devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • CommScope Partners with Google to Bring Orion WiFi to Public Venues

    CommScope’s RUCKUS SmartZone controller brings enhanced security and simplified network management 

    HICKORY, N.C. September 8, 2020 — CommScope is partnering with Google’s Area 120 for the launch of Orion Wifi, a platform designed to bring private, secure roaming for consumers while helping public venues solve cellular dead zones and monetize their networks. 

    CommScope, a global network technology leader helping customers and partners to design, create and build the world’s most advanced communication networks, is announcing the RUCKUS SmartZone controller’s support of Google’s Orion Wifi, which lets carriers offer a friction-less and secure experience when connecting their subscribers to public Wi-Fi in venues. 

    “Carrier Wi-Fi offload in public venues can be frustrating for consumers and even more so for venue managers and owners as they negotiate rates and try to solve roaming costs between operators,” said Pramod Badjate, senior vice president for the RUCKUS business, CommScope. “Developing this new platform for Wi-Fi offload with Google helps create the lasting connections CommScope has always delivered to consumers while enabling companies to monetize and secure their networks.” 

    The RUCKUS SmartZone from CommScope supports Hotspot 2.0 enabling devices to automatically detect and then connect to the Wi-Fi network. In addition, RUCKUS SmartZone provides advanced security and support for RadSec. 

    “Orion Wifi is about more connectivity for consumers, more options for carriers, and more revenue and happier visitors for Wi-Fi network owners,” said Raj Gajwani, Director at Google’s Area 120. “CommScope’s RUCKUS SmartZone allows venues to easily configure Orion Wifi with the highest levels of security.”      

      

    —END— 

    All product names, trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners. 

    About CommScope:  

    CommScope (NASDAQ: COMM) is pushing the boundaries of technology to create the world’s most advanced wired and wireless networks. Our global team of employees, innovators and technologists empower customers to anticipate what’s next and invent what’s possible. Discover more at www.commscope.com.  

     

  • BMC to Acquire Alderstone

    Acquisition streamlines and expedites ITSM modernization 

    HOUSTON – September 8, 2020 – BMC, a global leader in IT solutions for the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to purchase Alderstone, a leading provider of ITSM adoption and modernization solutions. The deal is expected to close in the coming months, subject to customary closing conditions. Financial terms of the transaction are not disclosed.

    Expanding upon the companies’ years-long partnership, BMC and Alderstone will be able to offer powerful migration tools and services so customers can quickly and efficiently modernize their service management with the BMC Helix solution.  Customers will be able to take advantage of the latest innovations and features with decreased risk, limited disruption, and reduced cost, time, and effort.  This will give customers new ways to leverage AI with automation and data-driven decision-making in their organizations’ evolution to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

    Alderstone’s solutions aim to provide a comprehensive, seamless, and error-free way to onboard customers onto BMC Helix – from application discovery, to preconfigured migration packs and data mapping – all tuned to maximize IT performance. Moving from other ITSM solutions or Remedy on-premise, BMC and Alderstone provide expert technology consulting services that leverage industry best practices to help customers decrease risk, reduce costs, and realize their ROI goals.

    “With Alderstone, BMC can help customers more quickly benefit from the intelligence and automation of BMC Helix, and accelerate their transformation to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise,” said Ali Siddiqui, Chief Product Officer, BMC. “By coupling the BMC product portfolio with the consulting and migration expertise of Alderstone, we can deliver a unique and holistic solution for their cloud-based ITSM investments to achieve their individual business goals.”

    “We serve the market with much needed expertise and guidance to leverage technology in meeting the greatest IT challenges,” said Steve Upton, CEO, Alderstone. “Over the past twelve years, we have had the incredible privilege of supporting our clients’ digital transformations, and we look forward to delivering even greater value as a part of BMC.”

    According to IDC, by 2021, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will rely on a mix of on-premises or dedicated private clouds, several private clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructures needs. [1]  As the ITSM market continues to grow, and cloud adoption continues to drive ITSM disruption, customers need a seamless path and tools to enable upgrades and migrations.

    The BMC Helix solution is the first end-to-end, cloud-based, service and operations platform to discover, monitor, service, remediate, and optimize IT landscapes. Powered by 360-degree pervasive intelligence to turn unknowns into knowns, it provides the agility, customer-centricity, and actionable insights needed  for the Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

    BMC continues to accelerate its focus on investing in innovation and disruptive technologies. This will be the company’s fourth acquisition in less than two years.

    Additional Resources:

    [1]IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2020 Predictions, Doc # US44640719, October 2019

    ###

    About BMC

    From core to cloud to edge, BMC delivers the software and services that enable over 10,000 global customers, including 84% of the Forbes Global 100, to thrive in their ongoing evolution to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

    BMC, the BMC logo, and BMC’s other product names are the exclusive properties of BMC Software, Inc. or its affiliates, are registered or pending registration with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©Copyright 2020 BMC Software, Inc. 

    About Alderstone

    Founded in 2008, Alderstone is a consultancy focused on BMC Remedy ITSM and related tools.  The company is one of BMC’s Technology Alliance Partners and specializes in ITSM rollout, upgrades, and data migration.

