devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • Agiloft Secures $45 Million Growth Equity Investment from FTV Capital

    Names Accomplished Legal Tech Executive Eric Laughlin as CEO to Accelerate Growth in No-Code Contract and Commerce Lifecycle Management Software Company

    Redwood City, Calif., August 17, 2020 – Agiloft, the global standard in no-code contract and commerce lifecycle management, today announced a $45 million growth equity investment from FTV Capital, a sector-focused investor in innovative companies in enterprise technology and services, financial services, and payments and transaction processing. Bootstrapped since its inception and profitable, Agiloft’s investment from FTV is the company’s first round of external funding and will be used to build on its leadership position in the rapidly growing enterprise contract and commerce lifecycle management (CCLM) space as it accelerates its AI-based product development and expands its vertical and geographic market presence. Agiloft’s no-code platform drives industry-leading configurability and automates complex enterprise workflows through an iterative design process at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional software.

    In conjunction with the transaction, Agiloft appointed Eric Laughlin to the role of CEO, effective immediately. Laughlin most recently served as global leader of legal managed services at Ernst & Young, LLP, where he managed the Pangea3 and Riverview Law teams and provided clients with technology and service solutions in the contracts, e-discovery, and compliance domains globally. Founder and former CEO of Agiloft, Colin Earl, will remain with the company as chief technology officer, overseeing product development, engineering, security and technology infrastructure and providing strategic guidance to the company.

    “Colin and his team at Agiloft have built a unique company, emphasizing customer-focused execution and a culture of trust and transparency — all built on a foundation of technical excellence,” said Laughlin. “The result has been steadily accelerating growth and consistent profitability. I’m honored to have been chosen to lead Agiloft in the next chapter of its development. A big part of my role will be to grow the company while maintaining the elements that have made it so successful.”

    “Eric not only has a track record of success, growing and leading large global organizations, he has the vision, domain expertise and integrity to lead Agiloft in its next phase of growth and product innovation. The search took over a year–and it was well worth it to find the right individual.” said Earl.

    Named a leader by Gartner in its 2020 Magic Quadrant for Contract Lifecycle Management, Agiloft has reported 134% growth in new sales thus far this year, an implementation success rate of 99.6% and has a loyal customer base of more than 600 customers, including CDW and Roche. Its adaptable contracting software is built on a no-code platform, allowing organizations to customize complex contract and commerce workflows without writing a single line of code. A robust AI engine simplifies the intake and organization of existing contracts and also identifies the level of risk in documents and clauses. The result is cost discipline in procurement, quantifiable reductions in revenue leakage in sales, and visibility into contractual risk and regulatory compliance for legal departments. The platform is easily extensible to the commercial processes adjacent to contracts such as spend management and integrates with enterprise systems.

    “Agiloft has established itself as a trailblazer in the fast-growing market for contract and commerce lifecycle management software,” said Alex Mason, partner at FTV Capital. “To develop a no-code product that customers love, while prioritizing profitable growth without external investment, is a remarkable achievement. We are proud to be a collaborative partner to the Agiloft team and look forward the exciting journey ahead.”

    “With digital transformation moving at the speed it is today, contract management solutions that are well-scoped and executable are mission critical,” said Abhay Puskoor, principal at FTV Capital. “As businesses continue to find new efficiencies and ways to reduce costs, contract management will play a significant role in adoption of automation, and Agiloft’s highly configurable no-code platform will enable automation at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional software. We welcome the opportunity to connect Agiloft to the enterprises in our Global Partner Network who will value the measurable ROI that the platform delivers.”

     

    As part of this transaction, FTV Capital’s Alex Mason and Abhay Puskoor will join Agiloft’s board of directors.

    About Agiloft
    As the global leader in contract and commerce lifecycle management (CCLM) software, Agiloft is trusted to provide significant savings in purchasing, enable more efficient legal operations, and accelerate sales cycles, all while drastically lowering compliance risk. Founded in 1991, Agiloft’s adaptable no-code platform ensures rapid deployment and a fully extensible system. Using contracts as the core system of commercial record, Agiloft’s CCLM software leverages AI to improve contract management for legal departments, procurement, and sales operations. Visit www.agiloft.com for more. 

    About FTV Capital

    FTV Capital is a growth equity investment firm that has raised nearly $4 billion to invest in high-growth companies offering a range of innovative solutions in three sectors: enterprise technology and services, financial services, and payments and transaction processing. FTV’s experienced team leverages its domain expertise and proven track record in each of these sectors to help motivated management teams accelerate growth. FTV also provides companies with access to its Global Partner Network®, a group of the world’s leading enterprises and executives who have helped FTV portfolio companies for two decades. Founded in 1998, FTV Capital has invested in 115 portfolio companies, including Docupace, Egress, Enfusion, InvestCloud, ReliaQuest, Riskalyze, Sunlight Financial, and VPay, and exited companies Globant, HCS (acquired by Ally Financial), and WorldFirst (acquired by Ant Financial). FTV has offices in San Francisco and New York. For more information, please visit www.ftvcapital.com.

