “always-on” automation. The conversational AI platform enables rich user experiences backed by military-grade security and a patented carrier purpose-built to handle any volume. The world’s leading companies place Pypestream at the center of their CX strategy, and earn dramatic increases in NPS, cost efficiencies, and new opportunities for revenue generation.

    About Conviva

    Conviva is the leader in streaming media intelligence, powered by its real-time platform. More than 250 industry leaders and brands – including CBS, CCTV, Cirque Du Soleil, DAZN, Disney+, HBO, Hulu, Sky, Sling TV, TED, Univision, and WarnerMedia – rely on Conviva to maximize their consumer engagement, deliver the quality experiences viewers expect, and drive revenue growth. With a global footprint of more than 500 million unique viewers watching 150 billion streams per year across 3 billion applications streaming on devices, Conviva offers streaming providers unmatched scale for continuous video measurement, intelligence, and benchmarking across every stream, every screen, every second.

  • Capgemini Introduces ‘Smart Foundry’

    Innovative DevTest environment management solution powered by Nutanix and Plutora capabilities bolsters speed-to-market for financial services institutions

    PARIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Capgemini today announced the launch of ‘Smart Foundry,’ its end-to-end DevTest1 environment management solution, powered by the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Plutora’s Value Stream Management (VSM) platforms. Smart Foundry integrates with Capgemini’s SmartQA platform to deliver multi-premise, cloud-agnostic, and domain-centric testing solutions for application deployment. The solution can deliver DevTest environments across on-premise, private and public clouds based on budgetary and reuse needs, and service level agreements. Smart Foundry can accelerate time-to-market by as much as 60%, lower costs by up to 40%, and reduce environment-related defects and provisioning delays by as much as 80%. Capgemini’s Smart Foundry solution is initially tailored to meet the needs of Financial Services organizations and will be rolled out to other industry sectors in the future.

    “Smart Foundry is designed to bring in intelligent integrations, more automation and self-provisioning capabilities to expedite ‘efficient route to live’ along with ‘effective QA’ in the Software Development Lifecycle”

    According to Capgemini’s World Quality Report 2019-20, the widespread adoption of agile and DevOps methodologies, the need for Quality Assurance (QA) orchestration and its impact on enterprises, is higher than ever before. The report concludes that there is a need for an integrated and intelligent ecosystem for DevOps2 and QA to realize business benefits.

    The new solution incorporates cutting-edge technologies and practices such as service virtualization, container management, interactive configuration management databases, chaos engineering, observability, and auto-healing. Smart Foundry was designed as a reference architecture that seamlessly integrates with Capgemini’s SmartQA platform and a wide range of test data, automation, and reporting tools leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.

    “Smart Foundry is designed to bring in intelligent integrations, more automation and self-provisioning capabilities to expedite ‘efficient route to live’ along with ‘effective QA’ in the Software Development Lifecycle,” said Ajay Walgude, Vice President, Capgemini’s Financial Services. “To do this, it is essential that a highly automated and intelligent test environment and test data management platform is implemented. We teamed with Nutanix and Plutora, who deliver next-generation technology, to achieve these goals. This is not just an engineering solution. Capgemini has leveraged its deep domain experience across sectors to build industry-specific environment solutions to address functional and non-functional testing requirements using Smart Foundry.”

    To provide a cloud-like experience, Capgemini chose the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud infrastructure platform to power, secure, and orchestrate DevTest environments. Additional Nutanix solution components that are incorporated into the solution include: Nutanix Calm which simplifies and automates deploying DevTest environments with detailed blueprints; Nutanix Karbon for Kubernetes management; unified storage to support the block, file, and object data needs of diverse applications; and Nutanix Beam which provides cost management capabilities.

    “Many organizations struggle with maintaining visibility and managing overheads for their DevTest environments, due to over-reliance on manual processes and the lack of standardization,” said Manoj Gupta, Vice President of Systems Integration at Nutanix. “Capgemini’s Smart Foundry, built on industry-leading Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure platform software, gives organizations a standardized, high-performing, continuous testing solution with measurable benefits such as shorter development lifecycle, improved software quality, high developer productivity, and significant cost savings.”

    “Software drives innovation and it has always been our intention to help organizations to shape their business through amazing software and stay competitive through continuous innovation,” said Jeff Keyes, Vice President of Product, Plutora. “By bringing Plutora’s Value Stream Management (VSM) and environment provisioning capabilities to Capgemini’s Smart Foundry, we believe the resulting visibility provides for a holistic environment management solution. To compete in today’s constantly changing landscape, it’s vital for organizations to focus on driving successful outcomes and increasing business value, and the importance of VSM in that pursuit is essential when building a holistic environment management solution like Smart Foundry.”

    Plutora offers a complete pre-production environment management solution that provides internal and external environment teams a central place to collaborate on and view environment bookings and configurations. As part of Capgemini’s Smart Foundry, Plutora gives users the ability to select from a list of available Nutanix Calm Blueprints and the system orchestrates the build of the appropriate environment, automatically. Plutora also allows users to create a Change Request that will orchestrate the provisioning of synthesized test data.

    Capgemini will host a FinServ Meet Up session at Nutanix’s upcoming Global .NEXT Digital Experience, on Wednesday, September 9th at 11:35am-12:15pm PDT and Thursday, September 10th at 12:20pm-1:00pm CEST. Participants can register to attend the free event and learn more about Smart Foundry.