  • Diffblue Launches World’s First AI-Powered Automated Java Unit Testing Solution with Free Community Edition for Developers

    Up to 100x faster than writing manual tests, built on a decade of artificial intelligence by (AI) researchers from the University of Oxford and backed by Goldman Sachs

    Oxford, United Kingdom, Sept. 8, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Diffblue, creators of the world’s first AI for code solution that automates writing unit tests for Java, today announced the general availability of Diffblue Cover and Diffblue Cover: Community Edition, a free version created for developers using IntelliJ, the most popular IDE for enterprise Java.

    Diffblue’s pioneering technology, developed by researchers from the University of Oxford, is based on reinforcement learning, the same machine learning strategy that powered AlphaGo, Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind’s software program that beat the world champion player of Go. Diffblue’s customers include Goldman Sachs and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

    Diffblue Cover automates the burdensome task of writing Java unit tests, a task that takes up as much as 20 percent of Java developers’ time. Diffblue Cover creates Java tests at speeds 10X-100X faster than humans that are also easy for developers to understand, and automatically maintains the tests as the code evolves even on applications with tens of millions of lines of code.

    “Software has revolutionized every industry, except software,” said Mathew Lodge, CEO of Diffblue. “Our goal is to be the leader in applying AI to code, starting with unit tests, the critical foundation that allows developers to more frequently ship higher quality software. We help organizations reduce time to ship, ship more often and ship code with fewer defects while freeing up developers to focus more time on the most engaging part of their jobs. Companies on the journey to digital transformation, especially during this COVID pandemic, can’t keep up with the rapid software changes required to reorient their businesses. Automating unit testing on new and legacy code can accelerate their journey to success.”

    A 2019 developer survey found that software engineers, among the most expensive talent in any company, spend 20 percent of their time writing unit tests and an additional 15 percent of their time writing all other types of tests. Yet, those unit tests on average only provided coverage for less than half of the code written. Diffblue Cover removes a key blocker to DevOps adoption in any size organization.

    Today, most unit test generators create boilerplate code for tests, rather than tests that compile and run. These tools guess the inputs that can be used as a starting point, but developers have to finish them to get functioning tests. Diffblue Cover is uniquely able to create complete human-readable unit tests that are ready to run immediately.

    Diffblue Cover today supports Java, the most popular enterprise programming language in the Global 2000. The technology behind Diffblue Cover can also be extended to support other popular programming languages such as Python, Javascript and C#.

    “As enterprises all over the world increasingly emphasize the velocity of their application development processes, unit testing becomes more and more critical. This is particularly true for the millions of enterprise Java developers worldwide, who are charged with maintaining countless critical applications for businesses large and small,” said Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. “The challenge is that tests can be tedious to write, and developers would prefer to devote their time and attention to writing code if the task of writing tests can be automated. This is the precise opportunity that Diffblue was built for.”

    Diffblue Cover comes in two commercial versions. Both the Teams Edition and Enterprise Edition install in less than 5 minutes and provide 100 percent automated Java unit test writing and integrate directly into CI/CD systems. Visit the Diffblue products page for more details.

    Available free by download to developers, Diffblue Cover: Community Edition supports IntelliJ, the world’s most popular enterprise Java IDE, and is an ideal way to onboard developers faster to realize the benefits of automating unit test writing.

    About Diffblue

    Diffblue is leading the automation of software creation through the power of AI. Founded by researchers from the University of Oxford, Diffblue Cover uses AI for code to write unit tests that help software teams and organizations efficiently improve their code coverage and quality and to ship software faster, more frequently and with fewer defects. With customers including AWS and Goldman Sachs, Diffblue is venture-backed by Goldman Sachs and Oxford Sciences Innovation. Follow us on Twitter: @diffblueHQ

  • Progress Announces Acquisition of Chef

    Acquisition aligns with strategy for accretive acquisition and extends product offerings in DevOps and DevSecOps with market-leading infrastructure automation

    BEDFORD, Mass., Sept. 08, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS), the leading provider of application development and digital experience technologies, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Chef, a global leader in DevOps and DevSecOps, providing complete infrastructure automation to build, deploy, manage and secure applications in modern multi-cloud and hybrid environments, as well as on-premises.

    “Chef is a market leader with best-in-class products, a vibrant developer community, an impressive blue-chip customer base and highly skilled and engaged employees,” said Yogesh Gupta, CEO, Progress. “Chef has built a successful business, product portfolio and go-to-market strategy and we will expand and accelerate that by bringing our resources to bear, building on the momentum Chef has established to date.”

    Founded in 2008, and with over $70 million in annual recurring revenue, Chef is a leader in continuous automation, an innovator in application automation and a pioneer of the DevSecOps movement. Its mission is to help the most enduring and transformative companies use technology to become fast, efficient and innovative software-driven organizations. Chef products include: Chef Enterprise Automation Stack, Chef Infra, Chef InSpec, Chef Habitat, Chef Compliance and Chef Desktop.

    Progress is a trusted provider of some of the best products to develop, deploy and manage high-impact business applications and Chef will enhance that position by providing industry-leading compliance and application automation products for multi-cloud and on-prem infrastructure. The acquisition will bolster Progress’ core offerings, enabling customers to respond faster to business demands and improve efficiency. The acquisition also aligns with Progress’ growth strategy through accretive acquisitions and will add both scale and cash flow.

    Progress will acquire Chef for $220 million in cash, subject to customary adjustments. Progress will fund the transaction with existing cash on hand and funds secured under its existing credit facility. The transaction is expected to be accretive beginning in Q1 FY2021 to both non-GAAP earnings per share and cash flow.

