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  • Avaya Delivers the Next Big Thing for Developing Digital Business Communications and Customer Service Smart Apps

    Avaya Breeze Provides a Next-Generation Technology Platform With a Framework, Development Environment, and the Industry’s First eCommerce Delivery Mechanism for Embedding Open, Mobile Digital Communication

    ORLANDO, FL – Enterprise Connect 2016 – Booth #1707 — More than two-thirds of IT executives plan to increase spending on mobile, customer-facing and cloud migration applications over the next two years as part of digital transformation initiatives. But first, IT executives must overcome a significant skills gap that will affect their ability to carry out such initiatives at customer speed.

    It’s a conundrum Avaya has solved with Avaya Breeze™, an entirely new way to develop business communications applications.

    At Enterprise Connect, Avaya will showcase Avaya Breeze, the next generation of the Avaya Engagement Development Platform — the technology platform that profoundly simplifies application development while delivering built-in capabilities for enhanced mobile, customer-facing and hybrid/cloud requirements. Avaya will also unveil the Avaya Snapp Store – the first eCommerce app store for business communications.

    Components of the Avaya Breeze technology platform include:

    • An open framework that brings the necessary attributes for communication in the digital age: embedded, multi-platform, mobile, fast, low risk, and workflow enabled — a key requirement to automate previously manual processes to improve digital experiences.
    • A development platform for rapid creation of new workflow-based applications within a matter of hours or days versus months.
    • A delivery mechanism — the Avaya Snapp Store — that allows a single integrated experience via browsers and native smart apps for entirely new customer experiences.
    • Open connectors/APIs that enable simple, integration with existing business communications services and access to the billions of devices in the Internet of Things.

    The Avaya Snapp Store is a focused, ecommerce-enabled marketplace for Avaya Breeze applications — or Snap-ins — from Avaya and 3rd party developers. Snap-ins — easily consumable, prebuilt connectors, fit-for-purpose apps and/or developer code — enable companies to quickly build workflows, customer journeys and other unique applications. The Avaya Snapp Store makes it easy to find, access and download Snap-ins by simply using a credit card for purchase. Developers can create Snap-ins and be on-boarded in the store within weeks.

    Gary Barnett, SVP and GM, Avaya Engagement Solutions, said:

    “Now, Avaya delivers on the promise of open, mobile engagement with a platform that allows companies to easily design and embed applications into workflows via a powerful, simplified, software-defined architecture and infrastructure for communications. This game-changing technology is built for digital business where companies need the flexibility, speed and the freedom to easily create unique value for their customers. Avaya Breeze liberates them from the confines of monolithic, vendor-locked platforms.”

    Avaya is issuing a challenge to the industry to creatively address the major challenges facing businesses and consumers today by developing new apps on Avaya Breeze to help resolve them. To date, thousands of developers from global enterprises have participated in Avaya Breeze Bootcamps and webinars, and are using their lab systems and Avaya Collaboratory accounts to design, build and test Avaya Breeze applications. This week, five of the growing list of third party developers will showcase their Avaya Snap-ins in the Avaya booth at Enterprise Connect, including:

    • eGain’s Knowledge Snap-In sends a contextual SMS link to customers on IVR so they can easily use web self-service, without losing their place in the phone queue. 
    • WEBTEXT uses its global network of SMS messaging gateways to seamlessly connect Avaya contact centers to their customers and the carriers.
    • Moxtra’s mobile-first business messaging and document sharing service Snap-In enables rich, persistent collaboration across teams, providing continuity as customers increasingly move between devices.
    • Verbio’s Voice Authentication Snap-In addresses increasing concerns about security and identity theft by authenticating users in a fluid and unobtrusive way.
    • Approved Contact’s Snap-In provides a worker with more control over who can contact them and when, acting as a personal gatekeeper.

    Those interested in developing to Avaya Breeze and/or creating Snap-Ins can learn more by going to the Developer portal at:http://bit.ly/20ZwM0T. For a list of Avaya Breeze Bootcamps and hackathons being held globally, visit: https://www.avaya-learning.com/lms/#/training/catalog/edp

    QUOTES:
    “I sat there, and I’m not an engineer, but I was dragging and dropping, building a whole workflow for a Web calling service, saying, ‘When this happens, play this IVR message.’ I recorded the message myself, put that in there … and in about two minutes we had a Web calling service Snap-In.”