  • Instana Becomes First APM Provider To Automatically Detect the Root Cause Of Process Crashes

    New Abnormal Termination Detection Built with eBPF and Works for Any Monitored Technology on Linux

    Chicago – August 17, 2020 – Instana, the leading provider of automated application performance management solutions for microservice applications, today announced the availability of automatic process crash detection and root cause analysis across the entire set of technologies the company monitors. The new capability makes Instana the first APM solution to automatically detect and determine the root cause of process crashes for any and every process managed by the solution.

    “Even though today’s microservice applications are built to dynamically handle individual service crashes, the fact is that abnormal process terminations do lead to poor application performance and other serious operational problems,” said Chris Farrell, technical director and APM strategist at Instana. “Instana’s new automatic crash detection and root cause analysis allows anyone involved with applications to see when and how a crash occurred so that it can be fixed, even issues that are difficult to troubleshoot, increasing the stability of applications and improving the end user experience.”

    The new feature, officially called “abnormal process termination detection,” is available today in the production versions of Instana’s SaaS and self-hosted (on-premises) solutions. Included with Instana’s cloud-native and microservices application performance monitoring solution at no additional charge, the new capability works out of the box on each and every technology and platform supported by Instana that runs on Linux machines or containers, working on kernels up to four years old.

    Coupling abnormal process termination troubleshooting with Instana’s real-time change detection, immediate pipeline feedback, end-to-end distributed tracing of every request and automatic root cause analysis delivers the most comprehensive set of troubleshooting capabilities available in a single application monitoring solution. All capabilities are delivered at no additional cost with Instana’s application performance management solution.

    Unlike traditional APM tools, Instana’s automated Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution discovers all application service components and application infrastructure, including infrastructure such as AWS Lambda, Kubernetes and Docker. Instana automatically deploys monitoring sensors for each part of the application technology stack, traces all application requests and profiles every process – without requiring any human configuration or even application restarts. The solution detects application and infrastructure changes in real-time, adjusting its own models and visualizing the changes and any performance impact in seconds.

    Learn more about Instana’s cloud-native, microservice application monitoring at https://instana.com

     

  • Mendix Drives Economic Value for Large Companies Amid Software Developer Shortage, Strong Rise in Business Demand for Applications – New Report Finds

    Leading Research Firm Uses Real-Life Customer Experiences to Show That Low-Code is a Low-Risk, High-Advantage Proposition with Multimillion-Dollar Business Benefits

    BOSTON – August 13, 2020 – Mendix, a Siemens business and the global leader in low-code application development for the enterprise, today announced the availability of a commissioned study conducted by Forrester on behalf of Mendix that demonstrates the real-world value of the Mendix low-code platform. The Total Economic Impact (TEI) of The Mendix Low-Code Application Development Platform study created by Forrester in June 2020 shows that an enterprise’s investment in the Mendix platform yielded total quantified benefits of $20.52 million over three years. That included $8.1 million in application delivery savings, $6 million in operational efficiencies from applications developed using the Mendix low-code platform, $3.3 million from accelerated time to market for new products and services, and $3.1 million in incremental revenue from improved customer engagement.

    “The adoption of the Mendix platform widened the available talent pool of software developers, accelerated outcomes, fostered better business and IT collaboration, and automated tedious plumbing and infrastructure tasks required in traditional application development,” Forrester wrote. “As a result, firms experienced application delivery savings, operational efficiency, and business lift from the introduction of new products and improvements to customer engagement.”

    This report comes at a pivotal moment in which companies across all sectors are struggling with digital transformation. The historic shortage of developer talent is now colliding with the growing demand for software by major enterprises seeking to meet rapidly changing needs.

    Many companies are turning to low-code to bridge the gap and accelerate application creation. Low-code’s graphical interface and model-driven logic allow people who have no or limited coding experience to play an active role in developing applications. It also enables business and IT collaboration to ensure the applications deliver the tailored results businesses need. But IT leaders may not support low-code because they don’t realize that this technology is actually enterprise ready, and they may worry that it will reduce their power and prestige.

    “The TEI study illustrates that low-code is no flight of fancy technology,” said Derek Roos, co-founder and CEO of Mendix. “The Mendix low-code platform profoundly impacts the way organizations work. Companies have been using Mendix for years to drive significant business results – and other organizations can realize the benefits of low-code, too.”

