devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • InfluxDB Cloud extends to Microsoft Azure Cloud — now available on all major cloud platforms

    InfluxData looks to accelerate IoT application development with PTC through strategic product integration

     

    SAN FRANCISCO — July 22, 2020 — InfluxData, creator of the time series database InfluxDB, today announced that InfluxDB Cloud is now available on Microsoft Azure, furthering the company’s commitment to increase accessibility to developers. With this announcement, InfluxDB Cloud is now live on all three major cloud platforms — Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services. In addition, InfluxDB will become the time series engine for PTC’s market-leading ThingWorx® Industrial IoT (IIoT) platform.

    “InfluxDB Cloud empowers developers to derive new insights from their data, and with usage-based pricing, ensures they never have to worry about added costs of overprovisioning or risk their application being unavailable when they need it,” explained Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. “The addition of Microsoft Azure, one of the dominant cloud platforms, has further extended the global reach of our cloud offering. Alongside our strategic alliance with PTC, we have created a comprehensive marketplace that provides developers with the fastest time to results. With InfluxDB Cloud, developers can get up and running in minutes and easily scale their IoT or DevOps projects as needed on the cloud of their choice.”

    InfluxDB Cloud now available on all major cloud platforms 

    The recent and sudden transition to remote working has accelerated moves to the cloud, with business leaders increasingly looking to cloud services to support digital transformation. This comes at a time when many companies — aware of vendor lock-in and keen to abstract their applications so they can be moved across clouds — are trending towards multi-cloud strategies. Now available across all major cloud platforms, InfluxDB Cloud has been built from the ground up as cloud-native, running as a stateful application on Kubernetes. This makes it the first and only serverless time series data platform with flexible and transparent usage-based pricing and a free tier to broaden access to all developers.

    “Two major areas of growth for companies today are time series databases and cloud deployment. The deployment of InfluxDB Cloud on Microsoft Azure provides an ideal environment for customers to develop and run their applications,” said Ayelet Steinitz, Head of Global Strategic Alliances at Microsoft. “Organizations can accelerate the roll-out of applications and benefit from unified billing and support, and integrations with key Microsoft Azure technologies.”

    InfluxData & PTC working to accelerate IIoT solution development

    InfluxData’s collaboration with PTC is designed to help companies accelerate the development of IIoT solutions. InfluxDB Cloud will be sold, delivered, and supported directly by PTC, for deployments of ThingWorx hosted in PTC’s cloud environment. PTC has deeply integrated its ThingWorx platform with Microsoft Azure, its preferred cloud platform for the industrial sector.

    “We believe that speed of development and deployment will be critical in rolling out new IIoT solutions,” said Chris Baldwin, Vice President of ThingWorx Product Management at PTC. “By embedding InfluxDB into ThingWorx, InfluxData and PTC aim to simplify and accelerate developers’ ability to collect, process, store and analyze even larger time series data workloads in multiple areas of their IIoT deployment.”

    Embedding InfluxDB into ThingWorx will enable customers to generate data insights from tens of thousands of internet-connected devices and sensors, each with a multitude of measurements, and generating hundreds of thousands of writes per second.

    About InfluxData
    InfluxData is the creator of InfluxDB, the open source time series database. Our technology is purpose-built to handle the massive volumes of time-stamped data produced by IoT devices, applications, networks, containers and computers. We are on a mission to help developers and organizations, such as Cisco, IBM, Lego, Siemens, and Tesla, store and analyze real-time data, empowering them to build transformative monitoring, analytics, and IoT applications quicker and to scale. InfluxData is headquartered in San Francisco with a workforce distributed throughout the U.S. and across Europe. For more information, visit www.influxdata.com and follow us @InfluxDB.

     

  • Instana Becomes First APM Solution with GitOps Enabled Agent Management

    Instana Agent Automatically Supports Git-Based Configuration Management to Streamline Configuration Rollouts Across Multiple Hosts

    Chicago, Il– July 22, 2020 – Instana, the leading provider of real-time application performance management (APM) solutions for cloud-native microservice applications, today announced the availability of the first APM solution with a GitOps enabled agent. With the release, Instana’s agent now automatically supports Git-based configuration management across any number of hosts.

