staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Veronica Haggar

  • Mediafly Launches Broadcaster to Elevate Visual Storytelling in Virtual Meetings

    New interactive content feature transforms buyer experiences in challenging selling environment

    Chicago, IL, June 17, 2021 — Mediafly, a leading sales enablement technology provider dedicated to interactive presentations, content management and value-based selling experiences, announced today Broadcaster, a new feature to expand visual and immersive presentation capabilities. Broadcaster further enhances revenue teams’ ability to share high-quality, interactive content during virtual meetings, delivering an inspiring content engagement experience that drives improved sales results.

    According to Forrester, 70% of companies will pivot to a hybrid work model post-pandemic. As revenue teams adjust to in-person and remote interactions, capturing and keeping buyers’ attention is increasingly difficult. More than ever, businesses need content that is not only personalized but delivered in a high-quality format. However, current video conference technology focuses only on static documents and cameras, failing to support the animated, interactive content formats required to engage buyers in today’s digital selling environment.

    “As revenue teams shift to engaging buyers in hybrid settings, delivering content that tells dynamic stories about buyers’ unique business problems has never been more important,” said Lou Jacob, senior vice president of media & entertainment at Mediafly. “Broadcaster allows revenue teams to share a more interactive, differentiated experience, ‘wowing’ buyers with content that resonates and inspires. By marrying these visual storytelling capabilities with Mediafly’s sales enablement technology, revenue teams are better equipped to bridge the engagement gap and drive deal outcomes.”

    Using Broadcaster, Mediafly customers can seamlessly and reliably share highly interactive content formats such as videos and presentations during virtual meetings. By simply sharing a link with participants during live interactions, Broadcaster immerses buyers in a dynamic, interactive story where the rep leading the meeting securely controls the playback of videos and flow of content.

    When creating Broadcaster, Mediafly worked closely with a Fortune 500 media and entertainment customer to help it successfully screen movies and TV shows. With industries shifting to digital at the outset of COVID-19, the company needed a new solution to virtually present “sizzle reels,” trailers and full-length TV shows and movies, while maintaining the same immersive experience as the movie theater. Mediafly’s customer utilized Broadcaster to deliver its high-quality promotional videos at exclusive events including press and private screenings. Outside the media and entertainment industry, companies use Broadcaster to elevate sales conversations with high-frame-rate presentations and share training materials and videos in a highly curated and engaging way.

    “Mediafly’s rapid growth is fueled by a commitment to our customers, harnessing their voice to fuel the innovation of our platform,” said Andrew Miehl, chief customer officer at Mediafly. “Listening to their unique remote selling needs throughout the pandemic, we developed Broadcaster to further enhance the content engagement experience, giving customers the ability to deliver high-quality video and presentation content without the headaches of slow and spotty playback accompanying traditional screen sharing.”

    For more information on Broadcaster and Mediafly’s visual storytelling capabilities, visit www.mediafly.com.

    About Mediafly
    Mediafly is a leading sales enablement and content management technology platform that creates interactive, value-based selling experiences. By using Mediafly’s technology, marketing and sales teams at companies including PepsiCo, Disney, GE Healthcare, Sealed Air, are able to deliver custom, interactive and dynamic sales presentations quickly and efficiently, engaging customers with insights that are relevant to them. Mediafly’s Evolved Selling™ solution enables sellers to be more flexible, insightful and interactive in their sales interactions, resulting in increased sales and stronger customer relationships. Mediafly has been named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies for seven years consecutively in addition to being named Crain’s ‘Best Places to Work’ for four years consecutively. Visit Mediafly.com or follow @Mediafly for more information.

  • MediaOps Wins Two Gold Hermes Creative Awards for Video and Podcast

    MediaOps Wins Two Gold Hermes Creative Awards for Video and Podcast

    We are thrilled to announce that MediaOps is the recipient of two Hermes Creative Awards. TechStrong TV won the Gold Award in the video/informational category and DevOps Chats won the Gold Award for audio/podcast series.

    The Hermes Creative Awards is an international competition for creative professionals involved in the concept, writing and design of traditional and emerging media. Hermes Creative Awards recognize outstanding work in the industry while promoting the philanthropic nature of marketing and communication professionals. Hermes Creative Awards are administered by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals (AMCP). Judges are industry professionals who look for companies and individuals whose talent exceeds a high standard of excellence and whose work serves as a benchmark for the industry.

    Our main goal here at MediaOps is to create and produce high-quality, educational and informational content to our audience, covering IT industries and practices that are re-shaping the world of technology, including DevOps, cloud-native, cybersecurity and digital transformation. These awards are a testimony to all the hard work and dedication that goes into producing these programs. We are proud of our MediaOps team and honored to receive recognition for our work.

    The two MediaOps broadcast programs recognized by the AMCP are:

    • TechStrong TV: Gold Award winner in the video/informational category. TechStrong TV is a streamed broadcast featuring fresh video news and information three days a week and on-demand content from conferences and shows two days a week on the Digital Anarchist network. TechStrong TV features interviews with industry thought leaders, covering the latest news on DevOps, cybersecurity, cloud native and digital transformation.
    • DevOps Chats: Gold Award winner in the audio/podcast series category. DevOps Chats is a “fireside chat” podcast featuring staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud and Security Boulevard Editor-in-Chief, Alan Shimel, discussing relevant topics with luminaries and thought leaders in the DevOps and security industries.

