devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • Eggplant enhances its Digital Automation Intelligence Platform with Deep Learning

    Further simplifies & accelerates test automation and provides impact analysis to detect risks

    LONDON & BOULDER, CO [28 May 2020] Eggplant, the intelligent automation specialist, today announced updates to its Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) platform. As digital demands increase as a result of coronavirus restrictions and the pivot to remote working, these new capabilities provide organizations with faster time-to-market through intelligent, AI-driven automation. By simplifying and unifying testing of enterprise-scale deployments to automate the entire testing lifecycle across organizations, Eggplant ensures that the performance of software and applications keeps up with user expectations.

    With the increased reliance on digital, it has never been more critical for businesses to scale and optimize DevOps to deliver a frictionless high-quality digital experience. Eggplant’s DAI platform supports continuous intelligent automation that tests from the users’ perspective rather than just code compliance. The new additions help accelerate the pace of software delivery by further simplifying and increasing the level of automation and insights while simultaneously engendering efficiency improvements for the test team.

    New additions to Eggplant’s DAI platform include:

    • Deep Learning Model for Automatic Test Generation: Through intelligent application analysis, this capability automatically identifies and classifies UI elements across any platform, including point-of-sale and mobile. In addition, it automatically generates all the automation assets needed to instantly run automated tests.

    • Business Impact Predictor: This capability uses powerful analytics to drive a visualization that shows users the overlap of common application failure patterns that are also heavily used by customers. This information can be used to automatically optimize testing and inform release decisions.

    • Central Asset Repository for Large Scale Test Execution: This capability makes it significantly easier to deploy Eggplant’s enterprise-scale testing capabilities across multiple test machines, and the testing process is further streamlined via a single, modern interface.

    Quotes and commentary

    “Digital organizations are dependent on their ability to rapidly deliver products that delight users. Our DAI platform helps businesses easily scale intelligent test automation and monitoring to optimize performance, keep pace with DevOps and drive positive business outcomes. This is another important step towards our mission of ridding the world of bad software- Gareth Smith, CTO Eggplant

    Additional Resources

    ·   Find out more about the Digital Automation Intelligence Platform here

    ·   Learn more about Eggplant

    ·   Follow Eggplant on Twitter

    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.

     

  • Instana Becomes First APM Solution to Automatically Collect Pre-existing W3C User Timing Events

    Company Releases Automatic Support for W3C User Timing and Trace Context APIs

    Chicago, Il– May 28, 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 to integrate data from both the W3C Trace Context and User Timing APIs. With the release, Instana automatically identifies custom W3C events and consumes them, with no code changes required.

    “Developers and Operations staff need maximum observability to work as effectively as possible,” said Chris Farrell, Instana Technical Director and APM Strategist. “By combining data from proprietary sources and W3C User Timing and Trace Context, Instana provides the best of both visibility worlds, a powerful way to provide maximum visibility with minimum effort.”

    Instana’s implementation of support for W3C User Timing API automatically collects all pre-existing W3C User Timing events, without developers needing to add their own JavaScript API calls to get the events into their analytics platforms. Similar to other performance entities inside Instana’s solutions, W3C User Timing API is made available for analysis in Instana’s Unbounded Analytics™ engine, allowing patterns across multiple profiles to be discovered and analyzed collaboratively.

    “The W3C Distributed Tracing Working Group via the Trace Context specification defines the format and semantic of distributed trace context propagation, enabling an integrated experience for users of various tracing tools, libraries, and platforms, while leaving space for innovation and experimentation,” said Sergey Kanzhelev, W3C Distributed Tracing Working Group Editor and Co-Chair. “Standards like Trace Context are increasingly important with the rise of cloud computing and modern platforms, especially as application development moves to a new level of abstraction where standards provide building blocks enabling compatibility and interoperability of different application components, simplifying the development process and speeding up time-to-market.”

    Instana’s support for W3C Trace Context includes correlating traces with AutoTrace™, Instana’s automated distributed tracing technology. Every trace, regardless of origin, is then available in the Instana Analytics Engine (called Unbounded Analytics), allowing developers and operations to get to the root of any issue and easily pass contextual information from one transaction to next across different tracing sources.

    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 and their W3C Trace Context and User Timing API at https://instana.com/w3c.

     

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    ABOUT INSTANA

    As the leading provider of Automatic Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions for microservices, Instana has developed the automatic monitoring and AI-based analysis DevOps needs to manage the performance of modern applications. Instana is the only APM solution that automatically discovers, maps and visualizes microservice applications without continuous additional engineering. Customers using Instana achieve operational excellence and deliver better software faster. Visit https://www.instana.com to learn more.

