devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Jules Louis

  • Panzura Launches Freedom Partner Program to Enable Solution Providers to Capitalize on Massive Shift

    CAMPBELL, Calif. – February 23, 2017 – Panzura® today announced the immediate availability of the Freedom Partner Program, a comprehensive new program that enables solution providers to capitalize on the massive shift of IT infrastructure to the cloud.  Building on the recent Panzura Freedom product line announcement, the Freedom Partner Program enables solution providers to assist customers in solving the immediate challenge of managing and storing the exploding amount of unstructured data by starting with Freedom Archive and easily upgrading those customers to advanced hybrid cloud storage functionality later using Freedom NAS or Freedom Collaboration.

    The Freedom Partner Program includes Elite, Premier, and Authorized tiers, each with its own benefits and requirements.  The program is designed to match partners to the level that best aligns with their go-to-market strategy and commitment.  Panzura’s new Freedom product line and licensing models were created with a partner first strategy as a top priority. Panzura Sales Teams are also incentivized to work collaboratively with partners on opportunities.  The new program is structured to protect partner-generated opportunities and margins through deal registration and there is a flexible, proposal-based MDF program that is designed to work with each partner’s unique business model. The enhanced Partner Portal features sales tools and resources that enable partner sales and technical teams to actively engage with customers throughout the sales cycle.

    Enterprises are accelerating their cloud first strategies.  Combine this with the massive growth of unstructured data and the fact that 90% of that data has not been accessed in six months is a major factor in the enterprise turning to Panzura’s market leading hybrid cloud storage solutions for scale, simplicity, cost reduction and performance.

    “Companies are moving workloads and data to the cloud at an accelerated pace. AWS is now the number two enterprise storage provider and Azure is number five,” said Patrick Harr, chief executive officer at Panzura.  “The new Freedom Partner Program along with the Freedom product line enables solution providers to capitalize on this massive transition and help their customers move to a cloud first storage model now.”

    “Panzura gives us the ability to provide clients the ability to cache active data on-premise for fast access with all data stored in our highly resilient and encrypted storage cloud.  This flexibility is critical given the explosive growth of data across all market segments,” said Clayton Weise, Director of Cloud Services at Key Information Systems.  “Further, Panzura’s distributed and highly scalable architecture ensures seamless and secure data flows across with support for massive growth to support the largest of data sets.”

    — Jules Louis

  • Ubertesters Platform Integrates into HPE Mobile Center to Streamline and Strengthen Mobile Testing for Developers

    Ramsey, N.J. —February 20, 2017 – Ubertesters, a world leading provider of QA testing solutions, today announced that the Ubertesters platform is now integrated into HPE Mobile Center. The integration provides Hewlett Packard Enterprise customers with a capability rich, well-integrated experience of crowd testing and mobile beta testing management for real devices providing support for the testing process across the mobile testing cycle – from the distribution of the build to the end-user – to ensure high-quality application delivery.

    The increased global focus on mobile app development, and the changing needs of mobile development enterprises created a need to improve the QA beta management process to fit the enterprise world. HPE Mobile Center users can now enjoy the benefits of the Ubertesters platform to better manage the different remote testing teams and ‘in-the-wild’ crowd testers.
    Starting with Mobile Center 2.01 release, users will have an easy and seamless experience trying out complimentary crowd testing services, direct from the management console.

    “Building high-quality mobile applications can be a difficult, time consuming and expensive process,” said Raffi Margaliot (@raffima), Senior Vice President and General Manager, Application Delivery Management, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “As a result of HPE Mobile Center integrating Ubertesters platform – and leveraging HPE’s strength in analytics and security – developers have access to a robust tool set to efficiently build and test applications with the speed, quality and scale needed to deliver high-quality mobile and web application experiences.”

    “We are honored that HPE, a global leader in QA software testing solutions, has integrated Ubertesters robust and comprehensive platform to enhance their application lifecycle management (ALM) software suite,” said Ran Rachlin, Ubertesters co-founder and CEO. “In today’s development environment of agile, DevOps, Continuous Deployment and more, release cycles are getting shorter and testing is done with many remote testers and beta testers. The Ubertesters platform is essential to better manage the crowd and mobile QA manual testing process on your way to launch a better rated app with better user experience.”