    The TEI Study is Based on a Proven Framework and Experiences of Actual Customers

    Forrester, a leading global research advisory firm, reached these conclusions using its TEI framework and methodology, which has been employed in studies with thousands of leading companies over more than a decade. The multi-step TEI research consisted of these steps:

    • Speaking with Mendix stakeholders and Forrester subject matter experts to gather data about the Mendix platform
    • Interviewing four Mendix customers to obtain data on costs, benefits and risks involved with their deployments
    • Constructing a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewed customers
    • Modeling the impact of the Mendix platform

    Mendix customers interviewed for the Forrester effort included two North American businesses – an insurance company and a real estate broker – which have been using the Mendix platform for 60 months and 102 months, respectively. The companies have 12,000 and 26,000 users of the applications created on the Mendix platform. The report also included two EMEA customers – a utility, with 48 months of Mendix platform experience and 26,000 application users, and an insurance company with 26 months of Mendix experience and 5,700 users on applications the client created with Mendix.

    Forrester used the data from the four customers to create a composite organization to illustrate the quantifiable benefits and cost savings that can be achieved with Mendix. The composite organization – a North America-based multinational B2B and B2C company with operations in Europe and Asia and 15,000 users of applications created with the Mendix low-code platform – was struggling to meet the software demands of its business units at a reasonable cost.

    The Research Shows That Mendix Delivers Significant Application Delivery Savings

    Like many businesses today, the composite organization had relied on traditional programming languages, frameworks, and legacy systems, and required manual data verification and integration prior to adopting Mendix. As a result, it suffered from error-laden and poor-quality data entry, high costs, and lengthy lead times. However, Mendix enabled the organization to increase development productivity, decrease personnel costs, and reduce application operations costs.

    This was possible due to a broad range of Mendix features and functionality. As Forrester noted, the Mendix visual modeling reduces reliance on traditional programming “speeding development by six to 10 times.” The Mendix low-code platform also enables technical and nontechnical developers to collaborate, which Forrester explained enlarges “the pool of talent able to participate in application development.” Forrester added that the “real-time involvement of business process domain experts” supported by Mendix is valuable in “reducing rework.”

    “The robust, complete Mendix platform enables organizations to solve problems by enabling blended teams to collaborate, driving efficiencies and doing more in less time,” said Roos. “Enterprises can bring their digital solutions to market faster, realizing an improved ROI at a faster pace, as well.”

    Addressing this point, the vice president of software development at the real estate broker interviewed for the TEI report explained his company’s experience, saying: “The ability to develop new products quickly with Mendix has changed our business. For example, most projects in our organization can take up to two years with traditional development. Now, we got our first iteration done within six months, and the second iteration done within four months. We can get so much out to our customers faster, and we get quick feedback from them. The speed-to-market has improved our relationship with our customers.”

    Businesses That Use Mendix Also Benefit from Greater Innovation and Profitability

    The Mendix low-code platform is also ideal for situations in which an individual or organization is not certain at the outset of a project just exactly what the application should look like. Traditional development makes experimentation incredibly expensive and slow. But Mendix enables developers to iterate quickly to deliver the right answers, experiences, and products faster. This accelerated time-to-market helps organizations grow their revenue and profits.

    Forrester said contributors to accelerated speed-to-market and incremental revenue include:

    • Testing and learning on new ideas, using speed-to-market benefits to lower the cost of failure, enabling the composite organization to “fail fast” and outpace competition with new products, services, and business models
    • A higher frequency of low-cost experiments with emerging technologies like conversational interfaces, AI, and IoT, leading to differentiated product and service experiences
    • Reduction of time and effort expended by skills development teams needed to achieve goals on time
    • Creating an innovation culture that attracts top talent and moving IT from a cost center to a revenue-driving enabler

    The insurance company’s development operations lead that Forrester interviewed for the TEI report commented: “Prior to our investment in Mendix, we outsourced some application development and experienced very long lead times. It was difficult to change our minds mid-project. It often took multiple years to build an application, and by that time, the business changed its focus, or the products changed, or the market changed, or all of the above changed. It was a very frustrating experience before Mendix.”

    Roos added, “Low-code is a paradigm shift. But with Mendix, it’s a low-risk change that yields real business results. We would like to thank Forrester, and our customers that participated in the TEI effort to tell their low-code success stories, for helping to illustrate the economic value of Mendix.”

    To read the full Forrester 2020 TEI study, download your copy here.

    To learn more about low-code, attend Mendix World: Version 2.0, the world’s largest virtual low-code conference ever. This event will kick off Sept. 1 and is free of charge for all attendees. Mendix World: Version 2.0 will feature more than 60 sessions, including more than 20 by customers, and cover the gamut of low-code application development topics from strategy to practical, hands-on platform training. For more information about Mendix World 2.0, and to register, click here.