     

     

     

  • RudderStack, Creator of Open Source Customer Data Platform, Raises $5M Seed Round Led by S28 Capital; Announces Acquisition of Blendo

    Key acquisition and new funding accelerate product development and go-to-market strategy for startup helping enterprises securely access and unify customer data

    San Francisco, Calif. – May 27, 2020 –  RudderStack, which provides the first open source alternative to traditional Customer Data Platforms, announced today it has raised a $5M seed round led by S28 Capital with additional participation from Salil Deshpande (Uncorrelated Ventures) and Florian Leibert (468 Capital). The funding will be used to accelerate product development and rollout to larger enterprises. RudderStack also announced the acquisition of data integration company Blendo, which brought additional IP and expertise to the RudderStack team.

    At most large enterprises, customer interaction happens at multiple places, from mobile-web to chat to backend systems. RudderStack provides the technical infrastructure required to bring all this customer event data together in a unified and consistent fashion, so enterprises can create value from it. RudderStack has built integrations with all of the leading customer data destinations, including Snowflake, AWS, and Zendesk, and is particularly well suited for privacy-conscious enterprises.

    Incubated at S28 Capital, RudderStack has already successfully implemented its solution with multiple customers, ranging from startups to large enterprises.

    “Understanding your customers is essential. The larger the organization, the harder it becomes. RudderStack is finally here to fix this,” said Shvet Jain, Partner at S28 Capital.

    Andrew Miklas, founding CTO of PagerDuty and Partner at S28 Capital, added, “With RudderStack, you can assemble a 360 degree view of your customer without the compliance and security headaches associated with sending all of your customer data to a third party aggregator. You can now get the big picture without the worry.”

    With the acquisition of Blendo, RudderStack was able to incorporate Blendo’s cloud-based ELT solution into the RudderStack Customer Data Platform, and combined the teams. Blendo founder Kostas Pardalis joined RudderStack as Head of Growth.

    “With Blendo, I had the opportunity to be part of a great team that executed on the vision of turning any company into a data-driven organization,” said Pardalis. “We’ve combined the talented Blendo and RudderStack teams together with the technology that both companies have created, at a time when the customer data market is ripe for the next wave of innovation. I’m excited to help drive RudderStack forward.”

    “We are very grateful for the support from S28 Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, 468 Capital and the other angels, which will help us drive product development and roll out our platform much faster to large enterprises who need a secure way to collect and merge their customer data for more informed decision making,” said Soumyadeb Mitra, CEO of RudderStack.  “With the addition of Blendo leadership, we have built an even stronger team and deeper technology infrastructure. The next phase for RudderStack is fast growth, hiring and expansion of our solution to large data-driven enterprises who are looking for a security-focused platform for actionable insights and real value from their customer data.”

    About RudderStack

    RudderStack helps enterprises capture more value from their customer data, with the first open source alternative to traditional Customer Data Platforms like Segment. RudderStack collects a company’s data from every customer touchpoint – including web, mobile and backend systems – and sends it in real-time to over 50 cloud-based destinations and any major data warehouse. By unifying and analyzing their customer data in a privacy- and security-conscious way, companies are then able to turn it into business actions across all their functions. To learn more or start a free trial, visit https://rudderstack.com/.

  • IBM Data Asset eXchange launches new data sets and exploratory Watson Studio notebooks

    IBM Data Asset eXchange launches new data sets and exploratory Watson Studio notebooks.

    By Edward Leardi
    Published May 26, 2020

    The IBM® Data Asset eXchange (DAX) is an online hub for developers and data scientists to find free and open data sets under open data licenses. A particular focus of the exchange is data sets under the Community Data License Agreement (CDLA). Since launching the exchange in 2019, the Center for Open-Source Data & AI Technologies (CODAIT) team has been working on steadily adding new data sets to the exchange, as well as resources that help explore these data sets.

    Our latest update to the Data Asset eXchange adds a host of new data-related assets and user experience enhancements. For existing data sets, we’ve added seven new Watson Studio notebooks as well as three Watson Studio projects (a new class of data assets that package multiple notebooks together). Along with these notebooks, we’ve also added eight new data sets to the exchange, featuring domains such as oil extraction, remote sensing, and speech recognition. Finally, we are working on improving the way DAX displays data set previews. We have begun to add data glossaries and detailed metadata sections to provide users with extra context behind a data set’s features and use cases. We have also started working on accommodating text, image, and audio data record preview allowing users to sample data sets without having to download the entire data set archive.

    New Watson Studio projects

    We are now gradually adding Watson Studio projects to data sets, which include sets of notebooks that illustrate how users can extract, clean, analyze, and model the data. To import a project into Watson Studio, visit one of the three data sets discussed below on the IBM® Data Asset eXchange (DAX) and click Run dataset notebooks or preview the code by clicking the link in the Use the Dataset section. To learn more about Watson Studio projects, review this tutorial. A fourth project is already under development and we will be adding more projects where relevant.