    Daniel Bergan, Head of Strategy and Transformation, Westpac

    “More than half of the companies are using or planning to use APIs to embed communications capabilities into their apps, while another 25% are looking at using them to build custom apps. Platforms like Avaya Breeze offer organizations the ability to deliver enhanced business value and execute on their digital strategies by integrating communications and collaboration into workflows, business processes and existing applications.”
    Irwin Lazar, VP and Service Director, Nemertes Research

    Tags: Avaya, customer engagement, applications development, contact center, digital transformation

    About Avaya
    Avaya is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience, increased productivity and enhanced financial performance. Its world-class contact center and unified communications technologies and services are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premises and cloud deployment options that seamlessly integrate with non-Avaya applications. The Avaya Engagement Environment enables third parties to create and customize business applications for competitive advantage. The Avaya fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.

    Certain statements contained in this press release may be forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “might,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “should” or “will” or other similar terminology. We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While we believe these are reasonable, such forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. These and other important factors may cause our actual results to differ materially from any future results expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. For a list and description of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Avaya’s filings with the SEC that are available at www.sec.gov. Avaya disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

    All trademarks identified by ®, TM, or SM are registered marks, trademarks, and service marks, respectively, of Avaya Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners

  • Are databases part of Agile? The new partnership between Redgate and DevOpsGuys points the way

    Cambridge UK, 7 March 2016 – DevOpsGuys, the Cardiff-based company that builds, deploys, and manages enterprise-scale web applications for blue-chip companies and the public sector, has become Redgate Software’s first Certified Partner in the UK. The move brings advantages for both businesses, with DevOpsGuys given the support and expertise to enable them to include the database in Agile processes like continuous delivery.

    With a growing roster of clients including ASOS, BAE Systems, the Government, and Fitness First, DevOpsGuys is gaining a reputation for delivering practical engineering solutions which revolutionize the way businesses work. Typically called on to improve software delivery processes, speed deployments, and reduce both cost and risk, DevOpsGuys are experts in improving IT performance using DevOps practices.

    Redgate, meanwhile, makes the world’s most trusted tools for shipping changes to enterprise databases. The tools are technically challenging to make, but intuitive to use – a philosophy Redgate calls ingeniously simple. As a direct result, the company has more than 650,000 users worldwide and 91% of the Fortune 100 use Redgate software.

    DevOpsGuys joins other noted software consultancies like Northwest Cadence in the USA and GDS Business Intelligence in Germany in becoming a Redgate Certified Partner.

    Certified Partners are given inside knowledge of Redgate’s products, training in advanced deployments, and expert advice and support so that they can offer a premium service to their own clients. As James Smith, CEO of DevOpsGuys, says: “We’re on the inside track, if you like. We can talk directly to the people creating the software we’re recommending to clients. It’s a big advantage because if we have an issue, we can resolve it with one phone call.”

    The relationship works for clients as well. DevOpsGuys were recently shortlisted by private gym chain, Fitness First, to introduce a standardized IT infrastructure to make software delivery faster, reduce errors, and cut costs. As Smith continues: “Our close working relationship with a key vendor like Redgate demonstrated our capability far better than a PowerPoint slide. It was evidence of our commitment to industry-leading standards and helped us win the business.”

    Redgate’s Database Lifecycle Management (DLM) products were included in the solution to source control database development and automate database deployments for Fitness First. As a direct result, it is now quick and simple for the gym chain to copy databases into new environments – something that was extremely difficult and time-consuming before.

    DevOpsGuys are now organizing a series of training workshops in London UK to teach developers and DBAs best practice for database source control, database continuous integration, and automated database deployment using Redgate tools.

    As Smith concludes: “Redgate have a portfolio of world-leading database products that make continuous delivery for the database a reality. The big thing for clients is understanding how they can work alongside tools for application development, and what new Agile processes need to be adopted to make it possible. That’s where we come in.”

    As part of Redgate’s ongoing commitment to DLM and continuous delivery for databases, DevOpsGuys will be joined in the future by further Certified Partners in the UK as well as America, Europe, and Australasia.

    – ENDS –

    Further information from:
    Michaela Murray
    Regional Partner Manager, Partner Program
    Redgate Software
    michaela.murray@red-gate.com

    About Redgate Software
    Redgate Software makes ingeniously simple software used by 650,000 IT professionals who work with SQL Server, .NET, and Oracle. More than 100,000 companies use Redgate products, including 91% of the Fortune 100. Redgate’s philosophy is to design highly usable, reliable tools which elegantly solve the problems that developers and DBAs face every day.

    About DevOpsGuys
    DevOpsGuys deliver DevOps-as-a-foundation to underpin digital transformation, achieving greater customer enablement and unlocking new revenue streams. Their DevOps Education, Automation, and Transformation solutions make enterprise organizations agile, scalable, and responsive to rapidly changing business requirements.

     

  • Software Complexity Driving DevOps Automation

    Software Complexity Driving DevOps Automation

    The drivers behind increasing software complexity also are the drivers behind expansive DevOps automation. As the saying goes, “Software is eating the world.” DevOps is gobbling up software, too, engulfing it in practices that are necessary to make it thrive under the pressure of the current environment.