    Background

    In a pandemic-disrupted world, software is the new lifeblood of our daily lives and the connective tissue holding together the global economy. However, traditional software development takes far too long and very often fails to deliver the results business needs and users love. Even prior to COVID-19 there were simply not enough professional software developers in the world to build all the software currently required. The global pandemic has accelerated and exacerbated what was already a software and business crisis. Enter low-code software development. Low-code from Mendix is a powerful enterprise-grade visual development approach empowering citizen and professional developers to make cloud-native applications more than 10x faster for web and mobile using drag-and-drop components and model-driven logic, all through an intuitive graphical user interface.

    Connect with Mendix

    About Mendix

    Mendix, a Siemens business and the global leader in enterprise low-code, is fundamentally reinventing the way applications are built in the digital enterprise. With the Mendix platform, enterprises can Make with More, by broadening an enterprise’s development capability to conquer the software development bottleneck; Make it Smart, by making apps with rich native experiences that are intelligent, proactive and contextual; and Make at Scale, to modernize core systems and build large app portfolios to keep pace with business growth. The Mendix platform is built to promote intense collaboration between business and IT teams and dramatically accelerate application development cycles, while maintaining the highest standards of security, quality and governance – in short, to help enterprises confidently leap into their digital futures. Mendix’s ‘Go Make It’ platform has been adopted by more than 4,000 leading companies around the world.

  • Myntelligence Optimizes Digital Marketing Campaigns And Unlocks Real-Time Business Insights With TigerGraph

    TigerGraph’s Rapid Data Analysis Fuels Myntelligence’s Media Automation Platform, Boosting Campaign Intelligence and ROI

    REDWOOD CITY, CA – Aug. 12, 2020 – TigerGraph, the only scalable graph database for the enterprise, today announced that Myntelligence has chosen TigerGraph to power advanced analytics within the Myntelligence Media Automation platform to deliver integrated, real-time insights to marketers. Myntelligence, with TigerGraph, is addressing a key business challenge: Marketers often struggle to manage multiple campaigns across various digital channels while analyzing integrated results in real-time – especially when working with data repositories such as Hadoop-based data lakes.

    “Today’s businesses must harness the power of interconnected data to gain real-time, meaningful insights – and this data is especially critical for marketers,” said Dr. Yu Xu, founder and CEO, TigerGraph. “In fact, almost 80 percent of today’s marketers describe their customer engagement as ‘data-driven,’ with this data being essential to understanding a customer’s engagement journey before, during, and after a purchase. TigerGraph’s advanced graph analytics bolsters the Myntelligence platform, arming marketers with the real-time campaign information they need to strengthen customer relationships, resulting in higher ROI.”

    Myntelligence’s Media Automation and Optimization SaaS platform enables marketers to utilize all ad-tech and mar-tech platforms available in the marketing ecosystem from a single web interface and run campaigns across the entire acquisition funnel. It gives marketers a single customer view across multiple digital channels, facilitating the real-time analysis and optimization of campaign results. TigerGraph serves as the advanced graph analytics foundation for the Media Automation and Optimization system and enables the interactive, fine-grained analysis of campaign performance across multiple ad and marketing touchpoints. Marketers can then aggregate events linking to individual consumers, run flexible audience analytics queries, and drill down into target demographics. Brands can use the resulting contextualized insights to design additional customer journeys through AI-powered campaign mapping, improving campaign efficiency and increasing ROI in the process.

    “Myntelligence’s prime objective is to help companies build digital communications strategies and omnichannel campaigns in-house. We realized we needed to add advanced graph analytics capabilities to our platform to bridge the ‘business value’ gap,” said Carlo De Matteo, co-founder, and managing partner, Myntelligence. “We were looking for a high performing graph analytics platform that would be easy to build our solution on top of. We evaluated all the players, including open-sourced solutions, and TigerGraph emerged as the best fit. TigerGraph offers the performance, scalability, and ease-of-use we needed and allows us to connect and transform the data in our Hadoop-based data lake so that we can deliver contextualized insights to our customers.”

    Data lakes are built for storing large volumes of raw data in its native format. However, these storage repositories are not designed for rapid data analysis, leaving companies stranded when it comes to deriving real-time actionable insights from marketing campaigns. Companies need to do more than connect multiple digital channels – they need to unlock the business value within these data lakes. Only then can marketers optimize their ad-tech and mar-tech platforms to drive customer engagement.

    “Many organizations have invested heavily in building data lakes. Meanwhile, they’ve learned that extracting insights from this ‘data overload’ is a slow, difficult process,” said Tony Baer, principal, dbInsight. “Graph databases can actually complement data warehouses, picking up where data warehouses leave off. Graph databases highlight specific relationships and connections within the interconnected data, shedding light on how various factors drive the customer journey. These newly discovered connections within massive datasets provide businesses with valuable competitive information.”