    Data Asset eXchange Weather Project

    Our first Watson Studio project release is the DAX Weather Project, which uses the NOAA Weather – JFK Airport data set. This project has three notebooks performing different functions. The first of these is a data cleansing notebook that walks the user through how to impute missing data values and encode certain weather features for better machine learning model performance. The project also includes a data analysis notebook that visualizes the data set’s feature dependencies and trends across time. Finally, the project includes a time series forecasting notebook to build an ARIMA model and evaluate its performance using the RMSE metric.

    Data Asset eXchange Fashion MNIST Project

    The Fashion-MNIST Project builds off its namesake DAX data set by exploring potential uses for an image data set of clothing articles. This project starts with a data exploration notebook that visualizes various clothing article categories and performs dimension reduction. The second notebook uses the scikit-learn library to compare the performance of traditional machine learning methods to classify clothing labels. The third notebook also designs a classifier, but this time using Keras to build a deep learning convolutional neural network.

    Data Asset eXchange Groningen Meaning Bank Project

    Our third Watson Studio project, the Groningen Meaning Bank Project utilizes the DAX GMB data set to explore named-entities within text. The project’s first notebook acquaints the user with the different types of entity and part-of-speech tags found in the data set, as well as visualizes attributes of the corpus such as most common tokens. The second notebook walks the user through how to build a simple named entity recognition model, complete with feature engineering and model result analysis sections.

    New exploratory data analysis notebooks

    Along with the Watson Studio projects, we also released a new batch of exploratory notebooks that accompany our DAX data sets. These notebooks can be accessed by clicking Try the notebook on each of the data set’s DAX landing pages.

    Contracts and Finance Proposition Banks

    The Contracts Proposition Bank and Finance Proposition Bank data sets, which consist of proposition bank-style annotations of legal and finance domain sentences, now have notebooks that load and visualize these annotations. Included, for example, are graphs that visualize feature distributions such as part of speech tags, as well as graphs that visualize the CoNLL node graph format the annotations are stored in.

    IBM Project Debater Wikipedia Oriented Relatedness and Category Stance

    Two more notebooks that were recently released supporting IBM Project Debater® data sets, Wikipedia Oriented Relatedness and Wikipedia Category Stance, explore text data extracted from Wikipedia. Both notebooks walk you through how to load the data into Pandas DataFrames. The Wikipedia Oriented Relatedness notebook visualizes a sample of concept relatedness data (scoring the relatedness between two Wikipedia articles) while the Wikipedia Category Stance notebook visualizes a sample of category stance data (pro or con stance of a Wikipedia article on a certain topic).

    IBM Project Debater Claims Sentence, Mentions Detection, and Sentiment Lexicons

    The final three notebooks added, Claim Sentences Search, Mention Detection Benchmark, and Sentiment Composition Lexicons also all feature data sets originally emanating from IBM Project Debater. The Claim Sentences Search notebook visualizes the data set’s collection of debate topics using topic modeling. The Mention Detection Benchmark notebook tokenizes the included text data and explores the various entity types present in the data. The Sentiment Composition Lexicons notebook counts and visualizes the sentiment of various bigram word pairs included in the data set.

    New data sets

    TF Speech Commands

    The newly added TensorFlow Speech Commands data set contains over 65,000 short audio clips of 30 common spoken English words. The data set is a good fit for training an audio classifier to detect speech commands such “Yes” or “No”. The data set also contains audio files with background noise that can be used to merge with the speech clips to diversify the training data.

    WikiText-103

    The WikiText-103 data set features over 100 million text tokens extracted from the set of verified ‘Good’ and ‘Featured’ articles on Wikipedia. It is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license and is a good fit for long-term dependency language modeling.

    Oil Reservoir Simulations

    The Oil Reservoir Simulations data set consists of 60,000 physics-based simulated oil reservoirs generated by IBM researchers. The features and production-rate labels of this data set are sequence-based, making this data set a good fit for testing and validating sequential algorithms. A detailed notebook is included with the data set and provides visual explanations of the simulations run to generate the sequential data. Included in the data set are the input files to the physics-based simulator as well as raw and pre-processed versions of the data, making this data set a good fit for both novice data scientists and advanced researchers alike.

    Wikipedia Entity Graph

    The Wikipedia Entity Graph data set developed by IBM Research consists of a knowledge graph of entities from Wikipedia where each entity is supplemented by a context document that represents all the contexts in which the entity appears on Wikipedia. This data set can be used for problems and techniques that perform joint modeling of graph structure and textual data.

    Mono Lake Surface Water Extent Landsat8 Data

    The Mono Lake Surface Water Extent Landsat8 data set contains Landsat8 satellite imagery data that was post-processed by researchers from IBM Research to measure surface water extent information for the Mono Lake during the time period of 2013-04-18 to 2019-12-31. Surface water extent is important to the studies of land use, water management, and ecosystem health. This data can be used to predict a time-series of lake water extent and condition in order to monitor how a lake is changing over time.