    That environment and those drivers are of keen interest to many. DevOps authority Andy Vitus, partner at Scale Venture Partners, has identified four drivers in particular that are creating the software complexity pushing DevOps automation.

    Multiple Distributed Software Locations

    According to Vitus, by moving software from one server to multiserver to multiple data center deployments, the industry has made software more elaborate. Applications now execute in a distributed manner and in parallel using multithreading inside multiple processor cores; among many servers running multicore processors; and in and between geographically dispersed data centers. This makes software more powerful and reliable, though it demands more DevOps automation to produce it.

    Simply incorporating the ability for software to run in parallel using multithreading adds intricacies to the development process. To keep both the workload and the number of man hours needed during development manageable, automate as much of the additional coding duties and testing as possible.

    “Running applications across servers and data centers requires that you ensure consistency in the data layer,” which will then need new databases to handle the load, says Vitus. Depending on the database, the developer must rewrite the software to be able to use it.

    The entanglements don’t end there.

    With mobile applications, mobile devices and back-end servers both store data. “You have to be a lot more careful about knowing what version of the data is the true one, unless you’ve got a synchronization layer built in,” says Vitus. Either way, programming annoyances can be introduced.

    Getting Lost in Translation

    Expanding development from a single programming language to multiple languages, even for the same project, has made software more convoluted. In legacy development shops, programmers typically used one language for everything regardless of whether it was the best language for their creations. These days teams are applying choice languages such as C++, Python and Go to the tasks to which they are best-suited. “This increases the complexity of security and patch management as you use six, seven or eight different languages all with their own vulnerabilities,” says Vitus.

    While adopting several languages certainly adds to patch management and security headaches, understanding how each language can and must be compatible with the others for them to work together is an entirely new challenge. “The ways that they handle variables and time stamps changes over time, and you have to ensure that different services can still talk to each other,” says Vitus.

    Stacks of Stacks

    Moving from a simple three-tier stack to a distributed microservices architecture catches software development in another snag, Vitus says. The database layer has grown to include in-memory and other database types. As development breaks the application layer into microservices, each potentially with its own data store, the two layers combine to create this new stack.

    Millions of Endpoints

    Finally, moving from deploying servers to deploying servers, mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) takes software down new paths of mostly uncharted territory, says Vitus. “Today you deploy software changes to a back-end server that must talk to a mobile client using iOS or Android or to IoT devices such as dishwashers and light bulbs in smart homes,” he says. “You could be deploying code to millions of devices.” This certainly affects the construction of the code for use on so many different platforms.

    Conclusion

    These drivers help create a magnified need for DevOps automation. Considering the costs of hiring engineers and technicians to do the same development work manually, the world will be watching companies that are pushing for increased automation to displace those labor costs. “To the extent that you can offload some of that to regression tests, you end up saving, and the cost of building a new software product goes down,” says Vitus.

  • Appvance Raises $5 Million Led by Javelin Venture Partners

    Latest Funding Round Drives Continued Growth in Disruptive DevOps-Ready QA Automation

    SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwired – Mar 2, 2016) – Appvance has closed a $5 million round of venture capital funding led by Javelin Venture Partners to continue its mission to reinvent enterprise software and application testing with the world’s first “DevOps-ready” software quality assurance solution. Appvance’s Unified Test Platform (UTP) helps enterprises improve the quality, performance and security of all their applications as much as 10 times faster and for far less costly than traditional, siloed testing tools.

    Appvance provides the first unified enterprise software and application testing platform that answers the needs of both DevOps and quality assurance teams by eliminating redundancies of traditionally siloed approaches to software quality assurance. Appvance’s “write it once” test scripting methodology is designed to seamlessly align with the ways modern applications are developed today — DevOps, agile development processes, continuous integration, frequent releases, rapid test development methods and time-challenged delivery environments.

    “As more enterprises adopt rapid development methodologies, QA automation quickly becomes the bottleneck. Everyone knows the legacy tools on the market are not up to the task,” said Appvance CEO Kevin Surace. “Our customers are global 5000 companies that require a complete and robust test automation platform that answers the need for velocity with quality. When enterprises move to agile and DevOps, they need Appvance.”

    “We led the investment in Appvance because we recognize the need for DevOps-ready test automation in every enterprise,” said Javelin Managing Director Noah Doyle. “As application development moves to DevOps, agile and continuous delivery, the old siloed tools quickly become a critical bottleneck. Appvance is the only technology we have seen that attacks that problem head-on, delivering speed and productivity improvements, while enhancing quality and security.”

    Appvance combines best-of-breed testing modules, including functional, performance, load, app penetration, compatibility, database, DDOS, mobile and more, into a single unified platform that allows test teams to write or record use cases once as well as test apps the way users encounter them, beginning-to-end including UX and API-level tests. This repeatable automation yields real-world results that are superior to protocol-level testing alone.

