devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • Amid Surging Customer Demand and Growth in the Application Protection Market, Virsec Appoints New CEO

    Dave Furneaux expands his role to CEO with continued leadership from Executive Chairman Atiq Raza

    SAN JOSE, CA, June 23, 2020 — Virsec, the industry leader in protecting critical applications during runtime, today announced that Dave Furneaux has been appointed CEO of the rapidly growing cybersecurity company. Furneaux will continue to work closely with Virsec’s former CEO Atiq Raza, who will remain at the company as Executive Chairman.

    Furneaux has served on Virsec’s board since 2014 and has been a driving force behind the company’s strategic direction and mission to fundamentally change security by focusing on protecting mission-critical applications from the inside against today’s most advanced cyberattacks.

    “When Virsec first appeared on my radar, I immediately recognized that the technology was truly unique in providing visibility and definitive protection against sophisticated threats, vulnerabilities and attacks, in a far more effective way than other solutions on the market,” Furneaux said. “Joining as CEO provides an incredible opportunity to further drive Virsec’s growth and continue reinventing what next-gen application protection looks like for leading enterprises and critical infrastructure companies.”

    Virsec is used globally by leading enterprises, utilities, governments, financial services, and healthcare providers. The company’s technology is being applied in new industries almost daily, and recent customer successes include one of the largest water utilities in the U.S., a Fortune 50 technology leader, an international telco providing managed security, and the executive branch of a national government, among many more.

    “I’ve been working closely with Virsec and recognize how powerful their technology is,” said Paul Forney, Chief Security Architect for Schneider Electric. “Virsec protects critical applications at the deepest levels of process memory – stopping the most sophisticated attack techniques.”

    Furneaux comes from an impressive technology and investing background and has had a long-time successful track record in the cybersecurity market, identifying market directions and players who can add value to the space. Top investments have included Watchfire which was acquired by IBM, Application Security which was acquired by Trustwave/Singtel, and Aironet which went public and was acquired by Cisco and Cybersaint.  Earlier in his career, he founded and led Kodiak Venture Partners and presently is also the founder, CEO and Chairman of BlueIO: an investment holding company that forms, builds and invests in market leading companies.

    About Virsec

    Based in San Jose, California, Virsec was founded on the belief that a new model is required to counter today’s advanced cyber attacks and threats. The company is led by industry veterans who have driven one of the world’s top processor teams, and created innovative technology in network security, embedded systems and real-time memory systems. The team has broad leadership experience at multiple leading cybersecurity and information technology companies, as well a long list of high-growth start-ups. More information and demos are available at www.virsec.com.

     

  • Unravel Hires Enterprise Sales Leader as New Vice President of Worldwide Sales

    The new VP Worldwide Sales will draw on experience working with global enterprises to help Unravel customers accelerate time to value for their business critical modern data cloud workloads

    PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA – June 23, 2020– Unravel Data, the only data operations platform providing full-stack visibility and AI-powered recommendations to drive more reliable performance in modern data applications, today announced that it has hired Roman Orosco as its new Vice President of Worldwide Sales. Orosco will scale out and lead the company’s sales and revenue operations teams as Enterprises across all industries leverage and increasingly depend on data to provide competitive advantage, improve operating efficiencies and re-architect their business to deal with macro-environment changes such as Covid-19.

    Orosco brings over 20 years of demand generation, channel, sales and operational leadership to his new role at Unravel. Orosco most recently served as the Vice President of Americas at BlueCat Networks, where he built a high-performing sales organization that fueled the company’s growth from $20M to $100M. Prior to BlueCat, he led revenue teams and delivered company changing revenue for over 15 years at SAP, NICE, Documentum, i2 Technologies, and other software companies.

    “We’re excited to have an accomplished sales leader like Roman join the Unravel team. Roman has a great combination of domain expertise and functional experience but most importantly he always puts the customer at the forefront of his decision making. At a time like we are in right now, it has never been more important for us to have high empathy with our customer’s business needs and focus on driving near term impact,” said Kunal Agarwal, CEO, Unravel Data. “Roman is the right person, at the right time to lead our sales organization through a period of growth and customer transition to modern data clouds.”