    Taranaki Basin Curated Well Logs

    The Taranaki Basin Curated Well Logs data set consists of a curated set of 407 oil wells located along the western coast of New Zealand. The underlying data was obtained from the New Zealand Petroleum & Minerals Online Exploration Database and processed and cleaned by IBM Research to produce a simple CSV file containing well logs, well coordinates, and well geological features.

    SimpleQuestions and WebQSP Relation Detection

    The SimpleQuestions Relation Detection and WebQSP Relation Detection data sets are sets of entity relation annotations generated by IBM Research from underlying question-and-answering data sets. The relation detection task deals with generating semantic relationships between entities in a text. The SimpleQuestions Relation Detection data set was derived using the SimpleQA data set developed by Facebook Research, while the WebQSP Relation Detection data set was derived from the WebQSP data set created by Microsoft Research.

    If you have any comments or feedback on the Data Asset eXchange, please get in touch with us using GitHub or Slack.

  • World Wide Technology Partners with Moogsoft to Extend AIOps Practice and Deliver Customers the Virtual NOC

    Moogsoft AIOps Platform expands WWT’s AIOps offering to automate incident management and help remote IT Ops prevent outages, now available to trial within Advanced Technology Center (ATC)

    SAN FRANCISCO – May 27, 2020 – Moogsoft, the pioneer and leading provider of artificial intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) and World Wide Technology (WWT), a global technology solution provider, today announced they have partnered to deliver clients a joint solution that allows IT operations and DevOps teams to generate increased business value and more effectively ensure digital service uptime from anywhere.

    This collaboration enables WWT’s market-leading AIOps practice to deliver enterprises virtualized Network Operations Centers (NOC) for increased productivity, reduced costs and accelerated innovation across their digital services. Under the partnership, WWT will leverage the Moogsoft AIOps Platform with clients to ingest data from multiple sources—including metrics, alerts, traces & logs—as well as patented Moogsoft algorithms and collaboration tools to proactively understand incidents and their root cause, prevent outages and minimize downtime.

    “The current crisis and business climate are driving a sudden shift in how enterprises rely on their digital channels to maintain connections with customers, and build new ones,” said Brian Ortbals, VP Global Engineering Team, World Wide Technology. “Moogsoft AIOps serves as the architectural cornerstone of our expanded AIOps practice, and will help our clients protect revenue-generating customer experiences through better early outage detection and prevention, and increased business awareness.”

    The world is rapidly moving to a digital-first business model, increasing the pressure on newly remote IT operations teams to ensure digital properties perform well.

    AIOps brings artificial intelligence and machine learning to IT operations and DevOps, giving teams a single-pane-of-glass to find and fix IT incidents before they become revenue-impacting outages.

    “World Wide Technology has built an impressive AIOps practice to help global enterprises transform their revenue-generating operations from traditional bank branches or retail stores into a collection of digital services,” said Moogsoft Founder and CEO Phil Tee. “The addition of the Moogsoft AIOps Platform helps boost the productivity of IT Operations, and lowers the total cost to deliver exceptional experiences across the business.”

    Moogsoft AIOps Live in the ATC

    WWT customers can also now experience the virtual NOC for themselves in a new Moogsoft environment at WWT’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC). Moogsoft’s ATC Lab lets clients test drive the platform, and experience its comprehensive set of advanced algorithmic functions which automate and streamline key IT operations monitoring processes, including ingestion of data of all types and from all sources; noise reduction; alert correlation; root cause identification; and resolution automation.

    Moogsoft Enterprise 8.0 Enables the Virtual NOC

    Built on the Moogsoft AIOps Platform, Moogsoft Enterprise 8.0 delivers unprecedented automation and user experience, allowing IT Ops and DevOps teams to virtualize their NOC and work more effectively — from anywhere. The Moogsoft Situation Room expands collaboration capabilities throughout the incident management process, so these teams can diagnose and resolve problems quickly, before they impact user experience. More details at moogsoft.com/VNOC.

    Additional Resources

    About Moogsoft

    Moogsoft is a pioneer and leading provider of AIOps solutions that help IT teams work faster and smarter. With patented AI analyzing billions of events daily across the world’s most complex IT environments, the Moogsoft AIOps Platform helps the world’s top enterprises avoid outages, automate service assurance, and accelerate digital transformation initiatives. Founded in 2012, Moogsoft has more than 140 customers worldwide including American Airlines, Fannie Mae, Fiserv, HCL Technologies, SAP SuccessFactors, and Verizon Media. It has established strategic partnerships with leading managed service providers and outsourcing organizations including AWS, Cisco, HCL Technologies, TCS and Wipro.

