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Tag: partnership

  • SAP Aligns With Tricentis on Continuous Testing

    SAP Aligns With Tricentis on Continuous Testing

    Tricentis this week announced an alliance with SAP under which a continuous testing platform that employs machine learning algorithms is being incorporated into the SAP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) portfolio.

    Jonathan Boswell, director of strategic content for SAP and packaged applications for Tricentis, said via this initiative SAP customers will be able to take advantage of a testing platform infused with machine learning algorithms to accelerate the rate at which they upgrade to the latest editions of SAP applications.

    Many of SAP’s customers still run older versions of its software, much of which has been customized. Those customizations make it difficult to migrate to the latest version of SAP applications because in many cases SAP has extended the range of functions provided with SAP applications, thereby eliminating the need for those customizations.

    The Tricentis tools enables IT teams to map existing custom functions to the standard capabilities that SAP provides now under a so-called Model Company initiative. Tricentis identifies the aspects of an upgrade that are likely to have the most risk to the business and surfaces issues involving integrations between SAP and third-party applications. Tricentis automates 90% of tests to help ensure the entire chain is tested, in addition to employing load testing to optimize SAP application user experience, added Boswell.

    While many organizations employ SAP applications extensively, many of them are struggling with upgrades. In an ideal world, more organizations would take advantage of the latest packaged SAP application features to drive digital business transformation initiatives. Right now, however, it can take organizations months to perform an impact analysis on the SAP upgrade process, he said.

    Tricentis shortens that time by employing machine learning algorithms to discover the difference between two application environments versus relying on legacy approaches based on testing scripts, said Boswell.

    Ultimately, he noted, the goal is to enable more organizations to focus more on business processes rather than application quality assurance.

    It’s not clear to what degree IT organizations will continue to customize SAP applications. SAP now provides a separate cloud platform that it encourages organizations to employ to build custom applications that extend SAP applications without ever having to touch SAP application code. Getting SAP customers to make that transition has become much more of a journey for many customers than SAP originally anticipated. However, as best DevOps practices continue to be adopted by SAP, the rate at which custom functions are built should accelerate. The challenge is creating and deploying those customizations in a way that doesn’t impede a SAP packaged application update cycle that happens every quarter.

    Regardless of the path forward, machine learning algorithms and other forms of AI are positioned to play a major role in application testing. They may never replace the need for human testers, but the days when business users needed to be recruited to help test every low-level function in an application may finally be coming to a merciful end.

  • Tenable Allies With Datadog to Drive DevSecOps

    Tenable Allies With Datadog to Drive DevSecOps

    Datadog and Tenable have teamed up to enable organizations to adopt best DevSecOps processes.

    Tenable CTO Renaud Deraison said his company is making the cybersecurity data it gathers via its Nessus vulnerability scanning software available to the monitoring and analytics service provided by Datadog. The goal is to make it easier for DevOps teams to discover and address cybersecurity issues before an application is deployed in a production environment, he said.

    Tenable has more than 30,000 customers, according to the company. Obviously, not all of them have embraced DevOps. However, unless DevOps teams can find a way to incorporate cybersecurity data, it won’t be practical for organizations to define a set of best DevSecOps practices. Even with that data available, Deraison said he expects it may be as long as five years before DevSecOps becomes broadly adopted. Many organizations are going to find a way to make cybersecurity teams part of the application development process. The challenge, of course, is finding a way to achieve that goal without unduly slowing down the application development process. In fact, Deraison said that despite all the hype surrounding DevSecOps at the moment, there still isn’t enough focus on actual workflows.

    Less clear is whether security will become a distinct functional test within a DevOps process or simply be incorporated into an existing quality assurance process. Deraison noted that cybersecurity and quality assurance are really two sides of the same coin.

    In the meantime, Tenable doesn’t have any plans to integrate with any other monitoring tool. The company chose to ally with Datadog because it makes available a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that are well-defined, he said.

    DevOps teams going forward should expect to see a raft of integrations between providers of cybersecurity tools and various monitoring platforms. That data needs to be made available both when an application is being developed as well as after it has been deployed in a production environment to help developers prioritize bug fixes. Not all vulnerabilities are equal in severity, so it becomes important for DevOps teams to understand which are critical flaws that need to be addressed immediately versus something that can be addressed later in the application development cycle.

    Naturally, the biggest challenge most organizations will face as they move to embrace DevSecOps is melding two very distinct cultures. In some cases, it may prove easier to teach developers the fundamentals of cybersecurity than it will be to teach cybersecurity how to participate in, for example, a sprint. There may not even be enough cybersecurity professionals available to participate in the application development process, given the current chronic shortage of staff. There are already millions of unfilled cybersecurity jobs.

    Precisely what role artificial intelligence (AI) might play in accelerating adoption of DevSecOps has yet to be determined. However, given the chronic shortage of cybersecurity expertise, it’s apparent more organizations are going to have to rely on AI frameworks embedded in monitoring platforms to analyze massive amounts of data in a way that surfaces actionable insights before applications can truly become more secure.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Deeper Technical Information with SweetCode and Fixate

    Deeper Technical Information with SweetCode and Fixate

    I know many of you go right to the article you want to read on devopsy.kinsta.cloud without ever visiting the front page. But if you go to the home page and look down in the bottom right corner of the page, you will see a link to Sweetcode.io. Sweetcode is a site run by Chris Riley and the folks over at Fixate.io, offering great deep, technical articles on all things DevOps and more. Check it out.