    — Jules Louis

  • Perfecto Introduces Tools Built for High-Velocity Mobile and Web Application Development

    BOSTON, MA and SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwired – Feb 14, 2017) –  DevWeek – Perfecto, the provider of the leading web and mobile quality lab, today introduced new tools designed for developers and development teams that accelerate the web and mobile app development process through faster debugging and troubleshooting. Powered by Perfecto’s on-demand, cloud-based Continuous Quality Lab, the new tools provide fast feedback to mobile and web developers and development teams. The tools allow developers to obtain real-world feedback early in their development process, identify and fix platform-specific bugs, and streamline continuous integration (CI) within their DevOps delivery pipeline.

    A recent trend in mobile and web development shows 25% of time is spent addressing a bug fix backlog, which slows down the velocity of releases and prohibits the innovation of new features that draw in users and boost engagement.

    According to a recent Forrester report, in order to build the right software better and faster, automated testing along the delivery pipeline is needed for continuous visibility into software releasability. By automating the delivery pipeline, teams can test software from the moment it’s committed, reducing release risk and business uncertainty.*

    This effort can be minimized with fast feedback, improved mapping of target coverage areas and the ability to embed automated quality practices throughout the entire SDLC, from development to testing to production. Mobile app and web developers can use Perfecto’s new tools to support these practices and in turn improve the quality of their code, increase time to market and reduce risks to the user experience in production.

    Perfecto’s new developer tools make high-velocity development possible. Key features and benefits include:

    • Injection of quality across development, QA and ops processes – Teams can integrate unit, exploratory and automated testing directly into their IDE of choice for mobile or web.
    • Full support for native mobile testing frameworks – Espresso (Android) and XCTest (iOS), enables developers to receive early feedback from CI builds over a wide range of platforms, environments and real user conditions.
    • Improved visibility into bugs – Perfecto’s DigitalZoom reporting provides cross-platform visibility and allows teams to track quality trends, analyze platform-specific issues and collaborate on test results for faster fixes.
    • Accelerated debugging – Perfecto’s DevTunnel accelerates debugging and troubleshooting in development cycles by providing instant access to a variety of real cloud-based devices, browsers and user environments from within your IDE of choice, leveraging your debugger of choice.

    “In today’s digital era, velocity of the application delivery pipeline is a key success metric for software executives,” said Roi Carmel, Chief Strategy Officer at Perfecto. “With this release, our goal is to empower mobile app and web developers to build a better delivery pipeline with an on-demand quality lab that supports high levels of test automation, and is integrated directly into their preferred coding environments, making it easier to gain reliable feedback, speed up build cycles and accelerate feature delivery.”

    Perfecto’s developer tools are available with an additional license. Free versions of select developer tools will be released in the coming months to those who pre-register here. To learn more about Perfecto’s tools for mobile app and web developers, visit justletmecode.io, stop by booth #130 at DeveloperWeek in San Francisco, CA, or tune in to our livestream demo on Wednesday, February 22 at 11am EST.

    *Build The Right Software Better And Faster With Agile And DevOps Metrics, Forrester Research, Inc., August 11, 2016

    About Perfecto
    Perfecto is the leading cloud-based test lab for web and mobile applications, empowering global enterprises with the tools they need to deliver better digital experiences for their users. With Perfecto, developers and testers can automate testing earlier in the SDLC, using the most reliable test lab comprised of real devices that simulate real-world networks, locations and scenarios. With more than 2,500 customers across major industries, Perfecto is enabling continuous integration and faster release cycles that set the speed of digital innovation. For more information, visit perfectomobile.com, join the Perfecto community, or follow us on Twitter at @PerfectoMobile.

    — Jules Louis

  • Panzura Introduces New Freedom Product Line

    CAMPBELL, Calif. – February 15, 2017 – Panzura® today introduced its new Freedom product line, enabling organizations to combine the economics of cloud storage with the performance of flash to solve growing unstructured data challenges. The new Freedom product family – Freedom Archive, Freedom NAS, and Freedom Collaboration – frees organizations from storing unstructured data on expensive NAS systems and move, manage and access that data in any cloud.  With Panzura’s Freedom line, customers can choose the hybrid cloud storage functionality needed now and easily upgrade with a simple license to access additional functionality later.