    Appvance will use the funding to expand operations including product development, sales and customer support. In addition to Javelin Venture Partners, the latest round also included H. Barton Investments and Three Bridges Ventures. This is the second round of funding for Appvance, bringing the total amount raised to $7 million.

    About Appvance Inc.
    Appvance provides the only DevOps-ready unified test automation platform. Built from the ground up with agile and cloud services in mind, Appvance offers true Beginning-to-End data-driven unified functional, performance, compatibility, and synthetic APM testing, enabling users to quickly uncover client-side and server-side issues in a fraction of the time of traditional testing solutions. The Appvance platform drives quality and velocity for DevOps-oriented or traditional development shops, showing 5x to 10x productivity improvements over siloed QA tools. Founded in 2012, Appvance is a venture-backed technology company headquartered in San Jose, CA, with offices in Costa Rica and India and funded by Javelin Ventures, Staenberg Ventures, Social Internet Fund, FundersClub, Three Bridges Ventures and HB Asset Management.

    Learn more at http://www.appvance.com. Follow Appvance on Twitter and on Facebook.

    About Javelin Venture Partners
    With $335 million under management, Javelin Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm specializing in technology based start-ups that leverage key innovations to create scalable, high-growth companies. Javelin Venture Partners’ investment professionals are proven new-technology entrepreneurs who focus on identifying exceptional businesses and management teams, and helping them achieve great success. The firm operates with the culture of a start-up and with an emphasis on being a true partner to entrepreneurs. Javelin Ventures Partners is located in San Francisco, CA, but invests in start-ups throughout the world.

  • Building a Foundation for Big Room Planning

    Building a Foundation for Big Room Planning

    When people think of agile, the first thing that comes to mind is a software development team. But agile is much more than that now, as every DevOps practitioner knows. Nearly a decade and a half of practice has shown us that high-performing agile software development teams are critical, but not sufficient on their own. When they operate in a silo, software development teams can easily become disconnected from the business and from other teams. To truly achieve the higher business goals, those development teams need alignment, or else they risk delivering the wrong things or the right things but at the wrong time. That is where Big Room Planning comes in.

    Big Room Planning is the secret sauce for effective agile planning and execution because it brings together all the people in an organization responsible for delivering software value to market—from development and test to program management and the business—to plan collaboratively. When I say bring them together, I don’t mean that figuratively: The key is to bring them together quite literally, assembling all of the stakeholders together in the same room in real time. That can feel quite shocking because it represents such a significant commitment by the company, but that is the point. Making agile work requires a commitment across every level of a company.

    Before the Big Room

    So do you just have everyone roll into a large space somewhere in a hotel’s conference area and hit a home run? Clearly, no. Setting up an effective agile delivery group takes time, and is far more complicated than spinning up agile development teams because of all the roles involved and how each team and individual will approach their part of the work. Most importantly, establishing the leadership changes required to truly change the way an organization works must also take place. Bottom line: Establishing an agile mindset throughout the organization is critical to have a foundation for success.

    There are three distinct phases of preparation required when standing up an agile delivery group (Agile Release Train, in SAFe parlance), which we call:

    • The Ready phase
    • The Sync phase
    • Rhe Go phase

    Each are vitally important, and without success in the earlier phases, your delivery will get bogged down in the latter stages.

    Get Ready

    The Ready phase is probably the most critical, and it establishes the right leadership, organizational mindset, and right group of people required for agile value delivery. Three key steps include:

    • Enterprise value stream mapping
    • Agile organization design
    • Leadership development

    Without these key steps, supported by leadership at every level, you simply cannot instill the cultural and mindset changes required to stick.

    Get Synched

    In the Sync phase, agile practices are instilled first. Agile practices specific to each role requires training and coaching to set in, and we advocate for a four-to-12-week period to ensure everyone understands their role, the ceremonies they will use to ensure collaboration and what artifacts they will use to plan and execute their part of the overall work.

    Once everyone in the delivery group gets it, it’s time to set up a first Big Room Planning event. This typically takes one month of preparation—without which your event is likely to fail.

    Preparing for Big Room Planning should focus on the inputs for the event. First among these is the business vision and context—the domain of executives, line of business leaders, etc. This is essentially the “why” behind what the teams will work on. Key initiatives for the delivery group, with clear outcomes defined (often supported by a lightweight business case), must be communicated effectively to inspire the group. It takes time to put this together.

    Next, develop a feature backlog that represents what the delivery group will be planning out during Big Room Planning. Doing this well is a more rigorous process than meets the eye. Features are the crucial ingredient because they represent the value being built to both the business and the customer, and they represent the key deliverables teams will produce.

