staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Veronica Haggar

  • vArmour Expands Leadership Team with Appointment of Chief Revenue Officer to Fuel Next Stage of Growth

    Sales Veteran Niels Jensen Tapped to Lead to Global Sales

    LOS ALTOS, Calif., June 10, 2021 — vArmour, the leading provider of Application Relationship Management software, today announced major additions to its leadership team. Niels Jensen will serve as Chief Revenue Officer, responsible for driving vArmour’s global go-to-market strategy. vArmour also added key hires in North America, APAC, and EMEA regions. These strategic additions follow a period of sustained growth for the company with 75% year over year growth from 2020 to 2021.

    “As major breaches continue to top the news headlines each day, we are seeing just how critical the adoption of Zero Trust strategy is proving to be across industries.” said Tim Eades, CEO at vArmour. “We are excited to bring Niels on board to build on the success we’ve seen in Financial Services, Telco, and Retail industries as well as expand new markets worldwide.”

    Jensen brings more than two decades of sales leadership experience to his role as Chief Revenue Officer at vArmour, having led global-scale sales teams for companies such as C3.ai and Forescout Technologies. He joined both companies at growth stages similar to vArmour’s current trajectory, and led successful teams as they transitioned from private to public companies.

    “The caliber of the leadership team at vArmour is stellar, and experience has shown me how key that is for companies looking to make it to the next stage,” said Jensen. “As we grow the global go-to-market team, I’m focused on bringing on board new team members of similar caliber. When considering the people, technology, and market opportunity, the sky is the limit for vArmour and I couldn’t be more excited to join the company.”

    The news comes at a time of both growth and expansion for the company. Jensen joins vArmour following a significant round of funding, raising $58M led by AllegisCyber Capital and NightDragon earlier this year. As the company takes advantage of business momentum following the pandemic-accelerated shift to the cloud, it is looking to expand further globally, including the recent opening of an office in Calgary, Canada, and the additions of both Jensen and its Head of Global Channel, Louise Cooke.

    Additionally, vArmour has added key leadership roles in Sales and Engineering to include Steve Rog as GM for the Americas, formerly at C3.ai; Rob Dao as RVP Federal, formerly at Tanium; and Shane Coleman as WW VP Systems Engineering and Services, who joins the company from Netskope.   vArmour has also added Ramon Buckland as VP of Strategic Architecture in APAC, previously at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and Kevin Bloch, former CTO of Cisco ANZ, as an advisor to the company.

    For more information on vArmour, please visit www.vArmour.com.

    About vArmour

    vArmour is the leading provider of Application Relationship Management software. Enterprises around the world rely on vArmour to control operational risk, increase application resiliency and secure hybrid clouds — all while leveraging the technology they already own without adding costly new agents or infrastructure. Based in Los Altos, CA, the company was founded in 2011 and is backed by top investors including Highland Capital Partners, AllegisCyber Capital, NightDragon, Redline Capital, Citi Ventures, and Telstra. Learn more at www.vArmour.com.

  • Checkmarx Appoints Roman Tuma as Chief Revenue Officer

    Veteran security leader to oversee Checkmarx’s go-to-market strategy and drive demand for developer-centric AST solutions

    Ramat Gan, Israel, June 10, 2021 — Checkmarx, the global leader in developer-centric application security testing solutions, today announced that it has named Roman Tuma as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Previously the Vice President of Sales for Checkmarx’s EMEA, LATAM, and APAC business, he will now be responsible for driving the company’s go-to-market strategy including overseeing global sales, channel operations, and strategic alliances.

    During his tenure at Checkmarx, Tuma has been instrumental in growing the company’s revenue and customer base in Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific, as well as streamlining global sales processes and forging new partnerships and alliances. Moving forward, he will continue this momentum and position Checkmarx for its next phase of growth by introducing new routes to market, expanding its network of customers and partners, and redefining the way code scanning and testing is consumed.

    “Roman brings an unparalleled level of strategy, leadership, and energy to his new position as CRO. As an industry veteran, his proven track record of success in scaling companies is a testament to his deep cybersecurity and cloud expertise, outstanding sales strategy and execution, and innovative mindset,” said Emmanuel Benzaquen, CEO, Checkmarx. “All organizations around the globe are grappling with today’s dynamic and complex application security landscape, and Roman will be essential in helping to meet and exceed their needs while also evolving Checkmarx’s business.”

    Tarim Wasim, Partner at Hellman & Friedman, which acquired Checkmarx last year, added, “Roman has demonstrated clear and sustained success, making him the ideal fit to join the Checkmarx management team and assume the role of CRO. During his time leading sales in EMEA, LATAM, and APAC, he has been a cornerstone of the team. We’re excited to welcome Roman to his new global position as we build on what has already been a very strong year for Checkmarx.”

    Tuma possesses more than 27 years of experience – 17 of which have been spent in the cybersecurity industry – building and operating high-growth, customer-oriented teams. Prior to Checkmarx, he spent over 10 years at IBM in multiple executive positions, including Vice President of IBM Hybrid Cloud where he oversaw sales, revenue growth and profitability, technical support, and cloud solution implementation strategy. Prior to this, Tuma held various leadership and sales roles at Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and ActivCard.