    Panzura Freedom Archive eliminates the need to store less frequently accessed data on expensive primary or secondary storage from vendors like NetApp or EMC or transfer it to more traditional archiving methods such as tape or optical disk.  Instead, Freedom Archive combines the benefits of high-performance local cache for high speed data ingest and on demand access to important data with the economics and limitless capacity of cloud storage to make archiving of petabytes of data dramatically simpler, faster and significantly less expensive.

    Panzura’s Freedom NAS provides organizations with fast performance to shared data and home directories by centralizing that data in the cloud while keeping active data cached close to the users and applications.  Local users have full read-write abilities with the global namespace while users at offsite offices can read data from a central cloud repository.  Freedom NAS is simpler, faster and less expensive than deploying separate primary, backup and archive storage at each site.

    Freedom Collaboration builds upon the benefits of Freedom Archive and Freedom NAS while providing full cross-site collaboration of project files regardless of where they are located.  Global teams no longer need to wait for files to open or sync before receiving instant access to application data.  Freedom Collaboration eliminates the need to maintain separate local copies of files and the version-control nightmares that can lead to data integrity issues.  All files are read-write accessible at every site as though on a local, locking filer and all of the data is backed by a central cloud data repository.

    “The rise of public cloud services has fundamentally altered the IT infrastructure landscape. The effects of this shift have disrupted few sectors more than the data storage segment. Faced with ever increasing capacity demands, the status quo of the traditional storage array is no longer sustainable for many organizations. Cloud can be an answer, but organizations still demand the performance of local storage,” said Scott Sinclair, Senior Analyst at ESG.  “Panzura’s new Freedom product line enables organizations to take advantage of cloud economics, but not sacrifice fast, local performance all while choosing the level of functionality needed.”

    “Enterprises are accelerating their cloud first strategies.  Combine this with the massive growth of unstructured data and the fact that 90% of that data has not been accessed in six months and you can see why enterprises are turning to hybrid cloud storage,” said Patrick Harr, chief executive officer at Panzura.  “Freedom Archive, Freedom NAS, and Freedom Collaboration enable enterprises to fulfill their cloud first initiatives, keep the fast flash local performance users and applications require, and save 70% compared to traditional storage.”
    Availability and Pricing

    All three products in the Freedom product line are available immediately. Organizations can download a free, 30-day trial version of Freedom Archive at http://panzura.com/freedom-archive-download/.  Customers can also request a free trial license of Freedom NAS and Collaboration.  Freedom products work across all major public cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, and IBM Cloud as well as private cloud object storage providers including IBM and EMC.

    About Panzura
    Adding over two petabytes of enterprise storage under management per month, Panzura is a market leader in enterprise hybrid cloud storage. Panzura’s hybrid cloud storage software seamlessly combines the economics, capacity, and business model of cloud storage with the flexibility, performance and features of enterprise storage. Using Panzura, enterprises shift from an antiquated storage status quo model into the cloud and unlock the power of data. Organizations like the Department of Justice, Milwaukee Tool, American College of Radiology and Chevon use Panzura for active archive, hybrid cloud NAS and cross-site collaboration. Please visit www.panzura.com for further information.

    — Jules Louis

  • QASymphony Launches qTest Pulse, a Continuous Testing Solution Focused on DevOps

    QASymphony Launches qTest Pulse, a Continuous Testing Solution Focused on DevOps

    ATLANTA, GA (February 14, 2017) QASymphony, a leader in test management solutions for the enterprise, today announced the general market availability of qTest Pulse, a new testing application designed specifically for development teams practicing continuous testing within their DevOps pipeline. qTest Pulse integrates with the most popular DevOps tools on the market including GitHub, JIRA, and Jenkins, enabling development teams to deliver high quality software with every release.

    QASymphony is hosting a webinar on March 1st at 2pm ET to demo qTest Pulse. More details here.

    Global enterprises are under increasing pressure to release software at a rapid pace.  As a result, companies are starting to adopt DevOps practices within pockets of their IT organization.  While DevOps adoption is significant, it is generally taking place at the project or team level, with full company-wide adoption of DevOps at only 20%.  The vast majority of enterprises continue to practice a mix of Waterfall and Agile development.  QASymphony’s qTest is the only platform that can support this diversity of development methodologies with solutions that cover BDD/TDD, Exploratory, Agile/Waterfall, and now DevOps testing.  And with qTest Insights organizations can consolidate manual and automated testing analytics into one complete view for the customer. This ensures a high level of quality across all the different teams in an organization.