    “This acquisition perfectly aligns with our growth strategy and meets the requirements that we’ve previously laid out: a strong recurring revenue model, technology that complements our business, a loyal customer base and the ability to leverage our operating model and infrastructure to run the business more efficiently,” continued Gupta. “We’re thrilled to add Chef to our product portfolio and are confident that this acquisition will provide benefit to both organizations, as well as our customers, partners, investors and the Chef community.”

    “Chef and Progress share a vision for the future of DevSecOps and Progress will provide the scale to further drive Chef’s platform forward and deliver additional value to our customers,” said Barry Crist, CEO, Chef. “At the same time, Chef fills a need in the Progress portfolio in DevSecOps, infrastructure, application, and compliance automation that is highly complementary to its existing products. For Chef, this acquisition is our next chapter, and Progress will help enhance our growth potential, support our Open Source vision, and provide broader opportunities for our customers, partners, employees and community.”

    The acquisition is expected to close in October 2020, subject to obtaining regulatory consents and satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.

    More information can be found in our presentation at www.progress.com.

    Guggenheim Securities, LLC acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Chef in connection with the transaction. Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP served as Progress’ legal counsel and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati LLP served as Chef’s legal counsel with respect to the transaction.

    More information on Chef can be found at https://chef.io.

    Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
    This press release contains statements that are “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Progress has identified some of these forward-looking statements with words like “believe,” “may,” “could,” “would,” “might,” “should,” “expect,” “intend,” “plan,” “target,” “anticipate” and “continue,” the negative of these words, other terms of similar meaning or the use of future dates.

    Risks, uncertainties and other important factors that could cause actual results to differ from those expressed or implied in the forward looking statements include: uncertainties as to the timing of the closing of Progress’ acquisition of Chef; the possibility that various closing conditions for the transaction may not be satisfied or waived, including that a governmental entity may prohibit, delay or refuse to grant approval for the consummation of the transaction; the effects of disruption from the transaction making it more difficult to maintain relationships with employees, licensees, other business partners or governmental entities; other business effects, including the effects of industry, economic or political conditions outside of Progress’ or Chef’s control; transaction costs; actual or contingent liabilities; uncertainties as to whether anticipated synergies will be realized; and uncertainties as to whether Chef’s business will be successfully integrated with Progress’ business. For further information regarding risks and uncertainties associated with Progress’ business, please refer to Progress’ filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended November 30, 2019. Progress undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release.

    About Progress
    Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS) offers the leading platform for developing and deploying strategic business applications. We enable customers and partners to deliver modern, high-impact digital experiences with a fraction of the effort, time and cost. Progress offers powerful tools for easily building adaptive user experiences across any type of device or touchpoint, the flexibility of a cloud-native app dev platform to deliver modern apps, leading data connectivity technology, web content management, business rules, secure file transfer, network monitoring, plus award-winning machine learning that enables cognitive capabilities to be a part of any application. Over 1,700 independent software vendors, 100,000 enterprise customers and two million developers rely on Progress to power their applications. Learn about Progress at www.progress.com or +1-800-477-6473.

    About Chef
    Chef is the global leader in DevSecOps and the developer of Chef Enterprise Automation Stack™ automating infrastructure, compliance and application delivery for many of the Fortune 500. For more than 10 years, Chef has led the industry in DevOps innovation, uniting teams at organizations of all sizes and optimizing processes and outcomes to accelerate its customers’ business growth. Chef software is developed as 100 percent open source under the Apache 2.0 license. For more information, visit https://chef.io and follow @chef.

    Progress is a trademark or registered trademark of Progress Software Corporation and/or its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Any other names contained herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

  • Transposit Unveils Next-generation Platform for Engineering Operations, Brings Human-centric Automation to Any Stack

    Unifies Incident and Service Management, Leveraging Bi-directional Integrations and Workflow Automations to Increase Uptime and Simplify Operations for Engineering Organizations

    SAN FRANCISCO – September 2, 2020 – Transposit, the modern engineering operations company for the enterprise, today launched its next-generation platform for engineering operations that enables DevOps, site reliability engineers (SREs), and other on-call engineering teams to achieve greater velocity both during incidents and when operations are running smoothly. Designed to address the challenges of modern stacks, Transposit’s new Mission Control is a centralized command center for operations and incidents that includes real-time visibility, streamlined communication, and stakeholder dashboards, as well as searchable documentation that is automatically generated. Knowledge Streams parse massive volumes of human-generated data and machine data to provide unified context across operations and incidents to drive root cause analysis during and after incident triage, dramatically cutting mean time to resolution (MTTR). By making it possible to take action from the command center or right within their communications tools, like Slack, engineers can move fast while preventing human error at scale. The platform logs all activities relating to operations and incidents, dynamically systematizes processes, and serves up interactive runbooks so that both new and experienced employees can access the latest best practices contextually – in real time – increasing productivity. In a separate announcement today, Transposit announced a $35 million Series B funding round led by Altimeter Capital with participation from existing investors Sutter Hill Ventures, SignalFire, and Unusual Ventures.