    “Checkmarx’s deeply-rooted AppSec and DevOps history, unique understanding of developer needs, and innovative approach to application security testing is a winning recipe for success,” said Tuma. “I’m excited to build on Checkmarx’s position as the market leader in AST, while driving value for every organization that’s concerned with developing secure applications and software.”

    About Checkmarx

    Checkmarx is the global leader in software security solutions for modern enterprise software development. Checkmarx delivers the industry’s most comprehensive Software Security Platform that unifies with DevOps and provides static and interactive application security testing, software composition analysis, and developer AppSec awareness and training programs to reduce and remediate risk from software vulnerabilities. Checkmarx is trusted by more than 40 of the Fortune 100 companies and half of the Fortune 50, including leading organizations such as SAP, Samsung, and Salesforce.com. Learn more at www.checkmarx.com.

  • Contrast Security Extends DevSecOps Platform With Revolutionary Technology To Find Vulnerabilities That Matter 10x Faster

    Breakthrough pipeline-native code analysis security testing with Contrast Scan is now available with the Contrast Application Security Platform for complete coverage of the DevSecOps life cycle

    Los Altos, CA, June 10, 2021 – Contrast Security today announced the release of Contrast Scan that revolutionizes static application security testing (SAST) with pipeline-native static analysis to analyze code and detect vulnerabilities early on in the software development life cycle (SDLC). The release of Contrast Scan extends the DevSecOps capabilities of the Contrast Application Security Platform to the entire SDLC, empowering security teams to run scans up to 10x faster and remediate vulnerabilities up to 45x faster while meeting compliance requirements of an organization’s security policy.

    Incumbent legacy static approaches employ noisy rule sets to look for code quality issues. This outside-in approach generates immense volumes of security findings that become increasingly more time- and resource-intensive to manage. This is exacerbated due to the number of distracting false-positive alerts that kill productivity—upwards of 85% in many instances. For newer developer-friendly code scanning tools, application security shifts left too far, exacerbating the problem of false positives and leaving developers with no context on prioritization or how-to-fix guidance. In response, two-thirds of practitioners who rely on legacy static scanning indicate they are looking for a different approach to application security.

    Contrast Scan aims to solve these challenges with a pipeline-native approach that achieves dramatic improvements in speed, accuracy, and developer experience, accelerating digital transformation by removing inefficiencies and roadblocks that slow release cycles. Onboarding with Contrast Scan is quick and easy—requiring zero configuration and literally three clicks to get findings. Further, as Contrast Scan is integrated as part of the Contrast Application Security Platform, organizations have a unified, developer-friendly view of vulnerabilities and attacks with harmonized security profiles across SAST, interactive application security testing (IAST), runtime protection and observability, and software composition analysis (SCA), all in one DevSecOps platform.

    Key benefits of Contrast Scan include:

    • Results that matter delivered 10x faster. A breakthrough demand-driven algorithm powers the static analysis engine in Contrast Scan, enabling teams to pinpoint exploitable vulnerabilities while ignoring those that pose no risk. As a result, based on real-world scan results, Contrast Scan can shrink the amount of time to run scans by 10x. Faster scans remove DevOps security roadblocks that slow innovation, improve the efficiencies of security and development teams, and reduce the operating expenses (OpEx) of scanning.

    • 45x faster remediation times. When used in concert with the broader set of capabilities in the Contrast platform, Contrast Scan accelerates remediation times by an astounding 45x. This is achieved by enabling developers to focus on exploitable flows, prioritize routes with entry points based on runtime and production traffic analysis, and leverage actionable remediation guidance. All of this pays down security debt, which results in reduced application security risks.

    • 30% improvement in application security efficiencies. By integrating pipeline-native static analysis security testing into the Contrast Application Security Platform, application security teams can improve scan, triage, and remediation efficiencies by up to 30%. Contrast’s comprehensive DevSecOps approach bakes security into rapid-release cycles that are typical of modern application development and deployment environments. It also offers complete coverage of the DevSecOps life cycle with application tools optimized from build to production. This streamlines compliance reporting—often shrinking the time to demonstrate security policy compliance from days to minutes.  Today’s organizations should not be forced to choose between speed and security. With the addition of Contrast Scan, the Contrast Application Security Platform now offers a path to DevSecOps that allows organizations to secure any application anywhere—from a developer’s desktop, at a release gate, or in instances of production. The Contrast platform was purpose-built to deliver true DevSecOps with SCA, application security testing (AST), and exploit prevention capabilities using instrumentation across the entire SDLC.

    “Contrast Scan is a game changer for both application security and application development teams,” said Steve Wilson, Chief Product Officer at Contrast Security. “It allows teams to get unprecedented observability into their applications’ threat landscape early in the development life cycle—without all the noise of traditional static scanning tools. This means organizations’ applications will remain more secure while enabling them to maintain the agility of their development teams.” For more information on Contrast Scan, visit the Contrast Scan webpage and check out the below content.