    With qTest Pulse, DevOps teams are able to:

    • Integrate continuous testing activities directly with Agile ALM systems like JIRA and version control tools like Git for full-circle traceability of test results back to individual tickets and even source code check-ins.
    • Streamline the DevOps pipeline by directly connecting all testing activity, both manual and automated, into the CI Build process run by tools such as Jenkins or CircleCI.
    • Store manual test cases in GitHub alongside code with push-button conversion to Selenium or other automated test frameworks to accelerate the automation process.
    • Facilitate better and faster communication between developers and testers via event-driven notifications and integrations across ALM, version control and CI systems.

    “Our customers have told us that are evolving the way they develop software,” said Dave Keil, CEO of QASymphony.  “Rather than having one single development methodology, they often have several different teams developing software in different ways.  With the launch of qTest Pulse, we now provide a comprehensive platform that can support all of the different teams within an enterprise, whether they are releasing software once a day, once a month or once a year. Additionally, our robust business intelligence and reporting capability brings together all of the testing-related analytics, providing executives with a complete view into software quality across the enterprise.”

    Test Pulse is available in cloud or on-premise versions. Visit QASymphony.com to sign up for a full demo.

    — Jules Louis

  • ExtraHop Introduces Addy: Cloud-Based Machine Learning for Data-Driven IT

    ExtraHop Introduces Addy: Cloud-Based Machine Learning for Data-Driven IT

    SEATTLE – February 14, 2017 – ExtraHop, the leader in real-time IT analytics, today announced ExtraHop Addy, the industry’s first cloud service that applies machine learning to the richest source of IT data—wire data—to provide real-time situational insight for IT teams. ExtraHop Addy is always-on, serving as the eyes and ears for IT and helping them take a proactive, data-driven approach to supporting and securing the digital experience.

    Organizations overwhelmingly want to be data-driven, but the quality of the data and the ability to access it at the pace of business is a significant barrier. Data is vast and growing and increasingly distributed across on-premises, cloud, and remote sites. With Addy, ExtraHop is tearing down these barriers, delivering real-time, objective insight that makes data-driven operations a reality.

    ExtraHop Addy is the industry’s first SaaS offering that observes and analyzes all digital interactions and applies machine learning to detect anomalies in real time. Using wire data from the ExtraHop platform, Addy builds continuous baselines for every device, network, and application, and then proactively detects and surfaces potential issues in the environment. The core algorithm and heuristics also incorporate feedback from in-house and crowd-sourced domain expertise to reduce the number of false positives and keep IT teams focused on the most critical issues. This means smarter, more proactive and data-driven operations that enable users to deliver everything from increased website uptime to more efficient assembly lines to better patient care.

    With ExtraHop Addy, early access customers have increased uptime, improved performance, thwarted potential breaches, and improved collaboration across teams.

    • A large cable provider averted a potential breach when Addy detected a server that was unexpectedly probing systems in another major datacenter, enabling the team to rapidly respond and shut down the compromised server.
    • A financial services firm was able to detect the Dyn DDoS attack in real time and route DNS traffic through an unaffected region to avoid downtime.
    • A national medical institution averted two potential security breaches when Addy detected international servers probing their DNS, as well as reverse DNS lookups.

    ExtraHop Addy provides real-time visibility across the entire spectrum of IT operations, from the datacenter to the cloud to the edge, federating that data within the ExtraHop user interface (UI) to provide a unified view of the environment. Alerts are surfaced and visualized within the platform in real time, allowing IT to see what’s happening “right now” as well as graphically represent anomalies and outages over time.

    “ExtraHop has pioneered data-driven operations with its platform for wire data analytics. Based on an innovative stream processing engine, ExtraHop provides a real-time view across the entire IT environment,” said Jesse Rothstein, Co-Founder and CTO of ExtraHop. “With Addy, we’re taking the next step, applying machine learning techniques to this vast data set while leveraging the scale, elasticity, and compute power of the cloud.”

    ExtraHop Addy will be generally available starting in April 2017, as well as through an Early Access Program for select participants. Pricing for the service starts at $2,990 per month.

    To experience the power of the ExtraHop platform, explore the ExtraHop interactive online demo.