    Product managers typically own this step, and if they are not well-prepared, they run the risk of either asking for too much or  asking for the wrong things that won’t have the desired impact on business results. At CA, our product managers go through several iterations of backlog preparation involving stakeholders throughout to company to make sure the priorities are clear.

    Even with a well-formed and prioritized backlog, effective Big Room Planning requires an understanding of the capacity of the organization to build what’s needed. This requires good estimation and a good understanding of the each team’s velocity. Estimation and a team’s velocity are big parts of what we learn during the Sync phase: Over a few iterations, the amount of work (a.k.a. story points) a team can deliver outcomes and provides an understanding of roughly the right capacity needed for effective planning. Doing this well ensures teams will be asked to plan not only the right features during Big Room Planning, but the right amount of features so that detailed planning can take place with enough time to design stories, resolve dependencies and address risks that emerge.

    Then Go

    The Go phase actually kicks off with the Big Room Planning event. The event itself occurs over a two-day period, which marks the starting point for agile execution. If formed well, the right people will be in the room to build value fast. With upfront preparation, the group members will understand what they will be building and why it’s important, and will be set up to create a plan that best delivers the value needed.

    Planning collaboratively ensures that the plan is well-designed across the group. Most importantly, because everyone has a part in building the plan—with the opportunity to work together across teams and across roles, with the ability to challenge and even veto decisions as they form—everyone ultimately feels a strong sense of ownership and commitment to the final plan. A successful outcome almost always ensues, and the group only gets better from there are they learn to prepare, plan and execute together as a cohesive “team of teams.”

    About the Author/Steve Wolfe

    Steve Wolfe photoSteve Wolfe is Senior Principal, Product Marketing for CA Agile Solutions. He has worked for more than 20 years on software products in both hardware and software companies. His experience spans 10+ years in both software engineering management and product management, including 7+ years on agile teams and delivery groups. Steve’s passions include helping organizations learn how to build the right things fast and reliably by applying agile and DevOps practices at scale.  He is a certified SAFe Program Consultant.

  • DevOps Connect at RSA: In Security, Choose Increments

    DevOps Connect at RSA: In Security, Choose Increments

    Earlier this week the worlds of DevOps and information security collided at the DevOps Connect Rugged DevOps event, held in conjunction with RSA Conference 2016. The security-centric audience got to hear from a number of thought leaders across the DevOps and infosec worlds about ways security pros and DevOps teams can work together and establish incremental improvements in application security, as IT picks up the pace of software delivery.

    Among the talks, Forrester Analyst Amy DeMartine discussed her team’s findings after studying the “best of the best” in implementing Rugged DevOps patterns. There are seven habits universal across organizations that are succeeding with this new way of developing and deploying secure applications, she notes.

    “Think of it as a fitness program, and the muscles that you are building up are those that strengthen application security,” she says.

    These habits included a number of obvious practices, along with a few surprises, including:

    • Increase trust and transparency between Dev, Sec and Ops.
    • Understand the probability and impact of specific risks.
    • Use the continuous delivery pipeline to incrementally improve security practices.
    • Standardize third-party software and then keep current.
    • Govern with automated audit trails.
    • Test preparedness with security games.

    All are good tips for getting security, dev and ops to work better at delivering code both faster and more securely. But the seventh habit probably raised the most CISO eyebrows and could have the most potential to effect meaningful change and collaboration:

    • Discard detailed security road maps in favor of incremental improvements.

    According to her, the “best of the best” organizations in Rugged DevOps have security leaders that make it a habit to ditch detailed security road maps in favor of a establishing broad vision and achieving incremental security improvements over time.

    As she related in her talk, she’s seen too many organizations develop extensive and extremely detailed multiyear road maps only to see them grow obsolete not only because of rapid changes in the IT environment, but also the constant pivots attackers make in their attack techniques.

    Instead, she said, security leaders have to take the same continuous improvement approach that their peers in development and operations have made in their shift to DevOps.

    “This is a mind shift change that has to happen,” she warns.

    To achieve good results, security leaders should be focused on “real-time, actionable measurements” to focus on improvements that matter, such as decreasing remediation time for vulnerabilities.

    “In DevOps, we call this Plan, Do, Check, Act, where you’re taking very small changes. Say you want to insert static analysis right after a developer checks in new code. So you’re going to go off and plan. The plan is to insert static analysis,” she says. “Then you’ll do—we’re going to look at tools, we’re going to create our rules. We’re going to check to make sure it works, if it improves things. And then we’re going to move on to the next thing—maybe it’s tightening our rules or maybe it’s adding another tool.”

  • Murphy’s DevOps: Is Security Causing Things to Go Wrong?

    Murphy’s DevOps: Is Security Causing Things to Go Wrong?