    “Updating and configuring agents in production environments is a tedious and time consuming effort for organizations today. Of course, the more agents that are running, the more tedious the task,” said Chris Farrell, Instana Technical Director and APM Strategist. “With this latest unique capability, Instana is giving more control to users while reducing manual effort, enabling them to manage agent configuration automatically during agent startup and reboot, and version pin the Instana agent to via their Git repository of preference.”

    Traditional monitoring solutions give organizations a choice of using static agents or giving up version control. Instana has allowed both options, but now makes it easier for clients using Git repositories. The Instana agent supports Git-based configuration management, delivering version pinning control for specific hosts, automatic configuration updates fetched on agent startup and reboot, the flexibility to turn this feature on and off at will, and the ability to map different groups of host agents to Git branches based on the environment that is being monitored.

    In addition to manual agent configuration being a complex and time-consuming process, it also introduces a high risk of error that could break the monitoring of critical systems. Instana’s GitOps enabled host agent reduces that risk, leading to fewer configuration errors while providing the option for easy rollback if an update causes a problem. With this novel capability, Instana’s agent delivers improved customer experience and more control for users, allowing them to keep the latest version of the agent when it is most convenient.

    Unlike traditional APM tools, Instana’s automated Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution discovers all application service components and application infrastructure, including Cloud infrastructure such as AWS and Lambda, orchestration infrastructure like Kubernetes and Docker, application services and DevOps processes. 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 GitOps enabled agent and Git-based configuration management by visiting https://instana.com.

  • Masergy Expands its SD-WAN Portfolio Offering the Broadest Choice, Flexibility, and Built-In SASE

    Now addresses the needs of multi-cloud businesses of all sizes

    DALLAS — July 21, 2020 — Masergy, the software-defined network and cloud platform for the digital enterprise, today launched the next generation of its SD-WAN portfolio. The new portfolio, based on Gartner’s Secure Access Security Edge (SASE) tenets, are designed with the flexibility in network, access, management, and security providing businesses the freedom to choose the right configuration for their cloud and network needs.

    Businesses large and small need to quickly gain the agility and flexibility SD-WAN offers as digital transformations have dramatically accelerated due to COVID-19. Pioneering software-defined networking two decades ago, Masergy continues to innovate its SD-WAN and cloud platform for businesses of all sizes. Recognizing that moving to SD-WAN is a journey not a destination, Masergy has expanded its solution options, allowing businesses to adopt SD-WAN on their terms. Masergy has long offered a fully managed SD-WAN solution with built-in security and is now expanding its portfolio with the following:

    • Multiple management options
    • Fully managed solutions: Masergy’s engineers and project teams deliver customized implementations and provide dedicated ongoing support, end to end.
    • Co-managed solutions: Leveraging the SD-WAN Orchestrator, clients can customize their configurations and make changes while Masergy simultaneously monitors and reports on performance.
    • SASE architecture

    Adhering to the primary tenets of SASE, Masergy has been uniting network and security functions into a single solution for years, coupling SD-WAN with security bundles that include Unified Threat Management, Threat Monitoring and Response, or complete Managed Security Services. The Masergy security portfolio includes everything from cloud-based firewall as a service, cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway, and Zero Trust network access to antivirus, intrusion detection/prevention, web filtering, data loss prevention, security analytics, endpoint detection and response, 24/7 SOC services, vulnerability scanning, more.

    • More hybrid networking options

    In addition to Masergy-provided private access, direct internet access, and broadband internet access, clients can bring their own third-party connectivity.

    • Expanded cloud on-ramp solutions

    Expanded connectivity to additional cloud service and SaaS providers; SD-WAN integration in Public Cloud Infrastructure; Shared private peering for SaaS apps; and a shared bandwidth model for multiple cloud services across the same exchange and across the Masergy Secure Edge Network; these are a few of the capabilities launching now and into 1Q21.