    About Contrast Security
    Contrast Security is the leader in modernized application security, embedding code analysis and attack prevention directly into software. Contrast’s patented deep security instrumentation completely disrupts traditional application security approaches with integrated, comprehensive security observability that delivers highly accurate assessment and continuous protection of an entire application portfolio. This eliminates the need for disruptive scanning, expensive infrastructure workloads, and specialized security experts. The Contrast Application Security Platform accelerates development cycles, improves efficiencies and cost, and enables rapid scale while protecting applications from known and unknown threats.

  • Contrast Security Extends DevSecOps Platform With Revolutionary Technology To Find Vulnerabilities That Matter 10x Faster

    Breakthrough pipeline-native code analysis security testing with Contrast Scan is now available with the Contrast Application Security Platform for complete coverage of the DevSecOps life cycle

    Los Altos, CA, June 10, 2021 – Contrast Security today announced the release of Contrast Scan that revolutionizes static application security testing (SAST) with pipeline-native static analysis to analyze code and detect vulnerabilities early on in the software development life cycle (SDLC). The release of Contrast Scan extends the DevSecOps capabilities of the Contrast Application Security Platform to the entire SDLC, empowering security teams to run scans up to 10x faster and remediate vulnerabilities up to 45x faster while meeting compliance requirements of an organization’s security policy.

    Incumbent legacy static approaches employ noisy rule sets to look for code quality issues. This outside-in approach generates immense volumes of security findings that become increasingly more time- and resource-intensive to manage. This is exacerbated due to the number of distracting false-positive alerts that kill productivity—upwards of 85% in many instances. For newer developer-friendly code scanning tools, application security shifts left too far, exacerbating the problem of false positives and leaving developers with no context on prioritization or how-to-fix guidance. In response, two-thirds of practitioners who rely on legacy static scanning indicate they are looking for a different approach to application security.

    Contrast Scan aims to solve these challenges with a pipeline-native approach that achieves dramatic improvements in speed, accuracy, and developer experience, accelerating digital transformation by removing inefficiencies and roadblocks that slow release cycles. Onboarding with Contrast Scan is quick and easy—requiring zero configuration and literally three clicks to get findings. Further, as Contrast Scan is integrated as part of the Contrast Application Security Platform, organizations have a unified, developer-friendly view of vulnerabilities and attacks with harmonized security profiles across SAST, interactive application security testing (IAST), runtime protection and observability, and software composition analysis (SCA), all in one DevSecOps platform.

    Key benefits of Contrast Scan include:

    Results that matter delivered 10x faster. A breakthrough demand-driven algorithm powers the static analysis engine in Contrast Scan, enabling teams to pinpoint exploitable vulnerabilities while ignoring those that pose no risk. As a result, based on real-world scan results, Contrast Scan can shrink the amount of time to run scans by 10x. Faster scans remove DevOps security roadblocks that slow innovation, improve the efficiencies of security and development teams, and reduce the operating expenses (OpEx) of scanning.

    45x faster remediation times. When used in concert with the broader set of capabilities in the Contrast platform, Contrast Scan accelerates remediation times by an astounding 45x. This is achieved by enabling developers to focus on exploitable flows, prioritize routes with entry points based on runtime and production traffic analysis, and leverage actionable remediation guidance. All of this pays down security debt, which results in reduced application security risks.

    30% improvement in application security efficiencies. By integrating pipeline-native static analysis security testing into the Contrast Application Security Platform, application security teams can improve scan, triage, and remediation efficiencies by up to 30%. Contrast’s comprehensive DevSecOps approach bakes security into rapid-release cycles that are typical of modern application development and deployment environments. It also offers complete coverage of the DevSecOps life cycle with application tools optimized from build to production. This streamlines compliance reporting—often shrinking the time to demonstrate security policy compliance from days to minutes.

    Today’s organizations should not be forced to choose between speed and security. With the addition of Contrast Scan, the Contrast Application Security Platform now offers a path to DevSecOps that allows organizations to secure any application anywhere—from a developer’s desktop, at a release gate, or in instances of production. The Contrast platform was purpose-built to deliver true DevSecOps with SCA, application security testing (AST), and exploit prevention capabilities using instrumentation across the entire SDLC.

    “Contrast Scan is a game changer for both application security and application development teams,” said Steve Wilson, Chief Product Officer at Contrast Security. “It allows teams to get unprecedented observability into their applications’ threat landscape early in the development life cycle—without all the noise of traditional static scanning tools. This means organizations’ applications will remain more secure while enabling them to maintain the agility of their development teams.”

    About Contrast Security

    Contrast Security is the leader in modernized application security, embedding code analysis and attack prevention directly into software. Contrast’s patented deep security instrumentation completely disrupts traditional application security approaches with integrated, comprehensive security observability that delivers highly accurate assessment and continuous protection of an entire application portfolio. This eliminates the need for disruptive scanning, expensive infrastructure workloads, and specialized security experts. The Contrast Application Security Platform accelerates development cycles, improves efficiencies and cost, and enables rapid scale while protecting applications from known and unknown threats.