    “My North star has always been for my teams and I to deliver tangible business value for our clients. Enterprises continue to scale their Investments in data and adopting best practice disciplines in Data Operations to ensure their data driven applications are high performing, reliable and operating cost effectively,” said Roman Orosco, VP Worldwide Sales, Unravel Data. “I look forward to working closely with our internal teams and partners to remove operational friction and where possible, automate key Data Operations workflows such as Performance tuning, Troubleshooting and Cost optimisation for cloud and on-premise workloads.”

    About Unravel Data 

    Unravel radically simplifies the way businesses understand and optimize the performance of their modern data applications – and the complex pipelines that power those applications. Providing a unified view across the entire stack, Unravel’s data operations platform leverages AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics to offer actionable recommendations and automation for tuning, troubleshooting, and improving performance – both today and tomorrow. By operationalizing how you do data, Unravel’s solutions support modern big data leaders, including Kaiser Permanente, Adobe, Deutsche Bank, Wayfair, and Neustar. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and is backed by Menlo Ventures, GGV Capital, M12, Point72 Ventures, Harmony Partners, Data Elite Ventures, and Jyoti Bansal. To learn more, visit unraveldata.com.

     

    Copyright Statement

    The name Unravel Data is a trademark of Unravel Data™. Other trade names used in this document are the properties of their respective owners.

  • LaunchDarkly Now Serving Over 2 Trillion Feature Flags a Day

    High volume reflects increasing focus on feature management as companies seek better control over the digital experiences and services they deliver

     

    Oakland, CA – June 23, 2020 – LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform that software teams use to build better software faster, is now serving more than 2 trillion feature flags a day. Working with over 1300 customers globally, including HashiCorp, InVision, and  IBM, LaunchDarkly has seen how organizations are using feature flags to respond to rapidly-changing work, social, and business environments.

    Feature management is an industry best practice of implementing feature flags at the core of software development practices. LaunchDarkly customers use the Feature Management platform to reduce the time between ideation and getting new features in the hands of users, safely test and validate features before fully releasing them, launch new features without fear of introducing application instability, and empower teams across their organization (engineering or not) to control features in production.

    “LaunchDarkly is a critical part of infrastructure for our customers, and these companies need to eliminate risk and deliver value to their customers,” said Edith Harbaugh, CEO and Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly. In a recent interview with NASDAQ, she shared “It’s really great to see how we’re empowering teams to get the right feature to the right person at the right time, and doing that in a safe and controlled manner.”

    In just the last few months, LaunchDarkly has seen an increase in feature flag usage. Though many of their customers find themselves in unusual circumstances, they aren’t slowing down release cadences or dialing back on experimentation. LaunchDarkly has found they are using feature flags more heavily than before to deliver essential services, target geographic areas with different restrictions, or unlock firewalls for specific information. Some are using feature flags to quickly hide functionality that is no longer relevant or potentially insensitive to surface during critical events.

    “We’re excited to empower customers to more seamlessly integrate LaunchDarkly into their existing tools and processes,” said John Kodumal, CTO and Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly. “We know the journey between flagging a feature to shipping a significant new release can be complex. Now teams can create powerful workflows within LaunchDarkly that better map to how they build, ship, and control software.”

    In a recent announcement, LaunchDarkly shared Feature Workflows, new improvements to their Feature Management platform. Feature Workflows has three main building blocks:

    • Scheduling – Users can pre-define and schedule their flag and segment changes for future points in time.
    • Approvals – Team members can request or require approvals before making flag changes.
    • Metric Checks – Teams can trigger dynamic changes to flags when pre-defined thresholds are crossed.

    These building blocks are composable and can be strung together to create repeatable templates that are applicable to any (or every!) feature release. Feature Workflows provides organizations with a standardized release process, ensures consistent best practices across teams, and helps automate and safeguard changes to features. Teams interested in getting early access are invited to sign up here.

    This June Edith Harbaugh will be speaking about Progressive Delivery at Collision from Home. In a fast changing world where deploying quickly has become even more important, delivering continuously comes with inherent risks. Progressive Delivery is the technique of delivering changes first to small, low risk audiences, and then expanding to larger and riskier audiences, validating the results as you go. In her talk, Edith will discuss how teams use Progressive Delivery and share best practices around achieving Continuous Delivery.

    Also, LaunchDarkly will host their annual Trajectory Conference in August. Due to recent global events, the conference will be held virtually. Trajectory will feature speakers who are pioneering modern development practices. Attendees can expect to hear from industry leaders from organizations including Honeycomb, VMware, Mulesoft, and Gremlin.