    Human-in-the-loop Automation Empowers Enterprise Engineering Teams

    Transposit uses automation to bring order to incident response and troubleshooting, upleveling an existing ecosystem while keeping humans in the loop at key decision points to enhance stability and flexibility. By reducing the pain of on-call operations, engineering teams are freed to focus on innovation and evolving their technology stacks. The platform turns human activity into a data stream that can be processed alongside their automatically collected machine data streams. It enables users to automate repeatable tasks and provides a centralized place from which to act. Knowledge Streams drill into context with a holistic view across events, triggers, actions, and services, speeding up root cause analysis and eliminating silos. With Transposit’s Developer Console and integration platform, teams have quick access to shareable, sophisticated workflows and actions with infinite customization capabilities to achieve flexible, robust, and transparent automation. Workflows via interactive runbooks are now able to trigger multiple auto-actions at once. When a human takes a direct action command (such as ‘revert code commit’), multi-step automated workflows are initiated while maintaining full transparency for human operators.

    “Automation is often sold as a panacea for managing today’s complex stacks, but full automation takes a complete understanding of the system and all of its possible outcomes, which is a constantly moving target when you have high velocity of innovation. Teams who attempt to automate everything without a clear awareness of what is and isn’t appropriate to fully automate end up with either complex and brittle systems or missed opportunities,” said Tina Huang, founder and CTO, Transposit. “While some solutions take the human out of the picture, Transposit believes in a human-centric approach to automation. We believe it’s better to plan around the human and their intuition, letting them command and control when to apply various automations. This approach makes automation easier to build out and more reliable, so people are less afraid to use it. The path forward lies in having user friendly systems that are instrumented to collect data for both the human and machine process. Making this data accessible before, after, but most importantly, during an incident can drive strategic action seamlessly through the tech stack, with exceptional speed and transparency for all stakeholders.”

    Intelligent Platform Increases Uptime and Productivity While Reducing Engineers’ Stress and Cognitive Overload in Agile Environments

    Traditionally the focus has been on the positives of agile development – transparency, improved product quality, and efficiency. However, there are downsides. According to IDC, “through 2022, the talent pool for emerging technologies will be inadequate to fill at least 30% of global demand and effective skills development and retention will become differentiating strategies.” Given the skills gap and difficulty in staffing DevOps roles, rapid agile development cycles, and the astronomical cost of downtime, the urgency of what it means to debug an incident has ballooned requiring engineers to support and debug against end users in real time.

    With Transposit, engineers are able to reduce the stress of on-call life caused by the increased reliance on their support of production systems. Enterprises now have a single place for anyone to access key information on incidents. Engineers can more easily investigate, understand, and act on what is happening in production, both at the time of an incident and during post mortems. The only solution built on powerful bi-directional API integration technology, Transposit gathers semi-structured data from communications platforms such as Slack, continuous integration and continuous delivery solutions (CI/CD), application performance monitoring systems, and workflow management tools like Jira. These integrations provide better visibility into production systems so on-call engineers no longer need to spend countless hours communicating progress to stakeholders and can focus on keeping systems running smoothly and solving issues.

    Key features of the Transposit platform:

    • Incident Command Center provides real-time visibility to on-call engineers and stakeholders, enhancing collaboration and simplifying communication so that teams can focus on what matters most: resolution.

    • Direct Action Commands (DACs) enable decisions to be carried from a communication platform, such as Transposit’s web interface or Slack, to a service, such as AWS ECS, with the touch of one button.

    • Interactive runbooks guide engineers through human-in-the-loop automated workflows.

    • Integration Hub manages identity and authentication and runs actions in Transposit’s serverless environment, serving as the “glue” that keeps the stack reliably connected as it evolves.

    • The Developer Console enables infinite extensibility and customization, as developers are able to fork, copy and modify any workflow or integration with managed auth, identity management, and versioning with git.

    • Self-documenting postmortems capture, annotate, and automatically document every action and event carried out on the Transposit platform and its connected systems.

    “With cloud-native applications and ‘everything as a service’ shaping the path forward for IT, technology and developer operations are ready for a revolution that keeps pace with digital transformation,” said Divanny Lamas, CEO, Transposit. “Offerings built before DevOps philosophy and cloud-native infrastructure existed fall short. They are too manual, segmented, and unfocused to provide the full value engineering teams need from ops management tools. With Transposit’s rich, bi-directional integration technology we enable unprecedented actionability, sustainable and secure connections between systems, collaboration, and multi-system event tracking. Our interactive runbooks, knowledge streams, and ability to automate actions while keeping the human in the loop allow teams to achieve well-functioning systems. Reliability of systems is all about having repeatable processes for humans and machines and our new platform brings our vision to life.”

    Customer Quotes

    “Anyone who works in operations battles the same challenge of having to parse through a tremendous amount of scattered institutional knowledge to get to a resolution. All of this manual, time consuming work gets in the way of innovation. With so much information spread across Slack and Confluence today, how do we surface understanding more efficiently to resolve issues faster? This led us to Transposit,” said Matthew Zeier, Director of Production Engineering and Operations, Lacework. “Transposit strings our world of APIs together and its fresh, human-centric approach to automation gives our engineers a better experience. It pulls relevant information into a unified UI so it’s available for everyone to access, serving as a guide for our experts and helping new engineers do their jobs effectively out of the gate. Transposit empowers us all to make on-call decisions with confidence and significantly saves clock time. At the end of the day, we want on-call to be easy enough to do from anywhere, even the beach, and Transposit is helping make the #BeachOps life possible.”