  • Element Announces Element Unify Integration with AWS IoT SiteWise to Enable Condition-based Monitoring for Industrial Customers

    Element Unify provides context-rich plant data for real-time KPIs and metrics, helping industrials make better, data-driven decisions using an ISO 27001 certified solution

    San Francisco, CA, June 9, 2021 — Element, a leading software provider in IT/OT data management for industrial companies, today announced a new offering featuring an API integration between its Element Unify product and AWS IoT SiteWise, a managed service from Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), that makes it easy to collect, store, organize, and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale. The API integration is designed to give customers the ability to centralize plant data model integration and metadata management, enabling data to be ingested into AWS services, including AWS IoT SiteWise and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) industrial data lake.

    Available in AWS Marketplace, the Element Unify AWS IoT Sitewise API integration is designed to allow engineers and operators to monitor operations across facilities, quickly compute performance metrics, create applications that analyze industrial equipment data to prevent costly equipment issues, and reduce gaps in production.

    “We are looking forward to bridging the on-premises data models we’ve built for systems like OSIsoft PI to AWS for equipment data monitoring using Element Unify,” said Philipp Frenzel, Head of Competence Center Digital Services at Covestro.

    Element also announced its ISO 27001 certification proving both the security controls protect customer data and the Information Security Management System (ISMS) provide governance, risk management, and controls required for modern SaaS applications. Element Unify also supports AWS PrivateLink to provide an additional level of network security and control for customers.

    “Our customers are looking for solutions that can help them improve equipment uptime, avoid revenue loss, cut O&M costs, and improve safety,” said Prabal Acharyya, Global Head of IoT Partners for Energy at AWS. “Now, the Industrial Machine Connectivity (IMC) on AWS initiative, along with Element Unify, makes possible a seamless API integration of both real-time and asset context OT data from multiple systems into an industrial data lake on AWS.”

    Industrial customers need the ability to digitally transform to maximize productivity and asset availability, and lower costs in order to remain competitive. Element Unify, which aligns IT and operational technology (OT) around contextualized industrial IoT data, delivers key enterprise integration and governance capabilities to industrials. This provides them with rich insight, enabling smarter, more efficient operations. By integrating previously siloed and critical time-series metadata generated by sensors across industrial operations with established IT systems, such as Enterprise Asset Management, IT and OT teams can now easily work together using context data for their entire industrial IoT environment.

    “The tie-up between Element and AWS IoT SiteWise not only enhances AWS’s ability to manage IT and OT data together in an industrial data lake, but further demonstrates Element’s leading DataOps infrastructure solution for industrial companies,” said Joe Perino, Principal Analyst for LNS Research.

    Though the API integration, AWS IoT SiteWise customers can now:

    • Centralize plant data model integration and metadata management into a single contextual service for consumption by AWS IoT SiteWise.

    • Ingest data directly into AWS services, including AWS IoT SiteWise and Amazon S3 data lake.

    • Integrate and contextualize metadata from IT/OT sources in single-site, multi-site, and multi-instance deployments, and deploy the data model(s) to AWS IoT SiteWise.

    • Enable metadata to be imported into AWS IoT SiteWise from the customers systems through Inductive Automation Ignition and PTC KEPServerEX to create context data.

    • Keep both greenfield and brownfield AWS IoT SiteWise asset models and asset hierarchies updated as the Element Unify models adapt to changes in the underlying data.

    • Close the gap between raw, siloed, and disorganized IT/OT data and enriched, contextualized, and structured data that can be easily paired with business intelligence (BI), analytical tools, and condition monitoring tools like AWS IoT SiteWise.

    • Empower the user to build complex asset data models with ease.

    • Build and deploy data models to AWS IoT SiteWise and keep them up to date with changes happening in source systems.

    • Easily create the underlying data models to power AWS IoT SiteWise and many other analytical systems including Amazon SageMaker, Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon Lookout for Equipment.

    “Operations data must be easy to use and understand in both the plant and in the boardroom. Industrial organizations who transform their plant data into context data for use in AWS IoT SiteWise, and other AWS services, will drive greater operational insights and achieve breakthrough business outcomes,” said Andy Bane, CEO of Element.

    The Element Unify and AWS IoT SiteWise integration will be available to AWS IoT SiteWise customers in AWS Marketplace.

    Learn more about the integration between Element and AWS IoT SiteWise in the AWS blog post here.

    About Element Analytics

    Element is a leading software provider in IT/OT data management, digitally enabling operations for industrial organizations. Element Unify transforms siloed IT/OT data into context data by enabling contextualize once, compute anywhere, consume everywhere data that is used to achieve cleaner, safer, healthier, more profitable operations. Element’s customers represent over $750 billion in revenue, $500 billion in fixed assets and 450,000 employees. To learn more about Element, please visit elementanalytics.com and follow the company on Twitter and LinkedIn.

  • Cortex Joins the GitLab Technology Partner Program to Accelerate SRE Control of Microservices

    Strategic partnership enables users to integrate GitLab into Cortex to view service information alongside other integrations and set standards for development maturity using repository details

    San Francisco, CA, June 9, 2021 —Reliability as Code pioneer Cortex , today announced it has joined the GitLab technology partner program. This strategic relationship allows users to import GitLab services into Cortex to view service information alongside other integrations and set standards for development maturity using repository details.