    About LaunchDarkly

    Founded in 2014 by Edith Harbaugh and John Kodumal, LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that software teams use to build better software, faster with less risk. Development teams use feature management as a best practice to separate code deployments from feature releases. With LaunchDarkly, teams control their entire feature lifecycles from concept to launch to value. Serving over 1300 customers, LaunchDarkly is used by teams at Atlassian, Microsoft, and CircleCI. LaunchDarkly is named on the Enterprise Tech 30 list, and on the Bay Area Best Places to Work list. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com

     

     

  • Hasura Launches Hasura Cloud, the First GraphQL Service That Connects to Multi-Cloud Data Sources to Accelerate Development of Modern Applications

    SAN FRANCISCO, June 22, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Today at Hasura Con ’20, Hasura, the data access infrastructure company, announced its new service, Hasura Cloud, that provides instant and secure access to data across hybrid- and multi-cloud environments with a unified GraphQL API. Hasura Cloud helps organizations create data-driven applications without costly investments in infrastructure or operational management. Hasura Cloud is based on Hasura’s successful enterprise-grade Hasura Pro product and brings new cloud-specific functionality such as dynamic data caching, auto-scaling, global availability and consumption-based pricing.

    Organizations already have data they want to use but it is trapped in silos. Rather than trying to use outdated approaches to overcome this problem like consolidating fast-moving operational data into static data warehouses or datalakes, it is time for a new approach: simply connect applications by federating access to where the data lives, using a modern API-based approach that includes security, governance and scalability as standard features. Hasura’s proven technology helps developers quickly generate GraphQL-based APIs to access data where it is today so they can focus on building useful applications and not on reinventing infrastructure scaffolding.

    “Enterprises building cloud-based applications want to easily create data-driven APIs, without lengthy and expensive data migration exercises or building monolithic data warehouses,” said James Governor, RedMonk co-founder. “Hasura Cloud is designed to solve this need.”

    With Hasura Cloud and its data federation capabilities, organizations can bridge new and old datasets regardless of location, helping developers quickly build new applications without needing to migrate large legacy datasets or getting locked into a specific vendor’s data platform. This flexibility helps organizations to move quickly as they adapt to the rapidly changing world around them without taking on huge operational complexity. Instead, they can react quickly and align the cost of operations with the value provided by these new applications.

    “Hasura Cloud means you can start using a globally available, production-ready GraphQL API service immediately. There’s no need to commission hosting infrastructure or worry about operational management, you can just get started straight away. It’s been the number one request from customers looking for the fastest possible experience,” said Hasura CEO and co-founder Tanmai Gopal. “We know that organizations of all kinds want to use modern APIs to connect data to applications. What makes no sense is spending years reinventing what Hasura has already done for you. Just use Hasura Cloud and get on with inventing the future.”

    Hasura Cloud uses GraphQL, an open-source data query and manipulation specification released in 2015 by Facebook, to automatically create programming interfaces (APIs) that developers use to access and manipulate data in modern applications. Hasura’s deep understanding of the way data is used allows Hasura Cloud to optimize data access with dynamic data caching and auto-scaling, improving performance for applications that have traditionally struggled to scale. Hasura Cloud takes care of the operational challenges so that organizations can concentrate on using their data to create value.

    “Hasura’s GraphQL engine is at the core of our infrastructure, and one of the most impressive features is its ability to scale horizontally. Having scaling handled automatically by Hasura Cloud will give us peace of mind that we can handle spikes in demand without manual effort,” said Damien Tanner, CTO of Konf.co.

    About Hasura Con ‘20
    Hasura Con ‘20 is a free virtual conference that will bring together Hasura’s users and community for six days of learning in June. The conference will have speakers from Airbus, Cherre, Credimi, General Assembly, GraphCMS, Krafteer, Lineup Ninja, Meow.vc, NuxtJS, Observable, OneGraph, Prefect, RESULT, Swiggy, SZTAKI, Tarbh, The Chicago Reporter, The Guild and WorkClout. For more information, simply go to: https://hasura.io/events/hasura-con-2020/.