    The MediaOps team would like to thank the Hermes Creative Awards for recognizing the content we publish. Most of all, we would like to thank you, our audience, for all the support you have given us throughout the years.

    TechStrong TV is available on the web at Techstrong.tv, with on-demand segments available on DigitalAnarchist.com and the MediaOps community sites (staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Security Boulevard, Container Journal). TechStrong TV is also available on LinkedIn Live (staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud page), Facebook Live (staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud page), YouTube (DevOps TV channel), on the staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud mobile app for iOS and Android, and on TV via staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud app for OTT channels on Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV. 

    Episodes are available after broadcast on-demand at Digital Anarchist, the next-gen streaming service for tech communities, which offers in-depth coverage on DevOps, cybersecurity, cloud-native and digital transformation, adding high-quality content on a regular basis. DevOps Chats are published on SoundCloud and iTunes, and are also available on Digital Anarchist.

  • Honeycomb Releases the 2021 Observability Maturity Community Research Findings

    Latest research reveals organizations that embrace observability experience higher productivity, code quality, end-user satisfaction, and software developer retention 

    San Francisco, CA, June 16, 2021 – Honeycomb, which provides industry-leading observability software for understanding, troubleshooting, and optimizing cloud-native distributed systems, today released its annual research findings on the maturity of the observability market. The 2021 survey found that 61% of respondents reported that their teams are practicing observability, an 8% increase from 2020, signaling that overall adoption is on the rise. However, the majority of respondents indicated their teams are at the earliest stages of observability maturity.

    With over 400 responses from across multiple industries and organization sizes, the report examines the challenges teams face and the practices they are implementing as they progress on their observability journey to achieve production excellence.

    Key findings include: 

    • Observability is gaining traction. Sixty-one percent of respondents reported that their teams are currently practicing observability, an increase of 8% from last year. That increase is sharply reflected across individual teams (up 7%) as opposed to entire organizations (up only 1%).
    • Teams on the higher end of the maturity spectrum realize more benefits than their less-mature counterparts. Teams that are mature in their observability practice realize even more impactful business outcomes, including deploying more frequently, being able to find bugs more quickly before and after pushing to production, and reduced burnout.
    • More-mature teams are also 3X more likely to deliver higher customer satisfaction. Teams that have achieved Intermediate or Advanced-level maturity reported their end-user customers are “Always Satisfied” with their service quality and capability at a rate of three times more than teams that do not practice observability.
    • Lack of implementation skills is a disproportionate barrier for observability adoption. While interest in observability has gained significant momentum, organizations at the earliest stages of observability maturity report lack of implementation skills as the second-largest hurdle to observability adoption, indicating a need for more training options. All respondents indicated their primary hurdle was competing with other initiatives.

    Now in its second year, the 2021 Observability Maturity Community Research Findings is becoming a benchmark that organizations can use to measure their own journey to observability and related practices against that of the wider business community. The maturity model outlines a progression of five distinct stages ranging from “Planning” or “Novice” (with limited observability capability and processes) to “Advanced” (with comprehensive processes). The highlights of this year’s report indicate that:

    • 10% of those surveyed reported a combination of practices and tooling that reflect a highly observable system in the “Advanced” and “Intermediate” groups. These two groups highly prioritize observability: 50% practice observability across the organization and 43% on a team-by-team basis. Respondents also reported high public cloud use, and most work at large enterprises (57%) and in the tech industry (46%).
    • 37% of survey respondents fall into the “Novice” group.  This group is more likely to self-report that they are practicing observability because they are using tools like logs, metrics, and traces. However, they also do not report having the key capabilities associated with practicing observability, such as having a comprehensive understanding of their systems, which suggests that respondents in this group may be focusing on the data needed for observability but not yet fully adopting the tools or practices of observability.
    • One in four teams are at the “Planning” stage or the very beginning of their observability journey and are starting to practice on a team-by-team basis. In this group, approximately one in five respondents do not currently practice or use observability tooling but have plans to do so within the next year.

    “This year, we’re seeing that teams focused on building up their observability capabilities are identifying problems faster and producing better business outcomes,” said Christine Yen, CEO and co-founder of Honeycomb. “Our observability maturity model can be used as a roadmap for anyone to see how organizations across the industry are approaching a fundamentally new way of understanding their production services. Teams can understand what’s working, what’s not, and how early investments in observability adoption are creating meaningful business impacts, so that they can achieve similar results.“

    Additional Resources

    On Tuesday, June 29, at 12 p.m. ET / 9 a.m. PT, join our webinar, “The State of Observability 2021: Mature Teams Ship Better Code Faster and You Can, Too,” to discuss the findings of this report and hear actionable insights that organizations can use to start or improve their observability approach. Reserve your seat by registering for the webinar.