    The Cortex platform features an automatic onboarding workflow that scans all potential microservices sources, discovers the microservices, maps metadata to them and infers critical information such as ownership and on-call rotations. The platform then generates a dashboard illustrating relevant metrics for each of more than 30 third-party tools, including GitLab, Datadog, Sonarqube, Snyk and PagerDuty. These integrations let engineers quickly access on-call rotations, latency dashboards, open vulnerabilities and more in one searchable dashboard. Each integration includes individual rules that enable users to drill down into specific metrics to grade the quality of their services via customizable “scorecards.” This enables development of production readiness checklists, security audits and evaluations of operation and development maturity.

    “GitLab is excited to build a strategic relationship with Cortex,” said Nima Badiey, vice president of Alliances at GitLab. “Cortex’s expertise across managing service architectures makes them a great fit for the GitLab Partner Program and enables us to jointly provide our customers with the right people, processes and platforms to enable them on their digital transformations.”

    Key capabilities of the platform include:

    • Microservices Quality Scorecards keep teams accountable for following best SRE/security/infra best practices by ‘gamifying’ service quality. Scorecards stack-rank services based on detailed performance metrics which motivates service owners to improve either performance, or decommission unused or unmanaged services.
    • Cortex Query Language (CQL), a domain-specific language, lets users write granular rules about health of deploys, SLOs, on-call rotations, security vulnerabilities, package versions and more, such as, “if the service is a production service, then there must be an on-call rotation and greater than 85% test coverage.” This enables engineering and SRE leaders to track and enforce service quality across the entire engineering organization. Engineers can set reliability standards across teams and types of services through direct integrations with a variety of tools.
    • Initiatives help drive progress towards meeting service metrics over a specified time period, letting users set goals and deadlines in a scorecard, making service quality a moving target for the team. Cortex messages service owners over Slack or email with their action items, which engineers can also see when they login to the Cortex dashboard. Initiatives align the team towards a common goal within a scorecard and help accelerate progress as a result.

    “We’re excited to Integrate with GitLab and help reduce service complexity for their users,” Anish Dhar, CEO, Cortex. “Cortex enables GitLab users to start tracking quality across their microservices and build a single pane of glass for their architecture.”

    About Cortex
    Cortex is the leading Reliability as Code platform, designed to give engineers and SREs comprehensive microservices visibility and control. Cortex provides a single-pane-of-glass for visualization of service ownership, documentation and performance history, replacing “tribal knowledge” and spreadsheets. This gives engineering and SRE teams the visibility and control they need over their services, even as teams shift, people move, platforms change and microservices continue to grow. Cortex is a YCombinator Company backed by Sequoia Capital. For more information, visit www.getcortexapp.com or see us on Twitter at @GetCortexApp.

  • Planful Debuts “Predict: Signals,” a Native AI and ML Anomaly Detection Technology for FP&A

    Predict Signals Gives FP&A Teams Unmatched Confidence and Strategic Insight to Drive Greater Business Impact

    Redwood City, CA, June 9, 2021 – Planful Inc., the pioneer of financial planning, analysis (FP&A), and consolidations cloud software, today announced the launch of “Predict: Signals,” the first of a range of product releases in the Planful Predict portfolio, a suite of native artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) products that will be released in 2021 and beyond.

    Predict: Signals, a native Al/ML anomaly detection technology, eliminates the need for a detailed manual review of data, ensuring forecasts are accurate and alerting the business to outliers in data. The solution checks for abnormalities, identifies patterns, and augments planning and decision-making efforts with intelligent forecasts and recommendations, using a native AI/ML engine.

    “Incorporating AI/ML into the Planful platform is incredibly beneficial to companies at many different levels,” said Glenn Snyder, Head of FP&A at Global Growth Holdings. “Predict: Signals has the potential to have a significant impact for Planful customers as they adopt this new technology. This range of Predict tools has the capability to dramatically improve the efficiency and accuracy of finance processes, allowing finance teams to focus on greater value-add and higher-impact work.”

    In addition to Predict: Signals, Planful Predict will expand over time to encompass a full suite of native AI/ML solutions that enhance forecasting, empowering business users to accelerate insight-driven decisions in a smooth-flowing environment. At its core, the suite is being designed to help finance and accounting professionals make confident and intelligent financial decisions with greater agility and accuracy.

    “The Planful Predict suite of applications will further modernize how finance and accounting professionals accomplish their work through three key attributes,” said Grant Halloran, Planful’s Chief Executive Officer. “First, as a super-powered digital assistant that operates like a million sets of extra eyes, 24/7, searching for anomalies in financial data. Second, as a technology that supports, yet doesn’t replace the skills of intuitive human planners and analysts. Third, as a frictionless aid that is native in the platform at the point of need, thus eliminating the need for third-party AI. Predict: Signals has the ability to augment a user’s efficiency in data signal detection by orders of magnitude.”

    Predict: Signals can surface hidden errors and anomalies in huge volumes of data that may require further investigation by a human and present recommendations for corrective action.