    • Unprecedented, market-leading SD-WAN Secure SLAs
    • 100 percent service availability for cloud connections when architected for redundancy
    • 100 percent service availability for SD-WAN sites configured for high availability
    • Proactive credits on service availability SLAs
    • 5-minute proactive outage notifications

    “Masergy was built on a foundation of enabling client success, and Managed SD-WAN Secure portfolio is another leap forward in allowing companies to better control their destiny as they modernize their IT infrastructures,” said Masergy Chairman and CEO Chris MacFarland. “Offering greater flexibility and more choice, our new SD-WAN portfolio enables clients to achieve optimal performance and security across hybrid, multi-cloud environments with an approach to management that fits their specific needs—all on a regional and global scale.

    “The Next Generation WAN is a moving target,” said John Burke, CIO and principal research analyst, Nemertes Research. “More than just a network connecting branches to data centers, the Next Gen WAN is the locus of enterprise control for all communications among resources not sharing a location. SD-WAN is its core, and has to evolve continually to meet new enterprise needs and preferences, and to connect resources wherever they are.”

    With the addition of SD-WAN Secure, Masergy is now the only provider with a single SD-WAN solution that unites a global software-defined network, firewall as a service, AIOps, shadow IT discovery, identity-based WAN analytics, co-managed options, alongside an unparalleled customer service.

    Watch the video

    Masergy SD-WAN Secure: Your network, your way

    About Masergy

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

     

  • Applitools Adds AI Auto-Maintenance and Smart Assist to End-to-End Testing Platform

    Dev teams running automated functional, cross-browser, and cross-device tests reduce maintenance time by up to 90 percent and radically improve test efficiency yielding faster, higher quality releases 

    SAN MATEO, Calif., July 21, 2020 — Applitools (https://applitools.com/), provider of a next generation test automation platform through Visual AI and Ultrafast Grid, today announced new AI capabilities for its end-to-end automated testing platform. Auto-maintenance AI leverages the power of Applitools Visual AI technology to accelerate test maintenance efficiency through virtual assistant recommendations. AI powered smart assist automatically analyzes large batches of test results, often numbering in the hundreds or even thousands of tests. It then removes all redundancies by grouping similar visual and functional regressions together. Applitools auto-maintenance AI instantly performs the mundane and redundant tasks often associated with manual testing without fatigue or errors. It reduces maintenance time by up to 90 percent so users reach better results with less effort, and allow engineering teams to release higher quality apps much faster with greater confidence.

    To see Applitools auto-maintenance AI in action, set a quick call with a test automation expert at (https://info.applitools.com/uG9U).

    Hundreds of Applitools customers use AI auto-maintenance and smart assist to reduce maintenance costs and improve efficiency:

    • “It’s well-known that AI has transformed how businesses make decisions. In today’s climate, it’s not only business decisions that benefit from AI – engineering teams are also leveraging AI to help digitally transform their application development,” said Parasar Saha, Enterprise Automation Architect at a leading North American airline. “AI that can reduce repetitive and error-prone tasks to free up time and resources is what you should look for to help transform your team. Applitools AI powered auto-maintenance does exactly this and is a perfect example of how AI can be leveraged effectively.”
    • “We use Applitools extensively in our regression testing at Branch,” said Joe Emison, CTO at Branch Financial. “Visual AI is incredibly accurate, but equally impressive are the AI powered maintenance features. With the volume of tests that we run, the time savings that the AI auto-maintenance features afford us are extensive.”
    • “Applitools auto-maintenance AI has transformed the repetitive and tedious process of analysing results into a streamlined process saving us an incredible amount of time,” said Marie Drake, Principal Test Automation Engineer at News UK.

    Test maintenance overhead is the leading challenge for QA and development teams with most teams spending 40-70 percent of their time on maintenance. As businesses digitally transform, the maintenance work required to ensure a visually and functionally perfect user experience across all browsers, devices, and viewports continues to increase. Dev teams are unable to maintain quality while also working toward faster release cycles.

    “Test maintenance is a painstaking and error-prone task, which is exactly what AI is meant to solve,” said Adam Carmi, CTO of Applitools. “Applitools’ core Visual AI technology helps automate test maintenance processes and does most of the heavy lifting to save test engineers and developers time while reducing errors. The assistant-like Visual AI recommendations are uniquely intelligent, accurate, and right-on-time to ensure that customers are tapping the full potential of the Applitools Platform. We are giving test engineers the time back to write new tests instead of getting bogged down in laborious and tedious maintenance work.”