    To receive a copy of the report, please visit this page.

    The 2021 Observability Maturity Community Research Findings study was conducted by ClearPath Strategies, an independent strategic consulting and public opinion research firm.

    About Honeycomb

    Honeycomb provides observability for modern development teams to learn, debug, and improve their production systems efficiently so that business-critical apps perform with minimal disruption to users. Honeycomb’s customers rely on the product for fast incident response, system optimization, and delivering pain-free releases across the software engineering cycle that translates to happy devs and happy customers. Learn more at www.honeycomb.io and follow us on Twitter.

  • Metallic Receives FedRAMP High Ready Status for BaaS Portfolio

    Introduces Metallic Government Cloud solutions, hosted on Microsoft Azure Government Cloud; Currently the Only SaaS Data Protection Solution to Achieve FedRAMP High Ready Status 

    TINTON FALLS, NJ, June 16, 2021 – Commvault (NASDAQ: CVLT), a recognized global enterprise leader in Intelligent Data Services across on-premises, cloud and SaaS environments, today announced its new Metallic Government Cloud offerings along with achievement of “High Ready” status for its Metallic Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) portfolio and Metallic Cloud Storage Service (MCSS) from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) – making Metallic the only comprehensive SaaS data protection solution to currently meet the highest confidentiality, integrity, and availability standards recognized by the U.S. government. This comes on the heels of Metallic recently receiving the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) compliance readiness attestation, a testament to its hardened security posture across the full portfolio of SaaS offerings.

    In addition, Metallic is launching its first FedRAMP High Ready offering, Metallic™ Office 365 Backup Government Cloud, in support of federal, state, and local agencies running Office 365 GCC High environments.

    FedRAMP is designed to provide a standardized approach to security authorizations for Cloud Service Offerings that government agencies and cloud service providers can adhere to, ensuring government data would be protected in the public cloud. Upon completing the rigorous and multi-faceted FedRAMP review process, cloud vendors are awarded a protection level – High, Moderate, or Low. High certification is the most stringent with 421 controls for security and risk management to prevent data loss and unauthorized access to information that could result in severe or catastrophic adverse effects on an agency, its assets, finances, operations, or individuals.

    As the only vendor to currently have FedRAMP High Ready status for its SaaS-delivered data protection technology, Commvault is able to provide government agencies and private sector organizations working with the U.S. government a single solution, which offers effective, scalable, easy to use, and extended SaaS data protection that meets rigorous security controls and monitoring standards set forth by FedRAMP across all impact levels; this also includes the security requirements pertaining to the FBI’s CJIS.

    “The vast level of secure data managed by government and related entities that process sensitive data, need the gold standard in data protection – a solution that meets the most stringent FedRAMP High security controls,” said David Ngo, Chief Technology Officer, Metallic. “With our Metallic BaaS portfolio, including Metallic Cloud Storage Service, we are bridging the gap in the government and intelligence communities, meeting their needs head-on. Built on 20+ years of trusted technology, our data protection solutions provide a scalable, seamless option that meets the highest levels of security standards and offers Federal, State, and Local governments, something no other SaaS data protection vendor can – true peace of mind.”

    Commvault’s recently expanded Metallic SaaS portfolio offers data management for critical SaaS and hybrid cloud applications, including the addition of Metallic Backup for Microsoft Dynamics 365. Following the launch of Metallic Office 365 Backup Government Cloud, additional workloads protected with FedRAMP High Ready status are expected to be available in the coming quarter.

    About Commvault

    Commvault liberates business and IT professionals to do amazing things with their data by ensuring the fundamental integrity of their business. Its industry-leading Intelligent Data Services platform empowers these professionals to store, protect, optimize, and use their data, wherever it lives. Delivering the ultimate in simplicity and flexibility to customers, its Intelligent Data Services platform is available as a software subscription; integrated appliance; partner-managed, and software-as-a-service—a critical differentiator in the market. For 25 years, more than 100,000 organizations have relied on Commvault, and today, every quarter, Metallic is doubling the number of customers who leverage it to modernize their environments as they look to SaaS for the future. Driven by its values—Connect, Inspire, Care, and Deliver—Commvault (NASDAQ: CVLT) employs more than 2,700 highly-skilled individuals around the world. Visit Commvault.com or follow us at @Commvault.

    About Metallic

    Metallic™, a Commvault venture, was established to bring next-generation SaaS data protection to market, delivering Commvault’s powerful core technology simply through the cloud. Together with its partners, Metallic offers a growing portfolio of SaaS backup and recovery solutions to help today’s companies keep their data protected, compliant, and safe from deletion, corruption, and attack. Metallic operates as a division of Commvault and can be found at http://www.metallic.io.

  • Sonrai Security Recognized in Gartner 2021 Cool Vendors in Cloud Security Posture Management

    Public Cloud Security Innovator Also Earns Trio of Industry Awards.

    New York, NY, June 16, 2021 – Public cloud security and governance leader Sonrai Security today announced it has been recognized in Gartner 2021 Cool Vendors in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) report. Gartner Cool Vendor research is “designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services.”