    About TigerGraph  TigerGraph is the only scalable graph database for the enterprise. TigerGraph’s proven technology connects data silos for deeper, wider and operational analytics at scale. Four out of the top five global banks use TigerGraph for real-time fraud detection. Over 50 million patients receive care path recommendations to assist them on their wellness journey. 300 million consumers receive personalized offers with recommendation engines powered by TigerGraph. The energy infrastructure for 1 billion people is optimized by TigerGraph for reducing power outages. TigerGraph’s proven technology supports applications such as fraud detection, customer 360, MDM, IoT, AI, and machine learning. The company is headquartered in Redwood City, California, USA. Follow TigerGraph on Twitter at @TigerGraphDB or start free at tigergraph.com/cloud.

    ###

  • SQream Connector Newly Featured in Tableau’s Extension Gallery Enables Interactive Analytics on Massive Data Stores

    Tableau customers can rapidly ingest data, enabling exploration, analysis, correlation and visualization of significantly more data with more dimensions

     

    NEW YORK, NY, August 12 2020 – SQream, provider of a data analytics acceleration platform that enables enterprises to gain critical business insights from their massive data stores, announced today that its data connector is now available in the Tableau Extension Gallery. The connector provides Tableau customers with near real-time interactive analytics on terabytes to petabytes of data. The SQream Connector offers a more convenient and reliable way to ensure version compatibility for SQream and Tableau integrations, while simplifying the addition of new data sources.

    SQream enables Tableau users to load vast amounts of data, while facilitating the exploration, analysis, correlation, and visualization of more data. The platform harnesses the high-throughput performance of GPUs for analyzing massive volumes of raw data.

    “We’re thrilled to expand our partnership with SQream, and offer an optimized connector with enhanced performance that will allow customers to instantly leverage the power of SQream directly within Tableau,” said Brian Matsubara, RVP of Global Technology Alliances at Tableau. “SQream’s data acceleration opens up new possibilities for analyzing more data at faster speeds.”

    SQream’s data acceleration platform performs the heavy hitting compute of complex SQL queries to be analyzed in Tableau. Users can connect and begin data exploration within seconds, with no limitations on the dimensionality or depth of the query.

    “We are very excited to partner with Tableau, the leader in interactive data visualization and analytics. The SQream Connector for Tableau transforms big data into the real-time insights that organizations need to create a competitive advantage, and to improve business decision making,” said Ilan Ackerman, Chief Business Development Officer at SQream. “Fast data discovery and exploration enables data scientists and analysts to generate valuable insights quicker, to improve the quality and accuracy of their business decisions.”

     

    About SQream Technologies

    SQream develops and markets SQream DB, designed to obtain unparalleled business intelligence from massive data stores. Global enterprises use SQream DB to analyze more data than ever before, while achieving improved performance, reduced footprint, significant cost savings and the ability to scale the amount of data they analyze to hundreds of terabytes and more. SQream DB is available both on premise and in the cloud. To learn more, visit sqream.com or follow us on twitter @sqreamtech.

  • JumpCloud Extends Cloud Directory Platform with New Windows App to Simplify Credential Management & Combat Phishing Attacks

    Patent-pending approach ensures secure credential management and resource access from an employee’s device

    LOUISVILLE, Colo., Aug. 11, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — JumpCloud, the world’s first Directory-as-a-Service®, today announced the release of the JumpCloud App for Windows, the latest update to its patent-pending strategy for enabling secure credential and identity management from an employee’s device. The release follows its Apple macOS App release, which established the company’s strategy for a device-centric approach to secure corporate password updates. Employees safely manage and modify their credentials from within the confines of JumpCloud-managed Windows and macOS hosts, eliminating attack vectors such as phishing emails, deepfake portals, and similar social engineering methods which pose as a company’s mandated way to update passwords.

    The JumpCloud Windows App streamlines credential management workflows and establishes the employee’s workstation or laptop as a trusted device. Along with JumpCloud’s endpoint-management capabilities, i.e. System Insights™, configuration policies, full disk encryption, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and user account management, the Windows App allows employees to interact with their corporate JumpCloud identity, access their User Portal securely to launch applications via SSO, and update their corporate password. A password change simultaneously updates their device password and all other resources the employee is connected to via JumpCloud’s cloud-based directory service.

    “As users find themselves managing credentials for an ever-growing number of platforms, they’re also targets for phishing attempts that have become increasingly sophisticated and difficult to distinguish from legitimate requests,” said KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, Industry Analyst at RedMonk. “JumpCloud’s Windows App–like its existing offering for macOS–is designed to help organizations eliminate the risk of email-based phishing schemes for associated user accounts by centralizing identity management on associated individuals’ devices.”