    Moogsoft® and the Moogsoft logo are proprietary trademarks of Moogsoft Inc. All other products or names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

    For more information about Moogsoft’s AIOps platform and its customers’ success, visit www.moogsoft.com.

    About World Wide Technology

    World Wide Technology (WWT) is a global technology solution provider with more than $12 billion in annual revenue that provides digital strategy, innovative technology and supply chain solutions to large public and private organizations around the globe. While most companies talk about delivering business and technology outcomes, WWT does it. Based in St. Louis, WWT employs more than 6,000 people and operates approximately 4 million square feet of warehousing and integration space in more than 20 facilities throughout the world.

     

  • Announcing Applitools Ultrafast Cross Browser Testing Hackathon

    $50,000 in prizes awarded to engineers who best leverage Visual AI and Ultrafast Grid to modernize their cross browser and cross device testing

    SAN MATEO, Calif., May 27, 2020 — Applitools, provider of a next generation test automation platform through Visual AI and Ultrafast Grid, today announced the industry’s first modern cross browser and cross device testing hackathon. Focused on the use of Visual AI and Ultrafast Grid, this virtual event seeks to educate and upskill developers and test automation engineers all over the world to test at incredible speeds and deliver better quality software faster and for less money than they do today.

    To apply and learn more about Applitools Ultrafast Cross Browser Testing Hackathon, visit: (https://info.applitools.com/uDB8).

    Software developers, quality engineers, and QA professionals will compete for $50,000 in cash prizes. The global engineering community will be challenged to author cross browser and cross device tests against a real-world app using both their preferred legacy cloud testing solution and Applitools Ultrafast Grid powered by Visual AI. Contestants are free to use any major test framework, such as Cypress, Selenium, and WebdriverIO, TestCafe, and in their preferred language including Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, or C#.

    Learn how Visual AI tested 29 browsers in 19 seconds and caught 119 bugs from Applitools Automation Architect, Angie Jones: (https://info.applitools.com/uDCa)

    The cash prize pool includes two diamond winners receiving $5,000 each, 10 Platinum winners receiving $1,000 each, and more. To be eligible, engineers must submit their hackathon app by June 30th, 2020. All submissions will be judged using several criteria that highlight the modern test automation techniques vital to cross browser and cross device testing success including:

    1. Test Creation and Execution Time – How code and time-efficient is test creation? How quickly do tests run?
    2. Test Coverage and Analysis – How easily and quickly are results analyzed? How effective are tests in catching all the bugs?
    3. Team Analysis and Collaboration – How easily and quickly are bugs logged and resolved across the team?
    4. Test Stability and Auto-Maintenance – How easy and quick is it to maintain tests? Do all tests execute successfully?

    This is the second hackathon in the past year from Applitools. The November 2019 Visual AI Rockstar Hackathon was extremely popular in the global engineering community with over 3,000 applicants. The seminal report “The Impact of Visual AI on Test Automation” was released in April 2020 leveraging more than one and a half man years of test automation engineering effort obtained through the Hackathon.

    • “Completing the Applitools Hackathon was a keystone achievement in my career! I’m now 100% convinced that Visual AI testing is an essential tool for efficiently validating web and mobile applications,” said Tracy Mazelin, QA Engineer at Paylocity and former $1,000 Platinum Prize Winner.
    • “This challenge propelled me to dig into alternative ways to traditional testing. While solving the challenge, I realized Applitools will save time on the proposed scenarios while still delivering the same value as traditional frameworks. Congratulations for the initiative and the elegant manner chosen for making me understand how powerful and awesome Visual AI is,” said Corina Zaharia, Test Engineer at Mendix and former $5,000 Diamond Prize Winner.

    “When it comes to software testing, you don’t get speeding tickets for being ultrafast. On the contrary, the faster you go the more you are rewarded,” said Gil Sever, CEO and co-founder of Applitools. “With everything going digital, speed, accuracy, and ubiquity are the three critical success factors in the software delivery lifecycle. Developers and Test Automation engineers who upskill and learn modern testing technologies for cross browser and cross device testing will help their teams release higher quality apps much faster using less time and money than they do today. Applitools Ultrafast Cross Browser Testing Hackathon provides an incredible vehicle to achieve these goals, upskill yourself, and have fun while doing it.”

    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 and 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.

     

     

  • DXC Introduces Corporate Incident Response Application to Help Businesses Proactively Reduce Risk

    Banco Santander streamlines crisis management systems and the Nordex Group improves worker safety through Corporate Incident Response application features

    TYSONS, Va., May 21, 2020 — DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC) today introduced its Corporate Incident Response (CIR) application for ServiceNow to enable organizations like Banco Santander, one of the largest retail and commercial banks in the world, and the Nordex Group, one of the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers, to quickly and proactively identify, address and manage important non-IT corporate incidents, such as those related to facilities, physical security, and environment, health and safety. The application, built on the ServiceNow platform, allows businesses to reduce their risk profiles and overcome situations before they evolve into companywide crises.