    Developers and Test Engineers can start using AI auto-maintenance and AI virtual assist today. To learn more about Applitools and the latest developments around Visual AI, visit (https://applitools.com/).

    About Applitools

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

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

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

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

     

  • Perforce Software Acquires Methodics, Expanding DevOps Portfolio

    Perforce Continues to Grow Platform Already Used by Top Semiconductor Companies 

    MINNEAPOLIS, SAN FRANCISCO, and SANTA MONICA, July 20, 2020 – Perforce Software, Inc. (“Perforce”), a provider of solutions to enterprise teams requiring productivity, visibility, and scale along the development lifecycle, backed by Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. (together with its affiliates, “Clearlake”) and Francisco Partners, today announced it has acquired Methodics Inc. (“Methodics”), a leading provider of intellectual property lifecycle management and traceability solutions for enterprises. The addition of Methodics further distinguishes Perforce in the DevOps market as a solution provider uniquely addressing the needs of some of the largest technology teams in the world facing extreme scale, time to market, and quality imperatives. Terms were not disclosed.

    Perforce and Methodics previously had a strategic partnership in place, providing a fully integrated solution to manage IP from design all the way through production and reuse in the semiconductor industry. Many of the world’s top semiconductor companies already leverage Perforce and Methodics’ solutions for electronic design and data management.

    “The semiconductor and embedded software design markets continue to expand, especially as they serve growing AI, automotive, cloud, and IoT markets,” said Mark Ties, Perforce CEO. “Together with Methodics, Perforce will enable these markets to drive faster time to market, higher quality, greater operational efficiency, and increased security and compliance at scale. We are also excited about the opportunity to extend this joint solution into gaming, automotive, and other industries.”

    “The importance of collaboration between multisite and multi-geographic design teams continues to intensify. Methodics solutions enable critical collaboration while assuring full traceability and reuse of important design assets and their associated metadata,” said Simon Butler, Methodics CEO. “We are excited to join the Perforce team, and we are confident that this acquisition will enable us to meet the needs of the semiconductor and embedded systems markets, as well as gaming, automotive, and beyond.”

    “Maxlinear has been using Perforce Helix and Methodics IP life cycle management solutions for the past few years to increase our productivity and introduce an IP reuse methodology at Maxlinear,” said Paolo Miliozzi, Vice President, SoC Technology at MaxLinear.  “We are looking forward to the solutions that the combined companies will be able to deliver to us moving forward as MaxLinear continues to grow.”

    About Perforce
    Perforce powers innovation at unrivaled scale. With a portfolio of scalable DevOps solutions, we help modern enterprises overcome complex product development challenges by improving productivity, visibility, and security throughout the product lifecycle. Our portfolio includes solutions for Agile planning & ALM, API management, automated mobile & web testing, embeddable analytics, open source support, repository management, static & dynamic code analysis, version control, and more. With over 20,000 customers, Perforce is trusted by the world’s leading brands to drive their business critical technology development. For more information, visit www.perforce.com.

    About Methodics
    Methodics is recognized as the premier provider of IP Lifecycle Management (IPLM) and traceability solutions for the Enterprise. Methodics’ customers benefit from the products’ ability to enable high-performance analog/mixed signal, digital, software, and SOC design collaboration across multi-site and multi-geographic design teams and to track the usage of their important design assets. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has additional offices and representatives in the U.S., Europe, Israel, China, Taiwan, and Korea.  For more information, visit www.methodics.com.

    About Clearlake

    Clearlake is a leading private investment firm founded in 2006. With a sector-focused approach, the firm seeks to partner with world-class management teams by providing patient, long-term capital to dynamic businesses that can benefit from Clearlake’s operational improvement approach, O.P.S.® The firm’s core target sectors are technology, industrials, and consumer. Clearlake currently has approximately $24 billion of assets under management and its senior investment principals have led or co-led over 200 investments. More information is available at www.clearlake.com.