    Is machine learning hope or hype for IT? Find out what IT professionals think in our TechValidate market survey report.

    What Customers Are Saying

    “ExtraHop Addy brings our environment into focus,” said David Johnson, Enterprise Systems Support Specialist with the State of Washington. “With this service, we’re alerted to issues we didn’t know we had, and it makes us much more proactive in resolving them before the effects are widespread. We now have the data we need to be smarter about how we operate.”

    “Addy builds on the expansive visibility already delivered by ExtraHop,” said a corporate IT infrastructure manager with a large e-commerce company. “Now, we not only have the data we need to take decisive action that keeps our services up and running, we also have proactive alerts that keep us ahead of potential issues. The fact that Addy learns from our input and the environment means that the alerting keeps getting better. It truly allows us to cut through the noise to focus on what’s critical.”

    What Analysts Are Saying

    “ESG research shows security and analytics as the top two priorities for technology buyers in 2017,” said Nik Rouda, Senior Analyst with ESG. “Leveraging the scale of resources of the cloud, machine learning is poised to become the next great change-agent for IT operations in these areas. ExtraHop’s approach, coupled with the size and richness of their data set, puts them at the forefront of this next evolution.”

    “To be truly effective, machine learning must take a realistic approach that combines analytics and automation with the ability to assimilate human expertise fluidly and in context—optimizing to unique IT and business environments,” said Dennis Drogseth, Vice President at Enterprise Management Associates. “ExtraHop is delivering on this promise now, leveraging their powerful data set, real-time analytics, and the scale and compute resources of the cloud to deliver intelligent insight for IT.”

    According to Gartner, “One of the consequences of these new digitalized business architectures is that it is virtually impossible to assess the global state of IT from a small number of strategically chosen locations. Instead, gather data from many points across the infrastructure and application stack. The quality of observation will grow exponentially with the number of points from which that observations are taken.”[1]

    In the same report, analysts Will Cappelli and Robert Naegle continue: “I&O leaders should lead their teams to shift to new approaches toward monitoring and IT operational management that uses big data and machine-learning-based analytics technologies.”[2]

    About ExtraHop

    ExtraHop makes data-driven IT a reality. By applying real-time analytics and cloud-based machine learning to all digital interactions, ExtraHop delivers instant and unbiased insights. IT leaders turn to ExtraHop first to help them make faster, better-informed decisions that improve performance, security, and digital experience. Just ask the hundreds of global ExtraHop customers, including Sony, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Adobe, and Google. To experience the power of ExtraHop, explore our interactive online demo. Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

     

    — Jules Louis

  • Demisto Raises $20M to Meet Growing Global Demand for Automated Incident Response and Security Orchestration

    CUPERTINO, Calif. — Feb. 9, 2017 — Demisto, Inc., an innovator in Security Operations technology, today announced that it has closed its $20 million Series B round of funding. As a part of this round, the company also announced the appointment of ClearSky Managing Director Jay Leek to its Board of Directors. Round participants also included Accel, Slack Fund and other strategic investors.

    The funds will be used to expand operations to accelerate new product innovation and customer rollouts, and ramp sales and marketing to meet growing global demand for incident response management, automation, and real-time collaboration across security teams. Today’s funding brings the company’s total funding to $26 million.

    “Demisto was built to make security analysts’ lives easier with its combined incident response case management and security orchestration platform, which is unrivaled in the industry,” said Slavik Markovich, CEO of Demisto. “This new funding is a testament to the tremendous and unbelievably fast growth we’ve already experienced, in less than a year since we first launched our product. We are also excited to add security visionary Jay Leek to our Board of Directors, and we will leverage his exceptional leadership and guidance as we grow our business.”

    According to a recent report published by MarketsandMarkets, the incident response market size is estimated to grow from USD $13.09 Billion in 2016 to USD $30.29 Billion by 2021, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18.3 percent. In 2016 Demisto saw rapid adoption of its incident response solution due to expanding market demand and a significant partner ecosystem which now includes more than 100 integration partners.

    “Demisto simplifies the way enterprises manage incident response with its automated and collaborative incident response platform that delivers unprecedented insight and resolution into complex threats,” said Jay Leek, managing director at ClearSky and former CISO of Blackstone. “I have been involved in this space for a long time, and I believe Demisto has the most comprehensive solution by combining automation and collaboration into a unified platform for security teams, and is positioned well to become a leader in the security industry.”