    This recognition underscores Sonrai Security’s continued innovation and rapid growth, including significant new functionality designed to automate the prevention of data breaches in public cloud deployments for its Sonrai Dig platform that ensures critical corporate data is secure wherever it resides in cloud environments.

    According to the Gartner report, “Complexity and scale in modern infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) workloads continue to grow exponentially. Multicloud, containerized and serverless applications combine to form dynamic, unpredictable interactions that are increasingly difficult to secure without advanced techniques. The Gartner Forecast Analysis: Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, Worldwide indicates that the CWPP market is expected to grow to $2.44 billion by 2023, with compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.8%.”

    In addition, Gartner recommends that “security and risk management leaders managing cloud infrastructure security should invest in innovative CSPM tools to address gaps in strategic tooling by continually evaluating current capabilities against known use cases and assessing your ability to protect serverless and container-based workloads from evolving threats.”

    Sonrai Dig, an enterprise security platform for AWS, Azure and GCP, extends CSPM with identity and data security for public clouds to also address cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), data classification and configuration management. This enables enterprise companies to enforce CSPM, achieve and maintain least privilege, enforce separation of duties, and lock down critical data. The Sonrai Dig platform is built on a sophisticated graph that identifies and monitors every possible relationship between identities and data that exists inside an organization’s public cloud. Dig’s Governance Automation Engine automates workflow, remediation, and prevention capabilities across cloud and security teams to ensure end-to-end security.

    “Sonrai Security has seen major growth over the past year – and we believe being named a Cool Vendor by Gartner is a strong validation for our unique capabilities and approach to securing the public cloud,” said Brendan Hannigan, CEO and co-founder of Sonrai Security. “We are continuing to innovate and move our customers forward with our vision of cloud security that centers on identities as the new perimeter. ”

    In related news, Sonrai continues to add to its credentials. The company recently received the following industry awards: American Stevies®/Silver Stevie® for Healthcare Technology Solution; TMC Cloud Computing Product of the Year Award; Cyber Defense Magazine’s Global InfoSec Awards for Next-Gen in Cloud Security, and Next-Gen in Identity Management.

    Supporting Resources

    *Gartner “Cool Vendors in Cloud Security Posture Management,” Tom Croll, Neil MacDonald, Mark Wah, Prateek Bhajanka, 9 June 2021

    Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

    About Sonrai Security
    Sonrai Security delivers an enterprise security platform for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes. The Sonrai Dig platform is built on a sophisticated graph that identifies and monitors every possible relationship between identities and data that exists inside an organization’s public cloud. Dig’s Governance Automation Engine automates workflow, remediation, and prevention capabilities across cloud and security teams to ensure end-to-end security. The company has offices in New York and New Brunswick, Canada and is backed by Menlo Ventures, Polaris Partners and Ten Eleven Ventures. For more information, visit https://sonraisecurity.com.

  • Coalition Expands its C-Suite with First Chief Marketing Officer Hire

    Dylan Steele, experienced VP from Splunk and Salesforce, joins Coalition to drive global marketing strategy

    San Francisco, CA, June 16, 2021 — Coalition, the leading cyber insurance and security provider, today announced it has appointed Dylan Steele as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Steele is an accomplished marketing executive with experience leading marketing efforts for high-growth technology companies, including Salesforce and Splunk. As CMO, he will oversee global marketing strategy as Coalition expands its reach and range of offerings to new markets.

    While at Splunk, Steele led corporate marketing efforts to create the “Data-to-Everything Platform” category, extending the reach and awareness of Splunk to a broader audience of technology executives and supporting the transition to a cloud-based software delivery model. He also led a technology transformation in the Splunk user community, engaging tens of thousands of IT and security experts across a global presence of digital tools and in-person user groups.

    Steele also brings a wealth of experience from Salesforce, where he helped to grow the Platform business to nearly $2 billion in various product marketing and marketing roles. His primary focus included growing the mid-market and enterprise business for products that included the Lightning Platform, Heroku platform-as-a-service, integration, security and IoT offerings.

    “Coalition has such an incredible opportunity to help organizations become more resilient in the face of increasing cyber risks and to create an entirely new category of insurance for the digital economy,” said Dylan Steele. “Chasing technology threats with even more technology can create a vicious cycle and I believe Coalition has a novel approach to managing risk and providing companies of all sizes with simple, actionable steps to protect themselves as they aim to get the best out of new technologies.”

    Joshua Motta, Coalition co-founder and CEO said, “Our vision of providing the first holistic solution to cyber risk is massive, and we need exceptional talent to achieve this. We’ve experienced rapid growth into new markets over the past year, and Dylan’s demonstrated history of expanding organizations’ global footprints is exactly what we need as we continue to build the cyber insurance company of the future. We are thrilled to announce this new addition to our team.”

    Coalition’s recent growth includes a $175M Series D funding round in March, valuing the company at $1.8 billion. The company was also recently included in Forbes’ 2021 Fintech 50, a list that recognizes the most innovative fintech companies, as well as Inc. Magazine’s 2021 Best Workplaces. Coalition continues to aggressively hire and is currently recruiting for numerous roles across marketing, engineering, security, business development and more.