    About Francisco Partners

    Francisco Partners is a leading global private equity firm that specializes in investments in technology and technology-enabled businesses. Since its launch 20 years ago, Francisco Partners has raised more than $24 billion in committed capital and invested in more than 275 technology companies, making it one of the most active and longstanding investors in the technology industry. The firm invests in opportunities where its deep sectoral knowledge and operational expertise can help companies realize their full potential. For more information on Francisco Partners, please visit www.franciscopartners.com.

     

  • TigerGraph Offers Multi-Cloud Graph Database-As-A-Service With Availability On Microsoft Azure

    TigerGraph Cloud Now Supports AWS and Microsoft Azure, Enabling More Companies to Unleash the Power of Interconnected Data

    REDWOOD CITY, CA — July 16, 2020 — TigerGraph, the only scalable graph database for the enterprise, today launched TigerGraph Cloud on Microsoft Azure. TigerGraph Cloud, the industry’s first and only distributed native graph database-as-a-service, helps enterprises harness the power of the graph: Companies can quickly and easily build and run applications that work with highly connected and complex datasets. The company recently announced TigerGraph 3.0, which makes no-code advanced graph analytics easy while delivering core platform capabilities. TigerGraph helps enterprises derive new insights and drive vastly better business outcomes through advanced graph analytics at scale. TigerGraph Cloud allows teams to use the cloud vendor of their choice, offering support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and now, Microsoft Azure.

    “TigerGraph Cloud continues to answer specific enterprise pain points for organizations in several industries, including healthcare, financial services and government. Relational databases aren’t up to the task when it comes to analyzing interconnected data,” said Todd Blaschka, COO, TigerGraph. “Graph database and analytics is the way forward. Historically, organizations had to rely on data scientists to design their graph analytics solutions. That has changed with TigerGraph Cloud, which makes graph accessible to all. And now, TigerGraph Cloud’s support for Azure makes it the first truly multi-cloud graph database-as-a-service in the market.”

    TigerGraph Cloud, an easy-to-use, cloud-based graph service, provides the ideal cloud-based service to model, search, and traverse relationships for analytical, transactional and real-time workloads. TigerGraph Cloud allows users to get started in minutes, build a proof-of-concept model in hours and deploy a solution to production in days. It eliminates the need to set up, configure or manage servers, schedule backups or look for security vulnerabilities. Also, TigerGraph Cloud allows users to scale their graph solution up to tens of terabytes and support more than 100,000 real-time deep link analytics queries per second on a single machine.

    TigerGraph Cloud delivers simplicity, and its elastic pricing means users only pay for hours they use. TigerGraph Cloud users can build a complete proof of concept in mere hours from one of 20 Starter Kits that cover real-world use cases such as customer 360, fraud detection, personalized real-time recommendation, hub or influencer computation, supply chain analysis, neural networks, cybersecurity and more. Starter kits are built with sample graph data schema, dataset, and queries focused on specific use cases such as fraud detection, real-time recommendation, machine learning, explainable AI and more.

    The newest version of TigerGraph Cloud includes configuration for distributed graphs and replica instances for high availability. Subscribers can provision distributed TigerGraph services for large production datasets, and have the choice to deploy high availability TigerGraph services. TigerGraph Cloud runs on the new TigerGraph Enterprise 2.5 platform, which features a Spark connector, pattern matching, and more built-in data processing functions. Users can start for free, then expand across the cloud as their data expands. TigerGraph’s ability to do SQL-like database computation along with ACID-compliant transactions benefits users with a lower TCO compared to other platforms.

    TigerGraph Cloud on Microsoft Azure is available now.

    TigerGraph Providing Graph Database Technology for Combating COVID-19 

    The company is providing free use of TigerGraph’s graph database technology to those helping to prevent the spread of, and improve the treatment for, Coronavirus worldwide. Local, state and federal agencies, corporate users, as well as non-profits can access the free tier on TigerGraph Cloud to load data and perform advanced analysis using graph algorithms. Sample use cases include deploying community detection algorithms to identify clusters of virus infection, PageRank algorithms to identify super-spreading events and shortest path algorithms to understand the origin and impact of spread in a particular area. A single free instance can store billions of entities such as people, locations, medical supplies, and drugs along with their associated properties and connections. The company also invites users to submit a free trial request to use TigerGraph Enterprise Edition for analysis of sensitive data related to COVID-19 on their own hardware or in your data center. TigerGraph will extend the free trial, as necessary, to support the initiatives focused on eliminating COVID-19.