    “Today, incident management is fundamentally broken. When an incident occurs in the middle of the night, chaos clouds clarity. How many people can think straight at 3am? I’ve been there and much of my team has, too – it’s the life of the on-call engineer. Engineering teams need clear guidance to be effective at operations, yet too often they’re forced to learn while in the fire of an incident and without the critical documentation at hand,” said Pierre-Alexandre Masse, VP of Engineering, Split. “Having Transposit as a centralized, systematic guide gives engineers the right context we need to make better decisions and drastically reduce MTTR. Transposit’s role in conserving and tracking context makes it more seamless for us to take action and automate repeatable processes so we can focus on resolution and innovation.”

    Availability

    To sign up for Transposit’s limited release program, please visit transposit.com.

    About Transposit

    Transposit, the modern engineering operations company for the enterprise, increases application uptime and improves quality of life for engineers. Designed for complex stacks, Transposit’s platform provides a single home for operations and incidents that surfaces relevant context across human and machine activities to drive root cause analysis, shrinking mean time to resolution (MTTR). DevOps, site reliability engineers (SREs), and other on-call engineering teams use Transposit’s human-centric workflow automation to increase velocity during incidents and when operations are running smoothly. Transposit gathers all the data engineering teams need and lets them take direct action in any system in the toolchain via Slack or Transposit’s interface with the touch of a button, so they can resolve issues faster with precision. Transposit Mission Control is a unified command center with real-time visibility, streamlined communication, stakeholder dashboards, and searchable, automated documentation. The platform dynamically systematizes processes and serves interactive runbooks to guide incident triage and daily operations, reducing stress, eliminating toil, and ensuring consistency.

  • Tricentis extends leadership in enterprise application delivery; launches fully automated testing for ServiceNow

    New Tricentis Test Automation Solution for ServiceNow enables 40x faster testing

    Mountain View, Calif. — Sept. 2, 2020 — Tricentis, the world’s #1 continuous testing platform, today announced a dramatic new way to automate ServiceNow testing with its new solution, Tricentis Test Automation for ServiceNow. This news follows Tricentis’ recently expanded partnership with SAP and broadens Tricentis’ enterprise applications testing capabilities to encompass all the major providers, including SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and ServiceNow.

    ServiceNow is a leader in IT Service Management, CRM Customer Engagement and IT Operations Management. With over 6,200 enterprise customers and more than $4 billion subscription revenues annual run rate, the ServiceNow platform has become a business-critical platform for many enterprise IT organizations serving hundreds of thousands of employees and end users.

    Every ServiceNow implementation is different, requiring extensive customization, development and testing of business logic, workflows, data sources, and user interfaces. ServiceNow delivery teams must stay on top of an increasing backlog of business requirements, change requests, and maintenance of the underlying platform. Every year, ServiceNow delivers two major platform releases and numerous patch releases, resulting in time consuming manual testing work to validate thousands of workflows common with ServiceNow deployments. This market is ripe for disruption and Tricentis now offers a much-needed solution to this problem.

    Tricentis Test Automation for ServiceNow is natively built on the ServiceNow platform and enables 40 times faster testing of ServiceNow applications with the highest level of usability to increase test coverage and quality. It provides enterprise customers an easy to use, flexible, and targeted solution to fully automate the testing of ServiceNow applications, workflows, and customizations. This frees up developer time to focus on business requirements and enables testers and business analysts to collaborate in a more agile way. With features such as point and click recording, real-time playback of tests, and automatic case creation, Tricentis Test Automation for ServiceNow has extreme flexibility to provide a versatile solution to test applications and workflows, regardless of customizations.

    “Tricentis has been consistently expanding its portfolio to offer the most comprehensive continuous testing solutions for large enterprises,” said Sandeep Johri, Tricentis CEO. “Digital workflows that enterprise IT organizations are looking to deliver on the ServiceNow platform require custom development and testing. Our new Test Automation solution offers break-through capabilities to test every aspect of ServiceNow deployments, without limitations, enabling speed and agility for our customers. As the global leader in continuous testing, our vision it to enable enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation and software delivery by addressing enterprise-wide testing needs.”

    Tricentis Test Automation for ServiceNow benefits:

    • Continuous automation – Automation runs continuously and can execute tests up to 40x faster than developers or manual testers
    • Accelerate deployments – Enables faster time to value by generating hundreds of tests in seconds as opposed to hours or even days
    • Customizable and flexible – Provides versatility for customers to test their workflows and applications before going live, as no two workflows are the same
    • Decrease defects – Increased test coverage allows businesses to detect errors immediately throughout the development process
    • DevOps compatible – offers ability to integrate with the organization‘s CI/CD pipeline so users can continue to test and innovate rapidly

    About Tricentis

    Tricentis is the global leader in enterprise continuous testing, widely credited for reinventing software testing and delivery for DevOps and agile environments. The Tricentis AI-based, continuous testing platform provides automated testing and real-time business risk insight across your DevOps pipeline. This enables enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation by dramatically increasing software release speed, reducing costs, and improving software quality. Tricentis has been widely recognized as the leader by all major industry analysts, including being named the leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant five years in a row. Tricentis has more than 1,800 customers, including the largest brands in the world, such as Coca-Cola, Nationwide Insurance, Allianz, Telstra, Dolby, RBS, and Zappos. To learn more, visit www.tricentis.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

  • Postman Launches New Web Client to Simplify API Development

    Customers can now access Postman from web browsers, allowing them to more easily improve the speed and scope of API development.