    More importantly, it is the visual evidence of a deeper strategic partnership that we here at MediaOps have formed with Fixate. I have known Chris Riley, the founder of Fixate, for about five years now. Chris has done a great job of developing a deep bench of technical writers who can really deliver the technical viewpoint without the marketing fluff. I know this is exactly the kind of content our audience loves. Not just our reading audience, either—our sponsors are also challenged to create good technical articles for their audiences. Now, we can deliver this either to our sponsors or on behalf of sponsors.

    On top of this, we are also going to add Chris’s technical chops and talent to our roster. You will see him hosting webinars, doing interviews at conferences for Digital Anarchist and otherwise engaged with our audience. Chris brings a practitioner/analyst viewpoint to his work that I think our audience will appreciate.

    I should emphasize this is not an announcement of an acquisition or merger with Fixate. Fixate will continue to operate as an independent company (which it is). We will just be working really closely with Chris and team there to help bring you deep technical articles and other forms of content that we believe you will find interesting. It is all part of our plan to keep creating and distributing the kind of material that our audience is looking for.

    So, go check out Sweetcode. We also will be promoting Sweetcode through our social media and newsletter channels. Stay tuned as we turn up the gas, and we hope you enjoy.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Chef Boards the DevOps Express with CloudBees, Others

    Chef Boards the DevOps Express with CloudBees, Others

    You often may have more questions than answers as you progress along your DevOps journey. Which tools should I choose? Do these tools work well together? What have other people done in my situation? You’re often left Googling to find the right integrations and piece together an architectural solution.

    Today, I’m excited to announce that Chef is joining DevOps Express, a new industry initiative comprised of 14 leading DevOps vendors and service providers. Led by CloudBees and Sonatype, and including everyone from Atlassian to GitHub, this initiative is focused on creating solutions that will help you adopt DevOps practices. Specifically, by defining reference architectures and highlighting best practices, supported integrations and solutions, we believe that DevOps Express will simplify and accelerate DevOps adoption for organizations of all kinds.

    DevOps Express uses popular technologies spanning multiple solution components to provide a framework for building reference architectures that are better integrated and supported. Creating reliable and actionable reference architectures for organizations will ease DevOps adoption and minimize risk for organizations.

    DevOps is collaborative by its very nature—it’s all about bringing teams together. This includes cultural transformation, breaking down silos between disparate teams and working together around the common goal of adding value for customers. These principles are just as true for us, the vendors providing tools to help you on your DevOps journey. We, too, must break down silos and work together to provide more value for you, our common customer. I’m looking forward to what we’ll build.

    About the Author / James Casey

    james_caseyJames Casey is vice president of Partner Integration at Chef. His career spans more than 15 years in companies ranging from mobile and finance startups to CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web. He specializes in building tools for operating large computing infrastructures. He previously created monitoring tools at CERN for the Large Hadron Collider.

  • Polarion Software and OpenMake Deliver a New Standard in DevOps

    New Partnership Allows Companies to Bring Software and IT Alignment to the Enterprise

    Stuttgart, GERMANY/San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) February 18, 2014: Polarion Software, creator of the world’s fastest enterprise scale web-based Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution, and OpenMake, a global leader in delivering Dynamic DevOps to the enterprise, announced that they will be working together to align software development with the operational needs of the enterprise.

    Said Stephen King, CEO, OpenMake Software, “Large enterprises are craving a standard DevOps solution that goes beyond what a single development team can download and script from the Open Source community. We are excited to work closely with Polarion to deliver a DevOps solution that meets this new standard – one that is model-driven, cross platform and transparent. We’re looking forward to helping enterprises achieve a quick and easy turnover between their developers and operations team.”

    Said Stefano Rizzo, SVP of strategy and business development, “More and more Polarion customers are realizing the power of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) as a powerful tool for Development teams and are quickly adopting this technology as a crucial part of their DevOps Ecosystem. Working together, both OpenMake and Polarion will help organizations work with an even greater sense of urgency to get their products to market on time.”

    “In partnering with OpenMake Software, Polarion will offer enhanced capabilities that take advantage of OpenMake’s continuous build through deploy platform,” added Rizzo.

    Polarion Software develops and markets fully integrated, web-based solutions for requirements management, test management/Quality Assurance (QA), and ALM — providing full traceability and transparency throughout the product lifecycle. Polarion’s browser-based solutions improve the efficiency of product development and help organizations identify and mitigate risks, improve quality and achieve compliance with safety, risk and quality standards in record time.

    OpenMake® Software delivers a dynamic solution for streamlining, accelerating, and standardizing build to deploy activities that can flex to meet the ever increasing operational demands of an organization. The company’s solutions automate tasks for over 400 companies worldwide.

    About Polarion Software
    Polarion Software’s success is best described by the hundreds of Global 1000 companies and over one million users who rely daily on Polarion’s Requirements Management, Quality Assurance, and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions. Polarion is a thriving international company with offices across Europe and North America, and a wide ecosystem of partners world-wide. For more information, visit http://www.polarion.com

    About OpenMake
    OpenMake Software has been the authority on the build to release process since 1995, providing Global 2000 companies with solid solutions for managing the enterprise development to operations hand-off challenge. Our experience has taught us that streamlining the enterprise build to deploy process cannot be done by each team cobbling together static scripts around open source tools. Instead we offer a dynamic DevOps solution that reduces cost through a reusable model-driven design that minimizes errors, achieves repeatability and openly communicates process through shared, community developed knowledge. For more information visithttp://www.openmakesoftware.com