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

  • Introducing IBM Blockchain Platform 2.5: Helping advance the new era of multi-party systems

    By Andy Carelli, Director, Blockchain Platform – Offering Management and Market Development, IBM
     
    New collaboration models are emerging out of necessity today and for better preparedness tomorrow.  It’s evidenced in the way supply chains are changing to provide better visibility for the distribution of emergency supplies. We see the need for public and private information to be validated and shared between healthcare institutes and government authorities to support humanitarian efforts. These applied areas are examples of how innovation is being given a chance to prevail over traditional approaches.  For blockchain enthusiasts, it’s an exciting opportunity to challenge the status quo and shift to multi-party systems.

    In just the last few months, we have seen a number of new conventional and unconventional use cases that illustrate how organizations overcoming old and new challenges by leveraging an enterprise distributed ledger technology. These include IBM Rapid Supplier Connect, a solution that helps medical organizations quickly find alternative suppliers, to an FDA pilot to create a blockchain-based pharmaceutical supply chain. Blockchain initiatives are transforming supply chains, giving developers access to reliable, more trustworthy dataand identifying entirely new uses cases on their own.

    New Era of Multi-Party Systems

    We’re on the cusp a new era of multi-party systems. Multi-party networks, spanning across industries, are leveraging the clear advantages of real-time, trusted, tamper-proof data exchange.  Businesses, industry experts, regulators, and people are leveraging new collaboration models to share and record data in a way that preserves both privacy and transparency, and ensures the validity of transactions. This technology is providing the basis for unprecedented levels of trust to support shared processes, and instilling confidence in a validated source of truth to support decision-making. Transparency under privacy controls forms the basis of a more effective business network.

    At IBM, we are committed to delivering the most advanced and comprehensive tools, technologies, and infrastructure within our IBM Blockchain Platform to help advance powerful multi-party systems.

    Introducing IBM Blockchain Platform 2.5

    Today, we are excited to announce the release of IBM Blockchain Platform version 2.5, which improves on IBM Blockchain Platform version 2 in a number of ways. These include supporting the latest open source innovation with Hyperledger Fabric 2.0and delivers new integrations with Red Hat technologies.  It boosts security, usability, flexibility, and development speedwith support for Hyperledger Fabric 2.0, Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces, Red Hat OpenShift 4.3, and Ansible Content Collections. This release delivers upon aspects of the advancements we highlighted at our digital IBM THINK conference in May.

    Register for our weekly User Series webcast to see a live demonstration of some of these new features and get your questions answered by the experts!

    About IBM Blockchain Platform

    Begin or advance your efforts in enabling multi-party systems powered by the leading automation and governance platform for Hyperledger Fabric.

    IBM Blockchian Platformis available as a managed service offering on IBM Cloud 
    and as a multicloud offering that can deployed in any environment – private, public or hybrid multicloud, or on-premises behind your firewall to meet data residency requirements.

    Tourour offering and learn more onhow to get started with IBM Blockchain.

  • HashiCorp Launches Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Automation as a Service with HashiCorp Cloud Platform

    New Offering to Enable a Bridge to Multi-Cloud for Enterprises with Push-Button Deployments and Fully Managed Infrastructure

    SAN FRANCISCO, June 22, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — HashiCorp®, the leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation software, at HashiConf Digital today announced its new flagship cloud offering HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP), a fully managed platform offering the HashiCorp products as a service to automate infrastructure on any cloud.

    With HCP, customers will be able to use HashiCorp products to provision, secure, connect, and run an organization’s cloud-based infrastructure without having to take on the operational burden.

    “As enterprises around the globe accelerate their move to the cloud, they are following the blueprint that many cloud-native companies pioneered — and are looking to the HashiCorp products to help them automate the management of that infrastructure,” said Dave McJannet, CEO of HashiCorp. “But even large organizations struggle to find the operational staff and skills required for the new cloud operating model. With the HashiCorp Cloud Platform, we are helping to democratize cloud infrastructure. By having HashiCorp operate this platform for you, it is simpler and faster to stand up and run your applications in multi-cloud environments.”

    Unlocking the true value and power of cloud means embracing a cloud operating model at all layers and for all of the constituents in IT, including operations, security, networking, and applications. With the HashiCorp suite of products—Terraform®, Vault™, Consul®, and Nomad™—enterprises benefit from consistent workflows across any environment and at every layer.

    HCP is designed to be a bridge to multi-cloud for organizations transitioning to a new, dynamic IT infrastructure model. HCP will lower the barrier to entry for using the HashiCorp products by enabling a customer to automate production deployments while relying on HashiCorp to handle management, upgrades, and scaling of the products. HCP will also offer a pay-as-you-go pricing model that is ideal for small and medium-sized organizations.