    “The ability for FP&A professionals to quickly and collaboratively use a wide range of trusted business data–not just financials–has become increasingly important to improve the business value of planning and budgeting,” said Robert Kugel, Senior Vice President and Research Director at Ventana Research. “The application of AI to planning will become increasingly important over the next five years. AI will enable companies to improve their planning and decision-making by, for example, identifying prediction signals that can improve forecast accuracy or quickly spot anomalies in plans or results.”

    To learn more about the Planful Predict suite and inquire about a demo of Predict: Signals, click here.

    About Planful

    Planful (formerly Host Analytics) is the pioneer of financial planning & analysis (FP&A) and consolidations cloud software. The Planful platform is used by the Office of the CFO around the globe to streamline business-wide planning, budgeting, consolidations, reporting, and visual analytics. More than 800 customers, including Boston Red Sox, Del Monte, TGI Friday’s, and 23andMe, rely on Planful to accelerate cycle times, increase productivity, and improve accuracy across the end-to-end FP&A process. Planful is a private company backed by Vector Capital, a leading global private equity firm. Learn more at www.planful.com.

  • StarTree Announces Commercial Availability of User-Facing Analytics Platform Raising the Bar for Speed, Scalability and Performance

    StarTree Cloud is Built on the Same Technology Used by LinkedIn and Uber to Democratize Data and Empower More Users with Fresh Insights

    Mountain View, CA, June 9, 2021 — StarTree, Inc. today announced the commercial availability of its “blazing-fast” cloud analytics-as-a-service platform, making it easier for organizations to share self-service analytics with their most important external stakeholders: their customers, partners, and members. Built around the popular Apache Pinot™, the new StarTree Cloud uniquely delivers fresh analytics at scale with low latency for thousands or millions of users.

    Built for progressive data-driven companies to help increase engagement and revenue through real-time user-facing analytics, the platform enables companies to build rich, interactive data-driven analytical applications to empower their customers and users to make informed decisions with the most up-to-date information.

    StarTree was founded by Apache Pinot’s creators, who built and operated the real-time analytics platform at LinkedIn and Uber. Apache Pinot has now been proven at scale by LinkedIn, Stripe, Uber, Walmart, Weibo, WePay and many others – setting the stage for the commercial delivery of StarTree’s service.

    Examples of user-facing analytics include more than 50 LinkedIn products, all powered by Apache Pinot, ingesting millions of events per second and serving more than 150,000 queries per second at millisecond latency. Sample applications include LinkedIn’s Who Viewed My Profile, LinkedIn’s Company Analytics and UberEats Restaurant Manager.

    “Apache Pinot revolutionized the way LinkedIn thinks about data analytics and delivers value to our members and customers through near-real-time insights,” said Igor Perisic, Chief Data Officer, LinkedIn. “Member experiences, such as ‘Who Viewed My Profile’ data, provide valuable, personalized insights at scale to all LinkedIn members thanks to Pinot. As the first company to use this technology, we are thrilled to see StarTree moving quickly toward commercialization so the rest of the world can reap similar benefits from the platform.”

    The new platform combines all the performance and scalability of Pinot with innovative features developed by StarTree to onboard data more easily and generate insights faster. Enterprises using the platform not only achieve faster time-to-value through these new capabilities, they can also benefit from all the ongoing updates to Pinot without having to manage the open source code themselves.

    The StarTree Cloud platform far exceeds the performance and scalability of existing commercial systems, which top out at a fraction of the 170k queries per second that StarTree supports, enabling millions of users to access data without any impact on the system’s performance.

    A premier convenience retailer is among the many leading brands that have benefited from Pinot. Getting timely and accurate data has been crucial for the successful operation of their ongoing campaigns and promotional programs across stores, mobile orders, and delivery channels. Using Pinot, they have empowered their business users to access all data and receive insights on the fly and at a very low latency. The platform has also served as a single source of truth across all lines of business, providing more accurate data. They are now planning to continue onboarding and building new applications.

    StarTree also provides the deep expertise in data management and analytics needed for enterprises to keep up with the growing volume of data and the complexity of generating insights from it. This includes an architecture that supports the most robust and still-growing set of data indexes to meet the demands of new types of workloads and queries.

    “Companies have a remarkable opportunity to provide insights to their users to help drive decision making and behavior,” said Kishore Gopalakrishna, co-founder and CEO of StarTree. “The next revolution in analytics is the recognition that every user is a decision maker in their own right, and that companies can add value by helping users make smart decisions.”

    StarTree Cloud is built on the same real-time distributed OLAP data store as Apache Pinot. The data store can ingest from batch data sources (such as Hadoop HDFS, Amazon S3, Azure ADLS, Google Cloud Storage) as well as stream data sources (such as Apache Kafka).

    StarTree’s founding team brings more than 40 years of combined experience building and operating distributed systems serving billions of users, and includes engineering leaders who developed Apache Pinot and Apache Helix, as well as other open-source projects including ThirdEye, Espresso and Samza.

    For more information about StarTree and Apache Pinot and to sign up for updates, please visit https://www.startree.ai/.