    SAN FRANCISCO — September 2, 2020 — Postman, the leading platform for API development, announced the launch of Postman for the web, a new browser interface for Postman that offers users simplified access and superior collaboration. The move marks somewhat of a return to Postman’s original roots.

    “Postman started off as a Chrome plug-in on the web, and then switched to a desktop application with amazing adoption,” said Postman CEO and Co-founder Abhinav Asthana. “We’re now returning to the web to harness the full power of the internet, and make API development faster, more collaborative, and more scalable.”

    The rapid growth of API development on Postman
    Since launching in 2015, Postman has seen huge growth in the number of API requests and collections. Postman has now powered more than 1 billion API requests and has also seen a massive increase in the number of API collections, with more than 48 million API collections  now running on Postman.

    This staggering growth, and the accompanying increase in demand for high-scale and performant API development tools, is what led to the creation of the new web version of Postman.

    “Companies building APIs are now looking to scale up the speed and scope of their API development processes in ways that simply weren’t possible five years ago. Postman on the web is an ideal solution for these demands,” said Asthana.

    Postman on the Web
    Until today, Postman users have accessed Postman through a desktop application. Accessing Postman through the browser has been one of the most-requested features from users; they say that downloading a desktop app can slow down onboarding, and can also make it challenging to stay on the latest version. Plus, the browser approach allows certain collaboration capabilities that aren’t possible within the app. The web version of Postman solves all of these issues by providing the following:

    • Simplified user access and onboarding: Users get instant access via browser with no app installation required, automatic updates, and faster user onboarding (i.e., just paste in the URL and go).
    • Optimized collaboration through deep linking: Now that Postman is on the web, everything in Postman has a URL, so users can easily share URLs to granular API elements for superior collaboration.
    • The ability to send requests at scale from the browser:  A unique agent architecture, developed exclusively by Postman engineers (see details below), facilitates scalable sending of API requests from the browser.

    Try out the web version of Postman HERE.

    The Postman agent
    Tightly connected to the Postman for the web client launch is the Postman agent. The agent was specifically designed to overcome the cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) limitations of browsers to allow for API requests to be scalably sent from a browser interface. By creating a proxy micro-application to facilitate API request-sending at scale, the agent conquers this browser challenge in a way that’s never been done before.

    “One of the fundamental limitations that Postman faced in building a great browser experience was the CORS limitation, which made it impossible to send API requests at scale from the browser; this constraint was ultimately why Postman decided to build a desktop app in the first place,” said Postman Chief Evangelist Kin Lane. “The Postman agent is a big technical breakthrough for the company that overcomes a fundamental limitation in browser-based applications that need to connect to APIs at scale.”

    Learn more details about the creation of the Postman agent HERE.

    High-performance API development on desktop and web
    As the scale and scope of API development has rapidly increased, the Postman team has been continuously working to improve the performance of Postman for every user. The chart below (Table 1) shows a sampling of these performance enhancements on both the desktop app and the web version of Postman.

    (Table 1)

    Postman desktop

    v7.18.0 

    (February 2020)

    		 Postman desktop

    v7.28.0

    (August 2020)

    		 Postman on the web

    (August 2020)
    Opening Postman 6.5 secs 4.5 secs 3.2 secs
    Joining a team workspace ~5 secs ~2 secs ~2 secs
    Resuming work in a busy team workspace ~5-10 secs ~3 secs ~3 secs
    Switching workspaces ~5 secs ~2 secs ~2 secs
    Memory usage when working with multiple workspaces 350MB – 1150MB 130MB – 430 MB 130 MB – 430 MB
    Typing URLs in an active workspace 300-800 ms 60 ms 60 ms
    Opening new tabs 300 ms 100 ms 100 ms
    Searching in sidebar 500 ms 50ms 50ms
    Opening an environment quicklook 60 ms 25 ms 25 ms
    Downloading large responses 30 MB Up to 150 MB Feature not yet enabled on web

    About Postman

    Postman is the leading collaboration platform for API development, used by more than 12 million developers and 500,000 companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible platform that is used to build connected software via APIs—quickly, easily, and accurately. Postman is headquartered in San Francisco and has an office in Bangalore, where the company was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Insight Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and CRV. Learn more at http://www.postman.com or connect with Postman on Twitter via @getpostman.

  • GigaSpaces Announces Version 15.5, Simplifying and Scaling Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Deployments to Empower Digital Transformation Initiatives

    First in-memory computing platform to support a hybrid cluster, provisioned on both on-premise, cloud and hybrid environments with autonomous scaling and advanced microservices deployment mechanisms

    New York, NY — September 2, 2020 —GigaSpaces, the provider of InsightEdge, the fastest in-memory data and analytics processing platform, announced today the release of GigaSpaces InsightEdge version 15.5, to simplify and scale hybrid and multi-cloud deployments to empower digital transformation initiatives. GigaSpaces version 15.5 adds new efficiency and automation capabilities to its Ops Manager module for easier monitoring, management and automatic provisioning of resources across all environments, to ensure maximum performance and availability at the optimal cost. The platform also provides smooth testing and deployment of microservices with no management overhead or service disruption.

    With version 15.5, GigaSpaces is the only in-memory computing vendor that enables the creation of a hybrid cluster that can be provisioned both on-premise and in a public cloud, eliminating the need for data replication between clusters.