    HCP will enable flexibility for multi-cloud environments with a consistent workflow and unified set of APIs for all HashiCorp products across all cloud providers. Enterprises will be able to use consistent HashiCorp identities and centralized access control policies to govern access to resources across teams and providers. HCP will reduce the operational burden for enterprises, accelerating delivery of their multi-cloud strategies and allowing them to focus on building cloud-native applications that can be run in the most appropriate environment.

    “Hashicorp’s popular automation tools are adopted by development and operations teams, but like all enterprise tooling carry an overhead in installation and management,” James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk. “HCP is designed to remove this overhead, making the tools easier to consume and run, enabling HashiCorp for humans, not just elite teams.”

    “Enterprise infrastructure continues to increase in complexity and is challenging to manage,” said Stephen Elliot, Program Vice President, IDC. “IT executives want different delivery options, such as a best-in-class user experience, but without the challenges and overhead of having to manage the infrastructure to support it. The managed, as-a-service model provides executives with an opportunity to accelerate cloud deployments, increase productivity, and make use of multi-cloud flexibility.”

    Availability
    HCP Consul will be the first service available on the new platform, initially supporting AWS. HCP Consul will offer secure service networking across EKS, EC2, and other AWS application environments, and also enable organizations to securely connect AWS environments to other cloud environments and to private data centers. HCP Vault will be the next service available and will also support AWS.

    Organizations can request early access to the HCP Consul private beta by visiting hashicorp.com/cloud-platform.

    HashiCorp Cloud Platform Resources

    About HashiCorp
    HashiCorp is the leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation software. The HashiCorp software suite enables organizations to adopt consistent workflows to provision, secure, connect, and run any infrastructure for any application. HashiCorp’s open source tools Vagrant™, Packer™, Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad are downloaded tens of millions of times each year and are broadly adopted by the Global 2000. Enterprise versions of these products enhance the open source tools with features that promote collaboration, operations, governance, and multi-data center functionality. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, though 85 percent of HashiCorp employees work remotely, strategically distributed around the globe. HashiCorp is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Franklin Templeton, Geodesic Capital, GGV Capital, IVP, Mayfield, Redpoint Ventures, T. Rowe Price funds and accounts, and True Ventures. For more information, visit https://www.hashicorp.com or follow HashiCorp on Twitter @HashiCorp.

    All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

     

  • Sauce Labs Recognized for Setting an “Ambitious Vision” in Report by Independent Research Firm; Ties for Top Score in Strategy Category

    Company named a “Strong Performer” in assessment of continuous functional test automation suites

    SAN FRANCISCO, June 18, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Sauce Labs Inc., the leading provider of continuous testing solutions that deliver digital confidence, today announced that it has been named a “Strong Performer” by Forrester Research, a leading global research and advisory firm, in its newly published report, “The Forrester Wave™: Continuous Functional Test Automation Suites, Q2 2020.” Noted for setting “an ambitious vision” with an approach “to help enterprises gain digital confidence,” Sauce Labs tied for the highest “strategy” score among evaluated vendors and received the highest possible scores for criteria including innovation roadmap, execution roadmap, partner ecosystem, and market approach.

    According to the report, “On one hand, Sauce Labs continues to focus on its cloud roots and commitment to the open source community. On the other, its vision includes common web-plus-mobile testing with insights and services, leveraging the sea of testing data from tests run on its cloud grid. The goal is to augment developers with testing intelligence from the cloud, with AI and ML algorithms providing insights from 3 billion-plus tests run so far and millions more every day going forward.”

    The report also notes how the Sauce Labs offering “has excellent integration in CI/CD pipeline automation, strong developer tester consensus, extended partnerships with third-party testing vendors and services suppliers, and a solid omnichannel testing solution.”

    “The future of testing will unquestionably be driven by analytic intelligence. By applying modern AI and machine-learning capabilities to our growing reservoir of test data, we can deliver a level of test insight no other vendor can match,” said John Kelly, CTO, Sauce Labs. “We’re pleased to be recognized as a Strong Performer in the Forrester Wave, and we look forward to continuing to help businesses large and small usher in a new era of digital confidence.”