    About StarTree

    StarTree believes that all decision-makers – from the C-suite to the end-user – deserve the benefit of timely, data-driven insights. StarTree is the real-time analytics platform that brings together the scale, freshness, speed, and ease of use necessary for any company to make that vision a reality. Founded by the creators of Apache Pinot™, StarTree’s technology has been proven at scale at leading companies such as LinkedIn, Uber, Stripe and Walmart. The company is backed by Bain Capital Ventures, GGV Capital and CRV. To learn more, please visit https://www.startree.ai/.

  • SoPost Launches Beauty Club Community in Collaboration with OK! Magazine

    OK! Magazine’s Beauty Club Powered by SoPost Aims to Deliver Custom Product Samples While Also Helping Top Beauty Brands Garner Intelligent Product Feedback

    New York, NY, June 9, 2021 — SoPost, a state-of-the-art online sampling platform, has launched its digital community partnership with OK! Magazine. The OK! Beauty Club is a great way for consumers to get free product samples while providing leading beauty brands with powerful consumer data and feedback.

    By integrating with SoPost’s sampling platform, OK! Beauty Club brands can target their product-sampling campaigns based on consumers’ specific needs and beauty preferences. Through members adding in their personal preference, unique ‘zero party data’ consumer data is created which can be very powerful pieces of data for brands to consider while planning future initiatives.

    By joining OK! Beauty Club, community members can receive free samples of products they’re actually interested in, leading to better consumer insights and higher engagement for beauty brands. Users can engage with brands at a proven 10% response rate. Consumers can also leave reviews that can be syndicated via the SoPost platform, creating deep data insights for brands looking for both consumer and product feedback.

    OK! Beauty Club is free to join and is available for users in the United Kingdom. In terms of registrations, it is SoPost’s most successful community launch to date, with 20,000 users signing up in the first week alone. Many top beauty brands have deployed SoPost’s community solution, and the OK! Beauty Club is no exception, having worked with both Eyeko and Balance Me, with many more campaigns coming soon.

    “We’re thrilled to be able to partner with OK! Magazine to provide their readers a unique and authentic online sampling experience. As we look ahead, we believe that community-driven sampling will continue to expand as a channel for leading beauty brands to gather real consumer insights at scale,’” said Jonny Grubin, CEO and founder of SoPost.

    Georgina Parrott, OK!’s publisher and head of magazine brands, says: “We are delighted to have launched the OK! Beauty Club with SoPost. This exciting brand extension enables us to deepen our relationship with our audience, who we know love all things beauty, as well as creating a highly insightful, interactive and valuable commercial opportunity for brands. We look forward to assisting even more beauty brands reach targeted groups of consumers who will love what they try.”

    To learn more please visit: SoPost.com and visit the OK! Beauty Club Powered by SoPost.

    About SoPost

    SoPost is a global technology company based in London and New York that provides state-of-the-art online sampling campaigns for leading beauty and CPG brands, with a focus on consumer product-relevance, data, and analytics. With a large and diverse array of integrated channels and partners, SoPost is the leading sampling platform on the market – driving more efficient sample distribution and product feedback with custom machine-learning AI algorithms that match consumers to products they are interested in.

    Brands choose SoPost for their easy campaign setup, seamless ordering with minimal distribution wastage, timely international fulfillment, and deep campaign analysis and reporting. Founded in 2012, SoPost is active in 15 markets and partnered with over 200 leading beauty and CPG brands. SoPost has engaged with over 10 million consumers, and captured over 2.5 million survey responses and reviews.

  • Morpheus Breaks the Hybrid Cloud Management Platform Mold with Kubernetes and Terraform Enhancements to Simplify Enterprise IT

    Greenwood Village, CO, June 9, 2021 – Morpheus Data, the hybrid cloud application orchestration company, has released its largest software update of the year in a move that will help enterprise customers streamline the transition to containers and simplify the adoption of infrastructure-as-code within a single self-service platform. In 2020, Morpheus grew over 70% by helping complex enterprises lower cloud costs and simplify the management of hybrid cloud infrastructure. With today’s release, Morpheus is announcing the industry’s first unified control plane to help platform engineering teams bring together cloud and container management as well as infrastructure automation.

    Highlights from Morpheus v5.3.1 include:

    • Morpheus Kubernetes updates to simplify how clients build, manage, and consume container clusters in hybrid-cloud and mixed platform environments.
    • Morpheus Terraform provider and new Terraform instance types eliminate automation islands while simplifying on-premises infrastructure-as-code.
    • Dozens of cloud management updates including expanded Google Cloud Platform and VMware integration as well as custom UI and reporting plug-ins.

    Today’s infrastructure and operations teams are facing a major complexity and skills gap crisis as they struggle to enable developers, manage hybrid clouds, and facilitate the shift to containers. The result is a rapidly changing market and a convergence of cloud and container offerings. Details can be found in the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Management Tooling,1 which features Morpheus as a representative vendor.

    “It has become virtually impossible for IT teams to manage an increasingly complex set of cloud services, container platforms, and automation tools,” said Brad Parks, Chief Marketing Officer at Morpheus Data. “Customers are flocking to Morpheus because we eliminate technology silos and bring order to cloud, container, and automation chaos.”