    TigerGraph has added a COVID-19 starter kit to expedite users’ efforts. Register for TigerGraph Cloud to use it. Complete details can be found here: tigergraph.com/stopcoronavirus.

    Helpful Links

    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. 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.

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  • Airship Launches Free Feature Flags by Apptimize, Allowing Mobile App Product Owners to Confidently Adapt to the New-Normal

    With app installs growing across many industries, and businesses rolling out new services to meet changing needs, feature release management maximizes opportunities and mitigates risks 

    PORTLAND, Ore., — July 15, 2020 — Customer engagement company Airship today announced that it is launching a free version of Apptimize’s Feature Flags solution, enabling app developers to control the scope and timing of feature launches in order to validate success and reduce risk prior to full rollout. From new apps to those with massive audiences, developers can use Feature Flags by signing up for a free account, or take advantage of newly reduced pricing for unlimited Feature Flags from Apptimize.

    The challenge with updating mobile apps is amplified by lengthy approval cycles required by the App Store and Google Play, which means new features either need to wait for the next update cycle or leverage suboptimal web views that lead to disjointed customer experiences. Apptimize Feature Flags allow companies like Quizlet, Stash and Western Union to maintain multiple branches of code within apps to gradually release new features to a small subset of users first — quickly rolling features back if needed, or fully deploying them as they are proven successful. This level of fine-grained control is vital in the competitive app environment, and is even more so now as businesses innovate with mobile to create new growth opportunities and revenue streams.

    “To ensure the millions of students who use Quizlet’s learning app have the optimal experience and can study effectively, we run A/B testing on all new features before they are fully released which means a smooth process is essential to our success,” states Allen Pan, mobile engineer at Quizlet. “Apptimize is our go-to for A/B testing because its tools provide easy-to-use controls to test and validate different configurations, including their feature flags for rollouts, and the results are easy to read and integrate into our internal analytics platform.”

    Whether it’s new curbside pickup experiences, appointment booking processes, or implementing enhanced recommendations or social selling features, developers can use Apptimize Feature Flags to choose when and to whom new features are accessible, and easily turn them on or off. For example:

    • VIP Customers: provide exclusive or first-access to a brand’s gold loyalty members

    • By Location: different regions may have different expectations, requiring gradual rollout to 40 percent of users in Germany but only 10 percent of users in France as an example

    • By Demographics: from high-value customers to gender, developers can set Feature Flags to control rollout to specific groups

    • By Behavioral Segments: use custom groups to target feature rollout to users with different affinities, interests, or behaviors

    According to a senior software engineer at The Western Union Company, “Before Apptimize, we couldn’t control the rollout of features to specific markets, which was especially challenging as we manage multiple apps across the globe and had to wait for each of their app release cycles. Now we can ramp up, roll back or even schedule feature releases to launch across various countries and user segments, and with Apptimize’s support have developed a common framework for our different apps to control feature releases and experimentation across multiple user segments.”

    For more inspiration, download Airship’s “5 Ways to Use Feature Flags to Supercharge Your Mobile Growth,” or read a complimentary copy of Forrester Research, Inc.’s “The Life-Changing Magic Of Simplifying Your Mobile App,” April 23, 2020.

    “Exceptional mobile-first experiences are more important than ever as companies strive to offer customers new levels of ease-of-use, convenience, and innovation that win their hearts and wallets,” said Brett Caine, CEO and president, Airship. “However, there are far too many businesses that maintain a ‘best guess’ and ‘fingers-crossed’ mentality that risks precious development resources, creates suboptimal user experiences, and jeopardizes hard-fought, expensive user acquisition efforts. We’ve now made it even easier — and free — for businesses to adopt feature release management and start reaping the rewards that optimization unlocks.”

    In addition to feature release management, the Enterprise version of Apptimize offers unlimited multivariate testing. Marketers can launch experiments in minutes through its Visual Editor without coding or app updates, while developers can leverage programmatic testing for more complex experimentation with one-time configuration of dynamic variables that can be changed instantly to add new variants. These testing capabilities allow for the highest ROI when launching new features.