    Setting the future for insights-driven testing with Failure Analysis

    As noted in the Forrester report, “the infusion of ML in Sauce Labs’ strategy shows in the new failure analysis capability that uses ML to work with pass/fail data and Selenium command logs to uncover and aggregate common failures, providing insights into how they affect test suites as a whole.” Now available for enterprise customers as part of the growing Sauce Insights package, Failure Analysis gives developers, testers, and QA managers insight into how often the same type of failure repeats itself across a given test suite, enabling them to move quickly to address the most pervasive issues and drive rapid improvement in test quality.

    Recognition in the Forrester Wave comes as Sauce Labs continues to accelerate business momentum and deliver critical product innovations to customers. Nearly 3 million tests are now run each day across its continuous testing cloud platform, which spans thousands of browser/OS, mobile emulator, simulator, and real device combinations. The company also recently announced the formation of its first-ever Open Source Program Office, further strengthening its already significant investment in the broader open source community. The department will develop, define, and implement the company’s long-term open source strategy while paving the way for increased contribution to high-value community projects.

    About Sauce Labs
    Sauce Labs is the leading provider of continuous testing solutions that deliver digital confidence. The Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud delivers a 360-degree view of a customer’s application experience, ensuring that web and mobile applications look, function, and perform exactly as they should on every browser, OS, and device, every single time. Sauce Labs is a privately held company funded by Toba Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Centerview Capital Technology, IVP, Adams Street Partners, and Riverwood Capital. For more information, please visit https://saucelabs.com.

  • Flexera Announces New Chief Financial Officer

    Seasoned Financial Executive David Zwick

    Itasca, IL – June 1, 2020 Flexera, the company that helps organizations maximize business value from their technology investments, today announced David Zwick as its new Chief Financial Officer (CFO), effective June 1, 2020, taking the reins from retiring CFO Joe Freda. Zwick joins Flexera from Transworld Systems Inc., where he served as CFO for four years

    “We couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome David to Flexera to help continue our track record of growth that we saw under Joe Freda,” said Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Flexera. “Just as importantly, he’s a great fit for our culture.”

    Zwick brings with him a global background in both publicly-traded and private-equity held companies, including extensive experience in mergers and acquisitions.  In addition to Transworld Systems, he held CFO positions at Hilco Global and Inteliquent, Inc.  Prior to that, he was a senior investment banker at Barclays Capital and Lehman Brothers.  He began his career at Arthur Andersen & Co.

    “This is an exciting time to join,” Zwick said. “Flexera has a strong vision, passionate employees, and a great story to tell. I’m thrilled to be part of the team that builds upon its success.”

    “I’m pleased to work closely with David during a transition period that continues the growth trajectory that Flexera has been on,” said retiring Flexera CFO Joe Freda. “He has the experience and track record to continue our momentum.”

    Mr. Freda is retiring after a successful 30+ year career and 12 years as Flexera’s CFO.

    For more information on Flexera, visit www.Flexera.com

    About Flexera

    Flexera helps business leaders succeed at what once seemed impossible: getting full visibility into, and control of, their company’s technology “black hole.” From on-premises to the cloud, Flexera helps organizations unravel IT complexity and maximize business value from their technology investments. For more than 30 years, our 1300+ team members worldwide have been passionate about helping our more than 50,000 customers optimize IT to achieve their business outcomes. To learn more, visit www.flexera.com.

  • Accelerate cloud-native development with IBM Wazi for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces

    By Willie Tejada, GM and Chief Developer Advocate, IBM

    Learning the ecosystem is one of the biggest challenges facing new IBM Z developers. It’s not enough that you’re new to the mainframe. You might also have to learn a new programming language and a new way to interact with a computer. Frequently, you’re forced to abandon your preferred IDE and instead use tooling that’s specific to IBM Z and your organization.
    That’s why I’m thrilled to announce the availability of IBM Wazi for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces (Wazi Workspaces). This environment addresses all of these onboarding challenges and, in the process, makes cloud-native development on IBM Z a reality.

    Wazi Workspaces offers you the ability to choose from a variety of IDEs for day-to-day development tasks. You can use Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces, an in-browser OpenShift-native developer workspace, an IDE on your desktop like Microsoft VS Code, or Eclipse-based IDEs such as IBM Z Open Development. Most importantly, Wazi Workspaces provides a personalized and dedicated z/OS sandbox — running on Red Hat OpenShift — to accelerate development and testing.