    Simplifying how enterprises build, manage, and consume Kubernetes on any cloud

    Most companies now report increasing adoption of containers, with deployments running across a mix of private and public clouds. Unfortunately, teams managing virtualized and hybrid cloud infrastructure are now being stretched to the breaking point as they take on Kubernetes. It’s no surprise that a lack of skilled resources and operational complexity are often cited as top challenges.

    Morpheus has already helped hundreds of enterprises reduce hybrid cloud complexity while avoiding vendor lock-in and is bringing those same benefits to container management within its unified and agnostic self-service platform. Updates include:

    • CNCF-certified Morpheus Kubernetes Engine (MKE) updated to 1.20 which enables simple deployment of consistent vanilla Kubernetes to dozens of supported clouds.
    • The simple addition of packages and services such as Prometheus, Grafana, Istio, and others within the point-and-click Kubernetes provisioning wizard.
    • Support of brownfield Kubernetes clusters such as AKS, EKS, OpenShift, Rancher, etc. updated to Kubernetes 1.20 to eliminate ‘Kubernetes-only’ tool overhead.
    • Consolidated management of dozens of new Kubernetes objects for cluster access, nodes, workloads, networking, storage, and more to improve operational efficiency.

    This means enterprise platform teams can eliminate the need to build, manage, and consume Kubernetes in a completely different control plane from their virtualized and cloud-native platform-as-a-service services. It also reduces lock-in as customers evaluate proprietary stacks such as VMware Tanzu or Red Hat OpenShift.

    Eliminating automation islands by bridging infrastructure as code gaps

    As enterprises have embraced Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform, they report challenges governing workflows and bridging the gap between infrastructure automation and application configuration. Linking tools like Ansible to Terraform can be difficult and expensive when you combine the cost of Terraform Enterprise with Ansible Tower on top of what enterprises are already spending on legacy VMware automation.

    Morpheus has been on the leading edge of infrastructure automation since its inception with support for native IaC syntax as well as third-party IaC including AWS CloudFormation, Azure ARM, and HashiCorp Terraform. Morpheus was an early proponent of GitOps with the ability to link IaC and configuration scripts to repositories for version control and continuous automation. Efficiency-minded enterprises have also reduced costs substantially by using Morpheus to eliminate spend associated with Ansible Tower and Terraform Enterprise.

    In Morpheus v5.3.1, customers can now take advantage of Terraform Instance Types, providing a catalog front-end to Terraform modules and directly linking IaC provisioned resources to automation tools like Ansible, Chef, SaltStack, Puppet, and more. By attaching phase-based automation to IaC, operations teams can fully control the lifecycle of a Terraform resource and simplify post-provisioning tasks. These Terraform instances can even be exposed to ITSM tools such as ServiceNow with just a handful of mouse clicks and zero added cost.

    Morpheus is also simplifying the use of Terraform in on-premises environments with the development of its own Morpheus Terraform provider. Traditionally, using Terraform on-premises has required separate providers for the dozens of tools that operations teams use on-prem including IPAM, DNS, hypervisors, and more. The Morpheus Terraform provider will enable Terraform users to have a single unified provider to utilize across any on-prem or public cloud without adding complexity.

    Bringing the cloud experience on-premises and extending control to public clouds

    Over the last 18 months, Morpheus has been named as a leading vendor and strong performer in hybrid cloud management analysis from major industry analyst firms. Much of this recognition comes from a feature set that spans self-service provisioning, governance and security, developer enablement, and cloud resource optimization.

    With the latest release, Morpheus has continued this market-leading trajectory with several core hybrid cloud management platform updates including:

    • Google Cloud Platform (GCP) enhancements including more flexible region scoping plus the creation and management of projects, security groups, and networking objects including networks, subnets, routers, and firewalls.
    • VMware updates for those moving from NSX-V to NSX-T including the ability to create and manage NSX-T load balancers, DHCP objects, and distributed firewalls in both single and multi-tenant deployments.
    • Morpheus plug-in framework enhancements enable systems integrators, customers, and alliance partners to create custom reports and custom user interface extensions for server tabs and instances.

    Prospective customers can request a customized product demo plus set up a financial justification session with an automation specialist at www.morpheusdata.com/demo. An independent review of the latest Morpheus release can also be found in this report by 451 Research.

    1. Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Management Tooling, Dennis Smith, Padraig Byrne, John Chessman, April 8, 2021.

    About Morpheus Data, LLC

    Morpheus Data is the market leader in hybrid cloud application orchestration, serving hundreds of enterprises, public sector organizations, and service providers globally.

    The Morpheus software platform gives customers a customizable self-service application provisioning catalog which can span dozens of on-premises hypervisors, private clouds, and public clouds. Its persona-based feature set meets the needs of Platform Engineering, Security, Application Development, and Finance teams seeking to modernize applications comprised of bare metal, VMs, containers, and public cloud platform-as-a-service services.

    With more built-in integrations and native functionality than any other platform, customers can standardize workflows, reduce tool sprawl, and unify processes across different teams and technologies.