     

    Apptimize’s dashboard offers a single, searchable view of Feature Flags that are active, drafted, scheduled and expired for easy access and management.

    Apptimize’s user interface offers fine-grained controls to release new mobile app features to precise segments of users first.

    About Apptimize

    Apptimize, an Airship company, is the most used multivariate testing and feature release management solution for mobile apps, also covering websites and OTT. Hundreds of leading global brands have gained advantage over competitors by creating amazing mobile experiences with Apptimize. 

    Now, together with Airship, marketers and product owners can now unify digital engagement and digital experimentation to optimize the entire customer journey end-to-end — from driving more testing participation to creating consistent and optimized experiences as customers move across messaging channels and digital properties. 

    Learn more about Apptimize by visiting its website, reading its blog or following it on Twitter or LinkedIn. 

    About Airship

    Marketing and digital experience teams at thousands of the world’s most admired companies rely on Airship’s Customer Engagement Platform to create deeper connections with customers by delivering incredibly relevant, coordinated messages across channels. 

    Founded in 2009 as a pioneer in push notifications, Airship now gives brands the user-level data, engagement channels, AI orchestration and services they need to deliver push notifications, emails, SMS, in-app messages, mobile wallet cards and more to exactly the right person in exactly the right moment — building trust, boosting engagement, driving action and growing value.

    Learn more about our Customer Engagement Platform, read our blog or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

  • Plutora Recognized as a Leader in Value Stream Management Solutions by Independent Research Firm

    Noted for great release plan visibility, strong common data model and governance capability

    SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Plutora, a leading provider of value stream management (VSM) solutions for enterprise IT, today announced that it has been positioned as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Value Stream Management Solutions, Q3 2020. Designed to assist application and delivery leaders in selecting the right solution for improving software development, Forrester Research assessed the 11 most significant vendors in the category against 30 criteria relating to product functionality and market strategy.

    According to the Forrester report, authored by Christopher Condo, “the VSM tools market has evolved rapidly as have prospective buyers of VSM tools. AD&D planners, engineers and release experts understand VSM and want it to help them plan, create and deliver software experiences that align to both the businesses and customers’ needs.”

    Plutora believes that it was ranked as a leader based on the strength of its current offering, the category in which it received the highest score possible in seven criteria. Plutora was also recognized for:

    ● Visibility – great release plan visibility to connect various toolchains and disparate processes

    ● Common Data Model – recognized as strong and for providing excellent extensibility

    ● Governance and Compliance – offers strong governance capability which allows for the commanding of complex workflows

    ● APIs – recognized by customers as straightforward and allows for the connection of various toolchains, providing visibility into disparate processes

    Forrester’s Wave Report is based on rigorous analysis, backed up by highly structured methodologies. The Forrester team conducted primary research to develop a list of vendors that met the criteria for the evaluation and definition of this market. These vendors were then assessed based on the defined criteria and where they stand in relation to each other.

    “We feel that being included as a Leader in the Forrester Wave is a testament to what we are building here at Plutora, and that it is the strongest validation yet of the work we do to provide the utmost value to our customers,” said Dalibor Siroky, co-founder and CEO at Plutora. “To compete in today’s constantly changing landscape, it’s vital for organizations to focus on driving successful outcomes and increasing business value, and we believe that Forrester recognizes the importance of the VSM market in that pursuit. Many organizations are still at the beginning of their digital transformation journey to becoming a software driven business, and we look forward to continuing to help them recognize and fulfill that vision.”

    VSM provides complete portfolio and pipeline visibility that allows teams to achieve smooth handoffs, governance and compliance and successfully facilitate collaboration, even in the increasingly distributed world we’re experiencing today. With VSM tools like Plutora, organizations can gain clear visibility of the waste that is slowing down the organization and measure the impact of the improvements on the business – allowing for full digital transformation growth.