    About Capgemini

    Capgemini is a global leader in consulting, digital transformation, technology and engineering services. The Group is at the forefront of innovation to address the entire breadth of clients’ opportunities in the evolving world of cloud and digital platforms. Building on its strong 50-year+ heritage and deep industry-specific expertise, Capgemini enables organizations to realize their business ambitions through an array of services from strategy to operations. Capgemini is driven by the conviction that the business value of technology comes from and through people. Today, it is a multicultural company of 270,000 team members in almost 50 countries. With Altran, the Group reported 2019 combined revenues of €17billion.

    Visit us at www.capgemini.com. People matter, results count.

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    1 A DevTest environment is a non-production environment used for development and testing needs.

    2 DevOps is a set of practices that combine software development and IT operations.

  • Hasura Brings Instant GraphQL to MySQL and SQL Server for Rapid API Development to Unlock Siloed Data, Raises $25 Million in Series B

    SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 08, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Hasura, the data access infrastructure company, today announced that it has added GraphQL support for MySQL and early access support for SQL Server to its existing support for PostgreSQL. Hasura now supports three of the most popular database technologies. A great deal of valuable data lives inside existing MySQL and SQL Server databases, and developers want to access that data to build new applications. By expanding its support to more database types, Hasura makes it easy for developers to access that data with a modern GraphQL-based API with inbuilt security, scalability and governance.

    “Data lives in lots of places, and in many different databases. We want our users to be able to access that data instantly with Hasura’s secure, scalable data access infrastructure so adding support for MySQL and SQL Server was our obvious next step. It opens up huge potential for all the developers who need to access the vast amounts of data that lives in MySQL and SQL Server today. Now they can enjoy instant data access with a modern GraphQL API, and Hasura’s built-in security, governance and scalability features will get their applications into production quickly and safely,” said Hasura co-founder and CEO Tanmai Gopal.

    Organizations already have data they want to use but it is trapped in silos. Rather than trying to use outdated approaches to overcome this problem like consolidating fast-moving operational data into static data warehouses or datalakes, Hasura provides a new option: simply connect applications by federating access to where the data lives, using a modern API-based approach that includes security, governance and scalability as standard features. With support for MySQL, SQL Server and PostgreSQL, using Hasura means developers aren’t forced to migrate data to make it accessible from their applications.

    Hasura’s ability to auto-generate modern, GraphQL based APIs and its built-in security, governance, and scalability features means developers can rapidly build applications that connect to data without waiting for costly, time-consuming infrastructure projects to finish building the pieces they need. Instead, they can concentrate on solving business problems with data and rapidly build and ship applications that add value to their organizations. The speed and flexibility provided by Hasura is truly transformative for organizations trapped in outdated ways of working.

    Major Company Milestones

    • 2017 Hasura was founded by Tanmai Gopal, CEO, and Rajoshi Ghosh, COO, to make access to data easier for application developers struggling with outdated approaches to API development. Hasura has made instant data access possible by auto-generating modern GraphQL APIs with in-built security, governance, and scalability. With secure, rapid access to data, time-to-market for applications reduced dramatically for developers using Hasura.
    • 2018 Hasura announced $1.6 million in seed funding led by Nexus Venture Partners.
    • 2018 Hasura released its popular open source GraphQL engine that connects to databases and microservices and auto-generates a production-ready GraphQL backend to accelerate product development of modern, data-driven applications. The product has tens of millions of downloads and more than 18,500 GitHub stars.
    • 2018 Hasura joined the GraphQL Foundation as a founding member.
    • 2020 Hasura announced $9.9 million in Series A funding led by Vertex Ventures US.
    • 2020 Hasura released its on-premises version with enhanced enterprise features for security, scalability and compliance.
    • 2020 Hasura released Hasura Cloud, a managed service that provides instant and secure access to data across hybrid- and multi-cloud environments with a unified GraphQL API. Hasura Cloud helps organizations create data-driven applications without costly investments in infrastructure or operational management. The service brings new cloud-specific functionality such as dynamic data caching, auto-scaling, global availability and consumption-based pricing.
    • 2020 Hasura held its first user conference Hasura Con ‘20. The virtual conference had speakers from Airbus, Cherre, Credimi, General Assembly, GraphCMS, Krafteer, Lineup Ninja, Meow.vc, NuxtJS, Observable, OneGraph, Philips Healthcare, Prefect, RESULT, Swiggy, SZTAKI, Tarbh, The Chicago Reporter, The Guild, United Health and WorkClout.
    • 2020 Hasura won API World’s Best in DevOps APIs award for being a leader in its sector for innovation and for its developer adoption.

    Today Hasura also announced $25 million in series B funding, bringing the total raised to $36.5 million. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures US, Nexus Venture Partners, Strive VC and SAP.iO Fund and new angel investors including John Thomspon, the current chairman of Microsoft.

    “We’re very impressed by how developers have taken to Hasura and embraced the GraphQL approach to building applications. Particularly for front-end developers using technologies like React, Hasura makes it easy to connect applications to existing databases where all the data is without compromising on security and performance. Hasura provides a lovely bridge for replatforming applications to cloud-native approaches, so we see this approach being embraced by enterprise developers as well as front-end developers more and more,” said Gaurav Gupta, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and Hasura board member.

    Hasura is using the funding to accelerate its hiring and investment in its open source and commercial product development to support its millions of users.

    About Hasura
    Hasura is helping to build the modern world of globally relevant, data-driven applications and APIs. Hasura’s range of data access solutions helps organizations accelerate product delivery by instantly connecting data and services to applications with GraphQL APIs. For more information, go to: https://hasura.io or follow @HasuraHQ.