    With the Wazi Workspaces environment, you can write applications for z/OS using your IDE of choice. Then you can debug, build, and test code in your personal z/OS sandbox on Red Hat OpenShift running on x86 hardware. The sandbox runs the real z/OS — with real CICS, IMS, Db2, compilers, and more — providing a full-fledged development environment. Once you’re ready, you can check-in locally tested changes from your development workspace directly to Git, and trigger build-and-deploy into the containerized z/OS sandbox as part of a standard CI/CD pipeline orchestrated by Jenkins — staged in popular artifact repositories like Artifactory or Nexus.
    All of this happens without the need to directly access an IBM Z system; you can use any on-premise or cloud-based x86 OpenShift environment. Then you can deploy these applications into production on native z/OS running on IBM Z hardware. With Wazi Workspaces, true platform-agnostic, enterprise-wide standardization — using popular open-source and third-party tools as part of a DevOps toolchain — is a reality.

    How does all this work? In the OpenShift UI, you simply run the IBM Wazi Sandbox operator. Once the sandbox is up and running, you can open your preferred IDE and connect to the sandbox to edit, debug, build, and test your code. This flexible environment empowers you with more than just your own tools; you also have a personalized, dedicated sandbox for z/OS development, optimized for OpenShift. Once again, we’re able to provide an environment where developers can build smart and build secure.

    Adi Sakala, Red Hat’s senior director of engineering, summed it up when he said: “Native development for Z continues to play a critical role as organizations go through a digital transformation journey modernizing their data centers and development teams to adopt Hybrid Cloud models. In this journey, a challenge most organizations are faced with is the evolving need for containerized development along with the associated tooling for z/OS. The current world situation has many organizations, including those with large Z investments, rethinking and retooling to scale their development teams along with scaling their applications. IBM Wazi for Red Hat Code Ready Workspaces offers organizations the opportunity to efficiently and effectively deliver z/OS applications for Red Hat OpenShift, and enables z/OS development teams to collaborate on container-native applications. IBM Wazi is built on Red Hat Code Ready Workspaces and optimized for Red Hat OpenShift.”

    Learn more — including how to get started — on the IBM Wazi for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces page. And visit this announcement blog postfrom Danny Mace, Vice President, IBM App Platform, to get a higher-level view of how IBM Wazi fits into the cloud-native development story for IBM Z.

  • Eggplant Named as a Leader Among Continuous Functional Test Automation Providers

    ndependent Research Firm Recognizes Eggplant’s AI-Powered Test Automation Platform

    Eggplant, the intelligent automation specialist, today announced that it has been named a Leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Continuous Functional Test Automation Suites, Q2 2020.” Eggplant received the highest score possible in sixteen criteria, including cloud platforms support, omnichannel testing, design automation and optimization, automation execution/continuous testing, testing personas, reporting, analytics, and quality insights, TDD and BDD, and innovation roadmap.

    Diego Lo Giudice, author of The Forrester Wave, stated in the report: “Eggplant has a strong testing vision with clear execution and innovation roadmaps. If successfully implemented, it will stay ahead of competition, confirm itself as a strong choice for enterprise testing clients, and remain well suited to Agile-plus- DevOps transformations.”

    “We are transforming the world of intelligent test automation,” said Dr. John Bates, CEO of Eggplant. “Our mission is to rid the world of bad software and we believe this recognition by Forrester underscores the competitive advantage that our AI-driven automation platform delivers. Our customers are reaping the benefits and can optimize the customer experience and business outcomes through our groundbreaking use of AI, deep learning, and analytics. We will continue to push the boundaries of intelligent automation to support and accelerate the pace and quality of the digital experience.”

    A complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave: Continuous Functional Test Automation Suites, Q2 2020, is available for download here.

    Additional Resources

    • Additional information about Eggplant’s offerings can be found here
    • Learn about Eggplant in action from our customers

    About Eggplant

    Eggplant, the fastest growing automation provider and a portfolio company of The Carlyle Group, provides user-centric, intelligent testing and performance solutions designed to optimize the digital experience, delight customers, and drive business success. Only Eggplant enables organizations to test, monitor, analyze, and report on the quality and responsiveness of software applications across different interfaces, platforms, browsers, and devices, including mobile, IoT, desktop, and mainframe. Learn more at Eggplant.