    Additional Resources:

    ● Find the full Forrester Wave Report here: The Forrester Wave™: Value Stream Management Solutions, Q3 2020

    ● Find more information on Plutora’s value stream management capabilities here

    About Plutora:

    Plutora, the market leader of value stream management solutions for enterprise IT improves the speed and quality of software development by capturing, visualizing, and analyzing metrics throughout the delivery process. Plutora manages and orchestrates releases across mixed methodologies, manages hybrid test environments, and manages go-live events. The Plutora Platform ensures organizational alignment of software development with business strategy with complete visibility, control, and contextual analytics, guiding continuous improvement through the measured outcomes of each effort.

  • Codefresh Cuts 85% of Traditional On-Prem CI/CD Costs with new Runner

    Codefresh Runner provides a foolproof way to run pipelines on your own Kubernetes clusters, reducing maintenance, providing scalability, and meeting compliance and security requirements. 

    Mountain View, CA, July 15, 2020 – On the heels of securing $27M in funding to further automate and simplify everything from code to cloud, Codefresh launched its Codefresh Runner, a flexible solution that allows engineers to selectively run pipelines on their own Kubernetes clusters no matter where they are: behind a firewall, on the desktop, or the virtual private cloud.

    DevOps teams commonly spend enormous amounts of time managing CI/CD build infrastructure. Between upgrades, user requests, managing capacity and dealing with pipelines breaking, engineering teams are often held back with self-hosted pipelines. Now instead of relying on aging software on inadequate infrastructure, users can install Codefresh Runner on their Kubernetes clusters.

    Codefresh Runner allows users to run all builds, do deployments, or access secure resources behind the firewall without needing to maintain the entire stack of CI/CD infrastructure. This is achieved by taking advantage of Kubernetes primitives to make fast builds with virtually no maintenance.

    The Codefresh Runner manages itself, self-updates, and runs behind the firewall. Secure resources like artifacts and code never exits the network. The runner connects to a service mesh – a way of managing multiple runners and setting configurations – but does not require any open firewall ports going in.

    Customer deployments confirm that moving from traditional self-managed CI/CD to the Kubernetes-native Codefresh Runner results in considerable savings, typically 85% of overall maintenance costs that can run hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

    “Enterprises often require self-managed software because they want their source code, sensitive data, corporate IP, and artifacts to stay on their network. Codefresh Runner meets those requirements, running on-prem, on your own cloud, your machines, your data center, your virtual private cloud,” said Dan Garfield, Chief Technology Evangelist. “Best of all, the runner self-updates and does not require management overhead like traditional software, making it possible for engineers to focus their time on things that are more valuable than software maintenance, like productivity and improving uptime,”

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

    About Codefresh

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

     

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  • Hiring world-class talent to build Sourcegraph Cloud

    By Quinn Slack on July 14, 2020…

    Felicis Ventures has invested an additional $5M investment in our Series B round, bringing the total amount raised to over $46 million. This comes after our $23 million Series B funding round back in March 2020 (before the pandemic — remember then?) and increases the company’s valuation by over 40 percent.

    2020 has been a transformational year for Sourcegraph, with new customers and usage expansion in recent months, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. To support the ongoing momentum of Universal Code Search and our plans to build Sourcegraph Cloud, we will be hiring in our engineering, sales, product, and marketing departments, more than doubling the size of the company in 2020.

    Demand for Sourcegraph is surging because the pandemic has changed how software developers work. Today, the vast majority of software developers are working from home, and even after the current pandemic has passed, it may stay that way as tech companies embrace an all-remote work structure. Developing software remotely will require solutions that boost productivity and allow teams to collaborate effectively.

    Sourcegraph Universal Code Search is proving to be invaluable for this purpose. With rapidly growing codebases, proliferating numbers of repositories, multiple languages and file formats, and a wide variety of developer tools, developers need a single place to find and fix things across all code, faster. Our customers see us as mission-critical.

    Sourcegraph began as a remote-first company, and we transitioned to all-remote in early February 2020 with employees from six continents and one living on an ocean-going catamaran. We are big proponents of developing software at home and the flexibility it gives our teams. This new funding has allowed us to leverage the skills of ultra-talented individuals from companies like Facebook and Google, who will be joining our team.

    Want to join us? View open positions at Sourcegraph at about.sourcegraph.com/jobs/, or reach out to hi@sourcegraph.com with any questions.