    To learn more about Coalition, visit https://www.coalitioninc.com/.

    About Coalition

    Coalition is the leading provider of cyber insurance and security, combining comprehensive insurance and proactive cybersecurity tools to help businesses manage and mitigate cyber risk. Backed by leading global insurers Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, Arch Insurance, Lloyd’s of London, and Argo Group, Coalition provides companies with up to USD $15 million of cyber and technology insurance coverage in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as CAD $20M of coverage across 9 provinces and 3 territories in Canada. Coalition’s cyber risk management platform provides automated security alerts, threat intelligence, expert guidance, and cybersecurity tools to help businesses remain resilient in the face of cyber attacks. Headquartered in San Francisco, Coalition’s team is global with employees based across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Portugal.

  • Imply Closes $70 Million Series C at $700M Valuation to Extend Leadership as Foundational Platform for Analytics-in-Motion

    Significant customer momentum underscores movement away from expensive, slow and static analytics solutions towards highly-scalable, cost-effective, and interactive analytics solutions.

    Burlingame, CA, June 16, 2021 — Imply, the pioneer of Analytics-in-Motion, and founded by the original creators of Apache Druid, today announced the closing of a $70 million Series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Tiger Global Management, bringing total funding to over $116 million. Existing investors A16Z, Khosla Ventures and Geodesic Capital also participated in this round. This additional funding follows a banner year for Imply, growing market adoption of both Imply and open source Apache Druid. Imply has now surpassed 100 enterprise and digital-native customers, using Imply as the engine for analytics-powered applications that they build, and/or as a complete solution to directly solve internal BI and operational analytics use cases. The additional funding will extend Imply’s market leadership in the rapidly growing area of Analytics-in-Motion.

    “The world of analytics is being upended, as it is now a competitive disadvantage to wait hours or days to iterate on insights, to make decisions based on stale data, or to leverage solutions that either crumble or cost a fortune at scale,” said Elliott Robinson, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “Every day, more and more established enterprises and digital natives realize the power of Analytics-in-Motion, and Imply is far ahead in this race to redefine analytics across the enterprise, with numerous marquee customers and demonstrated customer success worldwide.”

    Analytics-in-Motion is the new requirement for digital transformation, and has emerged due to the demands of modern business and the limitations of existing analytics solutions to meet these demands. Imply’s unique technology removes the handcuffs to effective analytics by delivering all four attributes organizations require for effective analytics:

    1. Interactive queries: questions do not need to be predetermined and organizations get an engine and an app/UI, not only a database; queries can be created on-the-fly, answers are provided immediately, and insights are generated at the speed of thought (sub-second OLAP queries, self-service data analytics, point-and-explore integrated UI)
    2. Unlimited scale: purpose-built to scale (high query concurrency, PB+ data volumes, high ingestion throughput)
    3. Real-time and historical data loads: insights can be derived from data in motion and the present can be compared to the past (Kafka/Kinesis integrations, data lake integrations, flexible and adaptive schemas)
    4. Best price/performance: built to scale with maximum cost efficiency (configurable price/performance, predictable performance and costs, fine-tune based on usage)

    The combination of these four requirements enables a broad set of new customer outcomes and will place analytics-in-motion as a defining characteristic of how every successful organization operates.

    New Customer Outcomes Driven by Analytics-in-Motion

    Leading organizations leverage analytics-in-motion as: (1) the analytics engine behind analytics-powered applications centered around security, operational and business insights; and (2) a complete solution to solve internal BI and operational analytics use cases.

    Analytics engine for analytics-powered applications
    Designed for developers and product managers

    • Network endpoint analytics in motion: “Companies that rely on the Internet for their business depend on ThousandEyes’ leading Cloud and Internet Intelligence platform to ensure seamless digital experiences for their customers and employees,” said Murtaza Doctor, Head of Engineering & Operations at Cisco ThousandEyes. “To build our industry-leading solutions, we leverage the most advanced technologies, including Imply and Druid, which provides an interactive, highly scalable, and real-time analytics engine, helping us create differentiated offerings.”
    • Fraud detection in motion: “As the leader in Digital Trust & Safety, Sift leverages advanced machine learning to ensure our customers can accurately detect and prevent fraud,” said Neeraj Gupta, SVP, Engineering & Cloud Operations at Sift. “Imply and Druid offer a unique set of benefits to Sift as the analytics engine behind Watchtower, our automated monitoring tool. Imply provides us with real-time data ingestion, the ability to aggregate data by a variety of dimensions from thousands of servers, and the capacity to query across a moving time window with on-demand analysis and visualization.”
    • Gaming analytics in motion: “As a leading provider of analytics in the mobile gaming space, a key aspect of our competitive differentiation is the depth of reporting we provide to our customers. To accelerate our customers’ success, we wanted to build a customer-facing analytics application that combined the performance of pre-computed queries with the ability to issue arbitrary ad-hoc queries without restrictions,” said Ioana Hreninciuc, CEO of GameAnalytics. “We selected Imply and Druid as the engine for our analytics application, as they are built from the ground up for interactive analytics at scale. In addition, for our internal analytics, Imply Pivot has become the tool of choice for our support and product teams to explore all of our data in a flexible way.”
    • Product Usage Analytics in motion: “Strivr’s Immersive Learning platform is revolutionizing hiring and training through Virtual Reality (VR),” said Aneesh Kulkarni, VP of Engineering at Strivr. “Analytics is critical to our platform as it provides customers with a unique level of data-driven insights from immersive training experiences. We chose Imply and Druid as our analytics database due to its scalable and cost-effective analytics capabilities, as well as its flexibility to analyze data across multiple dimensions. It is key to powering the analytics engine behind our interactive, customer-facing dashboards surfacing insights derived over telemetry data from immersive experiences.”