    GigaSpaces version 15.5 focuses on three main benefits:

    • Realizing the value of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments: This version introduces new automated provisioning across cloud, on-premise, hybrid and multi-cloud. Depending on the type of applications deployed, customers can choose to scale up for transactions (RDBMS) or out for analytics (NoSQL), and simply manage the resources required, either automatically or with  a single click, according to the thresholds defined in the system to ensure application performance levels. This process is automatic without any service disruption.

    • Perfecting microservices: With one-click microservices deployment and schema evolution support, customers can easily introduce new microservices into production, with no downtime, leveraging Canary and Blue-Green strategies. The system’s performance and health are continuously monitored, to ensure that no bottlenecks occur, resulting in an optimal customer experience.

    • Simplified management and operations: Additional no-code one-click connectors are available for more on premise and cloud RDBMS. This automates the data integration process, by discovering the data structure and the tables with their properties, as well as the indexes, eliminating human errors that can be associated with manual mapping. It reduces integration efforts from weeks to virtually a single click.  Index Usage is a new GigaSpaces tool that provides out-of-the-box index usage efficiency metrics to simplify the data modeling process, pinpoint problems, and uncover index optimization opportunities.

    “Our customers are accelerating their digital transformation initiatives and moving processes and services from offline to online,” said Yoav Einav, Vice President Product at GigaSpaces. “With version 15.5 we continue to deliver on our goal to simplify deployments and management across all environments including hybrid and multi-cloud with smart monitoring and automatic scaling to ensure the highest service levels even during  unplanned peaks, while eliminating time consuming manual operations and resource overprovisioning.”

    For more information, go to our blog entry Simplifying and Scaling your Hybrid and Multicloud Deployment Strategies with GigaSpaces v15.5.

    You can try GigaSpaces Cloud for free today by clicking here.

    About GigaSpaces

    GigaSpaces provides the fastest in-memory computing platforms for real-time insight to action and extreme transactional processing.  With GigaSpaces, enterprises can operationalize machine learning and transactional processing to gain real-time insights on their data and act upon them in the moment.  The always-on platforms for mission-critical applications across cloud, on-premise or hybrid, are leveraged by hundreds of Tier-1 and Fortune-listed organizations worldwide across financial services, retail, transportation, telecom, healthcare, and more. GigaSpaces offices are located in the US, Europe and Asia.

    For more information, visit www.gigaspaces.com and www.gigaspaces.com/blog/, follow us on Twitter, or  visit our YouTube and LinkedIn channels.

  • Chorus.ai Launches Most Advanced Outcome-Based Analytics in CI

    Conversation Intelligence leaders’ new analytics experience delivers unmatched insights into revenue key performance indicators

    SAN FRANCISCO – September 2, 2020 – Chorus.ai, the No. 1 Conversation Intelligence Platform for high growth Revenue teams, announced new advanced analytics capabilities in the platform that provides Revenue leaders with unparalleled insights into the most effective indication of revenue momentum: the health of their relationships with customers and what is being said in those interactions. The updated capabilities include a comprehensive collection of reports built on advanced AI that measures different aspects of customer interactions such as rep activity levels, conversation skills, sales skills, deal intelligence, and market intelligence. It also exclusively provides the ability to deeply drill down to listen to the specific moments behind the data.

    These advancements come after Chorus’ $45m Series C, furthering the vision for a connected CI and the company’s mission to help the enterprise bring their best to every interaction and the voice of the customer back to every decision. A connected CI platform weaves into an organization’s systems and workflows to provide powerful data and insights both in the platform and directly to other applications where Sales & Customer Success reps and leaders already work, such as their CRM. This provides actionable insights from customer conversations and ensures data is always up to date and consistent across teams.

    “Helping the world’s fastest-growing companies understand the moments that drive positive outcomes and replicating them across their Go-to-Market organizations is the new standard for developing brilliant customer relationships,” said Jim Benton, CEO of Chorus.ai. “Data is only helpful when it’s accessible and actionable, which is why we’re committed to ensuring our platform delivers the most impactful insights available for frontline reps all the way up to CEOs. Context is the most important aspect of getting truly actionable insights. The deal size, sales cycle, and complexity of the sales process matters. We’re able to deliver granular and 10,000-foot views of performance intelligence, revenue intelligence, and relationship intelligence because we own the most advanced AI on the market and continue to invest in innovation.”

    The new analytics suite provides unparalleled visibility into key performance indicators. Chorus is the only Conversation Intelligence platform to offer the breadth and depth of insights now available. Not only does Chorus offer bespoke analysis, 20 out-of-the-box reports, and aggregate trend comparisons, the platform also provides Revenue leaders with the ability to evaluate the impact of what’s being measured by drilling into the moments driving the report. Chorus’s analytics also shows the effect on sales stage conversions and if it leads to a closed-won or closed-lost deal as well as the ability to identify changes and trends over time.

    “The analytics from Chorus provide exceptional insights which help our processes like ramp time, rep coaching and company-wide collaboration,” said Jeramee Waldum, Vice President of Global Sales at Mavenlink. “Whether to find out if reps are using too many filler words, discover where most prospects are most engaged, or understand if brand messaging is as impactful as necessary, we trust the platform to give both granular and big-picture insights on how to win more deals.”