    “Rugged DevOps,” “DevSecOps”—am I missing any? About the only thing more abundant than the volume of terms emerging to describe different facets of how security supports DevOps are the number of vendors now claiming to provide products and services that “solve” related security problems.

    There have been some interesting offerings we’ve seen emerge at this point and most of them probably have merit, in that they likely can accomplish the job they claim to do. Regardless of whether that “job” is actually something that needs to be done to solve a DevOps-related security issue, that is something for the professionals in the developer, operations and security worlds to determine—and hopefully something they will be interested in discussing here.

    This new column’s point is to go looking for problems and solutions. Specifically, it’s focused on how and if DevOps is causing things to go wrong in security (and from time to time in other spots) and what DevOps-focused organizations are doing to correct course.

    Security Questions to Ponder

    Is it true that security can’t keep pace with “continuous?” Will “agile” and security always be oil and water? Will DevOps and security never achieve a harmonious “peanut butter and chocolate”-like relationship? Or, is the talk about how DevOps is the best thing that has ever happened to security and a great opportunity, actually the new reality?

    Another great question this column seeks to answer is whether any of the “so-called” security problems DevOps is creating are anything new, or if they are the same old challenges that have existed since the first bit of sensitive data was exposed to the Internet decades ago.

    There are times when I may mention specific vendor solutions in this column, but only if an actual end user or practitioner is attached to the reference. If that happens, I will always point out if any are clients of mine at my day job.

    It’s no coincidence that this column is being launched just ahead of RSA 2016, as DevOps Connect: Rugged DevOps @ RSA Conference is a major part of the big show, and, that is where the world will be talking DevOps and security after all. Here’s hoping the event will expose problems and provide solutions.

  • Conformiq Launches New Transformer for Automated Software Testing

    Transforms Tests for Execution, extending the Conformiq 360ᴼ Test Automation Solution

    San Jose, CA (PRWEB) February 23, 2016

    Conformiq™, transforming software testing with 360ᴼ Test Automation™, today announced Conformiq Transformer™, which helps automate software testing across all markets by transforming tests for execution. The new offering extends the Conformiq 360ᴼ Test Automation solution for complex system testing at the speed of development.

    One of today’s issues is that with new technologies such as model-based testing, software testers now spend about 30% in test design, and 70% in test execution. The transformation required is to shorten the time and decrease the resources needed for test execution, while maintaining the integrity of the existing software development lifecycle (SDLC) tools flow. The new Conformiq Transformer software platform automates the execution of new and existing tests, improving the productivity of the entire quality assurance organization.

    The new Conformiq Transformer solution shortens the path to test automation, simplifies model-based testing (MBT) adoption using existing methods, and automates manual test execution. It builds upon Conformiq Creator™, the automated test design solution.

    While Conformiq Creator generates executable test cases, scripts and documentation from models, Conformiq Transformer enables the transformation of tests for automatic execution, both for automatically generated test cases and for manual or existing test cases. Conformiq Transformer helps integrate the SDLC process, without requiring any changes to popular tools, standards and flows. It extends the value of a wide range of industry-standard test automation tools (commercial and open source) for automated test execution.

    New Conformiq Transformer helps save up to 70% of the required effort to automate test execution, and supports DevOps, continuous integration (CI), in-sprint, and Agile processes.

    “Conformiq Transformer technology was developed to address the key bottleneck in software testing. Companies need a way to automate test execution, the most significant cost and time sink in today’s SLDC flow. Transformer automates execution of existing, legacy, manual tests as well as automatically-generated tests from Conformiq Creator.” commented Mark Creamer, CEO of Conformiq. “Every software organization can benefit from this new solution, expanding our market and providing significant new value for our customers.”

    “Customers expect significant reductions in testing cost through automation, which traditional test automation approaches failed to deliver. Conformiq Transformer changes that by allowing dynamic generation of automated test scripts directly from the model,” stated the program manager at an international testing services provider.

    Conformiq Transformer reduces testing effort and the need for test execution expertise by automating functional testing and test execution, minimizing manual involvement, programming and scripting. It directly links to automated execution frameworks and SDLC tools and processes and leverages existing test assets – test cases, requirements, and prototypes. Now, testers can eliminate their test automation backlog and gain control, automation, integration and speed across the software testing cycle.

    Features of the new Conformiq Transformer software platform include:

    •     Automated execution of new and existing tests- provides the only integrated link between automated test case generation, and automated test case execution.
    •     Automated manual test case execution – imports manual tests for automation, and transforms manual tests into automatically executable tests.
    •     Automated execution of automatically- generated tests – extending the power of Conformiq Creator.
    •     Extension of industry-standard test automation tools to improve the productivity of the entire QA organization – the only solution that fully automates text execution for every major SDLC and execution framework and platform: Application Lifecycle Management, Test Management, Automated Test Execution, and Requirements Management systems.
    •     Automated test execution without programming – eliminating time-consuming, unmaintainable scripting with the ability to create and automate tests using drag and drop, form-based test suites, test case and keyword editors, assisted keyword automation, and live-check of test suites.
    •     Consolidated view of automated test case design, creation, execution, management and validation – Eclipse integration for a consolidated view for the tester; with support for existing and / or open source test execution tools.