    Demisto also announced today general availability of Demisto Enterprise 2.0, making Demisto Enterprise the industry’s first comprehensive incident management platform to offer integrated threat intelligence. The new capabilities enable customers to integrate leading threat feeds with Demisto to manage indicators and automate threat hunting operations, saving time and significantly reducing the risk of exposure.

    “Demisto is uniquely positioned to be the first true security system of record for the actions taken by incident responders,” said Jake Flomenberg, Partner at Accel. “This new investment will help the company further accelerate its efforts to achieve this vision and increase the productivity of IR teams everywhere. We are excited to have Jay join us in this journey and look forward to exciting times ahead.”

    About Demisto
    Demisto helps Security Operations Centers increase efficiency, improve incident response times and processes. Demisto Enterprise combines security orchestration, collaboration and threat management to reduce manual work and provide decision support for SOC analysts. At the heart of Demisto’s technology is DBot, a security chatbot that is integrated with dozens of products and understands hundreds of security commands. Demisto is backed by Accel and other prominent investors and has offices in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv. For more information, visit www.demisto.com or email info@demisto.com.

     

    — Jules Louis

  • eInfochips Announces HawkDTM DevOps Services for Continuous Delivery in IoT and IIoT Solution Development

    San Jose (CA) – Feb 08, 2017:  eInfochips, a global pure-play product engineering services firm, announces HawkDTM DevOps services, as a part of intelligent automation, for companies looking to develop connected solutions with continuous delivery capabilities. The practice empowers companies in Home & Industrial Automation, Security & Surveillance, Networking, Telematics, and Connected healthcare industries to accelerate their solution and product development cycle, improve code quality, enable operational scalability, and deliver higher cost savings through reduced outages and release efforts.

    “Today, agility, cost efficiency, and quality play an important role in attaining and retaining the market leadership for companies developing connected solutions. For product and solution owners, it is no more about releasing features alone, but owning and improving operational metrics is of equal significance,” said Abhishek Binaykia, Associate Vice President of Marketing at eInfochips. “We are one of the pioneers in the industry to provide DevOps services for IoT product development. HawkD provides companies with a well-defined roadmap and best practices to enable full-scale process automation in their product lifecycle, thereby enabling the product companies to continually innovate, improvise, and scale faster in the market”

    DevOps for IoT [Video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAfZt2t4HqA

    In an IoT connected device environment, unlike IT, product owners will face challenges in updating multitudes of hardware and software deployments at numerous locations in real-time. To enable a truly DevOps practice in such an environment, multiple scrum feature owners from web, mobile, device firmware, and QA need to work in an agile manner, a scrum-of- scrum model, to deliver a product feature.

    HawkD key offerings:

    • DevOps Consulting: Assessment framework and process consulting
    • DevOps Implementation: Continuous integration, deployment, testing, monitoring
    • DevOps Toolchain: Evaluation and execution; Migration, customization and enhancement
    • CloudOps Managed Services: Infrastructure automation and monitoring dashboards

    To request an assessment for enabling DevOps in your organization, contact here.

    eInfochips has extensive experience in developing connected solutions for many Fortune 500 clients, spread across multiple domains. The company has in-depth technical expertise in many proprietary and open source DevOps tools, and had customized various toolchains in the past to address specific business needs of its clients. HawkD has helped Fortune 500 product & solution companies to reduce the delivery cost/time by greater than 60%, and thereby accelerate their prototype to product cycle.

    — Jules Louis

  • BlueData Brings DevOps Agility to Data Science Operations with Spark, R, and Python

    Santa Clara, Calif.—BlueData, provider of the leading Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) software platform, today announced the new winter release for the BlueData EPIC software platform.  This new release delivers several new enhancements for data science operations, bringing DevOps agility and collaboration to data science teams as well as support for new machine learning use cases.

    More organizations are now building data science teams and the role of the data scientist is the #1 job in the U.S. for the second year in a row.  Data scientists are highly skilled at developing advanced analytical models and prototypes; their data-driven innovations can be game-changing.  But the siloed efforts and custom-crafted prototypes of individual data scientists can be difficult to scale, reproduce, and share across multiple users.  What works for an ad-hoc model in development may not necessarily work in production; what works as a one-off prototype on a laptop might not work as a consistent and repeatable process in a distributed computing environment.