    The CIR application provides an end-to-end workflow management solution to manage, track and respond to non-IT-related issues in an efficient, standardized manner.

    “In today’s world, business disruptions are inevitable. While operational resilience has been around for years, a change in mindset is required in order to prevent, respond to, recover from, and most importantly, learn from and adapt after crises occur,” said Dan Stoks, vice president, Global ServiceNow Practice, DXC Technology. “The Corporate Incident Response application can work with ServiceNow’s integrated risk management and other workflows to enable organizations to securely manage crisis response workflows and risks to the business.”

    Key features of the solution:

    • Situation rooms — provide a central point of collaboration for dispersed organizations to orchestrate response teams and plans and monitor and evaluate the overall picture.
    • App notifications — provide the ability to send companywide notifications, such as alerts, push notifications, email and SMS to predefined groups as well as external partners and customers.
    • 360-degree view — provides the management team with a 360-degree view of where the organization stands on corporate-related incidents, so they can make fact-based decisions that reduce their overall risk profile.

    Banco Santander Streamlines Crisis Management Systems with DXC CIR Application

    Banco Santander wanted a single platform to manage its global facility and security processes and replace its previous system with a new, digitized platform. Using the DXC CIR application with ServiceNow, Santander streamlined its processes with better-performing facility, security and crisis management systems and improved user experiences for its managers and end users. It also benefited from better insights and greater transparency in its global facility and security services.

    “The consolidation of existing and new facility management capabilities to a new platform was a crucial part of our business transformation journey,” said Galo Gilarranz Vicente, Real Estate, General Services and Security, Banco Santander. “DXC’s CIR application has allowed us to reduce costs by rationalizing the global application landscape, standardize our processes and increase employee efficiency with automation.”

    The Nordex Group Improves Worker Safety with DXC’s Health, Safety and Environmental Management Business Expertise

    The Nordex Group tapped the DXC Health, Safety and Environment Suite (HSE) for ServiceNow, which is part of DXC’s CIR portfolio, to create a safety-driven culture throughout its global operations. With the DXC suite, the Nordex Group experienced a more streamlined process to reduce worker hazards and prevent incidents before they occur.

    “Nordex is committed to worker safety, implementing proper processes to prevent and quickly respond to work-related incidents,” said Philipp Marten, program manager, Business Systems, Nordex Group. “With DXC’s HSE solution, we were able to reduce the complexity of our system, streamline reporting and create a safer work environment throughout our global operations.”

    DXC is offering this application for free for 120 days to complement and enhance the capabilities of ServiceNow Emergency Response Management applications.

    “Operational risk management is a crucial part of how ServiceNow enables resilience for our customers for both IT and non-IT operations,” said David Parsons, senior vice president, Global Alliances and Channel Ecosystem, ServiceNow. “Corporate Incident Response from DXC Technology exemplifies the innovative applications that extend the value of the Now Platform and our Risk and Business Continuity portfolio to serve critical and emerging use cases for joint customers enterprise-wide.”

    To learn more and download the CIR for ServiceNow application, click here.

    About DXC Technology

    DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC) helps global companies run their mission critical systems and operations while modernizing IT, optimizing data architectures, and ensuring security and scalability across public, private and hybrid clouds. With decades of driving innovation, the world’s largest companies trust DXC to deploy our enterprise technology stack to deliver new levels of performance, competitiveness and customer experiences. Learn more about the DXC story and our focus on people, customers and operational execution at www.dxc.technology.

  • JumpCloud Extends Cloud Directory Platform with Apple MDM Support

    Addition of Apple MDM Deepens Cross-Platform System Management Capabilities

    Louisville, CO — May 21, 2020 – JumpCloud, the world’s first Directory-as-a-Service®, today announced the General Availability of its support of Apple’s Mobile Device Management (MDM) services. The latest release extends JumpCloud’s capabilities to manage Apple macOS devices via the MDM protocol and support for deployment through Apple’s Device Enrollment Plan (DEP). The addition of Apple MDM support further extends the platform’s ability to simultaneously manage macOS, Windows, and Linux desktops, laptops, and server infrastructure.  With the new MDM functionality, JumpCloud continues to add robust security features to its comprehensive identity access control and device management platform, eliminating the need for IT admins to deploy disparate technologies and costly point solutions to fully manage a remote workforce.