    “The one place an employee should trust to manage their credentials is within their device, not over the open internet and not exclusively by an email reminder,” said Greg Keller, CTO at JumpCloud. “JumpCloud’s security policies, MFA, and our Windows and macOS apps provide the assurance that IT and security teams need for the most secure means to protect their employees.”

    Admins can try the Windows App and all of JumpCloud’s cloud-directory services for free. Find more information on:

    About JumpCloud
    JumpCloud® Directory-as-a-Service® is Active Directory® and LDAP reimagined. JumpCloud securely manages and connects users to their systems, applications, files, and networks. Try JumpCloud today.

    SOURCE JumpCloud

  • Elyra reaches 1.0.0

    By Luciano Resende, Open Source AI Platform Architect, CODAIT, IBM

    Elyra is an open source project that extends the JupyterLab user interface to simplify the development of data science and AI models.

    Elyra is proud to announce its 1.0.0 release. If this is the first time you are hearing about Elyra, check out our announcement blog for more details about the project.

    The 1.0.0 release of Elyra includes:

    • Notebook Pipelines visual editor
    • Ability to run notebooks as batch jobs
    • Reusable Code Snippets  (new)
    • Hybrid runtime support (based on Jupyter Enterprise Gateway)
    • Python script execution capabilities within the editor
    • Python script navigation using auto-generated Table of Contents
    • Notebook navigation using auto-generated Table of Contents 
    • Notebook versioning based on Git integration
    • Reusable configuration and editor for runtimes (new)
    • Support for JupyterLab 2.x (new)
    • JupyterHub Support (new)
    • Ability to try Elyra from Binder (new)
    • Support for JupyterLab Dark Theme

    Notebook Pipelines

    Elyra’s Notebook Pipeline Editor simplifies the conversion of multiple notebooks into batch jobs or workflows. By leveraging cloud-based resources to run their experiments faster, the data scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI developers are then more productive, and therefore able to spend more of their time focusing on their technical skills.

    Based on the great feedback from the Elyra user base, this release brings lots of bug fixes usability enhancements such as:

    • Enhanced inline user documentation
    • Validation capabilities to Pipeline Editor that notifies users of missing or invalid configuration values
    • Optimized dependency handling providing a much faster submission of pipelines
    • Easier access to previous submitted experiments from the Pipeline Editor
    • Support for “bring your own image” to be used as the environment to execute Notebooks on the external runtime

    Reusable Code Snippets

    Code snippets give you the ability to save time and reuse task-oriented blocks of code. Elyra’s new code snippets extension enables easy discovery, creation and insertion of reusable snippets of code into your Notebooks, Python Scripts or even Markdown files used for documentation directly from the JupyterLab workspace. This makes the process of writing code more efficient and accessible.

    The list of available code snippets is found in the left side pane and includes a preview of each snippet, and an option to either copy a snippet or insert it directly inline.

    Code snippets can also be conveniently created and edited from within JupyterLab.

    Leveraging  Table of Contents for Notebooks and Python Scripts

    Navigating large files to find specific sections in Notebooks or function definitions in Python Scripts can be difficult tasks. The Table of Contents extension, which was enhanced to support navigating Python Scripts provides an easy outline of your contents, enabling easy navigation.

    To allow for streamlined python development, Elyra’s python editor is now accompanied by an auto-generated Table of Contents, which allows for efficient navigation within large python scripts.

    Reusable configuration and editor for runtimes

    Elyra introduced a ‘shared configuration service’ that simplifies workspace configuration management, enabling things like information around accessing external runtimes to be configured once and shared across multiple components.

    With Elyra 1.0, this service is now used by multiple components and have been enhanced with schema based validation capabilities and a full set of REST APIs.  With this release of Elyra, users can also easily browse, create and edit these configurations from within the JupyterLab user interface.

    JupyterHub support

    With Elyra 1.0.0 we have also created a docker image and provided necessary [configuration steps](https://elyra.readthedocs.io/en/latest/recipes/deploying-elyra-in-a-jupyterhub-endvironment.html) to integrate Elyra with JupyterHub.

    Try Elyra from Binder

    To experiment with Elyra without installing it locally, just click on the binder link:

    https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/elyra-ai/elyra/v1.0.0?urlpath=lab/tree/binder-demo

    Using Elyra in real Analytics and AI scenarios

    While building Elyra, we work very close with data scientists, machine learning engineers and AI developers, and we have been building a few scenarios to validate the user experience when developing models and other applications using Elyra.