    Increasingly, data science is becoming a team sport – often involving multiple data scientists, data engineers, data analysts, and developers that have different skillsets and different specialized tools.  What’s needed is an approach that brings the agility, automation, and collaboration of DevOps to these data science and engineering teams.  They need to operationalize the data science lifecycle in a streamlined and repeatable way.  They require an agile and lean process that enables them to iterate quickly and fail fast.  They need the ability to easily share data, models and code in a secure distributed environment.  And they need the flexibility to use their own preferred tools and try out new technologies in the rapidly changing field of data science.

    The BlueData EPIC software platform delivers this agility and flexibility, providing an easy-to-use self-service interface that allows data science teams to quickly spin up Docker-based environments for their preferred tools – running on shared infrastructure either on-premises or in the public cloud, with secure access to common data (e.g. in an HDFS data lake or Amazon S3).  And the new winter release of the EPIC platform addresses many of the challenges outlined above.  Some of the highlights of this new release include:

    • Collaboration and productivity, with a choice of web-based notebooks: Provides the option for data science teams to use JupyterHub, RStudio Server, and/or Zeppelin notebooks.  Each of these notebooks are pre-configured and pre-tested as Docker images in the BlueData EPIC App Store and can be installed via automated one-click deployment.  BlueData EPIC ensures governance, security, and authentication while providing the ability for users to share their data, models, and code in a multi-tenant environment on common infrastructure.
    • Flexibility to support the full spectrum of data science tools: Data science environments in BlueData EPIC are pre-configured for R and Python support, with or without Spark.  This enables data science teams to use their preferred languages, packages, and tools – without the operational challenges of testing and validating configurations or version dependencies.  For example, data scientists can easily start with R standalone (e.g. RStudio, Shiny Server) and then later opt to use R with Spark (e.g. SparkR and sparklyr) for other use cases; the same applies to Python (i.e. with JupyterHub and PySpark).  Other tools can also be added to BlueData EPIC App Store, using the App Workbench to create new Docker-based images. 
    • Simplified job submission, either with a few mouse clicks or programmatically: Allows users to easily submit R, Python, Spark, Hadoop, or SQL jobs – for persistent or transient clusters – from either the BlueData EPIC Web-based UI or REST API.  This helps data science teams to quickly respond to dynamic business requirements by running a variety of jobs ranging from analytical SQL to Spark machine learning scripts against their data in a matter of a few clicks or with simple code.
    • Bootstrap and other action scripts to automate data science operations: Offers the ability to easily patch and update some or all of the nodes in a running environment with a single click.  Bootstrap action scripts within BlueData EPIC can be executed both during and after creating the environments – e.g. to install additional software or to change the configuration.  This helps to removes the operational overhead of setting up, configuring, and managing the end-to-end lifecycle of data science environments.
    • Support for machine learning and a wide range of other data science use cases: BlueData continues to add new Big Data frameworks and tools to its platform – including pre-integrated H2O as well as Spark MLlib and other machine learning tools.  With the pre-configured Docker image for H2O in the BlueData EPIC App Store, customers can now quickly deploy the H2O set of machine learning libraries – including H2O with R, H2O with Spark (i.e. “Sparkling Water”), as well as the H2O Flow user interface.

    Data science never really works right with a “one size fits all” cookie cutter solution.  With the BlueData EPIC platform, data science teams can analyze data using Scala, Python, R, or SQL; build models using R, Python, Spark MLlib, or H2O; and run and visualize their analysis using RStudio or JupyterHub or Zeppelin notebooks – all on the same Spark cluster, using shared data.  Data scientists and other users have the flexibility to take advantage of a wide variety of tools and algorithms to address an increasingly complex set of use cases.

    This new release builds upon BlueData’s continued product innovation over the past year.  Most recently, BlueData announced BlueData EPIC on AWS to provide ultimate flexibility and choice for Big Data deployments on the Amazon cloud, including the ability to tap into both Amazon S3 and on-premises storage.  BlueData provides the only Big-Data-as-a-Service solution that can be deployed either on-premises, in the public cloud, or in a hybrid architecture.