    Tweet this: Simplify #IAM and device management with Apple Mobile Device Management; now included in  @JumpCloud Cloud Directory Platform http://ow.ly/vh3L50zGCSd  #remote work #MDM #ITsecurity

    “As a company that has to manage both Mac and Windows machines, JumpCloud has enabled us to dramatically reduce our vendor footprint,” said Marie Selsky, IT manager at Nimbus Therapeutics. “We can do all of our device management and access control from a single platform.”

    JumpCloud’s introduction of Apple’s MDM integration provides new functionality to support deployment and management of Apple macOS assets. The release broadens its award-winning product’s management capabilities supporting fleet control of macOS, Windows, and Linux desktops, laptops, and servers. Currently,  over 100,000 organizations worldwide are enrolled in the JumpCloud platform.

    JumpCloud’s remote device management offering provides administrators the following across operating systems from its cloud-based management console:

    • System access and permissions control
    • Device Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) and Password management
    • Device Security policy configurations
    • Device wipe, restart, lock, and shutdown commands
    • Full-Disk encryption with secure recovery key escrow
    • Device-level Insights for host and application asset inventory and threat detection

    “JumpCloud’s cloud-based device management capabilities for Mac, Windows, and Linux have been successfully used by organizations around the globe for remote management, access control, and security,” said Greg Keller, chief technology officer at JumpCloud. “COVID-19 amplified this need for IT and system administrators, instantly forcing them to develop strategies for how devices, and all user access controls, could be securely managed outside the confines of their brick-and-mortar domains. We’re proud to be a part of Apple’s certified MDM vendor ecosystem and offer deeper deployment and management capabilities for macOS alongside our Windows and Linux fleet support.”

    “While COVID-19 has accelerated the shift to remote work, IT teams have long been evaluating how to best conduct business on any device from any location at any time accessing any app and any data,” said Doug Cahill, vice president and group director, cybersecurity at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).  “As distributed teams become the norm, admins are looking to solutions that consolidate device management and access control from a single platform, like JumpCloud, to simply and securely manage users across multiple operating systems and devices.”

    With COVID-19, IT admins are now tasked with managing users and devices across a wholly distributed workforce, an industry shift that research suggests may be permanent. A recent survey from Global Workplace Analytics underscores the scale of the shift, finding that nearly 89% of respondents reported working from home since the onset of COVID-19; nearly 80% of the workforce wants to continue to work from home once the pandemic passes. Combining cloud-based directory services and device management make this shift simple for IT admins, offering a unified solution for user, system, and device management.

     

    “MDM is the icing on the cake for JumpCloud,” said Evan Sheeks, IT systems administrator at Wisetail. “I feel much more confident that I can access 100% of my inventory in a few clicks with one tool.”

     

    Availability

    JumpCloud’s Apple MDM capabilities are available now and are offered at no additional charge for subscribers of JumpCloud’s Free and Pro-level plans.

     

    Additional resources:

    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.

     

     

     

     

  • Phizzle Announces 5X+ Performance Breakthrough in Edge Device Computation, Fortune 100 Customer Win

    Groundbreaking Regenerative Engineering™ Innovation Enables Edge Devices of 40 Watts or Less to Operate With the Performance of a 200-Watt Server

    SAN FRANCISCO, May 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Phizzle, the leader in software that solves the power and data complexity challenges of edge computing, today announced a dramatic breakthrough in edge computation that enables 40-watt or less edge devices to operate with the performance of a 200-watt server. This groundbreaking innovation means devices such as routers, gateways or switches now have the ability to operate with at least a 5x increase in efficiency that machines such as air quality monitors and pH conductivity meters require for IoT enablement.

    In addition, the company has signed on a pharmaceutical giant and Fortune 100 company as the first customer to put Phizzle’s solution in production – the EDGMaker Software Stack. The move indicates the company’s goal of leading the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry to automation, with other verticals such as manufacturing, transportation infrastructure, and smart cities on the horizon.

    Edge devices typically operate on 40 watts of power or less. This relatively low amount of power can slow computation speeds and system response times across entire networks, resulting in the inability to rely on these devices while constraining the edge market. In today’s environment, server-grade performance — typically defined as roughly 200 watts of power — is necessary for enterprises to automate IoT devices on the edge in mission-critical environments. Regenerative Engineering™, the backbone of Phizzle’s patent-pending first-of-its-kind EDGMaker Software Stack, solves the twin technical challenges of low power and high volume data surges commonplace on the edge during these key instances.

    “Phizzle’s innovation allows enterprise-class customers to finally rely on automated IoT devices to perform in mission-critical environments,” said Ben Davis, Phizzle CEO. “Enabling edge devices to operate at server-grade performance will tip the IoT market forward at a completely new pace.”