    Analyzing COVID-19 time series data

    One of the examples creates a pipeline to analyze COVID-19 time series data sets from both USA and Europe which is available as open-source in the [covid-notebook github repository](https://github.com/CODAIT/covid-notebooks)

     Analyzing NOAA weather time series data set and explore forecasting

    Another example utilizes [DAX – Data Asset Exchange](https://developer.ibm.com/exchanges/data/) NOAA dataset and produces a pipeline that consumes and applies ETL into the data set, and then goes about analyzing and experimenting different forecasting capabilities.

    Elyra community adoption 

    The Elyra community is working very hard to promote adoption and create a heath community around the project. In the past few months, we are starting to see some momentum in the past several weeks and below are some details :

    Github Stars : Elyra main repository is reaching close to 500 as of August 2020, please continue to show your support for the project and giving us more stars.

    Projects depending on Elyra: Other then the two examples scenarios mentioned above, we are starting to see other communities adopting elyra into their projects, CalPoly has been using the Elyra code snippets extension in their summer-intern projects and other communities are also experimenting with Elyra.

    Downloads: We have also seen an increase of downloads of the Elyra npm packages in the past several weeks, and we are floating between 60k – 70k weekly downloads.

    Elyra in the Enterprise: Components of Elyra are integrated and available in IBM Cloud Pak for Data and Watson Studio offerings.

    Summary

    Building on a Jupyter Notebooks foundation, the de facto tool for data scientists, machine learning engineers and AI developers, Elyra 1.0.0 provides a set of AI centric extensions to JupyterLab aiming to help users through the model development life cycle complexities, making JupyterLab even better for AI practitioners.

    We would appreciate for you to get involved with the [Elyra project] (https://github.com/elyra-ai/elyra/). Read our [contributing guidelines] (https://elyra.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html), create new issues if you have questions, suggestions for new features or to report any bugs. We also welcome contributions via GitHub pull requests.

  • IntraEdge launches proprietary thermal temperature sensor, QuikSense, that enables privacy-first health screenings

    QuikSense is a cost-effective and scalable temperature solution that integrates with existing hardware

    PHOENIX, August 6, 2020 – IntraEdge, the company behind Truyo, a privacy compliance platform powered by Intel®, today announced the launch of its proprietary thermal temperature sensor solution, QuikSense, that enables businesses to conduct contactless and privacy-minded health screenings. QuikSense can be tailored to each businesses’ needs and used with existing hardware, like a laptop or desktop, or IntraEdge’s self-check temperature kiosk, Janus.

    As businesses nationwide open their doors, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend daily health checks. Until now, affordable options on the market, like manual temperature screenings, were high-touch, inconsistent and unencrypted, but with QuikSense, companies now have access to a cost-effective solution that prioritizes health and privacy.

    “We are at the forefront of learning how to achieve temperature accuracy in real world environments,” said Dan Clarke, President at IntraEdge. “QuikSense meets a gap in the market for accurate, usable and secure temperature readings in the context of the pandemic.”

    To meet the highest health, privacy and security standards, QuikSense leverages the Truyo Privacy Rights Platform, an IntraEdge product, powered by Intel®, to power its Health-Check Management Solution that protects data collection, encryption and automation. QuikSense uses a medical-grade sensor that can capture an individual’s temperature by scanning their wrist. Wrist temperatures have been validated by researchers as an equally accurate non-contact alternative to forehead scans, and QuikSense provides the same level (+/- 0.5º F) level of accuracy as the leading product on the market.

    QuikSense is available for nationwide order and delivery. It is manufactured in Arizona and is ready to ship in less than two weeks. To learn more, please visit: https://truyo.com/quiksense/

    About IntraEdge

    IntraEdge is a large technology talent, products, services and training organization that functions with the agility of a significantly smaller firm. We provide our clients with the resources and expertise to enhance business performance through technology. We give our people the opportunity to grow in their fields, with the freedom to excel.

  • Document APIs with open source OpenAPI Comment Parser

    By Nicholas Bourdakos, IBM Developer Advocate

    Whether you’re building an application or website, great documentation is crucial to the success of your service. Developers need instructions on how to use your API and they need a way to try it out. Good documentation handles both.

    The OpenAPI Specificationis an open standard for defining and documenting your API. The OpenAPI Specification enables the generation of great documentation, but creating an OpenAPI spec takes a lot of time and effort to create and keep up-to-date. Often, the OpenAPI spec ends up a large, forgotten, thousandl-ine file.

    To help make it as easy as possible to document an API, today we are launching the OpenAPI Comment Parser. The goal of OpenAPI Comment Parser is to give developers a way to generate this OpenAPI spec from comments inline with their code. When the OpenAPI spec lives inside the code, developers are much more likely to keep it up-to-date as their code changes.

    This approach brings the OpenAPI spec to the code. It gets broken up into smaller, more manageable pieces. It lives next to the code that it’s describing. This enables developers to easily update the relevant spec when code changes and don’t have to go searching in the giant spec file. We are also introducing a new spec format that is tailor-made for being written in comments. On average, this new format has been shown to reduce the amount of spec needed to be written by 50 percent.