    “It’s time for enterprises to extend the benefits of DevOps to their data science and engineering teams, whether for real-time analytics and machine learning or other use cases,” said Kumar Sreekanti, co-founder and CEO at BlueData. “BlueData customers can bring this agility and speed to their data science operations, with the ability to create fully integrated data science environments in just a few mouse clicks – both on-premises and in the public cloud.”

    BlueData will be demonstrating this new functionality at the Spark Summit East event in Boston, February 8th and 9th, in booth K8. BlueData’s co-founder and chief architect, Thomas Phelan, will be presenting at Spark Summit on “Lessons Learned from Dockerizing Spark Workloads” on Wednesday February 8th at 12:20pm.

    — Jules Louis

  • Puppet Appoints Chief Product Officer and VP of Customer Success

    PORTLAND, OR – February 7, 2017 – Puppet, the standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us, today announced the appointment of Omri Gazitt as chief product officer and Sandra Hamilton as vice president of customer success. Omri comes to Puppet from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), where he was vice president and general manager of its cloud native platform business unit. As chief product officer at Puppet, Omri will oversee engineering, product management, next-generation technology and evangelism. Sandra joins from EMC, where she served as vice president of global services. She was instrumental in establishing the company’s consulting business and in helping it grow to more than $250 million in worldwide revenue. As vice president of customer success, Sandra will expand the global services practice, advance the customer vision and elevate customer relationships.

    “To sustain incredible innovations and outstanding customer experiences, we hire truly exceptional people to fill every position,” said Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO of Puppet. “Software is the heart of every business and Puppet’s vision is to provide cutting-edge products and services that enable global organizations to automate software delivery, support DevOps and drive digital transformation. Omri and Sandra will help accelerate this vision and our products and services roadmap.”

    Omri Gazitt

    Omri has more than 25 years of experience in roles spanning engineering, product and business management. Most recently, he was the vice president and general manager for the HPE Cloud Native Platform business unit, where he was responsible for all aspects of the business. Omri joined HPE as the vice president of engineering for the Helion Development Platform product, which he defined and launched. He was then promoted to vice president of products, where he led cloud strategy, product management, UX and security functions for the entire Helion portfolio, including HPE’s private, managed and public cloud solutions. Additionally, he oversaw HPE’s involvement in the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry open source projects and served as board director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation in 2016.

    “We’re in the midst of a sea change as enterprises deploy new workloads into public clouds such as AWS, Azure and the Google Cloud Platform,” said Gazitt. “It’s a great honor to be joining Puppet, an iconic company in our industry which has played an essential role in helping customers manage through the complexity of running ever-larger and more heterogeneous IT footprints. As our customers adopt DevOps practices and increase their agility, Puppet has an excellent opportunity to be their trusted partner on that journey.”

    Sandra Hamilton

    Sandra brings more than 25 years of experience to Puppet. She has a record of leading global organizations through successful business transformations in a range of industries, including finance, deal management, consulting and technology. In her previous role as vice president of global services at EMC, Sandra developed and supported EMC Global Services’ go-to-market strategy for its broad portfolio of professional services.

    “I’m very passionate about the total customer experience,” explains Hamilton. “My entire career has been about the customer, in one way or another. Even in the age of technology, I recognize the value of personally engaging with them. At Puppet, I’m looking forward to elevating the customer connection even further.”

    Promotions

    Puppet also today announced that Katie Abbott has been promoted to vice president of legal affairs and Terry Wrightson to vice president of Americas.

    Katie Abbott

    Katie has been with the company since 2014. In her new role, she will assume greater responsibility for legal matters, including guidance in the dynamic landscape of licensing, data privacy and open source software as Puppet continues its global expansion.

    Terry Wrightson

    Terry joined Puppet in 2015 after a lengthy career in high-technology sales, including roles with Quest Software, EMC, VMware and HP. In his time with Puppet, Terry has led the Western Field & Enterprise team and successfully executed business objectives. In Terry’s new role as vice president of Americas, he will be responsible for managing all aspects of the Puppet Enterprise business.

    New hires and promotions are taking place during a period of continued growth:

    • More than 35,000 companies around the world, including 75 percent of the Fortune 100, now use Puppet.

    • Strong growth in the U.S. accounted for 78 percent of bookings in Q4.

    • Strong growth in EMEA accounted for 18 percent of bookings in Q4.

    • More than 500 people work for Puppet today.

    Additional resources

    — Jules Louis