    With new Conformiq Transformer, transforming tests for execution, Conformiq 360ᴼ Test Automation further accelerates and automates the end-to-end testing process across all markets, including enterprise IT, communications and embedded software, and is especially effective for web-based applications. Please contact Conformiq about getting started with Conformiq 360ᴼ Test Automation.

    Availability

    Conformiq Transformer is available immediately. For more details and pricing information, please contact sales(at)conformiq(dot)com.

    About Conformiq

    Conformiq is transforming software testing with Conformiq 360ᴼ Test Automation™, providing the most sophisticated and comprehensive automated test design solution in the industry. The unique Conformiq 360ᴼ Test Automation technology enables the next generation of testing: transforming, streamlining and automating even the most complex system-level testing environments. Conformiq 360ᴼ Test Automation improves efficiency with a 40% faster test case development cycle; enables delivery of higher quality code through 50% more defects found; increases manageability with 50% better collaboration: and reduces costs with a 400% return on investment. Conformiq serves enterprise IT, communications and embedded software markets worldwide. Privately-held Conformiq is headquartered in San Jose, California, with a worldwide delivery and support organization including offices in Finland, Germany, Sweden, and India. Visit Conformiq athttp://www.conformiq.com

  • xMatters Boosts DevOps in the Enterprise with New Integration Platform

    Next-Generation Intelligent Communications Technology Integrates Processes and Systems for Enterprise DevOps Stakeholders

    London, UK. — 23rd February, 2016 — xMatters, inc., a leader in communication-enabled business processes, today announced the release of its integration platform – enhanced connectivity technology designed to help enterprises overcome key hurdles in DevOps adoption.

    "IT support and service management tools are largely automated today for maximum efficiency, but ultimately people must be involved to move processes forward. Enterprises need to integrate real human activity into the service management and DevOps processes to continue to gain agility. To do that effectively, it makes sense to connect — in context — to systems that run these processes where people spend their time interacting. Using xMatters’ DevOps approach to integrate these systems with an intelligent communication platform will enable enterprises to achieve their business goals — by meeting SLAs and better time to value in deployments,” said Daniel Conde, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

    xMatters’ award-winning cloud platform accelerates business processes through intelligent communication. The technology pinpoints and proactively alerts the individuals, teams and external service providers required to work together to quickly manage any business scenario along with resolving incidents, such as service disruptions and technical issues that interrupt the flow of day-to-day operations.

    Enterprises have long faced challenges in embracing DevOps – which Gartner defines as “a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach” – because the agility of modern systems conflicts with the strict compliance, stability and reliability requirements of legacy systems.

    Successful DevOps requires a wide range of stakeholders to efficiently communicate, collaborate and stay aligned with the business so they can build, test and release new software more rapidly, frequently and reliably. When companies engage in high-velocity software release cycles, it’s easy for key information to slip through the cracks or not get communicated to the right individuals, putting software delivery times or quality standards at risk.

    "Intelligent communications is an essential part of an Enterprise DevOps toolset,” said Doug Peete, SVP of Product Management at xMatters. “As IT organisations embrace DevOps initiatives, they need to empower both technical and business constituents to drive key processes forward. As the leader in intelligent communications for the enterprise, xMatters is in a unique position to enable DevOps initiatives while still supporting the specific business needs of ITSM and major incident management.”

    The xMatters Integration Platform connects modern and legacy systems and business processes to fundamentally alter the way development and operations teams work together in a DevOps environment. By doing so, standard IT service management processes can be managed in conjunction with DevOps processes.

    The new technology operationalises, contextualises and automates communications within key DevOps processes to drive personalised communication at scale so individuals and teams can collaborate effectively and efficiently.

    In September 2015, xMatters launched an expanded Global Partner Program designed to advance its platform for rectifying business disruptions in today’s always-connected enterprise. The company boasts more than 200 integrations and partnerships, including ServiceNow, Splunk, BMC Software, AppDynamics, New Relic, Salesforce and many more.