    The library is built for Node.js, but the CLI can work with any language that uses this style of comments:

    /**
    * comment
    */

    We plan on expanding to most popular languages.

    How can this make a developer’s life easier?

    The Comment Parser automatically creates better documentation with less code that is more manageable. On top of these improvements, developers writing the API can use the documentation generated from the Comment Parser to test their API. This means less time waiting for a frontend to be built or having to rely on other tools in order to test drive their API.

    Try it today

    We built this tool to solve some of the problems we face everyday developing services at IBM. Now, developers can try out the new tool on GitHub.

  • Harness Acquires Continuous Integration Pioneer Drone.io and Commits to Open Source

    Acquisition marks company’s entrance into the open source software community and establishes Harness as the complete CI/CD platform for cloud and container-native teams

    SAN FRANCISCO – August 5, 2020 – Harness, the industry’s first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service™ platform, today announced that it has acquired self-service Continuous Integration firm Drone.io, the creator of the popular open-source project Drone. Today’s news enters Harness into the open source software community and establishes Harness as the first self-service CI/CD platform for cloud and container-native applications. The addition of Drone.io’s continuous integration to Harness’ industry-leading continuous delivery platform will enable developers and DevOps engineers to build, test and deploy software on-demand, without delay or downtime.

    As every business becomes a software business, the challenge to build, test and ship software becomes critical. Industry analysts validate that sentiment, with IDC projecting that the DevOps software market will reach $15 billion by 2023. However, there are many DevOps tools on the market that can’t keep pace with today’s modern platforms, processes and engineering requirements. Legacy continuous integration tools like Jenkins were written ten to fifteen years ago—pre-cloud computing—and require teams of engineers to manually script software delivery pipelines, instead of delivering innovation for their business.

    Drone.io fills this gap. Instead of requiring scripts, continuous integration pipelines can be declared and managed as code in Git, which means they have standard syntax, require less work and are easy for engineers to create, use, maintain and troubleshoot. Drone.io plugins are all containerized—and therefore standardized—making them easy to download, use, upgrade and create. Drone.io can reduce the time and cost of continuous integration by 5-10X, so engineers can focus on writing code for the business versus scripting their CI builds, tests and pipelines. To validate this, Drone currently has over 50,000 active community users, including organizations like eBay, CapitalOne, Cisco and VMware, and is one of the most liked CI/CD projects on GitHub.

    “Today’s software developers are under incredible pressure to create and deploy new applications on-demand, yet a lack of automation means their current process is highly manual, time-consuming and error-prone,” said Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness. “With the acquisition of Drone.io, Harness will continue to simplify software delivery for developers, and will fully embrace, and commit to, the open source community so that we can accelerate the speed of software delivery together.” 

    “I’m extremely proud of what our Drone community has accomplished, creating the first container-native CI self-service solution that is both simple and scalable for engineers to use. If you look at Harness Continuous Delivery, its DNA is similar to Drone – both are self-service, simple and scalable,” said Brad Rydzewski, CEO and founder of Drone.io. “Together we can take CI/CD to the next level for our open-source and enterprise communities.”

    “With Drone, we can put the power of CI in our engineers’ hands. Drone is simple and scalable, like a Swiss army knife for our few hundred engineers around the world. They can build and run their CI pipelines in containers, independently, without resource conflicts or bottlenecks. We spend less than a few hours a month administering Drone, so it’s a light lift compared to CI tools we’ve managed before,” said Jim Sheldon, Senior DevOps Engineer at Meltwater.

    Harness will continue to invest, innovate and support Drone.io’s open source community, and currently has several internal projects under consideration for open source. As part of the acquisition, Drone will continue to be open-source and free for the community, and will become Harness CI Community Edition. Drone Enterprise will be sold as Harness CI Essentials Edition. Later this year, Harness will introduce Harness CI Enterprise Edition, a next-generation approach to CI that will redefine how engineers build and test code in the cloud.

    To learn more about Drone by Harness, visit https://harness.io/.

    About Harness

    Based in San Francisco, Harness is the industry’s first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service™platform designed to provide a simple, safe and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to release applications into production. Harness uses machine learning to detect the quality of deployments and automatically roll back failed ones, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight. Harness customers include NCR, Kohl’s, Discover Financial, Nationwide Insurance and McAfee. Follow Harness on Twitter or try Harness for free at harness.io.

    About Drone.io

    With 21,000+ GitHub stars and a robust, active open source community, Drone is a leader in container-driven Continuous Integration. Drone empowers development teams to deliver software at unprecedented speed. Follow us on Twitter @droneio or on Github for news and product updates.