    Complete solution for internal analytics use cases
    Designed for anyone needing to understand data

    • Observability Analytics in motion: “Plaid’s mission is to unlock financial freedom,” said Gordon Worley, Sr. Staff Software Engineer at Plaid. “To do that, we’ve built a world-class observability platform that allows our customers to offer the best fintech experiences to their users. Four things are crucial for observability analytics; interactive queries, scale, real-time ingest, and price/performance. That is why we chose Imply and Druid.”
    • Advertising Analytics in motion: “Ippen Digital is a pioneer in helping publishers transition to new sources of digital revenue, and analytics is central for us to deliver sophisticated use of audience data and deliver content recommendations,” said Jan Ippen, CEO of Ippen Digital. “Using Imply and Druid, we are able to aggregate and analyze all information, details and dimensions of advertising data from our upstream providers. We can now perform real-time exploratory analytics on advertiser behavior, which enables us to build a differentiated offering to our customers. Imply and Druid are core to our success as a digital advertising platform.”

    “In the modern world, what worked yesterday often doesn’t work today. Analytics-in-Motion will power the next frontier of digital transformation — the movement away from analytics solutions that are expensive, slow, and static, and towards analytics solutions that are highly scalable, cost effective, and enable customers to quickly get to the ‘a-ha’ moment,” said Fangjin Yang, CEO of Imply. “Bessemer Venture Partners shares our vision to re-define how organizations gain value from analytics, and we are thrilled to welcome them as our newest investor and to welcome Elliott Robinson to our Board of Directors. We are also thrilled to welcome two new executives to Imply in the wake of our Series C funding: our CMO, Praveen Rangnath (most recently at Confluent) and VP of Customer Success, Kevin Hodgkins (most recently at Fivetran).”

    Additional resources

    • Read more about this announcement from Fangjin Yang on the Imply blog
    • Read more about our vision for Analytics-in-Motion
    • Join Imply and be a part of redefining the massive market for analytics
    • See how Imply customers are leveraging Analytics-in-Motion

    About Imply

    Imply, founded by the original creators of Apache Druid, is originating and leading a new category of data analytics focused on analytics-in-motion. With analytics-in-motion, organizations can move away from analytics solutions that are static, difficult to scale, delayed and expensive, and towards analytics solutions that are interactive, highly scalable, real-time and cost effective. Leading organizations worldwide leverage Imply as the engine for analytics-powered applications that they build, and/or as a complete solution to directly solve internal BI and operational analytics use cases. Imply has operations in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific and is backed by A16Z, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tiger Global Management, Khosla Ventures, and Geodesic Capital. For more information please visit imply.io.

  • Imply Expands Leadership Team as Analytics-in-Motion Becomes Increasingly Central to Enterprise and Digital Native Organizations

    New Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Customer Success Join Company in Wake of Series C Funding and Global Customer Momentum.

    Burlingame, CA, June 16, 2021— Imply, the pioneer of Analytics-in-Motion, and founded by the original creators of Apache Druid, today announced two key hires to its executive team, with Praveen Rangnath joining as Chief Marketing Officer and Kevin Hodgkins joining as Vice President of Customer Success. Rangnath will lead the global marketing team and Hodgkins will lead all global customer success-facing functions.

    “Imply is on a rapid growth trajectory, as organizations worldwide are looking for modern analytics solutions that are interactive, highly scalable, real-time and built for price/performance — or, simply put, analytics-in-motion,” said Fangjin Yang, CEO of Imply. “We are thrilled to welcome two highly intelligent, strategic and proven leaders to accelerate our growth into the era of analytics-in-motion.”

    Praveen Rangnath joins Imply from Confluent, where he led the Product Marketing function spanning core product marketing, cloud and partner marketing, solutions marketing, technical marketing and product GTM strategy. Most recently, Praveen was the business lead for Confluent’s first S-1 filing in preparation for the Confluent IPO, as well as the original creator and architect of Confluent’s ‘Data in Motion’ messaging. Prior to Confluent, Praveen built cloud marketing at Splunk and was instrumental in the growth of Splunk’s cloud business and partnership with AWS. Praveen was also an early employee of Sumo Logic, and has held various positions in sales, marketing and management consulting.