    Supporting Partner Quotes:
    “DevOps is an agile, collaborative approach to IT service delivery that brings together siloed teams, technologies and processes. xMatters’ new Integration Platform acts as a system of engagement, and helps empower enterprise IT teams to better manage communication and collaboration across these silos. It ensures the right information gets to the right people at the right time – and brings that information and context in Cherwell Service Management as the system of record. In that regard, intelligent communications driven by xMatters is an essential piece of the enterprise DevOps toolset.”
    – Jarod Greene, Vice President of Product Marketing, Cherwell Software

    "Moogsoft’s anomaly detection and event correlation across the production stack, combined with xMatters’ intelligently targeted alerting technology allows enterprise DevOps to identify and resolve incidents faster than ever before. This integration allows for better collaboration across DevOps teams through Moogsoft’s Situation Room and xMatters intelligent communication to engage the right resources with rich situational context."
    – Stephen Hart, CTO, Moogsoft

    "Our vision for New Relic is to be the first and best place to look to understand your digital business. Communications plays a huge role in delivering this experience and showing customers that everything is working – the health of the software, the quality of the customer experience and the business outcomes. We are excited about xMatters’ new Integration Platform which makes it even easier for New Relic customers to receive critical alerts, and also ensure that the right people are being notified on the right device with the right data at the right time.”
    – Nate Heinrich, Product Manager, New Relic

    “The xMatters Integration Platform is a welcome solution for enterprises that are aiming to adopt DevOps, but are struggling with the mammoth communications challenge inherent in rapidly delivering new IT services, while making sure everything is stable, reliable and secure. xMatters’ new offering makes it easy to connect with services such as API monitoring that are essential to maintaining platform health.”
    – Neil Mansilla, Vice President of Developer Relations, Runscope

    Resources

    About xMatters, inc.
    xMatters’ cloud-based communications solutions enable any business process or application to trigger two-way communications (push, voice, email, SMS, etc.) throughout the extended enterprise during time-sensitive events. With over a decade of experience in rapid communication, xMatters serves more than 1,000 leading global firms to ensure business operations run smoothly and effectively during incidents such as IT failures, product recalls, natural disasters, dynamic staffing, service outages, medical emergencies and supply-chain disruption. xMatters is headquartered in San Ramon, CA with additional offices in London and Sydney.

  • DBmaestro Raises $3M in Series A Funding to Expand DevOps for Database

    Financing came after DBmaestro tripled subscription revenue in 2015 

     Houston, Texas, February 24, 2016 – DBmaestro (http://www.dbmaestro.com/), the pioneer and leading provider of DevOps for Database solutions, announced today it raised $3 million in Series A funding from a number of venture capital firms including StageOne Ventures, lool Ventures and iAngels. The financing will be used to grow DBmaestro’s global sales and marketing and to seal its place as the leading database automation solution.

    The funding round came after a banner year for the company. In 2015, DBmaestro tripled their subscription revenue and signed many high-profile brands, including Barclays, Bank of the West, Allianz, and VISA. These achievements were driven by the success of their flagship product, TeamWork, which enables agile development, Continuous Integration, and Delivery for the Database.

    DBmaestro’s DevOps for Database solution offers a comprehensive approach to the database development life cycle, providing enterprises need to deliver changes faster. DBmaestro has been at the forefront of Continuous Delivery for the database, with a solution which brings innovative methods for safe database automation and ultimately reduces costs in development and deployment. Subsequently, it was named to the 2015 SD Times 100 for its Innovation in the Database and was also recognized as a prominent vendor of the DevOps tools market in Technavio’s Global DevOps Tools Market 2015-2019 report published in August 2015.

    The company’s growth led to the hiring of Danny Neuberger as Senior VP of Sales EMEA & APAC and Roy Lauzon as VP of R&D. Neuberger brings over 20 years of executive experience at Microsoft and EMC, while Lauzon has led software development teams at Celebros for almost 10 years. Said Lauzon: “Having worked for a decade on the software development side, I can attest to the critical need to adopt the best practices we’ve been implementing for software to the database as well.”

    “I believe that the success we have seen underscores the need in the community for our solution,” said Yariv Tabac, CEO and co-founder of DBmaestro. “Our customers are in highly competitive markets and the ability to implement continuous delivery and integration for the database is crucial. We are proud of our achievements and excited to bring on a number of experienced executives to continue to support each of our growing number of clients as they navigate the journey towards complete database automation.”

    About DBmaestro

    DBmaestro is a pioneer and leading DevOps for database solution provider. Its flagship product, DBmaestro TeamWork, enables agile development, Continuous Integration and Delivery for the Database.

    TeamWork supports streamlining of development process management and enforcing change policy practices. The solution empowers Agile team collaboration while fostering regulatory compliance and governance. With DBmaestro, organizations can facilitate DevOps for database by executing deployment automation, enhancing and reinforcing security as well as mitigating risk.

    DBmaestro’s solutions are deployed at many major international companies, including Visa, Isracard (MasterCard), Barclays, Bank of the West, Allianz, Frost Bank, Thomson Holidays, Bank Leumi, and others.