    Additionally, the new advanced analytics experience prioritizes momentum and coaching signals in the interface, so each individual on every recording is empowered to understand deal and call context, as well as performance metrics. This provides sellers with an easy visual indication of performance, as well as quantifiable metrics on key conversation skills like filler words, engaging questions and longest monologues. This enables the front line to self-coach and improves skills that drive deal momentum.

    “Our Product and Engineering teams are on a mission to build the most intuitive and innovative CI platform. Today’s B2B customers expect the same experience in their software purchases as they do in their own consumer apps,” said Dominik Facher, VP of Product at Chorus.ai. “Conversation Intelligence buyers demand deep intelligence and enterprise-grade reporting as much as a consumer-grade experience for the frontline. We believe these updates will help us provide the experience customers expect.”

    To learn more about Conversation Intelligence or to schedule a Chorus product demo, visit Chorus.ai.

    ###

     

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

  • Catchpoint 2020 CIO New Normal Survey Reveals Aggressive IT Strategies More than Double Positive Business Outcomes during COVID-19 Pandemic

    BEST PERFORMING ENTERPRISES HAVE FOCUSED ON IT RELIABILITY, OPTIMIZING WORK-FROM-HOME TECH STACKS AND INNOVATIVE NETWORKING AND SECURITY INITIATIVES

    (New York, USA) – (September 1, 2020) – Catchpoint™ the leader in Digital Experience Management, released a survey of 200 enterprise CIOs and 200 enterprise work-from-home (WFH) managers today that examines the differences between those enterprises who fared the best and the worst during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey found that top-tier enterprises were 2.6 times as likely to have grown revenue, 2.5 times as likely to have reached profit goals and 2.1 times as likely to have high employee satisfaction numbers. Improved performance was seen also within IT, where top-tier enterprises saw improved app reliability, network reliability and cyber security.

    Methodology

    Catchpoint commissioned ReRez Research of Dallas, TX to conduct the survey. CIOs and managers came from enterprises with at least 1,000 employees and were geographically dispersed across the United States and comprised a wide range of industries. Enterprise managers surveyed worked from home during the crisis and used a computer for 50 percent or more of their day.

    Effects of COVID-19 on Enterprises

    Before COVID-19 hit, roughly one in three (33 percent) American enterprise employees worked from home at least some of the time. During the pandemic, this increased to three in four (74 percent). In terms of engaging with customers, prior to the pandemic, less than half (43 percent) of customer engagements were face-to-face. During the pandemic, this dropped to just one in eight (13 percent).

    The COVID-19 pandemic has been tough on most enterprises. Our survey shows that the three biggest impacts on businesses were profitability, revenue growth and productivity. Within IT departments, the biggest impacts were security, app reliability and network availability.

    “When it comes to today’s Digital Workplace, reliable performance is critical for employee productivity and morale, and with a fast-increasing number of employees working from home, systems are more prone to reliability, availability and performance issues affecting remote workers,” said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO at Catchpoint. “The ability to measure, visualize and proactively react to outages and slowdowns can deliver a 1st class digital employee experience.”

    Lessons from Top-Tier Enterprises

    Not every enterprise had the same experience and some did surprisingly well during the pandemic. To see the differences, we divided the responses into three tiers. Top tier are organizations that performed the best in terms of business and IT metrics and bottom tier performed the worst. We then compared the top and bottom tiers to explore those differences and what the top tier was doing differently.

    We found four keys to top-tier enterprises’ impressive results:

    · Focus on Reliability.The top tier is fully committed to reliability. Nearly all (91 percent) of the top tier has implemented a formal site reliability engineering methodology (SRE). This compares to just 69% of bottom-tier organizations.

    · Focus on Work-from-Home Tech Stack. The top tier is committed to making Work-from-Home (WFH) employees as productive as possible. For example, the top tier is 33 percent more likely to train their employees on work-from-home technologies. The top tier also does a better job of equipping their WFH employees—nearly three times as likely to say their employees’ collaboration tools are extremely effective.

    · General Networking Initiatives.Top-tier organizations are more engaged with cutting- edge initiatives that optimize remote work. For example, top-tier are 1.8 times as likely to be involved with robotic process automation.

    · Security Initiatives.Finally, top-tier organizations are also more engaged with cutting-edge security initiatives. Top-tier reported being 1.4 times as likely to be involved with better security management and working with software-defined perimeters.

    Catchpoint’s New Normal study includes even more insight on how enterprises are handling the impact of the pandemic and recommendations and strategies needed for enterprises to prepare for the new future of work. The report can be downloaded at: https://pages.catchpoint.com/cio-new-normal-report

    Connect with Catchpoint

    Twitter:@Catchpoint

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/catchpoint/

    About Catchpoint

    Catchpoint, the global leader in Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), empowers business and IT leaders to protect and advance the experiences of their customers and employees. In a digital economy, enabled by the cloud, SaaS and IoT, applications and users are everywhere. Catchpoint offers the largest and most geographically distributed monitoring network in the industry – it’s the only DEM platform that can scale and support today’s customer and employee location diversity and application distribution. It helps enterprises proactively detect, identify and validate user and application reachability, availability, performance and reliability across an increasingly complex digital delivery chain. Industry leaders like Google, L’Oréal, Verizon, Oracle, LinkedIn, Honeywell and Priceline trust Catchpoint’s out-of-the box monitoring platform to proactively detect, repair and optimize customer and employee experiences. Learn more at www.catchpoint.com

     

    Connect with Catchpoint

    Twitter:@Catchpoint

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/catchpoint/