    “There are three things certain in life: death, taxes and the advancement of technology,” Rangnath said. “Yesterday’s analytics solutions are invariably slow, static, difficult to scale, prohibitively expensive, or not built for today’s world of data in motion. Accepting one of these tradeoffs is now a competitive disadvantage for the modern business. I am thrilled to join Imply to help the world move towards a new category of analytics, characterized by interactivity, high scalability, cost-effectiveness, and native integration with modern data technologies such as Kafka and Kinesis.”

    Kevin Hodgkins joins Imply from Fivetran, where he led Customer Success for the Americas region, including pre-sales engineering, customer support, and customer and technical success management. During Kevin’s tenure he doubled the customer success teams in support of Fivetran’s continued growth. Prior to Fivetran, Kevin last led integration architecture and embedding of Birst into Infor’s Cloudsuite line of SaaS ERP products in addition to running all customer facing technical teams over his tenure at Birst prior to the company being acquired by Infor.

    “Throughout my career, I have helped my internal and external customers face challenges making use of their data to advance their businesses. Challenges have included both technology limitations and application of methods and architectures failing to support widespread analysis and full capitalization of all information assets,” said Hodgkins. “Imply provides the framework within which businesses can fully capitalize those assets beyond traditional methods. In addition to Imply’s unique value proposition, its Customer Success function is laser-focused on helping customers successfully apply and optimize a new framework taking advantage of Analytics-in-Motion.”

    The expansion of Imply’s leadership team comes on the heels of Imply’s $70 million funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Tiger Global Management. Existing investors A16Z, Khosla Ventures and Geodesic Capital also participated in this round. With the new funding and expanded leadership team, Imply is poised to further extend its leadership position in the rapidly growing area of Analytics-in-Motion.

    Additional resources

    • Read more about our vision for Analytics-in-Motion
    • Join Imply and be a part of redefining the massive market for analytics
    • See how Imply customers are leveraging Analytics-in-Motion

    About Imply

    Imply, founded by the original creators of Apache Druid, is originating and leading a new category of data analytics focused on analytics-in-motion. With analytics-in-motion, organizations can move away from analytics solutions that are static, difficult to scale, delayed and expensive, and towards analytics solutions that are interactive, highly scalable, real-time and cost effective. Leading organizations worldwide leverage Imply as the engine for analytics-powered applications that they build, and/or as a complete solution to directly solve internal BI and operational analytics use cases. Imply has operations in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific and is backed by A16Z, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tiger Global Management, Khosla Ventures, and Geodesic Capital. For more information please visit imply.io.

  • Allego Powers Virtual Selling and Buying with the Launch of New Digital Sales Room Capability

    Digital Sales Rooms empower B2B sellers to centralize vital resources and deliver a modern buying experience that keeps them in the driver’s seat while creating an engaging human-to-human connection with buyers.

    Needham, MA, June 16, 2021  — Allego, the leading sales learning and enablement platform, today announced the launch of Allego Digital Sales Rooms, a modern, online buying experience that provides a company’s sales professionals and prospective buyers with a secure and collaborative approach to buying and selling, providing quick answers to important questions and centralized access to useful resources, including relevant sales collateral, contextual video messages, recorded web meetings and calls, asynchronous presentations, and confidential documents.

    With more than 82% of companies planning for the complexity of full-time hybrid workforces, sales teams must transition their interim virtual sales approaches to more permanent models. According to McKinsey, companies that add the human touch to digital sales achieve 2x the return to shareholders. By equipping teams with tools that are digitally-centric, sellers have the ability to meet buyer demands more accurately and efficiently. Unlike traditional email, phone and video-based communication, Allego Digital Sales Rooms create a more personalized, contextualized and self-directed buyer experience.

    “The traditional buying experience often feels like a hunting expedition. Prospective buyers have to track down valuable information, including vendor communications, meeting notes, and key documents in order to inform their decisions,” said Allego Chief Product Officer Andre Black. “With Allego’s Digital Sales Rooms, we’re taking the drudgery out of both the selling and the buying processes by providing prospective customers with a digital personalized white-glove experience in a collaborative virtual space. It streamlines communication and secures the important information and assets, which brings us one step closer to a painless buyer’s journey. This is the way top sellers will differentiate themselves with prospects, today and in the future.”

    Digital Sales Rooms Provide A Unique Seller and Buyer Experience

    • Secure virtual buying space: Using Digital Sales Rooms, sellers can deploy a dedicated space for housing all content, video conference recordings, and files shared with prospects throughout the course of a deal or account management cycle.

    • Branded content experience: Sellers can use templates created by Marketing to deploy the right set of content assets for any given sales scenario, displaying their company’s logo and any applicable privacy statements.

    • Personalization for prospects and accounts: Sellers can personalize the Digital Sales Room with their prospect’s logo and a banner message tailored to the individual deal or account.

    • Maintaining the human touch: Sellers can put a face to the experience using personal video messages to “greet buyers at the door” and contextualize assets shared throughout the room.

    • Collaborative commenting: Sellers can observe which stakeholders are currently in the Digital Sales Room and exchange messages to answer questions, provide context, and convey value while the buyer is using the room.

    • Engagement tracking: Sellers gain valuable deal intelligence by tracking which stakeholders are engaging with which items in the Digital Sales Room in order to prioritize next best actions.