    Regenerative Engineering is a technical breakthrough in network infrastructure, the first resilient and self-optimizing IoT software designed specifically for edge computing. The innovations in Regenerative Engineering allows pharmaceutical manufacturers to automate edge devices, resulting in significant operational expense (OPEX) savings. Manufacturers currently require large teams to manage thousands of machines ranging from particle counters to Ph balancers in their production processes. Automating and digitizing these manual processes and workflows with the EDGMaker Software Stack unlocks hard-dollar OPEX savings at the scale of a Fortune 100 company — business outcomes that were not previously attainable using traditional edge architectures.

    Phizzle’s go-to-market partner is Cisco, and the company’s proprietary software stack is now integrated with Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture (DNA). Phizzle and Cisco are long-time partners and share a history of co-innovation to transform markets, including the sports and entertainment market.

    “I worked at Cisco when CEO John Chambers predicted the IoT market would be a trillion-dollar opportunity — but it has been slow in coming until now,” said Ron Ricci, a Phizzle board member and former senior executive at Cisco for 20 years. “Phizzle’s engineering innovation delivers server-grade performance on a Cisco router with only 40 watts of power — opening up an entirely new market for Cisco and its partners.”

    For more information on Phizzle and to download a technical white paper explaining its innovative Regenerative Engineering, visit www.phizzle.com.

    About Phizzle
    Founded in 2005 and headquartered in San Francisco, Phizzle is the first IoT software company to break through the performance requirements of edge device computation, enabling enterprise customers to automate and rely on IoT devices in mission-critical environments. The core innovation in the company’s enterprise-class software stack is Regenerative Engineering™, which solves the power and data complexity challenges typical of edge computing in an entirely new way. Phizzle’s EDGMaker solution benefits many manufacturing, pharmaceutical, transportation, oil and gas, and smart cities initiatives around the world. The company’s go-to-market partners include Cisco. Phizzle has a history of creating innovative products from consumer data to machine data. For more information visit www.phizzle.com.

  • FireHydrant Raises $8M Series A Led by Menlo Ventures

    Built by SREs for SREs, FireHydrant Helps Companies Manage Complex Systems Including Incident Management, Deploy Tracking and Service Ownership

    NEW YORK, May 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Today, FireHydrant announced its $8 million Series A funding led by Menlo Ventures, with follow-on participation from Work-Bench. Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures, joins the FireHydrant board of directors.

    Today’s cloud-based technology infrastructure systems are difficult to manage; if something goes awry, it takes immense coordinated effort and communications across customer support, software engineering and executive teams to restore service. FireHydrant provides systems management tools and frameworks for the most sophisticated and complex systems. FireHydrant works seamlessly within a company’s existing workflows, i.e. Slack, Jira, PagerDuty and more. Companies – including Packet and LaunchDarkly – choose FireHydrant to manage more than 50,000 hours of incidents and more than 10 million deploy events.

    With the new capital, FireHydrant will grow its team and build the platform, adding more integrations and continuing to improve the user experience.

    Introducing Free Public Status Pages
    Today, FireHydrant also launches its free public status pages. Status pages are automated, customizable and intelligent, providing an up-to-the-moment overview of a system’s performance. Now companies can keep their customers informed when complexity strikes.

    “Our solution is based on our experience in the trenches as engineers, feedback from our customers, and incidents we’ve observed in the real world,” said Robert Ross, CEO and co-founder at FireHydrant. “The rapid adoption of FireHydrant to date tells us that we’re addressing very real challenges and alleviating real pain points. Engineering teams need more insight and flexibility in managing complex cloud systems and turn to FireHydrant to help.”

    “Uptime and performance are highly correlated with revenue and customer experience, and yet systems reliability issues are unavoidable as demand for things like ecommerce and digital media explode. Today, these incidents are addressed in a reactive manner with a patchwork of repurposed tools,” said Matt Murphy, Partner at Menlo Ventures. “There is too much at stake to accept the status quo. Bobby and his team’s first-hand experience as SRE’s has given them a unique perspective on what is needed to systematically and repeatedly address the problem with an end to end platform, called FireHydrant.”

    “Having worked closely with the FireHydrant team since their founding, we’ve seen first hand their deep understanding of the pain points large companies go through when it comes to managing sophisticated infrastructure environments,” said Jonathan Lehr, Co-Founder and General Partner at Work-Bench. “Their past lives dealing with incidents gives them a unique edge in supporting top SRE teams and we’re excited to see them continue to deliver on their vision as a complex systems management solution.”

    Additional Resources:
    Matt Murphy discusses Menlo Ventures’ investment in FireHydrant
    Jonathan Lehr discusses Work-Bench’s investment in FireHydrant
    FireHydrant’s blog post on the Series A
    Sign up for FireHydrant’s new free public status pages
    Follow FireHydrant on Twitter

    About FireHydrant
    Founded in 2019, FireHydrant builds tools that modern operations teams are using to respond to complex problems in their globally-distributed applications.

    For more infor FireHydrant mation, visit www.firehydrant.com.