    “We’re already using Allego’s sales content management features, and the introduction of Digital Sales Rooms is going to make it even easier for our reps to collaborate with prospects and customers through one central communication hub,” said Matt Miersen, Senior Manager, Global Sales Enablement, Veritas Technologies LLC. “Being able to build relationships with buyers when you can’t be together is critical and sending too many emails just prolongs the sales process. Digital Sales Rooms will allow our reps to share all relevant information, including intro videos from the Veritas team, key sales collateral, invitations to events, product information, pricing, demos, and more, all in one place so prospects and customers don’t have to weed through emails and comb through our website to find what they need. In addition to making it easier for our prospects and customers to interact with Veritas, these Digital Sales Rooms will greatly help our various departments internally, such as New Business Sales, the Renewals Team, and Support to consolidate the sharing of information with our buyers.”

    Digital Sales Rooms are now available to Allego customers as an optional integrated module within the Allego Sales Learning and Enablement Platform. Select features will ship later this year. To learn how Allego Digital Sales Rooms can improve your team’s performance and help you close more deals, schedule a demo or visit Allego.com.

    About Allego
    Allego provides an all-in-one sales enablement platform that ensures sellers have the skills, knowledge, and content they need to optimize team success in a virtual world. In place of traditional training and content enablement tactics – which are rapidly outdated and often ineffective – Allego empowers reps with the activated content they need to close deals faster, and the personalized coaching and learning they require for continuous improvement. And it all happens in the flow of their daily work. Whether it’s providing feedback to one another through asynchronous video, or enhancing their skills through AI-powered coaching and peer-to-peer collaboration, more than 500,000 professionals are using Allego to revolutionize the way they onboard, train, collaborate, and sell. To learn more about Allego and learning and enablement in the flow of work, please visit allego.com.

  • AvePoint, Leading Microsoft 365 Data Management Solutions Provider, Hires Chief People Officer, Stuart Robertson

    To accelerate company growth, global HR executive with public company experience joins AvePoint as its First Chief People Officer. 

    Jersey City, NJ, June 16, 2021 — AvePoint, Inc. (“AvePoint or the “Company”), the largest data management solutions provider for Microsoft 365, announced today it has hired global HR executive, Stuart Robertson as its first-ever Chief People Officer. In this role, Robertson will oversee talent, organizational scaling, employee experience and performance as AvePoint prepares to become a public company, as listed on the NASDAQ. 

    Robertson joins AvePoint with over 20 years of experience in HR leadership, specializing in talent management and leadership development with a focus on internal mobility and driving collaborative culture. Serving at Fortune 500 companies on three continents and supporting many countries over the course of his career, Robertson brings a global perspective to AvePoint. He aims to facilitate community between the Company’s offices located in 14 countries. Prior to joining AvePoint, Robertson was SVP Head of HR for Richemont Americas where he oversaw the People and Culture programs that successfully enabled a digital transformation, resilient pandemic adaptation and talent mobility.

    “We are at the forefront of today’s workplace transformation, not only with the technology we offer our customers, but also serving as a model for effective digital collaboration and company cohesion,” said Stuart Robertson, CPO, AvePoint. “I am excited to lead our talent and growth strategy, in partnership with an exceptional leadership team, with whom I feel a strong alignment on values and priorities.”

    This appointment comes just prior to the Company’s upcoming, and initial public merger, which was recently approved by the SEC. The Company will benefit from Robertson’s public company experience as AvePoint itself transitions to the public market and looks to scale talent management and acquisition.

    As the first Chief of People Officer at AvePoint, Robertson plans to enrich talent programs that are grounded in the Company’s core values, which are passion, agility and teamwork. He will also work to develop the unique skill sets and approaches that every employee brings to AvePoint so that teams can maximize their processes and enhance customer success to meet Company growth.

    “Stuart will play an integral role in growing our Company’s exceptional employee base and bringing a scalable strategy to our talent development,” said Tianyi Jiang, AvePoint CEO. “As we expand our global footprint and work towards ambitious business objectives, we believe his expertise will help take us to the next level.”

    As the Company continues to focus on product innovation and global expansion, Robertson will spearhead initiatives targeted at enhancing the employee experience and evolving talent within AvePoint to achieve broad business goals.  

    To learn more about AvePoint and its data management solutions please visit: https://www.avepoint.com/.

    About AvePoint 

    AvePoint enables customers to collaborate with confidence. AvePoint’s data management solutions help its diverse, global customer base overcome complex transformation, governance, and compliance challenges in the Microsoft cloud. A five-time winner of the Global Microsoft Partner of the Year award, AvePoint offers the only full suite of SaaS solutions to migrate, manage and protect data in Microsoft 365. More than 7 million cloud users, including a quarter of the Fortune 500, rely on AvePoint’s solutions. AvePoint’s SaaS solutions are also available to managed service providers, so they can better support and manage their small and mid-sized business customers. Its multi-tenant solutions are available from over a dozen distributors in more than 100 cloud marketplaces worldwide. For more information about AvePoint, visit https://www.avepoint.com.